[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 43

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Guilty. I’ve certainly long treated cybernetics as a way to “brute force” my way past my own body’s shortcomings. Or what I viewed as shortcomings at the time. “The marriage of biology and technology must be like the marriage of man and woman. There must be true compromise. A peace between the two energies that nourishes both, and leverages their unique strengths for one another’s benefit.”

Cybernetics. The fusion of any two disparate paradigms in a way which exceeds the capabilities of either half by itself. I reflected on the nature of the US as a cybernetic nation. The decades of suffering and political chaos following the civil war, when refusal to compromise pit an obsessively masculine party of totalitarians against the prevailing zeitgeist of feminine sensitivity that they reviled.

It never really ended. That regime’s defeat only created a power vacuum filled by an ever-swelling, increasingly powerful Islamic empire. Even now it continues the uncompromisingly masculine campaign to dominate, suppress and control all things feminine. To purge female energy from the heart of every man, and to keep every woman in a state of quiet submission.

Who can blame women for pushing back in a militant way, in those countries where it’s even possible to without risking their lives? Albeit almost solely against Christianity, which is in all ways less aggressive and controlling than Islam. Perhaps wrongly imagining that the enemy of their enemy is their friend?

But that’s just playing the opponent’s own game. Like trying to put out a house fire with a flamethrower. I could now somewhat understand the nature of the problem Asherah identified with the direction our culture has taken...I just couldn’t begin to fathom how to solve it.

The second American civil war in many respects was just a long delayed cultural aftershock of the second world war. Fascists versus Communists all over again. The Alt-Right infested ‘American Action’ movement versus Social Revenge Warriors taking the place of Fatherland versus Motherland. Masculine social and economic ideals versus feminine ones, with lasting peace attained only after a stable compromise was arrived at.

Could such a stability and lasting peace be arrived at within our own bodies? What would it mean, and what would it outwardly look like, for a man to be at peace with himself? To be truly complete, not suppressing his female energy but using it to inform how to treat his mother, wife, sister and daughter?

A man’s heart, like any other organ withers with disuse. It’s possible not only to forget how to love, but also how to receive love from others. If I can’t love the woman inside myself, how can I love the one outside? No wonder Aubrey left.

It isn’t a problem specific to me, though. I can see it everywhere, now that I know what to look for. The modern man and woman have strayed so far from Asherah’s description of a wholesome, balanced relationship that I could scarcely visualize that either.

Sex has been an on-demand commodity for so long that I can’t remember a time when it was anything else. How can it go back to the way it was in a world where you can literally go out and buy whatever body parts you want on the street?

We’re too good at getting what we want. Our intelligence has greatly outstripped our maturity. Whatever we find pleasurable, we isolate it from its natural context, then set about exaggerating whatever aspects of it we find stimulating. We then gorge on the result until it destroys our physical and mental health.

Should I really be surprised by how sick that addiction has made me? By the severity of illness which unavoidably accompanies man’s abstraction from fundamental natural pleasures like clean air and water, birdsong, fresh fruit and a sunny day? What other escape is there from our downward spiral into ever more perverse concentrations of supernormal stimuli?

It’s clear to me now that sex must to go back to being about more than body parts. More than just a mechanical, physical act between interlocking organs. It would need to become a fusion of two spirits. The total blending of male and female energy.

That’s a genie I doubt if we could ever stuff back into the bottle. There’s nobody left who doesn’t consider total sexual liberation to have been anything but wholly positive. The only groups which ever succeeded in controlling sex were religions that did so for the express purpose of male comfort.

As a consequence, any sort of sexual conservatism has an irreparably tarnished reputation now. Nobody wants to hear that they should reserve sexual expression for the appropriate emotional context. That it should be something special, deserving of reverence and awe.

Neither is anyone willing to give up the self-indulgent products which resulted from the commercialization of human sexuality. You can’t take jiggling virtual anime titties away from today’s men, just as you can’t take glittery vibrating prehensile robo-cocks away from today’s women. They won’t let you.

Men and women no longer love one another in a daring, unguarded way...but they love their vices. They will defend those vices as fiercely as they once defended each other, because exaggerated objects of sexual wish fulfillment have replaced the opposite sex in their hearts.

I’m hardly innocent. When I think about some of the...male entertainment...I’ve consumed over the years and imagine how a woman would react to that material, I feel ashamed. There’s also a great deal of similar material aimed at women now that I can’t even bring myself to look at.

Could I bring myself to feel tenderness for a woman who consumes that sort of trash? Should I expect any woman to view me any differently, having glimpsed what sort of VR scenarios are popular with men these days?

Do the producers of such lurid materials know that they’re driving men and women apart? Making us ever more repulsive to one another, and at the same time more and more unapologetic about it? If they know, what do they get out of it? A reduction in population growth?

I cannot presume to cast judgement upon anybody though. I’ve never restrained my desires. I’ve never denied myself anything, I don’t even know what it would feel like to try. Blame can’t be placed entirely at the feet of the companies who fulfill those desires, either.

I could simply reject that sort of thing, but I never do. They aren’t to blame for my lack of self control. The change Asherah outlined was not to cultural moores. Not a neo-puritan restriction on what can be sold or consumed. It would have to be a change which takes place in the hearts of men and women.

Trying to force people to live healthier, or curate all forms of media such that we’d encounter temptation less frequently was never tenable in the long run. Only an attempt to evade the hard work of cultivating self control.

Instead of thinking only of myself, reflexively gratifying my every desire the instant I feel it, what if I’d learned to take Aubrey’s feelings into consideration? Perhaps she wouldn’t be in Antarctica now, married to that asshole crab farmer. For that matter, I probably never would’ve spent those six years in prison.

I was startled back to reality by a warm, tingling sensation inside my ribcage. Asherah’s oversized finger, skin resembling a flowing mosaic of leaves and flowers, penetrated bloodlessly into my chest. I asked what exactly she was doing to me.

“Just touching your heart. Should I stop?” On the contrary, I told her to keep at it. That I liked what it was doing to me, and wanted more. Intoxication of an entirely different kind, which rehabilitates rather than debilitates. I could feel large parts of my emotional landscape re-growing. Parts which I’d long ago burnt down, before salting the Earth to keep it that way.

Tears escaped my eyes, running down either side of my face, dripping into the rich brown soil beneath my head. I felt hyper-aware, tingling from head to toe. I could see connections between ideas I already knew about, but never thought to juxtapose in this way.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 44}