The Harem of an Autist

Alvaro de Menard

Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!
St. Augustine

In 1863, William Lang ran a mile in 4 minutes and 2 seconds, a record that would endure for 80 years. Standing undefeated across the decades, across two world wars, from horse and cart to television and airplanes, the record attained a mythical status. After innumerable failed attempts at breaking it, the 4 minute mile was considered impossible. Experts claimed the human heart would explode from the strain.

In 1954, Roger Bannister did what doctors had declared physically impossible: he ran a mile in under 4 minutes. A few weeks later the record was crushed again, and then another 46 times within just three years.

The essay you are reading right now is the four minute mile of Fucking.

Monk Life

Starting in my 20s, I spent about 15 years being celibate. Not because I couldn't get laid, I just chose not to. I was more interested in reading books than chasing women. A mediocre relationship as a teenager, feeling like I had to change who I was in order to get women (and turn into something I didn't like), feeling like I was undesirable, and generally just being more interested in learning at this time led me down that path. Then one day, at 34, I got bored and suddenly decided to make Fucking my autistic special interest. Soon, I was juggling relationships with multiple women and turning down eager propositions because I had better things to do.

Of course, I had to leave some things behind. I betrayed the philosophical life. Didn't read very much, and certainly didn't write anything. The mind atrophies as more and more blood is dedicated to engorging the penis, starving the brain of its essential nutrients and withering away its noumenal capacities.

This isn't a pickup guide. It's the story of a self-experiment. It's a case study in arbitrary limitations and choosing one's character. It's about social scripts. And it's about the discovery that what many consider to be rare and precious is actually abundant and easily accessible, if only you choose to pursue it.

People convince themselves of the absurd nonsense like "I'm just not good with women", "I'm too old to start dating seriously", "I'm not attractive enough for casual sex". These are nothing more than meaningless fixed ideas, and you can just wake up one day and decide to follow a different one.

Before we go further, let's establish that I'm not some gigachad by nature. I'm in my late 30s, tall and lean, not particularly handsome, and with the kind of light balding that says "I read too much philosophy". I'm a pretty good baker, I have a decent job that nobody is impressed by or interested in, and in the end I'm fundamentally a weird nerd writing esoteric blog posts on the internet.

What's a Vagina?

So what is it like to be a manwhore? Pretty sweet, actually. (If you were wondering why I haven't written a real essay in 2 years, now you know.) But it didn't start out that way...

My approach to trying new things is to dive into the deep end of the pool and figure out if I can swim. So, naturally, the first thing I did was to buy some leather handcuffs and a wand vibrator. I took a few decent pics, created a tinder profile, and started swiping.

My first date a few days later was a cute 21 year-old Ukrainian girl. We had a quick chat on the app and I invited her out for a drink. We met up outside the metro, walked to a bar and had a pleasantly anodyne chat for about an hour or so. I did not touch her beyond an initial hug. At that point I asked her if she wanted to come back to my place; she was up to it, and we headed off. On the walk back I thought to myself: "what the hell are all those people on the internet talking about? Dating is the easiest thing in the world".

She asked me about my sexual experience, especially with BDSM, but I was too insecure to tell her the truth, so I bullshitted about how some ex introduced me to the idea a couple of years ago.

We got back to my place and started making out on the couch a bit. It was at this point that ambition and reality came crashing into each other. I suddenly realized that I did not remember how any of this worked. I was basically a virgin all over again. I took her into the bedroom, but everything was off. I was too nervous, too eager, moving too fast. Neither of us was comfortable. I could barely get hard. Neither of us came. A disaster on every level.

I walked her down to the tram stop and never contacted her again. The embarrassment was just too bad.

The second time around was...not much better. And the third one too. Let me quote some of my dating notes from this time:

It is probably too early to judge after 4 dating partners, but thus far the apps have brought me nothing but disappointment, pain, and anxiety. I can't even get hard for the women I sleep with. I sincerely hope there is something better down the line because otherwise I am so fucked.

Initially thought I'd just fuck around, but very quickly discovered I was not built for casual sex. Don't enjoy sex all that much to begin with tbh. Can barely cum from it, when I manage to get hard! (Later note: maybe this was a bit misguided? (Later later note: it was misguided.)) [note from significantly later: casual sex is good actually]

But I kept trying, figuring out what to do and what not to do, getting feedback from my partners, experimenting with all sorts of new things, and just generally getting the hang of it. About a month after starting, I met someone I became madly infatuated with, fumbled it hard, and it was all over after just 4 dates. My notes are amusing in retrospect, so earnest:

Intrusive thoughts all the time, even when I'm spending intimate time with other women [...] I'm terrified of doing the wrong things, being too honest or not honest enough, coming on too strong or not strong enough. I'm scared that by liking you too much I'm going to start repulsing you: afraid of challenging you, acting like a doormat. Nobody wants a doormat.

Went from fucking being happy all on my own to the utter bullshit of limerence, loneliness, neediness...this shit better be worth it in the long run, man.

What if in the end our relations are the only thing that really matters, and it's too late for me? What if I'm totally fucked?

That was my first inkling that I really wanted something more than just casual sex, but I also felt the need to explore more before trying to settle down.

I had grown up on a steady diet of third-hand dating wisdom: I needed to act like a douche, develop "game," become some sort of Alpha Chad. Early on, dating felt like a rollercoaster partly because I was not really secure in myself. A week without any matches would feel depressing, a week with multiple dates would make me feel like I was on top of the world. Fundamentally the issue was that I was looking for external validation and trying to protect or build up a fragile ego.

So easy to get discouraged, even when things are going relatively well, I'm banging multiple women, etc. One failure and I'm feeling bad ffs.

What took a while to figure out was that being a weirdo worked just fine. More than "just fine", it was the right thing to do, because that's the only way you can attract people who are really into you. Breaking through the initial pain and anxiety was crucial though, I think it's easy to get caught in a cycle of low self-esteem, failing to improve, and self-sabotaging, which just causes more low self-esteem. But I just picked up the pieces, kept learning, and kept going. I tried to embrace rejection: fear of rejection is paralyzing, yet actual rejection gives clarity, courage, and finality. The absurd thing is that even after dozens of rejections, the fear never gets easier. The lesson seems impossible to internalize—maybe I needed more repetitions? Should've done 5x5 rejections twice a week like some kind of twisted gym routine?

The Harem of an Autist

Between August 2022 and June 2024 I went on 36 first dates with women of 26 different ethnicities. I slept with 17 of them, and had steady relationships with 7. From portfolio managers to women with shaved heads and dagger tattoos on their chest, I was mostly drawn to the "art hoes".

I don't play guitar or skate.

It didn't take long for me to figure out what to do in bed. Six months after my first date, one of my friends with benefits used the words "transcendent" and "I felt something die in me" to describe our night together. But my brain was busy cataloguing her self-absorption and being bored.

A curious thing I noticed was that many of the women I dated weren't actually seeing other guys on the side. Some were uninterested, unwilling to put in the effort, while some (even really cute girls) seemed to have trouble finding even someone willing to bang them. So I found myself in a weird harem situation, dating 3-4 women at a time, having threesomes and generally living a life of debauchery. My calendar looked like a messy game of Tetris.

This is the timeline of all my dates/relationships (blue: had sex; red: no sex):

Nothing says 'catch' like a man who Gantt-charts his dating history.

The reality of being a "player" was not always what I had imagined it to be though. Take Alice, for example: she was kind of a hopeless romantic who had spent a decade pining over her ex. Three dates in, she was clearly falling for me harder than I was for her. She was lovely: beautiful, intelligent, great in bed, had her shit together. She wrote me poems. We even lived together for a couple of months. And yet for some reason beyond my understanding, I felt an emotional distance that could not be overcome. I think on some subconscious level I was getting off on making her fall for me even more, but the screwed up power dynamic just gave me a hollow feeling. I almost stopped reading during my relationship with her, and my creativity died completelyal. I realized that I needed something different out of my partner, something with more intensity, even if it means having to go through more turbulence. Alice thought we'd date for a year and amicably go our separate ways, and that's what happened in the end.

Having women compete for your attention, maintaining multiple relationships, the power to say "no"—it pumps up your ego in a way that feels amazing at first but eventually reveals itself to be a bit empty. You end up creating these parallel lives, each relationship its own little universe that never quite achieves escape velocity. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. But it gets old.

In the midst of all this, I met some truly remarkable people. Despite things not working out romantically in the long run, I'm genuinely grateful for their presence in my life. I don't think failed relationships are a waste of time, not every connection needs to last forever to be meaningful. Some people are just passing through your life, leaving it better than they found it. And hopefully you leave them better than you found them. I also fucked up, more than once. I hurt people who didn't deserve it—made promises I didn't keep, acted in ways that I'm not proud of. Sometimes other people had to pay the price of my learning curve.

The one thing I was consistent about was being radically open and honest about everything, including seeing other people. Every time I tried to be "strategic" it backfired spectacularly. The whole pickup artist mythology about being a manipulative seductor is complete bullshit.

The Dating

Sex is easy to get in enormous quantities; finding someone you actually like is basically impossible. In the end, the game is probabilistic—you have to keep trying, keep meeting people, keep rolling the dice until you find something real. The scariest thing is that compatibility is mostly ineffable. The evidence collected by gwern is extremely interesting, and basically boils down to this: it's impossible to predict a couple's romantic success based on their explicit characteristics. Understanding this also helped me understand why the relationship with Alice didn't work out. The best you can do is try to minimize false negatives by letting go of your preconceptions and dating broadly.

That said, I found myself drawn to women who were independent, challenging, intelligent, creative, and unapologetically weird, the ones who weren't entirely sane but were intensely curious about the world. Other than lack of physical attraction, the most typical reason I would reject someone was "they're boring"—after spending years hanging out with 155 IQ schizophrenic metapolitical anarchomonarchists on the internet, conversation with normal people can start to feel a bit plain.

The Sex

Great sex comes from the same place as great relationships: openness, honesty, and genuine confidence. When you're comfortable with yourself and actually give a fuck about your partner's pleasure, spectacular things can happen. Sometimes your partners will orgasm so hard they start crying, and that's a good thing.

Just as runners for decades believed breaking that barrier was physically impossible, most people have convinced themselves that transcendent sex is out of reach, that "good enough" is the best they can hope for. They've internalized stories about how men are just naturally bad at sex, how women are difficult to please, how great sexual chemistry is rare and magical rather than just a learnable skill. But mastering this skill means leaving your ego at the door.

The truth is this: the bar for men is on the fucking floor. The vast majority of guys are absolutely terrible at sex, to a degree that is almost unbelievable. I met multiple beautiful women with bodycounts in the dozens who had essentially never had good sex in their lives before meeting me. Not because I'm some magical sex god, but simply because I gave a damn and put some passion into it.

A strange realization: I have vastly more sex than Aella, who is famous for being a whore. If even Aella isn't getting laid enough, what hope is there for normal people? How do we increase the fuck rate for the masses? I think the answer is depressingly simple: most people don't have more sex because the sex they do have is mediocre at best. They settle for "good enough" and stop looking for better, stop trying to be better. It's like someone declaring they don't like sushi after only eating gas station California rolls. So, to answer Tyler's question: people don't have more sex because most sex is lame.

Imaginary Barriers

Nice guys: a lot of people think you need to be a jerk to get laid, but that's just another fake social script. The truth is this: being "nice" from a position of weakness is dating kryptonite. Women can smell the desperation. But being genuinely kind from a position of confidence and abundance is incredibly attractive. The difference isn't in the behavior itself, but in the energy behind it. True kindness flows from having clear boundaries and standards, from being genuinely interested in someone's wellbeing and pleasure—not from being a pushover hoping to trade basic decency for sexual access.

The power to say no:

One of the most liberating discoveries wasn't the sex, but realizing I could...say no to it. At some point I started waiting for the second date before getting physical—the connection was better, the sex more comfortable. But it resulted in the strange scenario of girls practically pleading to come back to my place on first dates. Women find it bizarre when you say "no" in that situation, it's just not in their script. They're so accustomed to men desperate to get their dick wet that when you flip the dynamic, it short-circuits their entire understanding of dating.

This whole pathetic dance of men begging for a crumb of sex, trying to push the girl to come back to his place while she resists and acts as a gatekeeper to sex, etc.—it's entirely a choice. A collective delusion that persists only because everyone keeps playing their assigned role. You can simply reject it.

Abundance mindset: when I had 2-3 concurrent partners, I became extremely selective and rejected almost everyone I went out with. The psychological impact of abundance is to make you secure in your own judgments, to push up your standards to where they should be in the first place and stick with them. Scarcity creates artificial commitment to bad relationships. Abundance helps you realize that compatible partners aren't unicorns—they're just people you haven't met yet. And entering a serious relationship with the perspective and attitude that abundance bestows on you makes everything so much easier.

Cold approach: the barrier I have not broken yet. I'm too fucking terrified to cold approach women in public, yet at the same time, I've had way more sex than friends who regularly chat up strangers. A friend casually mentioned hitting on a cute girl in a museum, talking to her for an hour, and then bailing unceremoniously, not knowing how to close the deal. The very thought of hitting on a stranger makes me sink into the floor, melting through the boards, my liquefied body dripping right into the third circle of Dante's hell, but I have infinitely (literally, divided by zero) more sex than he did at the time. This makes absolutely no sense and completely contradicts conventional wisdom about "getting out there".

Finding Fluorescence

Once sex becomes easy, it loses some of its mystique. I found myself having as much sex as I wanted, but it was a fleeting satisfaction that left me yearning for more. One of the notes in my dating journal, following a breakup, reads:

All I'm left with is a nostalgic longing for a future that never was.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Getting your heart stomped when someone doesn't reciprocate your feelings is a special kind of hell, but it turned out to be a necessary step.

Last year, I wrote to myself:

I'm not looking for someone who ticks my boxes. I'm after "I can't believe you exist", I want to be amazed, I am after fluorescent effervescence and electric bolts running up my spine, I want to feel like I'm on amphetamines 24/7, entirely incapable of sleeping, lose my job and end up in an early grave because of my romantic obsession.

Perhaps my relationship standards had been set by reading too many Russian novels, but then, improbably, unbelievably, astonishingly, I found her! And while boatloads of casual sex was pretty damn good, it doesn't hold a candle to settling down in a loving, inspiring relationship with a fantastic partner.

But here's the thing: I don't think I could have found it, or been ready for it, without all the fucking around first. The experience, the confidence that comes from abundance, from knowing you can walk away, from having your pick of partners—it fundamentally changes how you interact with the world. Without experiencing the wrong relationships—the boring ones, the sexually charged but emotionally empty ones, the ones where you're more therapist than partner—you lack the contrast needed to recognize something extraordinary when it does appear.

This stuff often fucking hurts. There's a reason the Buddha thought desire was the root of all suffering. But you know what? Fuck the Buddha. Some pain is worth having.

Sometimes I wonder if getting into all this so late in life was a mistake. Did those years of celibacy permanently rewire my brain? Did I miss some crucial developmental window? A friend of mine said that celibacy has already destroyed my psyche. But I don't think that's true, it's never too late to fall in love.

So, what's next? Back to the books, or happy-ever-after relationship wireheading? One thing about breaking through arbitrary limitations is that it leaves you facing real ones, like how to spend the few days you have left on the planet. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I'm really happy with my life right now.

Fin

We're all role-playing, and most people don't realize that they can just switch roles. You can just choose to be whatever you want. You Can Just Do Stuff™. So here's the four-minute mile of Fucking: if you're a reasonably put-together guy in his mid-30s, you could be having threesomes with cute college students. You simply have to make the choice to do it, the barriers are all inside you. If you're actually handsome or successful, you can basically live like Leo in perpetuity, though you'll probably get bored of it faster than he does.

But even if that's not what you want, I still recommend making sex your autistic special interest for a year or two. Not just for the obvious benefits, but because it opens up new mental and emotional states, teaches you surprising things about how people work, and most importantly, lets you enter a serious relationship knowing exactly what you want and what you're worth. And then you can make an informed decision: do I want to go monk mode, or full Simon Sarris? (Those are the only legitimate options).