Can Sex with Rightists Solve Polarization?

I am not big into the art scene. But when a Dutch girl reached out to me to be part of one of her projects, I saw who she was with, noticed that they were within a twelve-minute drive, and decided that this could be fun.

As it turned out, Christiane is part of Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC), which is perhaps best known for its project getting Michel Houellebecq to agree to have sex with two of its members on camera. This led to him writing a short book denouncing his former collaborators and filing a lawsuit to try to stop the film from being released. You can read about the feud in the New York Times here, and watch the trailer here.

While engaging in their latest project, I got to talking with members of KIRAC, and they described another movie that director Stefan Ruitenbeek had made called Honeypot (2021). The premise is that Jini Jane, one of the girls who was set up with Houellebecq, publishes on a conservative Dutch website a call for right-wing men to have sex with her. She ends up settling on a far-right voter from the working class and a philosopher named Sid Lukkassen, and the film centers on her meeting up with them as part of her quest to solve political polarization.

Upon watching the movie, I decided to return to the house where I first met members of KIRAC and interview Stefan and Jini about Honeypot. To mark the occasion of the release of this interview, Stefan has today posted the entire movie on X. You can watch it here, and I would recommend doing so before listening to this conversation. As promised in the interview, here is the safe-for-work version, though it only has the first twenty-one minutes.

What I ended up being fascinated by was the contrast between the two kinds of rightists and how they interact with the same woman under vulnerable conditions. The film ended up telling us something important about the differences between those who land on the conservative side for organic reasons, working-class men who this kind of politics naturally suits, and the thinker who is as distant from members of his own coalition as he is from his fellow intellectuals. The foreplay, the sex scenes, and the aftermath of the second encounter brought home the depth of the pain and sense of cognitive dissonance felt by some right-wing intellectuals.

While we often see incels and trads as hateful misogynists, their views are in many cases an outgrowth of extreme sensitivity. They seem to be less equipped than other men to deal with being rejected by a woman. I simply could not relate to the emotional neediness Lukkassen displayed, and him accepting his role as the supplicant in the meet-up. The working-class guy did not have this problem! The insecurity that such rightists feel ironically makes them behave in ways that repel women, turning their fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t believe that Jini went in expecting this or manipulating the situation so she would accept the first man and reject the second. I felt that these were organic interactions that showed how a romantic situation can go one way or another depending on what the man reveals about his soul. You see Jini getting progressively angrier, and, like most women, unable or unwilling to put into words exactly what is turning her off, she latches on to these various excuses, which Lukkassen is not sophisticated enough to see for the pretexts that they are. Stefan explains to me what about the man he finds offensive. It’s not that he’s clueless, but rather the lack of curiosity. I speculate that this is what right-wing politics often is – retreating from complexity into a rigid inner life that creates a vision one uses to try to mold the rest of the world.

In the interview, I question the two guests on different scenes in the movie, including the parts that blur reality and fiction. I express some confusion about why a trad or incel-adjacent right-wing philosopher would agree to have sex on camera in the first place, as this would be unthinkable in the American context. Another cultural difference: in the Netherlands, feminists took the side of the right-wing philosopher. I enjoyed having the opportunity to question Jini regarding what exactly about Lukkassen’s behavior turned her off, and how he was unable to redeem himself in her eyes, even screwing up his attempt to give her a spanking. Don’t be this guy!

Lukkassen ends up humiliated here, so much so that it made me feel some unease about watching and promoting the movie. That said, he was an adult who consented to being in that situation. My mind was fully put at ease upon hearing from Stefan that Lukkassen was once again friendly with him and had come to accept what had happened, despite the film turning into a major scandal in the Netherlands.

Viewer discretion is advised regarding this interview, and especially the film, which has sex scenes that we discuss in detail.

You can follow Stefan, Jini, and Christiane on X, subscribe to KIRAC’s YouTube channel, or support them on Patreon and get their other films here. I’ve never been much of a connoisseur of performance art, but what KIRAC has done with Honeypot is give us the best version of it, provoking in this viewer at least thoughts about what women really want, the state of contemporary politics, and the various sorts of men who end up on the right in opposition to a left-wing elite monoculture.

One may watch for the implicit commentary on modern conservatism, but there are more generalizable lessons here on relations between the sexes, and also how the personal and political are not so easily separable.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe