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.

Earlier this month I had the most violent reaction to a work of art I’ve ever experienced. I wrote about how and why I was triggered and what it taught me for Decider.

All that and more applies to leading man Alessandro Borghi. Borghi’s fearless, shameless performance as Rocco is one for the ages — an actor leaping naked into the deep end and swimming downward as far and as fast as he can. It’s not just the countless sex scenes, or the explicit dialogue. It’s the willingness to be seen as a sex idiot, a man whose dick does his thinking for him. This can make him seem incredibly sexy or incredibly vulgar, like a dog humping another dog in the park while everyone watches. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for this kind of genitals-first performance, and I think Supersex has more to say, more insightfully, about sex than Poor Things manages to muster, that’s for sure.

A seemingly endless font of sexual fantasy, fetish, and dysfunction, Supersex is one of the bravest shows I’v ever seen. It turned me on and fucked me up. I’m grateful to have watched it.

I reviewed the finale of Supersex for Decider.

Watching Supersex is like shaking a snow globe filled with particles of the densest psychosexual shit imaginable, then seeing how these poor bastards deal with the fallout. Its frankness and ambition in this are unparalleled in my memory. 

I reviewed episode 6 of Supersex for Decider.

Supersex has already conjured up some of the most intensely traumatizing sexual experiences a person can have; perhaps it was inevitable that it would eventually get around to some of the most intensely transcendent. Set apart from the other episodes even by its title, “The Island,” Supersex’s fifth episode and its best since the premiere, chronicles a months-long lost weekend of endless, loving, liberating sex between Rocco and his new girlfriend, his first girlfriend. In this, as in its portrait of Rocco’s abuse and awakening, the show is fearless. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Supersex for Decider.

If Supersex has a problem at this point, it’s similar to Rocco’s: It hasn’t quite mastered the animal within. It has the spirit, obviously, the willingness to go there, whether there is Rocco’s mountain of childhood trauma or the show’s many explicit sex scenes. In a variety of ways this is not a forgiving climate for a show revolving in large part around how quickly a man does or doesn’t get an erection or ejaculate, much less for one willing to show so much of the process on screen in such explicit, if not actually graphic, detail. In a world where the filming of The Idol was all but ruled a sex offense by the press and the public, that Supersex even exists is exciting.

But that doesn’t forgive some of its soap-operatic excesses. The plot beats can get predictable: Tell me you couldn’t see Tommaso accusing Rocco and Lucia of sleeping together coming from a mile away, for example. Other times they seem to come and go as the needs of the show require them to: Weren’t the Corsicans after Rocco, and weren’t the cops after Tommaso? Meanwhile, writer-creator Francesca Manieri and director Francesco Carrozzini rely too heavily on the same set-ups for the creation of drama: If you made a drinking game where you took a shot every time the camera lingers on someone’s wide or flat or tear-swollen eyes as they stare at someone else doing something they don’t want them to do, I hope you have a very strong liver.

Still, there remains much to recommend Supersex if you’re interested in its core subject: the power of sex. I’ve never seen a television series this fixated on that one specific area of human experience, in those terms. I think they’re onto something, frankly. Sure, we may not all become world-famous porn stars as a result of those first pubescent stirrings of lust the way Rocco did. But something fundamental in us changes at that point, introducing an entirely new set of priorities into lives previously concerned with, I dunno, paleontology or Sailor Moon. It’s huge, basic driver of human behavior, even if it only becomes the driver of all our behavior for a very few of us. Supersex, and the character of Rocco, respect that power. They both ask how, or if, it can be controlled.

I reviewed the third episode of Supersex for Decider.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a television show dig this deeply into the annihilatory power of sex, into its ability to make you forget not just the troubles of the day but troubles at all, its ability to make you feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. (In fact I may never have seen it tackled this directly by a show; this territory tends to be reserved for feature-length erotic bummers like In the Realm of the Senses or Last Tango in Paris.) The Supersex persona is liberating for Rocco because it’s his way of not being himself anymore, not even being a person anymore. He’s a force, an entity, an energy animating a penis with a vestigial human attached to it. 

I reviewed the second episode of Supersex for Decider.

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.

I reviewed the premiere of Supersex for Decider.