The Kinshasa Interviews - Alex Kaschuta: Dracula's Masseuse

Alex on the Rationalist to Trad Pipeline, Romanian Sluts, American Ubiquity, Bongland 10s, Beta Bindis, and the Manlet Menace

Alex Kaschuta is that rare female specimen that likes nothing more than to see yet another request for sexy talk (and more) from men located in the Indian Subcontinent. To her, it builds self-esteem and a sense of self-worth that is so detached from reality that she dares refer to herself as a “Female Chad” (there is no such thing!). She recently was forced to flee London and return to her home in Romania as she was under police suspicion for running a Gypsy car-theft ring without a UK Gyspy car-theft ring license. A future trophy wife of a corrupt Balkan politician, Alex’s writing can be found vandalizing media outlets such as the New York Post and The American Mind, as well at her Substack. Alex joined me in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we are sourcing blood diamonds through various Armenian merchants in order to heavily mark up and sell illegally back in Europe to noveau-riche Eurotrash.

Bobs and Vagene. Arab man touches you. Open DMs on Twitter. Are European Blonde women the most oppressed race?

We are. I think it has more to do with poverty than a taste for luscious back hair, but having lots of Eastern European prostitutes in the Middle East has been a PR nightmare and a big source of our DM discontent. As for bobs & vagene, a slightly different class of Blonde Enjoyer, I commend them. They employ the ultimate shrapnel strategy with the tools at hand - ultra-high volume with sub-lottery level hit rates. It's probably a soul-soothing activity under the unforgiving Rajahstan sun. 

As a blonde of the central European mystery meat category - I'm German, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish & Czech - I feel moderately oppressed, mostly because it's hard to buy jeans around here as they're catering to the more southern Balkan stubby leg phenotype. The forced perma-Capri style is unforgiving in winter. 

You have recently returned to Romania after having lived in the UK for several years, particularly in London. There is so much to discuss regarding the UK: the rich history, how London is the cosmopolitan (and financial) centre of the world, amazing art, high culture, and so on. But before we turn to that there is a much more pressing matter: The Bongland 10. What are they like in the wild? What makes them tick? Do they possess the ability to see themselves, how they look, how they act, and how they come across to others?

Before visiting the UK, I had heard the whisper of legends about women relieving themselves on the sidewalks and collapsing in the street. When I moved to London, I found out that this is effectively a time of day and starts at about 8PM. The other remarkable fact about the perennial UK club girl is that her sartorial spirit is indistinguishable from her Eastern European counterparts, though her dimensions are often different. The rhinestone brassiere is a big favourite in the clubs of Bucharest as well, but only if you can pull it off. No bare midriffs for the objectively sub-10s. Another difference is that in Romania, you won't see nipples or underwear by mistake, at least until you pay up. This is a business after all. 

The real unicorns of the genre I saw in Edinburgh, though. Three alabaster goddesses in the well-known formation of 2 still walking, one carried, at about 10:00 PM, in lamé bras, platform shoes and no coat on a blisteringly cold December evening. They were singing something like a sea shanty and were having a blast. This is an underappreciated fact: the Bongland 10 is probably one of the most joyful creatures on the planet, highly underrated in her sheer lust for life, even if you do sometimes have to pick day-old cigarette butts out of her beehive. 

Years ago I read a piece in the UK Independent about UK stag parties in Eastern Europe. They asked a Latvian woman what she thought of British men and her hilarious reply was:

"I always dreamed of going to England and I imagined that Englishmen would all be real gentlemen, like Sherlock Holmes," said Marika, 21, a student from Riga. "Then, they started coming to my city and I saw that they are little more than animals."

How correct was she? You lived in Hackney aka the one-time Hipster Central, along with Shoreditch, so your experience may vary. The important thing to focus on though is criticism of the Brit male, and more importantly, the Eternal Anglo. Answer me now!

I think the British love for their gallons of deflated ales, early and often, is based on the fact that it's a sort of sanctioned, weekday Bacchanalia. You may live amidst the pale embers of a once-great empire, and you may have to kneel before the new gods, but you can also piss your pants on a Tuesday night without much social stigma. Win-win. 

Overall, I see the Eternal Anglo as a troubled creature. Nowhere left to go, nobody is impressed. The faint sparkle in their eye needs substantial chemical support because the most oikophobic culture in the world does not readily supply it anymore. Nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy their new 94,530 sq mile airport lounge. You may expect a Sherlock Holmes, but you get more of a beefy, soft Oliver Twist. 

There is a vitalist gradient in the UK, as far as I can tell, with the Norf still holding on to a simmering manhood. Unfortunately, the cultural and financial dominance of the South and the neutering legacy of "class" puts a big damper on it.

Would you agree that the UK is a culture apart from the continent? And if you do agree (don't contradict me), in what ways does this manifest itself based on your experiences there?

I agree. To me, the UK is the culture, and it's been disheartening to see it wither in real-time while I was there. 

I was just reading "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, a history of the first English Puritans to settle in the 13 Colonies, and the thought that occupied my mind most was this old Romanian saying: "Omul sfințește locul." - "The man sanctifies the place." The Puritans brought a very specific mix of extreme low time preference, a community & family-focused method of social organization, ultra-Protestant work ethic, a distaste of wealth for wealth's sake, and no-nonsense crackdowns on social ills like "man living alone" (you'd go to jail if you didn't find a family to hang out with after 2 months). Though this sounds a bit excessive and eventually led to a series of witchy freakouts, it was also a rather unique cultural edifice. Coming from Eastern Europe, one thing is clear - this would not have been possible here, and unsurprisingly, it didn't happen here. 

The indisputable greatness of UK culture is also proportional to its self-loathing. A small country in the armpit of the continent (like Romania) will never manifest this level of self-contempt because it's too busy inventing tales of importance to patch up national self-esteem. You never get to mount a rebellion against the "father" aspect of your culture if yours was never really in the picture - you just get to pin some drawings of your fantasy dad on the fridge. My favourite is the one with him holding the Sultan's head on a spike. 

Let's scroll back a bit: I've read quite a bit of your writing at your Substack and elsewhere. It's rather good, but you're no Jessica Valenti or Lindy West. Yet you still have what I would call 'medium talent'. I read about your contrarian youth, where you were the first feminist and atheist in your circle. Was this borne of a conviction besides that contrarianism? What influences were you drinking in at that time that led you to become a meme in the years prior to Meme Culture?

I think it was more pattern-matching than anything else. I grew up in a house full of books, an only child to two highly verbal parents who were often engaged in all-out war, and was pretty much left to grow up à la Rousseau, like a weed, seen and not heard. 

I learned how to make instant mashed potatoes quite early on and around the same time I concluded that the densest and least curious people I knew were also the most religious. So I had to investigate. My feminism naturally grew alongside that discovery because religion here comes with a hefty side of recommended subjugation. Even if now I have a more nuanced understanding of subjugation than when I was a teen, subjugating yourself to strident halfwits still doesn't make much sense. The second I got an internet connection I hit the forums, became a shitposter, and was living the sweet neckbeardless neckbeard life. That's also where I eventually outgrew much of my early thinking.

You have also touched upon the role of America in the lives of those in far-off American satraps like Romania. "We are living in Amerika", famously sang Rammstein. Is there anything positive to be drawn from this state of affairs? Or are we all hostage to a beast that is wildly flailing its arms about? I spent some time in Romania these past five years during several business trips and the people that I spoke to are rather fond of the USA as they see it as its protector from Russia, much as the Poles do. Yet curiously, I noticed a lot of Christian devotion, and not just by old people. I entered three different Orthodox churches during the week, only to be taken aback by how many people were there outside of Mass hours. What I'm trying to ask is: are Romanians too Byzantine to be Americanized?

Older Romanians (over 35-40) have lived through pretty vivid history and carry with them even more of the past in the stories of their parents and grandparents. The tragic view of existence is still very present in these sections of society, and with it the cynicism of the scarred and a fear of God born out of struggle. They remain at the Dallas stage of Americanization - wow, look at all those appliances! - but I don't think they'll become Kamala Stans any time soon. 

Millennials & Zoomers, especially the urban ones, are another species entirely and are for all intents and purposes about as mindwormed as kids in the West, especially after this year in the screen bunker. It's not surprising. They're just as attached to the global dopamine mainline streaming out of the US as everyone else. Even the kids who, for some incomprehensible reason don't speak English, get the same slop one trough down the waterfall in all the Romanian copycat Youtube & TV shows and dimestore influencers. 

Romania also comes across as an incredibly diverse country even though the only significant non-European populations that one encounter is the Gypsies and some Turks (although Arabs are becoming more noticeable). You have swarthy Wallachians, alabaster-skinned Moldovans, and Transylvanians who can pass for Swiss Yodellers. Personally I didn't feel at all out of place in Romania, and when I went to Dambovita County (just west of Bucharest) I saw a good 30 or 40 people that could pass for my close family. Does this diversity make the Romanian national construct a difficult one to maintain? Or has assimilation worked its magic?

Romania is a pretty young state, reaching final form only about a century ago, and is composed of a patchwork of principalities and ethnicities that always knew that they didn't stand a chance alone on this tectonic edge of empires. We've been conquered and traded and bled for tribute payments for millennia by the many more ethnically and culturally coherent and populous nations around us that I believe the tentative construct of Romania is the only serious breather these populations got since the Romans were here. 

Having a dominant majority religion, Romanian Orthodoxy, and sharing a language with wild regional differences, but common nonetheless, have helped keep us from going the now traditional Balkan mass grave route. Don't ask Romanians about the Hungarians in Harghita & Covasna, though. We're still touchy about those bastards. 

The most beautiful woman that I have ever worked with was a Romanian named Evelina who broke my heart when, after 5 minutes of me coming onto her intensely and handsomely, she really, really regretted to inform me that she already had a Spanish boyfriend (“you wouldn’t know him”, she said). I was going to chimp, but I was a recent hire at this consulting firm so my professionalism won the day and I changed the subject so as to make her feel less bad about having a boyfriend that she would have happily cheated on with me and who in no way was as charming as I am. (This is called empathy, btw). The subject that I seamlessly changed it to was the western perception of Romanian woman as 'slutty'. I asked her if it was true that Romanians are the only Orthodox Christians allowed to marry in the Church 3 times because their Queen Marie was such a slut. She replied "well you know, third time's the charm". This is now your opportunity to defend yourself.

The female European genus encompasses many distinct subspecies. From the translucent English Rose at one end of the continent to the opaque Russian frost bloom at the other. The gradient of reputed promiscuity goes from patchy pastels to block colors pretty fast past the Hajnal line. But there's western "slutty," and there's eastern "slutty". 

Western slutty is someone who thinks Samantha Jones is her spirit animal and that it's a feminist imperative to have loveless workout sessions with any beer-goggle-chad whose gaze she meets at a bar. 

Eastern slutty is more of a scalpel. The Romanian woman is more keenly aware of her sexual market value than any creature on earth, including the MGTOW forum member who hasn't seen daylight in 4 years, because she intends to use it. Typically, she deploys this knowledge in pretty trad ways. Most girls still want to and do get married young(ish - and I can't speak for younger people and especially Zoomers, they're a separate race). But for a hypergamous being in a place where options for desirable matches are limited, she is resourceful. One trajectory that a non-negligible percentage of women end up on is some form of transactional relationship, especially in the more affluent West, where they become prostitutes, strippers, and trophy girlfriends/wives. 

So even though a lot of call girls in your area may have a Romanian passport, the average Romanian girl is probably less slutty in the stereotypical sense because she intuitively understands sexual dynamics - and thinks the western-style slut is giving away the milk for free.  

Oh, So You’re “Trad” Now?

You have written about the "Rationalist to Trad" path that your life has taken. "Trad" has become a catch-all term on the internet, often associated with a life approach that idealizes an era that never really existed. 'Trad' also is very much a rebellion against what is now haute courant. What exactly do you mean by 'trad' when you use the term? And more importantly, what were the driving forces or key events that pushed you towards it from your Rationalist beginnings?

Rationalism is what many former new atheists landed in, once they woke up with a shame-filled hangover after a few years of autistic screeching about Jesus Camp. There's still a lot of valuable thinking happening in Rationalist circles, (*nod to Robin Hanson*), but like everything humans put their grubby fingers on, it turns into a cargo cult real fast. 

My central realization was that while having reason as a tool sure is handy, making reason your God is, well, unreasonable. You're equipped with a 2/2 cm keyhole with about a dozen distortion filters as a window onto the world. Thinking you can derive a telos from first principles with that gear is one dark hole of kidding yourself that many never swim out of.  And, naturally, therefore trad. Allow me explain:

"Trad" is a weird space online, and it means a lot of things to a lot of people, mostly about pickles and flower crowns and the glorious time before electricity. I was co-opted into the meme by association, mainly because I promote brutally reactionary, '90s era theories about men and women being different. To me, it's still a useful concept because it essentially means "time tested heuristic." It's a departure from reasoning yourself into and out of all positions - deferring to something that works, even if you have no idea why exactly. There's a lot of encoded knowledge about unknown (and maybe unknowable) unknowns in tradition that the most reasonable of us have written off because they don't make proximal sense. Well, many of them can't make sense because they don't optimize for what you optimize for. They work at the level of lineage, a dimension necessary to the thriving of the individual but mostly invisible to him. 

Which one is the best tradition? For you, probably the most robust and prosperous one in the near vicinity of your ancestors. Just another heuristic. 

One ugly element of our modern culture is this excessive obsession with youth. Whether it be celebrities far, far past their prime disfiguring themselves by way of plastic surgery, or 50-year-old men dressing down like college students, it seems that the idea of aging gracefully is becoming a relic of the past.

Old age is useless in a culture that believes wisdom is reactionary. When choice/consent is the only lever on your moral framework (one accessible at 18 to anyone with above-meerkat IQ), why would you need cranky old farts to steer you with their constraints? What do they know about OnlyFans side-hustles? 

Youth is the time of peak choice. You're free to be and consume and consent to your heart's content. The young are early adopters, status-focused, educated consumers who are ahead of the curve and create synergies (I can’t believe she used the word ‘synergies’ .ed) through their innovative spending patterns. 

But sooner or later, choice gets reduced if you like it or not. For women (especially), nature is the ultimate and early choice killer. And our culture can't have that. We plump, we pump, we freeze and lie to women to maintain the illusion of choice. 

Without a socially important role for the archetypes of old age, the Matriarch, the Crone, and also the Wise Male Elder, we'll still see people chimping out at 40, clawing at their bygone 20s by amassing lots of credit card debt and nuking their marriages. 

Alex, I am a strong proponent of bullying, especially when considering children. It serves as a needed social check. I've been bullied, and I've been a bully. I hesitate to imagine how much of an even bigger shit I'd be if I were never bullied. Something strange happened in North American culture that began in the 1980s and coalesced in the 90s; the natural hierarchy was upended as dorks, geeks, and especially nerds, were elevated above the jocks and the good looking people. Nature does not take kindly to its order being subverted, and I believe that this has resulted in many of the social (and now, political) problems that we now face. Not enough men are put into lockers as teens, allowing them to run off their mouths without any check being imposed on their behaviour, where once a simple punch would have taught them an important life lesson. You yourself have written on the significance of stigma as another social check. Is it time that we shove nerds back into the lockers where they naturally belong? Is it time to call out women for unladylike behaviour (except when you are in the bedroom with her)?

The idea that a healthy childhood involves a lack of conflict seems to be a recipe for our cratering mental health. It's the fantasy of the devouring mother come to life, the perma-womb. Her child was never really born, never really in the world. It's gentle purgatory on earth. 

I'm not advocating letting kids beat each other to a pulp, but letting them sort their own hierarchies in their own world, I believe, is wise. You can't have self-esteem by decree from the proper authorities. You're either competent at navigating social situations, which only comes from actually overcoming friction, or you're a social vegetable. 

In terms of calling out women, barring profanity and, especially, lack of wit, I strongly encourage it. It may be what saves Western Civilization (and, potentially, your marriage). 

Sex Work. Has Capitalism found its final form?

"Sex work" is one of those new catch-all normalization terms that brings together middle-class traders of nip slips with heroin-addicted sex-slaves. In this way, it has the ultimate virtue of being inclusive and gives the term kind of a punk rock, proletarian spirit. 

The typical thinking person's take on sex work is "live and let live"/consent/"what's it to you?". I'm sympathetic to this libertarian view, but it's robot logic, blind to human nature. Sex work doesn't happen in a vacuum. Whatever you believe about the personal impact of sex work on the girls performing it (not negligible), people need to understand humans are highly mimetic creatures, and we live in networked realities. These phenomena spread. This is especially the case for things that are financially expedient, like selling dope or selling yourself. Also, whoever thinks that only demand creates supply and that it's not, more importantly, the other way around, has never heard of marketing. 

A society that doesn't wield stigma for pro-social goals to get people out of self-destructive loops and fertility traps has an imminent expiration date. 

Not only are we all Americans, we are also all liberals. Much as Christianity has provided the substructure for the entire West over the past 1,000 years, liberalism has created an additional substructure alongside it, and is now taking it over. How pervasive and all-encompassing is liberalism (with respect to how you define it) today?

Liberalism is a magic word. That's why everyone wants to claim it. From the libertarian-conservat-ish "classical liberal" to the forever careening "liberal centrists" to the striver-socialist US "liberals" - it's virtuous by default. Whatever issues there may be with liberalism, it's all in the implementation - real liberalism has not been tried. 

Besides unquestionably being the most robust of all systems, it is also somehow always in danger. We hear that liberalism has been corrupted by viruses planted by the French, and that dreaded ‘illiberalism’ rears its ugly head inexplicably in a crazed game of whack-a-mole from Russia to Turkey, from Hungary to Poland. On the other side of the aisle, actual illiberalism is also plaguing the universities, with their speech codes and their struggle sessions. We must save it from itself!

The thing is, liberalism is the water we swim in. Right-liberals ("conservatives") have been the biggest supporters of the very market liberalism that has gutted their precious local communities and led to more alienation and social decay than most any bogeyman they have ever produced. And left-liberals have done the rest by working overtime at liberating people from custom, convention, the constraints of their physical body, and any guard rails there may have been on an aimless, empty existence. Feel free yet?

John Gray (philosopher, not relationship guru) is an excellent read on this and other things. Also, of course, Patrick Deneen. 

Is there an escape?

Sure. This is still a time of incredible abundance and resources, even as the cultural and spiritual coffers are dramatically empty. Use all the resources at your disposal to figure out a path (I recommend something time-tested), make a life worth living as off the grid as is possible, and circumvent the grand pipeline of "suggested meaning" that's gushing towards your soul 24/7. Building yourself, your family, and your community with serious, Aristotle-grade virtue is not a bad start. Whoever is reading this already has the tools to do all this. 

Also, remember that typically, repression is most intense at the twilight of regimes. 

Deep Inside Alex

Have you mentally emigrated from the West?

Impossible, I'm afraid. I'm a Westerner with a bit of extra seasoning and the cynicism afforded by growing up in a low-trust society. Every empire has a gravitational lock on its orbiters, and the second we got Dallas-pilled, we were hooked. 

People make the mistake of thinking that male height is genetic. The fact of the matter is that it is earned. Height is God's moral judgment bestowed upon a man as he reaches adulthood. Women instinctively sense this. This is why women are repulsed by Manlets. Will they ever learn?

Manletdom as cosmic punishment for sub-par manhood? Maybe, but it definitely is one hell of a sorting mechanism for badasses. Height is the ultimate test of male will, and history is full of diminutive conquerors bending reality to their will. You just have to crank up the sociopathy, and status tends to even out. 

Women do like tall men, I can't deny it. It does depend on your comparative sample, though. In Romania, as a teenage 5'10" amazon freak, I was pretty happy if my boyfriend would be around my height or marginally taller, already an ambitious project in this corner of the world. In the West, I have to say, my standards adapted rapidly. But regional height arbitrage in dating is always available. One woman's Danny DeVito is another woman's Danny Trejo.  

"Dinner starts with a ceviche of beef, the love child of northern Italy's raw beef culture and the couple's interest in assertive flavors from around the world. Depending on the day, you may find lemongrass, cilantro, and miso-perfect strangers across Italy-canoodling with cured anchovies and handmade pastas. "It's not fusion," says Francesca. "We don't ever think 'How can we work a bit of Asia into this plate?' If it makes sense on the fork, then we go for it." From there Francesca takes me through the entire menu: from the esoteric and unexpected- fried snails over a dashi-spiked potato puree, glazed pork belly with cavolo nero kimchi -to gentle riffs on the soul food you'd find in a traditional trattoria- fried artichokes dipped into an anise-spiked mayonnaise, tender pork sweetbreads with tiny candy-sweet asparagus and a slick of Mazzo's exceptional olive oil."

Rule of thumb: if my grandma wouldn't recognize it, it's probably an abomination and will fill you with insidious, demonic tumors. 

Mel Gibson plays a strong, yet troubled (horribly Anti-Semitic, he should it cool it with that) man reflecting on a long life devoid of meaning. He travels to the Google Campus to seek wisdom but instead sees an Alex Kaschuta-like character being mobbed by thousands of Roosh-subscribing Beta Bindis demanding 'sexy hot love you' from her. Mel smears himself in blue and white warpaint and pulls out a tactical nuke that he is coincidentally carrying in his inside jacket pocket, dropping it onto the crowd only a few short seconds after he grabs a hold of you and whisks her away in his Lamborghini Helicopter. Would you watch this?

I think it's got potential but lacks the Messianic angle I expect from my Mel Gibsons. 

Try this: They return to Google Campus after it's been leveled. Amongst the smoky rubble of the former jolly wage slave trailer park, in the crater-filled with charred bits of Settlers of Catan, bean bag lint, and the fading murmurs of a thousand Google Home Minis, they set the foundation of a new religion. One very tasteful suggestion of intercourse later, the camera pans out as they lay the first brick of the mighty Cathedral atop the now forever immured remains of Google's secret Army Sex Bot Singularity project. 

Mel sheds the first tear of his life, the Alex-type wipes it off and whispers: "It is done." Roll credits.

What the fuck was that shit?

You can sexually harrass Alex over at her Substack or at Twitter where she can be found @kaschuta.