White Lotus-eaters

An 18th century scholar on what Diderot can teach us about sex tourism and desiderata on HBO's hit series

Every now and again, there arises a cultural phenomenon significant enough that several friends text me about it at once. It might be the re-election of Donald Trump (Are you ok??? Subscriber, I was okay) or the release of a new Nathan Hill novel (such news rightfully rocks my corner of the world). Most recently, it was Sam Rockwell’s (in)famous monologue in the third season of White Lotus. Had I seen it? Did I have a take?

In case you need refreshing, I’m referring to the scene in episode 5 of the latest season wherein a hypnotized Walton Goggins listens as Sam Rockwell’s Frank describes his travails with sex addiction, for which the only known cure is ego death. The monologue might have remained little more than Graham Greene on nootropic steroids had it not taken a distinctly gender-y turn:

One of the friends who lit up my phone about this is George Boulukos, an 18th century scholar who knows a thing or two about the time-honored tradition of European dudes seeking vindication of their passions in the arms of the subaltern. We had a conversation about the Enlightenment thinkers whose notions of human rights and liberty were intimately bound up with lust. By the time George informed me that Denis Diderot’s notion of personal freedom definitely included the right to be horny abroad, I told him he just had to write an essay about it for this Substack.

And to our great luck, George agreed. The essay that follows is a fascinating comparison of Frank’s exploits in Thailand with Diderot’s enthusiasm for Tahiti. Given that I’ve been spilling a lot of ink lately on the linkages between gender and desire in my own world and others’, now is a better time than ever to run this insightful essay. I hope you enjoy, subscriber!

**This is the second in a series of guest essays about current “hot button” topics including gender, academia, cults, medicine, technology, personal freedom and ideological captivity in our warp-speed digital age. I aim to showcase a diversity of voices; the views expressed in these essays are those of the writers and may or may not reflect my own. You can read the first essay in this series here.**

-Raf

Diderot at the White Lotus, or: Mike White’s comedy of desire

White Lotus season three briefly grabbed the attention of the queer-adjacent blogosphere with a surprise appearance by Sam Rockwell, whose character riffed wildly on how he came to desire himself in the imagined form of a Thai woman. Out magazine ran a piece celebrating the mind-boggling queerness of it all: accidentally picking up ladyboys leads to self-revelation! Of course, the fun quickly soured as some diagnosed Rockwell's character, Frank, with autogynephilia and others denounced the very term as the essence of TERFism. All this, and not a trans character in sight.

During his over-the-top narrative, Frank informs us that he's had sex with thousands of Thai women. “I always had a thing for Asian girls,” he reminds Rick. All that sex has led Frank to seek relief from his unquenchable desire: “I realized I could fuck a million women, I’d still never be satisfied.” He has escaped to Buddhism, where he’s found comparative peace. “But I still miss pussy," he adds, grinning devilishly.

“Maybe — maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”

Walton Goggins, interviewed in Vanity Fair, praised his White Lotus character Rick for listening “without judgment” to Frank detailing his years of polymorphous sexual experimentation in Thailand. Frank tells of inadvertently picking up a ladyboy – Thai slang for a young man who’s been socially or medically feminized – and “instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me.” Frank explains this “got it in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me and to feel that.” Ultimately he pursues this desire by hiring a Thai woman to sit in the room as men have sex with him, so that Frank can watch her and imagine that he is her. Frank embraces his fetish to quite literally become the object of his own desire, only to retreat from it all into Buddhist discipline.

Goggins mentions in the VF interview that every time they shot the scene it was different, implying that Frank’s sexual journey was improvised in various forms by Rockwell. Clearly, Mike White went with Rockwell's most bravura performance. There's no sign in the show that Frank has considered transitioning to embody his own desire. Perhaps this is because racial transition remains taboo, even for Mike White.

But White Lotus did not maintain any commitment to Rick’s withholding of judgment. In the final episode, Rick insistently leaves Frank’s hotel room as more and more Thai prostitutes arrive. Frank, looking pathetic in a black tank top and Speedo-esque underwear, follows Rick to the elevator. “I gotta go,” says Rick. “But the ladies are here, man," Frank objects. Rick, dismayed and disgusted, easily shakes off Frank’s attempts to lure him back to the bedroom. Instead he departs by elevator, heading back to the White Lotus hotel, where he will assassinate his actual father for having assassinated his imagined father and thus bring about the death of his true love, Chelsea, whose deep sincerity is indexed by her very real teeth.^[1] Frank’s subsequent final shot shows him back in a Buddhist monastery, diligently performing ascetic practices. Despite the internet’s initial enthusiasm for Frank’s riffing narrative, this ending suggests that the audience isn’t being positioned to celebrate his juicy queerness, or even to fight shy of judging him.^[2]

The show is onto something here. White Euro men have a long history of celebrating the liberatory potential of utopian sexual freedom in exotic cultures, generally those ripe for colonial exploitation. When attached to the expansion of queer identity, such explorations may seem laudable. But these experiences could be called by a distinctly less appealing name: sex tourism.

The great Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot arguably invented sex tourism, or at minimum was an early proponent of its supposedly liberatory qualities. Diderot was also the force behind the definitive work of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie, and is often credited by scholars as a true critic of empire and the founder of modern human rights. Along the way, he evinced a Frank-like enthusiasm for the revelatory, even revolutionary, sexual possibilities for European men exploring the Pacific, although he did so entirely from his native Paris.

My outrageous accusation against Diderot stems from a key text: the Supplement to Bougainville, his fictional addendum, in the form of philosophical dialogues, to the Tahitian adventures of the South Sea explorer for whom bougainvillea is named. Scholars often present Diderot’s Tahiti as an Enlightenment sexual utopia, but it’s more precisely a male fantasyland of the total sexual availability of exotic, nubile women. This image of Tahiti in particular became more emphatic (and toxic) over time, as Paul Gaugin and Margaret Mead’s declining reputations attest. Diderot’s Tahiti, like Frank’s Thailand, approximates a “pornotopia”: an imaginary world in which female consent can always be taken for granted.^[3] Another Diderot text worth mentioning here is his early work, The Indiscreet Jewels, a novel in the form of an “oriental tale,” modeled on The Arabian Nights, in which a bored King acquires a magic ring which not only allows him to turn invisible, but, more importantly, gives him the power to make women's “jewels"—i.e. vaginas—speak.

Diderot’s speaker representing Tahitian culture is a man, husband, and father who rather insistently refers to women, especially in the context of sex with European men, as “our wives and daughters.” It is these wives and daughters that he offers to his new visitors in the spirit of hospitality:

Didst thou wish for our young girls? Save for these, who have not yet the privilege of showing face and throat, their mothers presented thee them all quite naked. Thine the tender victim of hostly duty. For her and for thee the ground hast been scattered with leaves and flowers: the musicians have tuned their instruments: nothing has troubled the sweetness nor hindered the liberty of her caresses or thine.

The reference to the “privilege of showing face and throat” indicates girls who haven’t been deemed to reach sexual maturity and so are not yet permitted to participate in sex. Still, the wording of the wished-for “young girls” becoming “tender victim[s] of hostly duty” suggests a yawning gap between the desires of young women and their social duty of sexual submission. “The Liberty of her caresses” hasn't been hindered. But the “tender victim” seems not to have the liberty to withhold caresses. While the possibility of rape is occluded by the utopian (i.e. pornotopian) setting, it's hard to unsee once it's noticed.

Slyly, Diderot raises the issue of rape, if partially disguised with a surprise twist and role reversal. In the below dialogue B –Diderot himself—speaks with A, a European interlocutor:

B.: I nearly forgot to mention a curious incident. This scene of benevolence and humanity was suddenly interrupted by the cries of a man calling out for help, the servant of one of Bougainville's officers. Some of our Tahitiens had thrown themselves at him, stretched him on the ground, taken his clothes off, and were preparing to show him the final courtesy.

A.: What! these simple people, these good worthy savages?

B: You are quite wrong. This servant was a woman disguised as a man, a fact that was never discovered by a single member of the crew during the whole period of their long voyage. But the Tahitiens divined her sex at the first glance. She came from Burgundy and was called Barre, neither pretty nor ugly, and twenty-six years old. She had never left her village and her first notion of a journey was to go round the world. She always showed good sense and courage.

Diderot's essay in praise of sex tourism, like White Lotus, finds Western notions of gender destabilized in the exotic East. Before Frank appears, Patrick Schwarzenegger’s frat bro character spots ladyboys and jokes about them, only to subsequently find himself caught up in a threesome with his younger brother. In White Lotus, Thai ladyboys make straight white guys see their desires anew, in defamiliarized and destabilized terms. But in Diderot, it’s the French who import gender instability to the exotic East: the Tahitians are too close to nature to be fooled by social misdirection—[1] such as crossdressing—and restore the natural order of biological sex over socially performed gender by stripping the French… boylady? They attempt to show him/her the “final courtesy” of sexual assault which, to Diderot's interlocutor, seems at first a shocking outrage coming from “the worthy savages.” But to Diderot’s character, outrage is “quite wrong.” This attempted rape (though ultimately averted) is not unnatural, an outrage, or a crime, because the intended victim proves to be a woman who has denied her womanhood. The Tahitian men seek to rape her to restore “natural” sexual order.^[4]

Diderot was inspired to present freely available female sexuality as utopian by Baron Lahontan's Dialogue with Adario, an earlier text defining indigenous liberty in New France through pointed insistence on women’s freedom of sexual choice. For Adario, young Huron women must be free to accept or reject any man; they cannot be reduced to the status of mere property, and cannot be constrained to obey anyone, even their fathers.

But Diderot's Tahitian revision of Adario erases the possibility of a young woman having the liberty to reject sex; the subjection of Tahitian women to the men who own them is revealed most clearly by the attempted rape of the cross-dressed sailor. Diderot refers to the sailor as “he” with what seems to be a brief and stunning flash of anachronistic wokeness – that is, until the Tahitians strip her and reveal her biological sex. Diderot implies that to the Tahitians, women are and must be sexual objects for men. Their attack on him/her is not a crime, but the assertion of the order of nature. A woman in Diderot's imagined Tahiti has the “liberty” to bestow caresses, but never to refuse them.

And what of the women in Frank’s Thai pornotopia? Can they have sexual freedom when they are not individuated? Are we to regard them as having actively chosen sex work? Mike White doesn't directly engage with the question, although Rick’s escape from Frank and his “girls” suggests skepticism. Parker Posey’s condescending southern matriarch poses the question by attempting to rescue a beautiful young Thai woman from “this middle-aged weirdo,” her sugar daddy. The encounter yields discomfort humor, as the young woman, assumed to be a victim of exploitation, protests: “I actually love Rupert.” Is the joke intended to be about the rich white lady’s arrogance alone?

The final scene between Frank and Rick, prostitutes posing, flouncing, and pouring into the room as Rick flees toward his beloved, ends on the minor key of Frank's desperation and loneliness. He pleads with Rick to stay, apparently unhappy to find himself alone with the many women he has hired. If the older, balding white guys are repulsed by the very scene designed to satisfy their desires, one must wonder whether these women – exoticized professional objects-for-hire – have a sincere desire to be there as well?

George Boulukos (pictured here as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein), is Professor of English, and affiliate faculty in Africana studies, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, the author of The Grateful Slave (Cambridge UP, 2008), and the editor of the never-before-published memoir by an eighteenth-century stableboy, Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond 1775-1782 (University of Virginia Press, 2017). His current project, A Vindication of the Rights of Monsters, traces the implications for histories of human rights of the paradox that in late eighteenth-century conceptions, slaves must rebel to claim their rights, yet rebel slaves must be killed.

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[1] The most genius moment in the season Chelsea's deadpan invocation of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride in response to Rick’s anguished admission of his vengeance quest. Rick turns out to be on more of a Luke Skywalker journey, minus the Vader redemption arc. The notion that Rick is part of a truly loving couple, BTW, bandied about in recaps of the final episode, is hogwash. Rick embodies toxic masculinity and that is precisely what attracts Chelsea to him. That he causes her death with self-defeating violence is almost too on the nose.

[2] The Out piece denouncing TERFy readings of Rockwell’s riff notes that his character is not trans and is actually fictional. I agree!

[3] The term was coined by the literary scholar Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians, which book, notably, was cited by reputed sex tourist Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality vol 1.

[4] See also: lesbianism and “corrective rape.”

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