Not Love: The Fetish of Misery and the Moral Pornography of Old Age

Some stories call for empathy.

imagem of Fabio Ivan

Others demand a scalpel.

This one demands acid. A seventy-year-old woman: refined, educated, financially comfortable. A forty-five-year-old man: drug-addicted, socially unstable, raised in a favela. She calls it a relationship. The audience, paralyzed by political correctness, rushes to call it “love without prejudice.” Let’s call it what it is: fetish. A fetish for misery. A fetish for imbalance. A fetish for power exercised without shame. 🤢 This is not late-life romance. It is moral pornography. Psychology does not romanticize scenes like this — it dissects them. What we see here is the eroticization of inequality: desire sustained not by connection, but by asymmetry. Not by affection, but by decay. Not by the person, but by the ruin they represent. The addiction becomes erotic garnish. Poverty becomes aesthetic. The favela becomes exotic fantasy. 🌫️ Let’s be honest: this is a paraphilia of power. There is a specific kind of relational perversion that flourishes when time runs short and identity grows tired. At seventy, the future shrinks. The superego loosens. Ethics turn optional. Transgression gets confused with vitality. “I can still desire,” says the exhausted ego — and to prove it, it chooses the most distant, unstable, degraded object possible. The shock is part of the pleasure. ⚡ She does not love the man. She loves the narrative. The savior narrative. The refined woman descending into hell and returning untouched. The chaos consumed at night and discarded by morning in a clean apartment. 🛋️➡️🕳️ This is not courage. It is emotional tourism. On the other side, there is no poetry — only calculation. The man does not love; he anchors himself. He gains shelter, money, legitimacy, and an excuse to remain undeveloped. Chemical dependency finds its perfect ally in emotional dependency. It is a pact of decay: She needs degradation to feel alive. He needs structure to survive. A transaction without affection. A relationship without dignity. 💸 Defenders shout: “class prejudice!” A convenient lie. The disgust does not come from social origin, but from the use of misery as erotic object. The same revulsion provoked by the philanthropist who exhibits poverty as a trophy. When inequality becomes pleasure, it stops being a social problem and becomes a private perversion. 📸 Psychoanalysis has a name for this: ethical sadism — pleasure in occupying the superior position while pretending to be generous. Power without whips. Domination without insults. Exploitation with perfume. Cultured, polite — and therefore even more repulsive. 🌹🗡️ Let’s not confuse freedom with decomposition. Not every taboo broken is liberating. Some are just poorly processed old age playing with the underworld to deceive its fear of death. 🕯️ Desire without ethical grounding is not bold — it is grotesque. Calling this “love” is semantic violence. Love requires recognition of the other as a subject. Here, there is an object. Love implies mutual growth. Here, one stagnates while the other feeds on decay. And society applauds — terrified of appearing conservative. It prefers swallowing its own repulsion to stating the obvious: not everything that is desired is worthy. Lucidity is not moralism. It is intellectual courage. 🧠 If a bond requires one person to remain broken so the other can feel alive, it is not a relationship — it is shared pathology. If pleasure is born from another’s degradation, it is not passion — it is perversion. If the discourse must romanticize misery to survive, it is not love — it is disgust wrapped in progressive language. 🧪 The scandal is not the age gap. Nor the class difference. The scandal is the celebration of all this as something beautiful. It isn’t. It’s ugly. It’s sad. And it reveals how often we confuse desire with virtue. Some stories do not ask for empathy. They ask for shame.

✍🏽 Fabio Ivan

Journalist and Mountaineer