An Apex Predator & Consent

The White Lotus incest plot takes a darker turn

“One day, I'm going to take you down,” Lochlan warned his big brother, Saxon. With a kiss and a handjob, he did just that. His mischievous grin giving way to guilt the next morning, while Saxon was deathly hungover and in denial. So, did Lochlan give his big brother a taste of his own medicine to knock him down a peg? Or was he just exploring his own sexuality with the tools his brother gave him?

A big theme in the show is sex as power. Both men are at the top of society’s food chain: white, rich, hot, young, and “straight.” So what’s left to weaponize? Violence or sex. The demon twink chose sex, and the incest taboo comedy took a dark turn into a sexual Cain and Abel. After being pressured to do drugs, Saxon is disoriented and nearly incapacitated: his confused “What?” after that kiss and clearly struggling to compose himself as Chloe and Lochlan start to have sex. Was he in the right state of mind to consent to his little brother’s advances?

White Lotus tends to be tight and symmetrical. The issue of consent had been previously addressed a couple of times. Compare Saxon’s fuzzy memories to Belinda’s direct and hilarious sex scene: “I consent. Are you guys doing that here? We just started.” (Side note: if there were any justice in the world, Natasha Rothwell would get an Emmy for her endearing comedy work here, a counterweight to her scene-stealing in Insecure.) Most importantly, earlier in the night, after begrudgingly taking the pills, Saxon actually joked about being taken advantage of to the girls, who he was waiting for to get “messy.”

The morning after.

I’ve read a lot of recaps of this episode, none of which ask whether Saxon actually consented. With his narcissism, creepy hypersexuality, and general douchebaggery, Saxon is an apex predator. Do we believe someone like him doesn’t warrant that conversation, or worse, that he deserved it or “asked for it?” If the gender roles were reversed, would we think of his scenes differently?

I posed the question “Did Saxon Consent?” on social media. Here were the results:

I love what creator Mike White is doing here. Great art is also about the questions we’re not asking.

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More on how media shapes our views of sex in POST and Analog Cruising