Episode Details

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