If differences between people are partly innate, who does that absolve, and of what responsibility? And why do we look to genetics for that answer?

I am not a geneticist. I am in my fourth month working in genomics, as a research engineer studying the origins of mutations in ancient and modern human genomes. I came to it from physics. I write code, build models, try to date mutations, compare modern humans with archaic humans, think about Denisovans. My model can be off by several thousand generations. Error is a property of the model, not a person’s fault: I answer for the former, not the latter.

Until recently, I had never even asked myself whether I had the moral right to do this kind of research. Working with ancient human remains, populations and genomes has its own ethics, of course, but I had not yet faced the dilemma directly: are there questions it would be better not to ask, even when they are technically well formulated? In my field, meanwhile, genetic differences between present-day populations are a routine subject of research: Denisovan admixture is unevenly distributed among them. I had assumed that a researcher’s right to ask questions was a given. Otherwise, politics gets to decide which answers we are allowed to find, and to decide in advance, before the question has even been asked.

Nathan Cofnas’s lecture at Ghent University on race, intelligence and the so-called Great Awokening was the first thing to make me not so much question this principle as feel that it was insufficient. Cofnas discusses the heritability of intelligence and the gap in average IQ test scores between Black and white Americans. Does science have the right to investigate such differences if we would rather not know one of the possible answers? My first answer is yes. The difficulties begin when I try to explain why.

At first, I thought this was the central question. Gradually, though, something else began to trouble me, and it proved harder than the first: why would we rather not know one of the answers? Why does our defence of equality so often rest on the hope that science will sooner or later confirm that we really are the same? And what will be left of that defence on the day science refuses to confirm it?

I first encountered Cofnas through the story of Jason Arday, a professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge, rather than through a scientific paper. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarism and questioned his academic record. The university that had awarded Arday his doctorate did not substantiate the plagiarism allegations, but questions remained about his publications, qualifications and biographical claims, and Cambridge opened an investigation of its own. After several weeks of media pressure, Arday left the university. Nine days later, he was found dead at home. That was precisely the order in which it all reached me: first the scandal and the death of a man Cofnas had publicly accused, and only then Cofnas’s own writing. It is hard to imagine a worse sequence for an impartial reading.

Later, I read other work by Cofnas. Among it was Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, in which a man of the right takes a certain methodical pleasure in examining data suggesting that his political allies score lower on measures of intelligence, on average, than those on the left. A rare instance of scientific impartiality: the uncomfortable conclusions begin at home. This does not make Cofnas objective or validate his conclusions about race. It does, however, get in the way of the most convenient explanation: that he simply picks the science that flatters his own group.

But the right to ask a question does not mean the question has been framed scientifically. A column labelled race in a table does not turn race into an unambiguous biological entity. Current guidelines for genomic research require researchers not to use race as an automatic proxy for genetic ancestry, and to explain why they have chosen a particular population category at all. Race may be a necessary variable when studying the effects of racism, but that does not make it a precise synonym for genetic ancestry.

Between banning a question and granting a free pass to any answer lies a considerable stretch of ground that both sides prefer to ignore. Science has the right to ask uncomfortable questions. But the presence of a category in a dataset does not make it a property of nature.

Cofnas, incidentally, sets up the dispute in advance as a question of the right to speak. He begins the lecture with Pierre Thiriar, a judge at the Antwerp Court of Appeal, who had recently written that some of Cofnas’s statements might fall under Belgium’s anti-racism law. Cofnas gives a harsher account of the situation, presenting it almost as a threat of criminal prosecution. At the end of the lecture, he returns to the question of who, in the end, ought to be in prison.

We have not yet reached the argument, but its political frame is already in place: here is a man whom others are trying to silence. After an opening like that, any objection can easily be presented as confirmation of his own account: you are simply not allowed to discuss these things. The louder the demands to cancel the lecture or drive this kind of research out of universities, the more comfortable that position becomes. Cofnas also has a more serious point. If people like him are pushed out of academia, he says, only real extremists will be left studying race and intelligence. Prohibition does a poor job of selecting ideas, but an excellent job of selecting people: the first to abandon a controversial subject are those for whom an academic reputation still means something.

It does not follow, though, that a university is obliged to give a home to any and every piece of research. “Otherwise the Nazis will be the ones talking about it” is an argument about the possible consequences of exclusion. It does not establish the quality of a particular work or confer an unconditional right to a university’s prestige. A platform is not neutral either: it lends institutional weight to what is said. There is no comfortable solution here. Banning Cofnas does not refute him; inviting him does not mean accepting that he is right.

Cofnas’s critics also find a certain convenience in this scene. If the man before us is obviously a racist, there is no need to examine the argument itself. I do not know whether Cofnas is a racist in the sense of possessing some inner essence, and I am not even sure that such essences can be reliably diagnosed in another person. The word “racist” can be entirely accurate and still refute nothing. Academic freedom protects the possibility of asking a question. A good answer does not come with it.

Cofnas builds his argument almost as a syllogism, and everything that matters here lies in that “almost”. He calls the first proposition the equality thesis: on this account, races and sexes do not differ, on average, in socially relevant traits. The second sounds much more modest: everyone has the right to realise their potential. Put the two together, add the observed gap in outcomes, and what you get is less a conclusion than an indictment: if the groups are the same but the outcomes differ, the environment is to blame, discrimination is to blame, injustice is to blame, and society is obliged to change the conditions until the gap disappears. Cofnas calls this “wokism” and argues that the defence of equality rests on sameness. Only he draws the conclusion in reverse: if they are not the same, the very basis for demanding equality disappears.

And almost the entire debate revolves around the first proposition. Are the groups actually the same? How heritable is intelligence? What, exactly, can be inferred from the heritability we observe?

Cofnas is not presenting a genetic discovery of his own. He assembles existing scientific findings into an argument that ends far beyond the bounds of genetics. I am therefore not going to try to establish here whether his particular estimates of heritability are right or wrong. I lack the expertise, and in any case my interest in this story lies elsewhere.

One distinction does need to be made, however, between heritability within a group and the cause of a difference between groups, because too much in this debate depends on it. It is precisely where a conclusion seems obvious that we are most likely to miss the fact that it does not follow from the preceding claim at all.

High heritability of a trait within one group tells us nothing, by itself, about the cause of a difference in the averages of two groups. These are different questions. Variation in a trait within each population can be substantially associated with genetic factors, while the observed difference between the two populations’ averages can be caused by the environment. So the statement “intelligence is heritable” does not yet answer the question of why group averages differ. That requires further data and further assumptions. The argument around Cofnas cannot, then, be reduced to a simple choice between “genes” and “environment”.

Cofnas’s argument looks impeccably coherent until you start asking where each successive “therefore” comes from. Its moral component sounds humane: every person has the right to realise their potential. But the right to realise one’s potential is not the same as moral equality. A person is given the opportunity to fulfil whatever capacities they possess, while the extent and social value of those capacities may already have been declared unequal.

What happens to a person whose abilities are modest, have gone unnoticed, or simply turn out to be of no use to anyone? Formally, nothing is forbidden to them. They are allowed to realise the little that has been found in them, and from there a small salary, rented housing, inaccessible healthcare and a shortened life all fall neatly into place as the logical continuation of their modest gifts. First, an expert determines the extent of their potential. Then society determines the corresponding extent of the world available to them.

For me, moral equality means equal dignity, equal political agency, the right not to be humiliated, and equality of opportunity that is genuine enough to mean something in practice. It does not mean that every choice must have the same consequences. I do not believe that effort and a complete refusal to make any should be valued equally. Differences in work, discipline and the decisions we make may well justify differences in outcomes. But a different outcome and the loss of the basic conditions of a human life are not the same thing. To confuse them is to confuse inequality with the denial of dignity.

To demand complete equality of outcomes is sentimental infantilism, as is treating being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth as a personal achievement. Innate advantages are merely a stroke of luck, not a sign of some higher favour. But to cast every class divide as a tragedy is to indulge in dreary moralistic posturing. The point lies elsewhere altogether. The main question for institutions is much more prosaic: do they give a person real means of living a decent life, or do they cynically stop at granting rights to things they know that person cannot access? A system is under no obligation to make human lives identical. But it has no right to turn difference into grounds for humiliation.

I do not know where circumstance ends and choice begins. My argument needs only a narrower position: there is a minimum of basic goods and dignity that should not depend on how highly we rate a particular person’s abilities, discipline or usefulness.

Cofnas speaks of socially relevant traits, of characteristics that matter socially, as though their relevance were contained in the traits themselves. But the social value of intelligence, memory, productivity, physical strength, the capacity to care or to submit to routine is not set by nature. One ability is recognised, another passes unnoticed, and a third does not even have a name in the language that might describe it.

Even if the first link in the chain turns out to be biological, that does not make the rest natural. Between ability and poverty there is always an institution. The very same difference in ability may have negligible social consequences under one institutional arrangement and determine almost the whole course of a person’s life under another. The natural difference may be the same; its social cost will differ. If defending equality first requires us to prove that people are the same by nature, then, for some reason, we already regard difference itself as sufficient grounds for inequality.

Three distinct questions converge in Cofnas’s argument. The first concerns cause: where the observed gap comes from in the first place. The second concerns blame: whether anyone can be held responsible for its emergence. And the third is a different question altogether: what society should do about its consequences now. He does not literally claim that an innate difference releases society from all obligations. His claim is that if a substantial part of the gap has a natural cause, the “moral emergency” disappears: the one that drives an endless search for discrimination and efforts to change the environment until the observed inequality is gone.

But this is precisely where I am interested in how the argument works beyond its literal wording. If a difference has a natural cause, society did not create it; if society did not create it, society is not to blame. From there, it is very easy to take one more step: once the blame disappears, the demand to put anything right loses some of its former force as well. That step no longer belongs to genetics.

Obligation and blame are not the same thing. No one invented old age, illness or congenital disability, but that does not turn assistance into a favour. The state did indeed have nothing to do with the origins of someone’s misfortune, yet it still has no right to watch that person bear the cost alone. We confuse blame with obligation because we expect politics to deliver a verdict: name the culprit, and then we will decide who owes what to whom. If there is no culprit, the obligation seems to vanish.

For Cofnas, the fact that a difference is innate weakens the moral demand to remedy it. From another moral standpoint, the conclusion is almost the reverse: if the limitation itself cannot be removed, some obligations may prove permanent rather than temporary.

Here I am deliberately changing the question. Cofnas is not challenging social obligations as such, but the habit of explaining every persistent difference in terms of discrimination and treating it as sufficient grounds for special policies towards an entire group. My example does not refute this; Cofnas would most likely have no objection to it. Its purpose is different: to separate obligation from blame. Universal assistance, special measures for particular groups, or a combination of the two: that is the next debate, and the genome will not settle it for us.

It was easier for me to think I had been born this way. As a queer person, I never experienced born this way as an entirely abstract argument from the history of emancipation. There was something reassuring about it, and something irritating too. It lifted some of the shame: I had not chosen my desire, so I should not be punished for it.

Gradually, though, it was that very “I did not choose” that began to seem suspect. For some reason, before I could claim the right to my own sexuality, I first had to prove that I deserved neither credit nor blame for it. The very demand to prove the absence of choice already accepted the prosecution’s terms. It seemed I could be granted freedom only after proving my own lack of it. If it were convincingly established tomorrow that sexual orientation involved an element of choice, my view of gay rights would not change. No one should have to prove the biological inevitability of their desire for the state to leave them alone. Equal dignity in this case does not depend on a gene, a hormone, childhood trauma, the family environment or a conscious decision.

I do not know how much of sexuality is innate, and I do not think my argument requires a definitive answer. A large genomic study by Andrea Ganna and his colleagues, published in Science in 2019, found a complex polygenic influence on same-sex sexual behaviour, but no way of making any meaningful prediction about an individual’s sexuality from their genome. Even genetics failed to provide the simple explanation of sexuality that had been expected of it for so long.

The right to live as you wish has to be justified by proving that you could not have lived any other way. Perhaps this is the paradox of born this way: it defends freedom, yet still demands proof that a person did not choose their own desire. Why is it not enough simply to desire? Why must we establish where that desire came from, name it, and turn it into an answer to the question of who you are?

With Cofnas, what changes is not the logic of the argument but whom it absolves. In the case of born this way, biology absolved the individual: I was born this way, so do not judge me for something I did not choose. Cofnas is not saying that “society no longer owes anyone anything”. He is saying that a natural origin for the gap weakens the moral demand to seek out and eliminate its social causes. Politically, though, such an explanation can easily lead to another conclusion: if the cause lies at least partly in nature, schools, the state and social institutions have grounds to consider themselves less responsible for the observed outcome.

I still lean towards letting the research proceed. Perhaps because I am used to treating doubt as the cardinal professional virtue. But “science above all” sounds good only for as long as the consequences of scientific curiosity fall on someone else.

The possibility of enduring innate differences takes that support away from me. I would have to defend people’s equal dignity without claiming that they are the same in every respect. I would have to acknowledge that a just society will not produce identical people, and that some forms of support may be needed permanently, not merely until the next reform. That is not enough for a complete theory of justice.

When it comes to my own sexuality, it is still easier for me to say “I did not choose” than “even if I did, nobody asked you”. As a researcher, it is just as convenient to say “I am only asking questions” and leave the consequences of those questions to somebody else. Both are partly true. But both phrases let us stop at just the right moment and ask no further questions about our own responsibility.

I still believe that science has the right to investigate the origins of human differences, including by asking the most politically dangerous questions. But that “yes” does not absolve a researcher of the need to justify the category, the method and the limits of their conclusion. Nor does it permit an account of a cause to become a ready-made answer to a question of justice.

The genome may explain why we differ. But no explanation of a cause can, by itself, determine our obligations to one another. Biology has not changed. What has changed is who is absolved.

A novel about how the internet renders violence as text, as content — and casts the reader as a quiet accomplice, one who assures himself he’s merely a spectator.

We like to believe there is some common denominator to what is vile, corrupting, and unbearable in literature, that readers might, in principle, agree on where it really starts to hurt and draw a reasonably clear line beyond which something becomes unacceptable. There is no such line. Everyone has their own threshold: one person can get stuck on a single sentence for days, while another will make it through any amount of humiliation and brutality without so much as flinching. And yet there are subjects that seem almost certain to fall beyond the pale for just about anyone.

Incest, cannibalism, child abuse, rape as such—the same catalogue keeps turning up in fiction that has long enjoyed a reputation for being forbidden. And plenty of people, understandably and quite rightly, would rather have nothing to do with any of it: not read it, not imagine it, not put it into words. Arguments about books like these usually collapse pretty quickly into the question of how far an author has the right to go. As though a book’s brutality could be measured by the number of dismembered bodies per page: the more bodies, the harder the reading.

Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts operates on this terrain, but it soon becomes clear that Cooper is less interested in the limits of the permissible than in the behaviour of the person who has reached that limit and still hasn’t closed the book. He is interested not only in what happens to his characters, but in what happens in us as we watch it. At a certain point it becomes hard to tell what is more disturbing: the scene on the page, or the fact that we keep following it. Cooper does not so much test the reader with cruelty as deny him the comfort of deciding that all of this is happening somewhere else, to other people, at the hands of absolute perverts with whom he has nothing in common. Violence needs more than a perpetrator. It needs a witness, a spectator, a narrator, and somebody asking for more.

The first time I read the novel, I wanted to say that The Sluts brings these perspectives together: there is the figure of the willing victim, and then there is the whole crowd watching him—reading, writing, commenting, doubting, chewing over every new detail, and in doing so becoming part of what is happening. On a second reading, “willing victim” already feels much too simple. Especially if willingness is taken to mean that once a certain Brad—and Brad is precisely who this is about—has agreed to something, his consent no longer matters from that point on. Brad offers himself up and then backs away; says it doesn’t matter whether he opens his eyes the next morning, then says outright that dying was never part of the plan; ties his submission first to love, then to money, a place to stay, a fix, a ticket to Los Angeles, a wife he might still go back to. In the same letter he can say “do whatever you want” and “you scare me.” Everyone around him hears the first sentence perfectly well and somehow goes a little deaf during the second.

Cooper is not showing us someone who knowingly and lucidly agrees to everything, only to discover that his consent means nothing. He exposes the way consent can be produced by dependency. Formally, Brad agrees. In practice, his choices have already narrowed: he has no home, no money, no stable sobriety, no confidence that he is worth much of anything and, at times, not even anyone he can call. His body is the only currency he has. He uses it to pay for love and for staying alive. So the novel’s question is not why Brad wants to become a victim. The question is who gets the right to turn his contradictory words into permanent permission.

The book came out in the early 2000s and, on the surface, is built out of the early internet: dubious-looking websites, Hotmail, AOL (America Online), message boards, forums, emails, faxes. The novel is divided into sections called Site 1, Ad, Board, Email, Fax, and Site 2. There is no conventional narrator. There is not even any certainty that the book has a single present tense. We read the remains of communication and try to work out what happened between them.

The novel begins not with a psychological portrait but with a form. Escort’s name. Age. Height. Weight. Hair colour. Price. Accuracy of description. Rating. Would hire again. A person enters the book already broken down into consumer specifications. His body exists in the same register as a phone number, a price, and a customer review. Even Brad’s age comes with a question mark, a joke, or somebody else’s assurance, as though we were dealing with an incorrectly listed product size. It is precisely this neutral format that makes the book so hard to take. Cooper does not build horror through authorial commentary. He puts it inside the language of customer service. After the description of violence, there is still a box marked rating. After humiliation, you can still click recommended. After a presumed death, the question remains: hire again? The administrative tone does not soften what is happening. It strips it of its exceptional status. Everything can be entered into a form, compared with a previous experience, and recommended to the next user.

Physical violence is only the next stage of a process already under way. It begins the moment a body is accepted as a set of parameters and the other person’s response becomes an optional part of the service. One client in the second half of the novel makes it perfectly clear that what he wants is not a person but compliant meat. Brad’s passivity suits him just fine. Better still is the knowledge that this is “the legendary Brad.” The biography is already included in the price.

At first, the book’s central mystery seems to be the identity of the real Brad. How old is he? Does he have a brain tumour? Did he live with Brian? Was he an escort, a prisoner, the husband of a pregnant woman, a dying boy, a manipulator, or somebody’s invention? As the book goes on, another question becomes more interesting: why does everyone need the real Brad to exist so badly?

As long as his identity remains uncertain, everyone gets to write a Brad of their own. To one person he is an innocent child who needs to be saved. To another, he is someone who can spot another person’s vulnerability and knows how to use it. To a third, the perfect kinky boy. To a fourth, a doomed sick kid whose murder can be passed off as the fulfilment of his dying wish. At one point, a forum user admits it outright: the real Brad may exist, but the Brad they are obsessed with is a fantasy. The person himself is secondary. What matters is how readily his name can be made to serve other people’s projections.

That is why fact-checking works strangely in The Sluts too. In theory, checking facts should eliminate one version after another until the picture becomes clearer. Here, every confirmed fact drags another couple of possibilities in behind it. The administrator contacts posters, asks for evidence, checks addresses, searches newspaper reports, calls supposed participants. No merciful ending or catharsis is coming, obviously; looking for some glimmer of hope here would be a sappy optical illusion. Truth is not needed to bring the story to an end. Quite the opposite: it is needed to keep it going. It gets dragged into the light for one sober purpose—to whet the appetite, throw the crowd another piece of meat, raise the stakes, and sell them the same story again, only this time at three times the price.

Hence the novel’s strange form of authorship. Brad is not written by Dennis Cooper in the usual sense. He is written by an entire workshop of co-authors. Clients describe his body. Brian and Zack hang their own desires on it. The forum invents his biography. The administrator decides what gets published and in what order. Users pitch possible scenarios for what should happen next. The reader decides whose version sounds most convincing. Brad himself comes last; by the time we reach him, he has already been described, dismantled, and appropriated. Brad has a voice, but no right to the last word. The moment he answers, his words are drowned out by other people explaining what he “really” meant. Says he doesn’t need saving—symptom. Asks for help—manipulation. Agrees—he is asking for it. Refuses—part of the game. His silence is interpreted just as eagerly as his words.

The Ad section is particularly important: at first it feels as though Brad’s story has simply been interrupted. For me, it was the hardest part of the book to read. I used to see it as a digression: Cooper temporarily peels himself away from Brad and throws in a new batch of eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds selling themselves for money and drugs, some of them willing to go as far as being killed, while the same old fag with a taste for young boys takes the bait. Now I see it differently: it is the exact same logic as the rest of the book, only without the wrapper of Brad’s story.

“No limits” is a routine line in these ads, but this is not about free will. It is about how much it takes for someone to agree to anything. One will do “anything” for five thousand dollars. Another needs a fix. A third barely speaks English and accepts whatever terms he is offered because he needs money for his family. The buyer methodically feels around for the string he can pull—addiction, poverty, trauma—to push the boy a little further. The body alone is not enough for him; in one conversation he says it plainly: I’m not letting you leave. You’re coming here to die. And that is why the scenes in which the past surfaces are difficult to read for reasons beyond what is actually happening in them. An adult makes a boy describe his own trauma the way you would describe a product—listing its features as though he were talking about something other than himself. The past matters to him neither for understanding nor for sympathy. He uses it to calculate how far he can go this time. Cooper never says that surviving abuse somehow naturally leads to self-destruction. He shows something else: how another person’s trauma can be used to estimate where they will break.

There are also people in the book who want to save him. They want to cure Brad, take him away from Zack, find him a home, return him to a normal life. Saving someone and destroying them are not morally equivalent. But in the novel they operate according to the same structure. Both the saviour and the buyer who wants to break Brad and finish him off have already decided who Brad is and what is supposed to happen to him. One is desperate to prove his own absolute cruelty, the other his absolute goodness. With either of them, Brad remains raw material for someone else’s moral biography.

There is no altruistic samsara to be found here; selfless rescue turns, quickly and without the slightest embarrassment, into ordinary control. Brian’s love works the same way: an ordinary Brad is not enough for it. He has to be exceptional enough to justify the obsession, the money, the rescue, the murder. Nobody spends this kind of love on an ordinary person. Brad is not allowed to turn out to be a boring hole, a nobody, unremarkable, or simply someone who changed his mind.

And when the supposedly “real Brad” finally appears, he is far more ordinary than any of the versions invented for him. He didn’t want to die, none of that extreme shit turned him on, he did sex work for a short while, he lives with his wife, works construction, and dreams of opening a little shop. He does not think of himself as especially beautiful or important, and asks the people obsessed with his name to get on with their own lives. This is perhaps the most radical version of Brad in the entire novel: a person refusing to be a story. We still have no way of knowing whether this Brad is real. Cooper gives us no certainty even at the end. But the mere possibility of such a Brad is fatal to the forum. If he really is alive, more or less ordinary, and unwilling to participate in someone else’s tragedy, then the whole grand construction did not grow out of the mystery surrounding him. It grew out of everyone else’s refusal to accept how ordinary he might be.

Another central figure in this system is the forum administrator. At first he looks like someone trying to preserve what remains of reality: he verifies posts, contacts their authors, publishes warnings, removes dubious material. Gradually, though, it becomes clear that he is also the managing editor and the owner of the business. He openly admits that the Brad story drove traffic to the site. He decides to shut the forum down only when the discussion starts driving users away, generating complaints, and creating legal risk. The platform develops a conscience at precisely the moment risk begins to outweigh profit.

The administrator does not invent the posts, but he decides which ones get visibility. He does not know what is true, yet arranges the posts in a sequence that creates suspense. He warns the audience and, at the same time, invites them to “stay tuned.” His verification does not stop the story; it gives the story editorial form. He does by hand what the feed does now: turns scattered statements into an event, because an event holds attention.

So The Sluts is not simply a novel about people obsessed with violence. Cooper is interested in the moment when a private fantasy stops being private, finds other willing participants, and turns into collective demand.

This becomes especially clear after the Email, Fax section. At last, it seems, Brad himself appears behind the reviews and other people’s versions. Instead of descriptions of somebody else’s body, we get a long, confused first-person account. But immediately afterwards the novel launches Site 2 and everything starts over. Name. Age. Price. Rating. Hire again. A private voice is put back into a service listing.

This is one of Cooper’s cruellest formal decisions. Even Brad’s account of himself ends up as just another version of Brad: material to be discussed and used alongside everyone else’s. Everything that ought to puncture the myth—addiction, fear, poverty, the mess of his feelings—only drives up its price. The clients are no longer buying a body. They are buying access to the legend. They pay for the right to enter the story. Violence against an unknown person does not carry the same value for them. The victim has to be Brad, meaning the bearer of a collectively produced biography. Otherwise the client feels cheated. One of them is outraged not because he mutilated a helpless young man, but because he mutilated the wrong young man. He believes the fraud deprived him of the opportunity to make a moral decision. It may be the most precise formula for self-exoneration in the whole novel: the act is mine, but the blame belongs to whoever gave it the wrong meaning.

By the end, the question of authorship becomes literal. Zack admits that after Brad disappeared, he wrote the reviews himself, struggling to come up with a better ending. What had actually happened did not satisfy him. The story lacked the necessary effect. He wanted to give the audience what it expected and stage the perfect death, but so many questions and contradictions accumulated that the plot slipped out of his control. The final fabrication was supposed to give the readers what they had been waiting for: at last, the promised ending.

And here everything finally changes places. We thought the reviews were recording events. It turns out the events are being made to meet the demands of the reviews. At first the text follows the body; then the body is required to follow the text. Brad has to die because the story already demands his death. It has rules of its own, an audience, a backlog of expectations that need to be satisfied. He is not allowed simply to disappear, change his mind, or turn out to be an ordinary person with an ordinary life. An unfinished story is unbearable to people who have invested fantasies, money, and hours of reading in him.

The novel itself draws an important line. One forum user says that a person should be free to fantasise about whatever they want. Another replies: fantasise all you like, but don’t write to Brad; keep it to yourself. The ugliness does not begin inside the head. It begins at the point of contact, where somebody else’s desire acquires an address and power over another person’s actions.

So it would not be entirely fair to say that the reader is no better than the people on the forum. The reader will not write to Brad, book an appointment, or send money. He is dealing with a novel, not with a real crime unfolding in real time. Reading alone does not make him an accomplice. Otherwise any act of reading about violence would have to count as complicity. Cooper still leaves the reader in an uncomfortable position. We are desperate to know how it ends, who is lying, who died, who is hiding behind the name Brad. We sift through testimony, arrange causes and consequences, choose whichever version seems most plausible. Conventional fiction gives the reader a character to hide behind, an intermediary whose “I” can conveniently be made responsible for our own gaze. There is no personnage alibi here. The reader has to assemble the story himself out of mutually contradictory versions.

Complicity does not begin with curiosity itself. It begins with the desire for some real body to finally confirm our version. We do not only want to understand the story. We want it to end correctly. Moral disgust is no guarantee of innocence either: it can easily become the pleasure of feeling superior to the characters while your hand keeps turning the page.

The title The Sluts is plural. Cooper can hardly mean only the people selling sex. By the end of the novel, the word has spread far beyond prostitution and come to name the whole system of exchange that has formed around Brad. Not because everyone is equally guilty. They are simply trading in different things: bodies, money, fantasies, care, outrage, attention, and their own curiosity.

By every outward sign, The Sluts belongs unmistakably to the early 2000s. Its internet is slow, ugly, and almost touchingly homemade. But its inner mechanics have not aged at all: a story gains visibility, visibility creates demand, demand requires more, and the platform discovers responsibility only once responsibility itself becomes a threat. A correction ends nothing; it becomes another post. An exposé does not kill the myth; it refreshes it. And all the while a dubious story has enough time to acquire perfectly real consequences, while everyone involved finds a reason not to stop it. One is convinced the whole thing is made up; another allows that some of it might be true but waits for proof; a third suggests a scenario; a fourth pays; the administrator publishes. Taken separately, each person does too little to admit to being the cause—and exactly enough to keep the machinery running.

In that sense, The Sluts is an extraordinarily precise and deliberately uncomfortable book. Possibly the hardest book I have ever read. What is frightening is not that Cooper turns something unimaginable inside out. What is frightening is that there is almost nothing to turn inside out: it already works this way without him. And by the end, the question of who the real Brad is no longer matters all that much. Something else does: why did everyone need him in the first place? The client needs him so that fantasy can pass for experience. The administrator needs him so that exploitation can pass for a service. The reader needs him so that jerking off to someone else’s misery can pass for an interest in the truth. Brad himself is the one person nobody really needs. He can disappear, survive, die, or turn out to be someone else entirely. The name will keep working anyway. The demand for Brad will outlive whoever is unlucky enough to end up being him.

Blue Film argues that turning trauma into a commodity does not heal the past, and that real agency begins where the purchased ending gives way to the unbearable demand to reclaim one’s own name.

Cinema is said to be dead. No one seriously argues with that diagnosis anymore; the only debate left concerns the date of death and who inherits the estate. Queer cinema died differently. Its cause of death is almost more embarrassing than tragic. Not censorship—it survived that—but recognition. The industry learned how to market it and forgot how to risk it. Which makes it all the more startling when, from the endless heap of content assembled by yet another film-school graduate in twelve days and on next to no money, something resembling a pulse suddenly makes itself heard. Blue Film, Elliott Tuttle’s debut feature, was shot in twelve days and rejected by both Sundance and SXSW—the very institutions that have spent the last two decades teaching us the virtues of courage, inclusion, and radical empathy, only to cross themselves and look away the moment genuine transgression enters the room. Festival liberalism, as it turns out, ends exactly where discomfort begins. Films about the oppressed? Certainly. Films about desire? Absolutely not. Desire may well be the last subject under a genuine embargo in 2026. Selling your body is acceptable. Selling your soul is practically expected. Talking about either out loud remains bad manners.

Aaron Eagle—a camboy performing under a professional pseudonym (played by Kieron Moore, whose face looks as though an AI had been prompted with twink, melancholy, late capitalism)—makes his living through findom, financial domination: perhaps the most honest economic model ever invented. Then comes the sort of offer people are not supposed to refuse. Fifty thousand dollars. One anonymous client. One night. The client opens the door wearing a mask. In cinema, masks always come off eventually. The only question is what waits underneath: a face—or the past. Here, the past answers the door. Behind the mask is Hank (Reed Birney), a former high-school English teacher who served time for attempting to sexually assault a twelve-year-old student. But that is not the film’s real horror. The boy standing before him now—the one naming his own price for humiliation—is not the child Hank abused. The victim was someone else. Someone who merely looked like him. For years Hank loved one boy and dragged another into a school bathroom. The entire night that follows is spent trying to answer a single question: in this story, who exactly was Aaron? The survivor. The cause. Or simply the double for whom somebody else paid the price.

The title says everything there is to say—and then says it again. A blue film is, first of all, simply pornography. The film has the decency not to pretend otherwise. It opens exactly like porn: a cam show, “What’s up, faggots?”, immediately seating the audience in the chair of the paypig—not the voyeur, notice, but the one paying to look. The second meaning arrives only at dawn. The blue film is the one Hank has been making all night. He never lets go of the camera. And when Aaron finally asks why, Hank answers:

When you leave, all you take is your memories. And I thought, I want to take mine of you with me.

At that moment the genre collapses before our eyes. Pornography turns out to be a home movie about love. The home movie proves indistinguishable from pornography. In the end, the entire plot comes down to two people spending one long night trying to figure out what, exactly, they are filming.

The film is structured like a receipt printing itself before our eyes, one line item at a time. Twenty-five thousand dollars up front. Another five to persuade Aaron not to leave once the mask comes off and staying becomes unbearable. Another thousand for a song—“That’s all I’ve got, really.”—it isn’t a figure of speech. Hank is poor in that peculiarly American way American cinema almost never bothers to show. Fifty thousand dollars represents an entire lifetime spent stocking shelves at Shop ’n Save, converted into cash and folded into a single envelope. And suddenly the logic of findom—in which Aaron is sovereign and Hank merely the obedient wallet—turns itself inside out. Taking everything from someone wealthy—that is domination. Taking everything from someone who has almost nothing begins to resemble an inheritance, with all the obligations one owes the dead. Strip the money away from this night, however, and remarkably little changes. Power remains. So does shame. So does the longing to be seen. So does the loneliness that knows only one way of making contact with another human being: destruction. Money creates none of it. It merely renders visible what was there all along. The more unsettling exercise is to perform the same subtraction on your own relationships. Take away everything transactional. Then pray something survives. That is precisely what makes Blue Film so difficult to watch. The bargain it stages is one almost all of us have entered at one time or another. Most of us simply never received an envelope. And unlike Hank, we were never paid full price.

High, furious, and exhausted, Aaron proposes sex. Hank refuses. Instead, he proposes a role-play. Together they restage—I have no intention of softening the assignment of roles—the scene in the school bathroom.

— You can’t tell anybody I did this because we could both get in a lot of trouble. — Please get off. Stop, Mr. Grant. Please stop.

Once again, Hank fails to stop when he should. And the crime, replayed in miniature—with consent, with a camera rolling, with money changing hands—does not cease to be itself. Re-enactment, it turns out, is no safer than the original. At this point the film leaves me with a question I still answer differently every time I revisit it. What happens when trauma becomes a commodity? Is selling your wound a way of gaining power over the past—or simply another way of never escaping it? “My body. My pain. I set the price.” It sounds like a manifesto of agency. Until you notice the catch. Anyone who makes a living from selling a wound has to make sure it never heals. The market has no use for a person. It wants a body attached to a story of suffering, packaged neatly enough for consumption. To Tuttle’s credit, he refuses to resolve the dilemma. He simply shows that both answers are true at the same time. And there is no cure for that simultaneity. Not even fifty thousand dollars.

The contemporary moviegoer enters the theater the way people enter therapy: looking for causality. Show us the protagonist’s childhood and we’ll understand. Once we understand, we’ll forgive. Once we’ve forgiven, we’ll go home and have dinner. Blue Film treats that desire with remarkable cruelty. Or rather—it reveals that the desire itself is the weakness. Hank is given an origin story assembled according to every convention of prestige cinema. A grandfather for whom he was the special grandson. A mother who understood perfectly well what was happening and quietly sacrificed her younger son to her own father, the way one sacrifices the smaller loss to preserve the larger whole. Aaron, meanwhile, is denied an origin altogether. Pressed for an explanation, he invents one. He tells Hank he was abused as a child. We believe him instantly. Why wouldn’t we? It explains everything. Or so we think. Only after Hank has finished confessing does Aaron admit that he made the entire story up. Every word. Nobody ever touched him. His father was a good man. His mother was a good woman. He was loved every minute of his life. He was simply born this way. And that is the only fact in his biography for which he refuses to apologize. All at once every explanation we were so eager to construct turns out to belong not to him, but to us. The film performs the same operation on our hunger for forgiveness. More than once I caught myself wanting Aaron to forgive Hank. But if I’m honest, that desire was never Aaron’s. It was mine. A forgiven story becomes bearable. It is no coincidence that forgiveness is most enthusiastically promoted by those who never have to do the forgiving. Aaron, it seems, wants something else. Not forgiveness. Recognition. He wants what happened to be named aloud. Named plainly. Named without ornament. And he refuses to let anyone demand a beautiful ending from his pain. Beautiful endings are transactions too. The only difference is that this time the victim always pays.

Does the film judge Hank? It does. Silently. Without a single accusatory speech. Tuttle has no use for verdicts. Instead, scene by scene, he strips Hank of every version of the story that still allows him to live with himself. The film reaches its rhetorical peak in the most unlikely place imaginable: Ancient Rome. Pederasty as institution. As military initiation. As the bond between soldiers marching into battle two by two. Human history is remarkably generous when it comes to furnishing alibis for anyone who paid attention in school—and Hank, after all, used to teach English. The argument is constructed so elegantly that for a moment you almost forget what, exactly, it is trying to excuse. Then the entire edifice is brought down by one absurdly ordinary line.

You eat pizza with a fork. What kind of fucking gladiator are you?

Grand theories rarely survive contact with ordinary life. By morning, Hank loses even his last refuge. All night he has repeated the same sentence: “I let him go. I had principles.” By dawn he quietly surrenders even that. The boy wasn’t let go. He got away. Nothing remains. Not his church. Not his job at the supermarket. Not his belief that years of quiet decency somehow balance the books. I confess that I am capable of looking at Hank as a human being. To my own misfortune, I am capable of looking at almost anyone that way. Empathy without limits is a perversion too. It simply happens to be a socially acceptable one. But the film never asks us to choose between understanding and condemnation. It asks something much harder. To hold both thoughts in your head at once. Here is a man shaped by poverty, fear, and a grandfather who carried the same name. And here is James Scott—the twelve-year-old boy who never made it to college and whom his former teacher still runs into behind the checkout counter of the very same supermarket. Understanding does not abolish responsibility. It merely robs us of our favorite luxury. A simple verdict.

The ending could hardly be simpler: by dawn, the entire film has contracted into a single word, one Aaron spends the whole night unable to claim. From the moment the mask comes off, he keeps correcting Hank—not Alex, Aaron—as though the pseudonym were the last defensive line left to him, because by then it is; if he gives up the name he performs under, there is almost nothing else left to protect. And yet, in the morning, holding the envelope with the full fifty thousand dollars and two photographs—one of himself as a child, the other, Hank explains, “just me”—he finally says, “Call me Alex. Please.” Three words, and the entire film has been moving toward them.

The night ends in a strange exchange: the man who paid for love leaves with a videotape, while the man who spent the night selling himself leaves with his own name. No one is healed, no one forgiven, no one saved—the genre of miraculous mornings belongs to another kind of cinema. And the final question of the night comes not from the one who paid: “Do you still love me?” asks the man who has spent the evening selling his body and, only at the very end, allows himself to ask for love. The film offers no answer, and it is right not to.

Films like this usually share the same fate: not box office, not awards, not a respectable festival biography, but a kind of private cult, sustained by links passed from one person to another by people whose taste you still, more or less, trust. And yet I cannot shake the uneasy feeling that Blue Film may outgrow that fate. One day, when the queer canon is rebuilt not according to usefulness, respectability, or the demands of the current vocabulary, but according to where it actually hurts, Tuttle’s film may find itself beside Genet, Derek Jarman, and Dennis Cooper—not as one more work about queer identity, but as one of the rare texts capable of showing its underside.

Queer cinema needs more than stories of victory. The display windows are already in place, the lights are on, the merchandise is refreshed every June, and everyone knows which gestures must be performed in front of the glass. What it also needs is another room—darker, less comfortable, immune to the logic of the press release—where shame, loneliness, power, and the forms of violence that live not outside desire but inside it can be spoken about without first checking whether the conversation risks letting the community down.

Representation taught us that we have the right to be seen; Blue Film adds the much less comfortable proposition that being seen and being recorded are not the same thing, and that an entire life can stretch between those two conditions, sometimes not even your own. Films that love us only as long as we remain easy to love come out every Friday; films that see us as we are, without first asking us to become simpler, cleaner, or more legible, arrive perhaps once in a generation. What makes Tuttle’s ending unbearable is not what it shows—in the end, what we have witnessed is only a transaction—but the fact that the film quietly takes away our right to a beautiful ending and gives us back our real name instead.

P.S. — Please.

Matières Fécales, The One Percent, and marginality’s right to set its own value.

I kept postponing the Matières Fécales interview for Fashion Neurosis, even though it should have been the first thing I watched: everything they do — from their outward appearance to their way of thinking fashion as a form of cultural conflict — had already settled too deeply inside me. That is why the usual labels here feel not simply insufficient, but too small for what they are trying to describe. Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskar are not designers in the conventional sense; they work with the very system of looking that preemptively sorts bodies and faces into the permissible and the impermissible. What that system is used to calling “ugliness” ceases, in their work, to be a stigma and becomes material for form. They take someone else’s fear of otherness, push it into a sovereign, aggressive image, and send it back to the addressee. This is not simply fashion, but an intervention into the very way we look. If this appearance provokes immediate rejection, then it has already done its work: it has forced the boundary to reveal itself, the point at which taste turns out not to be a personal preference, but a learned system of prohibitions.

That is precisely why I did not want, for a long time, to translate this impression into explanation. As long as such an image remains silent, one can remain inside it: it operates before words, before biography, before the neat dissection into “trauma,” “aesthetic,” and personal history. But the conversation with Hannah and Steven did not destroy that silence; it made it heavier. Behind the visual obsession, what emerged was not a confession about “self-expression,” but a more uncomfortable construction: labor, poverty, disgust, discipline, production — and, most importantly, the price.

At one point, Hannah names the price of a blazer: 3,500 euros. And the point, of course, is not that such a price tag could come as news to the world of high fashion. There, what is sold is not fabric and buttons, but handwork, myth, archive, surname, a place in the museum, the fantasy of heritage, and that particular European air capable of turning meaninglessness into savoir-faire. Old luxury always has an alibi. Even if an object costs as much as a car, it is called craftsmanship. Even if it is impractical, it is called couture. Even if no one needs it, it is called culture.

Before that number, their biography could still have been placed inside a ready-made cultural case: religious upbringing, school uniform, fear of the body, upcycling, the kitchen where hoodies and T-shirts were sewn for ten years. Contemporary culture loves these narratives, provided they remain touching enough and poor enough. Trauma becomes style, repression becomes silhouette, trash becomes resourcefulness, poverty becomes proof of authenticity. All of this can be consumed almost without risk: as a beautiful story of overcoming, where the moral position has already been placed safely on the correct side.

And yet the awkwardness of that sum does not disappear. This is not the price of luxurious inaccessibility, but the price of painful possibility: high enough to remain an exception, close enough to begin functioning as desire. Not the mythic sum of old couture, but a perfectly real market threshold beyond which an image stops being free. Probably because this jacket is not being made by the heirs of proper luxury. It is being made by people whose brand name is almost a physiological spit in the face of gloss: Fecal Matter, Matières Fécales, Fekal’naya Materiya. Not a “maison,” not an “archive,” not “heritage,” not the noble continuity of craft, but material that culture is accustomed to pushing out of sight. It introduces into this language what is usually excluded from it: the low, the bodily, the recycled, the discarded, everything from which fashion draws its energy but prefers not to call by its name. It reminds us that matter is not only silken, but intestinal.

In the interview, Steven says that the very name of the brand was a way of arguing simultaneously with fashion’s wastefulness and with luxury’s glossy self-image; with that world which knows how to sell not so much clothing as a version of life already cleansed of anything that might betray its underside: waste, labor, sweat, shame, and the social awkwardness of matter. They do not add eccentricity to luxury; they return to it everything it usually excludes in order to appear immaculate.

As long as their practice looked like the romance of independent resistance, it easily fit into a familiar cultural scheme. They sewed everything themselves, worked with found materials, rejected fast fashion, turned trash into clothing and limitation into method. Such a biography is convenient to admire: poor, inventive, ethical, romantic enough to be consumed without internal conflict. Marginality in this form does not threaten luxury, because it remains a supplier of images, not a participant in the system of value. But the moment this same world acquires production, a factory, artisans, support from Dover Street Market, clients, shows, celebrities, and a retail price, the very optics change. What could once be loved as pure radicality enters the economy. Poverty stops being only a beautiful origin, upcycling only a moral gesture, and otherness only a free visual resource. The awkwardness arises not because Matières Fécales has betrayed its source, but because that source no longer agrees to remain a poor proof of authenticity.

This is where the most interesting conflict begins. The industry has long known how to draw energy from marginality: from clubs, from poverty, from queer culture, from bad taste, from trash, from bodies that were long denied the right to be beautiful. But usually that energy must pass through someone else’s system of legitimation before it can become expensive. Steven and Hannah do something else: they do not allow their origin to be transformed into a safe reference. They preserve for it the right to price, production, and the authority of form. So the question is not why their protest became a commodity. The question is why we become uneasy when marginality stops being merely material for someone else’s luxury and begins to participate in assigning its own value.

The image of Matières Fécales, as becomes clear in the interview, appeared long before the brand, the shows, and the Parisian fashion system: as a child, Steven was already drawing what they would eventually arrive at — a bald, androgynous, sensual woman. Before it became a body, this fantasy existed as a drawing, as an escape into imagination, because physically being that way was impossible. Then it became makeup, a shaved head, the absence of eyebrows, clothing, kitchen production. Now it has become a jacket with a price. When a homemade fantasy receives resources, it does not necessarily betray itself. Sometimes it stops being a request for the first time.

Here it is important not to fall into the opposite stupidity and declare expensiveness automatically moral. A 3,500-euro jacket does not become accessible because it was conceived by people with an experience of repression. It is inaccessible. It is elitist. It exists inside luxury. It will not be bought by the person who recognizes themselves in Steven’s religious trauma or Hannah’s school uniform, but by someone who can pay for rarity, image, and proximity to radicality. The market, in general, knows how to digest everything. Even that which arrived to insult it. Even the word “feces” can be printed on an invitation, placed next to champagne, sold through Dover Street Market, worn by Sarah Paulson, photographed, archived, evaluated. The market has long been selling protest to those who can afford a good-looking version of protest.

And yet it is difficult for the market to fully absorb this artistic organism. Their clothes resist the role of beautiful status object not because they stand outside luxury, but because inside it they retain too many discordant features. The name does not allow one to forget the materiality that luxury usually hides. The silhouette does not offer the wearer calm status. When Hannah says of the pink suit that there will be fewer than fifty of them and that not everyone will have the courage to wear that shoulder and that color, what one hears in the phrase is not only pride in a difficult form. There is almost a social test there. Money grants access to the object, but it does not guarantee the ability to withstand it. In old luxury, price functions as an automatic pass into someone else’s cultural code. With Matières Fécales, everything is less convenient. The price opens the door, but behind the door remains a form that may prove stronger than its owner.

But the interview leaves the price as a simple fact. It explains the origin of the awkwardness, but does not show it in action. For that, a show was required — the place where protest stops being conversation and becomes a live event, ritual, and desire. It was there that the price tag stopped being a characteristic of an object and became a question of my own complicity.

I was present at The One Percent, and for that reason it is difficult for me to write about Matières Fécales from the position of a noble outside observer. I did not study them as a phenomenon behind glass. I was inside the very machine they were dissecting: the show, the invitations, the light, the aching wait. The audience had come to watch a critique of wealth, one that unfolded within the framework of that same expensive ritual. This was where the central tension emerged: the challenge to the system was not being issued from outside, but from within its own mechanism. The One Percent was not simply a fashion show, although the clothes existed with such a degree of control and tension that the word “look” could no longer contain them. It was not a show in the usual sense, where the viewer retains the comfortable position of observer. This one percent operated differently: it did not allow you to watch the critique of wealth from the outside, because the situation of the show itself had already made the viewer part of the world being opened up. And here the first discomfort appeared: I felt good.

A show that, in theory, should have produced unease generated an almost euphoric impression. Not because it softened its cruelty, but because that cruelty was flawlessly organized. This was not a political idea placed over clothing as an explanation. It was an idea cut, sewn, staged, lit, and brought to the point of desire. Perhaps the most unpleasant effect of Matières Fécales lies precisely in this: they do not simply “expose” luxury; they make that exposure unbearably seductive. And at that point it becomes impossible to pretend to be innocent. Was I admiring protest, or the fact that protest had finally begun to look like power? Was I moved by the critique of wealth, or by the fact that this critique itself had begun to speak its language: rarity, staging, inaccessibility, immaculate form? At what point does the viewer become an accomplice? When they applaud? When they want the object? When they realize that the critique of the elite has become one of the season’s most desirable events?

Contemporary luxury has long since learned to applaud its own exposure. This may be its highest stage. It is capable of accepting an accusation as an invitation, an anatomical theater as a premiere, a spit as a new kind of shine. That is why The One Percent should not be read as a simple pamphlet on the theme “the rich are ugly.” Steven and Hannah are too precise for that cheap pleasure. What interests them is not the rich person as caricature, but the very aesthetics of domination: how power chooses a face, a posture, a material, a silhouette; how it decides whose body will be considered normal and whose will be considered a creature.

In one of their statements — not quoted verbatim — there is a formula that seems to be the key to everything: “Society sees us as creatures; we don’t see ourselves as creatures. People dehumanize what doesn’t fit in.” The world first turns a person into a monster, then demands that they be ashamed of that form. Their gesture is arranged in reverse: they return the imposed image of the alien creature to the space of high fashion no longer as a stigma, but as a sovereign form.

Their early collection was called The Other. This matters: The One Percent does not appear out of nowhere as a clever seasonal comment on wealth. It is a continuation of the same conversation about visibility, only pushed to its class limit. The other is not simply the one without money. The other is the one whose body is read without their consent. The one who is placed in advance inside the zone of the strange, the animal, the not quite human. The one permitted to be inspiring, but not determining. Desired, but not powerful. A reference, but not the author of the price.

In this sense, The One Percent is not only an economic formula. The one percent are not simply those who have money. They are those who have the right to determine what counts as reality. The right to a face. The right to proportion. The right to expensive meaninglessness. The right to be strange without being immediately sent into the category of creature. The right to turn private trauma into public style and receive not pity for it, but power. That is why the show could not be reduced to a straightforward critique of wealth. It was a fantasy of what wealth looks like after a curse. Not exposed wealth, which must now be ashamed and repent, but wealth pushed to its true physiognomy. Old luxury tries to look like a dream. Matières Fécales shows it as a system of exclusion.

The strongest effect of the show did not arise where one might most easily expect it: not in deformation and not in the rejection of familiar beauty. What is more frightening in Steven and Hannah’s work is the degree of control. Everything that might have fallen apart into chaos is gathered into a strict system. The repulsive is not smeared across the surface, but constructed; excess is subordinated to an internal logic, and deformation does not cancel couture precision, but makes it even more evident. There is no protest against good taste in their clothes. They do not arrive as disorder that can be dismissively written off as provocation, but as an alternative order — colder, more demanding, and perhaps more honest about the violence always hidden inside the very idea of immaculate form. That is why The One Percent does not ask for a reaction, as an ordinary provocation would. It acts more harshly: it places you in the room and makes you part of the mechanism. You look at a critique of money made in the language of money; you admire what was supposed to expose you; you feel awkwardness, but cannot renounce pleasure. This is the precision of the show: it does not resolve the contradiction, but refuses to let you leave it.

In the interview, this alien, almost depersonalized normality appears not as a biographical detail, but as a condition of tension: the less the surrounding space coincides with them, the more sharply the image is forced to intensify. They still need resistance against which form can sharpen itself. Freedom, in Steven’s words, is defiance. There has to be something standing in the way. Earlier, what stood in the way was religion, family, school uniform, poverty, lack of capital, the impossibility of being oneself. Now something else stands in the way: the possibility of being understood too well by the market. This is perhaps the most difficult stage for any radical artist. As long as you are not understood, you are protected by your own marginality. When people begin to understand you, buy you, invite you, archive you, and call you important, another form of pressure begins. Now you may not be destroyed, but absorbed. Not forbidden, but beautifully explained. Not expelled, but given a seat in the front row, where your gesture is transformed into a culturally acceptable image.

Matières Fécales is still resisting precisely this. They do not occupy a convenient external position in relation to the industry. Their gesture is more complex: they work with its tools, accept its rules of visibility and production, but do not allow it to fully swallow their own meaning. They work with the couture code, but return to it what is usually scrubbed out of it: shame, corporeality, class awkwardness, the experience of exclusion. They speak of pain, but do not ask for compassion. They make expensive things, but not things that are comfortable for status. They do not reject shine, but they do not apologize for the fact that shine gets dirty.

My own admiration for them is not innocent either. It would be too convenient to say: I am interested in their critique of luxury, their ethics, their struggle against the norm, their artistic wholeness. Yes, all of that. But I am interested in something else as well: the way they entered this industry on their own terms. I am interested in their revenge — not literal, not petty, not cruel, but aesthetic. The former object of someone else’s gaze becomes the one who organizes the gaze. The one who could have been called a creature now builds an entire system of creatures, and the fashion system comes to watch.

To read them as a story of personal liberation is to replace conflict with convenient morality. They are not interesting as an example of the idea that “everyone has the right to be themselves.” Yes, they do — but that is much too poor a conclusion for their work. Their gesture is far less humanistic and far less comfortable for the viewer. It shows that appearance is not a question of taste, but a field of power; that the body is either read for you, or you try to damage the alphabet; that wealth appropriates not only objects, but the parameters of reality: who is beautiful, who is human, who is worthy of visibility, who may be strange without becoming ridiculous. And if that answer now costs 3,500 euros, the problem is not only the price. The problem is that a feeling which was supposed to remain cheap, traumatic, and grateful for visibility has suddenly acquired form, a runway, a client, and the right to assign value.

Their radicality is measured not by the accessibility of the product, but by the autonomy of representation. The objects themselves remain inside the narrow economy of luxury, but their visual language already exists in general circulation: through shows, interviews, social media, celebrities, and their own bodies, which have long been more convincing than any advertising campaign. It is a strange, damaged kind of democracy: the object belongs to the few, the image to everyone. And yet it is precisely the price that prevents this story from becoming a beautiful tale of freedom. It returns the market, access, desire, and the awkward right of marginality to assign its own value back into the conversation. It does not remove the contradiction, justify it, or solve it — but it makes it honest. A 3,500-euro jacket remains inaccessible, elitist, built into the system of luxury. And at the same time, it refuses to be only a symbol, only a reference, only a free proof of authenticity.

That is why I define Matières Fécales as a relict entity. Not because they belong to the past, but because within them something has survived that contemporary culture organically cannot tolerate: wholeness, internal tension, and resistance to linear interpretation. They cannot be fully translated into the regime of instant consumption. This is a fundamental refusal to be immediately understandable, useful, or inclusive — a refusal to turn into safe content. They do not smooth their edges for the comfort of the industry, but neither do they imitate independence by pretending to exist outside its system. This is where their rare honesty lies: in functioning inside the system while fundamentally refusing to coincide with it.

So why does radical protest also seek to acquire a price tag?

Because it is tired of being a moral pauper. Because marginality is not obliged to go on proving its authenticity through the absence of money. Because hand labor has value. Because cheap clothing is too often cheap only for the buyer. Because an outsider can not only negate the system of luxury, but act within it while remaining faithful to themselves. Because the right to create an image remains incomplete if the right to assign it a price belongs to someone else.

But there is another, less comfortable answer. Protest wants to cost 3,500 euros because protest wants power too. Not only righteousness, visibility, sympathy, a place in the cultural program, but power — over the gaze, over the market, over desire, over what is considered valuable. As long as protest is poor, it can be loved as moral decoration. When it becomes expensive, it stops asking for our approval and starts issuing an invoice.

If the old bourgeois fantasy is allowed to be inaccessible, then the fecal fantasy has the right to its own markup. But Matières Fécales is not trying to turn dirt into gold — that would be much too old-fashioned an alchemy. They operate more precisely: they force conventional luxury to admit that its sterile shine has always been directly bound to displaced labor, corporeality, waste, and shame, to everything the industry so carefully leaves outside its shop windows.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the distance of the spectator. Today, that distance becomes a Russian question: can one look at Ukrainian pain and still remain a bystander?

In the title of Susan Sontag’s book there is one word that, after February 24, 2022, can no longer be read as before. Others. Regarding the Pain of Others. The word seems to promise distance: there is us, there is them, there is the photograph, the screen, the page, the newsfeed, the safe position of the spectator. But in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine, this division begins to lie. Ukrainian pain is not ours — it cannot be appropriated, cannot be turned into material for Russian moral maturation, cannot be made into a mirror in which we finally see our own tormented face. And yet to call it simply “other” is no longer possible either. It is produced by a state that speaks in our name, in the language of our power, out of our history, through our taxes, our silence, our fear, our habit of living beside violence and calling it politics.

The Russian spectator before Ukrainian suffering is not an ordinary spectator of someone else’s catastrophe. He is not inside this pain, as a Ukrainian is, but neither is he outside it, like a distant observer. His position is intermediate, and therefore morally uncomfortable. He looks at a destroyed house and knows that this house was destroyed not by a natural disaster, not by an impersonal “war,” not by history in general, but by a force that came out of the same political space in which he himself once learned not to ask unnecessary questions, grew accustomed to the television in the next room, to the faces of officials, to the words “stability,” “greatness,” “our interests,” “their provocation.” That is why compassion here does not carry him beyond what is happening. It only poses the question: what exactly connects his calm to someone else’s pain?

It is important to say this at once: “Russian” in this text is not blood, not an ethnographic belonging, not a mystical guilt by fact of birth. It is a place of looking. An address. A position on the map. The Russian spectator may be someone who lives in Russia, someone who has left it, someone who speaks Russian and feels how this language has been seized by orders, justifications, mockery, the bureaucracy of death. This is not necessarily a person who wanted the war. But it is a person forced to admit that the war did not come to Ukraine out of nowhere. It came from a world where it had been possible, for too long, not to look.

Sontag begins her discussion with the question of photographs of war, of what images of other people’s bodies, destroyed houses, burned-out cities do to us. In her book, photographs do not simply show suffering. They test the spectator. They test who he is, where he stands, what he wants to see and what he desperately does not want to know. Virginia Woolf, whom Sontag addresses, hoped that photographs of war should produce the same horror in everyone. Here are bodies, here are ruins, here is what war does. How could one argue? How could one fail to understand?

Sontag answers more complicatedly. A photograph is not pure evidence. It always waits for a caption. It waits for someone to say: these are ours or theirs; this is a crime or a necessity; these are victims or “losses”; this is a house or an “object”; this is a child or a “staged scene.” War tears and destroys, but then language arrives and completes the work. It explains, erases, recaptions. It makes death fit for use.

Sontag writes about photographs of war, but the further one reads, the clearer it becomes: she is interested not so much in photography as in the distance between pain and the one who sees it. The photograph is only one form of that distance. Today, in its place, there may be a video from a Telegram channel, a story, a short clip, an eyewitness message, a surveillance-camera frame, a satellite map, a photograph of a kitchen without a wall. The device is not what matters. What matters is the position of the spectator. Who is looking? From where? What does this distance allow him?

A Ukrainian looks at a destroyed house differently, because it may be his house, his city, his street, his relatives, his future. For him, the image is not entirely an image. It is not separated from life by a reliable frame. It is not simply “news.” It is a possible version of his own fate. Even if the house is in another city, even if the dead are strangers, the structure of the threat is shared. The strike may change address. The siren may sound here. The message may arrive at night. A photograph of someone else’s apartment without a wall is not “someone else’s” in the safe sense of the word: it says not only “this happened,” but also “this could happen to you.”

A European looks differently. For him this is someone else’s war, but too close to remain an abstract piece of news. It disturbs the border of his own peace, returns a history that he wanted to think of as museum-bound, raises questions about the price of freedom, about fear of Russia, about comfort built on postponed decisions. A European can sympathize, help, grow tired, argue about aid, vote for politicians who either understand the danger or trade in fatigue. But his distance is the distance of an external witness. He looks at a crime committed by another state against another country.

The Russian spectator looks from the place from which the violence came. This does not automatically make him a soldier, executioner, informer, artilleryman. But it does not allow him to occupy the innocent position of a human being in general. His gaze is already historically stained. He looks not simply at someone else’s misfortune, but at a misfortune his state produces as a political fact, as a military operation, as a television plot, as an object of pride, as a reason for silence. He may be against it. He may be horrified. He may cry over photographs of Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Dnipro. But tears do not change the direction of a missile. And, more painfully still, they do not cancel the question of why he is on this side of the screen.

Not looking is also a privilege. Closing the tab, turning off the phone, leaving a Telegram channel, saying “I can’t take this anymore” — all these are gestures of a person to whom war comes in the form of information. A notification can be switched off. A channel can be muted. The newsfeed can be replaced by music, a series, a household task, illness, work, depression, caring for a child, anything at all. This is not always cynicism; sometimes it really is the only way not to fall apart. A person is not made for continuous horror. Shock has a limit. Sontag writes about this very soberly: shock evaporates, horror becomes habitual, people have defenses against unpleasant information.

But in the Russian case, this defense ceases to be merely psychological. It becomes political. Because a person to whom war comes as a notification has the freedom not to look, while a person to whom war comes as a missile has no such freedom. You cannot mute an explosion. You cannot leave a city if the city is surrounded. You cannot scroll past the death of someone close. The spectator’s fatigue changes nothing in the position of the one who has found himself inside the event.

Here the conversation about compassion becomes less comfortable. The Russian spectator often wants his horror to count as an action. He wants his disgust at the war already to separate him from the state, the army, the television, the neighbors, from those who write “they deserved it,” from those who rejoice at the strikes, from those who remain silent not out of fear but out of consent. And there is human truth in this desire. No one wants to be fused with a crime he did not commit with his own hands. No one wants his inner “no” to turn out to be nothing. But Sontag is dangerous precisely because she does not allow feeling to be exchanged so easily for innocence.

She writes about compassion as a feeling that can announce our innocence and our powerlessness. We sympathize — which means, supposedly, that we are not involved in what causes suffering. We are horrified — which means we are not on the side of evil. We cry — which means we are still human. But compassion can become the last form of self-justification. Especially where a person does not want to think about the connection between his own peace and someone else’s pain.

“It hurts me to look” is not a lie. But it is not yet a position. “I am against the war” matters. But it is not enough if what begins after that phrase is the right not to think any further. “There is nothing I can do” is sometimes true. But often it is a phrase in which powerlessness appoints itself eternal in advance.

The problem is not that the Russian spectator is obliged to live in a state of permanent hysteria. Permanent hysteria quickly becomes another form of emptiness. The problem is that he may confuse the impossibility of endless shock with the right to a moral exit. First horror. Then adaptation. Then “I don’t read the news.” Then “life goes on.” Then “we are all hostages.” Then “well, what can I do?” Then “let’s not talk about politics.” Then “how much longer about Ukraine?” The state does not need everyone to be enthusiastic about the war. It is enough for the war to become a background to which people have grown accustomed.

The fatigue of the aggressor is one of the most vile forms of historical comfort. Not because a person has no right to be tired. He does. Everyone gets tired. Horror destroys the one who looks at it too. But when fatigue becomes the right not to know, not to think, not to connect oneself with what is happening, it begins to work for violence. It turns into a social function. The war continues because some conduct it, others justify it, still others are afraid, a fourth group is tired, a fifth is busy, a sixth says: “it’s not so simple.” And all this variety does not change the common result: the missile flies.

Sontag writes a great deal about captions. An image of a dead child can be used by different sides: “change the caption and use their deaths.” This thought, it seems, describes today not only propaganda, but Russian state speech itself. Russia does not simply destroy Ukrainian cities. It comes after the explosion and changes the sign on the ruin. A destroyed house becomes a “military object.” A killed civilian becomes a “victim of Ukrainian air defense.” An occupied city becomes a “liberated territory.” Deportation becomes “evacuation.” War becomes a “special military operation.” Aggression becomes “self-defense.” Ukrainian resistance becomes “Nazism.”

This is not secondary violence. It is part of the violence. Because death whose caption has been changed ceases to accuse the killer. A wound given a false name becomes fit for consumption. A corpse turns into an argument. A destroyed house — into proof of someone else’s guilt. Tears — into material for the evening broadcast. Propaganda does not necessarily hide suffering. Sometimes it shows it, but shifts the arrows. It says: look how terrible this is — and immediately slips in the wrong address of the criminal.

That is why the Russian spectator faces a task more difficult than simply “looking.” He must refuse the imposed caption. He must not accept “it’s complicated” as final wisdom. He must not hide behind “we don’t know the whole truth.” He must not repeat “but who started it?” as though history cancels responsibility for today’s shot. He must not dissolve aggression in the formula “ordinary people suffer on both sides,” where symmetry becomes a way of hiding the direction of violence. Words must be given back their subject, verb, and object. Russia attacked. The Russian army is destroying Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian civilians are dying from Russian aggression. People had names, homes, plans, mornings, work, love, irritations, habits, unfinished conversations. They must not be left in the language of “losses.”

War de-individualizes a person physically. Sontag observes something terrible: a disfigured body can lose the signs of individuality and even of belonging to the human species. This is not a metaphor but the limit of horror. But Russian violence de-individualizes twice. First it destroys the body, the home, the biography, the city. Then it destroys meaning. People are called “targets,” “objects,” “manpower,” “the local population,” “nationalists,” “those affected by a blast.” War deprives the killed person of a face. Propaganda deprives him of a name. The newsfeed deprives him of duration. The spectator, tired of horror, deprives him of the last thing — attention.

And that is why it is especially dangerous for a Russian author to write about Ukrainian pain. One can describe ruins too beautifully. One can turn destroyed Mariupol into scenery for one’s own conscience. One can turn Bucha into an occasion to speak about Russian guilt, Russian trauma, Russian exile, Russian powerlessness, Russian shame. One can place the Russian back at the center again — no longer as an imperial victor, but as a suffering witness, nobly crushed by his own revelation. This would be another form of appropriation.

Ukrainian pain was not given to us for our moral maturation. It is not educational material for the Russian conscience. It is not material for confession, not a backdrop to a penitential monologue. It is not a mirror in which we finally saw Russia. It is first of all the pain of concrete people to whom Russia has done evil. And if a Russian text about the war has any right to exist at all, it is only on the condition that it does not replace Ukrainian suffering with the Russian experience of that suffering. The Russian spectator may speak about his gaze, but he must remember: his inner crisis is not the main event. This is a difficult limitation, because it is precisely the crisis that makes one write. But perhaps honesty begins with the refusal of beautiful self-exposure. With the recognition that shame is not an action, pain is not compensation, horror is not help. They can be a beginning. But if they become the ending, they serve the same spectator who wants to leave the hall cleansed.

In Russia, people are generally fond of cleansing themselves through suffering. There is an old cultural habit in this: suffering as depth, suffering as the right to a special soul, suffering as proof of human authenticity. But the Ukrainian war requires not depth, but precision. Not “the tragedy of brotherly peoples,” not “a shared misfortune,” not “a historical rupture,” but something simple, almost unbearable: there is an aggressor and there is a country that was attacked. There is a state that destroys, and there are people being destroyed. Too great a love of tragic formulas often turns out to be a way of not uttering the simple sentence.

Russian memory of war should have taught this. But it taught something else. Sontag writes that collective memory is a dubious notion, and here I am fully in solidarity with her, while a collective lesson does exist. In Russia, this lesson was replaced by a cult. “Never again” turned into “we can do it again.” Memory of the victims — into the right to speak in the name of the victims. Horror before war — into a parade. Victory over fascism — into armor against any future guilt. A people accustomed to remembering itself as a liberator proved unable to recognize itself as an aggressor. Any suffering caused by us had to be immediately recaptioned. We could not be killers, because we were used to considering ourselves heirs of the victors. We could not be an empire, because we called our empire security. We could not attack, because in our language we are always only responding.

Thus memory became not an obstacle to war, but its warehouse. From it they took words, faces, songs, grandfathers, films, a banner, school lessons, the intonation of sacred struggle. The Ukrainian present was crushed by the Russian past, which refused to be past. And the Russian spectator, raised inside this memory, often looks at Ukrainian suffering through a layer of justifications prepared in advance. He may even be against the war, but somewhere deep in his language there continue to live formulas that make Ukraine not fully separate, Ukrainian pain not fully real, Russian responsibility not fully one’s own.

In this sense, the war has not passed the Russian spectator by. It simply has not always struck him. Between “not being killed” and “being uninvolved” lies an enormous moral distance, which Russian society tries to pass off as innocence. Yes, many are afraid. Yes, many decided nothing. Yes, in Russia there are repressions, prisons, threats, denunciations, ruined lives, emigration, the breakup of families, fear of return, fear of speech. All this is true. But this truth must not become a curtain behind which Ukraine disappears. Russian suffering from the Russian dictatorship exists. But Ukrainian suffering from Russian aggression is not its subdivision.

Perhaps this is where the thinnest boundary lies. The Russian spectator must give up two convenient roles at once. The role of the innocent humanist who simply mourns the horrors of war. And the role of the chief victim of his own guilt, which turns the conversation about Ukraine into a conversation about his unbearable shame. The first role is too clean. The second is too dramatic. Both once again save the spectator from the map on which “our privileges and their suffering” are located side by side.

What remains? Not purification. Not an eternal scream. Not the demand that one feel equally intensely every day. A person cannot withstand such a regime, and the suffering of another does not become more respected because we destroy ourselves before the screen. What remains is a drier, less beautiful thing: the obligation not to lie about the connection. Not to let the caption replace death. Not to confuse fatigue with the right to exit. Not to use compassion as proof of innocence. Not to make Russian metaphysics out of Ukrainian pain. Not to turn away as though the absence of a gaze cancels what is happening.

Watching won’t wash you clean. This, perhaps, is the main lesson of Sontag for the Russian spectator. One can look not for cleansing, not for moral superiority, not in order to say: “I saw it, therefore I understood.” One must look in order not to let oneself return to innocence. To hold onto the connection one wants to renounce. To remember that distance does not always mean noninvolvement. To remove the false caption from someone else’s death again and again. Ukrainian suffering remains Ukrainian. It cannot be appropriated. Russian responsibility remains Russian. It cannot be washed away with compassion. Between them lies a map one so does not want to read: a map of missile trajectories, linguistic habits, historical myths, state crimes, private fears, comfortable fatigue, belated horror. And on this map the Russian spectator is not off to the side. He is located where looking is already insufficient, but not looking means continuing the old work of blindness.

In Return to Reims, Eribon writes about an adulthood that does not arrive with success. One can acquire language, status, and a name, and still continue assembling oneself out of shame, rupture, and other people’s expectations.

Late youth begins not where a person takes too long to grow up, but where adult life itself is arranged as an endless transit. Formally, everything has already happened: departure, education, work, another language, another circle of people, another system of coordinates. The biography moves forward, sometimes it even looks successful. But inside this movement there remains a strange emptiness: as if the person is not entering life, but constantly proving their right to be in it.

In Return to Reims, Didier Eribon writes precisely about this non-coincidence. His book cannot be reduced either to a story of class shame, or to a history of homosexual liberation, or to a sociology of the family. All of that is there, but something else matters more: Eribon shows that social ascent does not necessarily produce adulthood. One can leave, acquire a language, become an intellectual, a public figure, a person with a name, and still remain suspended between what one came from and what one never fully entered. Late youth, in this sense, is not a psychological delay and not a private melancholy. It is the political condition of a person whose trajectory was built on rupture. In order to move forward, he had to renounce one world without receiving a natural right to another. He had to learn to speak, but not rid himself of silence; to work through shame, but not erase its traces; to become himself not through wholeness, but through the constant reassembly of the self.

For Eribon, adulthood is built at the intersection of two trajectories. The first is to become a homosexual man not only in the secrecy of desire, but in the form of life. The second is to become an intellectual — that is, to exit the social destiny that had, almost from birth, already assigned to him a speech, a body, a future profession, a horizon of the possible. The two lines are closely connected, but they move differently. The first, as he himself writes, is realized relatively quickly. The second gets stuck, breaks, circles around itself, finds a way out not through the direct route of academic legitimation, but through detours, accidents, connections, journalism, a subcultural milieu, late recognition. What matters more, however, is this: neither of these lines ends in wholeness. Eribon leaves for Paris, begins to live as a gay man, enters intellectual circles, writes books, receives public recognition, becomes a professor. But all these markers of a successful biography do not produce what the bourgeois imagination usually calls adulthood: a calm coincidence with oneself, a confident right to one’s place, the feeling that life has finally taken form. Success does not gather him into a whole; it only makes visible the price for which that wholeness had been promised.

In this sense, Return to Reims undermines the familiar plot of social ascent. This is not the story of a self-made man who, thanks to work and talent, overcomes his milieu and finally becomes himself. Eribon shows something more unpleasant: one can overcome social distance without overcoming it inside oneself. A new life built on the rejection of the old one never becomes entirely innocent. External movement forward does not abolish the inner rupture. It only makes it less obvious, but no less active.

Adulthood is usually imagined as the end of division. A person supposedly enters their own life one day, takes their place in it, stops proving their right to be who they have become. Adulthood promises form: composure, legitimacy, inner coincidence. For Eribon, this promise is not fulfilled. The rupture turned out not to be an episode in his biography, but its early structure: on the one hand, the renunciation of social origin; on the other, the appropriation of a sexual identity that the world had already managed to turn into an object of shame. Such a subjectivity cannot simply “mature.” From the very beginning, it is formed as conflict. Sexuality, for him, is not a private truth of desire that society then accidentally or cruelly stigmatizes. It is arranged differently. What comes first is not desire, but the language of humiliation. First comes the word, the mockery, the threat, the risk of public exposure. Insult appears before self-understanding. The world already knows how to humiliate you before you yourself understand what that humiliation refers to.

That is why his famous formulation — that he was produced by insult, that he is a “son of shame” — is not a gesture of self-pity, but an indication of how social language produces a person. Insult does not merely cause pain: it creates in advance the place into which the subject is forced to enter, and turns the future into the expectation of threat. It announces: humiliation will be waiting for you ahead, even if you do not yet know that it is already addressed to you. His “I” emerges not in the free unfolding of desire, but in the field of someone else’s knowledge, someone else’s laughter, someone else’s suspicion.

What arises, then, is not simply an identity, but a way of living under the constant pressure of another’s gaze. Vigilance becomes a habit. Discord with oneself ceases to be a thought and becomes a bodily habit. A person lives under a gaze that has already managed to define him, and for that reason even solitude ceases to be fully private: within it there is another’s norm, another’s suspicion, another’s language. Eribon does not deny the possibility of turning “shame into pride.” But his thought is more precise and less consoling. To appropriate an insult does not mean to destroy its history. To reverse the sign does not mean to erase the wound. Pride does not cancel shame; it works with its material. It is built not instead of shame, but out of it. That is why liberation, for Eribon, is never absolute. There is no clean exit from the past, no point at which the subject finally becomes unharmed. There is only work with what has already been inscribed into the body, speech, memory, reactions. We do not create ourselves anew. We merely redistribute the meaning of what has already been done to us.

But sexual shame is only one side of his book. The other, recognized later and perhaps more difficult, is class shame. Eribon already knew how to write about subordination, humiliation, insult, and subjectivation. He had a language for homosexual shame. But his own working-class origin long remained a zone of muteness. This is not an accidental omission. By that point, sexuality already had a political vocabulary: recognition, coming out, pride, minoritarian subjectivity, the right to speak in the first person. Class did not offer such a language. Or, more precisely, it offered another language — collective, party-political, sociological — but not one in which it would be possible to say without remainder: I was ashamed of my family, my address, my father’s profession, my mother’s speech, the world I came from. It is here that the true form of his division becomes visible. Paris was not only liberation. It was also shelter. The move allowed him to become visible as a homosexual man and, at the same time, invisible as someone from the working class. One closet opened; another closed.

The class closet in Eribon is not just a figure of speech, but a daily practice of self-control. It is not simply a matter of not speaking about one’s origins. It is watching one’s voice, intonation, gesture, word choice, the way one sits at the table, the way one pronounces names, the way one reacts to jokes, the way one hides family facts that, in another circle, immediately become social evidence. Class reveals itself not through confession, but through detail. That is why it has to be controlled not occasionally, but constantly. In this way, class origin becomes a second secret. Not something forbidden by law or morality, but something that can at any moment show: you are here not by right of inheritance, but by effort. To be exposed means to become not only gay, but an impostor: a person who has learned the language, but has not inherited the right to speak it.

In this sense, late youth in Eribon begins not before the escape, but after it. Escape does not end youth; it transfers it into the new life. The person no longer belongs to the former world, but the new world accepts him only conditionally, as someone who must constantly confirm his right to be inside it. He is no longer where he came from, but neither is he here in the calm, inherited manner in which those who are “from here” exist here. He has mastered the language, but he has not acquired the right to carelessness. He has learned to read, write, interpret, argue, recognize names, distinguish styles, but he has not rid himself of the feeling of illegitimate presence. To be an outsider does not mean to be ignorant. Sometimes it is precisely the one who has learned too much, because from the very beginning he knew: the smallest mistake would give him away.

School and university, in Eribon, turn out to be not so much places of knowledge as mechanisms of selection and translation into another social language. They offer a chance, but they demand payment. For a working-class child, studying means not only mastering a curriculum; it means reworking oneself. One has to change one’s voice, gesture, speed of reaction, relation to time, to the body, to authority, to culture. One has to learn not to laugh where one would have laughed before, not to speak the way people speak at home, not to reveal the old awkwardness before what others received as a natural environment. Thus adulthood ceases to be a biological plot. It is distributed by institutions. Family, school, cultural capital, knowledge of routes, confidence in one’s own right to continue further — all of this determines in advance whether adult life will be experienced as a natural entrance or as a series of tests. For Eribon, education does not end adolescent instability; it transfers it into adult life.

It is here that a notion emerges which I have already called the privilege of reversibility: the right to experience instability, crisis, or marginality as a temporary episode rather than as the final arrangement of life. In My Own Private Idaho, this asymmetry is almost literally visible: for one character, the road remains a prolonged experiment from which one can return to an adulthood prepared in advance; for the other, it becomes not a road, but a place in which one has to live. In Eribon, the same logic is transferred from the space of the road into the space of class, education, and memory. His exit from the old world was not protected by the possibility of a return route. He could not simply try on another life and return unharmed. Every step forward required renunciation, and precisely for that reason adulthood did not become for him a natural entry into life, but turned into a long labor with the consequences of his own exit.

What I recognize in Eribon is not a biography, but a structure of experience. The moment when external movement ceases to coincide with inner adulthood is, for me, connected to the defense of my doctoral dissertation. From the outside, it was supposed to look like completion: a stage passed, a status obtained, a transition accomplished, entry into another world confirmed by a document. But inside, no final composure appeared. There was no feeling that now I had the right to be where I had arrived. Rather, the opposite: legitimation itself made the absence of inner arrival more visible. In this sense, the new status turned out not to be a sign of adulthood, but a sign of its deferral. It confirmed movement, but did not bring peace. It showed that social achievement and adult wholeness do not coincide. This is what makes Eribon so close. Not a similarity of circumstances, but a similarity of fracture. Class splitting, shame, escape, the attempt to assemble oneself through intellect, the impossibility of returning — all of this, for him, is not a set of themes for analysis, but the very fabric of life. In order to move forward, it was necessary to become another person. Not to develop, not to unfold, not to “find oneself,” but precisely to remake oneself. Such remaking can become a habit, even a second nature, but it does not become innocent. It fuses with life, leaving the seams visible.

The family appears in Eribon precisely at this point. The return to Reims has nothing to do with a soft scene of returning to one’s roots. It is not the search for a lost home, but a confrontation with the fact that home has long ceased to be a place, yet has not ceased to be a force. For years he takes no interest in his family, answers his mother evasively, promises to visit and does not come, does not want to know how they live. This lack of curiosity about “his own” is almost cruel. But it is precisely this cruelty that makes the book honest. Eribon does not try to appear nobler than he was. He admits: the rupture happened not only to him, but also by his own will. His brother became for him a reminder of the fate from which he wanted to save himself. Distance from the family was not a side effect of success, but part of success itself. He chose himself, and the book begins where that choice ceases to be a clean justification.

At the center of the book, therefore, there is not one escape, but two: from a homophobic world and from the working class. One required recognizing himself; the other required renouncing the fate assigned to him. It is from this contradiction that his intellectual life grows. To be an intellectual, for Eribon, meant not simply to love books, but not to resemble his family. His intellectuality was built partly through the negation of the cultural forms of his own origin. This is a very unpleasant truth, and that is why it matters so much. It contains not only liberation, but also snobbery, shame, and social mimicry. Later he understands this and tries to play it back: to recognize that the small social promotions that seemed ridiculous to him were, for his parents, almost a question of dignity; that love for “high” culture is not neutral, but always tied to the desire to be different; that an intellectual biography, too, can be built on repression.

Here I stop reading Eribon from the outside. Until the age of eighteen, I have no gratitude toward the past, only the desire to distance myself from it. That distancing was also bound up with shame, silence, the impossibility of being myself, with the social point that defined me more strongly than I would like to admit. Later, between twenty and thirty, a more complex feeling appears: not gratitude in the pure sense, but the ability to see that this very past is what formed me. And yet no real return takes place. As with Eribon, what matters here is not reconciliation with the past, but the understanding that it continues to work inside you. From this perspective, the notion of late youth as a political condition becomes especially precise. For me, it is above all the feeling of deferred adulthood, the impossibility of fully belonging to any world, a social leap that did not bring inner peace, and the constant reassembly of the self. It is no accident that, in Eribon, the decisive moment is connected not to final success, but to the realization that even after recognition, travels, lectures, books, international prizes, and a university position, he has to rethink his own history all over again. And he does this only after the political and theoretical categories he had previously used begin to seem insufficient.

It is here that the book ceases to be only an autobiography. It does not merely describe a personal drama. It asks a question about the political languages through which a subject becomes able to remember himself at all. Eribon notes that collective movements give us categories for self-understanding. When sexuality, minoritarian subjectivity, shame, insult, and the process of becoming a subject move onto the stage, he can finally speak about his homosexual experience. But class remains a blind spot. This means that the problem is not only personal avoidance. The problem is that different forms of oppression are historically supplied with different languages of visibility. And for this reason adulthood cannot be whole not only at the individual level, but also at the political one: we are constantly taught to think ourselves fragmentarily.

From here follows the book’s main conclusion, important for a broader understanding of unfinished adulthood. Late youth becomes a political condition precisely because it does not fit into a single line: neither class, nor sexuality, nor shame, nor the plot of social ascent. The subject is formed at their intersection. And for that reason, the subject cannot be whole where the political map itself forces him to choose one language at the cost of silence about another.

In this sense, Return to Reims is not a book about return in the literal sense. One cannot return. It is impossible to re-enter the former world as one’s own. It is impossible to restore a wholeness that, perhaps, never existed in the first place. But one can measure the distance. One can understand what it consists of. One can stop mistaking one’s inner split for a personal failure and see in it the trace of a social history. That is why this book resonates with me so strongly. It shows that a person can go very far, become public, recognized, intellectually formed, and still remain in an unfinished conversation with himself. Not because he has not grown enough. But because the world he came from and the world he entered have never composed themselves inside him into a single, non-contradictory figure. Late youth is precisely this life after the exit has already taken place, when adulthood still does not feel like home. When there was movement, but no arrival. When you have already become someone else, but still carry inside you what you were leaving behind. When you have managed to enter history, language, the city, the profession, but have not managed to feel that this life is yours.

And perhaps this is precisely where his greatest accuracy lies: he allows us to stop romanticizing wholeness. He allows us to see that maturity sometimes consists not in agreement with oneself, but in the capacity to endure one’s own inner contradictoriness. Not in final coincidence with oneself, but in the precise knowledge that one is assembled from conflicting trajectories. Not in the illusion of liberation from zero, but in the difficult, never-ending work with what the social world has already managed to make of you.

Russia is once again learning to see itself through someone else’s eyes — through the eyes of Merezhkovsky’s Vasyuta: “some milk, maybe… but I don’t feel like it”. And that “I don’t feel like it” is enough to describe today’s reaction and the war.

To feel the pulse of today’s Russia, one paradoxically has to begin with a text more than a century old: Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s essay “The Little Head Droops” (Golovka Visnet). Written over a hundred years ago, it suddenly feels frighteningly current: the same spiritual convulsions, the same cultural complexes, the same endless attempt to understand “what is wrong with us.” None of that “eternity” Russian thought so loved to speak about — only a jammed mechanism, turning again and again in the same circle.

Russia, for Merezhkovsky, is Vasyuta: a child with a heavy gaze, saying, “some milk for me, mama — but I don’t feel like it…” (molochka by ty mne, mamka, — da ne khottsa…). There is not a drop of sweetness in that “I don’t feel like it,” only exhaustion and a strange, almost physical disgust with one’s own life. The helplessness and estrangement he writes about can be transferred all too easily onto the present day: a country stuck in its own past, unable either to renounce it or to acknowledge it honestly. History weighs down not as a “great tradition,” but as a chronic illness, one that slowly yet stubbornly destroys the organism.

Merezhkovsky, as a man of the fin de siècle, tries to grasp the mechanism of this Russian reaction to the world and, in essence, admits: it does not obey the usual laws. Not mechanics, but some strange, twitching metaphysics. Today this is felt even more sharply: Russia seems to be moving somewhere, for some reason, but this movement increasingly resembles not a path, but a prolonged fall. Every attempt to “settle one problem” turns into another new collapse, even more painful and dirtier than the last. The paradox is that the country constantly pretends to be emerging from crisis, while in fact it is merely stepping carefully into its next iteration.

What he called a “standing rebellion” now also sounds almost like documentary prose. This is neither rebellion nor obedience, but a viscous, learned helplessness: when protest has not even been suppressed, but seems to have been cancelled in advance. People live inside dictatorship and repression, but most often not as heroes, rather as patients: with dulled sensitivity, with the feeling that “it has always been this way and, most likely, will continue.” The image of the vanka-vstanka — the roly-poly toy that always rights itself — is another precise metaphor: Russia may suddenly jerk, overturn, straighten up, and then, with the same stubbornness, return to its original authoritarian position. Reforms, revolutions, “thaws” turn out to be brief episodes between long, drawn-out returns to the familiar vertical.

Especially unpleasantly recognizable is Merezhkovsky’s thought about the “depth of Russian reaction,” which almost automatically becomes religious. Today’s state eagerly returns religion to the role of lightning rod and justification. Church language, icons, processions with crosses — all of this is built into the state scenography, meant to sanctify not only “traditional values,” but also very concrete political decisions, including the war in Ukraine. As a hundred years ago, faith becomes an instrument of power, and instead of religious experience, what remains is decoration, convenient for television images and ceremonial speeches.

In this sense, “The Little Head Droops” ceases to be merely a historical document of the Silver Age. It is a mirror we are forced to hold up to the face again and again, each time discovering the same angle. History does not “teach”; at best, it repeats itself with minor stylistic changes. Russia’s present and future turn out to be tightly tied to its past, like to the same old clothes, long unchanged but stubbornly still worn. And the question Merezhkovsky asked of his own time sounds almost unchanged today: do we really not understand what we need, or are we simply afraid to admit to ourselves that we do not want to understand? Because otherwise, we would finally have to lift that “drooping little head” and look history straight in the eye.

I now see My Own Private Idaho not as a film about beautiful rootlessness, but as a film about the difference between those who have an “afterwards” and those who don’t.

The great treachery of cinema is its ability to adapt itself to our deficits and then sell them back to us as freedom. I remember how, at twenty, I greedily watched road movies about drifting heroes, and against that backdrop my own poverty began to look almost like a political gesture. You look at the screen and see photogenic rootlessness, existential slack, young bodies that seem to refuse reality on principle, as though the world were simply not good enough for them. But with time you begin to notice that perhaps there was no freedom there at all. The road no longer promises escape; it increasingly resembles a condition from which one cannot get out. And what once appeared to be a pose, or an aesthetic gesture, turns out on closer inspection not to be a gesture at all, but ordinary life without support and without any clear “afterwards.”

Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho has been read for far too long, and far too successfully, as a film about beautiful rootlessness for us not to finally notice the banal class segregation behind this queer pastoral. To treat it as a postcard collection of Gregg Araki-style fragility and nineties melancholy is to sign one’s own certificate of myopia. Van Sant, of course, gives us all the necessary attributes: night highways, somnambulant trips, and the general atmosphere of “breathable” grunge, where even dirt under the fingernails looks like an element of style. But if you remove the filters, what remains is something far less sentimental: the unequal distribution of the future. This entire road romance is, in fact, about the fact that youth is not a universal condition, but a derivative of social capital. Adulthood is promised to the characters on different terms, and that is the central tragedy.

Mike and Scott may sleep in piles, share the same clients, and prop up the walls of Portland backstreets with equal visual effect, but they exist in parallel social universes. Keanu Reeves’ Scott is doing what sociology would call downshifting, or, more bluntly, social tourism. His hatred of his high-ranking father is not an existential rebellion, but a luxury only an heir can afford. It is rebellion with an open return date. While Mike falls into narcoleptic sleep, trying to find some trace, any trace, of his mother, Scott is openly rehearsing his future entrance into society. His present marginality is merely an overextended performance, an elegant pause before he puts on an expensive suit and occupies his allotted place in the hierarchy. For him, the road is a choice that can one day be cancelled; for Mike, it is the absence of any other route.

In this sense, Scott is not a rebel, but the holder of a rare privilege: the right to reversibility. He can afford to inhabit the bottom as a temporary set, knowing that his place in the social hierarchy has not been annulled, only put on pause. For him, this is not an existential collapse, but an overlong gap year in dubious company. All his rage directed at his father or at Bob is not a break with class, but a typical intra-estate squabble. Scott is simply renting out his life short-term to the marginalised, knowing the exact date of checkout. Mike, however, is built according to entirely different specifications. The issue is not simply the absence of inheritance, or of a resonant surname that can be put on when necessary like a fresh shirt. He has no right to a life that would arrange itself into a comprehensible sequence rather than a series of collapses.

His narcolepsy is usually interpreted as an elegant authorial touch, securing River Phoenix’s Mike the status of the generation’s “great fragile face.” In reality, it is a social sentence. While Scott constructs his strategy of return, Mike literally falls out of reality. He loses not only time, but the very possibility of possessing a biography. Growing up, in the normative sense, is a linear process: you act, and you bear responsibility for your actions. But Mike has no such line. He wakes up somewhere other than where he fell asleep and finds himself in a world that has disposed of him in his absence. This is not poetic vulnerability, but the complete liquidation of subjecthood. Where Scott has conscious performance, Mike has the physiological inability simply to be present in his own life, let alone govern it.

I always know where I am by the way the road looks… I just know that I’ve been stuck here before.

That is exactly why the road in Idaho is not about horizons and not about Kerouac. It does not lead anywhere at all; it is, in essence, a geographical tautology. When Mike says he recognises a place by the pattern of cracks in the asphalt, like a human face, he is not describing the romance of wandering, but banal repetition. This is not a path toward the self, but a kind of viscous sinking. The horizon here does not open the future; it merely confirms the cancellation of arrival. You are still moving, but it is movement in a void, stripped of all teleology. At this point, the film stops being “a film about teenagers” and becomes a rather harsh social diagnosis. Late youth, in this case, is not an extended search for meaning and not prolonged adolescence, but a habitat — a kind of social limbo.

This is Van Sant’s central political message. Not a moral one, and certainly not a psychological one. In his optics, growing up is not a universal biological process of “maturation” that supposedly happens to everyone. It is a question of insurance, capital, and the right to make mistakes. Scott can afford the luxury of postponing adulthood because it is guaranteed to him by birthright and awaits him at the end like a clean shirt. Mike, on the other hand, has no possibility of postponing anything; his future simply has not been included in the budget.

Hence the difference in their affect — or, if you like, in the very architecture of their intimacy. The most uncomfortable line in the film is not a cry of despair, but Mike’s quiet, almost resigned confession:

I love you, and you don’t pay me.

In that short circuit, the entire essence of the class rupture is compressed. Prostitution here does not function as moral downfall, but as the only form of contract Mike understands, the only one that guarantees at least some degree of safety. Love outside market relations, for him, is a catastrophe: a step into open space without a suit. As long as desire is monetised, it is governed by rules and distance. The moment it ceases to be a commodity, Mike finds himself in a zone of total defencelessness. He does not love “unrequitedly”; he loves outside the system of guarantees. He has not a single social trump card that could justify the risk.

Scott, meanwhile, is not some cartoon villain exploiting his friend for his own benefit. Everything is much more prosaic, and therefore much more hopeless. He can afford tenderness, an attentive gaze, even a brief bodily surrender, but for him this is no more than an optional gesture, a non-binding act of charity. In this asymmetry, Scott is protected by his origins: he enters intimacy without risking his own integrity, while Mike stakes everything he already does not have. Where one merely tests his boundaries, the other finally falls apart, because beyond this attachment he has no other point of support.

This is where the film’s central injustice is exposed: in Van Sant’s world, even affect is distributed along class lines. This is not to say that capital directly dictates whom we desire, but rather that social insurance determines the depth of your personal catastrophe in the event of refusal. For Scott, unrequitedness is an unfortunate plot twist, an occasion for a melancholy shot, after which he will inevitably return to his “self,” safely reserved by inheritance and status. For Mike, refusal is a form of final loss of ground. He simply does not have that “self” to which one might retreat and reassemble oneself. His personality is entirely invested in another person, and when that asset burns out, Mike becomes an empty place.

In Idaho, everything we are used to considering intimate and deeply subcutaneous turns out, on inspection, to be sanctioned from outside. Even Mike’s odyssey in search of his mother is not an Oedipal complex and not a tearful melodrama, but a hopeless attempt to legitimise his own existence. He is not looking for warmth, but for elementary narrative continuity — something that would confirm that his life is not a series of random glitches and memory blackouts, but an intelligible biography with a beginning, a logic, and at least some kind of postal address. But the further he moves along this imaginary map, the more obvious it becomes that he has been denied the right to continuity: the mother slips away, the gestalt does not close, addresses lead into dead ends, memory fails to assemble the past into a whole, and it remains a set of fragments. In the end, the world does not return his subjecthood to him; it merely states the fact: for people like him, there is neither home nor history — only the endless reproduction of the same emptiness.

In respectable society, adulthood is, among other things, the obligation to have a coherent story about who you are, where you came from, and why your life looks the way it does rather than some other way. Mike does not even possess this subsistence minimum. He exists not as a subject endowed with a history, but as a body chaotically moved between other people’s cars, paid sex, narcoleptic attacks, and ghostly silhouettes of the mother. His life does not assemble itself into a plot; it falls apart into physiological acts, stripped of all teleology.

The ending, in this sense, is absolutely merciless, though logical to the point of nausea. Scott triumphantly returns to the bosom of the system to which he always belonged. All those suits, hereditary obligations, and prospects of a political career are not evidence of his “inner transformation,” but an act of reunion with his own caste. It turns out that, for Van Sant, “growing up” does not mean acquiring some mythical wholeness; it means occupying, on time, the chair that had already been reserved for you. For Scott, adulthood is the restoration of class continuity. For Mike, no continuity is provided in principle.

My Own Private Idaho tells us something much less digestible than the usual mantras about “cruel and beautiful” youth: youth as a space for experimentation is, in essence, a bourgeois privilege available only to those holding a return ticket. For some, this trip with drugs and street work is merely an overlong weekend, from which one can evacuate at any moment into the family mansion, later adjusting one’s tie and remembering it as “those wild years.” For others, it is not a phase, but a final disposition; not a temporary crisis, but the only available way of being in the world.

If I try to apply this optics to myself, avoiding cheap empathy and the temptation to sew my own buttons onto someone else’s rags, I have to admit: my personal instability was never fate in the fatal, medical sense in which Mike’s was. On the contrary, I lived it as a painful, overextended, but still functional transition. The social elevators, creaking as they did, nonetheless worked: degrees were obtained, borders were crossed, class belonging was clumsily but somehow adjusted. And yet this is precisely where Van Sant’s film becomes truly sticky. An unpleasant thing becomes clear: even when all the formal thresholds have been crossed and the suitcases unpacked in some conditional “better world,” that gap does not disappear. You seem to have overcome the distance, changed language and status, but the very feeling of suspension does not evaporate. It continues to exist as an internal form of time, as an ineradicable defect of perception. You are already on the other shore, but that aftertaste of temporariness and the absence of guarantees remains with you forever — as the most accurate knowledge of your own life.

Looking at those who remained in local social dead ends, one finally understands: the right to experience collapse as a “stage” is far from universally available. For the lucky ones, any crisis is merely a story they will one day tell in respectable company; for the rest, it is a stationary mode of existence. Adulthood here appears not as natural maturation, but as a set of impossible demands issued by a world that forgot to provide its test subjects with the necessary equipment. You are expected to be respectable and reliable, while the fact that the ground beneath your feet was never included in the budget is simply ignored. In fact, having a future is not a metaphysical hope, but a very concrete service package: a financial cushion, the right accent, and, above all, the right to make a mistake with a guaranteed resuscitation plan. High social status is, first and foremost, the privilege of reversibility. And then “late youth” ceases to be photogenic uncertainty and becomes a politically determined delay of life, from which there is and can be no legal exit.

Idaho is surprisingly difficult to turn into an object of nostalgia, even though, outwardly, it seems almost perfectly designed for it. Behind one and the same night road or accidental kiss lie fundamentally different relationships to time and the future. The true cruelty of the film is not in the difference between temperaments or the intensity of feeling, but in the radical asymmetry of time itself. One exists inside a glossy, pre-booked “afterwards”; the other desperately tries to feel his way toward at least a rough draft of a life that could legitimately be called his own — and in the end he is left with nothing but a road resembling a face he has already seen before.

Why No Skin Off My Ass matters not only as a film, but as a trace of a queer culture that had not yet become polite, institutional, and safe.

American queer culture from the 1970s through the 1990s now seems to me far more substantial than any canonization of film, however impeccable. In that semi-underground debris, in that deliberately ugly and impoverished material, queerness existed not as a dreary institution or a talking point, but as a living gesture, a systemic glitch, and a radical way of looking at the world. It is a mesmerizing moment of formation: a moment when form has not yet been cast in bronze, and utterance still retains vulnerability, risk, and a kind of living instabilitya state so magnetic that it gives rise to a strange, unappeasable desire to write about it, against all logic.

That is why Bruce LaBruce's No Skin Off My Ass, by the Canadian filmmaker, does not register for me as an artifact out of some dusty archive, but as something disturbingly alive. It lays bare, to the point of exposure, everything that constitutes the true essence of that culture: its driftlessness, its bodily insolence bordering on self-erasure, and that specific mixture of cheapness, fetish, and tenderness that cannot be simulated on a soundstage. This film does not reconstruct an era; it is the life that arose within a particular milieu rather than being neatly placed, after the fact, into a sterile context by curators and historians.

No Skin Off My Ass is one of those films that at first glance looks like pure accident: a movie cobbled together out of unsated libido, a friends-only clique, and a kind of intoxicating aesthetic rudeness. Yet with time it becomes clear that this deliberate awkwardness is not a production defect at all, but the only possible modus vivendi. The film refuses final polish and any neatly legible message. It does not want to be finished, buffed, tidily composed. It lives in the gap between the gesture and its interpretation, between desire and a parody of desire, between a love story and a mockery of the very possibility of a love story.

I have always been seduced by that border zone where the marginal fuses with physiology, and a frame aspiring to artistic dignity suddenly turns into something it becomes indecent to shield behind "the distance of intellectual interest." I have a deep distrust of vulgar psychologism, forever trying to pack every human impulse into a convenient container labeled "childhood trauma" or "forbidden fruit"— a lazy, almost petit-bourgeois way of executing meaning. But the truth is that 1 am invariably drawn to things that are defective, intermediate, aesthetically suspect. To the place where you can no longer justify your interest by invoking "high art," because the frame is too physiological, and your desire to appear an intelligent spectator finally drowns in a fully legitimate embarrassment.

That gap, perhaps, is what resonates most strongly in me. My gaze was formed by a habit of reading meaning sideways: first within the airless cultural space of the post-Soviet world, and later in France, where there is incomparably more outward freedom, yet where it becomes even clearer how quickly any radical utterance begins to be domesticated, translated into a polite language, made culturally safe. If, at "home," what hardened me was the pull of the deviant itself— the fracture, the things that categorically refuse approval-then in the Fifth Republic that pull merely crystallized. Distance helps one become more aware of one's own perversions: what draws me is not purified, "proper" queer art, but dirty transitional forms, aesthetic promiscuity, and that very indecent handmade quality that no curatorial sanitizing can fully subject to a sponsor's peace of mind. This is not a pose but a simple distrust of cultural gloss, especially now, when the language of otherness is domesticated faster than one can truly hear it, and in the process it loses its poisonous force.

At the center of LaBruce's film is a structure as absurd as it is oppressive: a hairdresser-demigod lures a skinhead into his lair, washes the street dirt off him, and locks him up nearby, trying to appropriate not so much the body as the very manner of his inaccessibility. It would be the perfect fairy tale of capturing the object of desire, were it not being told by someone with no illusions about the innocence of desire itself. In LaBruce, eroticism is always infected with social chimeras. The skinhead here is neither a subject nor even a sexual fetish in the pure sense, but an overloaded cluster of codes class, visual, politically toxic which, as it happens, only adds to their erotic charge. The film works precisely because LaBruce refuses on principle to untie this knot or hand the viewer a moral indulgence.

Yeah, I locked him in the guest bedroom. I thought that's what he wanted.

What occupies me is not a primitive cataloguing of fetishes so much as the mechanism by which sexual obsession is transformed into a full-fledged intellectual construct. In essence, any desire is not a naked physiological datum but a specific aesthetic regime: the dictatorship of the frame, the precision of the pose, an intonation behind which there hides not so much passion as yet another carefully chosen mask. No Skin Off My Ass matters precisely because nothing here is reducible to banal admiration of a silhouette or a social role. A certain elusive depth emerges from the nonconforming, provocatively "dirty" material itself. LaBruce shoots "badly" in the only register where aesthetic messiness and lopsidedness prove more honest than any ironed-out academicism. There is in him a principled refusal of gloss, a complete lack of shame before his own poverty- scenic, budgetary, and, above all, bodily.

Oddly enough, this film lacks the savagery one expects from LaBruce. What surfaces instead is a kind of softness all but extinct in radical underground work— not syrupy, God forbid, but angular, almost shamefaced. He does not ennoble his characters or slip the viewer any convenient crutch in the form of sympathy. And yet beneath this jeering, sneering surface there suddenly appears a strange line of credit extended to human absurdity. His characters may be pathetic, comic, or trapped in the cramped chambers of their own imagination, but it is precisely within that total disarray that they seem frighteningly alive. They are spared the humiliating obligation to represent something or serve as an illustrative aid. Their genuine driftlessness is a luxury that appears in cinema today far less often than any political audacity, no matter how loud.

The whole goddamn world's a fag.

To this day I cannot finally decide what seduces me in this construction: the radical gesture or its sudden intellectual underside. Without provocation, the film would never produce that specific optics that compels one to return to it not as a marginal footnote in the history of the underground, but as evidence of an authentic, unsettling humility. And yet without that buried tenderness, the provocation itself would quickly run out of breath, remaining nothing more than an empty aesthetic maneuver. LaBruce balances masterfully on that unstable hinge: he needs to shock the viewer, but it is far more important to him not to let shock become meaning's final refuge.

In essence, the film is assembled from fragments of an old cinematic canon. Here one finds the classic motif of isolation, desire projected onto a mute figure, the eternal game of departure-and-retention-a plot about how sealed-off loneliness begins to generate its own illusions. But in LaBruce this dusty material has been passed through the filter of an entirely different sensibility. Every obsessive idea suddenly acquires the contours of sentimental absurdity. He takes an honorable scheme of clinical pathology and substitutes for high tragedy something far less noble, but infinitely more alive: the story of how two catastrophically mismatched fetishes can, given sufficient stubbornness, come together into a fragile semblance of human closeness. That is probably why I am so drawn to the Western queer optic of the 1970s through the 1990s, and the reason has nothing to do with banal nostalgia for an era I never lived through, nor with the collector's thrill of checking off "required names." What interests me instead is that unstable moment when a language is only just taking shape, when a culture has not yet decided what it wants to be or in what voice it wants to speak.

What draws me is not the final assembly of identity but its makeshift montage; not the dusty canon but the noisy scene five minutes before the canon comes into being; not the archive as a graveyard of meanings but the archive as a living trace not yet disinfected. In that register, No Skin Off My Ass is not a story about the dictatorship of taste at all. It is about total capitulation before the raw matter of life: poverty, sexual challenge, the debris of accidental ties, and that specific dirty air in which alone something genuine can be born. LaBruce belongs, in principle, to that rare breed of directors whose true significance emerges not in moments of official canonization-which always amount to surrendering them to the archive but in those seconds when one notices exactly how they discredit the canon from within. What seduces in his early work is this demonstrative unwillingness to choose between "high style" and pornography's physiological excess, between rarefied cinephilia and grubby basement aesthetics, between a political manifesto and an intimate fetishistic obsession.

Today such hybridity is commonplace, but in the 1990s it read differently: not as genre acrobatics, but as a total default of hierarchies, a refusal to recognize the right of certain images to "high status" while all others were simultaneously deprived of it. In that sense, No Skin Off My Ass is not merely a queer statement but a radical revision of cultural legitimacy itself.

And it is precisely here that I recognize something deeply close to myself. For all the heaviness of my academic baggage, for all my ingrained habit of dissecting reality and arranging it into hermetic intellectual boxes, I have always been drawn to the underground. But not to the kind that gets turned into a convenient emblem for sale: to a space where the articulation of thought has not yet been severed from real risk, where style has not yet become a predictable commodity. In youth this was felt on the level of instinct; later it hardened into a position.

For me, LaBruce's film is not an object of sterile "film-theoretical interest" but the confirmation of an uncomfortable truth that today it is indecent to utter in decent society: sometimes only through conscious "bad taste," bodily excess, and demonstrative untidiness does art crawl toward that degree of truth forbidden to forms that are more well-bred and more carefully composed.

That is probably why this thing has not gone flat. It exists not as a dusty monument to an era, nor as a "valuable document" of an urban marginal scene, but as an unassimilated, under-reflected spasm. One still watches it not out of politeness toward history, but for that specific, almost physical discomfort that mixture of thick embarrassment and some utterly illicit tenderness. The film does not try to recruit you into its faith, nor does it trade in moral truths with which one might leave the theater in a state of false catharsis. What LaBruce leaves behind is not a lucid conclusion but a strange residue: a dim suspicion that the most vulnerable forms of closeness always look, from the outside, a little ridiculous, a little shameful, and catastrophically homemade. That, perhaps, is where its exceptional, almost provocative honesty lies. No Skin Off My Ass neither romanticizes the bottom nor exploits the currently fashionable optics of trauma.

It simply records a world in which desire is inseparably fused with bad taste, fetishism, playacting, and a conscious refusal to be aesthetically "correct." And yet within this universe, glued together out of random details, poses, and bodily improvisation, something faintly resembling feeling suddenly comes into view. Not grand, not redemptive, and certainly not cleansed of perverse ambiguity— but perhaps for that very reason, in its very nonconformity, it feels like the only thing that is real.

The Masturbator’s Heart speaks of death calmly, almost matter-of-factly, as something simply pencilled into the schedule.

There are titles you immediately want to hide in the pocket of your coat, like a bar receipt: awkward to show, but throwing it away would mean lying about the night. The Masturbator’s Heart is exactly that kind of case. It sounds like a provocation, and then it suddenly turns out that what it provokes is not the audience, but you — into honesty. Into not hiding behind “a timely subject,” “teenage depression,” “the influence of the internet,” and all those other airbag-phrases. And that “bar receipt” you want to hide — it always comes from somewhere: it has a place, an evening, a cash register, a bartender with a strange look in his eyes. The Masturbator’s Heart has its own place of origin too — small, almost underground. It is called Kiddiepunk.

Kiddiepunk is not exactly a “publishing house” in the usual sense, but rather a small machine for producing vulnerability: they print, shoot, and release things as if they needed neither permission to exist nor the comfort of the reader or viewer. And Michael Salerno’s film is made according to that same logic: without the grand gesture, without a life raft, without the moral conclusion that “in the end we all understood something.” There is a teenager, there is a screen, there is a game of fifty tasks, and there is the strange, almost domestic persistence of death, which does not look like tragedy but like a schedule.

The main trap here is that Salerno demonstratively turns off the mode of anticipated compassion. The film does not ingratiate itself, does not trade in trauma, does not try to squeeze a modest tear out of you on behalf of a “lost generation.” It is a dry, almost dissecting test of your ability to register another person’s disintegration once all the usual humanist crutches and staged emotional crescendos have been taken away. To love, in this case, means to grant another person the right to self-destruction without your routine sympathy. It is not a sentimental impulse, but a willingness to keep looking at someone else’s catastrophe. Simply to look at a catastrophe that, in principle, has no need for your emotional evaluation.

Although “catastrophe” is too bulky a word for Salerno, too reminiscent of cheap staging. In his optics, death has been stripped of any metaphysical weight; it is not a tragic ending, but rather a final reconciliation of accounts, the routine reduction of a system to a common denominator. It is not “terrifying,” it is “logical”: a kind of medicine against everything excessive, a return to sterile neutrality, to absolute zero.

At the centre is a nameless, long-haired teenager played by Ange Dargent. He seems always to stand slightly aside: he does not fall out of the frame, but he never quite becomes part of it either. He methodically follows the rules of an online game: fifty tasks over fifty days. What at first seems like an almost absurd domestic whim quickly mutates into a destructive algorithm aimed at the only logical finale — the final “task.” But on the way there, the protagonist does something far more radical than an ordinary suicidal gesture: he annihilates the very fact of his own presence in the world. Objects, images, digital traces — Salerno records not simply the death of a body, but the total erasure of identity as a record, after which there should remain only an ideally clean, uncompromised emptiness.

Compositionally, the film is built as a series of studies in loneliness. The four-by-three format compresses the space, and most often we see the protagonist alone in the house. The interior looks almost caricaturally “respectable”: patterned wallpaper, wooden furniture — a shell of propriety that in no way corresponds to what is happening inside. And even among people he still seems to be somewhere off to the side: in class, his desk is pushed into the far corner; in one of the first scenes, the camera slowly moves towards his face while he looks at a classmate and meets not a person’s gaze, but a faceless back. This is not a story about how he “tries to make contact and fails.” There is no contact here. He is alone from the very beginning. This is not where the story “arrives”; this is where it starts. Against that background, death becomes not a dramatic turn, but the only exit left in the available menu.

And then everything folds into a repeating sequence. Salerno literally makes him walk backwards: in several scenes, he really does retreat, physically moving back-first. This reverse motion is not a beautiful device; it is simply how he lives: backwards, so as not to look reality in the face. Salerno merely staples this retreat to the file: login, shower, cold pizza, and ritual autoeroticism — without passion, but capable of filling the void.

What matters is that the director does not slip into moralising and does not try to “expose” the internet; he records an everyday life in which the interface has long since replaced the nervous system. The fifty-day quest is not a plot trick, but the only way to legalise one’s own presence: a day counts only if it has been properly documented. Moving backwards removes the need to choose or to want; one can simply do what has to be done, step by step. That is why the lo-fi image and the archaic online world do not work as nostalgia, but as diagnosis: we are locked in the basement of a present that has hopelessly “frozen,” and it is precisely in this shabbiness that the frightening resemblance to reality lies.

Dargent’s character exists in a state of continuous transmission: endless screenshots, fragments of video, dry reports sent nowhere. This gaze into the monitor is the perfect illustration of contemporary contact: the illusion of presence with the complete atrophy of the interlocutor. You are connected not to a person, but to an interface where emptiness has learned how to send notifications. The room does not save him. It locks him in. Society is somewhere out there, behind the screen, while you remain alone with yourself.

Every day at four in the morning he sends a short “réveil,” demonstratively stripped of any emotional debris like “how are you” or “I’m scared.” It is not a greeting and not a cry for help, but rather a compulsory mark on a timesheet, a technical report submitted to the void. Awakening here has nothing to do with the beginning of a new day; it is merely another authorisation in the system, an automatic confirmation of presence in the frame. Salerno deprives us even of the minimal right to psychologise: instead of human drama, we observe the operation of an indifferent algorithm, where the protagonist is reduced to a purely technical function — to press “continue” on time, so that the game of disappearance is not interrupted.

This teenager is not so much a subject as an empty terminal, waiting for some external confirmation of his own existence: a signal, a password, permission to end. When he tries a belt around his neck, there is not a single gram of that cheap transgressive pathos so often traded at independent film festivals; this is not a performance, but a routine fitting, as if he were simply checking how it will be, and then moving on. In Salerno, death is finally desacralised: it is not the outcome of tragedy, but the last item on the list. And the most disconsoling thing here is not the “horror” of the situation, but its frightening consistency. Our protagonist does not look insane; he is simply perfectly integrated into this reality, where total isolation has long since become the only possible social contract, and any attempt at intimacy looks like an irritating error not anticipated by the system.

The climax arrives in the form of a dry notification from @administrateur: matrix.org:

30 juin. C’est le jour de ta mort. Tu dois accepter.

The most repulsive thing in the final scenes is not even the cold steel of the blade, but that damned verb: accepter. Consent turned inside out and transformed into an ultimatum. You are forced to countersign your own departure, using skin instead of paper. And Dargent obeys almost mechanically, with the same somnambulant grace as someone already used to carrying things out. No pause, no questions. The photograph of the cuts flies into the emptiness of the chat as irrefutable proof of completed work — because any platform, whether social or suicidal, recognises only verifiable content.

For Salerno, this is his first feature film: the Australian-born director, now living in Paris, runs the small publishing house Kiddiepunk and worked as a cinematographer on projects by Dennis Cooper. Cooper can be heard here anyway, even if one knows nothing of the biographies. The Masturbator’s Heart revolves around familiar Cooper obsessions: agonising queer youth, the eroticised pull of death, adolescent worlds closed off to adults, and that strange mixture of tenderness and cruelty from which it is impossible to look away.

But the more important thing is elsewhere: the film takes these themes not as aesthetic merchandise, but as cold reality — without pose, without radical gloss. Salerno stubbornly avoids sweet conclusions, psychoanalytic decoding, moralising warnings. His task is the dry registration of the moment when the need to be understood is finally displaced by the will to disappear. This is no longer a cry for help. Rather, it is a decision to vanish — not to talk, not to explain, but to erase oneself completely.

And perhaps that is why the title, and the film itself, ultimately are not about provocation or “scandal.” They are about the point at which a person no longer needs a viewer; he needs a witness — but even the witness becomes excessive. And you leave the film with the feeling that you have been tested not for compassion, but for your ability to endure someone else’s emptiness without beautiful words. That same bar receipt: you want to hide it immediately, but if you throw it away, it will look as if nothing happened.