The Ex-Vegan Euphoria
It’s Kinky

An R-rated reply to the question, “Why do so many ex-vegans experience some kind of euphoria (increased sex drive, or other psychological changes, presented as seeming health-benefits) when they decide to discard their ethical commitment to the vegan diet and revert to eating meat.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDuKT0H-LTA

I got a simple, straightforward and fundamental question from the audience and it’s a question I have not seen or heard answered already on the Internet, so let’s tackle it in a relatively short video here.

I was asked, vegan to vegan, honestly, sincerely, when these people go back to eating meat, these people having been vegan for many years, having been committed to the vegan cause; morally, ethically, ecologically, when they go back to eating meat, so many of them experience these transformative effects. Whether that’s in their sex drive. Dive in their sense of physical strength and vitality, whether it is psychological or physiological, we now have a pretty large sample size. We have a significant amount of anecdotal evidence of people feeling that it’s a revelation and a transformation. They feel tremendously energized. They feel some kind of effect when, after being committed to veganism, they go back to being carnivores, whatever you want to say. Why is this?

This is in one of the most heavily observed, heavily discussed, heavily researched areas of social anthropology. It’s because they’re engaging in boundary-pushing behavior. It’s because they’re engaging in taboo violating behavior.

Now, not everybody is like this. I myself am completely alien to this experience of human nature. But if you just start reading the autobiographies of historical figures, it doesn’t really matter if they’re like politicians or actors or actresses you will see. There is an incredibly common pattern in human psychology, which was like when they were growing up as teenagers, they tried to have sex with their boyfriend or girlfriend in the back seat. Of a car. And the whole time, they’d be terrified that their parents would find them or their older brother would find them, that they’d be discovered, that they’d be caught. And then they remained fascinated and excited by this for the rest of their lives. They became a fetishist for having sex in the back seat of a car, and it just it just stays with them.

There are white people who grow up with a racist family and the American South and their whole life they have this fascination with. Being a white person, having sex with black people because it was taboo because it was forbidden because they’re crossing a line because they’re engaging in boundary pushing. Behavior there is a very clear psychological dimension to someone who adhered to and believed in and promoted a vegan diet. Someone who either believed this believed in this as a form of self abnegation, like they may have thought of it as a kind of monastic vow. They may have thought of it in terms of personal purity. They may have thought of it in terms of a moral mission to change the world. An externalized mission where it’s not about their self improvement, but about improving. The world they. May have thought about of it in terms of a humble service to help animals, the suffering of animals. However it was, they thought. Of it, it is ultimately a self-evident kink fetish boundary pushing moral precept violating behavior that they get a thrill out of when they then return to eating meat.

And the psychological dimension to this, I think is transparent and it’s demonstrable. Because all of these people can remember what it was like eating meat when they were just a kid growing up with their parents before they adopted veganism and it didn’t have any of these effects on them?

Some of these examples, they’ve now become like memes on the Internet ever being fun? Ohh, I ate fish for the first time in 10 years and wow, I had this, you know, amazing transformation in my libido, my sex drive. It often is the sex drive. Do you notice that it off both male and female? We’ve had several reports of this. Right.

Well, again, I’m, I’m sorry. This is one of the most studied, most talked about things in anthropology. Talk about kind of, you know, boundary pushing and, you know, liminal zones of morality and so on, so liminal meaning on the limits of morality. Remember, I even once read a sorry it can be any. It can be any boundary that people are raised to not cross or in this case what’s maybe a little bit more interesting is that it was a boundary that they probably adopted maybe as teenagers, but maybe in their early 20s, it probably wasn’t a moral precept. They grew up with where that was. Forced on them by outside authorities so they believed in themselves. But maybe that makes, frankly, the erratic effect of transgressing that boundary all the more thrilling and all the more satisfying.

So look, I’ll use two examples from opposite sides of the of the world.

I knew a guy who was in training camps to be on the Olympic team for boxing, he was somewhat serious, he was not a world champion boxer, you know, he was training. Seriously for boxing. At at whatever level and he, you know, he knew I was vegan. We talked about vegan ethics and he described to me the scene of him going. To a farm wasn’t even really a slaughterhouse with a group of other, you know, young men training to be boxers. To drink the blood of of a horse like a horse that was to be killed that day. You can imagine this is like a ******* Stone Age ritual. I mean, this is, you know, let’s take it back to experience. This people at. 10,000 years ago, you know, and you know everyone doing this ritual, they went they this was legal, by the way. And it’s same. Thing people eat meat. This wasn’t illegal. This was in France. This is a white band in France. This is in Western. And, you know, they went. And they had. They each had a cup. And you can imagine they’re young guys who are in some ways nervous and in some ways maybe cocky and proud. And, you know, they stand around and you watch this animal die. And of course, if you if you hadn’t used your imagination, the blood comes out of the animal hot and thick. And of course it’s disgusting if you let yourself be disgusted. But they want to seem tough. They want to don’t want to vomit. It was like probably you can remember being a teenager and drinking vodka or drinking whiskey for the first time and it doesn’t taste good. You’re not used to it or something you can imagine. There were a lot of psychological moments. This and this guy told me absolutely, like with conviction that he got some kind of boost in strength and energy out of drinking, you know, horse blood. And as I recall, he did it again. I don’t know how many times, but he on another occasion it was just it was just cow blood. It was a slaughterhouse for for cows and going getting the hot blood so him and. Him and this group of athletes, it was something not unknown within the subculture of of boxers. Now you can do a chemical analysis and say, OK, what is actually in? Horse blood fat. Salt, water. There’s there. There are some things you can be reacting to there. There’s some level of chemical effect, but primarily just this whole scenario, the whole setup, it’s obvious what kind of effect that’s gonna have on you. And it’s gonna have a lot of the quality, frankly, of some kind of dark satanic ritual. There’s going to be a sense of fear, fear of death, seeing blood, seeing this animal that the smell. If you guys, as vegan activists have been animal slaughterhouses, you know, there’s the smell of the animals. They stink already. But you know, there’s the smell of death in the air. It’s it’s probably that alone. That even if you don’t feel afraid consciously, you’re probably reacting to that and feeling keyed up, and so on. Then you drink this hot, salty beverage.

I read another account I mentioned in another video briefly. Of a young man who was fighting in the Civil War in northern Myanmar, and he went out and in very bizarre circumstances, he was rescued basically by a tribe of local local people still living in in tribal conditions. What I want to say, local people living in in very simple traditional conditions and to help him and the other the other guys with. They they they strung up a goat and slit its throat and and offered him hot goat plot. And I mean. He was somewhat starving at the time, you know, and he didn’t describe it positively. He was, he felt really disgusted by it. He didn’t want to shame the people who were did this ritual form cause they were also trying to help him back from, you know, he was to some extent, dehydrated and starving. And, you know, he didn’t want to insult his host kind of thing, but he described how revolting. It was. And then he felt kind of dizzy and weird and awful after doing this. No. If you just drink salt water. If you drink the salt water from the ocean, you can feel pretty weird, so I also don’t know if just the salt content is part of the problem. Part of the psychoactive effect of of drinking up a significant quantity of blood. I don’t know. OK. So yeah, there are exactly 2 dimensions to this. Story on the one hand, there is a kind of physiological medical nutritional reality of what’s in the blood you’re drinking or or the meat you’re eating. That’s that’s not that complex. That’s a pretty short, shallow story. Like, guess what, if you eat eggs, you get a ton of fat and a ton of cholesterol and not much else. There’s not a lot of food. Value and eggs. You know, if you suddenly start eating red meat, you get a ton of salt, a ton of protein, a ton of fat, cholesterol, and other stuff that’s bad. You you know, it’s gonna have some effect on you, but having a vegan protein shake, you know, I I I feel a little bit of a boost after drinking a vegan protein because I’m getting some getting some nutrients. If you just drink something that’s full of sugar, you can get a boost from the sugar and caffeine and so on that side is is pretty shallow and pretty straightforward. But. You know, here on YouTube, most people really play it cool. I think you’re kind of underestimating. How much veganism meant to these same people? And look, I use the same verbiage. You know you can call them fake vegans. You can call them insincere. You can say they were never really activists or never cared about ecology, whatever. All that’s doubtless true. All that and more. They’re probably terrible people, but for a lot of these people, veganism was one of the most meaningful things they had in their life.

To give a great example, Charles Marlow. Complete idiot. Complete scumbag. Former heroin addict junkie, by his own admission. By the way, I’m not making any allegations here. I can remember him talking to me and him saying to me in a very honest down to Earth way, that when he found veganism he was really searching for something he wanted something more meaningful in his life. And you know, not conventional religion. He wanted a sense of meaning, sense of direction, a sense of moral purpose. Egotism gave him those things, and veganism gives you a self-discipline. For many people, a sense of personal purity. And. Again. But even just that one word mission, a sense of mission, sense of direction, that means a lot to people. And then by that same token, violating that pushing the boundaries, going beyond it, wallowing in your own filth, violating the laws of purity, the state of yourself. That is going to have for a lot of people some kind of some kind of psychologically thrilling element.

So look I’ve mentioned on this channel before relatively long time ago, I do not experience jealous. I do not experience any kind of thrill in violating boundaries for the sake of violating boundaries. Doesn’t turn me on, it really does nothing for me. I mean, all this, you know, you know, there are people who grew up in the Catholic Church, and then they have fantasies about, like, you know, having sex on the horrible wooden benches in the church. And it’s precisely because it’s forbidden.

Melissa had a friend, a female friend, and she was tempted by this guy, and she admitted, she said to Melissa; ‘but you know what the worst thing is?’ She said. ‘I know I only want this guy because it’s forbidden because I’m not allowed to be with him’. She met him in, like, a workplace scenario. There were various reasons why it was forbidden. Love, you know, whatever I remember. Like, OK, now now she’s got problems now she’s that, that’s that’s something you can ever satisfy.

There are people for whom the forbidden and violating the law is something very exciting. There must be some people who just who just grow out of it.

You tell me, what is sexy about a pair of handcuffs? Really think about that. I mean, the pathetic thing about human nature is that a huge percentage of us, I don’t know, it’s 30 percent, 40% percent look at a pair of handcuffs and get turned on because people want to be restrained, people want to be beaten and humiliated and I know, when I was a teenager, when I didn’t even know what I when I was like 17, they were fully grown women who wanted me to do this stuff to them. There were, there were girls my age too. There were women around like oh wow, this is some kind of tall, self-confident guy.

In terms of what people get turned on by and what they get. Good boy. You know, the human mind creates these divisions and boundaries, creates the division between black and white between, you know, Christian and Jew, between, you know, whatever you want to say, you know, Jew and Gentile, I had one ex-girlfriend and she grew up Christian. Enough that it was. It was a little bit thrilling for her. It was a little bit kinky. Just my Jewishness, you know, I don’t think of myself that way. I don’t think of myself as exotic from her perspective. You know, that was, you know, that was exotic. That was thrilling.

We even had, there was some first person testimony from ‘a privileged vegan’. Another vegan YouTuber here, and she talked about how before she became vegan just because she grew up with the idea that, like deep fried chicken wings were for men, that it was thrilling for her to wear a leather jacket and eat greasy, unhealthy chicken wings out of a bucket. She was doing something that like a blue collar man would do and not something a refined, erudite. You know, woman would do like gender roles and social class rule. The sense of violating about and she felt thrilled by this. She felt proud and powerful by this.

So, people want to violate boundaries and they experience it, I think that is the purest word, as a thrill. It’s not taking the Peach out of the orchard. It’s knowing that you’re climbing over a fence and stealing a Peach, and that you have to scramble to get back over the fence as quickly as possible. And there’s an attack. Coming from that is the bleak and brutal reality of what human beings want. And yet most people are too lazy and too self indulgent, and they don’t actually get out of their chair and take real risks in the real world. They don’t do some of the crazy things I do. They don’t go to do humanitarian work on the border between Laos and Myanmar and have people threatening to kill them. They don’t have these kinds. Of they don’t. Take meaningful risks in their life. They want to take meaningless risks. So I guess you can say in a phrase, this is the psychology of the roller coaster ride. But most people before they get into the roller coaster. They put on their safety belts.