Earlier this year, 22-year-old philosophy student Jini van Rooijen published an ad on the Dutch right-wing blog GeenStijl: she was looking for far-right men to have sex with on camera to “overcome the polarization in porn.” Interested candidates, van Rooijen, said, should send a video introducing themselves.
Van Rooijen is part of KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), a controversial art collective based in Amsterdam. KIRAC rose to fame in the Netherlands through videos where they confront artists and their artwork, usually to expose what they see as a pervasive superficiality in the art world. The group is intentionally provocative, relishing in controversy while also bemoaning “woke people” and “cancel culture.” In 2018, the Gerrit Rietveld art academy in Amsterdam cancelled a screening of Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein, a film by the group criticizing the #MeToo movement.
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A few weeks after van Rooijen’s ad went up, the group received a video from Sid Lukkassen, a 34-year-old self-described philosopher and an influential figure in the national far-right discourse. Lukkassen has ties with the far-right party Forum voor Democratie (FVD), with party leader Thierry Baudet even writing the foreword for one of his books. He often writes about the ‘threat’ of Islam and “Cultural Marxism” to Western culture, as well as other white-nationalist talking points, in opinion columns.
In his 2017 book Avondland en Identiteit (Occident and Identity), Lukkassen rehashes ideas popular among the self-described “incels.” He argues that because women get to choose who they have sex with, a small group of “alpha males” dominate the sexual “free market.” This supposedly means “male intellectuals” like himself are left without the sexual gratification necessary to continue producing “great works of art.” One solution Lukkassen suggests is for school principals to announce “a test at the end of the month and where the top ten students get pussy.”
Lukkassen explains in his video to van Rooijen that he once had an affair with a “leftist woman.” The affair, he says, charged him with “creative powers,” and he wants to rekindle those feelings.
Almost immediately after Lukkassen sent the video, KIRAC invited Lukkassen to a small house in Zandvoort, a beach town just west of Amsterdam.
The events that followed would inevitably lead to an absurd trainwreck of epic proportions, one which would ignite a debate over consent, free speech, and the blurry line between fact and fiction. Half of that trainwreck is KIRAC’s 23rd film, Honey Pot, which Lukkassen said the group released without his consent; the other half is everything that came after it. In the Dutch-language media, different sides would point to the film as an example of their opponents’ hypocrisy.
Lukkassen is visibly nervous when he first appears on camera in the film, which comes after footage of van Rooijen having sex with a supposedly right-wing roadworker. Discussing why he chose to come with Tarik Sadouma, a KIRAC member who plays van Rooijen’s pimp, Lukkassen says he wants to “research what I write about.”
After Lukkasen recounts the same theory about alpha males and sexual gratification he writes about in his book, he and van Rooijen kiss, undress, and fondle one another in bed. “Do you enjoy being here with me right now?” Lukkasen asks at one point.
Things take a turn when van Rooijen chides Lukkassen for bringing her cheap chocolates as a gift (the cheapest supermarket chocolates available, van Rooijen would later tell Motherboard). “I just started getting horny and you interrupt me again,” he replies, after which van Rooijen leaves the bed. Lukkassen then retracts his “permission to use this material.”
After being rejected by van Rooijen, Sadouma convinces Lukkassen to buy a gift for her at a jewelry store, but the store is closed. When he returns, Lukkassen asks van Rooijen if he can lie with her, but she again rejects him.
“Then it wasn’t successful to bridge the gap of polarization,” Lukkassen says before leaving. “I tried my best to be nice and sweet with you, but I do not feel accepted by you. I feel rejected. I feel rejected in the worst possible way.”
Interlaced through the film is a call between Lukkassen and Kate Simha, a member of KIRAC, from some time after the shoot. “All I’ve got is this animalistic anxiety,” Lukkassen, audibly crying, says regarding the release of the film. “I can’t do anything anymore, understand? I’m completely broken.”
In true KIRAC fashion, Honey Pot’s premiere was arguably even more controversial than the film itself. The group invited Julian Andeweg, an artist who has been accused of rape, stalking, and sexual assault by 20 women and is currently under criminal investigation, to the screening. Andeweg reportedly rode on stage atop a dark horse.
A few weeks later, the prestigious De Balie cultural center in Amsterdam also screened the film along with a panel discussion.
In response to the screening, advocacy group GeenPodium accused De Balie of being part of the “glorification of sexual violence” by giving KIRAC a platform.
KIRAC director Stefan Ruitenbeek and van Rooijen brushed off criticisms for inviting Andeweg. “I’ve met him [Andeweg] and had sex with him and I think he’s a lovely guy,” van Rooijen told Motherboard. “If this is all true then it’s awful, but is it true? What happened?”
The decision to release the film without Lukkassen’s consent has also been controversial. Some point out that Lukkassen knew what he was getting into, others accuse KIRAC of exploiting the power asymmetry between filmmaker and subject. Some opponents of Lukkassen find it hypocritical for him to criticize the group for releasing the film without his consent while he argues in his book that the “sexual selection power of women” is an existential threat to the West. His supporters point to the situation as an example of a supposed double standard when it comes to consent.
In an email response to a request for comment, Lukkassen asked Motherboard not to cover the film.
“This matter has given me intense feelings of stress and depressiveness and I would leave it behind me,” he wrote. “Just as a question of conscience: do you think that [the] media should reward this publishing without consent by covering it, blowing it up, transposing it from a national context to an international one – so that it will haunt me forever even when I go abroad?”
Van Rooijen, who elsewhere has described Lukkassen’s reaction to the film as “pathetic,” told Motherboard that her own consent to participate in the scene was contingent on the footage being published. She claims Lukkassen retracted his consent because she rejected him, because he didn’t get what he wanted.
“His project was not to end polarization, but to say that polarization would end if women would just do what he says,” van Rooijen said in a phone call. “That’s how the things he writes about come to life in the film.”
Ruitenbeek and Simha agreed. They said Lukkassen is trapped between taking “his own quest as a philosopher” and his conservative readers, some of whom he has lost because of the film. It’s about self-esteem and pride, and what they describe as the “entrapments of ideology.” If things had played out the way he wanted them to, they claimed, he would’ve wanted the film to be published.
“If Sid would have gone in and really fucked her brains out, he would be very proud to show the footage,” Ruitenbeek said.
Van Rooijen expressed disappointment that the controversy surrounding the film has detracted viewers from its content. Both she and Ruitenbeek described the film as really about Sid looking for an escape from his “incel bubble” through a “leftist” student, and Jini finding her role as a performer.
But it’s also clear that KIRAC’s intention was to provoke controversy. To their critics that provocation is cheap, distasteful, and unethical—to their fans it’s brilliant. Either way, KIRAC knew they were orchestrating a trainwreck. They say so themselves in the trailer: “Come and see KIRAC’s greatest clusterfuck.”
Correction: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated that Honey Pot premiered at the De Balie cultural center. The De Balie screening in fact came a few weeks after the film’s premier.
