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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.
The same cast of Baptists and Bootleggers hates prostitution and sex tourism, and related things like porn and men traveling for geographical dating arbitrage. The Baptists are social conservatives who hate those things for the usual reasons; the Bootleggers are women in general who hate those things because more sexual outlets for men means less leverage and bargaining power for women. There is tremendous compass unity when it comes to blaming men for women’s coffee decisions.
Unlike drugs where the suppliers are blamed more than the consumers of drugs, the consumers of sex (men) receive all of the blame while the suppliers of sex (women) are absolved. You fucking donkey vs. oh dear, oh dear, gorgeous. The exploitation narrative is an alibi for Western women to signal and protect their Wonderfulness and cover-up their own self-interest, one that Just so Happens to paint men as villains and women the victims. Sex Work is Real Work and sex workers are Stunning, Brave, and Empowered victims of capitalist, patriarchal societies that oppress and objectify women; men who use prostitutes or consume pornography are disgusting perverts and exploiters of women just trying to make ends meet.
Everyone who’s not an incel or misogynist knows women don’t care about height or wealth, and that hypergamy is a redpill myth. So if Western men find greater dating success by traveling, it must be because they’re exploiting foreign women or doing something else nefarious. The modal secular Western woman hates sexual/romantic offshoring—the idea that she could be a Replaceable commodity in the global marketplace, that she might have to compete with foreign women for Western men—lest she has to work on keeping herself thin and making herself pleasant to be around. After all, she’s not some sort of pathetic Pick Me with internalized misogyny.
It's bad enough that some unattractive Western men cheat their rightfully deserved fates in eternal sexual/romantic purgatory by going abroad, leaving fewer simps, orbiters, and monkey-dancers for Western women. Ugh, gross. What if a substantial number of attractive men start doing so, as well? "Are we dating the same man?" Facebook groups would need to expand to be global in scope. A city-level problem turns into a planetary one; you're already struggling with the Penguin and then one day Doomsday shows up.
In general, it appears many Western women have a haunting fear that somewhere, a Western man might be happy without it actively benefitting Western women. Sometimes that somewhere is right in front of them. Hence the occasional, amusing thread in FIRE- or AITA-adjacent subreddits to the tune of “Sold my company and happily fatFIRE’d, but now my wife wants me to get a job—what do I do?” or “My husband retired and now I resent him, AITA?” where she then goes on to talk about him like Tony Soprano talking about his son.
Western women like to portray foreign women who date or prostitute themselves to Western men as the victims of poverty and exploitation, that women in regions such as Southeast Asia or Latin America have no other choice if they want to put food on the table or have a roof over their heads. It certainly couldn’t be that, for the most part, such women prostitute themselves primarily for the same reasons Western women do, the same reasons Instathots flyout to Dubai to serve as human toilets: buy the latest phone, get their nails done, buy more makeup, expand their shoe collection, buy more expensive clothes, travel to exotic places and take photos of themselves. And sure, it makes paying rent and buying food easier too because money is fungible. In any case, spreading one’s legs is easier and faster than slowly saving up from working a 9-5 job like some regular schmuck. Then when she's ready to settle down after having had her fun and marry a Western or local man, she can just pretend she was an angel all along.
When it to comes to the topic of men dating abroad or foreign prostitution, it’s like the sudden view of Western women that the default lifestyle of regions of the world such as Southeast Asia is to live in mudshacks or underground tunnels, akin to the Vietcong in a ‘Nam war movie. If foreign women are as desperate and destitute as Western women claim, then shouldn’t the Western men who date or use the services of foreign women be praised for stimulating the local economy and lifting women out of poverty? Or maybe Western men should just Be Decent People and give foreign (and Western) women money for free.
Plus, what happens to foreign men in such supposedly destitute regions? Do they just go, “guess I’ll die” since they don’t have quite the same dating and prostitution options as women do? I suppose one could tack on an epicycle by saying: Due to lingering patriarchal oppression from Western colonization and cultural imperialism, foreign women don’t have nearly the same opportunities as their countrymen do, thus have no choice but to do sex work.
You do realize sex workers are capable of having relationships while also being sex workers, right?
In all seriousness, this doesn't work out. I know a guy who married a prostitute made good (not as a client, they met elsewhere). The problem with marrying someone who has sex for money is that the mercenary attitude to sex tends to leak into their relationships. She ended up treating the guy as a sort of long-term john, cheating on him when she wanted more spending money or when his salary was too low for her liking. Also, of course, all the original problems that led her to prostitution were still there: awful criminal family, drugs, low motivation etc. The guy was far from perfect but this isn't a dynamic you want.
I read an interview once with a prostitute who also had a boyfriend. She said she loved him very much, but it caused problems all around. When she was with him she was tired from having sex in her job and just wanted to take a break. When she went back to work, she felt like she was cheating on her boyfriend. Not sure if she was telling her boyfriend the truth about her job, but it caused problems all around.
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That wording makes it sound like a relationship with an ex-sex-worker, not a current sex-worker. Or at least the guy thought they were no longer a sex-worker and turned out to be wrong about that.
If the guy believed being "good" requires not being a sex worker, then I can see how the relationship went poorly.
"Made good" is a turn of phrase. He married her. They were (supposed to be) in a committed, monogamous relationship for several years. There was some tension there, it's true, but he also did his level best to get her back on her feet and help her build the financial independence and social life she'd never been able to achieve on her own.
I think you have a very idealised view of 'sex workers'. This particular girl wasn't a free spirit being imprisoned by her awful sex-negative husband, she was a sweet, lonely girl who lacked the innate sense of self to turn down anything that made her feel good in the moment. She had been doing this since she left school, and it had left her physically broken and worn out in certain important ways. The cosmetic alterations she got, or had been encouraged to get by her pimp, had long term consequences that ruined her health. I can't say for sure, but I think she realised that she was rapidly running out of road, tried to escape, and kept getting dragged back in by drug addiction, criminal family members and chronically low time-preference.
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That's a rather strange reading of what he said. Nowhere in there was any mention of her returning to prostitution.
You think she'd be showing him undying loyalty otherwise?
How did you interpret
then?
No, but believing your partner is fundamentally a bad person sounds like a poor basis for a trusting relationship.
That she slept with other men, not because she returned to prostitution, but as some sort of act of petty revenge, or behavioral conditioning on her husband.
You can believe someone did something bad in the past, but aren't fundamentally bad people. With prostitution in particular it's easy to believe the person was victimized into it, but when they're no longer doing it, it's still accurate to describe it as being "made good".
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