I.
This is a manifesto for Sexy Trads.
It is a response to the misguided minority of the Catholic traditionalist movement who are retarding their family formation and alienating the wider right-wing. The members of this minority have become Puritan in order to disguise their own failings. This is a loving attempt at fraternal correction.
This is not a criticism of the many trads who are already on the true path to virtue. Instead I hope for this to reach two primary audiences: the first are fedora-trads who equate chastity with sexlessness, and who have lost contact with the fullness of their masculinity. The second are right-wingers who are drawn to the ancient faith but who hesitate to embrace its call lest it castrate them. This fear is unfounded.
The path forward lies neither in larping nor in hesitation. The true path forward is that of the authentic reactionary; the man whose faith is evidenced not by his insistence on cultural traditions from particular historical moments but by the shining intensity of his contact with eternal virtues - courage, fortitude, love. Goodness, truth, and beauty.
His faith and his masculinity are aligned and fully expressed. He is dangerous, seductive, and devout.
He is a Sexy Trad.
The democratization of eroticism has at least served to show us that virginity, chastity, purity, are not bitter and morbid old maids, as we believed, but silent vestals of a pure flame.1
II.
You’re a trad. You love the Latin Mass: its austere beauty, its military execution, its timeless majesty. During the Mass, it is clear to you that modernity can still be transcended if one has the discipline to follow the old ways.
The dignity and reverence of the Mass are born of those old ways. Through millennia of refinement, every detail of the service reinforces the central reality that the congregation is present to witness Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.
We should aspire to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold the Mass to. We must strengthen the faith of others just as the mass strengthens our faith - through beauty, discipline, and quiet majesty.
The Muscular Christians have hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.2
III.
Do not fornicate. This is the law. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
But are you adhering to this law as a supreme act of will and obedience? Or - dare I say - do you happen to be adhering to this law as a result of your sins and not your virtues?
Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which the threat of fornication was imminent? In which two desperately tempted people, through a saintly commitment to chastity, held their nerve to please the Lord? If not - can you truly say that you have ever been virtuous?
The incel is the prisoner of fate. The volcel is the true man of will.
I’m not asking you to expose yourselves to near occasions of sin. I’m asking you to remember that you were made in the image of God, and to honor that image through a commitment to treating your body with such respect that that image shines through. To be beautiful.
Or know you not, that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body.3
I’m asking you to give yourself a chance to be virtuous. This means not being sexless. In fact - it means being sexy.
IV.
You need to recognize the scale of the challenge of marrying a young and beautiful virgin in modernity, and of abstaining from sex before marriage. Modern women have been conditioned to expect sex as the fuel that sustains intimacy during extended dating. If you deny them this, and offer only a sterile and barren ‘relationship’, you will fail in your pursuits. You must offer a more seductive alternative.
To achieve this you have to give yourself every possible advantage. She must be swept up in a love and desire so intense that she agrees to your outlandish wishes of a short courtship and marriage before consummation.
There must be a palpable drumbeat to your dating; a momentous undercurrent of attraction that leads inexorably to the night of your wedding. From day one, every stage should be deepened, appropriate to the stage of your relationship. Initially, an intimate curiosity, and subsequently, an engagement humming with anticipation. My own relationship - now a happy marriage with children - would not have survived without this energy.
You are defying every modern convention. This requires true strength; the strength not just to resist temptation but to have the discipline to unswervingly build yourself into a man that is worthy of being desired in this way: beautiful, strong, seductive.
V.
Those whose only contribution to the continuation of traditional courtship is online moralizing and the condemnation of perceived dissenters are hurting and not helping the faith.
In a chokingly suppressive culture, you can only win by being a force of freedom and life. You cannot win by prioritizing your own version of suppression. You shouldn’t spend time on Twitter harassing others.
Focusing on the behavior of others serves as a useful distraction from your own failings. Equipping yourself with a Chesterton profile picture and purity spiraling is only one step removed from phariseeism. It is demanding that others do the hard work of virtuous discipline rather than bearing the full force of the burden yourself, as a man must.
This performative traditionalism unfortunately takes many forms. I’ve heard advice that includes avoiding kissing before marriage and ensuring that you have a chaperone accompany you on dates. To follow this advice is to prevent the formation of intimacy and to lose women with whom you could have otherwise formed a beautiful and intense bond.
Performative tradition is stolen valor from your superior forefathers, who did not live as you live. This intellectual fedora wearing is vanity, superiority, smugness, stultifying. It’s ultimately an excuse, a way of erecting a barrier around yourself that you can blame for failing to connect with women, when in fact the fault lies with you.
By leaning on your ‘traditional’ status in this way, as someone that sees themselves standing apart from ‘degenerate moderns’, you’re subconsciously engaging in an attempt to avoid competing on the same terms as your contemporaries, as you know you can’t match them. “I’m of an older breed.” But you’re not the equal of the men of old, either.
You can change this. Your task is to be a ‘traditionalist against tradition’ - actually embodying virtue rather than virtue signaling.
In this way, Jesus might be seen by the faithful as the ultimate “Gentleman Barbarian” — he had the power and capacity to destroy all of his enemies with a wave of the hand, but chose to lay down his life — making the sacrifice not an act of weakness but of perfect and complete will.4
VI.
That is not to say that the Authentic Reactionary takes no inspiration from the past at all, however. On the contrary, in order to “reconstruct within himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him,” the Authentic Reactionary depends upon the distilled wisdom of the voices of the past, with whom he maintains an intimate correspondence.5
At the center of reactionary Catholic philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s thought is the notion that we should not fixate on any one historical manifestation of perennial virtues, but on the underlying virtues directly. From this understanding we can divine a path to authentically embody those virtues in our own time.
Without this clarity we are always one step removed from virtue itself, but are instead attempting to wear talismans of moments past.
If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the reactionary does not measure his anxieties with the history of yesterday or with the history of tomorrow. The reactionary does not extol what the next dawn must bring, nor is he terrified by the last shadows of the night. His dwelling rises up in that luminous space where the essential accosts him with its immortal presence. The reactionary escapes the slavery of history because he pursues in the human wilderness the trace of divine footsteps.6
VII.
We must become Sexy Trads: this is the only path to virtuously win the women we want and to evangelize the full romantic power of the faith to others.
He that truly believes should strive to evangelize with every aspect of his being, to shine with spiritual and physical health in a time of decrepitude. This requires mastery of body and appetites.
This starts, as so many right-wing endeavors do, with the total subjection of the body. Your physical being must become a testament to the presence of virtues: fortitude, courage, and adventurousness. Your physical health must be obvious, suggestive of discipline, fasting, exposure to nature. Your physique must be athletic: rather than remaining chaste by collapsing your sex drive, these energies should be redirected into sports and bodybuilding.
I therefore so run, not as at an uncertainty: I so fight, not as one beating the air: But I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway.7
You may find that this discipline is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural:
The reabsorption of semen by the blood is the strongest nourishment and, perhaps more than any other factor, it prompts the stimulus of power, the unrest of all forces toward the overcoming of resistances, the thirst for contradiction and resistance. The feeling of power has so far mounted highest in abstinent priests and hermits…8
VIII.
How else should we embody these virtues, this beauty?
Trads, I beg you to stop dressing in costume.
As with the rest of this manifesto, this is directed at a small but highly-visible minority of Traditional Catholics. By ‘costume’ I mean the selection of clothes that are suitable neither for this time nor for you as individuals.
I’m sure you’ve all seen it at the Latin Mass, the cheap tweed, the bold but ill-fitting three-piece suit worn by a 24-year-old.
Many of these attempts to look ‘traditional’ would look immediately odd to men of the age that you’re trying to emulate. If you’re wearing poorly-fitted sporting winter tweed in the city in summer - something is off. Even non-expert onlookers will intuit this. If you’re not confident in navigating and knowing how to break these rules, you will look silly, and you will feel silly, and it will show.
Forty years ago, you would have looked ridiculous dressing as someone from 90 years ago. Today, you look silly dressed as your grandfather. You’re not ‘dressing smartly’. In fact, you’re proving the opposite; that you’re not smart enough to understand and navigate the subtle, ever-changing societal conventions that broadcast who we are.
Wearing a costume communicates a very un-masculine, un-Catholic need to be the center of attention, to be performative and provocative. This is effeminate and childish. Dressing too self-consciously is vanity. You don’t have to subject yourself to this!
It is true that the mass represents both a wedding and a funeral; the marriage of Christ to His bride the Church, and the remembrance of His death on the cross. We should dress accordingly. But being well-dressed is not the same as being overdressed.
Wear simple clothes that fit well. A nice suit and tie, altered to fit your physique. Attempt effortless elegance. Allow your athletic body to make the statement.
You might object that this is boring; but to the man of taste, there are many opportunities to convey uniqueness and personality - subtly! Think Catholic jewelry (crucifixes, wedding and signet rings, watches, cufflinks), grooming, posture, tanned and lean face. Perhaps a subtle fragrance (Comme des Garçons Avignon if you want to double-down on the Latin Mass theme).
And, of course, the ultimate signal: having a happy wife and children at your side. Until you’ve reached this point, I’d hold back on the criticism of others.
IX.
The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether.9
The struggle against lust should be a difficult one, for righteous struggle pleases the Lord. That requires both man and women to be beautiful.
The point of sexuality is love, and the intensification of a properly ordered sexuality represents the tighter binding of people. The deadening of the sexual urge is thus a travesty if it represents a diminishment in your capacity for love, in a collapse of the intensity of your relationships.
Discipline must be enforced internally, against the self and those already firmly within the faith. Be brave enough to wage war on yourself rather than to harass others. Engage in masculine rather than womanly struggle.
But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret: and thy Father who seeth in secret will repay thee. And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard.10
Allow your virtue and the beauty of your relationships to speak for you. Advertise sexual propriety not by insisting on rules but by showing the world your thriving family. Your whole being should be a living message that there are things higher than this fallen world.
X
The pure reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.11
I know the notion of holding yourself to the dual commitments of remaining chaste and building your body is intimidating, and that you will often be alone amongst your friends on this journey.
But I promise you: if you’ve discovered this blog you have uncommon insight and curiosity. If you read long-form essays you have uncommon discipline and focus. If you are an avid consumer of content from our sphere you have uncommon intelligence.
You can do this. Be beautiful my friend. Be sexy.
Please consider supporting the continuation of this project by leaving a like or upgrading to paid. It’s hugely appreciated.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, An Anthology (special thanks to
for originally introducing me to Dávila's work)Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
Brett McKay, Muscular Christianity: The Relationship Between Men and Faith
Matthew Pheneger, Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary’
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, The Authentic Reactionary
1 Corinthians 9:26-27
Friedrich Nietzsche, Notes (1880-1881)
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World History (quotation also featured in friend
/'s Twitter bio).Matthew 6:6-7
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, The Authentic Reactionary
This was such a brilliant and necessary piece
The incel who abstains from porn and masturbation is acting virtuously.