«People there are not mere objects»: «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk» and the catalogue of bodies

Some songs make more sense if you start at the end. «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk» is one of them. For almost its whole length it's a savage satire of dating apps: a character who thinks he's a god goes around blocking anyone who isn't perfect, armed with a list of flaws that makes you cringe on his behalf. And at the very end, just when you can't take one more "you're fat, you're bald", the song changes planet. Literally.

The final verse contains a line that sums everything up: «Y las personas allí no son simples objetos», and people there are not mere objects. That line is the key to the song, and the one that makes sense of the name of the trilogy's first album, which shares its title. This blog already has a post that reads it as a satire of femmephobia and the apps, the one about the planet born from a block, as well as the song's own page. Here I want to walk the other way round: start from that last line and work backwards, to see what it means to turn a person into an object, and why you have to invent a planet to stop doing it.

The line that closes the song

This is how the lyric ends, exactly as published:

Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GayFolk No hay grinder ni aplicaciones, tampoco hay complejos, No hay de qué preocuparse a los que van de discretos, Y las personas allí no son simples objetos. Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GayFolk No hay grinder ni aplicaciones, Se acabaron las preocupaciones.

In plain English: a new planet called GayFolk has been discovered. There's no Grindr there, no apps, and no hang-ups either; those who keep things on the down-low have nothing to worry about; and people there are not mere objects. No Grindr, no apps, no more worries.

Look at the word «simples», mere. The lyric doesn't say that on the planet people aren't objects of desire. That would be something else, and a little sad: desire is part of life, and in such a camp song it would be odd to disown it. It says they aren't mere objects. That they can't be reduced to that. You can want someone and see them as a whole person at the same time. What the planet abolishes isn't desire. It's reduction.

That distinction is exactly the one philosophy draws when it talks about objectification, and we'll come back to it. First, it's worth looking at how the discovery is announced.

A headline with no subject

"New planet called GayFolk discovered." The sentence has no subject. It doesn't say who found it, or when, or with which telescope. It has the precise shape of a newspaper headline: participle, noun, modifier. It's the kind of line you read on the front of the science section over your morning coffee.

That shape, whether or not it was a conscious choice, has a clear effect: it turns a fantasy into news. Not "if only there were a planet", not "I imagine a planet". Discovered. As if it were already there, as if all you needed was to look in the right direction. A passive headline carries the authority of the verified. And that authority is what the song needs so that its utopia sounds less like wishful thinking and more like a fact.

The subjectless passive has another advantage too: anyone can be the one who discovers it. It isn't Mike's planet, or any particular group's. It's a planet waiting for whoever finds it. The trilogy's second album, «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a Gayfolk» (If Only We Could Travel to Gayfolk), picks up exactly that baton: now that it's been discovered, can we go?

How you discover a planet

I like thinking about how planets outside our solar system are actually discovered, because the metaphor fits the song beautifully.

The first planet found orbiting a Sun-like star was announced in 1995. It's called 51 Pegasi b, and it was discovered by the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 2019. Thousands have been confirmed since: in 2022 NASA's tally passed five thousand confirmed exoplanets.

The curious thing is that almost none of them have been seen directly. They're too far away and too faint beside their stars. They're found indirectly. One of the most productive methods is the transit: when a planet passes in front of its star, the light reaching us dips ever so slightly, by a tiny fraction. Astronomers don't see the planet. They see the shadow it casts.

And the planet Gayfolk is discovered the same way. For most of the track, the song doesn't show it. What it shows is its shadow, its negative: the app, the block, the contempt. All the satire in the verses is like that dip in the light that gives something away. If there's a place where all this is so ugly, there must, by contrast, be a place where it isn't. And when the coda finally arrives, the planet is defined precisely by what it lacks: no Grindr, no apps, no hang-ups.

The spec sheet of a body

Now let's go backwards, into the verses. «Eres gordo, eres calvo, / No eres lo que estoy buscando», you're fat, you're bald, you're not what I'm looking for. «Eres viejo y poco dotado», you're old and not well endowed. «Tienes pluma y eres afeminado», you're camp and effeminate. «Eres un abuelo y no estás marcado», you're a granddad and you've got no definition.

Strip away the music and the rhyme and what's left is a list of specifications. Weight, hair, age, size, mannerisms, muscle tone. It's a product spec sheet. Exactly what you'd find in the description of a household appliance: capacity, energy rating, dimensions, finish. The character in the song isn't looking at people. He's comparing models.

And the most unsettling part is how easy it is to recognise. Anyone who has spent time on a dating app has read profiles like this, sometimes more politely, sometimes less. "No fats, no femmes, no over-forties." The song doesn't exaggerate as much as it seems; it just drops the courtesy.

He didn't invent this himself, either. Dating apps, by their very design, tend to present people this way. A photo, a handful of measurable facts, a distance in metres. Grindr, the best known among gay men, launched in 2009 and was built from the start around that grid of faces sorted by proximity. It's practical, no doubt. But any format that presents people as a list of data invites you to treat them as a list of data.

The song pushes that mechanism to the grotesque, and in doing so makes it visible. When someone calls you fat in a song, with a rhyme, it sounds ridiculous. When a profile does it at two in the morning, with "no fats" in the bio, it sounds normal. And it shouldn't.

Seven ways of turning someone into a thing

In 1995 the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum published a much-cited essay, "Objectification", in which she asked what exactly we mean when we say someone is treating another person as an object. Her answer was that there isn't one way but several, and she proposed seven. It's illuminating to run the lyric through that list, because nearly all of them turn up.

The first is instrumentality: using someone as a tool for your own purposes. «Buscando el polvo perfecto», looking for the perfect shag, is exactly that. The other man isn't someone to be with but a means to a specific end, and if he doesn't meet the spec, he's no use.

The second is fungibility: treating someone as interchangeable with others. «¡A todas horas!», round the clock, yells the chorus. There's always another one. If this one won't do, next in the grid. Nobody is unique when there are hundreds just a tap away.

The third is denial of subjectivity: treating someone as though their feelings don't count. «Si no contesto y te bloqueo», if I don't reply and I block you. Not a word, not an explanation. The other person has no right to know anything or to feel anything that matters.

The fourth is denial of autonomy: not treating the other as someone capable of deciding for themselves. Here come «ponte a hacer deporte, ¡Romeo!», go and hit the gym, Romeo, and «vete a llorar al cirujano», go and cry to your surgeon. The character tells the other man what to do with his body to earn a reply. No life is acceptable except the one he'd sign off on.

The remaining three are inertness, violability and ownership: treating the other as passive, as something that can be damaged without consequence, or as something to be possessed. The verses don't go quite that far, though the calm cruelty of «hoy lloras», today you cry, has a touch of violability about it: the other person's pain is a punchline.

Nussbaum drew an important distinction: not all of these are always wrong, and some can occur between equals, with consent and affection. The real harm comes when they pile up and become the only way of looking at someone. That's just what the song says with its «simples objetos». The problem isn't desire. The problem is when there's nothing else.

The god who is also a spec sheet

There's a detail in the lyric that strikes me as very sharp. The character who objectifies everyone else describes himself with a spec sheet too. «Yo soy dios y tú estás desgastado», I'm a god and you're worn out. «Yo soy deportista y un buen macho», I'm sporty and a proper man. He says nothing about what he thinks, what he loves, what makes him laugh. He just lists the attributes that trade well: the body, the sport, the masculinity.

In other words, the one who treats others as objects has already turned himself into one. His self-esteem is made of specifications, which is why he needs to keep comparing. The day he stops being sporty or starts losing his hair, his own spec sheet expires. The word «desgastado», worn out, which he uses as an insult, is waiting for him too, because it's a word for things. People age; objects wear out.

That, I think, is the song's deepest critique. Objectification doesn't only harm the person on the receiving end. It also impoverishes the one doing it, who ends up living himself as a product with a sell-by date.

"Today you cry!"

The chorus has a cry that comes back again and again: «¡Hoy lloras!», today you cry. In the published lyric, the last time it's drawn out, «¡Hoy lloooooraaaaas!», a wail stretched to breaking point.

It's a cruel line, but an ambiguous one. From the character's mouth it's a taunt: today it's your turn to cry, now that I've blocked you. But listen to the whole chorus, with its "round the clock" and its endless hunt, and it starts to sound different. Who's really crying? Maybe the one chasing the perfect shag at all hours and never finding it. Maybe everyone inside the app, the blocker and the blocked. "Today you cry" becomes a collective diagnosis.

The song has that false bottom so typical of the catalogue: a chorus to shout along to and laugh at which, looked at calmly, tells something rather sad. The same happens in «Soy marica sideral» (I'm a Sidereal Queen), where excess is armour, and in «Marica chill» (Chill Queer), which stands up for another way of being on the scene.

The advice from Toledo, and the market

Halfway through the song there's a narrative stretch, almost a monologue, that shifts the tone:

Un buen follamigo que tuve en Toledo hasta que me fui de allí Me dijo sincero: te daré un consejo que yo aprendí aquí Si buscas casarte esta no es la aplicación, Y si no te cuidas tendrás que bajar el listón, No hay más solución.

A good fuck-buddy I had in Toledo, until I left, gave me some honest advice he'd learnt there: if you're looking to get married, this isn't the app for it, and if you don't look after yourself you'll have to lower the bar. There's no other way.

The earlier post on this song already lingered on the line about how everyone comes to the app already in tears. What interests me here is another: "you'll have to lower the bar". It's market talk. The bar is a price, a valuation. If your value drops because you don't look after yourself, you'll have to settle for something worth less. The fuck-buddy's advice is sincere, even affectionate, but it's spoken in the language of supply and demand.

The sociologist Eva Illouz has written a great deal about this. In books such as "Why Love Hurts" and "The End of Love", she shows how relationships have come to resemble a market, with its competition, its constant sense that something better might be out there, and its anxiety about one's own worth. The apps didn't invent that market, but they made it visible and put it in your pocket.

And the narrator's reply is gorgeous: «Yo le dije que eso me parecía deprimente», I told him I found that depressing. He doesn't dispute the facts. He doesn't say the fuck-buddy is wrong about how things work. He says it's depressing. It's the reaction of someone who refuses to accept the rules of the game even while knowing them. And that refusal is the seed of the planet. If this world works like that, and that's depressing, another one will have to be discovered. The fuck-buddy, by the way, isn't the villain of the piece. He speaks from experience and with good intentions, like so many friends who hand you practical tips for surviving a system none of you chose.

An eighteenth-century philosopher on the dance floor

The idea that people shouldn't be treated as mere objects is far older than the apps. Its most famous formulation belongs to Immanuel Kant, who in 1785, in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals", proposed that we treat humanity, in ourselves and in others, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.

The beauty of that sentence lies in the word "merely", which is the same as the song's «simples». Kant didn't say we may never make use of each other. We do it all the time: the baker sells us bread, the driver takes us home, the lover gives us pleasure. What he said is that while we do so, we mustn't forget the other is someone with a life, aims and dignity of their own. That they aren't only the bread, the ride or the shag.

There's something delicious about a camp song, with a chorus that bellows the name of an app, arriving at the same place as an eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher. But it also makes sense. Great moral ideas tend to be simple, and one of the simplest is this: the person in front of you is a person. The song takes three minutes of satire to say it. Kant took a whole book. They're saying the same thing.

"No hang-ups either"

Back to the coda. The first thing to vanish on the planet is the apps. The second is hang-ups. And the link between the two isn't accidental.

A hang-up, in everyday speech, is the feeling that some part of you doesn't measure up. The nose, the belly, the bald patch, the years, the campness. And a good many of those hang-ups are born of comparison, of looking at yourself through the eyes of a spec sheet. The longer you spend somewhere people are ranked by attributes, the more you start ranking yourself that way too.

That's why the planet couldn't have apps and no hang-ups at the same time. Take away the shop window and you take away the need to be permanently on display in it. The verses, with their fat, their bald, their old and their effeminate, are a list of manufactured hang-ups. The coda wipes them out in one stroke.

Then there's the line about the discreet: «No hay de qué preocuparse a los que van de discretos», those on the down-low have nothing to worry about. It's a generous line. All through the song, the "discreet boyfriend" of the chorus is a bit of a joke. But on the planet, anyone who still needs to keep things quiet has nothing to fear. Nobody's going to point at them, because nobody's looking through those eyes.

Why this song names the album

That this is the song chosen to christen the trilogy's first album says a lot about the project. It isn't a romantic ballad or a self-empowerment anthem. It's a fairly brutal satire that only opens up to hope at the very end. The album, and the whole GAYFOLK universe, are born of that movement: look at what hurts, laugh at it and, finally, imagine something else.

Many songs in the catalogue can be read as inhabitants of that planet or as shadows that give it away. «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I Don't Want Another Cushion Boyfriend) turns down another kind of empty relationship. «He creado un novio con inteligencia artificial» (I've Made a Boyfriend with Artificial Intelligence) imagines what happens when the perfect boyfriend is manufactured, the logical conclusion of hunting for the perfect shag. And «Que te mola el cruising» (So You're Into Cruising) deals with another ritual of gay hook-up culture, with a humour of its own.

If you want to explore the whole universe, the best way in is the Planeta Gayfolk page, and every song is on the singles page.

The lyrics are by Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid, the first AI songwriter. The words are his; the music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools.

Who this song is for

For anyone who's been blocked without a word and been left wondering what was wrong with them. For anyone who's looked in the mirror through the eyes of a spec sheet and not liked what they saw. For anyone who's blocked someone over a single detail and, hearing this song, recognised a little of themselves in the worn-out god. For anyone still on the app with no plans to leave, who wants to look at other people differently. For anyone who, like the narrator, has heard the rules of the market and thought: this is depressing. Also for anyone who's never used a dating app and wants to understand why so many friends come out of them with their self-esteem dented. And for anyone who designs technology, because the way we present people on a screen is never neutral: it invites us to see them one way or another.

The planet isn't on any map. But it's discovered the way exoplanets are, by its shadow. And every time someone treats another as a person and not as a mere object, the light dips ever so slightly and the planet comes into view.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk» about? It's a satire of gay dating apps and of the way people are judged on their looks, age or campness. At the end it imagines a planet with no apps and no hang-ups, where people are not mere objects.

What does it mean that people "are not mere objects"? That on planet Gayfolk nobody is reduced to a list of attributes. There can be desire, but each person is seen as someone whole, with feelings and a life of their own, not as a product to be compared and discarded.

How is it related to «Buscando el polvo perfecto»? They share lyrics. This post reads the song from its final verse and the idea of objectification; the post on «Buscando el polvo perfecto» reads it as a satire of femmephobia on the apps.

Who is the fuck-buddy from Toledo? A character in the song. He stands for the voice of experience explaining the rules of the hook-up market. He doesn't refer to any real person.

Who makes this song? Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid, the first AI songwriter. He writes the lyrics and directs the production; the music and vocals are generated with artificial intelligence.