Women have sex with WBE because they want to read about it later in his blog. (Credit: Getty)
You don’t half find some bollocks on Substack. Its millions of writers range from intrepid and brilliant to derivative and shite, with a heavy skew to the latter among the moony autofiction types who infest the blogsite. Thousands of women post obsessively and badly about their fraught romantic lives; these Substackistas gesture grandly towards feminist theory but always just end up writing a diary. Their male equivalents are no better, but tend to plump for outrage rather than solidarity; their topics are not dating but edgelord politics and nihilism.
Substack’s most compelling writer is a sickening cockatrice of the two types, filing bleakly post-moral missives from the trenches of tortured male sexuality. The Worst Boyfriend Ever, for it is he, writes long, granular accounts of his actual sexual conquests. Almost every post features a new woman or five; some are afforded a separate “Slut Review”, while most appear as comedy episodes in broader tales of his travels. He is a self-described “retarded horny clown”, an “awkward antisocial sensitive young freak”, a cheater and a rapist and a racist who variously claims that his blog is “fiction btw” and all completely “real”. He is one of the most popular voices on the site, regularly in the top-30 blogs in the fiction category, but you will feel like you need a shower after reading him.
If WBE is real, then what we can glean about him is as follows: he’s 27 and white; he used to live in Seattle and now sleeps in his van, roaming around the West Coast and doing lots of drugs and having sex with lots of women who read his Substack. He went to college, and for a time worked in marketing. He’s a dork: he compares himself to a character from the anime film Neon Genesis Evangelion and litters his posts with weebish screenshots and memes. His homeless, druggy, itinerant lifestyle means that, despite his frequent and intimately described attempts, he is “literally too weak to rape now”. His body count, consensual or otherwise, is in the seventies and rising. He has ex-girlfriends, despite the handicap of a “somewhat recessed” jaw. He regularly solicits sex with prostitutes. He loves using the n-word. He hates himself.
WBE is sometimes very funny and sometimes fairly moving but mostly just shocking. He’s fascinating in the way that only three-car pile-ups can be. Men read him because of the vicarious thrill of watching him live out their own suppressed ids. Women have sex with him because they want to read all about it later in a blog post; they hope he’ll describe them not as the 99% of women he “fucks” in the back of his van (“Fat Ginger Bitch Chicago”; a “tiny little corpse”; “objects”) but the 1% for whom he holds sentimental candles, like a woman called Celine who seems to have a personality. In reality very few escape humiliation; they lie on a spectrum from fuckable (mostly Asians, ideally willing to larp being racist or based or say “rape isn’t real” to amuse him) to unfuckable (like the “ugly autistic retarded BPD former mental patient” he scams out of $2,000).
He might be an ironic construction: the daydream and release valve for a real writer conducting an experiment on the boundaries of permissible speech. But I think he’s real: he splices his posts with actual pictures of hotel rooms, drinks and dating profiles mentioned in his writing; he shows the women he sleeps with, sometimes anonymised via AI renderings, sometimes not. For this reason, and because of his well-documented appearances at a smattering of disastrous LA readings, I believe the Worst Boyfriend Ever walks among us — a real Adderall fiend, a real rapist, a real vessel of porn-sick Zoomer chaos. If so, he should be in prison; either way, it’s hard not to rubberneck.
WBE deserves scrutiny because he is every Gen Z preoccupation metastasising in the spirit of one raving man. He is a pornsick, blog-based Clavicular, drenched in the aesthetics of the alt-Right, who has clambered from the gutter of 4chan and Reddit to scare the hoes on pseudo-literary Substack. He takes edgelordism offline, walks the walk. Rape jokes become actual rape: “All the stories are real but I call them fiction, because they’re so dark,” he writes, meaning that when he writes that he “had to wrestle [women] down pry their legs apart and even once contend with tears in their eyes” he is confessing. His biggest fanboys wave these problems away with appeals to personas and artistic license — but if we take him on his word, these assaults actually happened.
Obviously, this notoriety is good marketing: his blog’s success rests partly on flirtation with legality. Last spring he self-published a first book based on his blog; he has a real agent and real liability, and is publishing what he himself claims to be real evidence. We have become so used to men in public life obfuscating and denying and reframing their misdeeds; maybe all they needed to do was to claim radical, picaresque authenticity, write about their rapes in romans à clef. But for WBE, the jig might soon be up. In one post, he writes that an ex-girlfriend has warned him of a lawyer collecting women’s testimonies for a “Class Action Fuck You Lawsuit against me & my beautiful artistic expressions”. He fears being banned from Substack; it is his livelihood, and he survives on cash and favours from fans. For many readers, keeping up with this baddest of boyfriends is about seeing whether he’ll get away with it.
WBE has captured an important cultural moment. He embodies an overcorrection of the progressive consensus of the past decade; he is living proof that its tools of cancellation and shame are now completely blunted. Liberal feminism and ubiquitous pornography were always uneasy bedfellows, and inevitably porn — which tramples all humanity in its pursuit of orgasm — won out. So it is that a decade on from #MeToo, one of the most-read underground writers is boasting about how he “struggled” with one woman “for several hours, until her wrists were ‘really sore’ from being held down by me as I unsuccessfully tried to rape her”. The fact is that fans find these vignettes refreshing; one commenter under a rival Substacker’s takedown writes WBE “shines like a beacon of hope in this endless sea of oestrogen and … feminist monolithic culture we find ourselves in”. Some women comment things like “you’re a rapist and you should die”; others arrange to meet WBE and shag him. His blog chronicles the fag-end of ultra-permissive sex positivity: in the dying days of the fourth wave, all we’re left with is lots of terrible, demeaning and dangerous hookups, slurs and pills and Japanese brothels.
This backlash is hitting the literary world too. Literary culture has lately abandoned its gonzo male rebels in favour of austere and right-on writers like Sally Rooney, with her schoolmarmly moral absolutes. Her style is remarkably similar to WBE’s: arid, straightforward, unbeautified — but a stultifying complacency about sexual politics makes it hopelessly boring. In the eyes of his admirers, WBE is here to remedy literature’s overfeminisation with a new, poisonous irony that not only defies hyperliberalism but laughs in its po-face: “I’ve never fucked a girl with so many tattoos… beside my sister. Half-joking. Truth is my sister has a lot of tattoos too and it makes me sad. But at least she’s White.” If masculinity was castrated by post-#MeToo party lines, then blogs in the Substack bro ecosystem (Delicious Tacos is another big name) are drops of water in the desert for long-muzzled men.
For 10 or so years, punky young men couldn’t say “retard”. Now that the post-2020 backlash is upon us, they can — but they still want to shock. That’s how you get WBE defending his “freedom” to say the n-word, bragging that he’ll write it 30 times before starting a post. That’s also how you end up with his best but most appalling passages, about soliciting then getting robbed by transsexual prostitutes in the Philippines, or seducing the sister of the already-cuckolded boyfriend of a reader stricken with cancer. These instalments shock us not only because they are horrible, but because they remove the stabilisers of qualifying ethical commentary — guilt or redemption — that we’re used to. No force holds our hands and shows us This is Bad; WBE rarely shows regret.
We — I — may want this stuff to be rubbish; the biggest problem is that it’s not. When a masseuse offers sexual services, WBE bemoans too much distraction from his craft (sitting in a cafe on his laptop); he adds: “make it snappy you fucking jappy! She wasn’t japanese she was filipino.” He warns her off his prostate “because im not fucking gay” before she “oil[s] up my beautiful white naked body”. These episodes cross several moral lines, but that doesn’t make the writing bad. On several metrics, his writing is in fact good: it has earned many, many readers; it is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny; it is very difficult not to continue. WBU plumbs the outer limits of autofiction: how will a schmaltzy and tired genre respond when an exciting interloper is a villain? How will we?
My suspicion is that this rightward Substack jumpscare will burn itself out: WBE’s nihilism is poisoning himself as much as everyone else, and like many in his coterie of writerly dirtbags his yelps for attention are shot through with borderline suicidal shame (Christian conversion incoming). His downfall can only be self-inflicted: WBE won’t be banned; he can’t be cancelled. Like all internet edgelords he doesn’t give a toss about his critics, those he claims never to read yet cites relentlessly. They are merely “jealous miserable snobs”. He hates himself more than we ever could; he is “completely fucking alone”; he will probably be undone by substances and his unbearable inability to connect with other people. Until then, he’ll be the patron saint of a generation — my generation — reared on the sex-with-everyone-all-the-time spirit of pornography then neutered by progressivism, and now exalting in its own sniggering degradation after years in the wilderness. The Worst Boyfriend Ever will never make it to a university syllabus — but he doesn’t need to. All the students will have read him anyway.
