With Daddy, sex is domination

Investigating what carnal love is by breaking it down into its essential parts: sex. Pure sex, just sex: between strangers, with nothing before, nothing after, on repeat. Describe it in sensory detail: visual, tactile, olfactory. And on this basis try to say something not only about love, but also about our social constructions, our relationship with time, our capacity to live. Regular readers of Nicola Gardini - those who have known him for his essays on the beauty of Latin and Greek, on Ovid and Homer, on the Renaissance, for his delicate novels, poems, translations, paintings - will perhaps be surprised to read Daddy. A book that some will find scandalous, terribly scandalous, even if it is not scandalous at all, if it should not be scandalous at all. A text that we believe will do much talking.

Daddy is the first-person account of a widower closer to 60 than 50. After 30 years of 'perfect, sweet monogamy', his partner has died. And he feels old, melancholic, finished. Instead, he discovers he is an icon. Indeed, at the urging of a friend, he joined Grindr - a social network for homosexuals that connects people together - and realises that he is a daddy. The word defines a 'typically gay international mask', which in Italian is translated as daddy, papi (yes, just what Berlusconi used to call himself), papino: the lover that many young people yearn for.

"The daddy, as the current code prescribes (which draws from millennia of homosexual history, having behind it the timeless archetype of Greek paidic love, but - I am calculating on the adversative - presents today deadly simplifications due to the digital packaging), is experienced and decisive male. He dominates, chastises and rewards. He spoils his boy and at the same time sets him straight. He penetrates him thoroughly, tirelessly; he hurts him to do him good'. Seeking out the daddy are the children, or stepchildren, 'with an obvious claim to incest', or cubs. Various figures, but all adopting the same type of behaviour: 'all puppies, before having sex with the daddy, in order to entice the daddy, proclaim themselves to be compliant, obedient and eager to serve him'.

The protagonist decides to meet after a few weeks of scepticism, in which he observes between amused and perplexed the profiles that appear in this catalogue of sex between neighbours, where rudeness reigns and the photos, mostly of body parts, are ugly. And even when they are beautiful they give off 'a nauseating narcissism. I couldn't help thinking with anguish, taking Grindr as a sample of the whole country, that those illiterate asses and dicks, ugly or beautiful, all corresponded to voting individuals! And what on earth were they voting for?"

Within a few weeks on Grindr, a metaphor for our present, catabasis takes place. Lucid, curious, but increasingly addicted, the protagonist sinks into a world of casual encounters - the daddy must remain an idol, it is very difficult to meet a puppy more than twice, he would not accept an 'ontological decay' - consumerist, coactive, stereotyped, in which both the daddy and the puppy are reduced to sexual objects, puppets. He describes them in stark, direct words, without shadows, because there is no intimacy in a sexual relationship between strangers who do not want to know each other, who have chosen each other chatting on a app, sending each other photos of anatomical parts. There are no nuances, no mystery. And the language must follow. Except then, once the tale of intercourse is over, it soars, becomes philosophical, poetic.