how I learned to stopped worrying and love luigi mangione

another guest post

Elspeth Catton: Oliver, I have a complete and utter horror of ugliness. Ever since I was a child. I don't know why.

Felix Catton: Maybe because you're a terrible person.

— Saltburn (2023)

it was the performance art piece of the century — it made 9/11 look like a banana taped to a wall: an insanely hot turbo centrist bisexual working in tech assassinating a soulless neoliberal ghoul. the manifesto could have done with a bit more pizzazz, but who cares? menendez brothers, move over. cynthia erivo, come back down to earth. a new queer icon is born. mother is dead; the beautiful boy has come.

i’m not suggesting that any of this was scripted, only that it will be, and that in a just world, that job would go to john pistelli, with luca guadagnino directing. i’m also not insinuating that the good doctor pistelli’s esoteric practices have anything to do with this tragic case, although it will surely contribute to a favourable media environment for an italian-american bad boy.

is it too late to make simon magnus a bit hotter?

i can’t help but feel that the breathless online reaction to the insanely hot bisexual alleged murderer has revealed certain moral hazards of the new romanticism’s aesthetic turn. but i had to let go of my initial moral indignation when in an act of self-examination that should make st. ignatius proud, i asked myself, if luigi popped up on my grindr right now, would I, knowing all i know about him, still want to fuck him? dear reader, I regret to inform you that the answer is one hundred percent yes. and by that i don’t just mean he’s a one on the binary.¹ if i had to assign a nate silver-style probability to my willingness to fuck him, it would still be 100.0000%. i’m not saying this out of pride, but simply out of honesty. i would probably justify it to myself as being mainly, or at least partly, a question of intellecto-aesthetic curiosity: what does the act of murder do to the way someone comports themselves, how they talk, how they make love?²

is this perverse? of course it is. but as pauls bloom and franz remind us, perversity is perfectly natural. and as laura kipnis has said about porn: transgression is the point.³ i don’t think we need an evolutionary psychological explanation for why, under the right circumstances, the spectre of violence can add to a man’s (or a woman’s) sex appeal, especially if they are already insanely hot to start with. but it helps to be aware of how envy/desire can colour our reactions in such cases.

weil may be right that imaginary evil is romantic and varied, and that real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren and boring, but weil also didn’t show any signs of a libido. i suspect many of us are closer to jean genet in this regard:

but even this may be too much of a self-pleasing narrative. are we drawn to luigi because of the glamour of violence, or because of his arresting smile and great body? i don’t know. but i do know that it would be a shame for such a great body to go to waste. so here’s an effective altruistic proposal: as a form of gay and female reparations, luigi should be allowed to do onlyfans from prison.

1. the [would fuck]/[would not fuck] binary is one of many things i learned on the red scare podcast.

2. if you think this is sick, consider how much time people have spent combing through his “online footprint” as if there’s an art to find the mind's construction in the substacks he reads.

3. this is an argument for a moderate restriction on things like porn and drugs. if it’s a bit of a quest just to find a naughty picture or a spliff, you’ll probably appreciate it more.