"Old men with sex drives are gross!"

How watching an obscure foreign film made me want to die young

A certain gross old man I know, one who, disgustingly enough, still has a sex drive

There are many challenging aspects to getting older. This would hold true even in a culturally healthy society. Aging has always had its naturally accompanying hardships.

But in an age of ever-advancing degeneracy and progressive moral deterioration, aging carries unique social burdens.

Older people, especially older men, and even more especially older men who aren’t handsome, even more more especially non-handsome older men with little to no social clout, are often treated with unfathomable cruelty today, particularly when they betray the existence of any sort of sex drive.

After all, if older, ugly men are seen to possess a sex drive, that is just considered gross. And a person who strikes one as gross must perforce be a pervert. (It doesn’t logically follow, of course, but in the visceral realm of one’s subconscious, where prejudices are commonly manufactured, the one often leads ineluctably into the other.)

For an aging man, such as your humble interlocutor (who turned 53 years young back in January), awareness of being viewed in such a negative manner by a broad swath of the population has proven to be somewhat of a bitter pill… Usually, I am able to take such matters in stride. However, I will admit that watching the Romanian film Mo (in English, Indecency) on Amazon Prime last night made me quite depressed about my current state of advancing decrepitude, and of the highly unfavorable social prospects that no doubt await me in my golden years.

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In Indecency, two morally-challenged college girls, Vera and Mo, attempt to cheat on a final exam by sneaking their smartphones into their underwear, so they can surreptitiously research the assigned topic on the internet. Their attempt is foiled by a teaching assistant; they are then reamed out by their professor, a bespectacled, grey-haired bachelor in his sixties, and their phones are confiscated.

Razvan Vasilsecu, who plays the lecherous professor in “Mo” (“Indecency”)

After his incident, the girls approach the professor as he is relaxing with a glass of wine at a local restaurant. They apologize for cheating, then ask to be given another chance. Here, the man’s demeanor changes radically. He relents to the girls’ request, even letting them know which notes are best to study for the make-up exam, then invites the pair to drink with him, then invites them over to his apartment, where he says he will cook them supper.

The girls warily accompany the much older man, unsure of where things are going, but encouraged by the notion of getting on their professor’s good side. After they eat, the man shows them his collection of vintage punk-rock CDs, and takes out his guitar. He and Mo— the shorter-haired, homelier girl with the more rebellious attitude, in whom the professor seems to have greater interest— play a song together, New Order’s “She’s Lost Control” (fittingly, as we shall see), after which he tells her that she’s beautiful and that she should never stop being audacious, and then begins to kiss her passionately.

At first, the girl (whose nickname “Mo” translates to “indecency,” hence the title), doesn’t resist the sleazy prof’s advances, but when things move to the bedroom, she demurs quite vigorously; nevertheless, the prof refuses to relent, leading to the girl getting raped, in spite of her and Vera’s earnest pleas for mercy. Incensed at suffering such an intolerable coitus interruptus, the professor angrily throws both girls out of his apartment. The girls, dazed and traumatized, stumble outside finding themselves walking the dark streets of the city in the wee hours of the morning. Roll credits.

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Thus, what began as a depiction of two incredibly amoral young women ends with those same women as the victims of a disgusting and abhorrent older man. The girls, whose behavior at the start of the film seemed to invite the audience to view them as deeply unsympathetic, have now won the audience over, since they have been put through the ordeal of suffering the attention, and (for Mo), the violation of a gross old man, one rendered all the more repellent and ridiculous because of the pathetic efforts he makes to be “cool” (like showing off his CD collection and guitar skills to women roughly one-third his age).

The ultimate takeaway of the film, then, is NOT that dishonest people who try to get away with cheating are morally repugnant and need to mend their ways, as Mo/Indecency seemed to be saying at first.

Instead, the final takeaway, following the girls’ victimization is: That old man is gross because he’s unattractive and he has a sex drive. He also finds young women attractive, which again, is just gross! (A “dirty old man”! Talk about an “ick”!) And of course he’d be a rapist, too! After all, he’s a gross old man with a sex drive who’s attracted to younger women! What else would you expect from someone like him???”

Honestly, the older I get, the more I understand The Who’s famous lyric: “I hope I die before I get old.” Well, too late now!

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.