Notes Toward a Theory of Ball Smell

Extended dialogue about God's responsibility for our suffering and/or horror comic Be Not Afraid makes its triumphant return to comic stores January 28, 2026. You can get the full preview over here. Be prepared: FOC for the sixth and final issue is January 19.

Dead Teenagers, a slasher about getting stuck and growing up, will be out in March of 2026 from Oni Press, with art by Caitlin Yarsky. You can learn more and see a few pages here.

Finally: DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, my third book of non-fiction, is available wherever books are sold, via Bookshop.org, and (in smell form) at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

On January 27, the DILF World Tour continues with a stop at Literary Arts in Portland, featuring the astonishing Katherine Cross. Learn more here.

Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another are two of the most hyped movies of 2025. I saw them both, in one holiday weekend, and both left me cold. 

It’s a problem that has followed me all year. I like Ari Aster a lot — I can talk myself into liking Beau is Afraid, on a good day — but Eddington’s both-sidesing bothered me. I loved Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, but his follow-up, Weapons, wasn’t as surprising or well-constructed, and lacked the incisive cultural commentary that made Barbarian stand out. There’s a new Oz Perkins movie. The less said about Oz Perkins, the better. 

I liked all of those movies more than I liked Marty Supreme and/or One Battle After Another, though, and in both cases, it came down to the fact that the movies (sorry) smelled like dude. I mean: Eddington, for all its flaws, did an amazing job with Emma Stone’s plot arc, which was genuinely haunting, captured some painfully real dynamics around how families refuse to acknowledge abuse, and traced a real descent I’ve seen people go through while coping with childhood sexual trauma. Marty Supreme casts both Sandra Bernhardt and Fran Drescher, two widely beloved actresses primed for a Substance-style comeback, and manages to use both women for a combined total of about thirty seconds. 

And One Battle After Another… where do I start? Here is a movie about a “leftist” “revolution” that both begins and ends with a rape joke. It’s a movie in which a militant reproductive justice activist, who sticks a gun in a man's face to defend abortion, also keeps an unwanted pregnancy for the full nine months, seemingly just because the plot requires it. It’s a movie that invites us to gawk at this young Black woman’s “unfit” and “irresponsible” mothering – a choice with a real and heavy history – by showing her drinking while pregnant or fighting while pregnant or abandoning her child, but which also has endless time and sympathy for that baby’s white father, who is routinely too wasted to do the most basic parenting. It’s a movie in which, between Sean Penn (domestic violence), Leonardo DiCaprio (he gets older, they stay the same age), and Paul Thomas Anderson (pushed Fiona Apple out of a car, amongst other things) there are never fewer than one, and often up to three, sets of Allegations on screen at any given time. Then the Jonny Greenwood score kicks in, and you remember those rumors about him being a TERF. 

This is your big leftist movie of the year? Seriously?? 

For all that, I cannot say that these are objectively bad movies. They’re well-made. They’re well-acted. (Marty Supreme would be better-acted if Sandra Bernhardt or Fran Drescher actually got speaking parts, but whatever.) Many people like or even love them, and these are not bad people: My partner, for instance, liked both, and will probably never invite me to the movies again. They’re simply examples of a sensibility that I, personally, cannot deal with. Both movies are afflicted with what I have come to know as Ball Smell. 

Have you ever been inside an apartment shared by a bunch of guys in their early twenties? Not grown men; not even young men; not boys, at least not chronologically — I’m talking a bunch of guys, guys whose kitchen cabinets are filled with protein powder and empty space, guys with no toilet paper and an open porn mag next to the toilet, guys who haven’t slept on an actual bed with a frame since they left Mom’s house. Guys with headsets and video games and energy drinks and sweat-stained armpits in frayed graphic tees. Guys whose living room furniture is a half-dozen office chairs stacked in corners or put together in odd couch-like configurations, and lest you protest that this last example is implausible, I am describing a room in which I have been. 

I’m talking guys here. Guys who Smell, and whose apartment is richly laden with that Smell, a smell that is probably testosterone sweat and unwashed sheets and moldy refrigerator takeout and mildew and weed, but which your brain, for reasons that are bio-essentialist yet evocative, always manages to gloss as the aroma of unwashed balls. You walk into their living rooms and it’s like walking into a crumpled pair of boxers, that harsh genital whiff, and your soul cries out, dear God, when was the last time a GIRL was here? Not because girls are civilizing influences, mind you, but because sex is a powerful motivator, and a guy who expected to get laid would at least try to clean this up. 

It’s the smell of straight-man separatism, Ball Smell. It’s the male Mist of Avalon, the fog separating our mundane, mixed-gender world from a magical realm where women play no part. It’s a lonely smell that doesn’t realize it’s lonely. It’s the smell of giving up. It’s “freedom” defined purely in terms of self-neglect: You don’t have to clean, you don’t have to eat healthy, you don’t have to buy real furniture, you don’t have to flush the toilet or hide your porn or watch your alcohol intake or wear clean clothing or do anything but get filthy and unhappy and die of preventable diseases caused by eating nothing but Creatine and Taco Bell. 

Years later, men whose apartments were afflicted with Ball Smell will realize they had undiagnosed depression, and that’s the first step. The second step is realizing that depression runs in families, so your mom probably had undiagnosed depression the whole time she was cleaning your shit up. 

What I wish to posit here is that the Ball Smell is not just a physical aroma, but a metaphysical presence; an aura, if you will. It is possible for certain people, certain choices, certain aesthetics to carry it. For instance: Before I saw Marty Supreme, I had to first pass through a public men’s room where every single toilet was unflushed, not because the toilets didn’t work, but because each man who entered had chosen to surrender to a state of nature and leave his waste out in the open like a goddamn bear or something; this fact had tremendous Ball Smell, though its smell was not of balls. 

When I entered the theater, the audience was mostly men, very often men sitting alone. This fact, in and of itself, does not bespeak Ball Smell. But my nearest neighbor was a guy in his early twenties, wearing pajama pants and a gigantic hoodie, sitting under a woven blanket he had brought from home, with his feet up on the seat in front of him, guzzling a huge bottle of Gatorade he had apparently snuck into the theater: My friends, Ball Smell was with this extremely comfortable movie patron on that day. 

I can already hear the complaints — so what if a guy wants to be comfortable? Why do you hate men so much? Aren’t you a man, and therefore legally prohibited from criticizing them? It’s classist to expect somebody with a $750 gaming console to buy chairs — so let me assure you that the vast majority of men can get dressed in the morning, and many even make use of indoor plumbing. I also get why it's tempting to let the Smell build up. I was undeniably less cozy than my neighbor down the aisle. For a moment, I was tempted to imagine myself in his place: That beatific confluence of fleece and hydration, that marvelous excess of breathable fabrics in lush, rolling layers, that just-rolled-out-of-bed feeling (it was 3:30 in the afternoon) with the bed somehow still attached. I would never know that feeling. I had worn pants, because I was going out in public, and society has rules. 

Marty Supreme is a movie to not wear pants to. It’s the movie equivalent of a $750 PlayStation Pro next to a half-broken recliner you got out of a dumpster. Even the movie’s online presence has something testicular about it, and I mean this literally: The second-most popular review on Letterboxd is from a guy who hosts the Cum Town podcast, and reads “Timmy dropped his fat little nuts on everyone with this one.” This review, needless to say, has Ball Smell. Naming your podcast Cum Town has Ball Smell. All of it has the aura of a dude reveling in his own grossness, ready to turn the world into his unflushed toilet. 

This is Ball Smell as social phenomenon. But what of Ball Smell as an aesthetic? How does it translate  — for example — into the art of cinema? 

To say that a movie has Ball Smell is not the same as saying that it has a masculine perspective; the vast majority of directors are (still) men, and not all movies have it. It’s not the same as saying that a movie concentrates on male characters, or that it underutilizes female ones: Wes Anderson nearly always tells stories about men, and writes women mostly as blank, sexy enigmas, but to accuse him of Ball Smell would be laughable. No-one who cares that much about color coordination leaves the house without pants. Diagnosing something with Ball Smell is not even the same as calling it misogynist: David Lynch was a Republican with a rape obsession, and yet his movies are too attuned to light and color and music, too enduringly beautiful and particular, to let the Smell reach them.

No: Ball Smell is the artifact of a particular, naive, adolescent masculine worldview, which does not hate women so much as it fails to recognize their existence. Ball Smell is the imprint of an overgrown boy whose only model, for a relationship with a woman, is the one he has with his mother, and who therefore views women first and foremost as service providers — human vending machines from whom you can get stuff (a hot dinner, a clean apartment, a bed frame, sex) but not fellow human beings, with thoughts and feelings, trying to navigate the world. 

So, in the Safdies’ Good Time, the protagonist’s situational pedophilia (in which he “seduces” a teenage girl in order to evade capture for a crime he’s committed) registers as a plot event rather than a sex crime — the girl is an obstacle, or a means to an end, and what happens to her is a cleverly icky solution, not a real assault on an actual human child. In Marty Supreme, the climactic emotional moment comes when Marty yells at his pregnant girlfriend that “I have a purpose and you don’t.” He’s a real character who is on a quest to achieve an objective (winning ping-pong games); she’s just a woman, an object made to get fucked and bear children and keep house, not someone capable of wanting or achieving things in her own right. If and when she does want things, those things seem to be, exclusively, "Marty;" she is willing to fake her own domestic abuse (!) to get her hooks in him, but what she actually wants out of her one wild and precious life, other than the chance to nail one specific man that she's already nailing, is never clear.

The movie is sort of, kind of critiquing Marty's cruelty toward the girlfriend — I’m told that the Safdies specialize in “charismatic scumbags you can’t help rooting for,” although I can very much help rooting for Marty — but it can’t let that critique carry any real consequences. Marty still ends up with her at the end of the movie. We still end on him whispering “I love you” to a half-conscious woman, and having some kind of cosmic realization around the birth of his son, with no time or consideration given to the woman, whose “happy” ending is spending the rest of her life with a man who once happily left her to die so that he could go play ping-pong. 

One Battle After Another, likewise, portrays fatherhood as a transformational experience for the male main character, without seeming to recognize that the child in question, a daughter, is a person and not just a means by which men are transformed. 

At its core, One Battle After Another is a story in which a young Black woman named Willa loses her mother, effectively raises herself while her counterculture-casualty white Dad gets high and stays out partying, gets kidnapped by a white supremacist, finds out that the white supremacist is her biological father, and is forced to kill multiple people in order to survive and be reunited with her emotionally absent fake Dad. If this sounds like a fascinating journey for any character to take, I agree with you, which is why it’s puzzling that 80% of the movie’s action centers on the white Dad and his struggle to comprehend things like triggers and they/them pronouns. 

It’s not that Willa doesn’t feature in the movie, exactly. It's that scenes between Willa and the white supremacist always manage to be about the white supremacist; scenes between Willa and her loser Dad always manage to be about her loser Dad. The actual experience of being Willa, and having to forge yourself in a hostile world despite the emotional or physical absence of every adult who was supposed to take care of you, is never dealt with in depth, or at all. Willa is almost never shown alone, in this movie, and when she has scenes with other people, Willa often — like, really, really often; like, so often that it becomes glaring once you notice — does not have lines.

Thus, Ball Smell; not just because of Leonardo DiCaprio’s ratty bathrobe (I have one just like it), not just because of the pronoun jokes or the revolutionary leftists making code words out of their “favorite kind of pussy,” not just because of the silent chorus of neglected comediennes playing Moms and Friends of Moms in the background, not just because the Safdies are so heterosexually allergic to male beauty that they can’t even cast Timothee Chalamet or Robert Pattinson without giving them repulsive little mustaches and frosted tips, but because nothing in these movies suggests a man who spends regular time socializing with women or talking with them about their experiences. Every woman is an obstacle or a plot development or (in Willa's case) a MacGuffin, rather than a person; these are not stories about humanity, they’re stories about an all-male universe in which a few female props have been left lying around. 

How do you solve a problem like the Ball Smell? How do you catch a stink and pin it down? It’s tempting to dismiss it as a sign of immaturity — which, for most of us, it is — and wait for time or responsibility to solve it. But Josh Safdie is 41; Paul Thomas Anderson is 55. Anderson began writing One Battle After Another shortly after his oldest daughter was born, and Safdie has said that Marty Supreme mirrors his own journey to becoming a parent. (Yikes.) 

If fatherhood is a transformative experience that makes men out of boys, it doesn’t show up in these filmmakers’ output, which is still obsessively and narcissistically concerned with the boy-men at the center of the story. And anyway, to say that fatherhood civilizes men is too close to saying that women civilize men, which is not their job. Women are not born grown-up either: Messy women, irresponsible women, immature women, inconsiderate women, all exist. It’s just that they tend to be punished and shamed for that behavior, rather than becoming respected auteurs. 

Being turned off by Ball Smell isn’t about “hating men” — though, when I am put on trial at the Hague for Misandry, I fully expect this post to be used as evidence against me — but about resenting arrogance. Refusing to flush the toilet or put on real pants when you go out in public is, in its own messy way, a flex; it’s refusing to acknowlege a difference between the world and your living room, which is a way of saying that the world is your living room, and that you expect to be made comfortable there. Just as you can increasingly tell the difference between bosses and underlings by the fact that the bosses don’t wear suits, being a slob asserts a subtle hierarchy: There are people who are judged on their appearance and behavior, people who have to make themselves presentable and amenable to others, and then there is you, the person exempt from judgment, who can relax. 

That behavior will persist as long as it is rewarded, and we reward it often. My only hope is that, as our roster of celebrated directors diversifies, Ball Smell will become less ubiquitous; it wouldn’t be so overwhelming if it didn’t so often feel like the only option. There are girls out there, in the world and in the theater, and some of them make movies. That work may eventually change the terms of the conversation. Right now, though, it’s just a breath of fresh air. 

Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another certainly are movies, aren't they? I thought Benicio Del Toro was really good.

Meanwhile: Please enjoy this deeply unprofessional interview about how I got my first byline.

This newsletter does not associate manhood with the presence, or absence, of balls. The term is purely meant to establish what the apartment smells like. It does smell like that, Kevin.