The Ontological Horniness of Hasan Piker’s Comments Section

An excessive examination of romantic obsession, feminine desire, fanfiction and — for some reason — Stephen Sondheim’s Passion.

1

You might imagine you’re the horniest person who’s ever lived. And then you go online.

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I was scrolling on my mental illness machine when I came across this from Hasan Piker’s TikTok comments: i want him to put so much dna in me it messes with my 23 and me results. Ok, wow!

Anne Carson tells us, “Imagination is the core of desire. It acts as the core of metaphor.” And what a metaphor. To be loved is to be changed, after all. It’s such a successful declaration of desire. The kind of statement that preempts a furrowed-browed head nodding of the let-her-cook persuasion. Like, yeah girl, I get it.

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I’m something of a pervert myself. I, who have toiled in the Ao3 mines. I, who spent my summer trading daily Glen Powell updates with a friend.

Who, upon my fifth viewing of Challengers in the theater, remarked to a friend that I’d like to stand under Mike Faist’s character and catch his falling sweat in my open mouth.

“Okay, Lauren, wow.”

The other day I gave the same (extremely offline) friend a tour of the internet boyfriends in my camera roll. She thought that meant a man I’d met through the internet. No, no, no, I had to explain, it’s a man — usually a celebrity or something just short of that: an influencer — I consume through screenshots, fancams, thirst posts, fanfiction, Twitter threads and beyond.

I’m only familiar with the searing horniness of Hasan Piker’s comments section because of a spiral induced by a picture of him that ended up on my timeline by mistake and — anyway, now I have the Twitch app on my TV (dear god, being horny has taken me to places I wouldn’t go with a gun).

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And this is shameful, no? Why do I feel so comfortable opening up my phone’s cache of pictures of Hasan and his dog or Mike Faist jumping over a tennis net for my poor friend with a normal appetite for flesh-and-blood people? Why would I do that to her? That’s crazy, Lauren, that’s wild. You’re an adult, you have an 830 credit score, you can’t also have a saved folder of horny TikToks “for later.” Look at you, zooming in on their knuckles, their jawlines, their chest hair. Stand up!

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But I’m reluctant to admit that it’s embarrassing, even now: Revealing to you that when I see these images of masculinity, I’m reduced to humina-humina-woof-woof-awooogaaaa. That I spend more time thinking about licking the sweat from a hot man’s hairline than I do plotting the fall of patriarchy.

I’m past the reflexive urge to apologize for letting you all down by even writing this essay exalting the virtues of men and masculinity. I’m not sorry that your sharp admonishments of But sexism! But queerness! But Jordan Peterson! are deaf to me in my abject horniness.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think about that Kermit-the-Frog-ass bitch as much as y’all seem to. I only think of hot men, if I think of men at all.

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But at this point even heteropessimism is banal. How else do we explain Glen Powell summer or Sabrina Carpenter’s lilting enthusiasm for her lover’s cock even as she begs him not to embarrass her?

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Not true! cries the Second Coming of the Second Wave. Men are squarely in the red lately because of their dependence on being dumb and boring. American women are turning 4B. They’re reissuing Andrea Dworkin. They’re going SCUM Manifesto-mode. They’re asking how if patriarchy demands women want men, then can we ever know if we really do or not? A successful way of controlling someone’s destiny is by directing their desire. So is the very act of wanting men a form of patriarchal control?

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Yet, women do want men — and they should! — but what we’re teasing out here is the excessiveness of that desire. How, as Hélène Cixous said, their “libido will produce far more radical effects of political and social change than some might like to think.”

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And so, it’s not that masculine men are back — but depictions of masculinity as seen through the lens of the feminine. It’s “Boys” by Charli XCX. It’s Ao3-core. It’s Zendaya fujoshing over her tennis boyfriends making out.

Even the internet boyfriends know this. Given how Hasan Piker watches his baby-girlified fancams on stream or that Glen Powell recast his public image into a pastel-clad, little dog-toting soft man.

Masculinity by men seemingly cannot go beyond the dime-store rhetoric of the manosphere. Men lack the capacity for the levels of imagination women effortlessly achieve. They can only write what’s directly in front of their face. That’s why they’ll never truly be happy. And why we, at the end of the day, respect them a little less.¹

Men by Men is out. Men by Women is this moment’s lasting image.

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And yet, if I try to imagine a sexualized masculine body made for public consumption, it still comes through the male gaze. Which is to say, the male gays. Why do men own desire? Or is it just this version of desire? That of images and gazes and objectification. What would a feminine language of desire look like?

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“[Women’s sensuality was] so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate,” Anaïs Nin wrote. “The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.”

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Cixous wrote “The Laugh of the Medusa” not only as an ode to women’s writing but also their libidos, which she sees as inextricably linked.

“I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.”

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about desire. What does it feel like? A leg that’s gone numb with sleep — painful but laughing. How does it taste? Like salt and copper wire. What’s the sound it makes? Surely a scream. It’s a room of many pinks and velvet skins. Like a womb. But there I go projecting.

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Okay, so, forget desire as the soft roundness of feminity. Something harder then. Muscled and rigid.

And if I said one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read was on Ao3? The piece that haunts me, that I keep bookmarked to return to when I need a shot of inspiration straight to the dome.

Fanfiction is the “intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional” that Nin says “gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements.” It’s about the private parts, the tender-side of skin.

This is where the language of feminine desire lives and the main medium is men. It’s a long-held truth that fanfiction —from Wattpad to LiveJournal to the early days of zines — is largely homoerotic in nature and written by women on the whole.

And everyone wants to know why. I’ve heard it said that women access more sexual agency through male avatars. That M/M pairings remove the risk and power imbalance inherent in heteronormative sex. Maybe women simply enjoy sexualizing men and M/M ships give them double the men to fantasize about. Straight women get off on fetishizing gay men. Maybe it’s as simple as: Women understand wanting what we’re not supposed to want. Maybe women’s sexuality is dysfunctional, deviant, disturbed. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

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P.J. Falzone is interested in Kirk/Spock — the grandfather of slash fic — as a revolutionary act. “Sexuality provides a fertile ground for this imagining because it is accessible, visceral, and primal. The queer here is not a variation or riff on traditional androcentric, heterosexist normativity, but the queer is a break with these traditions.”

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Maybe we just call a spade a spade: It’s because M/M relationships are based on equality. Women desire male desire that’s borne out of mutual respect and admiration; not control.

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Consider that the M/M ships often arise from friends who become lovers; while enemies-to-lovers is more popular amongst heterosexual couplings. What can we glean from this? That these men are two complementary parts who the writer-lover wills into one whole like the Platonic man split by Zeus and doomed to an eternal search for his other half.

Addressing Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s assertion that Kirk and Spock are two distinct aspects of his identity, Falzone decides, “The final stage in Roddenberry's Utopia is the return to the union of the one, the two halves of the self reunited to form a more complete being.”

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What’s a crush but recognizing a part of yourself in another? Are we simply feeling our way back to the masculinity within?

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But I admit, this yearning, it fatigues. You get bogged down in its too-muchness. How can I contemplate genetically altering loads of DNA when there’s laundry to put away and dinner to cook and drinks to attend?

Because there’s no satisfaction to be had and I’m just drawing attention to my pain point, to the absence in myself, like when Anne Carson said, “When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack.”

You just feed it, your pain, with all that excess — all that bad taste.

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So, no, I don’t want to write about Hasan Piker or his big, beautiful eyes or soft curls or the vulgarities the gray in his chest hair stirs in me. I just want to feel whole. Sometimes, I wish I wanted nothing at all.

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Beauty brings such violent longings. It makes us possessive and terrible. On the other side of unimpeachable male beauty is monstrous feminine desire.

In Stephen Sondheim’s strange, upsetting melodrama Passion, a sickly woman becomes romantically obsessed with a handsome soldier. Despite his rejection, she pursues him relentlessly, inspiring nothing but disgust — in the soldier, in the other characters, in the audience.

Her passion — shamelessness, excessiveness, transgressiveness — abjects them both. Our soldier, instead, longs for his youthful, beautiful married lover back home, the one who possesses what Chloé Cooper Jones describes in Easy Beauty. The phrase comes from Bernard Bosanquet in reference to beauty with mass appeal: a pop song, a sweeping natural landscape, per Bosanquet, “a youthful face, or the human form in its prime.”

In Passion, our heroine is humbled by difficult beauty which, as Jones discusses, can often “provoke resentment and disgust.” When her solider does finally relent and they have sex, she dies².

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Her love is too real, too vulnerable. In foisting it upon her love-object, it draws his attention to his own mortality. Her love for the soldier pulls her away from death — while drawing him toward it.

It’s painful to want another. It’s embarrassing to admit that we need anyone but ourselves. It’s vulnerable to be moved by beauty. It’s terrifying to be so human. After all, to be human only means death.

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Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way, though. Instead of “why do women want men?” consider the question “why do men hate women?”

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We might look to the dissonance between romance books — which traffic in the easy beauty of tropes, stock characters and happy endings — and the perverse milieu of horny posting, fanfiction and the gothic.

See, for example, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu: Ellen’s desire takes a putrid, deformed shape. One so vile many viewers thought it could only represent sexual abuse and trauma — the main avenues for female sexuality in the dominant culture.

But make no mistake, Count Orlock is her desire. He’s female desire seen through men. Or, as I previously wrote in an essay about women’s identification with the monster: “When the woman looks at the monster, she sees herself through the trick mirror of the male gaze. The horror film shows us the male gaze through the woman’s eyes. Look what they did to her. Look what they’ve done to us.”

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Take the most literary depiction of being horny on main, I Love Dick. Chris Kraus’ overwrought, embarrassing, vulnerable, intellectual, vindictive, transgressive account of her obsession with Dick exemplifies Anna Watkins Fisher’s idea of the female parasite.

“Rather than fleeing charges of hyperfemininity and overdependence, [Kraus embraces] them all the more tightly, performing the figure of the parasite as a figure of overidentification, a term Slavoj Zizek and others have used to describe a manic maneuver by which one pretends to take the system at its word and plays so close to it that the system ultimately cannot bear the intensity of one’s participation (Parker 2004). In these works, overidentification manifests in the artists' manic insistence on loving men who reject them.”

This unrepentant parasitism, this dependence, this mutability is a site of anxiety for a patriarchal society. As I previously asked, “Is there anything scarier to a man than being contaminated with femininity?”

But the erotic is predicated on the urge to merge.

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“More compelling is the extent to which Western feminist discourses have internalized these anxieties, warnings of parasitism cropping up in canonical texts of often white, U.S., and European feminist historical projects. In these writings, the parasite is often represented as shorthand for the perceived threats to feminism by forms of dependence upon patriarchy at various historical junctures” (Fisher).

Is to be obsessively in love with men a threat? Might we police our boundaries more strictly to maintain independence and self-reliance? Should we only love in good taste?

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If we’re so convinced of what we don’t like about each other, what could we say of what we do?

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In the margins of “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I scribble aspects of masculinity I admire. Passionate, generous, protective, impulsive.

It’s not lost on me that these are qualities I’m always trying to embolden in myself, the exact places where my natural talents do not lie.

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When I say “desire” I don’t mean sex. So much of desire happens in the symbolic. Sex becomes the dream we create together.

“Poets and novelists, like lovers, thought that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges.” (Carson).

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When I say “language,” I mean the ways we change each other.

The writer-lover does what all writers and lovers do: She creates. The page becomes a field of play. “What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge” (Carson).

As Cixous reminds us, “… writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought…”

Fisher considers Kraus’ manic commitment to heterosexual romance, especially through letter writing, as a way of revising traditional gender, romantic and sexual relationships. Kraus’ use of the letter as an artistic medium is tantamount to her feminist aims, creating a “conduit for relational exchange” that undermines patriarchal power structures. When we write, we’re writing across boundaries, creating a dialogue so that we may, at last, speak with one another.

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So: Why men? Why all this wanting? What’s the revolutionary potential of thirst posting?

For Carson, vis-à-vis Socrates, change is driven by conversation and this exchange is alive with potential. It’s vital you remain open to this potential, that you long for the other. Yearning is a revolutionary necessity.

As Carson says, “Socrates’ central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and, indeed, divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. … More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.”

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In Easy Beauty, Jones finds God on the tennis court — much like my own experience with Challengers.

Watching Roger Federer in a moment of beauty, she contemplates, “Kant wrote that a genius could create something that displayed the furthest edge of our humanity and, by doing so, give us a sense of what might lie beyond that edge. Genius opened up a space for God to encounter man.”

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Is this not Eros? Our imagination (God) encountering our physical beings (man).

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So post. Post those incandescantly horny comments like our humanity depends on it, open that field of play, put wings on your soul. After all, “whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires, Aristotle says, that movement begins in an act of imagination…” (Carson).

Be as reckless and excessive and embarrassing as possible. Give into madness, release control. It’s not about submission — it’s an acceptance. Of vulnerability, of the erotic, of humanity. Of parasitism and passionate love that go beyond self-interest and dive straight into ego death.

Beauty — desire — moves us closer to each other, which moves us closer to the divine.

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I would rather — and always will — be reaching.

1. the only exception being the reply guy who coined you swan, he frog

2. yes, that’s literally the plot of the play, I fucking love this story