I never went near ‘the’ article, though I read some similar ones. They all give that same Humbert Humbert vibe. Moist Gollum fingers they want to get onto ‘soft nubile flesh’. It’s very unsettling.
I think you very insightfully laid bare the key to it - a deep-seated inability to see women - girls, specifically, but women in general - as persons. They are not funny, smart, stubborn, determined, kind-hearted, empathetic or vulnerable. They’re ‘well developed’ and ‘look 25’. Having tits isn’t a personality, my dude. Why are they like this.
My own teenage years were a really long time ago but I remember these guys, they were everywhere. They started noticing me when I was around 14 and they completely lost interest when I turned 20. It was one of the greatest reliefs in my life. I had had enough of the Gollum vibes. They all give off Gollum vibes, regardless of how they look. You just always feel like their fingers would be sticky and moist.
Someone under a similar article suggested to me that ‘us old hags are preventing young girls from having agency and fucking dudes, and the young girls hate our guts for it’. Sounds like a cope to me but okay. Same guy was insisting you should totally ‘let’ a 13 year old have sex, then just ‘force her to have an abortion’ if she gets pregnant.
Inigo - I was endlessly impressed reading through every paragraph of your essay. One of the most emotionally intelligent response pieces I've read on this platform that doesn't seem to provoke, but illuminate. What an extraordinary writer you are. Subscribed ❤️ Looking forward to diving into your film writing too x
“I don’t want to assume, but I wonder if your objectified fixation on the female form is a misappropriation of your own lack of self-acceptance?”
I can’t describe the hope it gives me to see one man giving this sort of in-depth analysis of another man’s depravity. It honestly makes me feel safer in this world knowing that there are men capable of reading a piece like that and seeing it for the projection and violence toward women that it is.
Absolutely brilliant response to and analysis of that article. I could see the insecurity and loophole-seeking all through his piece. He’s desperate to have some public acknowledgment and approval for his distorted and objectifying views of girls and women. Thanks for writing this.
YES. I had a sibling who was on Warped Tour every summer so I occasionally found myself hanging around bands. It was all men (plus Katy Perry that one time and I think she felt it). It bothered me SO MUCH to hear young men, early to mid-20s, talk about teenaged girls as though they were grown women — and of course, talk about them in grotesquely misogynistic terms.
It bothered me because I taught high school and I do not see the adolescent mind as adult. I remembered myself at that age, completely innocent and sheltered. It bothered me that men were so incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of another human being because they have different genitals. It bothered me that they didn’t see the girls as quite fully human. The girls weren’t just excited; they “wanted it”, they were “sl*ts and wh*res” — 16-year-old girls who may not have even known what, exactly, was stirring them to such excitement. In that context and across society at large, in so many insidious ways, the girls weren’t deserving of the respect that men would’ve had to show them at school (at least on the surface).
I saw the title of that newsletter about teenaged girls and it grossed me out. It reminded me of how men talk when they’re around other men, when they don’t notice any women around. Thanks for taking time to push back, to shame this behaviour. It’s shameful on so many levels.
— just read it a third time. Absolute emotional evisceration. You dissect, identify, and scrutinize. Would that every shoddy argument could receive this treatment — brilliant EQ!
I could not have written this better in a million years. I'm far too violent even after I have a Xanax and touch some fucking grass (it's all dead here anyway.)
I would only like to add that I believe this man, whoever wrote the original text in reference, aside from literally everything you wrote here being the singular response needed, people can quit writing about it now. But based on my sniffing of the air around that piece, and this is somehow important where I come from, but, no one has ever seriously tried to hurt him. I don't mean that in a barroom hero brawl sort of way, I mean no one has ever taken him to the edge of mortality and shown him his own capacity to be erased. No one in his life has tried to kill him. After a few people genuinely try to kill you, out of malice, or over business, but definitely trying to END YOUR LIFE the world looks very, very different.
I fucking hate nostalgia.
But this was an immaculate essay sir. I would now give you the slowest most appreciative clap ever for having written this.
I also explicitly stated the 20 year old who took the 12 year old’s virginity was wrong, no matter how much more mature or smarter she was than he was. She was already getting into bars at 12 without being carded. This is why I stressed to card or walk away if there’s any doubt.
Ok, now scroll up and read the essay again, then come back. Ok, done? Think before you feel the need to engage reactively.
I have a few questions, because your comment is a non sequitur coming after mine. I said not enough people had tried to kill you. I don't mean that in a malicious way, I mean that in a literal, you have not stared the yawning void of the possibility of your non-existence in the face enough for it to give you pause before you sit your middle aged ass down to write things like the essay in question. Engage with my comment or get on the main thread.
Why are you commenting on my comment, get on main thread. Goddamn. I don't care. I'm shocked that you're such a petty shitbird that you made it through EVERYTHING surrounding your piece of flaccid writing (and I mean, it wasn't even written well. I'm an editor, this is an insult.)
Why the fuck are you interacting with me and not Inigo or the actual brilliantly thoughtful essay he wrote? Why the fuck are you even down here kid?
I addressed in order. 1. your comment is on MY comment, not the main comment thread. Making it a non sequitur.
2. Engage with my comment directly, the original one, or be dismissed.
3. Your prose style and rhetoric is lacking in both style, substance, and fluency. You were first published when you were nine? Here, have a cookie, that was 40 years ago, no one cares.
A Clarification: I am a paid freelance editor specializing in developmental and line editing short and long form fiction with 20 years experience in the field. I want to make my clients work better while preserving their voice and bringing the best out of them through thoughtful engagement with their use of the language, their style, their personal grammar, syntax, and anything else associated past that. I want to help make them look their best while I remain invisible. I charge a reading fee of $125 for 2500 words because I expect people seeking my services to be both serious about their work and willing to put skin in the game. I reserve the right to decline to work with a client even after the reading fee if they are obviously out of their scope and my services would not be what they need, but if they are denied I will do an autopsy on why they were denied as clients. My rates range from .03-.05 cents a word to negotiable contracts depending on the scope of the work and the needs or wants of the client. I also edit a serialized fiction group project on Substack that you can go find for yourself. I come from the faraway land of independent publishing. Okay, there's my bona fides, now fuck off about it.
And yes everyone is entitled to think what they want. Conventionally this is called an opinion. Some people hold this up as a holy grail in discourse. "Well, that's my opinion." Ah, but see, opinions can be verifiably bad, wrong, and dangerous all at the same time.
What I wrote is based on realities I witnessed. and I answered your questions. I get the feeling you're just here to sell your services. I've worked as a legal and financial proofreader for 20 years, and have proofread and edited books from friends in exchange for cover art.
As far as non sequiturs, you asked me why I didn't interact with the writer, which I did, and now you're asking why I'm not directly engaging with you, which I am.
Maybe you aren't as good as you think you are.
You didn't bother to go through the thread to see if I engaged with the author. You seem to now be saying I should directly respond to you. It's unclear, or more likely, flip-flopping. No matter what I write, your mind is made up.
What you posted on my comment neither engaged with my comment nor made sense. Go read my first reply again. And now we've reached the stage where I get tired of you and say this.
You were never going to be able to sway what I thought. Your opinion, your words, what you wrote, was bad, and you should feel bad. What's more you should feel stupid for being so petty as to engage someone you don't know on a comment thread about your shit piece of writing TEN DAYS AFTER THE COMMENT WAS MADE.
And I'm pretty damn good at what I do. "I've worked as a legal and financial proofreader for 20 years" Needing to make a point of this directly before this "and have proofread and edited books from friends in exchange for cover art," is telling to me. It says that your life has been miserable. Finance is miserable. Business proofreading and technical writing or editing, is fucking miserable, just like writing for content farms. You have NO soul left, and it shows. And proofreading is a form of editing, it pays shit. I've been doing this twenty years. I've been editing fiction at the levels I described for pay for a decade, but what level of editing beyond proofreading did you do for their manuscripts? Be specific or get off my dick.)
In summation.
Fuck you, and fuck your family. (If you respond to this comment, I will respond with this. If you continue, I will do this for as long as it takes you to shut the fuck up. You're being a pissbaby troll, we can play that game. I like it in the mud.)
Thank you Inigo! This is a fantastic response and very healing for survivors of abuse at a young age. I think another point to mention is that often the teenage girls that appear more mature are the ones who have experienced childhood sexual abuse, or other forms of abuse within the family home. I developed physically very early and could pass for much older in looks and supposed 'maturity'. I was also smart and could discuss issues with adults. But I was mature because of having to survive my narcissistic abusive parents and I was coping with CPTSD. I may have presented as having 'sexual energy' or knowledge, but really iy was the lingering imprint of childhood sexual abuse that had fragmented my soul. The first time a boy put his arm around me and tried to kiss me I had a PTSD flashback of abuse that I repressed and I had to literally run away and cry.....even though I really liked this boy....
I read it and commented. I was once a teen girl and did some of the things described, but why? Grooming by adults, probably.
I worked with people like this in tech. The “grass on the playing field” set. 12 year olds who “pass” are “fair game”. I’m a mom, I know how early grass appears these days. I do not accept tweens as “fair game.” I wouldn’t let someone near my child who did.
Even my grandma pointed out it was predatory counting down when the Olson twins, being stylized as twins with different looks for the adult male gaze, were “legal”🤮.
My impression of Ivy League tech bros is that they are rapey. I did not interact with or trust them outside work. They are how I learned the rich are just as Jerry Springer trashy as the poor long before the Kardashians.
I decided not to travel overseas with one for work in my 20s as planned because I did not trust him not to try to sell me to someone.
The original author is normalizing grooming and statutory rape I and other women experienced and have the good sense to feel a little queasy, and protective of our daughters and younger peers about.
My bestie and I recently apologized to each other for not recognizing how predatory the scene we were in (as adults) was or better protecting each other from that bs liberated sexual freedom that mostly benefits dudes who want to get laid.
Your explanation is great! “Midlife crisis creeper laments not being able to troll after teens and other women decades younger” vibes.
I’m around the same age. Nobody more than a decade my junior has ever been attractive to me. I feel protective/nurturing about younger people. It’s a creepy and indicates a man-baby perhaps not mature enough to be successful in his own age range.
My oldest daughter (in college) and her friend group are wary of creepy ra’s and other older men sniffing around. What do they have in common? Nothing. Predators want naive pussy.
I heard another man brag they like them young, without baggage, so they can give them new baggage to pack. Imagine letting people at similar levels of development learn and grow together instead of some grown man doing terrible damage just to be “first.”
All my life I had older men fetishize “corrupting my innocence.” It makes me sick to understand how I was maneuvered by predators, peers, and family the first half (or more) of my life.
It is a softening of what’s “acceptable” which normalizes a lot of sexual abuse men are engaging in, getting away with already, and attempting to implicate those they groomed as equally culpable. Participation culpability is how abusers trap each other and deflect blame to targets of their abuse. Diddy knows it.
This is the only response to that essay I’ve needed to see. THANK YOU.
Holy shit how good this is.
I never went near ‘the’ article, though I read some similar ones. They all give that same Humbert Humbert vibe. Moist Gollum fingers they want to get onto ‘soft nubile flesh’. It’s very unsettling.
I think you very insightfully laid bare the key to it - a deep-seated inability to see women - girls, specifically, but women in general - as persons. They are not funny, smart, stubborn, determined, kind-hearted, empathetic or vulnerable. They’re ‘well developed’ and ‘look 25’. Having tits isn’t a personality, my dude. Why are they like this.
My own teenage years were a really long time ago but I remember these guys, they were everywhere. They started noticing me when I was around 14 and they completely lost interest when I turned 20. It was one of the greatest reliefs in my life. I had had enough of the Gollum vibes. They all give off Gollum vibes, regardless of how they look. You just always feel like their fingers would be sticky and moist.
Someone under a similar article suggested to me that ‘us old hags are preventing young girls from having agency and fucking dudes, and the young girls hate our guts for it’. Sounds like a cope to me but okay. Same guy was insisting you should totally ‘let’ a 13 year old have sex, then just ‘force her to have an abortion’ if she gets pregnant.
I don’t think they can hear themselves.
Inigo - I was endlessly impressed reading through every paragraph of your essay. One of the most emotionally intelligent response pieces I've read on this platform that doesn't seem to provoke, but illuminate. What an extraordinary writer you are. Subscribed ❤️ Looking forward to diving into your film writing too x
"Meet the Grahams" type beat
Dear Harry I’m sorry that you published that horrible essay, the content scary and self reflection is necessary
Outstanding 🙌🏻
For further context about Harry Seitz, the way he engages with commenters is revealing.
“I don’t want to assume, but I wonder if your objectified fixation on the female form is a misappropriation of your own lack of self-acceptance?”
I can’t describe the hope it gives me to see one man giving this sort of in-depth analysis of another man’s depravity. It honestly makes me feel safer in this world knowing that there are men capable of reading a piece like that and seeing it for the projection and violence toward women that it is.
Absolutely brilliant response to and analysis of that article. I could see the insecurity and loophole-seeking all through his piece. He’s desperate to have some public acknowledgment and approval for his distorted and objectifying views of girls and women. Thanks for writing this.
YES. I had a sibling who was on Warped Tour every summer so I occasionally found myself hanging around bands. It was all men (plus Katy Perry that one time and I think she felt it). It bothered me SO MUCH to hear young men, early to mid-20s, talk about teenaged girls as though they were grown women — and of course, talk about them in grotesquely misogynistic terms.
It bothered me because I taught high school and I do not see the adolescent mind as adult. I remembered myself at that age, completely innocent and sheltered. It bothered me that men were so incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of another human being because they have different genitals. It bothered me that they didn’t see the girls as quite fully human. The girls weren’t just excited; they “wanted it”, they were “sl*ts and wh*res” — 16-year-old girls who may not have even known what, exactly, was stirring them to such excitement. In that context and across society at large, in so many insidious ways, the girls weren’t deserving of the respect that men would’ve had to show them at school (at least on the surface).
I saw the title of that newsletter about teenaged girls and it grossed me out. It reminded me of how men talk when they’re around other men, when they don’t notice any women around. Thanks for taking time to push back, to shame this behaviour. It’s shameful on so many levels.
— just read it a third time. Absolute emotional evisceration. You dissect, identify, and scrutinize. Would that every shoddy argument could receive this treatment — brilliant EQ!
I could not have written this better in a million years. I'm far too violent even after I have a Xanax and touch some fucking grass (it's all dead here anyway.)
I would only like to add that I believe this man, whoever wrote the original text in reference, aside from literally everything you wrote here being the singular response needed, people can quit writing about it now. But based on my sniffing of the air around that piece, and this is somehow important where I come from, but, no one has ever seriously tried to hurt him. I don't mean that in a barroom hero brawl sort of way, I mean no one has ever taken him to the edge of mortality and shown him his own capacity to be erased. No one in his life has tried to kill him. After a few people genuinely try to kill you, out of malice, or over business, but definitely trying to END YOUR LIFE the world looks very, very different.
I fucking hate nostalgia.
But this was an immaculate essay sir. I would now give you the slowest most appreciative clap ever for having written this.
I also explicitly stated the 20 year old who took the 12 year old’s virginity was wrong, no matter how much more mature or smarter she was than he was. She was already getting into bars at 12 without being carded. This is why I stressed to card or walk away if there’s any doubt.
Ok, now scroll up and read the essay again, then come back. Ok, done? Think before you feel the need to engage reactively.
I have a few questions, because your comment is a non sequitur coming after mine. I said not enough people had tried to kill you. I don't mean that in a malicious way, I mean that in a literal, you have not stared the yawning void of the possibility of your non-existence in the face enough for it to give you pause before you sit your middle aged ass down to write things like the essay in question. Engage with my comment or get on the main thread.
Why are you commenting on my comment, get on main thread. Goddamn. I don't care. I'm shocked that you're such a petty shitbird that you made it through EVERYTHING surrounding your piece of flaccid writing (and I mean, it wasn't even written well. I'm an editor, this is an insult.)
Why the fuck are you interacting with me and not Inigo or the actual brilliantly thoughtful essay he wrote? Why the fuck are you even down here kid?
I engaged with him, I first got published when I was nine, again at 10, and multiple times since for money.
Every writer for a paper is listed as an editor.
I got most from the beginning to the end and started a dialogue.
You’re free to write and think whatever you want, and so am I.
You're answering questions I didn't ask.
I addressed in order. 1. your comment is on MY comment, not the main comment thread. Making it a non sequitur.
2. Engage with my comment directly, the original one, or be dismissed.
3. Your prose style and rhetoric is lacking in both style, substance, and fluency. You were first published when you were nine? Here, have a cookie, that was 40 years ago, no one cares.
A Clarification: I am a paid freelance editor specializing in developmental and line editing short and long form fiction with 20 years experience in the field. I want to make my clients work better while preserving their voice and bringing the best out of them through thoughtful engagement with their use of the language, their style, their personal grammar, syntax, and anything else associated past that. I want to help make them look their best while I remain invisible. I charge a reading fee of $125 for 2500 words because I expect people seeking my services to be both serious about their work and willing to put skin in the game. I reserve the right to decline to work with a client even after the reading fee if they are obviously out of their scope and my services would not be what they need, but if they are denied I will do an autopsy on why they were denied as clients. My rates range from .03-.05 cents a word to negotiable contracts depending on the scope of the work and the needs or wants of the client. I also edit a serialized fiction group project on Substack that you can go find for yourself. I come from the faraway land of independent publishing. Okay, there's my bona fides, now fuck off about it.
And yes everyone is entitled to think what they want. Conventionally this is called an opinion. Some people hold this up as a holy grail in discourse. "Well, that's my opinion." Ah, but see, opinions can be verifiably bad, wrong, and dangerous all at the same time.
Sort of like yours.
Now go away.
What I wrote is based on realities I witnessed. and I answered your questions. I get the feeling you're just here to sell your services. I've worked as a legal and financial proofreader for 20 years, and have proofread and edited books from friends in exchange for cover art.
As far as non sequiturs, you asked me why I didn't interact with the writer, which I did, and now you're asking why I'm not directly engaging with you, which I am.
Maybe you aren't as good as you think you are.
You didn't bother to go through the thread to see if I engaged with the author. You seem to now be saying I should directly respond to you. It's unclear, or more likely, flip-flopping. No matter what I write, your mind is made up.
What you posted on my comment neither engaged with my comment nor made sense. Go read my first reply again. And now we've reached the stage where I get tired of you and say this.
You were never going to be able to sway what I thought. Your opinion, your words, what you wrote, was bad, and you should feel bad. What's more you should feel stupid for being so petty as to engage someone you don't know on a comment thread about your shit piece of writing TEN DAYS AFTER THE COMMENT WAS MADE.
And I'm pretty damn good at what I do. "I've worked as a legal and financial proofreader for 20 years" Needing to make a point of this directly before this "and have proofread and edited books from friends in exchange for cover art," is telling to me. It says that your life has been miserable. Finance is miserable. Business proofreading and technical writing or editing, is fucking miserable, just like writing for content farms. You have NO soul left, and it shows. And proofreading is a form of editing, it pays shit. I've been doing this twenty years. I've been editing fiction at the levels I described for pay for a decade, but what level of editing beyond proofreading did you do for their manuscripts? Be specific or get off my dick.)
In summation.
Fuck you, and fuck your family. (If you respond to this comment, I will respond with this. If you continue, I will do this for as long as it takes you to shut the fuck up. You're being a pissbaby troll, we can play that game. I like it in the mud.)
Thank you Inigo! This is a fantastic response and very healing for survivors of abuse at a young age. I think another point to mention is that often the teenage girls that appear more mature are the ones who have experienced childhood sexual abuse, or other forms of abuse within the family home. I developed physically very early and could pass for much older in looks and supposed 'maturity'. I was also smart and could discuss issues with adults. But I was mature because of having to survive my narcissistic abusive parents and I was coping with CPTSD. I may have presented as having 'sexual energy' or knowledge, but really iy was the lingering imprint of childhood sexual abuse that had fragmented my soul. The first time a boy put his arm around me and tried to kiss me I had a PTSD flashback of abuse that I repressed and I had to literally run away and cry.....even though I really liked this boy....
I need an Inigo’s daily thoughts podcast stat ty 🫶🏽
You a nicer man than me.
I read it and commented. I was once a teen girl and did some of the things described, but why? Grooming by adults, probably.
I worked with people like this in tech. The “grass on the playing field” set. 12 year olds who “pass” are “fair game”. I’m a mom, I know how early grass appears these days. I do not accept tweens as “fair game.” I wouldn’t let someone near my child who did.
Even my grandma pointed out it was predatory counting down when the Olson twins, being stylized as twins with different looks for the adult male gaze, were “legal”🤮.
My impression of Ivy League tech bros is that they are rapey. I did not interact with or trust them outside work. They are how I learned the rich are just as Jerry Springer trashy as the poor long before the Kardashians.
I decided not to travel overseas with one for work in my 20s as planned because I did not trust him not to try to sell me to someone.
The original author is normalizing grooming and statutory rape I and other women experienced and have the good sense to feel a little queasy, and protective of our daughters and younger peers about.
My bestie and I recently apologized to each other for not recognizing how predatory the scene we were in (as adults) was or better protecting each other from that bs liberated sexual freedom that mostly benefits dudes who want to get laid.
Your explanation is great! “Midlife crisis creeper laments not being able to troll after teens and other women decades younger” vibes.
I’m around the same age. Nobody more than a decade my junior has ever been attractive to me. I feel protective/nurturing about younger people. It’s a creepy and indicates a man-baby perhaps not mature enough to be successful in his own age range.
My oldest daughter (in college) and her friend group are wary of creepy ra’s and other older men sniffing around. What do they have in common? Nothing. Predators want naive pussy.
I heard another man brag they like them young, without baggage, so they can give them new baggage to pack. Imagine letting people at similar levels of development learn and grow together instead of some grown man doing terrible damage just to be “first.”
All my life I had older men fetishize “corrupting my innocence.” It makes me sick to understand how I was maneuvered by predators, peers, and family the first half (or more) of my life.
It is a softening of what’s “acceptable” which normalizes a lot of sexual abuse men are engaging in, getting away with already, and attempting to implicate those they groomed as equally culpable. Participation culpability is how abusers trap each other and deflect blame to targets of their abuse. Diddy knows it.
I thought about writing something like this but decided against it for the sanity of my mind - I appreciate that you weren’t as selfish.
👏👏👏 Amazing. Thank you for taking the time to put words to what we all thought and felt!
excellently written!