The Erotics of No

Everyone loves a good no. Friends of mine have tried to outdo each other with legends about why they couldn’t get past Sven’s impenetrable non-smile at Berghain (my favorite being the one from a friend who was given a complex math problem, only to get turned away when he got it right). Or they will quote Bartleby whenever they’re feeling a little lazy and would rather polish off a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, save for the last bite out of the delight of refusal. At parties, they’ve told me about their dreams of living off-grid, where they’ll fight heroic battles with real mosquitos to escape the blue screens pulsing in front of their faces, or about their desire to have »fuck you money« so they can show their bosses exactly where they can stick their poorly formatted Excel sheets. And no, none of this is about me. Or not literally. You see, even though I have no stories about hunting for a Birkin like a boar or pressing Ctrl + R until my fingers bled for Kate Bush tickets, I have constructed extensive daydreams about Emily Dickinson never leaving the house or about Gerald Murnane wasting away in the Australian plains, brewing his own beer and conducting complicated horse races in a country that exists only in his mind.

No is a currency, the oldest luxury. Any Cracker Jack economist can tell you that scarcity = desire. Rare Porsches with rare ceram-ic composite clutches. Patek Philippe watches with waitlists longer than it takes to put your kids through college. Maison Margiela 0 sweaters whose owners cry when their lower-class mothers, not understanding the economy of damage, reattach the dangling stitches. But the good opera seats, morning Pilates, dermatologist appointments, seasonal matcha latte flavors, overhead bin space on airplanes, and toilet paper during the pandemic—are they re-ally any different?

We love no because we can’t accept it. Because we think that maybe we can be the ones to break it and undo the spell. An unanswered email becomes a follow-up becomes a text message becomes a phone call becomes a calendar invite. Still ignored? Mouth-frothing spite. »Sorry, we’re all sold out, come back again tomorrow«—an affront that can only be met with a negative Google review while sparing the banality of details. And real re-fusal? How painful! How unjust! Why couldn’t Japan, for instance, just open up? We didn’t mean to end its centuries of restricted contact. We only wanted friendship—you know, trade, coal, access, leverage, nothing but innocence. Still not interested? Fine, then. Have it your way. »Send in the gunboats«. What’s that, China? You too? You’re going to accept British opium and you’re going to like it. »Who wants democracy? Get your democracy here!« Don’t worry, we’ll deliver it to you in armored vehicles. You see, persistence is key. Any self-respecting self-help author will tell you to »go for no«, as they know no is only the beginning—the fastest way, statistically speaking, to receive the yes you oh so deserve. So, get your better arguments, better manners, or better weapons ready and then squash such impertinence, such »back-ward savagery«, like a bug. »Bartender, help«. There’s a predator. He’s moved from charm to bargain to insult. Can anyone step in?

»Hey buddy, if you don’t get the fuck outta here, I’m gonna smash

your teeth in.« Which is to say that the old bumper sticker slogan

»Fight Violence« is alive and well. »Forgive them, for they know not what they do.«

Since we know no »no«, we fantasize about one strong enough to survive us. Hello, Emily. Hello, Gerald. How’s the weather? Thoreau! Did your mom bring back your laundry? But no, not even these are right, for they all dreamed of themselves in the limelight. Our minds must go deeper. But where? The colonial imagination, not known for being subtle, associates depth with jungles and pins its fat finger on Brazil. Sure, let’s follow it. I don’t have a better suggestion at the moment. So, let’s go where the birds are louder than planes and every European cliché is lurking in the undergrowth. But no, not even that will do. For we have been told that where there is Starlink, there is doomscrolling in a swarm of mosquitos. Text messages to the person sitting across from you and gambling on the stock market. And even if you sided with the Marubo people in their defamation case against The New York Times and TMZ, rejecting the claim that they became addicted to porn once they had internet access, the contact became content: a morality play about innocence and corruption and Elon Musk. The point is: there’s no escape from the maze once you’ve entered it.

But there is one stronger no. Expressed so thoroughly and ef-fectively and with so much hostility that we keep wanting to get closer. Ever heard of the Sentinelese? Don’t worry if not. There are maybe between fifty and one hundred fifty Sentinelese people (unverifiable) living on North Sentinel, a small island roughly the size of Manhattan in the Andaman archipelago, and they want absolute-ly nothing to do with you. In fact, you probably couldn’t even hear their refusal. The Indian Coast Guard is likely to stop you in the Bay of Bengal before you reach the island. And you wouldn’t be able to speak to the Sentinelese about why they don’t want to have anything to do with you anyway. Their language is unknown to outsiders and apparently not mutually intelligible with their Andamanese neighbors. What’s more, if you had ever met the Sentinelese, a people often said to have lived in the Andamans for as long as sixty thousand years, they might have killed you before you killed them with your breath. (Strangely, the island does have a single Google review from a local tour guide, awarding it five stars.)

Ever since the East India Company’s scouting ship Diligent (cough, cough) first noted signs of habitation in 1771, foreigners have been shown the proverbial door at the coral reef surrounding the island. They’ve been screamed at and attacked with projectiles, which the foreigners have mostly interpreted as »scram«. Should we manage to get closer, and should we bring them gifts of coconuts, the Sen-tinelese have been known to accept them on occasion. But if we bring them pigs and dolls, they spear them and bury them in the sand (infection management?). And if we bring them Bibles, they shoot them with arrows. The only time they seemed to get along with foreigners in the long record of attempted contact was after the Primrose wrecked on the reef in 1981 and a salvage contractor came to dismantle it. Then, apparently, the Sentinelese canoed out at low tide, accepted fruit, and took small pieces of metal in what might be the best version of contact with the island: not conversion or friendship or access, just scraps of metal for knives and arrow-heads, the humans incidental.

»We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.« This was what

M. V. Portman had to say in the late nineteenth century, but it looks like his memo didn’t reach every desk. The freaks keep sneaking past the Indian Coast Guard and bribing guides to bring them to the island on kayaks. These fruit loops come for God, like the American missionary John Chau, who wanted to convert »Satan’s last stronghold on Earth«. Or they come for the memes (aren’t they basically the same thing?), like the American influencer Mykhailo Polyakov, who brought them a coconut and a Diet Coke. One end-ed up dead, the other in jail. And now Polyakov is making a YouTube series about his »adventure«, where he refers to Joseph Conrad’s

»Heart of Darkness« and voices his desire to fill in »the blank spaces on the map«.

But there’s nothing to fill. We don’t know why the Sentinelese have chosen no contact. We don’t even know whether »chosen« is the right word. We don’t know who has decided it, under what condi-tions, with what alternatives, by what stories, laws, fears, memories, or obligations. We don’t know if it is about survival, sovereignty, grief, custom, happiness, terror, or nothing that would survive translation.

Sentinel (n): a person or thing that watches or stands as if watching; a soldier stationed as a guard to challenge all comers and prevent a surprise attack; in medicine, an indication or mark that a disease is present or prevalent.

Whether the Sentinelese are any of these things, all of them, or something else entirely is also unknown. What we do know is simpler: outsiders have arrived with pigs, dolls, Bibles, cameras, Diet Coke, alleged friendship, anthropological interest, and religious explana-tions. The Sentinelese have answered, repeatedly, with distance and arrows. They’ve said no to our disease—if no is even the right word for what might not be addressed to us at all. For that alone, they might be the smartest people on the planet. I hope we never know. The erotics were entirely our own.