You Can’t Fuck the Sad Away

a thousand nights and nothing to show for it

Note: This spoils about 5 minutes of a single episode of White Lotus, Season 3. It won’t spoil the show for you.

"You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another."
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

There’s a moment in episode five of The White Lotus, a show steeped in performance, projection, and class tourism, where Sam Rockwell delivers a monologue that feels like it stumbled out of another show entirely. He plays Frank, a vaguely disgraced American man now living in Thailand, telling a tale that begins as a travel story and quickly morphs into confession. He describes, in loose and knowing tones, “a thousand nights” of meaningless sex. The women blur. The point blurs. What remains is a craving that grows larger, even as it feeds on nothing.

What struck me wasn’t the sleaze or the sadness. It was the recognition. That I, too, have chased selfhood through others. That I’ve told myself stories about how this next sexual encounter might awaken something in me, or quiet something in me, or let me feel, briefly, like someone worth wanting. And that it has left me, more times than I can count, naked in rooms I don’t recognize, with people who don’t know me, feeling like I’ve just stepped out of my own body.

There’s a term for what I’ve experienced that feels embarrassing to say out loud: sex addiction. And it isn’t an addiction because it feels good. Often, by the time it’s happening, I don’t even want it. But the pursuit of it feels like scratching at a phantom itch. It feels like something I don’t always know how to stop.

Rockwell’s monologue isn’t the main thread of the show. But for four minutes, the camera lingers on a man trying to explain himself and takes us on a wild ride. I couldn’t stop watching. In part because I know what it means to build a self through others, through sex, through the idea of being desired. I know what it means to feel engorged and empty all at once.

It’s easy, in some corners of the internet, to laugh at men like this. To say that any man obsessed with sex, with conquest, with the endless affirmation of the perceptions of other men, must really just be gay. As if queerness were the ultimate twist ending. As if every male misdeed could be chalked up to a repressed identity. But that is not analysis. It is a punchline, and it is a lazy one at that.

Worse, it is cruel. It weaponizes queerness as a kind of shameful reveal. “See? He just wanted dick all along.” As if that were the darkest truth imaginable. But if it were the truth, and sometimes it is, it would be deeply sad. A man who has built his life on the lie of heterosexuality, who has hurt people out of confusion or repression or fear? That is not funny. That is tragic. But more often than not, the men we’re talking about aren’t closeted. They’re not secretly gay. They’re just selfish. Or lost. Or hollow. Or addicted. Or all of the above.

To say “maybe he’s gay” is a way of letting them off the hook. It deflects. It reframes their destructiveness as confusion, as identity crisis, as something unchosen. It strips away the reality that they did choose. They chose to lie. They chose to cheat. They chose to center themselves without a care toward others. They chose to betray people who loved them, who knew them, who built futures with them. These aren’t passive accidents. They’re active violations.

And the irony, of course, is that many of these men, these self-professed real men, these chest-thumping traditionalists, invoke the language of honor, duty, and fidelity. They evoke imagery of oaths and sacred promises. They cosplay as stoics, as fathers, as patriots. Meanwhile, they leave a trail of destruction behind them, smirking in the mirror as they zip up their pants.

Rockwell’s character, Frank, isn’t that guy exactly. But he is orbiting the same planet. His honesty is a kind of performance, too. He lays it all out, matter-of-factly. His tastes expanded. He liked to dress up like a woman. He liked it when men who looked like him fucked him. He liked to have a girl watch, not necessarily because he wanted her, but because he wanted to be her. Or wondered if he was her inside. He says this all with a wry detachment, a performative candor that almost dares you to judge him. But there is pain under it. There is longing. There is confusion. There is maybe a little relief in finally saying it out loud.

Walton Goggins' character watches, eyes widening, but he doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t moralize. He doesn’t flinch. There is surprise, yes. But not cruelty. And that was part of the subtle beauty of Mike White’s writing. Because Goggins’ own 50-something-year-old man-child, stumbling around on his journey with a beautiful 20-something-year-old who just wants him to open up, to talk to her… he doesn’t treat her like a person. He doesn’t reflect on her wants, needs, and desires. He is detached in the exact way the “somber, silent-type” often are. He is deeply disturbed and worried when she experiences a moment of danger, but generally he does not care to show her a modicum of respect. She is an ornament, not a person. His friend Frank, however, is a man he respects. So he can listen to him wax poetic about something that is fairly shocking to hear out of the blue. He can meet the moment with grace.

And yet. For all Frank’s honesty, he is still a man who left wreckage in his wake. Who ran from something, or someone, or some version of himself, and ended up in a place where no one knew his name. A place where he could become no one. Or everyone. A thousand nights of empty sex. A thousand performances. A thousand ways of trying to feel whole.

I know what it is like to chase that same feeling. To convince yourself that each new sexual encounter might restore something in you, your worth, your masculinity, your power, your desirability, only to feel numb as soon as it starts. Or worse, repulsed. Trapped in a body going through the motions while your mind floats above, wondering why you’re here again. Wondering why this doesn’t feel like anything. Wondering if it ever really did.

The difference between me and Frank is that I’m still in the middle of it. Still trying to parse what is desire and what is compulsion. What is yearning and what is self-sabotage. I’ve sent messages to people I don’t know, made plans I didn’t want to keep, found myself in rooms I never meant to walk into. I’ve done it while telling myself it was normal, or fun, or brave. I’ve called it empowerment, flirtation, freedom. But I’ve also looked at my own reflection after and felt nothing but disgust.

There is something particularly bleak about the way some men use women to self-actualize. Not just sexually, but existentially. The girlfriend who teaches him empathy. The wife who teaches him responsibility. The affair that teaches him shame. The daughter who teaches him tenderness. Women, in these narratives, are not people. They are plot devices. They arrive on time, deliver their lesson, and are discarded or destroyed accordingly.

It is astounding how many men need to be broken in order to become decent. Not challenged. Not humbled. Broken. Dragged through years of conflict, failure, rage, and betrayal, often inflicted on others, until finally, like a dog who has chewed through one too many pairs of shoes, they are housebroken.

Comedian Ali Wong has a joke about wanting to date a man who is already divorced, already yelled at, already house-trained by another woman. It’s a joke obviously, but it’s still kind of sad. The idea that the baseline for a decent man is one who has already been screamed at by another woman, long enough and loud enough, to be marginally tolerable to the next.

Objectively funny that the pre-yelled at man is Bill Hader

What does that say about us? About me? I am embarrassed to be one of them. To be part of a group that so often needs to be taught kindness, fidelity, presence, through pain and punishment. It is shameful. There is not really another word for it. Shameful that we do not listen until it’s too late. Shameful that we treat people as mirrors for our own transformation. Shameful that so many of us destroy the very people who tried to love us into becoming someone better.

And the worst part is, it sometimes works. Some people do change. They grow up. They go to therapy. They learn how to say “I was wrong.” But they learn it standing on top of someone else’s wreckage. They become good partners, finally, just not to the person who stayed with them through the bad years. They become whole men, but only after breaking people who loved them when they weren’t.

Me after ruining countless beautiful women’s lives.

Frank, by the time we meet him, is trying something else. He’s a Buddhist now. Celibate. No more thousand nights. No more chasing. Just quiet. Just stillness. He says it with the same offhand charm he uses to describe being spit-roasted by strangers. But there is something sincere in it. He is still looking for the answer. He doesn’t pretend to have found it. But he’s trying.

It is unsatisfying to say that maybe that is the best any of us can do: try. Because it has to be more than that, doesn’t it? But let’s ask the question more honestly: should we give up?

Stop using other people as mirrors. Stop expecting other people to fix the broken parts of us. When we fail, which we will, we can at least tell the truth about it. Not because it redeems us. But because it might stop us from running so far that we forget what exactly we’re running from.