There are a lot of questions on season two of The White Lotus, which trades season one’s lush Hawaiian decadence for the luxe frescoes and “sick palazzos” of Sicily. Who will die? How many will die? And will it, by chance, be every man on the show? Because something is rotten in Menmark. 

Season two gives us new strains of wealthy vacation misery, but also puts fraught gender dynamics under the microscope—largely the fumbling obliviousness of men and their testy interactions with the miserable ladies they can’t quite gel with. All rich people may be trapped in a beautiful prison of their own making, according to creator Mike White, but their performances of gendered expectations are a concurrent sentence. If this season has a grand sociological observation woven into its usual *Rich People Are Sad–*brand 500-thread count sheets, it’s the European flax-linen duvet cover called Men Also Disappointing and Sad. And every male character here is diagnosably sad in one way or another.

“I feel sorry for men, you know,” muses Daphne (Meghann Fahy) to Harper (Aubrey Plaza) in episode three over drinks and edibles in nearby Noto, where they’ve ditched husbands Cameron (Theo James) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) for the night. “They think they’re out there doing something really important, but really they’re just wandering alone.” Alone with an unfulfilled boner. Where the third episode really crystallized this thematic truth of men and women never quite relating to each other, episode four showed us how, in a particularly dread-filled kaleidoscope of unease for every character. 

Take Greg (Jon Gries), honeymooning with Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) after she procured expensive doctors to cure his life-threatening illness. Their interactions have been, thus far, less connubial bliss and more old hat. Greg seems perpetually irritated by Tanya’s childlike aspirations for her Italian vacay (“I want to look just like Monica Vitti!”), and he routinely negs her food consumption and complains about his lesser earning power. At one point, we overhear him speaking reassuringly in the bathroom to an unknown third party by phone in a manner that suggests Tanya is being swindled (thank God for prenups!) before splitting for a “business trip.” 

The duo is Mars-Venus dynamics to an almost cartoonish degree: She thinks he’s grumpy; he thinks she’s crazy. Whatever grace we felt toward his good-natured tolerance of her last season has vanished with his boner’s failure to launch. Whatever good-natured enthusiasm we had for fun, hot mess Tanya fades with each demanding public emotional outburst. With Greg gone, Tanya finds a bevy of gay men to commune with who at least seem to appreciate her chicness, bonding with their ringleader Quentin (Tom Hollander), who sidles up to her and gets her to spill her life story. Finally tended to, this chatty rapport gives Tanya her first bit of actual fun on the trip, and she soon observes that gay men are the only people women can really trust, since most women are drips, even though you can’t blame them for being so depressing. This may be a temporary respite from straight men, but does it solve the problem of Tanya and Greg? Not really. Still, something feels off about these new besties, particularly when Quentin rehashing with relish the tale of an old Italian wealthy woman on a nearby island who was killed off for her property.

Then there’s Cameron, the outrageously cocky establishment tech bro slash oblivious new money incarnate. He and his wife, Daphne, are both irritatingly blasé about the world, better at discussing immaculate hotels than current events, but his wolfy grins and perpetually entitled horniness recall the sleaze of Peter Gallagher in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He constantly alpha-dogs newly rich tech nerd Ethan, who seems under threat of undue influence by Cameron’s toxic schtick. Daphne and Cameron’s saving grace was that at least they seemed to truly enjoy their money, but it turns out that even their mutual delusions can’t save their relationship from game-playing and willful ignorance.

Cameron declares to Ethan that everyone cheats, so it’s cool, bruh. Ethan prefers porn to sex with his willing but barbed-wire-coated wife, so while it’s laudable that Ethan doesn’t succumb to the temptation Cameron swan dives right into it with sex workers Mia (Beatrice Grannò) and Lucia (Simona Tabasco) on their bros night out, it doesn’t feel like a hard-line stance against it. He’s malleable and weak-willed, and in episode four, we see that he’s happy to keep up the bro code Cameron has requested about his own infidelity—a slippery slope. 

If the show is battling for the souls of the newly rich Harper and Ethan, who are stands-ins for viewers, and who must now choose whether to remain in their intellectual, politically aware life or join Cameron and Daphne in Oblivious Richville, it seems Harper is the only one doing any of the resistance fighting. Daphne intimates her version of Tanya’s theory to Harper that women can’t really be trusted, asking her to keep her secrets as well. Harper does precisely what Daphne suspected she would: Promises trustworthiness, then spills it to Ethan as soon as she’s back at the resort. Still, his refusal to fess up sends her into a funk, and we see her at the edge of the sea, perhaps contemplating escape (or death).

And then there’s the Italian American family of Bert (F. Murray Abraham), Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and Albie (Adam DiMarco), who are a kind of multigenerational ink blot for our conversations about Men Today. Grandpa Bert boomer crop dusts his way through an old-school, evo-psych PowerPoint slide for excusing horny male behavior: Men are biologically hardwired to bone, an immutable law that time nor the woke teachings of Stanford can alter, and that is that. His Gen X son, Dominic, who is in the doghouse for cheating on his wife (played by Laura Dern only in voice by phone) claims to be a feminist who totally respects women, yet leans on his own purported sex addiction to justify his inability to resist temptation. He guilts his son, Albie, a Gen Z gentle snowflake, into defending him with his mother, which Albie steadfastly refuses to do. 

And about Albie: He seems like the only decent, principled man in the bunch (sweet or secret softboy? That’s TBD!), but his lack of assertiveness and constant tending to women’s feelings proves nothing kills eroticism like talking it to death. His withering critiques of his chauvinistic grandfather and repugnant father’s failings, as well as the patriarchy as a whole, are salient. And yet, he too is too weak-willed to be hot. Are these women’s choices today? 

His timid advances on Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), Tanya’s long-suffering assistant, are painfully awkward. The White Lotus is observing a particularly modern problem everyone hand wrings about in the Discourse. Albie is everything we claim to want in men today—sensitive, respectful, feminist—so why doesn’t she want to fuck him? Instead, she dreams of getting tossed around by an Italian beefcake who won’t be asking permission for anything. In episode four, she finally gets her wish with a tatted-up English fuckboy named Jack (Leo Woodall). That sends Albie into the arms (or mouth, as it were) of Lucia, whom he is seemingly unaware is a sex worker (which his father watches unfold with horror). Is Albie too oblivious to really understand women? Or is he, ultimately, just like his father, perfectly content to outsource a blowjob now and then while claiming to care about women’s feelings? 

In many ways, only Lucia and Mia seem to live without illusions in the show, trading sex for money to survive and performing whatever roles they must to get by. The White Lotus shows the hypocrisy of their treatment by staff and guests, who certainly know how useful their services are. But when Mia decides to finally boff the lounge piano player in exchange for advancing her career, it’s the hardened Lucia who suddenly seems protective of her, hoping she doesn’t have to forfeit what’s left of her innocence to get by in this world. Even their solution for survival as women is not much of one, long-term. But at least they are loyal to each other, something no other women on the show can claim.

The White Lotus’s focus here feels in many ways like the sum total of all our conversations about men the last handful of years. It’s not that men haven’t heard the call for their heads. It’s that for all their degrees of mea culpa-ing, they still can’t seem to quite get it right, and either counter with outright resistance or frantic overcorrection. Maybe that’s a start. But if anything, it has left men and women in the same boat as always, no closer to understanding each other, and still circling each other in battle gear. Much like their beautiful misery, it’s yet another problem money can’t solve.