The last acceptable prejudice? Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.
Lou Reed was right. It’s hard being a man. In my mid-Twenties I spent three months living with my family in the mountains of Kabylia. As an analytical tool, that period was incredibly useful. Algeria, by comparison to the West, is a de-sexualised zone. Interactions between men and women are severely curtailed. There are no billboards featuring giant, unobtainable breasts to gaze at on your way to work. After three months devoid of stimuli, I found I no longer even masturbated. Back in London I’d been yanking the thing off round the clock. Out and out obsession with sex wasn’t a default setting, I realised. You needed to be obsessed with it so people in corporations could sell you things. It was all part of the capitalist fun. To have your basest impulses exploited endlessly and without restraint, that’s what was meant by the word: freedom.
I’d rather not live in a Muslim country. My cousin Abdul lives in Algeria and flunked out of school early; now jobless, he’s finding it impossible to marry, which means screwing is indefinitely off the cards. At least his world is ontologically consistent though, at least he knows where he stands. Sat on the tube the other day I noticed one of these new TFL posters that condemns leering. “Unwanted staring is harassment,” the legend ran. Fair enough. One mustn’t stare. Right next to this TFL warning was an advertisement for perfume — I forget the brand. This ad consisted of a young blonde lady, her bikini-clad chest all but bursting out of the frame, her stare set to a merciless come hither. The screaming contradiction might well sum up the predicament of many a Western male today: stare, but whatever the hell you do, do not stare. Be this, but whatever you do, don’t.
The paradox I found myself bound up in on the train brought to mind an online spat from a few years back — a subject I’d given a lecture on in New York last summer. At the tail-end of 2022, climate activist Greta Thunberg was set upon by viral misogynist Andrew Tate. Unprovoked, Tate sent a picture of himself with one of his gas guzzlers, offering to email Thunberg a list of his cars with details as to their respective “massive” emissions. Her response set the internet on fire: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”
Hailed by the commentariat, the phrase soon found unlikely mainstream currency. Imagine for me if you will, the feminised parallel of “small dick energy”. Now, take whatever three-word expression of gendered body shaming you’ve come up with, and imagine it not only finding its way into print at a high-profile newspaper in the year 2022, but being crowned “one of the greatest Tweets in history” by the country’s foremost progressive media outlet. In attempting to equate machismo with climate change denial, the author most famous for introducing the term “mansplaining” into the discourse — Rebecca Solnit — here finds it fit to lean into a chauvinism all her own. The uselessness of attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, as feminist hero Audre Lorde might have it, is casually thrown aside in a moment of point-scoring ideological bloodlust. A sadly familiar tale this last five or 10 years. No, I did not take an especially dim view of Greta’s comeback to Tate — Solnit’s opinion piece on the other hand I found genuinely disturbing. I still do. Given her stature, and given the fact her 2015 Lit Hub essay, 80 Books No Woman Should Read, castigated Hemingway on account of his smearing Scott Fitzgerald in exactly like fashion. She might have been more aware of the harm she was wreaking.
About Tate I know little. Unless I’m trying to sell something or ogling members of the opposite sex from a safe distance, I avoid being online. I try to keep myself out of touch, try to expose myself to as few of these click-ravenous public spats as possible. I’m often tempted to leap into the fray, but the jungle is laden with ideological tripwires — one’s actual opinions seem barely worth the hassle anymore. A cursory glance at Tate’s Wikipedia page suggests the lowest form of human life. A deeper dive leaves me thinking that I probably wouldn’t piss on the guy if he was on fire. By what contemporary progressive metric, I couldn’t help but wonder, does one feel entitled to equate everyone born with a small penis to this uber-pillock?
In an epoch defined by its obsession with the sweeping away of generalisations pertaining to that with which you were born, how does abuse like this end up on the top shelf? For sheer hit count, it’s still the fourth greatest Tweet of all time. If you wanted to turn confused young men wandering hopeless through the spiritual apocalypse of the internet, young men searching desperately for a way to rationalise or displace their ever-swelling superfluity into fully-fledged woman haters, then there are few more optimal ways you could go about doing so than by employing this kind of reactionary double standard. The history of Western civilisation was one bad joke, women were the butt of that joke, therefore, let’s all laugh at the little members.
More meat equals more man. More meat equals dignity, respect, honour and self-assurance. It all has, well, a bit of a Trumpian air about it, wouldn’t you say? The Solnit school of thought here appears as attracted to the source of its resentment as it is repulsed. The old heinousness is to be given a certain amount of free play. Hatred at a healthy dose in a bid to expel it from the community: the way of the scapegoat. A viable target must be selected, ideally someone harmless. In this instance, the small dick community — a community only now, for the first time in history, finding the courage to step out of the shadows and speak its truth — is being utilised as a kind of sponge with which to mop up society’s moral impurities.
The all too natural obsession with penis size proves an obvious fault-line in recent ideological trends. It is to “progressive” idealism what Epstein’s “suicide” was to the concept that our ruling elite are not child-molesting lizard people: a fissure, a glitch in the official narrative. Through this crack, that of guilt free, publicly proud, “sing it from the rooftops one more time Miss Solnit” small penis resentment, we momentarily glimpse the true nature of the beast, the faintly scrutable shadow play of bad faith, reactionary hysteria masquerading as social justice. Identity fetishism run ragged, basically, the very thing which has led us into our current political quagmire. Through its progressive arm, the neoliberal regime finds fullest validation and authority by posturing as the voice of equality and freedom. Questions of race and gender are of course important, but inflamed to the point where they drown out discourse centred around class, they wind up producing a kind of narcissistic counter-solidarity. Everyone reaching for their own personalised crusade, everyone obsessed with immutable characteristics — but only when it suits them.
Unsurprisingly, Miss Solnit got back on her soapbox to denounce the election of America’s irreverent strong man. She had lost none of her gift for aggravating cognitive dissonance. In her article she wrote of the “extraordinary balance of idealism and pragmatism, the joy, the generosity” of Kamala Harris’s coalition building. As a Muslim, I don’t quite see it that way. I see a party posturing as the representatives of moral hygiene while aiding and abetting an excruciatingly visible genocide. That was always going to be a tough sell: we’re the party of fairness, of diversity and inclusion… unless the people in question are a strategic inconvenience, in which case, bombs away. Maybe, some credit is due actually, after all they did achieve the impossible: they managed to make the touchy-feely convicted felon look like the one in possession of a shade of integrity. She then described the failed candidate as “supremely qualified”. The one hoop of qualification Kamala had to jump through — a primary — she hadn’t. She’d been anointed despite a track record of 0% electability, utterly devoid of democratic process, then attempted to sell herself as a bulwark against a lack of democratic process. Stare, but whatever you do, don’t stare…
Then of course we have the usual victim blaming where the “crisis in masculinity” is concerned. Apropos nothing, she reminds us that Silicon Valley — to whom she allocates a third of the blame for Trump’s success — was created by “white men”. The guy who comes to empty my wheelie bin once a week is also white. By whacking him and Elon with the same stick, all you’re doing is pushing them closer together, providing them with common ground. That even now, after an era defining drubbing, the self-defeating uselessness of this mode of attack still remains elusive to certain people is astounding.
It is the “crisis in masculinity” that leads us to the Donald, apparently. The “crisis in masculinity”, not the Democratic Party’s sponsored and curated usurpation of class politics with a self-glorifying, divisive fixation on identity. No, the now undeniably very real Bernie-to-Trump pipeline simply gave birth to itself. Instead of acknowledging the writing on the wall — that Western liberalism, in a kind of decadent, echo-chamber induced trance this past 10 years, has allowed itself to become dangerously unmoored from reality — commentators such as Solnit persist with more of the same alienating drivel, unaware or in total denial of their part in the symbiotic expansion of intolerance and scorn on both sides of the political spectrum this last 10 years.
Men have always been in control. They’ve always been largely superfluous as well where reproduction is concerned — there’s always been a superabundance of male chaff. Hence sending them off to die in their droves fighting this war or that. What else are we supposed to do with all of these blokes? Maybe that feeling has never been so acute as it is in the here and now? War is generally less of a thing. The provider, the protector, the patriarch; all notions fast becoming the stuff of nostalgia.
A long and bitter confrontation with our disposability is on the cards. Hence the explosion in male suicide. Hence Trumpism. The Don isn’t busy rubbing salt into the wounds of male redundancy. When I take a look around me, the lads generally seem to be falling apart: jobless, almost universally depressed, semi-homeless, furiously alone, minds ravaged by incessant pornography and drug abuse. Meanwhile liberal media outlets — which erroneously seem to believe that they speak for the man in the street — have been busy churning out articles for the last 10 years about the toxic masculinity of sky scrapers and the like.
And what have we got to show for it on the Left? The reduction of culture to a never-ending round of trauma Top-Trumps; a guy who goes on telly claiming illegal aliens eat cats and dogs is in charge of the Empire; and these little signs on the tube that remind you “staring is bad”, signs that jostle for attention with images of breasts begging you to stare at them — that’s like offering someone with a brain tumour a band-aid. The Democratic Party of America deserves all the loathing in the land. By gaming identity, by placing undue emphasis on it in a bid to retain power without having to betray their corporate sponsors, they have opened up questions of identity to undue enmity amongst the population at large. By forcing this fraud on people, they have inflamed the very issues they purported to solve. The one silver lining of the election result might be that it finally brings the curtain down on identitarian orthodoxy, that we finally get a Left that sticks up for the proles, instead of one that insists on trying to patronise them into submission. A Left more concerned with the size and shape of a man’s wallet than what he keeps stuffed down the front of his jeans. I doubt it, but god knows more of the same is no longer an option.
Lias Saoudi is the frontman of Fat White Family and the Moonlandingz, and the co-author of Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure
FatWhiteFamily 
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SubscribeSo what? The market goes up and down and really down when the “Wall Street insiders” decide to get really greedy and screw everyone else. I am in the market but this is what needs to happen: a national and global reset, and the “wealth managers” better start earning their money.
If Liberation Day results in surpluses rather than deficits, the dollars will continue to put into Wall Street. It could be the saving of them. Trump had to take action to turn around the debt and deficit situations. I’m not sure though if Liberation Day is the right action.
Everything we know about Trump tells us that he has zero appetite/ability to play the Long Game. He’s driven by whims and grudges, yes, but also by a desperate desire always to be able to present himself as the Winner. Thus I conclude there is zero chance that he will stay the course with this policy, which even on the most optimistic assessments would take years to pay off (if people really are going to be persuaded to onshore/reshore American manufacturing, just how long will it take to get those factories designed/permitted/up and running, particularly if you are asking the companies involved to make major capital allocation/investment decisions at a time when the bottom has just fallen out of the global economy precisely because of this new tariff policy ?).
Just watch.
If any of us had a nickel for every time the experts have pronounced Wall Street as in “free fall” and certain not to recover, well, we could buy a lot of stock and be rich as Croesus. The market is as skittish as a Congressman in November by its very nature. Please calm down.
Interesting to note the currency fluctuations as well.
Scott Bessant spelled it out on the All In podcast – main street over wall street. Tariffs is one part of the 3 arrow plan. It is a more sophisticated approach than Liberation Day optics would suggest. That said, pulling multiple levers for success always risky. I console myself that there is some serious practitioner firepower in this presidency (Bessant, Wright, Lutnick). I’m hoping they can pull it off. They could hardly do worse than the political and academic types, could they?!?!
Watching closer it’s discernible Bessent uncomfortable answering questions on this strategy. Luttnick previously on the record detesting tariffs and saying never work. The sycophancy may not last as long as folks think.
If he’s truly serious in the ‘intent’ to re-shore to help the Little Guy and stuff the asset holding parasites then there is a nobility to what Trump is trying to do. Certainly some Leftists will grasp and appreciate that even if they dislike alot of the other Trump tripe. Problem is it’s just too early to conclude how much is that or how much a massive vanity project? The fact he keeps encouraging deals seems to suggest ‘deals’ more interest to him than fundamental long term reshoring. He’s not going to be around in the White House to see the fruits of fundamental reshoring so something doesn’t quite tally.
As everyone knows a key immediate issue is how much pain for US consumers will this create and how long will they put up with it because they really believe in the potential reward later. Again too early to say. Conjecture on both will rage for the time being.
As regards unintended consequences – Trump already seems slightly nervous he might unleash coordinated retaliative action from others. And he may have prodded others out of their slumber too to the effect the US actually weakens its influence. Trump’s retributive emotion then could have this spiral well beyond trade. And then that further crashes Business confidence. This isn’t going to remain contained just to tariff and investment decisions for long.
And Xi will be pondering whether the time and excuse for stronger action on Taiwan is more rapidly approaching. Taiwan has been clobbered by Trump too and that can’t aid the cause of resistance to China. Other US allies have been battered. Serious tension in the South China Sea would further shock the world economy, although again medium/long term might have some benefits in similar fashion to Trump’s tariffs. But in the short term does it all burn the house down?
So far, I haven’t seen a discussion of Trump’s political calculation here.
In the short term, markets will drop and prices will rise for consumers, and Trump will be blamed. One question is how long the “short term” lasts before/if long term benefits start to accrue from this tariff strategy?
Already mid-terms aren’t too far away, and it’s less than four years to the general election. The Republicans might lose their slim legislative majority at the midterms if voters are feeling the financial squeeze. It’s also possible the US economy might only start to improve as the 2028 election approaches and Trump’s successor Republican candidate will not reap the benefits at the polls.
Yep bits of it seem politically v daft and GOP will go into panic mode, esp given the recent elections in Wisconsin and Florida already showed big swings away from Trump.
I suspect a theory may build that Trump going to ameliorate the political risk by election interference and deployment of tactics from all angles possible now he’s his sycophants in all the key jobs (bar the US Fed Reserve of course where his rage will build). A test of US democracy yet to come perhaps. I have more faith in the US system and it’s Constitution but one can see what could be coming given he’s already tried to overturn an election he lost by 7m votes.
Classic Oligarch tactic to erode billionaire wealth and shrink wealth inequality between the 1% and the masses. Like tax cuts, everybody knows a booming stock market helps the “Millionayahs and Billionayahs” the most.
All the Labour Marxists must be horrified!
You forgot about the millions who hold those assets in retirement accounts and pension plans, you are dreaming if you think this is the way to deal with inequality, you ain’t seen nothing yet, wait until stagflation kicks in , jobs disappear and businesses go under. The Trump show is about to become the nightmare on main street.
Got it. So low taxes only benefit the rich but stock gains are universally shared. Thanks Dave!
No problem with taxes as long as the money is well spent on education, infrastructure and other needs of the country. The US really needs to look at the overcostly, inefficient and profiteering health care system. Way too much money is wasted going to insurance companies for instance, that’s just one thing.
A tariffs is literally just a tax on international corporations. You either tax individuals, domestic corporations or international corporations.
I don’t understand the argument that only tariffs “pass on costs to consumers” while high taxes on domestic companies don’t inflate costs.
Imagine the money being made by people with deep pockets right now!
How so?
Flipping blue chip holdings that dive and bounce. Harvesting strategically shorted stocks. Hedge fund transfers. Currency trades. Throwing vast reserves of cash at opportunity bargains. And god knows what in the crypto quarters of the market.
The digitalisation of the world’s markets means you don’t have to shove diamonds up your ass and bolt anymore.
Yes, there will be some people making money out of this mess. But in some cases when big changes like this occur, the money moves from one person’s pocket to another person’s. In this case the vast majority of the trillions of dollars of money just disappeared.
Money is just an abstraction, so no real wealth vanished. But money does real wealth creation, so we will likely all lose out on a lot of economic growth. The future was a lot brighter before last Wednesday.
Trump has implemented radical left policies that Corbyn or Sanders could only dream of doing!
Just like the political left would never have gone for Brexit, they would never have gone for thus either.
An element of radical Left always anti-EU. Corbyn/McDonald weren’t great Remainers, and if we go back to likes of Benn there was a considerable Left tradition on this. The lumping all Left into one amorphous lump misses this a bit I think.
Thus I also think an element of the radical Left would have gone for some of what Trump is doing. Which is one of the great ironies and paradoxes. The radical Left likes chaos and revolutionary atmosphere/environment.
That’s why I said political left, though it’s probably not the best phrase to have used. Corbyn, despite his own personal beliefs, never took Labour to a position of supporting Brexit despite it having some clear ‘left’ aspects, which is the point I was trying to make. It took a ‘right’ party, in no small part voted for by the working class, to force a referendum.
Re: the paradox, we think of the political spectrum as a line, but it’s really a circle with an opening. The negativity of both extremities of Right and Left keep it from joining.
“Today it was announced that Opec+ is set to ramp up oil production dramatically, and, as a result, oil prices have crashed”
If there is a global recession then price of other raw materials will also crash. So I’d say
“Russia, hardly hit, seems to be onside,”
seems unlikely.
China, as the workshop of the world, is also going to be hit hard so I wouldn’t be sure about
“may be able to absorb much of the pain”
No-one knows how this will play out.
Having just read the Rapley article, I’d really like it if Unherd hosted a debate or discussion between him and Pilkington on this subject, since their analyses diverge quite drastically (though I consider Pilkingtons analysis superior almost every time).
Well, as a holder of a portfolio of shares and keen private investor, this has been painful.
But I choose to listen Warren Buffett who always implored investors not to panic and hold tight through these things. There are some good discounts to be had in such times; opportunities among the destruction.
Onwards.
Not really I suspect. If you’ve held the investments any length of time you’ll be sitting on huge gains from the US stock market which have only very partially been given up – i.e. still well ahead. These are the sort of problems you want – better than most alternatives. And yes, there may be some opportunities emerging.
It’s hard not to see the US stock market as being in a massive bubble for the past few years – most recently in the AI craze. Housing bubbles still persist everywhere.
But it’s high time someone called time on the financial model of the last 30 years where governments and central banks have always acted to prop up financial markets and assets – thus making them ever more expensive and excluding large groups of people from participating. Sadly, it won’t be the Wall Street operators who suffer the most here.
If Trump blows this whole thing apart and delivers the necessary “hard reset” to the system (whether accidentally or not), this may well be a good thing in the end, however painful the transition is. Someone has to eventually. I’ve felt we (in the West) have been living in an economic fool’s paradise for at least the past 30 years.
Agree with elements of this. Your key point for me though is reference to who may ‘suffer the most here’. Short/medium term it’ll not be the v rich to any really discernible degree and in not distant future alot of folks I think will notice that. The WWF Trumpian rhetoric bit out ahead of the reality coming isn’t it, so once that blows through…
The rich will always f**k the poor. Until the poor become big and ugly enough to f**k the rich. The bubble has been inflated so far, and for so long, that I think a violent catharsis might almost be inevitable now.
Buffett has been accumulating cash for the past year, at last count he was holding over 300 billion. We have to assume he has also shorted several overvalued stocks. He has giving several warnings about overvaluations and destructive Trump policies. It’s only beginning as the tariff war spreads , recession begins, unemployment rises and inflation sets in from all the tariffs and lower dollar. If anyone believes that companies will suddenly close factories in Vietnam or elsewhere and move them to Wisconsin, they are dreaming in technicolor, because the costs of new factories, infrastructure and labor in the US is much higher regardless of tariffs. Companies will sit back and wait for the investment climate to improve before making any long term investment decisions. In the meantime, prices will rise thanks to the tax on consumers. The Trump experiment will be a total failure, this will be obvious in the next 12 months as the economy tanks. Of course, he will try to deflect the blame to the federal reserve for not doing enough, and his supporters will blindly believe it
Didn’t Buffet bale out some months ago? Saw what was coming perhaps?
It’s no surprise lots of asset holders now suddenly waking up to who they helped gain the White House. All the WWF schtick not so pretty now?
This is the sort of sober analysis that maks this journal worth the subscription.
Not just an impartial reading of events but, as the Prayer Book uses the word in its old sense an ‘indifferent’ one. A very rare and precious thing indeed.
Perhaps the issue is whether the ‘sober analysis’ as prevalent in the White House?
And economics can both be influenced by the classic ‘animal spirits’ and longer term thinking on big investment decisions. The reshoring Trump hopes he’ll stimulate (if one can assume he has some coherency to his thinking) is not going to happen quickly. The scale of investment decisions mean they won’t be rushed. In meantime ‘animal spirits’ will prevail and generating panic and uncertainty usually not good for more than a small minority.
> Wall Street is the loser from ‘Liberation Day’
I think this is kind of the point. Wall Street since basically 2008ish has made money not by producing things but by playing financial games increasingly removed from reality and more and more at the expense of their fellow citizens. They have been aided and abetted by a government that is desperate to ensure nothing bad happens so they can stay in power. The fact of the matter was that in ’08 there was correction needed, the politicians and “experts” were too focused on “the economy” as an abstract mathematical model, and then there has been constant efforts to avoid the reckoning thats been due since then. But it couldn’t be avoided for ever and so now we must pay the piper with over 10 years of interest, and the reality is coming home that most of the “wealth” that has been built over the past 20 or so years is actually just fancy spreadsheet games.
Basically the security blanket that many have been using to convince themselves things are fine has been torn away and the stark reality of the conditions for the average American has been revealed and can’t be denied any longer by hiding between fancy statistics and complicated jargon from “the experts”
I have no idea how this will play out, but in its apparent willingness to prioritise Main Street over Wall Street, the Trump administration is already a vast improvement over preceding administrations, Democratic and Republican.
It will likely lead to increased prices for US consumers in the short term. If it also means that manufacturing jobs and capacity return once more to the US, then strategically it is an intelligent and possible essential move. Whether incomes then rise enough, and quickly enough, to offset the price increases will likely determine who wins the next election.
‘Apparent’ being the debatable point SD.
So we have Trump looking to cut healthcare and social security for millions, increase the price of their groceries and find a way to enable tax cuts for Billionaires. Quite a smart cocktail that.
It may be that he genuinely thinks he’s going to create lots of jobs for Americans (albeit US labour market is tight already so quite who is doing the jobs? Immigrants?), but it’s not how it’s going to feel for some time for many. And he doesn’t need many to switch sides to lose Congress in 20mths. Suspect panic will build in GOP. Even before the tariffs the recent elections had shown significant swing away from them.
Only the terminally deluded could hope that Wall Street’s Financialisation & Unproductive Assets Class, which has serially f**ked Main Street USA for several decades now, is going to respond to having vast chunks of their virtual wealth obliterated overnight by investing whatever real money they turn out to be worth…in the long-term, very modest returns available – and then only possibly – from any slow, substantial, strategic rejuvenation of American domestic industry.
These people are vicious jackals in rented suits, who would boil Joe Sixpack’s children for soap if they thought it might help their slippery pretend-money slide into – and out of – the next Ponzi grift a little faster. The notion that ordinary worker wages and incomes will be allowed by either their or Trump’s kind to rise ‘quickly enough’ to offset inflation…is less wishful thinking than ‘useful idiot’ intellectual negligence.
Wall Street is not going to rescue the US economy or the US workforce from this act of suicidal economic self-mutilation. It will be too busy kicking everyone else down and trampling over them in the race to be first out the US economic exit. One of course doesn’t wish these investment bank CEOs, venture capitalists and hedge fund managers any more physical ill-harm than one would want to see befall any other greedy, nasty, pretend-money industrial imposter – health insurance fund bosses, for example. But the next six months is very likely to see the hatred of Wall Street from Main Street USA reach pre-1917 Russia levels.
For the first time a second American civil war doesn’t seem like such a hysterically undegraduate impossibility. Or maybe a second War of Independence, only this time as an attempt by the people to escape the tyranny of their own elected government.
Trump has just shattered the precarious hand-to-mouth subsistence economics that already immiserates the daily lives of vast chunks of his own (already dwindling) base, UnHerders. Think about the impact of that final oligarchic betrayal for a second – without your ideological blinkers on.
Oh, bless..
meh
Those financial games were of course facilitated by money creation after 2008 and the pandemic. After the GFC showed that the economic expansion produced by financial games, prior to 2008, essentially wasn’t real. But all that money is still in the economy.
For example, the M2 money supply in the US jumped from 15 to 20 trillion during the pandemic. Although some of that money might evaporate after a stock market crash due to margin calls, and what not, I think a lot of excess liquidity still has to go somewhere. I also wonder if central banks will start QE (printing money) again in case of a recession, re-inflating the bubbles once again.
So I suppose that if we really want to get rid of the ‘everything bubble’, central banks have to remain hawkish as well. Or the government has to redistribute money towards main street. But Trump is not a tax guy.
Right on!
Gets it just about right.