GeenStijl Does Not Want to Do Forum Philosopher Sid Lukkassen

A radical-right philosopher appears in a sex film. He has second thoughts; he does not want it; he wants out. He begs the makers: stop editing, I do not give my consent. In tears.

On Wednesday, De Balie will screen Honey Pot. Het Parool wrote about it last week; this week NRC published a reconstruction. “How on earth did this film come about?” the newspaper quite reasonably asked.

The film was made by KIRAC, a collective whose provocative films take aim at political correctness in the art world. This has earned it the embrace of websites such as GeenStijl in recent years. In June, that site duly published an appeal: “22-year-old University of Amsterdam girl really wants sex with commenters.” It concerned Jini, a philosophy student associated with KIRAC, who, as a “left-wing girl”, wanted to bridge the divide by having sex on camera with a right-wing man. Sid Lukkassen, Forum voor Democratie's in-house philosopher and a former VVD councillor in Duiven, was one of the few who responded.

Just two weeks later, he went to a dreary apartment in Zandvoort to do the deed. Once there, he regretted it, felt humiliated and wanted to withdraw his participation. Too late, the makers say.

The madness arouses curiosity, of course. But when I first heard about the film a few weeks ago, I knew immediately: I am not going to watch it. If you have lectured friends from your moral high horse for forwarding videos of Patricia Paay and Fred van Leer, with a prim “you just don't do that”, you cannot now sit down to watch a film in which a radical-right philosopher plays the leading role against his will. Even if he has filled bookshelves with sexist and racist bedroom theories in which women are always the devious, dominant party and men the wretched losers — except men of colour, because women supposedly flock to the “exotic allure” of these “generally ghetto types”.

Ugh, what disgusting virtue-signalling-cunt behaviour from me. Very bourgeois, too, because this film was made in the name of High Art. “I do think you are allowed to sacrifice things for the work of art,” KIRAC founder Stefan Ruitenbeek told NRC, “including Sid Lukkassen.”

I heard someone say on a podcast that the film must be terribly confusing for progressive people. They loathe people like Sid Lukkassen, but suddenly have to stand up for a Forum type because, after all, they think online sexual violence is wrong.

It did not actually strike me as particularly difficult or confusing.

The real contortions are on the other side, among people who know both Lukkassen and KIRAC well and are forever talking about “woke terror” and “finger-wagging”. Forum ideologue Paul Cliteur is apparently very fond of KIRAC's work, but now thought the collective would “walk over dead bodies”.

The cognitive dissonance was greatest in Bart Nijman of GeenStijl, a website whose rich history hardly suggests an aversion to humiliation. Take Jantine, for example, who discovered in 2004, at the age of sixteen, that her stolen nude photographs were on the site. Or Manon Thomas, the former presenter whose “wank pics” spread across the internet thanks to GeenStijl. Or Patricia Paay, and many others. If, as a female journalist, you wrote about these practices, Nijman would put your face on the site under the heading “Would you do her?” “I'd like to tap my hard, just-came cock against her nose,” the commenters would write.

GeenStijl refuses to show the KIRAC video. In his column for Nieuwe Revu, Nijman wrote that the makers would have been better off going out on the booze. “That makes you feel very grand for a while too, and you don't have to destroy anyone else to do it.”

There was no self-reflection, but it was revealing. Suddenly, apparently, the humiliation was very easy to imagine.