Het Parool — Controversial film Honeypot: ‘Sid would have been very happy with the film if he had given Jini a good fuck’

By Jan Pieter Ekker.

It all began with an appeal on GeenStijl — the website that describes itself as ‘tendentious, unfounded and needlessly offensive’ — from Jini van Rooijen, a 22-year-old philosophy student at the University of Amsterdam with an OnlyFans account. For her graduation project, she was looking for right-wing men who wanted to ‘fuck her left-wing pussy’ on camera. In other words: porn to overcome polarisation.

The story does not say how many men responded, but the chosen one was right-wing philosopher Sid Lukkassen, a representative of incel — involuntary celibate — thinking, who had shortly beforehand won Forum for Democracy’s essay competition on ‘sex and sublimation’.

He certainly lived to regret it.

The trailer for Honeypot — a title referring to a Cold War term for female secret agents who use sex and love to gather intelligence — shows a half-undressed Lukkassen stammering: ‘I don’t want you to use this footage.’

‘Sid was set up,’ said the right, led by GeenStijl. ‘Lukkassen knew what he was getting into,’ said the left. ‘A severely autistic man was exploited,’ said the right. ‘The man went to university, has a PhD and worked at the European Parliament. And now we are supposed to treat him as an autistic person who cannot be held responsible for his actions?’ the left retorted.

Revenge porn

The feminist organisation Wonda Collective and the Revolutionair Verbond launched a petition against De Balie, the debate centre that had programmed an evening around Honeypot. At the try-out, the art collective Kirac had given a platform to artist Julian Andeweg, who has been accused of rape — see box — and was therefore ‘perpetuating rape culture’. The activists had little confidence that the ‘heavily subsidised’ De Balie could guarantee the safety of ‘marginalised groups’.

The petition has now been signed more than 1,700 times, and a copy was handed to De Balie’s programme makers last Monday. Slogans such as ‘no platform for racism’ and ‘no fascism’ were chanted. Jini and artist Tarik Sadouma wanted to offer the demonstrators a cake on Kirac’s behalf, bearing a picture of Andeweg’s leg; a PowNed camera crew filmed the police preventing them from doing so.

Journalist Chris Aalberts wanted to boycott the evening for a different reason: if Sid had been ‘Sidonia’, he argued, ‘every term from revenge porn to sexual harassment and assault would have been wheeled out’. ‘If you watch this film, you are no better than its makers or the political movement Sid represents,’ he tweeted.

The ‘victim’ himself also spoke out on the eve of the screening at De Balie. ‘It was an impulsive act; perhaps I shouldn’t have done it, but I still think it is valuable to open myself up to people with other political views,’ Lukkassen wrote on the right-wing weblog De Dagelijkse Standaard. ‘I find it bizarre that Kirac is releasing the film without my consent. At the same time, I can see how counterproductive it is to argue with them about it.’

The evening itself, with De Balie director Yoeri Albrecht critically questioning Kate Sinha and Stefan Ruitenbeek — both of Kirac — filming from the front row, was long and a little laboured. While two police vans and several motorcycle officers waited on Leidseplein for possible demonstrators, and three security guards stood ready to keep Julian Andeweg out, Albrecht wanted to discuss the limits of what is permissible with Kirac.

Regret afterwards

‘For us, this whole battle, this discussion, this uproar is about defending the work of art,’ Sinha argued. ‘The moment Sid says he no longer gives permission for the film to be shown is also the moment Jini rejects him. Our impulse then is to hold Sid to his original reason for taking part in this project at all: he felt he was going to experience something interesting with Jini. We wanted to hold him to that; he should have the sense of honour to see the whole thing through with us. That is his responsibility as a philosopher: if you begin an investigation and something happens other than what you had hoped for beforehand, you shouldn’t say, “I don’t want to do this any more, I quit”; you have to keep going. If Sid cannot do that himself at that moment, we will hold him to his calling as a philosopher.’

‘I sometimes think: what have I got myself into?’ Ruitenbeek added. ‘But you cannot withdraw your consent. You can say you do, but you can’t. You may regret it afterwards, but you cannot withdraw your consent. That isn’t how it works. Sid wanted to go to bed with Jini on camera, and I think he would have been very happy with the film if he had given Jini a good fuck, but that didn’t happen. That is part of life too: sometimes you don’t get to have a go.’

‘Left-wing UvA academic’ Linda Duits said she hoped Lukkassen would file a complaint so that a judge could rule on the matter.

‘Fine,’ Sinha retorted. ‘I hope there is a court case too. It is not a sword of Damocles hanging over us as makers; if it happens, it will be interesting.’

Honeypot is available at vimeo.com.

Kirac

Keeping It Real Art Critics (Kirac) was founded in 2016 by artist Stefan Ruitenbeek. Together with his partner, archaeologist and philosopher Kate Sinha, and artist Tarik Sadouma, he makes critical, provocative, disruptive, populist, postmodernist online reflections on art, subsidies and other matters about which they wish to vent their spleen. ‘Where these art critics enter, knees begin to tremble,’ de Volkskrant wrote in early 2018.

Kirac operates somewhere between art criticism and art. Shortly after its foundation, a jury chaired by NRC arts editor Sandra Smallenburg awarded Kirac an encouragement prize in the ‘Innovative Criticism’ category of the Young Art Critics Prize. That same year, after an initial rejection, Stefan Ruitenbeek received a €40,910 grant from the Mondriaan Fund for his video series examining the ‘socioeconomic context in which artists operate today, and how this is expressed in the art they make’.

‘I have a warm place in my heart for Andeweg’

Before the ‘live try-out’ of Honeypot on 8 October in a warehouse near the former Bijlmer prison, Kirac literally hoisted the Hague artist Julian Andeweg onto a horse. He is under police investigation following dozens of reports of sexual and other violence and abuse. For the opening scene of a film about today’s cancel culture, Andeweg rode down a street strewn with flower petals. A message was then posted on Instagram: Andeweg had been ‘uncancelled’.

‘I have a warm place in my heart for Andeweg,’ said Ruitenbeek. ‘I think I should cherish that. I think I should make my film from that sense of humanity. You have to engage with your subject; I did that with Sid too. I do that with whoever I work with; otherwise you cannot understand your subject.’

The cancelled Andeweg, like Lukkassen a ‘stowaway of society’, had approached them to tell his side of the story, Sinha said. ‘I don’t know what happened, and even if he did the things he is accused of, I think you should be able to make a film about him. Our reason for putting him on a horse is to show: this is a mystery. We want to know what people are so afraid of when he is sitting on that horse — because he isn’t going to jump off it to rape you.’

In an interview with Folia, Jini van Rooijen said she found it difficult ‘that you aren’t allowed to speak openly about sexual violence and the fantasies surrounding it, that as artists you aren’t allowed to investigate that’. ‘I have also slept with Julian Andeweg. Otherwise he was a sweet boy; his balls taste a bit like Camembert. I didn’t find it particularly violent.’