The White Lotus Speech

Wanting to be someone, after all, may not be incompatible with sexual desire, and identification and desire can alternate or be experienced simultaneously for some people.

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Below, a contribution from psychoanalyst Darian Leader.

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Therapists have been besieged this last week with requests from journalists, clients and friends to authenticate Sam Rockwell’s speech about his sexuality in ‘The White Lotus’. If you aren’t aware of this show, it’s a painful, finely observed dissection of American values, focusing on sex, race, class, friendship and aspiration. Each season is set in one of the White Lotus hotels, luxurious and pricey resorts where the economic and social disparity between staff and guests is acute, and where a crime acts as a lens through which to accentuate intersectional tensions and dissonances.

Written and directed by Mike White, it’s like an American version of a Mike Leigh film, with audiences cringing and squirming at the display of their own prejudices. Brilliantly cast and with sterling performances from the likes of Aimee Lou Wood, Parker Posey, Walter Goggins and Jason Isaacs, it is unmissable TV, and shows what careful, thoughtful writing can do, with a real understanding of human psychology.

So why Sam Rockwell’s speech? Without going into the plot and context, it’s basically a confessional monologue about his own quest for sexual satisfaction and where it led him. Relocating from the States to Thailand in the pursuit of “Asian girls”, he explains how he became “out of control, insatiable”, with each sexual encounter serving only as the conduit to the next. This desperate and unending search for fulfilment is punctuated by the realisation, after “about 1000 nights”, that he would never be satisfied, and that the reason for this incommensurability between desire and satisfaction was simple: he was sleeping with ‘Asian girls’ yet what he actually wanted was to BE an Asian girl.

From there, the next time he finds himself with a ladyboy, instead of penetrating her she penetrates him. “It was kinda magical”, he says, “I really wanted to be one of these Asian girls being fucked by me and to feel that”. He then places an ad for white men like himself to penetrate him - sometimes more than one at a time - dons female lingerie and perfume, and engages Asian girls to watch the sexual spectacle. Looking into their eyes, he’d think “I am her and I’m fucking me”.

From sexual practice, the monologue becomes more spiritual, with talk of the vanity of earthly forms and Buddhism. “Am I an Asian girl on the inside and a middle-aged white guy on the outside?’, he muses, and then reveals that he finally chose sobriety “to escape the never ending carousel of lust and suffering”.

The monologue is admittedly a bit staged, a moment when we sense we are hearing a script being performed, in contrast to the much more fluid and natural dialogue in the rest of the show. But the question everyone seems to be asking is this: Do people actually have these experiences and feelings? Is it genuine? Would anyone actually switch like that? The very fact that such questions are being asked is itself indicative that something very real is being touched upon: a deep ambiguity in many people’s sexual identity that Rockwell’s speech brings out so clearly.

First of all, there is the question of one’s sexual choice. It is very common for tweens and teenagers to develop obsessions on someone of the same sex, often a figure who seems to embody some version of masculinity or femininity. They can’t stop thinking about them, may imitate them and generally gravitate towards them. But does this mean they desire them sexually or not? Does a same-sex obsession mean that one is gay? Prevailing social norms, despite surface openness, usually conceal powerful dichotomisations: one has to fit into one of two boxes, male or female, straight or gay. Which box does the person ‘really’ belong in.

This is where Christian conversion therapies and most mainstream psychodynamic therapies share a basic premiss: there is a difference between identification and desire. Being drawn towards someone else does not necessarily mean that we desire them sexually, but perhaps that we want to BE them. Remember that adolescence is a time when identities are being tested and explored, so it is very common for same-sex crushes and fascinations to be created, especially with those who seem to know how to navigate sexuality and social prestige, figures who seem to effortlessly embody masculinity and femininity.

But does fascination mean sexual desire? This is a point of confusion and ambiguity for many young people, which traditional conversion therapies capitalise on by pointing out the difference between wanting to be someone else and being sexually oriented to them. Psychodynamic therapies explore this question with more nuance and care, aiming to avoid normative judgements and predetermined goals. Wanting to be someone, after all, may not be incompatible with sexual desire, and identification and desire can alternate or be experienced simultaneously for some people.

Rockwell’s speech brings out the tension between desiring and wanting to be, but also shows that this wanting to be can in itself initiate desire. As he explains, after realising he wants to be an Asian girl, he then takes her place in becoming the sexual object of other men. So what he has identified with, it seems, is not just a woman but a woman AS a sexual object for a man. This kind of identification can be decisive for sexual desire, fusing an identity with a sexual position.

But who are the man and the woman here? The woman is a sexual object for a man, the pole of desire, and the man is a “middle-aged white guy” like himself, a mirror image, so that watching the sex through the eyes of the paid witness is a way of watching himself. He is in three places at once: the girl watching, the person being penetrated, and the person penetrating. All this is unequivocal in Rockwell’s monologue.

The triangular scene brings out the mystery and trauma of sex for a child. Two adults are having sex, watched by a third party, like a child witnessing the bedroom scene between their parents. What is going on? How can this make sense? Is the person being penetrated experiencing pleasure or pain? Who do I want to be in this drama? Can I be in both places at once? These childhood questions form the backdrop to the scenes Rockwell plays out, and give them their compulsive quality.

The dilemmas and perplexities of childhood don’t just go away, but shape our later sexual life. What does a woman feel during sex? Why does a man desire her? Why would he want to penetrate her? What does it feel like? What makes her an object of desire? The only way of elaborating these questions is to occupy more than one place at once, a strategy I’ve discussed in ‘Is It Ever Just Sex?’. People having sex, indeed, often try to see themselves through the eyes of their partner, even removing or hiding parts of their bodies as they imagine what the other party is seeing or feeling. Or they imagine that they themselves are someone else, as if to explore what it means to be desired from their partner’s perspective.

Rockwell’s tableau also bring out another key feature of much male sexuality. Men often spend their lives performatively trying to prove their prowess and masculinity, as if the threat of failure here were a constant menace rather than a threshold to be crossed in the past. They have to prove on a daily basis that they are a man, which, in many cases, means NOT being a woman. This is revealed not only in homophobias and hypochondrias but in jokes and memes which all revolve around the terror of being penetrated and of being in the position of a sexual object. Macho masculinity, as has often been pointed out, is fundamentally defensive. Being a man means keeping one’s feminine position at bay, outside consciousness, and often rejected with violence.

As we watch Walter Groggins listen to Rockwell’s monologue open-mouthed and clearly in shock, his disbelief represents that of many male viewers, who are stunned to see their own psychical truth being unveiled. Their own repressed feminine position is openly acknowledged and recognised. Wanting to penetrate women aggressively often masks the wish to be penetrated oneself, as if this has been transformed from a desire into a fear. Hence the way that many men subscribe to the belief that all women want to be penetrated – they have simply attributed their own feelings to women. Sex itself can be a disguised treatment of such fears.

Rockwell manages to exit the cycle, transcending the world of carnal pleasure and finding – apparently – some kind of peace in abstinence. Well, unless we discover otherwise in a future episode…

Darian Leader