Televisual Reality
On the Undeath of Decadence
CONTENT WARNING: BRIEF STRONG SEX, DRUGS, PRE-EMPTIVE WAR, EUROMISERABILISM1
An abundance of gay sex!
David Sessions summed up 2025 as “The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist”.2 He didn’t seem too happy about it. The idea seems to be that it is unhelpful to the gay cause to have “straight magazines” write about the supposed dangers of GHB.3 David’s got a point about ba(i)ting: in notre temps, a trend piece in one of these little New York magazines turns the virtual Eye of Sauron on your identify group and the resulting discourse is rarely aesthetically edifying.4
But I have been wondering: how gay does a magazine need to be to stop being “straight”? I can’t recall ever in my life having read an article published in a “gay magazine”.5 If gays are waiting for the creation of a safe space to the talk openly about the less-than-optimal consequences of the digital sexual revolution on gay men in particular, I reckon it’s going to be a pretty long wait.
Naturally, David writes about Heated Rivalry, a gaynomenon he had shamefully been unaware of “despite loving a boy who reads M/M sports romances”. I have not watched Heated Rivalry. I have not read Heated Rivalry.6 “Am I the only gay still interested in having sex rather than watching it on TV?” I asked A, who had been gifted a copy by an adult human doctor. Why not both? the cakeists ask: after the orgy, each gay can retire to his/their own private chamber and jerk off to fantasy hockey smut. Why does this bother you? It isn’t hurting anybody.
Threequal rites
Aella writes about the “The Pain and the Glory of Nonmonogamy” in a very “Born This Way” way:
I realized: almost everyone is monogamous. If I wanted a man who wouldn’t get oneshotted by a scarcity-mindset monog girl trying to steal my boyfriend, I needed to only date guys who were absolutely dedicated to the non-monogamy cause independently of myself. After this I stopped considering anyone who was even open to monogamy. Polyflexible? You’re out.
[…]
I knew that if I expressed the faintest whiff of displeasure, hordes would coalesce into furious support for me. I was fighting against a current, trying to stop it from pushing the bomb of victimhood into my fingers. I wanted to figure out a way to express my discomfort without triggering that bomb.
This was made harder by the fact that I was genuinely scared. I was in the high-on-drugs phase of new love, and hearing another woman’s moans was an ancient threat to my burgeoning attachment. Would he leave her for me? Was she hotter than me? Was the sex better? Would this be the beginning of the end of our relationship? I was so scared. I listened to them in the same way I watched a horror movie.
Lindy West (famous for being called fat by Dan Savage) also unexpectedly found love in a hopeless place throuple:
West: […] I went by myself to pick her up. And she was instantly captivating. Like she was just so pretty and so sunny and smiley. And then we went to the show, and Roya and I held hands. Then we went to a bar, and Roya and I were sitting next to each other talking, and some drunk guy came up and grabbed her arm. And I was like, “I’m going to [expletive] kill that guy.” And I kind of bodied him away from us. The feeling I had was like: “That’s my girlfriend. Why would you think you can just touch her?” And then we went to the hotel, and we had sex, and it was really fun.
Martin: The three of you [you, Roya and Aham], or just the two of you [you and Roya]?
West: The three of us. And it was really fun and hot. But I’m skipping over that, because I don’t like to talk about sex.
Not just a pretty face
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is a good7 three-part Netflix documentary8 in which the supermodel turned executive producer turned ice cream mogul Tyra Banks comes across as a complete psychopath. Since I haven’t always been this gay, the scandals, including the date rape on tape and the race swapping, were new to me. The only question that Tyra and the other producers seemed to have asked themselves throughout this whole process was: does this make for good TV? And by good they meant popular. The general consensus is that the show did not age well, but surely this can’t be because we now have a more responsible media environment. Thanks to the wonders of market segmentation, the lowest common denominator that content producers can appeal to can be pretty low indeed.
What sells even more readily than sex is porn and it doesn’t even have to involve sex at all. You can go to the “front page” of the New York Times and watch the bombs raining down, like a firework display with added pathos. The likes of Ed West have sheepishly admitted to participating in the production of Decline Porn, a.k.a. Britain’s only growing industry. In my own case, it’s a type of methadone compared to the stuff they produce back home.
I think often about the “reign of ersatz” the very Catholic philosopher Chantal Delsol wrote about in her 2016 book La haine du monde: Totalitarismes et postmodernité (my translation):
Materialism is just a cover — like one talks of the cover of a spy; or a sleeping pill, capable of disguising the true dominant ideology: a Prometheanism so excessive that it is unreal and forces many to live in falseness, in make-belief, like impostors. Simple good sense is impossible. All is artifice and surface. Totalitarianism was the reign of ersatz. Kundera made a literary motif out of it, together with kitsch. One bought in Warsaw a product “resembling butter”, such was the official label (in reality it was carcinogenic margarine). There was no more ham, only a product “resembling ham”. An existence where everything is false: whence the force of the need according to Patočka “to live in truth”. Today we are not forced to accept margarine, but we live under the reign of Baudrillard’s simalucra. In excess, the desire for emancipation becomes an aggression against reality.
Despite Delsol’s anti-communism, the basic thesis here is not miles apart from the vulgar Marxism visualised in They Live (1989) at the peak of capitalist self-confidence. Gen Z’s affection for the film (imho not very good qua film, except for the banging soundtrack co-composed by director Jonn Carpenter), is giving less Red-Green revolutionary fervour and more Ostalgie, in the way that sorry generation tends to get nostalgic about times and places they only know from short videos on the Internet. Maybe, like M. Gessen, they miss our alien overlords having the decency to lie to us.9
On the “Rights” of “Women”
Well-known Centrist Dad Jeremy Bentham famously called the idea of natural rights “nonsense on stilts”. Add to that the metaphysically slippery concept of “woman” and I’m surprised that the philosophically minded Gemma Mason , a.k.a. the last guest on the unmourned Mary Jane Eyre show, is surprised that “women’s rights” is not the rallying cry it used to be.
“We should all be feminists,” said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as sampled by Beyoncé. But if everyone is a feminist, it’s not clear what this means (as Adichie herself found out after her run-in with the transfeminist police). These days, identifying as a feminist says about as much as identifying as queer (you could be a monomously married straight woman who is gay for Dylan Mulvaney). Are feminists for or against sex work? Porn? BDSM? Monogamy? Abortion? Dress codes? Female Circumcision? HRT for teenagers? If feminism is such a broad church, who/what is being worshipped?
As a bit of a human rights nerd myself, I never get tired of pointing out that Afghanistan was one of the original signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (both the Soviet Union and South Africa abstained):
Article 1 — All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2 — Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
etc.
An American woman, Eleanor Roosevelt, was instrumental in getting the draft agreed. That was then. Now the idea of “universal liberalism” seems about as antiquated as “Catholic Integralism”.10
On not selling out
I had hoped that The Moment (2026) could be my moment to write a big essay on how Americans still don’t get brat, but unfortunately the film, not unlike the brat tour, amounted to little more than a few entertaining TikToks stitched together by the parasocial attachment of “little gay criminals” (to quote the best line in the film), with as much artistic ambition as a middle-of-the-road episode of I.T. Crowd, suggesting that, au fond, there’s just not that much to get. It is very of the moment, though, especially in Britain, where the question on everyone’s lips seems to be: why bother?
Sir Keir Starmer has recently made the case for an urgent increase in Britain’s military spending. To do what? Politely decline to defend our own bases? At least we’ll always have this picture of the third female Prime Minister of Britain driving a tank.
Notes on a sunny day
The sunrise was shockingly beautiful this morning. I thought about taking a picture. This thought ruined the moment (see Sontag’s On Photography). The nature of an act (e.g. a sex act) changes not the moment you hit record but the moment you think about hitting record. And then the question arises, what was the nature of the act to begin with?
I did end up taking a picture and sending it to my family in South Africa with the caption “Mooi weer hier vandag”.
Only human
Recent moves by the Australian and UK governments to limit the access of under-16s to the Internet, especially to porn and social media, suggests that governments are increasingly treating the Internet like a drug. Experience with regulating and deregulating and re-regulating actual drugs do not make me hopeful that governments will do so sensibly, by which I mean balancing the goods of taking responsibility for yourself and taking collective responsibility for the vulnerable. Remember that the status quo is that banning online sports betting or the keyword HnH is an unacceptable infringement on individual liberty but mass surveillance and implied extortion is not.11
Becca Rothfeld is back on Substack (it’s as if she’s never left) to implore you to protect your natural human mind from the encroachment of technology:
Don’t use AI to get recipes; don’t use it instead of Google. There is a difference between reading a text that a human being typed out and reading one that a machine excreted. It’s good for you to know that you are making contact with a bored intern when you read a blog post. It’s good for you to let your mind snag on the difficulties and the basic boredoms.
I hate to break it to Becca, but there aren’t many humans involved in a Google search either. This is like being paranoid about seed oils so you buy a blend of olive oil (9%) and palm oil.
IN: Humanising lies (think Dr. Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker)
OUT: Artificial truth (barf emoji)
I feel about experimenting with AI the way I feel about experimenting with sex and drugs: YOLO but try not to be stupid about it (you better have a pretty good hypothesis before shooting H). I asked ChatGPT when last a human beat an AI at chess. Back in 2005, it told me gleefully, and added that the AI engine Stockfish currently boasts an elo rating (look it up) of ~3700 compared to the highest ranking human male player (2882) and the highest ranking human female player (2735).
I find it kinda endearing when it lies to my face, just like my human friends do. I recently asked it to Machinesplain to me the “Mods and Greats” Oxford degree that Murdoch keeps harping on about (confusingly, the “Mods” as nothing to do with modernity) and it chirpily provide me with a list of notable figures who followed this course of study, including Theresa May, who famously did not, opting for geography instead.12
Allegedly, a bone of contention between the CEO of Anthropic and the Department of War (in retrospect, the rebranding should have been a red flag) is the use of fully automated weapons. The idea seems to be that at the last minute human wisdom will prevail. Somewhere in the human soul, a small quiet voice will whisper: “On second thought, maybe let’s not bomb Iran”.
For my readers who “don’t like to think about Europe”.
Since 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the fire drone, permit me to recommend the music of Eliane Radique:
Entre nous, the only time I’ve ever blacked out from drinking or drugs was the one time I did G. I’ve subsequently found less drastic (if not necessarily 100% kosher) means to “chill out”.
That’s one of the reasons I’m encouraging my fellow humans to dis-indentify as a first step towards unselfing.
I have however listened to a decent chunk of Straight Jacket: Overcoming Society’s Gay Shame (2016), by Matthew Todd, former editor of the UK gay magazine Attitude, asking the eternal gay question: why if we’re free, are we still so fucked up?
I couldn’t make it past the blurb page:
Not in the Platonic sense.
Like a CDO squared for a FinanceBro, a behind-the-scene look at the behind-the-scene look of the behind-scene-look at the filming of a reality TV show can offer a mind-boggling ROI on IP.
Or maybe they miss the Machine being more subtle about our duties toward it.
Don’t slack off now, bro, Comrade Stakhanov has produced nine new hole pics.
Since I reviewed Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right, Michael “Flight 93” Anton, one of Field’s principal personae, has written his own review for the Claremont Review of Books, rather paranoidly terming the book and the warm reception it has received a “psy op” and a slander against all of Red America. He has a point, though, about how embarrassingly fawning the has been (William Gladstone, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute, calls Field “a latter-day Athena soothing today’s Furies to rescue American democracy.”) Field herself courts this comparison, although she’s willing to share the limelight with the stunning and brave Nancy Pelosi who intervened just too late to save us from this international trauma:
In hindsight, the summer of 2024 looks like the flubbed deus ex machina moment in our collective history: the moment where the pod bros and George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi, like the Goddess Athena in Aeschylus, took noble action on behalf of democracy, forced Biden out, and tried to save the day. But it didn’t work. The switch to Harris offered a brief reprieve from the tragic gloom, but the forces at play were beyond what the liberals were equipped for. By the end of the campaign—if not long before—liberals like me were angry, too.
Note for the straights: HnH = High ‘n Horny. See my forthcoming monograph from The Free Gay Press: The Best Minds of My Generation: Sex, Drugs and Big Tech.
Geography turns out be a surprisingly subversive discipline. Other notable human geographers include Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (none of these titles were hallucinated by a machine).
As an addendum to note 12, I'm surprised you didn't mention the most radical geographer of all time, Pol Pot, who taught Geography in a private elite school in Phnom Penh during the 1950's.
I am a little surprised to be described as “surprised”! Certainly, it is no longer surprising—if indeed it ever was—that there are those on the far right who want less participation from women in professional life. This has been growing for several years, and of course it also taps into an anti-feminism from evangelical Christians that is decades old.
I am aware that you’re more sympathetic than I am to these kinds of currents, and I appreciate your perspective, though you should expect that at least some of the writings that you throw out in a neutral or approving fashion will be repurposed by me as targets! I trust you’ll not resent the disagreement.
Rights, as a social construction, are far from nonsense these days. I think they’ve shown themselves to be a powerful tool for ordering society in a way that doesn’t just serve the interests of the powerful. But you should interpret both my most recent pieces as locating rights downstream of a broader idea of good, instead of considering them fundamental.
As for feminism, I think the internal disagreements have always been healthy! The fundamental notion that women are people is necessarily dependent upon an understanding of what it means to be a person. That’s a hard question; disagreements will naturally follow even as areas of agreement also emerge. I’d much rather have competing perspectives that start with a sincere attempt at answering what it would mean to respect and support women than have a unified movement that can’t address its foundations. Indeed, my main complaints about modern feminism centre on the way it sometimes resembles the latter.