Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“So,” my wife says, turning to look at me as the closing credits roll. “What did you think?” We’ve just finished watching the first episode of Supersex, writer-creator Francesca Manieri’s biographical Netflix drama about the life and career of Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi. As is custom, I’d like to share my thoughts.
“It was pretty intense for me,” I say cheerily, and begin to sob.
I sob loudly, forcefully, uncontrollably. It goes on and on. Eventually I recover, long enough to say “I’m going to be sick” and stagger into the bathroom. There, I retch into the toilet for a few minutes. The dry heaves bring up nothing.
We talk some. We put on our jackets and walk to our son’s bus stop. By this time in my life I have been in two catastrophic car accidents and walked away without a scratch. On the way to the bus stop I tell my wife I feel worse now than after either time I totalled my car. When we return home, I sit for a while, then I get up and retch into the kitchen sink.
I realize at this point that I have been triggered.
Supersex is the Netflix equivalent of European arthouse erotica: “From the network that brought you Stranger Things comes In the Realm of the Senses,” that kind of deal. I put it in these terms not to make light of the unlikely achievement that is this show, but to celebrate it. Did you ever think the Squid Game: The Game Show streamer would bring you anything close to Last Tango in Paris: The Series? Why would it bother? Why would it want to?
I don’t know the answers and I don’t care. All I know is that this loosely biographical series about the deeply dysfunctional life of one of pornography’s rough-sex pioneers cracked something open in me as surely as if it had used a ball-peen hammer on my skull. Appropriately, it did so by loosely biographical means of its own.
When I was a little boy I was molested by distant relatives hired to babysit me. Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “molested,” afraid that I am in some way stealing valor. After all, it was only the one time for me, and was it really so bad? A poke and a prod, a thoughtlessly cruel joke about the appearance of my genitals, a few days of run-of-the-mill physical and psychological abuse on either side, and that was that. My parents came home and rescued me, believing me even though my abusers said they would not. (I never really doubted, that much I remember; I knew who I could trust to tell me the truth.) My abusers, however, faced no long term consequences, as family politics precluded this, for reasons I was not privy to then and find hard to care about now.
I have discussed this aspect of my life in detail in public exactly one time before now. This was when Game of Thrones was very popular, and also very controversial for its graphic depiction of sexual abuse. As a fan of Game of Thrones and a victim of sexual abuse myself, I was (pardon my Dothraki) sick to fucking death of hearing about how the depiction of sexual violence was exploitation at best and endorsement at worst.
It got to the point where I felt the need to pull rank and say “Excuse me, sexual abuse victim here, showing sexual abuse on screen in a story about how violence is inherently destructive and evil no matter what is fine actually” if anyone was going to take me seriously about the issue. I’m not happy with the circumstances that led me to accurately deciding this and I’m not happy with myself for going along with them, but it is what it is.
For many years I’ve observed the trigger warning debate from a comfortable remove with no strong feelings either way. It seemed to me like a nice thing to do to throw up a few warnings in case the fucked-up shit in your work ran the risk of seriously fucking up someone’s shit.
It also seemed to me like a voluntary thing to do, not a mandatory thing. Taking an exhaustive inventory of every aspect of your work that could conceivably trigger a trauma response in any given member of your audience would be a full-time job on top of being an artist, which is difficult and demanding enough.
The closest comparison I could come up with for it on my own was my trypophobia — a fear of lotus pod–style patterns of bumps and holes in flat surfaces, organic ones especially. Though I’ve managed to dislodge the phobia through exposure, for a long time if I saw or even thought of such a texture I ‘d curl up into a fetal position.
This wasn’t my fault, of course, but nor was it the fault of whoever had taken the photograph or drawn the picture that set off my phobia. It was no one’s fault. It just was what it was. Giving me some kind of warning might be nice, but not giving it to me wasn’t mean or anything. You just can’t live preparing for every eventuality all the time.
Then I saw Supersex Episode 1. I saw young Rocco Tano, a little boy with an admittedly precocious interest in sex in general and the opposite sex in particular, surrounded by older bullies. I saw them sexually taunt and tease him. I saw them touch his penis without his consent, drawing attention to its apparently unusual appearance.
I saw what happened before and afterward too. I saw his youthful fascination with printed depictions of sexually attractive women attained in secrecy. I saw him come to associate his sexual desires with the disapproval of his otherwise loving, and beloved, Catholic mother. I saw his emotional plight echoed by that of his brother, the young man who taught him that success in this world and success with beautiful women “are always connected.” I saw that brother scream at his mother for her disapproval of his relationship with a girl she believed to be a slut.
“I’m not a reject!” he shouted. “She loves me!”
What I was seeing was myself.
No, I am not a world-famous porn star. I am a mildly internet-famous television critic with a higher tolerance for sleaze than most of my peers. But seemingly every step on the path that led Rocco Siffredi to the former position and myself to the latter was the same. It’s not just the maternal Catholic guilt, not just the powerful nascent desire to experience women visually and physically even before I knew what that would actually entail, not even just the sexualized bullying. It’s all of Rocco’s subsequent attitude toward sex — an attitude about which I have wondered since I first truly began to come to grips with this part of my life in my mid-30s.
I am 45 years old. Unlike Siffredi, I have been a monogamist all my life. But I hold fast to these relationships the moment they form, I think, for the same reason the Siffredi depicted in Supersex starts new sexual relationships on a daily basis: They are the source of my sense of self.
Sexually abused before being fully sexually formed, both Rocco and I decided, on some level, that our bullies were right — that our penises were, in fact, an important indicator of who we are as people. If they can make us feel worse by mocking and hurting us there, it only stands to reason that a gentler voice or touch, a voice or touch fueled by desire instead of cruelty and contempt, could make us feel better, both physically and emotionally.
For eleven years now, since an initial breakthrough enabled me to see this part of my life clearly, I’ve wondered how deep the wound goes. My adolescent conviction that I was not the f-slur my lacrosse-playing enemies called me so long as attractive girls, who eventually started finding me attractive in turn, paid me sexual attention. My eroticization of being seen, of knowing some part of me that’s not supposed to be revealed has been revealed, and has been found desirable instead of laughable. The sense I cannot shake that sex is some kind of video-game health meter, and that without it my bar will drop to zero, Game Over. Does all of it stem from this moment, a moment I’m not sure my abusers even remember?
Supersex wonders the same thing. It seems reasonable to believe that a handsome, well-endowed, charismatic, creative guy like Rocco would have wound up doing just fine with the ladies irrespective of his abuse. But his overwhelming need to funnel his entire life into this one area of existence, this bone-deep conviction that only sex gives him purpose, this life-long equation of success as a sexual being with success as a human being? Is that who he is, or is that who his abuse made him?
I recognized these questions as surely as I recognized my own abuse. They’re questions I ask in my writing all the time. They’re questions I ask myself all the time. Not for nothing, they’re questions I ask my therapist all the time, haha. And, of course, they’re questions that I’ve asked every woman with whom I’ve been romantically involved, in one form or another. Never have I been crazy about the answers.
All of this came roaring up out of my brain while watching that first episode of Supersex. Then, somewhat literally, it came roaring up out of my gut as well. It was too much, too much to see my physical abuse and the resulting years of emotional turmoil represented so almost exactly on screen. My mind and body couldn’t take it. I got sick. I got sick again. It ruined my day. It fucked up my work week. It triggered me, full on, full stop, in the textbook sense.
From a critical perspective, my response was clear cut.
Supersex upset me worse than any other show…ever, really. I had a reaction to “Superpower,” the premiere of this loosely biographical series about Italian porn legend Rocco Siffredi, so intense, so severe, that it knocked me out for the rest of the day. There’s a chance this review runs late because of it and everything.
Good. Good! I’ll say it again: Good. Art should have that kind of power. Art should be able to change your entire day. That it changed my day for the worse is immaterial. Supersex moved me, and that’s what good television is supposed to do.
From the perspective of the human being behind the critic, though — from the viewpoint of the person responsible for protecting myself, not just talking to readers — I’m even happier.
To see so much of myself on screen screen made me hurt, yes. It also made me feel less weird, less perverse, less alone. Other men experienced this? Other men felt this? Other men continue to feel it decades later? The sense of validation was indescribable. I would not want to be warned against it.
Now I’ve actually experienced being triggered, a phenomenon I’d only ever really viewed from a remove, almost academically. I’ve really gone through it, felt truly awful, felt like I wanted to shrivel up and blow away, felt like I wanted to puke my whole insides out. And while I can only speak for myself of course, I now really do believe that trigger warnings do more harm than good.
What would have happened had I seen “TW: child abuse” before watching that episode of Supersex? Well, not much in my case, as it was a paying gig I was obligated to do, and I’d have watched it anyway. Moreover, without knowing beforehandhow similar it was to what I’d gone through, I probably wouldn’t have given the warning much thought. I’ve been at this for a while, and I’ve seen plenty of rough stuff.
But had I seen a trigger warning, I’d have steeled myself for it. I’d have braced for impact, and thus the impact would have been lessened or even lost. The catharsis I experienced, that feeling that something inside me that was festering and poisonous was being violently forcibly expelled — so much for that. So much for that sense of validation, the gift of the knowledge that I’m not the only one. So much for the tremendous, miraculous privilege of being that moved by a work of art, of having a work of art speak directly to things inside myself I couldn’t even bring up on my own. This brought them up alright, pretty literally. I’ll never forget that. I wouldn’t want to go back.
After I finished the episode, I got in touch with my Decider colleague and fellow aficionado of freaky shit Meghan O’Keefe, who’d recommended the show to me after I’d show initial interest. I told her the show upset me so badly it made me sick to my stomach. She felt awful until I explained I meant this as a compliment.
At that point she offered to send me warnings for difficult material coming up. My reply was just “Thank you for offering, but nah. I don’t want to live that way.” I don’t pretend to speak for everyone, or to have the final verdict on the benefits and costs of trigger warnings. I simply know I don’t want to live in fear of feeling. I don’t want to insulate myself from the awesome power of art. Getting sick is a small price to pay for getting well.
If you or someone you know needs to reach out about sexual abuse or assault, RAINN is available 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673), or online at RAINN.org.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
