Some of you may have noticed shookwun posting several comic strips featuring a gaunt, bald man having sex with prostitutes. After googling it, I found out the strips were from a 2011 graphic novel called "Paying for It" by the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. It chronicles his experiences paying for sex over a period of ten years, and also serves as an argument in favor of legalized prostitution.
I got it out of curiosity and skimmed through it in a few hours. The book itself is not that interesting. The art is austere and repetitive, and the ideas contained within it are sophomoric at best. However, the meta-narrative of its creation contains some delightful shards of Impact angst.
The novel starts in 1996 when the author breaks up with his girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee (who is a minor celebrity in Canada). Three years before, he looked like this. NW5 territory not far away. Notice the thousand-yard stare on her face.
View attachment 42707
The author, being a giga cuck, does not move out after being dumped. No, he stays in her apartment, listening from another room while his ex bangs other men. This continues for
three years (!). Prior to breaking up, his girlfriend had essentially been denying him sex for at least a year.
View attachment 42711
To his friend, he says that the only reason he had girlfriends before was to boost his ego, fit in socially, and to get sex. He feels he's done with romantic love and is basically just interested in the sex. When asked why he doesn't just go and do one-night stands, he delivers this fine blue pill interpretation of his predicament (lol @ "social skills"):
View attachment 42713
The majority of the book is short vignettes featuring him having sex with various prostitutes. Reading between the lines, most of them seem to find him creepy and having sex with him unpleasant. One even covers her face with her hair while having sex. It's obvious that some of the girls may be trafficked or exploited.
View attachment 42714
After a while, he finds a prostitute that he really likes and eventually settles into an arrangement where she lives with him and he pays her for sex. The book contains plenty of digs against romantic love, which he comes to believe is a flawed concept originating from flawed interpretations of medieval poetry.
View attachment 42715
All in all, I feel this book captures the travails of the balding man quite well: you have the (ASIAN) girlfriend who dumps him when the hair loss gets too bad, followed by years of not having sex, and the eventual turn to prostitutes for coping. The guy is tall, not fat, and a semi-famous artist. Doesn't matter, bald = game over. You then get the MGTOW-style rationalization of his failures with women, and to top it off, a marriage of convenience to an over-the-hill prostitute.
And his ex? Here, have a picture of her and her current BF. LOL @ this cursed condition.
View attachment 42716