Saxon Ratliff, the protein-shake–blending, muscle-bound bro at the center of the latest season of The White Lotus, is the man of our moment. Played with impish glee by Patrick Schwarzenegger, Saxon is the sort of young male we’re supposed to care a lot about these days: scornful of political correctness, indifferent to what is happening outside his privileged bubble, definitely voted for Trump. If we could only figure out what makes Saxon tick, if we could only light up some part of his lizard brain that would compel him not to vote for Trump, then maybe everything would be all right. Discovering what Saxon and other young men want has become a veritable holy quest for the liberal press and political class, the skeleton key to saving the Republic. Unfortunately, Saxon’s interests are limited to getting laid, pumping iron, and going to Duke.

Or so it seems. It often feels like the show’s creator, Mike White, is spinning his wheels in this third season, cycling through familiar critiques of the empty materialism of his wealthy and out-of-touch characters, who search for solace and meaning in all the wrong places: sex, money, lorazepam. Nevertheless, through the travails of Saxon, the show has struck upon some devastating psychological territory that shimmers just beneath the discussion of young men and their desires, most notably in a now-notorious scene in which a drug-addled Saxon gets a hand job from his little brother Lochlan during a threesome. This scene has largely been interpreted as the latest example of HBO shocking viewers with depictions of incest — a decadent society’s last sexual taboo — a trick the network has played going back to the first episode of Game of Thrones. But Saxon’s crisis is more significant than that, a glimpse of a larger conundrum for heterosexual males who, in this anti-woke era, are less beholden to women than ever.

While Saxon hits on any woman in sight, women are just interchangeable ciphers in a campaign of sexual conquest — picking up chicks, Saxon tells Lochlan, is “a numbers game.” In fact, the person he is really trying to impress is Lochlan, a sensitive boy who is caught in a tug of war between Saxon and their soul-searching sister, Piper, who has come to Thailand to join........

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