“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston Churchill

Regular readers of Anonymous Conservative’s excellent blog will be familiar with the competing mating strategies of r and K selection, or rabbits and wolves respectively. Rabbity people tend towards the following character traits, some mildly, some extremely:

– Highly promiscuous
– Sexually indiscriminate, even to the point of homosexuality
– Hedonistic, and unsettled when not chasing pleasure
– Flightly
– Constantly seeking novelty
– Migratory

AnonCon explains it far better than me, but once you’re accustomed to seeing rabbits and wolves, you can easily pick them out. I bring this up because as I continue to read Casanova’s compelling memoir, I’m trying to form a portrait of his character. It’s difficult to do because he’s the writer and thus the reader only knows what information Casanova chooses to tell.

I remember reading Iceberg Slim’s excellent autobiography Pimp. I then read the Pimps Bible, another (less well-written) autobiography. The latter writer was far less able to conceal his propensity for bullshit and thus I was struck by a thought:

Here is a pimp telling me that the secret of his trade is an ability to convincingly bullshit people into accepting his frame, telling lots of lies. And yet having spent his entire life bullshitting whores and marks, he’s now supposedly telling the truth to me, the reader?

No chance.

Iceberg Slim is such a convincing writer that his bullshit isn’t obvious, but I now realise he was blowing smoke up my ass at least as much as he did to the girls. Liars lie. Lying isn’t a one-time or case-specific thing, it is an ongoing relationship to the truth. There are essentially three options [1]

1. Truth Teller: You know the truth and stick to it.
2. Liar: You know the truth but subvert it in order to get what you want.
3. Bullshitter: You don’t care what the truth is and never bother to find out. It’s easier just to say whatever will implant whatever ideas you want in the other person’s head.

Iceberg Slim was a bullshitter. Giacomo Casanova was a bullshitter. And when dealing with bullshitters it’s a waste of time trying to separate truth from fiction [2]. When reading Casanova I was asking myself, “he’s an old man now, trying to record his life for posterity, so maybe he’s matured and no longer has a stake in bullshitting. He could be giving the reader the straight truth, surely?”

But I immediately thought, “he does have a stake. He has the grandiosity to want to be remembered as a big man long after his death. He has every reason to bullshit even now.”

My solution is to temporarily take him at face value, as I will for this review. I’ll just assume what he writes is passably close to what really happened. So, doing that, I come to the conclusion that the young Casanova had an extremely broken moral compass and possibly none at all [3]

Here are some of the events that Casanova relates in volume 2:

1. He has sex with both an 11 year old and a 12 year old girl, on consecutive days, pimped by their mother. He then tries to fuck their older transexual sister who he thinks might be a boy.
2. He bums, and is bummed by, a rich old Turk in Constantinople
3. Together with friends he kidnaps and gang-rapes a young woman
4. He pretends to be a magician digging up treasure that’ll make a family rich, in order to deflower their 14 year old daughter
5. He beats a teenage girl with a heavy stick, hospitalising her, because she won’t fuck him after he paid her
6. He digs up a corpse, cuts off the arm, and puts it in a Greek man’s bed. The shock gives that man a stroke and he dies soon after [4]

What’s that, you say? Surely not? Surely you’re twisting his words. Let’s consider those words in turn:

1. Child Molestation
In chapter one he’s staying at an inn in Ancona and hears there’s a family there of a mother, two daughters, and a son [5]. He meets them and describes the two daughters as such on page 5, “the elder of whom, named Cecilia, was studying music and was twelve years old; the other, who was a dancer, was eleven and named Marina; they were both pretty.” The next evening he bangs Cecilia (described on page 9) and the next evening he bangs the younger Marina.

Anyone who has looked into psychopaths and child molesters knows they backwards rationalise sickening events in order to pretend the victim was compliant, and possibly even eager to be victimised. This is how Casanova describes raping the younger girl (page 10)

Just then in comes Marina, looking sulky, and says that she does not know how she had deserved the proof of my disfavor I was about to give her.
“Cecilia spent the night with you, you go off tomorrow with Bellino, I am the only unlucky one of us.”
“Do you want money?”
“No, I love you.”
“You are too young.”
“Age has nothing to do with it. I am better developed than my sister.”
“Then perhaps you have had a lover.”
“Certainly not.”
“So much the better. We’ll find out this evening.”
“Then I’ll tell my mother to have some sheets ready for tomorrow, otherwise the maid would guess what happened.”

Does this sound plausible to you? An 11yr old virgin comes on to a 22yr old man she only met two nights before in an inn, and demands he deflower her, for free, with her mother’s permission and he’s just done the same thing to her 12yr old sister?

I think even John Podesta and Bryan Singer can come up with more convincing stories than that. Speaking of pedo-inclined faggots, let’s move on to the Stealth Bumming….

2. It’s Not Homo If You Don’t Make Eye Contact
Casanova finds himself in Constantinople with a letter of introduction to some Turkish nobles. He soon befriends Ismail who lives in a huge palace. On page 83, Casanova describes an incident,

“but after receiving and treating me with the utmost politeness the Turk invited me to take a walk with him in a small garden where, when we had entered a summerhouse, he suddenly proposed something which was not to my taste; I smiled and said that I was not of that persuasion, then, wearying of his fond assiduity, I rose rather abruptly. Ismail then pretended to approve my repugnance and said that he had only been joking”.

So, we’re clear that they are NOT homo because they’ve assured us respectively that it’s not of their persuasion and it was just a joke? We’re clear on that, right? Great, let’s move on a couple of weeks…

While visiting the same palace late at night, Casanova accidentally [6] bumps into Ismail again in the gardens and they fish until past midnight. They somehow end up in the same summerhouse [7] eating the fish, by the lake, when they hear three girls from Ismail’s harem skinny-dipping. Ismail suggests they conceal themselves in a nearby garden-house and spy on the naked trio. Casanova picks up the story on page 95:

“they exhibited themselves in every conceivable posture. This charming spectacle could not fail to set me on fire at once, and Ismail, faint with delight, not only convinced me that I should not restrain myself, but encouraged me to surrender to the effects which the voluptuous sight could not but produce in my soul, by himself setting the example.”

I know what you’re thinking. They are both masturbating, side-by-side, while looking at the girls. How gay! [8] It get’s gayer….

“Like him, I found myself reduced to making the best of the object beside me to extinguish the flame kindled by the three sirens, whom we saw now in the water, now out of it, and who, though they never looked at the window, seemed to be indulging in their voluptuous sports only to burn the spectators who were intently watching them through it. I chose to believe that such was the case, which gave me only the more pleasure, and Ismail triumphed when he found that his proximity condemned him to take the place of the distant object to which I could not attain.”

Oh, that’s not so bad, you say. So he bummed a Turk, but at least he was thinking about the girls. Casanova continues…

“I also had to submit to his taking turnabout. It would have been impolite in my to refuse; then too, I should have shown myself ungrateful, a thing which is not in my nature.”

Oh, that’s alright then, far better to be bummed by a Turk than to be impolite. I hope we all agree that this wasn’t actually homo because it was all a bizarre coincidence and they were thinking of the girls all the time.

3. Gang Rape of an Innocent Woman
Not content with molesting children and bumming Turks, Casanova finds himself down on his luck and takes a job as a fiddler [9] to make ends meet. His fellow musicians are all ruffians who amuse themselves for weeks on end doing practical jokes that are the 1700s direct equivalent of ringing doorbells and running away, setting off fire alarms, and joyriding in cars [10]. Things escalate and in an effort to outdo each other they come up with a plan.

In chapter seven, he describes the opening,

“It was during one carnival, midnight had struck, we were eight, all masked, roving through the city, each of us trying to gain distinction in our comrades’ eyes by thinking up some new kind of practical joke. Passing the magazzeno of the parish named Santa Croce, we are tempted to go in for a drink. We enter, we walk about, and we find no one except three men peaceably drinking with a rather pretty woman.”

They pretend to arrest the three men and spirit them off in a gondola to a little island, marooning them there till daybreak. They also kidnap the woman and take her to a house.

“We then removed our masks, and we saw the woman we had carried off become all amiability at the sight of our faces and the way in which we behaved. After we had encouraged her with words and glasses of wine there befell her what she could not but be expecting. Our leader, as was only right, was the first to pay her his amorous duty, after most politely overcoming her reluctance to yield to him in the presence of us all. She chose the sensible course of laughing and letting him do as he pleased.

But I saw that she was surprised when I came forward to be the second; she thought herself obligated to show her gratitude; and when after my turn, she saw the third, she no longer doubted her happy fate, which promised her all the members of the band. She was not mistaken. My brother was the only one who pretended to be ill.”

He then describes the woman as thanking them for the gang rape [11]. If you want to look up his stories of deflowering the 14 yr old (page 299), or beating the teenage girl (page 275) or digging up and desecrating the corpse (page 272) please do. There’s also a nice story on page 288 were his friend Captain O’Neilan takes him to a brothel, cudgels a prostitute’s customer, then pisses on her and refuses to pay.

“Why,” I asked him, “don’t you pay these wretched creatures?”
“Because I’d like to see them all dead from starvation.”

Apparently Captain O’Neilan did this a lot and he also ran down an old woman with his horse and split her skull open (but got off scot free, claiming an accident) while galloping full speed down a street. Casanova concludes, “Despite all this O’Neilan was noble, generous, brave, and a man of honor.” [12]

It’s also clear by the end of volume two that the young Casanova has absolutely no ability to endure adversity. He changes profession four times, sacking off and running away every time things fail to please him. It’ll be interesting to see how his character develops as he ages, but the Casanova of the first two volumes is a mealy-mouthed evasive rabbit with almost no admirable qualities. He just drifts from adventure to adventure, conning everyone as he goes while assuring the reader he is of high moral character.

Fascinating book and I look forward to reading volume three.

If you want a memoir about shagging loads of women that doesn’t involve paying for it, attacking teenage girls with broomsticks, or gang-raping random civilians, try my series beginning with Balls Deep.

[1] Thanks to Ricky Raw’s now-defunct blog for an excellent post on this
[2] Readers of my memoir, particularly volume 2, will see the trouble this caused with one PUA I knew.
[3] Some people change, so perhaps in later volumes he’ll show some moral fibre. We’ll see.
[4} Admittedly, that’s really funny.
[5] The son turns out to be a daughter cross-dressing and wearing a genital disguise, but Casanova doesn’t find that out until he’s already gone to bed with ‘him’. He says he would’ve been okay if it was really a boy.
[6] I swear, it’s not what it looks like!!!
[7] Another unfortunate coincidence.
[8] It’s another unfortunate coincidence that neither of them remembered the girls were in Ismail’s harem and thus they could just walk right up to them and have sex.
[9] An actual fiddler, not a kiddie-fiddler
[10] Literally. The only difference is the technology at play.
[11] Literally a gang of masked rapists.
[12] It reminds me of when one charlatan PUA scumbag gives a testimonial of another charlatan PUA scumbag right before announcing their co-taught boot camp.