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So I just finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform and have written up my thoughts about it over on my blog. I thought I would cross-post here in text form to get some thoughts.
Short plot summary: Like most Houellebecq novels, the protagonist of Platform, Michel, is a middle-aged frenchman with little in the way of meaning to his life. He hates his bullshit job in the government, doesn’t have much in the way of a social network, and lacks hobbies except for perhaps a bit of cooking.1 At the start of the novel, Michel’s father dies, leaving him with an unexpected windfall. He uses this money to take a trip to Thailand, where he visits some “massage parlors” as well as engaging in the usual touristy pastimes of relaxing on the beach and visiting ancient ruins. His tour group consists of an eclectic group of other French people: the jaded Robert, the working class Lionel, a few couples of various ages, and the smoking hot Valerie. For some reason Valerie falls in love with our main character, and when they return to France the two begin a relationship.
Valerie works in the tourism industry, and upon her return to France she is put in charge of a series of failing hotel chains along with her coworker Jean-Yves. Michel has the bright idea to turn these hotels around by making sex tourism an implicit part of the vacation experience. This goes swimmingly: Valerie and Michel prepare to retire to one of their sex resorts in Thailand, until the usual suspects intervene and it all goes to shit.
I first found out about Houellebecq on the subreddit /r/stupidpol circa 2020. Stupidpol is a forum dedicated to a Marxist/Leninist critique of identity politics: the userbase loved Houellebecq’s irreverence for contemporary “woke” sacred cows like Islam and Feminism, as well as his extension of Marx’s analysis to the arena of romantic relationships highly relevant to our times.2 I didn’t get around to reading any of his books until 2023, where I read The Elementary Particles, which I enjoyed other than the stupid sci-fi subplot. Last year I read three more of his books: Submission, Whatever, and Annihilation. Although he can get a bit repetitive, Houellebecq perfectly captures my own frustrations with dating, and with lack of meaning in the modern world. Platform was no exception to this pattern. Here Houellebecq focuses on our troubled relationship with the Third World and on romance as the meaning of life.
A quick note on translation: This was my first Houellebecq book in Spanish. While my reading experience was probably slightly worse than it would have been in English, as my Spanish is not as good, there were two aspects of the Spanish edition that I liked more than its English equivalent. First: Houellebecq actually includes phrases in English in the parts of the book taking place in Thailand, highlighting the unequal relationship between the languages of the West and the East (and even French and English). Without another language to compare to, you would completely miss this. Secondly, the Spanish translation includes footnotes about the translation itself, and for identifying French celebrities and politicians an international reader might not be familiar with. I certainly appreciated these, and I hope future English editions include them.
So, tourism: It’s not a very controversial position to disapprove of sex tourism, especially in America, where prostitution itself is illegal, and puritanism still holds some cultural sway. Sex tourism is obviously exploitative and coercive of young women: they trade their beauty and their best years of their life for money in a manner that we would never allow here.
Yet even in an era before OnlyFans, this attitude is highly hypocritical in a number of ways.
To start with, all our relationships with the Global South are like this. Our cheap raw materials and manufactured goods all rely on unsafe, exploitative labor performed in the Third World. Is there really such a big difference between selling your body directly to an overweight German, or selling your body to the factory that makes his BMW? The more family-friendly aspects of tourism in dining, beaches and hotels are not really much better. Houellebecq uses the example of Cuba, which after the spent fury of the few years after the revolution siphoned labor off of essential agricultural and industrial work (which it would have needed to become self-sufficient and truly free from the American embargo) to the tourism industry to make a quick buck, leaving the country dependent on the West once again. Even the most benign form of tourism, that which encourages the preservation of historical sites, art, and artifacts has damaging effects on the coherence of a local culture. No longer are those artifacts for the culture itself to enjoy, but a product to marketed towards Americans.3
Secondly, as my Spanish tutor Rafa pointed out, we have no problem with other types of sexual tourism that don’t involve money. Rafa told me a story of one of his German friends who used Tinder Plus as an alternative to hostels in Latin America. Although all these women were consenting to this German man sleeping over and presumably having sex with them, the relationship was no less exploitative than if cash was used. Dreams of being taken away to the West, higher status in one’s local community (for bagging a Blanco), are two big non-amorous factors at play in this situation that many would find just as damaging to the individual women and the local community than if cash was exchanged.
Finally, sex tourism is the natural result of a refusal to deal with the incel-problem. The sexual revolution, and its far more damaging digital counterpart, created a “sexual marketplace”. Like other markets, this created a range of outcomes. Certain men enjoyed a very large amount of sexual success, due to their physical appearance and “rizz”, while others were completely locked out of the market. Most women did fairly well until their mid-thirties when their physical appearance began to decline. Without the marriage and traditional family formation, these two demographic groups (low-status, ugly men and older women) have had to resort to other ways to satisfy their desire for sex and personal connection. One solution is internet pornography, which is obviously bad and frowned upon, but covertly permitted. Another is sex tourism and mail-order brides.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think sex tourism is good. But it’s incredibly frustrating to hear people condemn the practice (and things like it like OnlyFans) without acknowledging what the root of the problem is. Young men don’t want to be alone in their room jerking off to a computer screen, but society doesn’t present them with many other options for romantic connection. And the problem is getting worse.
This brings me to my final point about this book, and Houellebecq in general. Contrary to what many think, the man is not a nihilist. Rather, I think he believes that we derive most of our meaning in life from our personal relationships, and from Romance in particular. You can see this in the way the Michel and Valerie’s relationship4 just lightens up the tone of this book. Their once-every-ten-pages sex scenes and other tender moments seem like something that Houellebecq is happy to be writing, especially when contrasted to the rather grim tone of the rest of the book. Houellebecq is a Romantic with a capital R. Yet he also recognizes that even in the best of times that these relationships are only temporary. We no longer even live in the best of times. Hence the accusations of nihilism.
Personally I am 100% on board with Houellebecq on this. I have never been happier than when I have been in love, both romantically, and in a more general sense with the community I am surrounded by. But those kind of connections are becoming harder and harder to find in a world that is increasingly split into its Elementary Particles.
Although he also spends quite a bit of time throughout the novel reading Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. Perhaps the French really are much more literate/cultured than we are, but I always find Houellebecq’s everyman constructions a little bit unbelievable. If you’re fairly obscure philosophy, you’ve got a bit more going on than the average dude who just likes sportsball.
The title of Houellebecq’s first book in French translates as “the Extension of the Domain of the Struggle”, referring quite literally to Marx. Why the English translator decided to use the title “Whatever” instead I could not tell you.
I think I understand a little better why Palestinians don’t want non-Muslims going up to the Dome of the Rock
This is apparent in Houellebecq's other works as well.
Nice book review.
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it: the Fascist-Feminist Synthesis holds that women have no agency in such a situation, and that they must be protected from their own decision to offer themselves to beastly men.
But why does the center go along with this still? Residual Puritanism might explain some part, but I doubt it's the whole answer.
Does the far left hate it? Maybe I just don't have any exposure to the group you're calling "the far left". I understand it's not a normie view, but I somewhat often see pro-sex-worker sentiment in places as diverse as the leftist Tumblrs I follow, my IRL friends' Facebook posts, and Ars Technica comments (mostly when in comes up in the context of anti-sex-worker laws like FOSTA-SESTA).
The leftist take is generally that the female prostitutes are either empowered women or hopeless victims, and that the Johns should all burn in Hell. Some feminists prioritize the empowerment of women while mostly ignoring Johns (they still think they should probably burn in Hell), while other feminists think the presence of Johns is so terrible that the entire industry needs to be incinerated. Sometimes one or the other group will dominate. Other times there'll be compromises like in Sweden where prostitution is legal for women to sell, but illegal for men to buy. It's truly a shining model of feminist equality.
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To the extent that I'm familiar with this political issue, I'd argue that the 'far left' in this case does claim to be pro-sex-worker in the sense that they advocate or at least claim to advocate for the protection of their rights as workers and see them as victims of an exploitative trade to be rescued. They see the entire industry as one manifestation of the horrors of late-stage capitalism and advocate for its eventual abolition.
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