#Dagny Taggart's Himbo Harem

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!!! I forgot that I already had a tag for the sexuality in Atlas Shrugged, so if you want to specifically look for (or block!) discussions of sex in Atlas Shrugged the tags to look out for (so far) are "matryoshka of cuckoldry" and "Dagny Taggart's Himbo Harem."

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So y’all are REALLY thirsty for an Ayn Rand discourse/shipost/criticism blog, huh.

Fine, fair enough, please sit with me in my pet obsession.

(I feel like I should warn you right now that a lot of the things I approach in talking about Atlas Shrugged are going to be based in kink/sex/sexuality because I’m genuinely not kidding when I say the world would be a better place if Rand had had a nice dungeon in which to express herself)

So Cheryl/Jim and Lillian/Hank are set up as obvious parallels, where one partner is the self-determined rugged individualist and one is the bloodsucking parasite bent on eradicating achievement. In both cases the bloodsucker fakes a personality that the rugged individualist is interested in pursuing.

In Jim’s case he takes credit for Dagny’s achievements; he already has wealth and power and he pretends to have the same drive and determination his sister does in order to attract Cheryl. Lillian pretends to be interested in Hank’s work but uninterested in his person, a proud charger unwillingly submitting to the hand of a stronger master. He initially thinks less of Dagny because she’s willing to fuck him, for what it’s worth.

(BTW Dagny’s handle on the kind of sex she wants and how far she’s willing to go to get it is actually kind of incredibly progressive? People talk about the rape fantasies but honestly I don’t really see that here; in The Fountainhead, sure, but Dagny is shown either as a service sub playing maid while chasing the D she doesn’t feel she’s earned yet or as a powerbottom who is a thousand percent in charge of her interactions with Hank and Francisco - when Hank attempts to slut shame her the morning after she kicks her clothes away and basically says “you’re damn right I wanted to fuck, have you seen me? I’m incredible. You’re pretty awesome too so I wanted to bone but if you’re gonna be a shit about it I can take care of myself”)

Cheryl really ends up talking herself into trusting Jim in spite of the fact that he’s shitty to her (taking her to parties where she’s ridiculed, etc) and she works harder and harder to be what the person she believes him to be would want (poised, graceful, in control of herself).

Rearden loathes himself for wanting Lillian, but LET’S BE REAL HERE, Rand writes this dude with a humiliation kink. He thinks of himself as base and animalistic when he approaches Lillian for sex, he considers himself crude and undeserving and the fact that is impatient and horny while she delicately marks her place in a book with a pure satin ribbon makes him hornier. (The frigid, disinterested domme raising a perfectly shaped eyebrow to sneer at a sub who has to earn the privilege of rubbing himself off on her shiny latex boot because all he’s good for is humping her leg like a dog and bringing her a tribute of money is totally a thing and findom would be better for Rearden than that nightmarish thanksgiving dinner)

Anyway what I’m getting at here is that both Jim and Lillian get off on the degradation of their partners but they approach it in different directions.

Jim thinks about how he used to buy shopgirls like Cheryl for the price of a meal and he likes watching her be innocent and humiliated, confused after a social faux pas. She doesn’t want anything from him except to accommodate the things he’s done, she doesn’t want his money or even his attention really, she wants to worship at the altar of productivity and their relationship eventually falls apart because, of course, he’s been lying about actually doing things. He can no longer degrade her the way he wants to when she realizes she’s been had, she regains her dignity and control of the situation once the lie is revealed. And then she jumps off a dock and kills herself because Rand is a shitty, shitty writer.

Rearden’s situation is interesting because he’s stuck with Lillian not because of lies she told him but because of lies he told himself. Cheryl stays with Jim out of a misdirected sense of admiration, Rearden gets together with Lillian because “well isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

If I’m being honest I find Cheryl much more interesting and sympathetic than maybe any character in the book other than, perhaps, Eddie Willers.

So my question is where does a self-determined, self-made man like Hank Rearden get the idea that he needs to get married to a society girl who won’t put out?

I think this might be an interesting question of class - Dagny, Francisco, and Jim were raised rich, they knew that marrying the “right type” was bullshit. Galt was apparently more than mortal flesh and wouldn’t touch the hand of a lover until it had been purified by fire and had the taint of society burned away so we can ignore the fact that he was from a working class background and would have had the same socialization as Hank.

So where did Rearden get it?

How does a man grow up and start his own business and buy several other businesses and hire a staff and do research and lease offices and buy a car and go about the world making his own way and still get married to someone who doesn’t respect him out of the belief that it’s the done thing?

This is one of the many, many, things that Rand doesn’t set up well about her characters. Hank is a main character for RATHER A LOT of the novel but he’s not really a person and he’s not meant to be. He’s meant to be the kind of guy who’s ALMOST good enough to deserve Author-Avatar Dagny Taggart.

So somewhere in him there’s that inexplicable flaw, somewhere in him he cares too much about what others think or was too willing to think well of people and that’s what killed his chances in the end. He’s a sucker for society, he wants to be part of something.

And unfortunately if you’re pining for Dagny Taggart that means you’re just placeholder dick.

(it’s okay, he’s clearly fine with being passed over for novels or other men; one must imagine Rearden happy and jerking it to the thought that somebody more deserving is fucking his old lady)

(I’m going to have SO MUCH TO WRITE ABOUT when I get to the party bracelet scene)

Anyway.

That wasn’t really meant to be coherent, I just figured it’d be a good way to kick things off before I dig into the book for real.

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This is a dead horse that I'm going to be beating *A LOT* on this blog, but Rand was so clearly so interested in writing consensual nonconsent, total power exchange, and cuckquean scenes between impossibly beautiful, emotionally stunted people that I believe that if she had found a way to survive off of writing that specific type of smut and nothing else the world would be a much better place.

Ayn Rand's characters are stilted and unnatural at nearly all times unless they are engaged in some bizarre psychosexual fuckery, in which case the wooden puppets she's been beating you over the head with become playful and dynamic and full of longing and denial.

There's a scene late at night when Dagny is overwhelmed trying to finish the John Galt Line in which she puts her head down on her desk and lets herself feel the weight of all her longing for someone who is an equal to help her share the load - that scene reads as very contrived, the desire it expresses comes off as artificial, and the story moves on to the next scene with no satisfaction.

Compare that with Dagny's last night in Galt's Gulch, when she and John are in separate rooms, wanting each other but denying their pleasure as part of an intricate ritual of grappling with power and belonging; the scene puts all of the tension and desire into the sound of a footstep and the click of a cigarette lighter and in a way that feels believable and cathartic even as it thwarts the desires of the two characters because the eroticism is in their shared denial.

The parts of Rand's books that deal with sex are always the parts that seem the least practiced and most sincere, even if that's Dominique getting rawed by a man she hates in order to shame Roark for not doing enough to deserve her. Even when her villains fuck it gives more insight into their characters than nearly any other scenes they're in. Considering how many interminable bitchy party scenes she writes to show off how horrible most of her non-main female characters are, this is shocking.

I haven’t read Atlas since 2005, so I’m stoked to passively ingest snarky commentary.

It always seemed to me that the people around me who were most in love with this book often particularly love the idea that other people should love them regardless of how they treat other people. Like, being a dick, or just not having very good social skills, shouldn’t tarnish the adulation due to Smart People TM, (my super cringe teenage self included) who should run the world.

I’m super curious if this matches your observations.

So I'll tell you about the two people who I most vividly remember loved Atlas Shrugged when I was working at the coffee shop and they saw me reading it.

One person was a young latina woman who had worked her way through college and law school and who had passed the bar a year before and was working overwhelming hours at a law firm where she was getting significant raises on a regular basis. The job was difficult, and she always seemed on the verge of burnout, but she was very firmly entrenched in the idea that hard work paid off and liked the book because it was about people who were brilliant and rich and worked hard anyway and they came out on top in the end.

The other person who loved it was a middle-aged man who worked taking bets at the racetrack and who was a literal, actual VOCAL member of the John Birch Society. He was notable for two habits: he never tipped, and while he never bought his own pack of cigarettes he would also never, ever allow you to *give* him cigarettes, so he would 'bum' smokes from me and pay me a quarter each (this was when a pack cost about five dollars, so that was just about what a cigarette cost). He liked the book because he thought the world was full of moochers (he's the only person I've ever spoken to who would regularly refer to people that way in conversation) and the book was a story where the moochers got what was coming to them for once.

These were VERY different people who took pretty different messages from the book for very different reasons.

I think the central fantasy of Atlas Shrugged is that it is full of characters who are loved and valued for the thing that they most value about themselves. It is a book that is not just about a meritocracy, it is about a Meritopia. It is about people who get the things they want because they are the best at what they do. This is CENTRAL to the story.

The reason I used the term "Matryoshka of Cuckoldry" to describe the relationships is because of this meritocratic point of view. Eddie loves Dagny but is not jealous of the fact that she wants Francisco because Francisco is a better man than Eddie. Francisco wants Dagny, but understands her passion for Hank because Hank is a good man who is currently part of her world in a way that Francisco can't be. Hank *sends her a letter* letting her know that he's okay with her leaving him for Galt because he meets Galt and understands why Dagny can't love Hank anymore once she has met the pinnacle of humanity. Then both of her exes help her rescue her current lover because he is a better man than them.

The Fountainhead has a much more literal cucking thing going on with Dominique marrying and fucking two men who she thinks are much worse than Roark, sullying herself with their lust until Roark chooses to stop sullying himself by operating in a world that doesn't value him the way that she does.

What is the same in both of these novels, and what I think you are pointing at in your ask, is that the horrible characters are loved for the things that they love about themselves, and all of their unloveable traits don't matter.

That is the fantasy that people are getting from Atlas Shrugged, and that's why you might find some real assholes out there "Looking for their Dagny/Galt" (a literal phrase I have seen on Libertarian dating sites!).

And you know what, I can be sympathetic to that.

I was raised to value intellect over everything else. Academic achievement, high test scores, acceptance to a good college, and being smarter and more knowledgeable than all my peers was what I was taught was more important than being kind, or being polite, or making friends, or taking care of my mental health.

That meant that I really, really, really wanted people to love me for how smart I was.

And, well. The thing about that is, I ended up loving and being loved by people who didn't care if I was cruel or selfish, and who didn't mind being cruel or selfish to me.

I'm still kind of an asshole. And since I started dating my spouse within three months of when I first read Atlas Shrugged, it's not a surprise that he doesn't care much if I'm nice to people and is, himself, kind of an asshole (though, notably, he is not an asshole with me and part of me getting better has been both of us learning to draw boundaries on how we are willing to be treated by one another).

But oh my god, I'm never an asshole like I am when I'm around my dad. I'm never as much of a snob as I am when he brings it out in me. I'm never as mean as I am when I'm talking to him. And I've never stopped hearing from my dad that I'm too smart to be doing the job that I'm doing, that I'm too smart to be going back to school for a different degree, that I should be getting a PhD and focusing on one field because that's what I'm best at and the rest of the world should recognize it. I know that's what my dad loves about me more than anything else he loves about me. He thinks I'm smarter than him, and he thinks that's awesome, and he thinks that everything I do that is not about harnessing raw intelligence into an academic career is a waste of my mind and time.

So there is a part of me that deeply identifies with these characters whose best trait is their efficiency, who never bother to be nice because it would slow them down in the process of being perfect. I desperately understand the fantasy of someone saying "you are the best in the world at this one specific thing and I find that so sexy that I don't care about your lack of work/life balance, offputting personality, and total lack of skills unrelated to your area of interest."

(Of note: another part of this fantasy in the novel is that skill in one area translates to skill in others. There's a philosopher who is also an incredible short order cook; there's a banker who is also a brilliant tobacco grower; there's a railroad executive who is also an expert maid because Ayn Rand is so fucking kinky she doesn't know what to do with herself)

That's just, you know, a shitty way to live and means you treat people like crap and sometimes that takes a little while to understand that and figure out how to be less of an asshole.

Also: part of the fantasy is that you actually ARE good enough at any one thing that that's what someone will love you for. Most of us aren't! And that's a good thing actually, because people should love you for more than one aspect of yourself!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: one of the most important things that I've ever come across for my mental health is this image:

[ETA: the image is a print by Nicole Manganelli of Radical Emprints and you can get one here.]

I saw it on Tumblr some time in 2013 or thereabouts and instantly recoiled from it. I was angry about it. It was *WRONG.* At that point, in my mind, ALL that you are were worth was your productivity. That was literally all that you had to offer to the world, and literally all that people could love you for.

That's the Atlas Shrugged mindset. That's what the people who are fans of the book are carrying around in their heads. That's why they think it doesn't matter if they're an asshole, so long as they're rich enough, or work hard enough, or are the best at enough things, or have enough to make up for the fact that they aren't anything outside of their productivity.

But the picture wasn't wrong, I was wrong.

Anyway, I've done a lot of therapy about it and that's the best answer I've come up with.