Everyone cheered. Daedone was the charismatic founder of OneTaste, a business which hoped to provide “one billion orgasms” to women and believed the sexual force of orgasmic mediation would change the world. It was the same year they had launched the “Nicole Daedone Intensive”, a course that cost $36,000 and involved hearing some of Daedone’s advice and being given a few assignments. There was a tacit understanding that devotees would “do whatever” they could to pay. Daedone considered herself a sexual prophet, but there was a slow distrust building in her community. Based on the surrounding tactics of Silicon Valley, her start-up scaled, going global, and as her sales tactics grew more vicious, followers were leaving who felt violated and sexually exploited.

“When you can own your ultimate taboo,” she told the cheering crowd that day, “what can anybody do to you?” It was a line delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she was untouchable. Even after the FBI began investigating her and her face appeared in a scathing Netflix documentary, Daedone continued hosting public demonstrations in Los Angeles. But last June, the taboo couldn’t save her: she and her chief sales executive, Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges — found guilty of coercing followers into sex and work by exploiting their deepest vulnerabilities.

Such exploitation seems obvious in retrospect. Beyond the crazy amounts of money OneTaste asked for, there was the strangeness of the practice itself: women lying half-naked, legs butterfly-open, in a room full of strangers, while men, often strangers, stroked their clitorises according to a ritualized technique. Not only would this transform the energy of the receiving woman, but she was supposed to transmit that energy to whoever was watching. You were told off if people in the room didn’t feel you. Often these were rooms full of men, showing up for a free demo session. 

A new book, Empire of Orgasm, written by the Bloomberg reporter, Ellen Huet, who first exposed the company’s inner workings, reveals the depth of Daedone’s deeper philosophy towards sexual relationships. At times, the philosophy bordered on rape apologia. Men were encouraged towards the practice of “skillful violation” and women towards “aversion practice,” which means having sex with people you don’t want to for spiritual growth, or vice versa. Many of her followers were survivors of sexual abuse, as was Nicole, and she taught them that “arousal” was the cure for trauma. Nicole said once in a lecture, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100%. Because then there’s nothing to rape”. Physical violence and domestic abuse was encouraged because of the “yin” and “yang” of male and female energy. Whatever was needed to preserve your “Divine Feminine”.

A young lesbian couple at the center of the trial were split up, made essentially indentured servants, and forced to become the sexual “aides” of Reese Jones, the Silicon valley venture capitalist whose millions funded OneTaste. He was also Nicole’s boyfriend. This happened regularly to women who joined. Daily blowjobs were assigned to many women as “aversion therapy” to “help their spiritual growth”. When colleagues fell out, they were told to take off their trousers and receive “the practice”. Nicole persuaded a man in chronic agonizing pain to leave his girlfriend, a key witness who later sued OneTaste for sexual assault, by instructing him “to give his money to the feminine”. Devotees gave tens of thousands to pay for Daedone’s courses, often going into extreme debt and falling out with family members. Daedone told them money was a “scarcity hex”. Such grim stories are rife within the OneTaste universe.

More from this author

Why women love Tracy Anderson

By Lily Isaacs

But not everyone is convinced of Daedone’s malevolence. A fervent group of followers — “Team Nicole” — remain steadfast in support of her. They showed up every day to the trial. In fact, the certain fans’ behavior, like harassing the judge, superimposing a swastika on the Justice Department’s logo, posting a witness’s bikini photos online, and making faces in court, was considered so zealous that it might have impacted the conviction itself.  They seem to have put this behind them, and continue to post to Daedone’s 40,000 followers on Instagram. This week alone they’ve posted five of Nicole’s teachings about erotic power, and a video where Nicole refers to “some very public, challenging, things happening in my life”.

They post advertisements for a new, more low-key iteration of orgasmic meditation called “women over dinner” and for the new OneTaste organization, “Eros platform”, which shares regular videos of Nicole and Rachel’s teachings. Women who “stand with Nicole” host podcasts on the page. They describe themselves as “erotic artists” and “erotic nuns”. Nicole is still front and center on the “Eros Platform” website; and they still host regular OM demos and courses. In their description of Nicole there is no mention of her conviction, but sometimes, on Instagram, they post direct dispatches from Nicole in prison. When Charlie Kirk died, Daedone wrote in praise of a man “tried by fire to purify his heart”. The caption had the hashtag #eroticjustice. 

Why do these people still believe nothing was wrong? Huet offers a compelling reading of the mechanisms of coercion; how intimacy, trauma, and longing were used to bind people to Daedone long after the harm had become undeniable. But there is another answer that feels harder to face: Big Tech has warped our idea of sex and freedom so completely that nothing about OneTaste seemed, to its believers, to cross a boundary. The cult logic didn’t feel like a cult logic; it felt like a natural extension of what the digital world had already taught them to expect from desire.

The arguments Daedone and Cherwitz offered in their defense were straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook. When arrested, they hired the same lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Keith Raniere; but unlike those men, Daedone and Cherwitz insisted they were being persecuted for innovating. They once sold themselves as sexual liberators, framing their orgasmic gospel as a kind of feminist therapy in the wake of Me Too — yet now they cried “cancel culture” and portrayed themselves as victims of a prudish, censorious state. Money from OneTaste loyalists funded sympathetic coverage in right-wing outlets lamenting the “criminalization of sex”, and their lawyers insisted to the New York Post that the government was punishing consensual acts because it feared female pleasure.

It was the same rhetorical maneuver deployed across the tech-sex economy whenever regulation or scrutiny arrives: any critique becomes moral panic; any boundary becomes censorship; any evidence of harm becomes an unfortunate side-effect of progress. And the unsettling parallel isn’t just rhetorical but literal: as Silicon Valley was building its world, OneTaste was building its own. They grew in tandem, in the same location, guided by the same ideological currents: frictionlessness, optimization, disruption, the belief that human attachment is a system that can be hacked. While tech platforms were reinventing connection and desire at scale, just a few miles downtown, OneTaste was constructing an embodied version of the same fantasy: that sexuality could be engineered and sold.

Many of OneTaste’s first joiners were Silicon Valley engineers. Huet points out that “in this spiritually optimized culture, it wasn’t weird to meditate; it was weird to have never tried it”. Non-monogamy was everywhere, and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone reading The Ethical Slut. “Against that backdrop”, she writes “a mindful clitoral -stroking practice wasn’t strange at all. Orgasmic mediation for a richer, more connected, happier life? Sure, why not?” 

Suggested reading

Are effective altruists more horny?

By Mary Harrington

One journalist for Gawker, who went to OneTaste’s 2015 conference OMX realized as much. “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies,” she wrote “but the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley”. OneTaste turned orgasm into a subscription product, Silicon Valley investors treated it like another life hack, its followers believed they were buying transcendence. Tim Ferris, the king of the life hack, wrote a chapter about OM in his book, The Four Hour Body. Sex, in this form, could be both optimized and commercialized. For men and women alike, women’s bodies became tools for personal upgrade; the site where higher living might be extracted and optimized. Sex, in this formulation, wasn’t intimate or relational; even if it was spiritual, it was still a system that could be monetized. And once you start looking at sex in these economic terms, you realize OneTaste wasn’t an aberration at all. It was simply one branch of a much larger project: the slow remaking of desire by the ideology of tech.

Because if Daedone built a Silicon Valley for the female orgasm, the male counterpart has been growing in plain sight. The corruption isn’t confined to a single cult but runs through the entire tech-sex ecosystem: porn platforms built for infinite scroll, OnlyFans’ gig-ified intimacy, the roboticized fantasies of the consumer-sex industry, and the loneliness that digital life quietly enforces. All of it culminates, in its most grotesque form, in the world Harper’s recently reported on: the universe of gooning.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad” reveals a community of men whose lives revolve around masturbating to online porn in pursuit of “goonstate”: a condition of total psychic collapse, a kind of orgasmic ego-death, achieved only by edging for hours or days. It is, uncannily, the same promise that Daedone offered, transcendence and becoming more than human through orgasm — even if the route there is vastly different. One gooner porn producer told Harper’s, “we humiliate them for the fact that gooning… is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their lives spending money on femdom clips”. It is an unsavory annihilation. As OneTaste wraps its pursuit in the language of surrender and female empowerment; gooners frame theirs as a kind of spiritualized self-destruction. Both, however, are children of the same parent ideology: that the body is a machine whose ecstasies can be pushed to their furthest limit, and that the limit itself is the point.

Huet, wary of the word “cult,” offers a definition anyway: groups that “present an overarching belief system that proclaims itself the singular answer to all the big questions. Non-adherents are to be pitied, avoided, feared”. It is a neat description of OneTaste. It is an even neater description of Big Tech.

If Daedone’s conviction offers any clarity at all, it’s only that her empire was just a preview. A small, garish shard of the overwhelming technological machinery that now governs the world’s desires. We talk about OneTaste as if it were an outlier, a freakish aberration in the sexual landscape, but the truth is far harder to face. Daedone didn’t invent a new darkness, she made disturbingly visible what Silicon Valley had already been teaching us — that intimacy is a product, that bodies are interfaces, and that desire is a system to be optimized and scaled.

Gooners chasing ego-death through endless tabs of porn; influencers selling pseudo-intimacy on subscription; AI girlfriends engineered to be tireless, compliant, and always online; sex itself stripped of reciprocity and rebuilt as a productivity tool. All of it belongs to the same world that OneTaste was built on. Big Tech didn’t just corrupt our sense of privacy, or community, or attention. It corrupted our sense of what sex is for. 

Daedone’s downfall makes an easy morality tale: a manipulative guru, a predatory pseudo-feminist brand, a group of traumatized followers. But just as disturbing a story is the one Huet’s book gestures toward: that OneTaste wasn’t a deviation from the world Silicon Valley was building, but a mirror of it. A prototype of the future of sex. A reminder that the extremes we fear are often just the logical conclusions of norms we already live inside.

Inside, the air was thick and immaculate, heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (“NYC temp,” they told me, “the LA class is even hotter”). The teacher was not Anderson, but a smiling Spanish man named Javi. “No talking,” he said, citing the first rule of Tracy World. “Just music.” We began, and he adopted Anderson’s uncanny-valley grimace. Movements started with small arm pulses, before escalating into kicks and angular twists. To the uninitiated, the signature Anderson method might look something like a jacked-up combination of Pilates and dance, but from within, it is one woman’s unique and vast accomplishment, a sprawling universe of moves (more than 200,000 in Anderson’s library) and routines that comes complete with a creation myth, esoterica, and, of course, merch.

Halfway through, I was drenched. The middle-aged woman beside me, with an enviable six-pack and sparkling gold jewelry, smiled when I asked her after class how long she’d been doing it. “Three months?” she ventured. Javi laughed. “You’ve been here a year!” Time, it turns out, works differently here.

Anderson leads a cult-like empire that frames its offering as more than just a workout. To practice her method is to change your life — it is, as she proclaims, “revolutionary.” Women like me answer her siren call in droves. Hers is the lingo of gentle space, physical truth, creation, purpose, aura, passion, empowerment, and personal transformation. Those of us seeking these things — plus a closer conformity to that beauty standard — have made her $100 million dollars so far, cementing her cultural position with the liberal rich and making her rich-rich in the bargain. Men across the Hamptons wear T-shirts that say ‘MY WIFE IS AT TRACY.’ 

More from this author

Joan Didion’s husband was the original ‘wife guy’

By Lily Isaacs

Online, Anderson reaches far beyond the 1%, connecting to more than a million followers on Instagram. She has a subscription “online studio,” a kind of mini-Netflix of fitness through which you can tune into her live classes or do them on demand. Her p.r. team wouldn’t tell me how many people take her classes — but the more than 15 million on TikTok who have posted videos doing her workouts would indicate the number is high. She first came to fame as Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer, and offers a similar brand of aspirational wellness as the actress. But Anderson’s has an edge: exercise has become a luxury product, necessary for self-worth and available only to those who can afford it. 

The cult of exercise and its promise of personal magnificence are not new. The German-born Joseph Pilates rebelliously invented the choreography that became the global Pilates industry during his internment in England during World War I. About 40 years later, across the world in California, the perverted yogi Bikram Choudhury exported his heated sequence to the West, spawning a proliferation of hot-yoga studios and a culture of sweating it out in sweltering rooms. Both promised their exercise was not just to make you look good — it was to heal you. 

With the rise of a new crop of female fitness gurus, the tenor of the promises changed. After escaping the Nazis in Germany, Lotte Berk invented ballet barre and opened a studio in London in 1959, to strengthen, “without adding bulk.” In the 1960s, women — always the target audience of these fitness figures — were gaining sexual and financial freedom, and were discovering that the freedom to do with your body as you pleased meant that the practical activity of losing weight might become a kind of leisure hobby. Huge industries were born. Blond Californian Jacki Sorenson invented “aerobic dance” in the late 1960s, soon to be known everywhere as aerobics. By the 1980s, the “Jane Fonda’s Workout” videos were popularizing the term “feel the burn” and funding Fonda’s political activism by promising women they could “burn off fat” and find “energy for living.”

What’s different about Tracy is not just that she combines the promise of transcendence with weight loss, but that she has harnessed the immensity of the internet to do it. Her rise to stardom coincided with the two great forces: the flourishing of the fitness industry in the 2010s — it grew by 75% mostly driven by women — and the burgeoning world of streaming services. The medium is the message, and Anderson’s message was about to be everywhere. Women, her customers, were getting more money, too. In 2010, women controlled an estimated $5 trillion in the United States. By 2023, that figure had risen to $10 trillion by conservative estimates; McKinsey projects $30 trillion by 2030.

With women’s growing financial power came a trap: we would find ever more things to spend money on. This was the era of #GirlBoss capitalism: Dior sold a $700 We Should All Be Feminists T-shirt, and Sheryl Sandberg wanted us to “lean in.” Chelsea Clinton hosted a presidential fundraiser for Hillary at Soul Cycle, where classes run $40 a pop. Exercise studios proliferated. 

The high prices and turbo-charged clientele meant that the fitness offerings needed to promise more: it wasn’t just that working out could make you look good or feel good anymore; it was that it could make you be good. Tracy’s waist-trimming DVDs sold in the tens of thousands, and so she set up brick-and-mortar studios, which she could charge even more for. Buying into something was seen as moral participation. To pay was to believe. 

Through social media, millions could now see what Tracy did, what she wore, what music she liked or didn’t. Her association with figures like Paltrow, Madonna, and J-Lo, all of whom she’d trained, boosted her own status as a quasi-celebrity. As legend would have it, her fallout with Madonna was so bad no one is allowed to play her music in any TA studio. The fact that people spread such a legend mattered. Watchers formed parasocial relationships with her, enough that when she launched her online studio in 2015, they signed up from all across the world to watch her sweat daily. A subscription allows you not just a workout, but access to the “TAMILY.” And the workouts became an ever-more-expensive commitment. Anderson added “heartstone weights,” and bands, and “premier membership,” and “summer camp.” 

In 2020, as the exercise studios were shut down for the pandemic, so were the managerial-class women. Capitalist feminist figures fell down like dominoes: Glossier’s Emily Weiss, Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine, The Wing’s Audrey Gelman, all burned in the flames of cancellation. They had bred “toxic cultures” (an accusation later lobbed at Anderson by various ex-trainers). Fitness studios everywhere were going bust. The rest of us were crawling inside, too, kept away from work or school, slinking reluctantly into domestic confinement. Right where Anderson was waiting for us.

More from this author

Meet the new MAGA girlies

By Lily Isaacs

I discovered Anderson in that strange, suspended pandemic time. Anderson streamed daily workout classes from her ranch in Montana, always following her non-speaking rule, but offering comforting platitudes at the end of class about our inner and outer transformation. She told us the best way to spend these wasted days was doing exactly as we were — spending money on her.  Her business grew by 120% that year, according to an article in WWD, as the work-from-home world had more time on its hands to move, and to think about how it looked. Consultations for teenage eating disorders increased threefold during the pandemic. Anderson advised we eat fruit puree for breakfast and vegetable puree for lunch. 

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, wellness had already slipped its moorings from public health and become a kind of private religion. Anderson’s dialect of health (“detox,” “raw milk,” “natural healing”), once the parlance of liberal hippies and weight-loss aficionados, was consistent with the tenets of what we now know as the MAHA movement, which makes the body, once a source of human frailty, “an object of almost religious devotion,” as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book Natural Causes, published in 2018. In Tracy World, the body is both temple and test, a site where moral character is performed through effort.

Capitalism is the perfect companion for such efforts. In On Immunity, a book on vaccines written years before the pandemic, the critic Eula Biss identifies in the anti-vaccine movement, “evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us.” She argues that it is understandable that such huge swathes of people would feel that the system is up to no good, because in so many other ways they are right. Now, our distrust in systems is being rechanneled into consumption, and the market sells you back the very faith it helped erode. 

Anderson knows it well. Last week, she announced a one-day “TracyFest” in Labelle, Fla. She called it an “inaugural rite of realignment festival” for the “global Tracy Anderson” community. The ticket costs $500, not far off the price of a Coachella weekend. The staff that accompanies her workout costs $779. Memberships to her physical studios across America start in the tens of thousands; joining her London studio runs more than $13,400 a year. Small rocks to hold in your hands are $285. You can buy every type of clothing from her, and her new $125 perfume and candle set smells like “sweat.” 

When I left Anderson’s studio I felt elated — manic even. I grinned at my fellow travelers on the bus. The world looked beyond beautiful, and the rest of the day felt ridiculously promising. But hours later, I was tired, achy, and fed-up. If I could go to that studio daily, perhaps I’d be able to maintain the euphoria. But who could ever pay that much money, when movement is the one thing the body can do for free? The fantasy of “taking health into your own hands” only works if you have hands free to begin with, if you can pay for the gym, the supplements, the time. The rest are left behind, instructed to “blame themselves” for their sickness. Slumped on the sofa later that night, watching television, my body had returned to itself, untransformed. I told myself I was “fighting capitalism” by refusing to move — and perhaps it was true. 

It’s a strange contradiction. Knox spent years insisting that her own innocence was a hard truth. Afterwards, once the world began to agree with her, she became a tenacious advocate for the rights of the wrongly accused. Yet she’s also an example of the way truth has increasingly become privatized in our society, especially when it comes to the trauma narrative. We each have our “own truth”, and the more shapely and compelling the story — and the slicker the redemption arc — the better. It used to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. But that old judicial motto has been replaced by another: “lights, camera, action.” A new genre is emerging. Call it the age of the trauma blockbuster.

As the Knox show dropped, there were also developments in the Menendez brothers’ case, a kind of first test of whether a television redemption can translate into a judicial one. Lyle and Eric were convicted of the brutal murder of their parents in 1993, and the trial was one of the first to be broadcast live. Millions tuned in to watch the prosecution paint the brothers as spoiled rich kids, and the defense lay out the years of sexual abuse the brothers endured at their father’s hands. They expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison, until Ryan Murphy’s sensationalized account of their life, Monsters, aired on Netflix last year. 

More from this author

Joan Didion’s husband was the original ‘wife guy’

By Lily Isaacs

The brothers’ family objected to the retelling, it featured grotesque re-enactments of the brothers’ abuse, as well as the implication of incest (in a soapy shower scene). But Murphy was right when he proclaimed his own series “the best thing that has happened” to the brothers in decades. They have a chance at freedom now. Though their requests for parole were denied, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering the brothers for clemency, and their lawyers are pursuing promising other legal avenues. Since O. J., since Lorena Bobbitt, since Casey Anthony, justice has been a spectacle. But now spectacle is justice.

The Menendez brothers “own truth” — that their moral compasses were mangled by the repercussions of sexual abuse — wasn’t enough to lessen their sentences in 1994. But it might be now, under our new shared understanding of trauma. If criminality requires  a guilty act and a guilty mind, we are now inclined to absolve the minds of the traumatized. The reasons some might kill are complex, personal and potentially exculpatory.

Certainly, the Italian authorities didn’t have much understanding of these wider contexts at the time of Knox’s trial. Her conviction rested significantly upon the weird “vibe” that she gave after her friend Meredith Kercher was found murdered. Knox took a shower after mistaking blood stains for period blood, and kissed her then-boyfriend Raffealle Sollecito at the crime scene, who was also convicted and then acquitted of the murder. The Italian detectives took her behavior as signs of her guilt, but the less complicated answer — that she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and that she didn’t process it afterwards — also required the abandonment of certain assumptions about what shock, horror and grief should look like. 

Sollecito, who also served four years in prison, never garnered the public shaming or subsequent fame that Knox did. According to Instagram, he’s now a “vegan yogi”, and had no part in the Hollywood retelling of his story. We might wonder if he is better off than Knox — unable, or maybe unwilling, to capitalize on his trauma or rehearse the unfairness of his story. 

Our culture’s love of the trauma plot line risks telling the version of events that feels truer not because it is more accurate, but because it is more emotionally satisfying. When Johnny Depp and Amber Heard faced off in court in 2022, I listened to some of my devoted feminist friends call Heard a “liar” who was betraying women. The harrowing details of her allegations ceased to matter, the “truth” had been rendered irrelevant in the algorithmic court of public opinion. Heard and Depp were flattened into TikToks, memes, and YouTube supercuts.

Meanwhile, that same year, the Netflix show Inventing Anna transformed Anna Delvey from a convicted fraudster into a media darling. The internet reappraised her as a kind of camp icon, who walked fashion runways and sold her own merch. It seemed we didn’t mind her stolen money, or her imprisonment — not if she was willing to sashay on Dancing With the Stars. Depp returned to the silver screen; but Heard, broken, faded into oblivion. Maybe she’s found peace there, but her case demonstrates that there are certain rules for women, and then there are exceptions, mostly made for those who bleed on cue, according to the rules of TV.

The Knox series is unusually forthright about the power dynamics involved. Knox’s creative control and the imprimatur of fellow trauma star Monica Lewinsky, who executive produced the series, are designed to reverse a decade and a half of tabloid mythmaking (“Foxy Knoxy”) by monetizing empathy. It’s a defensible project, an exonerated woman insisting on her version of her life, but the meta-move matters. The claim isn’t simply “I am innocent”; rather, it’s “my authorship is innocence’s proof”. The show’s authority comes not from a judge’s final opinion, but from the right to tell and sell one’s own story in the most persuasive medium of our time. 

Suggested article

The creepiness of Amanda Knox

By Valerie Stivers

The medium has no interest in arbitrating fact from fiction; it rewards sexiness and the appearance of truth. There’s a reason why the Menendez show cast two very good-looking actors as its protagonists and had them shirtless often. Ditto with Knox. Our appetite for watching alleged criminals is driven by their undeniably seductive power. Perhaps we all become trauma stars in our own minds.  

Justice used to borrow the theatre’s stage, now it borrows its logic. For 30 years, we’ve lived with “trial as show”, from the Menendez brothers on Court TV to O. J., then the Depp-Heard livestream. But the true-crime boom has completed a cultural inversion: television isn’t the shadow of justice anymore; it’s the forum where guilt, innocence, and redemption are negotiated and sometimes won. 

The form’s best ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed. If a series helps us understand how an interrogation breaks down or how misogyny distorts a case, that’s a public service. If clemency for the Menendez brothers reflects a better grasp of youthful culpability, good. The trouble is the genre’s gravitational and manipulative pull. The Greeks knew that drama purifies through pity and fear; today we purify through pity and fandom. Truths — whether “own truths”, or the actual kind — tend to be erased in the white-hot glare of the public appetite. And Knox, at least, should know better. The “mystery” of her guilt was always a narrative contrivance: Italian prosecutors, the tabloids, and then Hollywood all found the beautiful American exchange student a more compelling protagonist than the obvious culprit. The trauma industry, no surprise, is good for no one.

But not all mythic literary marriages have been so vampiric. For a long time, one marriage in particular offered an example of something better: that of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The Didion-Dunne partnership signaled that a wife might become a magnificent writer not in spite of her husband, but because of him. Dunne seemed, in our modern parlance, like the ultimate “wife guy,” and I held him up as such. That is, until I read his recently reissued memoir, Vegas. Even in the most collaborative creative marriages, Vegas reminds us, a woman’s writing might still threaten the male ego, and that the “wife-guy” act is just what happens when the support act can’t quite bear the cost of being secondary.

This shouldn’t have surprised me. The term “wife guy” has become a punchline now, a meme of performative reverence: Prince Harry dancing with Meghan Markle in the delivery room; Mark Zuckerberg commissioning a statue of his wife, Priscilla. When “wife guy” peaked, it echoed a kind of post-#MeToo skepticism: was this love — or compensation? In June, The Atlantic published a soul-baring essay from one such man, who claimed the vulnerability required to broadcast your adoration is “the only state of being worth pursuing.” Jill Filipovic asked dryly in Slate: “Fellas, is it liberal to love your wife?”

Didion and Dunne had something quieter. Their partnership wasn’t a rapturous literary romance, but closer to a transactional equality, built on professional discipline and mutual respect. In the 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, Didion described Dunne as the reliable one. He built fires in the mornings; made breakfast for their daughter, Quintana; and drove her to school. Didion would wake up bleary, drink a Coke, and start writing. Notes to John, her posthumously published therapy diary, describes the way that their collaborative screenwriting funded their life, a life they both enjoyed.

Dunne loved her more passionately than she loved him — “I don’t know what falling in love means” — but he also knew better than most how easily he could be written off. He understood that he could be written off merely as Didion’s husband, a footnote to someone else’s genius; in the same way that so many women down the ages had been written out of history for doing the very work he’d done.

Which is partly what makes Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, so compelling. Dunne didn’t wait for history to revise him; he did it himself, half-drunk in a hotel room, eating his fifth Twinkie, calling up yet another hooker from the Yellow Pages to take out for a drink. Though he suggested that the scene was a mix between “fantasy and reality,” in a letter to the writer Jane Howard, he confessed that the claim functioned to throw his mother off the scent (“I don’t think that will fool mum”).

The book has just been released by McNally Editions more than 50 years after it was published and then quickly fell out of print. It’s a lurid account of the almost year-long stretch Dunne spent in Vegas, having realized he was “going to die” someday. He abandoned his wife and young daughter in an attempt at self-destruction, a telling artifact of a particular kind of American male dissipation in the early Seventies, when the strictures of marriage were threatened by the ever-growing potential of a wife to outshine her husband.

It was the era of second wave feminism, a decade after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique swept the nation, when Gloria Steinem was proclaiming that “women are becoming the men they want to marry.” Didion was puncturing feminism in the The New York Times, writing that “nobody forces women to buy the package.” But she was living the ideals of the movement, making her own money through her writing, with a husband who edited her work, looked after their kid, and made her a better writer. A 1984 profile described the couple’s fame like this: “The Dunnes are walking along the beach one day when they meet Jesus. Later on that day, Dunne describes their miraculous encounter. ‘Ran into Jesus today.’ ‘Oh, really? What’d He say?’ ‘He loves Joan’s work!’”

We might think of today’s “wife guy” as a contemporary iteration of men like Dunne, whose supportive tendencies seethed under his envy — until they cracked. To his great credit, he was self-aware that tearing apart his life was childish; but in Vegas, everyone’s lives were imploding, so he felt at home. The Atlantic’s “wife guy” is busy crafting “vulnerability” into content, but Dunne understood that such confession is still a form of control. He described his secrets: how he first took Didion to bed; his life-long voyeurism; a fantasy of appearing on a tell-all interview show not to reveal himself, but to wrest back some narrative power. He knew he’d become, as the Los Angeles Times put it, a “reflected celebrity.”

Didion shone; Dunne cracked jokes in the corner.

Near the time he was writing Vegas, Didion had just published the essay “In the Islands,” which references their marital troubles: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she wrote. You’d expect Vegas to be Dunne’s rebuttal, a literary act of revenge, but the only person he truly skewered was himself.

They stayed together. Dunne wrote about the oddness of attending parties with Didion after her piece ran. “For depressed people, they certainly laugh a lot,” people would say. It wasn’t that Didion was always in control, just that her writing gave the illusion of it. “It was a kind of safe death wish,” Dunne observed of his compulsions. “Like trying to cut your wrists with an electric razor.” Didion’s prose sliced; his just shaved the surface.

There’s a scene in Vegas that distills the power imbalance. He rings Didion to tell her he has a date with a 19-year-old prostitute who is supposed to “suck and fuck” him. “It’s research,” she replies. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” The power bounces between the couple, as Dunne tries to provoke Didion, and Didion, ever the great writer, insists that Dunne follow through. He is just drafting, but she has already distilled the action’s meaning. When she asks him later when he’ll come home, since she’s “lonely and depressed,” he quips back, “As soon as I get my life in order.” “Why not try living it?” she said, “For a change.”

Dunne knew he might be winning “the battles, but she was winning the war.”

In a city teeming with losers, it was really the women who came out on top. When Dunne left Artha, the young prostitute, he would invariably wander “alone through the casinos on the Strip, staring at all those men who looked like sun-tanned liver marks, all cardigan sweaters and pinky rings, men who seemed to have spent too much time in saunas and steam rooms.” These men — sweating, conniving, and paying for sex — have melted into blobs of steam, dripping and off-putting. The washed-up comedian he befriended was “never without a cold,” always oozing something wretched.

More from this author

United States of (Jane) Austen

By Lily Isaacs

Dunne’s existential crisis erupted when a doctor told him he has “soft shoulders.” This diagnosis was literal, but the symbolism was louder: the American man, once hard-edged and certain, was morphing into something slack. His fellow New Journalist Hunter S Thompson described a similar “gross, physical salute” in his own Vegas book, Fear and Loathing: “How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? … This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood?” The body was the message, and the message was that men are not OK.

But Artha and the other women in the book weren’t disintegrating; they were made of harder stuff. They bounced through sexual transactions without illusions, understanding who the winners and losers are. They had left behind not loving wives for the city of sin, but abusive husbands, deadbeat families, towns with no hope. They were American pioneers, forging futures for themselves, however grimly, and they were not under the illusion that bewitched Dunne: namely, that he “vandalized other people’s lives instead of coming to grips with [his own].” Rather, these women vandalized other people’s lives precisely in order to come to grips with their own. The difference was that the men were falling apart because they’d lost power, while the women were pulling themselves together because they didn’t have any to begin with.

Didion and Artha knew the deal. To use other people, you must do so with respect, greater purpose, and style. That was the promise of the Seventies women’s movement, that women might finally take what men always had: the right to be brilliant and ruthless at once. In fact, while Dunne was awol in Vegas, Didion wrote her greatest novel, Play It as It Lays. She was lonely and sad, it shows in the book, while he was disintegrating into something rotten. So when he came back to his real life (“the fever had broken”), we can deduce that it wasn’t because Didion needed him, nor Dunne her — it was that they wanted each other.

The modern man’s pose of feminist devotion often conceals a hunger for credit; something Dunne, in his darker way, had already forfeited. Their union suggested marriage might mean something different from love or possession: a long improvisation between people who understood that to love each other didn’t mean always being good or even generous, but to be “fantastically dependent on each other.” If today’s “wife guy” aims to make husbandly adoration legible, Dunne’s devotion was neurotic, intermittently self-aware, but ultimately unconditional. He fled to Vegas to unravel, convinced that his wife’s brilliance was his emasculation, but he came home to that brilliance eventually, and Didion let him.

In the end, what endures is not the partnership, but the residue it left: two bodies of work that are unevenly valued but deeply entangled. Dunne, ever conscious of the camera turning toward Didion, staged his own diminishment with theatrical flair. But there’s a reason this book faded out of print. We already know how it ends: it is Didion who emerged cool and unflinching, the better story, having written the scene, placed the props, and cast herself in the part of the woman who survives. Dunne was right to fear death, the anxiety that launched his breakdown: he died suddenly of a heart attack a few decades later as he sat down to dinner with Didion. What followed was Didion’s bestselling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, a luminous container of unspeakable grief, spoken. She got the last word, like she always did.

The Clare Boothe Luce Center’s annual leadership conference for young women promises to nurture “strong, conservative leaders” and help “young women flourish… while strengthening their families, communities, and country”. With more than 120 there, this was its biggest gathering yet.

Clad in what I thought was my smartest outfit — white shirt, black trousers, ballet flats — I realized my miscalculation the moment the elevator doors opened. Before me stood Mia, 21, from North Carolina, in a long white dress and stilettos, her curls immaculate. It was a sea of voluminous blowdries and meticulous makeup. Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one, while I looked like the Senate librarian.

Over breakfast, I met some of them, as they daintily picked at their syrupy pancakes with scarlet nails: Maddy, a sparky 20-year-old in baby blue, was working as a Comms intern for her “hero”, her state’s first female senator; Cecelia, the youngest and sternest, was interning for the conservative and religious First Things magazine. Paige, another congressional intern, grinned at me: “Today is so fun!”

They were fresh-faced and ambitious. Most were under 21, and were in DC forging the beginnings of their political career, only a few among the swarm of interns that descends upon the city each summer. They came from colleges all over the country, often from campuses that were allergic to their political persuasions, and they hoped that the people they met here would one day be their colleagues in congress or on the senate floor.

Kimberly Begg, the center’s president, is a Catholic attorney, who has five children, and has worked for various conservative causes throughout her life. She took this job last year, feeling a desire to teach the values she’s living to the next generation. “I want them to know what it means to be a good woman,” she said. “Not just how to excel at work, but how to live. ”

Her summer interns are taking note. One of them, Anastasia, told me she’d learned “how to look good on camera and spread the message”. When I asked her about this message, she responded brightly: “That you can be a mom and be ambitious.” I would hear this repeatedly: you shouldn’t disvalue mothering alongside your greater career goals; ; you can most definitely have it all. The practicalities of this were never addressed — can you stay home while running for senate? Instead, we were told that womanhood isn’t possible without babies.

The first speaker was the 30-year-old Mary Margaret Olohan, a redheaded White House correspondent for The Daily Wire. She’d grown up in an Irish Catholic family, “proudly” one of 11 children, and had been homeschooled. She began her career as a publicist during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings, where several women accused the now Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct during his confirmation hearing. “I don’t know if you were politically cognizant then,” she told her fresh-faced audience, “but that’s when I was radicalized.” Olohan quit her job to become a journalist, a “truth-seeking one”, convinced that the “Pro-Abortion” media were trying to stop Kavanaugh’s appointment, and now she covers abortion as a beat.

Today, she’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office: “There’s things you have to do to get noticed, I wear bright colors, have a peppy smile, I make sure I look good, really good.” Recently, she’s been reporting on the doxxing of ICE agents. Yet she told us that she’ll always make space for Mass during her work day, even if it means missing a scoop.

Like every other speaker that day, Olohan offered career advice with the caveat that there are “more important things to remember. You should never prioritize your career over finding your spouse… You should try and put yourself in the position that you can be at home. Like me, if God willing, I have a family, I can be at home writing.”

As girls queued for selfies, Maddy, who writes for her student newspaper, told me she was excited that such a young woman could be breaking such big stories. “She was just so cool. I mean, how old is she? And she’s everywhere.”

But not everyone felt so inspired. Courtney, a dazzling blonde from Utah who is currently interning in Congress, sighed. “We’re all girls here, so I may as well just tell you, I’m 17 weeks pregnant. And it’s really hard. I’m the only girl in my office, and I’m just totally exhausted. No one gets it.” She looked around the room. “This is what I hoped DC would be like.” She clearly admired Olohan: “I really want to do that too. To fight abortion, trans stuff, to fight for America. I want to make a difference. But I’m so tired now, and I haven’t even had the kid yet.” And yet for all her talk about balancing work and homemaking, Olohan had offered little practical advice: “I mean, she’s not even married yet. How can she tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Courtney asked me.

The other girls, whose youthful naivete no amount of makeup could conceal, had no answer. “I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have your family around. Someone to look after the baby, right?” Maddy ventured, as the rest of us nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know how to trust someone else with my kid,” Courtney replied. “And don’t even get me started on daycares.”

There was a fracture at the table now: tiny, but visible. None of the other girls was married. None had boyfriends. Maddy said she’d gladly date someone “if he’s not intimidated by a strong woman”. She was here to network, but Courtney was here to find out how to live.

Suggested reading

The doomed politics of MAGA Romantics

By Matt Feeney

Courtney had become pregnant by “accident”, and married her boyfriend earlier this year, “because what else can you do?” All the girls I spoke to were vehemently pro-life, except Maddy, who thought there “should be some exception for rape”. Paige and Courtney weren’t so sure; they grimaced at Maddy’s mention of rape. “Two wrongs just don’t make a right,” Paige told me.

Besides, Courtney was grateful for her unexpected pregnancy. “Now we have to become real grown-ups, we have to step it up,” she said. Her husband is 23 and still has two years of college left. He is spending the summer delivering Amazon packages. “He’s a good man, for that. He wants me to stay home.” She showed us wedding photos taken at the Utah State courthouse.

What really struck me, though, was that in a room of worshipping conservatives, who were excited by what the new administration had been doing, there was no mention of Donald Trump until after lunch. The values of being a “conservative woman” — being polite in your power, being nurturing with your strength — didn’t seem to align with Trumpian chaos. He was the unmentionable representative of a more turbulent revolution.

When I asked about Trump, Paige perked up: “He’s not perfect. But he loves America.” “I just wish he’d get off Twitter!” Courtney sighed. The girls liked Melania Trump and admired her reticence. “People are so mean to her, it’s so disrespectful,” Courtney said. “Feminists especially.” But their real heroine was Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s feisty 27-year-old press secretary. “They say [Trump] doesn’t like strong women, I mean just look at the women surrounding him. Look at her, she’s amazing,” Courtney said. Leavitt, who had a baby on the campaign trail, went back to work just four days after giving birth. To these girls, she’s the ultimate embodiment of conservative womanhood. She grinned through it all with her hair freshly blow-dried.

“Everyone knows conservative women are the happiest in America,” McFarland told the cheering crowd. Like many others that day, McFarland offered happiness like a revolutionary compact: work harder and look better, don’t waste energy on girls who “suck the energy from you”. Don’t out-man the men but outshine them.

We heard from Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s lawyer, and Paula Scanlan, who spoke with steely hurt about her time on a swim team with Lia Thomas, the transgender athlete. “Women are naturally kind and caring,” Scanlan said. “It’s really challenging to break through that.” Courtney nodded beside me.

More from this author

The manosphere meets its match

By Lily Isaacs

In line for the bathroom afterwards, a group of girls discussed Scanlan’s courage. “She can’t be more than 20,” one said, admiringly. An 18-year-old from California sighed, “That’s the problem with being young. Guys just can’t match our maturity. I have to date, like, a 25-year-old.” The line dragged. Despite the day’s lengthy applause for single-sex spaces, the girls broke into the men’s bathroom. “This is so funny,” a 20-year-old from Maryland told me. One girl dry-shampooed while another fixed her lashes. Another took a mirror selfie to send to her mum.

As I was leaving the conference, I exchanged numbers with Maddy. “It’s funny,” she said when I complimented her outfit, “it was actually my mom’s wedding dress.” “She gave it to me.”

Was that it? Did this maternal gesture in some way sum up the entire movement? In this room, femininity wasn’t something to rebel against or escape from, but something to inherit and slightly refashion, like your mom’s old wedding suit. The girls identified as “first-wave feminists”, because they weren’t looking for equality, but a way to make peace with everything they’d been told to seek. Here, the pursuit of love didn’t conflict with ambition, nor was faith at odds with intelligence.

Yet, as Courtney seemed to realize, there were holes in the story of conservative womanhood these girls were being sold. “Tradwife or Girlboss, maybe you don’t have to choose,” read one of the conference’s ads; and in many ways, the movement on offer here felt like a soft-lit inversion of the girlboss era, with self-empowerment refashioned as political purpose. Where the girlboss promised liberation through self-branding, the conservative woman here was encouraged to become her fullest self by serving others, her God, her country, her family. Yet both models offered the same tired bargain: perform perfectly, and you’ll be rewarded.

Courtney was waiting for that reward. She left hopeful that she would “figure it all out”, become a mother in a few months and then become something else too. And the day’s agenda only offered a more orderly container for those things, one with clear expectations and attractive packaging. But Courtney’s tired eyes and unasked questions still hover over the whole thing: a reminder that no amount of lipstick or prayer can gloss over what this brand of femininity can’t sustain.

We were told all day that boys have it harder now, and the women nodded along, because nodding is easier than asking what hard really means. They’d been “going dancing”, having “movie nights”, cooking each other “cute little dinners”. But they were also getting on in the world. And at some point, the fervor they built up trying to change America would have to be sacrificed for their truer calling: motherhood. Then, it would be the boys left standing in the Oval Office, the Senate floor, or even in their own homes, making decisions.

That siren call of conservative womanhood is not shouted but whispered. A murmur that tells you your instincts are sacred, your sacrifice noble, your submission a kind of strength. It makes giving things up feel like choosing them. Even while Courtney abandoned her political dreams (at least for now) she felt her greater purpose would arrive with her baby. I could easily feel the allure of such a promise. But that’s what I left shaken by: how quietly a life could be rerouted, not by force, but by suggestion. This way they could have it all, supposedly, but the rooms of real power were still off limits, reserved for the boys who never had to choose.

That Austen should continue to provoke such rapt devotion in her 250th year is neither new nor surprising. Her novels, modest in scope and domestic in preoccupation, have become talismans. She died at 41 and was never famous in her lifetime, writing about love but remaining alone and staying by herself quietly in the parlor of a Hampshire rectory, immersed in her universe of characters. Her books were published anonymously or posthumously, but she now presides over a trans-Atlantic empire of adaptation, fantasy, and projection.

That empire is remarkable: Austen owns the American book market. Her romantic tome Pride and Prejudice outsells new John Grisham novels, and tickets to the upcoming Jane Austen Society of North America tour cost more than $1,300. They come with afternoon tea, a regency-style dance, and whatever might be involved in the “literary inclusions” advertised on the site. In the breadth and frenzy of her trans-Atlantic legacy, she has no equals. Dickens might be a sharp prose stylist — but you can’t exactly imagine any girls swooning over Great Expectations or adult women getting dressed up in full customs to re-enact Hard Times. Even Shakespeare needed the young, beautiful Leonardo Di Caprio to goad people to the cinema for Romeo and Juliet.

Dismissing Austen’s popularity as mere “fandom” misses its point. Rather, the cult of Austen showcases how America’s fetishization of tradition is at odds with a capitalist culture. For Elizabeth Bennett, the challenge was to find a husband who makes you both happy and prosperous. For Americans, whose country is still a year younger than Austen, it’s the bigger, blurrier project of using your life to find something that feels to you like happiness and prosperity.

More from this author

The manosphere meets its match

By Lily Isaacs

A few months after I moved to America, a sweet friend invited me to her 25th birthday. There, at her apartment in Williamsburg, Sense and Sensibility — the 2008 BBC version, not Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation — played on loop on the TV.  I assumed we’d be drinking a beer and talking over the dialogue. It didn’t take me long to realize that quite a few of the others there could recite almost all of the words. For years, they had watched Sense and Sensibility, taking from it a charming story of love leavened by English humor. But also, I think, they recognized their own desires; not so much just to pursue happiness — a universal aspiration — but to seek something individually fulfilling; as Austen wrote, “to know your own happiness.”

But I shouldn’t have been surprised: it was actually first in America, not England, that the Austen cult bloomed. Serious Austen scholarship emerged not from Oxbridge, but from US universities in the early 20th century. Her biography was serialized in Harper’s and the North American Review. It is the peculiar achievement of the Austen-industrial complex to have made her miniature works of psychological realism into global entertainment products.

By the Nineties, a period in which “Austenmania” came into fashion, it had become apparent that Austen was no longer merely an author; she had been repurposed into something adjacent to a lifestyle brand. Colin Firth’s dripping Mr. Darcy, Keira Knightley’s feral Lizzy Bennet stomping through fields at dawn, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary, the eccentric Disney adults of Austenland — all of it coexisting in the same floating semiotic cloud.

The urge to inhabit Austen’s world is stronger in America than almost anywhere else; but love sells, as does the regency-esque aesthetic of babydoll silhouettes and silken bonnets. Americans, who once threw off the yoke of George III with a revolution, now seem determined to cosplay British class hierarchies in softened, candlelit form. Austen offers a sanitized simulation of aristocracy: just enough status anxiety to titillate, never enough to threaten. Her England is one where money is spoken of, but rarely vulgar; where virtue, if not always rewarded, at least enjoys a kind of narrative dignity.

Last year, a viral personal essay in The Cut headlined “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” devoured my friends and my conversations. The essay’s author, Grazie Sophia Christie, was pure Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park, who marries a very unexciting man, because “a large income is the best recipe for happiness.” The writer described being “daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self” but having found the cure in an older, richer husband, who taught her how to live, to behave, and provided for their life. She watched her friends’ relationships with pity: “If you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things.” The piece elicited both rage and praise – some defended her for playing the patriarchy, others attacked her for falling for it.

Like Christie, Austen recognizes that in these constraints, there is freedom — or at least, the performance of it. Elizabeth Bennet says no to a wealthy idiot and yes to a haughty, emotionally stunted aristocrat. Emma meddles and is corrected. Anne Elliot gets a second chance. The novels contain, over and over again, the fantasy that a character can transcend material reality. But unlike Christie, for Austen’s women, this is their only option.

The idea of transforming oneself through marriage, money, a job — take your pick — is so concrete an American fantasy, that I’ve found it’s only here that people radically “pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do,” to borrow from Zadie Smith. It’s the fantasy that drives Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, who decides to begin “the very kind undertaking” of transforming a less becoming woman to up her standing in society. Austen warns us, of course, that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” but that doesn’t mean her characters can’t try. They move within the limited scope available to any woman in their day; and as far as finding “happiness,” the notion of falling in love was a pretty good start.

Suggested reading

How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Indiscretions,” written in 1924 for Vogue, noted the impossibility of loving Austen appropriately. “We needs must adore,” she wrote, “but she does not want it; she wants nothing; our love is a by-product, an irrelevance; with that mist or without it her moon shines on.” Woolf, characteristically, was half-merciless and half-right. Austen, who lived her adult life in a small house with her mother and sister, now presides, at least paranormally, over a cultural empire whose currency is romantic transformation. She is the patron saint of witty heterosexual courtship, and she is utterly absent from it.

But the courtship she presides over, combined with this sense of American optimization, means that Austen’s charming directions toward love land off their mark here. The hyper-individualist is always transforming: confronted with Equinox ads to “want it all,” to preempt their wrinkles with Botox, to meditate into transcendence while working into oblivion. But Austen knows, even when we try to change everything around us; it doesn’t do the trick, “it must be from within.” It’s why those who have examined her narrative prose in detail, know that she makes no promises. When I watched The New Yorker’s literary critic, Merve Emre, being asked for advice, she knew to quip: “Honestly? Marry rich.” Whether or not serious, it’s still a truth universally acknowledged.

What Austen understood, and her American readers often prefer to forget, is that the ending is never guaranteed. She is a patron saint of love who leaves her characters behind on the altar. Happiness, like love, is provisional. And narrative is only ever an attempt to make peace with that.

She exists in a strange subcultural ecosystem: the reactionary feminine id, emerging like mold in the shadow cast by figures like the Tate brothers, Jordan Peterson, and President Trump. But she’s far from the palatable rebellion of Netflix’s Adolescence.

RFH emerged from the same digital petri dish of the manosphere, fluent in its grammar of outrage and irony. But she inverts its vernacular, posting incendiary feminist content in a voice that calls out the trolls she once aligned with. Her account has become a minor spectacle on X, where she draws both threats and disciples. She is documenting, in real time, what it looks like when a former anti-feminist tries to escape the ideology she once helped amplify; and how the internet doesn’t make it easy to leave.

By the time I called her a few weeks ago — early afternoon — she had already tweeted 14 times. There was one that said, “I am the female Donald Trump,” and another, a reposted meme from a fake WikiHow article: “How to get men to leave you alone.” The answer: “Show them your Twitter.”

She laughed when I brought that up. When men do indeed go running, it shows her who they really are. Or they do the opposite: rage-quote her into a thread with 10,000 likes, tagging friends and followers to come and see what a deranged woman looks like. Sometimes, they go darker: burner accounts, threats. But she insists she doesn’t really care, because she’s there mostly “to have fun.”

She called herself Rad Fem Hitler, twisting the insult “Feminazi” into a parody so grotesque it loops back into being seductive. It stuck, succeeding in pissing people off. She doesn’t want me to use her real name, which makes sense: the whole project is part performance, part exorcism.

Her tweets are lacerating, occasionally brilliant, and often disturbing. When Russell Brand — the former actor, revival-tent star, and accused serial predator — was filmed being baptized in the ocean, RFH captioned the clip, “Put some clothes on, wh*re.” A few weeks earlier, she tweeted, “If I were a gay guy, I would be r*ping so many straight men.” She claims it’s just jokes, and in one sense, it is. But even jokes have a location; and hers live somewhere between trauma and spectacle, sharpened by the language of the Right-wing enemies she had counted as allies.

More From This Author

TikTok is the new Disney Channel

By Lily Isaacs

On the phone, she’s disarmingly gentle. “I’m kind of in the middle of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t have this entire hate-boner for trans women…. I don’t really care about adults doing these things”. The internet rewards extremism — including the kind she traffics in — but reality rarely does.

There’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in her cruelty. Or maybe it’s righteous anger. She uses the language of the online Right because it’s the dialect in which she first learned to be political, and because it’s the only tongue that seems to stir a reaction. Her fluency with it is part echo, part strategy, part theater.

She grew up in a “normal Republican family” in a Chicago suburb, with a brief interlude in Bahrain for her mother’s work. She remembers her childhood happily, and her parents modeled an equal partnership she’d hoped to find for herself. But her politics came online at the University of Michigan, where she discovered the term “libertarian,” and suddenly, everything clicked. “I think I was kind of a libertarian as a child, I just didn’t know there was a word for it. I remember thinking, why are people not allowed to do drugs? That’s their own business.”

She found, among her fellow libertarians, a bunch of “nerdy spergy guys who probably have mommy issues and don’t like women that much.” (The word “spergy,” in her usage, oscillates between self-identification and diagnosis; it feels defensive, maybe self-hating, maybe affectionate. In a way that’s hard to parse, she includes herself in the insult.) “That was me,” she said. “I was them.” At the time, she called herself an “anti-feminist.”

She ran in the same circles as the Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, who was then running Breitbart. When Trump announced his run, she became a die-hard MAGA fan, because all his talk about “The Wall” was exactly what she felt Republicans had been missing.

She and a friend who worked for Yiannopoulos thought it would be “funny” to go to a Bernie rally and ask for donations for Trump’s campaign. To top it off, the rally was in Columbus, Ohio, and they wore their Michigan clothes, poking at the fiercest rivalry in college football. The plan was to troll everyone: Bernie fans, Buckeyes, liberals, the internet. “A lot of people were swearing at us” but some engaged, and some “thought it was almost kind of funny.”

That friend has since left politics and got the video scrubbed, but when RFH was recently doxxed, people from “back then” remembered it and put it on the internet—a gotcha. Many relics of her Trumpian days have since re-emerged, used as fodder against her. “I’m not in contact with any of those people now,” she tells me, sternly.

Things began to fall apart in 2018. The edge-lord e-Right — which once felt like a self-aware, post-political LARP — began bleeding into real life. Meet-ups turned into romantic entanglements, and RFH witnessed “unconscionable misogyny. There was so much domestic violence and horrific emotional abuse.” One man was trying to starve his girlfriend down to nothing. Some were addicts, and some died. There was slut-shaming, deadbeat fathers, self-destruction. “And somehow,” she added, “it was always the woman’s fault.”

She felt this in her personal life, too. She had absorbed the belief that “marriage was my salvation as a woman … that I had no other real purpose.” So she married a man from her libertarian college circle. She was 25. She got pregnant “immediately.” He wanted nothing to do with the baby. “I felt like I was living a meme,” she said.

Trad-wife life had promised adoration; instead, she was treated like a leech. Her husband’s misogyny, once theoretical, turned violent. When she asked for help, he would scream, “I’m not here to serve you.” The spell broke.

Her slow burn toward feminism began to accelerate. “I would say motherhood is quite radicalizing.” Her former views curdled into suspicion. “They want women to be mothers to just sort of keep them almost lobotomized, away from society.”

She saw it in the way conservatives talked about divorce. “The minute there’s a divorce, it’s like, ‘You just took his money,’ and, ‘You didn’t do anything.’ I’m like, didn’t you just say motherhood is so important?”

She won’t talk about her divorce to protect her child’s privacy. But she’s made the stakes clear elsewhere: “I had to live out the consequences of these ideas,” she said recently in an interview with the UnHerd contributor (and repentant online Rightist) Richard Hanania. “It’s not just an abstract, funny thing. It has real-world implications, and they’re not good. Not for me, or for other women.”

That’s the thing about RFH; her whole schtick is a kind of black comedy about realizing, too late, that the joke was always on you. The thing she’s doing on Twitter isn’t quite politics, but a kind of shadowboxing against her former self: an attempt to climb out of the hole using only the dirt that buried her.

Still, she remains caught between poles. She’s not trying to win approval; she’s trying to balance fury with fluency. She still hates liberal sanctimony, rants about immigration, and tweets like someone who spent too much time on 4chan.

Online fame has presented a double bind for her privacy: since her doxxing, she must defend herself as a “beautiful woman” while also impressing how much a woman’s “beauty” is overvalued. And she is cruel about people’s (usually men’s) lives and appearances, only to reap the same treatment when it’s flung back at her. It didn’t take me long to find men on Twitter talking about killing her, raping her, the size of her bust.

Suggested reading

The three tribes of MAGA men

By Poppy Sowerby

But for RFH, the point isn’t clarity or persuasion — it’s chaos with a feminist flavor. And it works. She’s built a significant following, with many of her posts going viral, not because people agree with her, but because they can’t look away.

She reminds me of Valerie Solanas — the radical feminist most famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Before she pulled the trigger in 1968, Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a text that called for “thrill-seeking females” to overthrow society and eliminate the male sex. It was dismissed as lunacy, and eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. “I love Valerie,” RFH told me. “She was onto something.” Like much Twitter-speak, they both fall somewhere between dark comedy and a call to arms.

RFH reaped the full Solanos treatment in December. When a teenage girl carried out a school shooting in Wisconsin, killing a teacher, a student and wounding six others, Twitter users alleged that RFH was cited in her “manifesto.” Months on, nothing from federal investigators suggests that RFH, or feminism, had anything to do with the shooting; but that hasn’t stopped her opponents going wild over it.

It made her “sour” on the internet. She says anyone who suggests her calls to violence are earnest is just being disingenuous: “They don’t even believe it. You can’t read my stuff and believe that. There’s nothing in there that hints at some sort of violent takeover of men.”

Still, it lingers, like all internet scandals do. And she keeps going, because, in her view, things are changing. “We’re entering a weird postwar America,” she said. “Young men aren’t dying off anymore. We’re going to see this slow, social collapse.”

“We’re just going to have this big kind of culling,” she clarified. “I don’t mean killing people, but there’s just gonna be a lot of people that don’t reproduce.” Her vision of the future is certainly not what Andrew Tate’s devotees want to hear. It’s not clear yet whether RFH is helping that process or just making it harder to ignore. But she doesn’t seem interested in guiding anyone to safety. She’s more like a lighthouse that flashes on and off, just enough to show you how rough the water is.

The move would eliminate more than 20,000 jobs: case workers, public-health researchers, Narcan distributors, Medicaid rehab staff — the very professionals and programs, in other words, that serve the victims of American Carnage. It is among the gravest betrayals of Trumpian America in a second Trump term that undeniably favors Reagan-style austerity over popular domestic policy.

Since Oxycontin emerged on the market in 1996, more Americans have died from accidental opioid overdoses than were killed in the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Second World War combined. The bloodshed of the opioid epidemic is the worst conflict in America this century; and its architects — the Sackler family — still live in luxury and wealth.

For decades, the crisis only got worse, prescription meds giving way to fentanyl-laced pills; the Covid pandemic isolating people from their support systems; hundreds dying every day. Yet recent successes were undeniable. This year, overdose deaths plummeted by nearly 30,000, the first such drop since the Nineties. This progress owed to a combination of expanding Medicaid rehab, making the anti-overdose drug Narcan free and ubiquitous in rural counties, and establishing data systems to track where spikes were happening in real time. In other words, thanks precisely to the programs now on the chopping block.

Yet, even as Team Trump destroys the tracking programs that rendered the crisis visible, American literature has served up the first great opioid novel, The Emperor of Gladness. The 36-year-old author, Ocean Vuong, grew up in the ruins of the crisis in Connecticut, where Oxycontin was created, lending him the firsthand experiences that form his tender Bildungsroman. It follows his fictional stand-in, Hai, rescued from suicide by an older Lithuanian woman who makes him her carer.

The book is infused with the grim, perpetual reality of post-industrial America — the words “pills” and “war” recur in every chapter. Hai describes the bloodshed around him as his adolescence unfolds: “It did not have a name, this slaughter, and yet your loved ones were being slowly erased, even teachers and lunch ladies overdosing overnight, then cremated without ceremony, their faces soon existing only in your mind.”

More from this author

TikTok is the new Disney Channel

By Lily Isaacs

When I went to his book launch in New York, Vuong moved himself to tears three times. He gets a lot of flak for being too emotional, and his earnestness can be exhausting (watch him on Oprah). But it reveals something profound: he believes his success is born from the fluke that he is still alive. He is “no better than the friends I’ve lost, just lucky that when I tried the pills, they made me feel like I was drowning; and that I didn’t like that.” In this part of the country, lucky means he was addicted to cocaine, instead of the Oxy and “fent-dope” his friends took.

That sense of arbitrary survival, just brutal luck, is threaded through the novel. Hai tries rehab, relapses, remembers the boy he loved who died from wanting “too much of one feeling.” He witnesses his first overdose at age 12, and thinks as he watches a woman saved by Narcan at work: “Her mouth was open like a Scream mask.” One of Hai’s coworkers at the local fast-food chain thinks the world is run by lizards that are “feeding off our negative energy.” She’s crazy, Hai thinks, but kind of right.

It’s a reptilian twist on a capitalist reality: Vuong watched his friends die from fentanyl and OxyContin that billionaires had bribed doctors to prescribe. 

The pain exhaled throughout Vuong’s book stores enormous political capital that Trump once tapped into. In 2016, he campaigned on a platform of expanding access to Narcan, cutting opioid prescriptions by a third, and securing “billions” for opioid treatment. Then, in 2024, he started to mine support from an even more politically rewarding angle: revenge, by promising to shut the borders through which chemicals for fentanyl come into America and threatening the death penalty against dealers. Vuong, who worked picking tobacco and at the fast-food chain Boston Market, wasn’t “surprised” by Trump’s win either time. The “slaughter” around him wasn’t being talked about by the Democrats, and Trump swooped in.

When they started to market OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s sales reps targeted communities with high cancer rates, which were mostly white, working-class, and rural. They told doctors that OxyContin was “non-addictive,” encouraged high dosages, and launched “pain-management seminars” with steak dinners and bonuses. By 2012, opioid use in those areas was 50% higher than in similar economic regions, and overdose deaths were twice as common. Communities hooked on prescriptions have since turned to fentanyl bought from dealers.

In 2016 and 2020, the counties that had been hit hardest by Purdue’s marketing became some of Trump’s most loyal voting blocs. A 2023 study by economists Carolina Arteaga and Victoria Barone traced a direct line from Purdue’s targeting to the ballot box: people who lost their families to pills also lost faith in the status quo, and when conservative media paid more attention to their pain than liberal media did, they chose their side. The opioid crisis radicalized people in favor of Trump.

He blamed border enforcement, whilst spinning his own Justice Department’s choice to go easy on the Sacklers as a big win. Since then, CNN’s coverage has helped his case, with the network interviewing cartel members who move fentanyl across the border. But these have a powerful point when addressing Trump: “the problem is the consumers are in the US. If there weren’t consumers, we would stop.”

Yet the second term has seen Trump attacking anti-opioid policy and abandoning even the pretext of addressing the deeper social crises that drive addiction. His attorney general, Pam Bondi, claimed a few weeks ago: “Since your last 100 days, we’ve seized 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos … which saved — are you ready? — 258 million lives.” The number is suspect, but it doesn’t matter, her onlookers cheered.

The bigger point is that fentanyl is not a thing you “win” against by merely seizing it. The crisis will be stopped by addressing why people want to use it in the first place. Funding housing, health care, and treatment. Asking why Americans, alone among wealthy nations, keep dying by the tens of thousands. In 2023, there were still more than 125 million opioid prescriptions written. I tested it myself. I found an online health site, and 20 minutes later, with nothing but a call and some claim to vague back pain, I was offered a way to get a prescription for Oxycodone. America is still manufacturing this crisis; still pretending it’s a foreign invasion, not a domestic product.

Suggested reading

Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

A boy I went to elementary school with in California, with whom I’d exchanged love notes with under the table, was prescribed Oxy after a high school football injury. He died in 2020 of an accidental overdose, at age 18, alone in his car. His funeral was held on Zoom, and his mother wept into a screen. He’s not a statistic, but he is one of a generation; a vanished cohort that Vuong writes about with unblinking clarity. And the systems that were just beginning to try to save kids like him are now being dismantled by Trump.

Vuong does not pretend that addicts will always choose redemption, but he offers something stranger: mercy. “How strange,” Hai thinks, “to feel something so close to mercy… and stranger still that it should be found here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river.” We’re back at that river again. A brief drop in death and a flicker of institutional compassion, but now, a sudden turn back to cruelty and abandonment. The real question isn’t whether Trump’s budget cuts will let more people die, but whether he’ll get away with saying this is about safety, instead of feeding the fantasy of revenge. The opioid epidemic is not a mystery. We know how to fight it and what works: research, Narcan, Medicaid and funding.

This crisis has always been about pain, who gets to treat it, who gets punished for it, and whether America is willing to recognize that the people who are suffering most are still worth saving. ​Now, we need to learn Vuong’s lesson that it is “something close to mercy” that saves lives. The sharp reduction in deaths proved it. The question is whether we’ll be smart enough to hold on to the gains.

Rae was 18 when she broke into our cultural imagination amid the first Covid lockdowns. She choreographed and mimicked dances in TikTok videos, and turned her millions of followers into devoted listeners. Her first self-titled album, released the following year, preached the #GirlBoss feminism of a bygone era: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you.” It was a flop. But then she let go of her self-determined pop vision, gave up attempted originality. Instead, she became something cleverer, more kitsch, consciously emulating Britney Spears and Bjork — less a pop star than someone who wants to be a pop star. Since her transformation, every single she’s released has shot up the charts to wide critical acclaim.

Her success is an index of TikTok’s power as a star maker, and the way the app has dominated not just the music industry, but fame itself. But it’s a Cinderella not lacking for a dark side: TikTok fame endangers and takes advantage of teenage girls.

Rae’s metamorphosis followed a clear-cut, and volatile, path familiar to earlier generations of teeny-pop fans raised on the Disney Channel: that of the young star who shed the snakeskin of adolescence into something sexy and avant-garde. Rae’s formula was formula. Her innovation was not to innovate at all. And so, she fulfilled the American Dream that Disney, and now TikTok, promised: an ambitious cheerleader from Louisiana — where her idol Britney Spears also grew up — could be shepherded by managers and executives waving more cash than her family had ever seen, to become a global superstar. But it’s never that simple.

More from this author

The lesson of l’affaire Huang

By Lily Isaacs

There are Disney princesses, and then there are Disney Channel princesses. Disney brought up a generation of young people who went home after school and were parented by their televisions. As society shifted, so did Disney: the soft traditionalism of prince-charming love stories gave way to high-schoolers who fought, laughed, danced, and sang for millions of young watchers; the mediators of what life could and should be. Then those teenagers rebelled, turning their lives inside out. It’s now just as much a well-trodden path to success as the one it was originally defined as a fall from: Rae became, in the words of Rihanna, “a good girl gone bad”.

The formula may be the same, but the medium has changed. The Disney Channel is a shell of its former self, with only about 100,000 viewers while 68% of teenagers go on TikTok every day. The Wild West of TikTok influencers — paid through lucrative brand deals but without contracts or stability — means that you can shoot to enormous success as a teenager without any guardrails or support.

Yet even in the Disney-dominated era, there were signs of trouble. Britney Spears shaved her head and was hounded by paparazzi; Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball; and so on. These tendencies have found their next shape in TikTok’s algorithm.

The day after Rae flashed Coachella’s crowd and was videoed by thousands, the child star Sophie Nyweide died at 24, from a what authorities suspect was an accidental overdose. Nyweide was thrust into the spotlight when she was just 5, and her death was a sobering reminder of what fame’s aftershocks can do to the young and vulnerable. Nyweide’s death, like Britney’s breakdown, is another example of the industry’s Faustian bargain: give up control and we’ll make you into a star.

Girls like Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Miley Cyrus, who got famous as kids on our televisions, turned their Disney fame into stardom at brutal costs to their lives. They were left unable to make the usual mistakes of being a teenager without the eyes of millions upon them. This was not an incidental side effect. As a new book by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl, argues, the industry was designed to feed on girls — and then discard them.

Gilbert suggests that two forces, porn and paparazzi, transformed a generation of women, impelling them to switch away from powerhouse idols like Madonna in favor of sexualized but virginal and girlish figures like Britney Spears and Kate Moss. Real women, in control of their music, were replaced by girls being shaped by their managers. This was the era of American Beauty, Britney Spears with schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, a 2003 Vanity Fair cover declaring: “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” The early Oughts showed girls that “there was only one way to exist in public”, Gilbert writes, “and it was a trap.”

TikTok has brought this trap to the doorstop of every teenager in the world. Want to use your body for likes, money, and fame? The siren app beckons. The algorithm rewards nudity, dancing, and oversharing personal trauma. The writer Roxane Gay, after sinking glassy eyed into the algorithm, observed how “right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more”.

Take Jenny Popach (whose real name is Roselie Arritola), who had 7 million followers by the time she was 15 and posts hyper-sexualized dance videos with captions like “when men can go to jail for being with you”. She rakes in a small fortune from brand deals but still has braces. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked her mom about her daughter getting famous, she said: “We loved it. We loved the attention…. I knew I’d be famous one day, I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe Roselie is that.”

Kids like Popach proliferate on TikTok, dancing, making money, and dreaming of the Addison Rae model of fame: where a video can turn into a record contract, and then into the main stage at Coachella. Nearly a third of TikTok users are under age 14; and any scroll on the app will lead you to prepubescent girls, dancing, trying on makeup, playing at adult femininity but for an audience that includes not only their peers, but millions of unknown grownups, too. Gilbert’s book tracks the horrific “countdowns” that magazines and public figures had for Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and the Olsen twins to turn 18 and be legal for sex. Popach’s 18th birthday has elicited countless such fantasies from men on TikTok.

By sharing your own life, you may eliminate some of the power of the paparazzi who stalked Spears so brutally, but you also have to accept your place in the industry’s ecosystem; or as Gilbert writes: “Young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.”

More from this author

TikTok girls like me are just fine

By Adeline Isakov

Addison Rae bought into the bargain. She only got famous the same year that Britney gained control of her finances. Her tongue-in-cheek references to Spears show her ability to alchemize pop’s darkness into fun self-defense. She teased the paparazzi with her likeness to Britney when she was photographed walking down the street in pigtails reading Spear’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me; and in her music video for “High Fashion,” she danced next to a bottle of Spears’s perfume. Her success, we can hope, is a direct rebellion against the more exploitative forces that trapped Spears. She references Spears so frequently not just because she admires her, but because she isn’t her.

Still, as Gilbert’s book reminds us, the misogyny inflicted upon Britney and her peers never went away: we internalized it. Scroll through TikTok, and the exploitation paradigm feels like everyone’s reality. Back in the Disney days, says Gilbert, it was shocking to imagine that girls “could be most liberated while on their knees”. Now it would only be shocking to question that.

Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.

But it could also turn the final frontier into another zone of hyper-exploitation — a grim possibility probed by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s new political satire set in space, Mickey 17, whose villain is a hybrid of Musk and Donald Trump.

As the SpaceX craft plummeted back to its Florida landing spot, dolphins jumped sweetly out of the water to greet it. The scene was so beautifully cinematic, it could well have served as the opening of Mickey 17. In it, Joon Ho imagines a future that we already live in: where exploited laborers (here referred to as “expendable clones”) serve at the whims of a short-tempered oligarch whose devoted “followers” have eagerly joined his space flight.

Suggested reading

Elon Musk just wants to go to space

By Gerard DeGroot

Our protagonist is Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, and since he is essential to the ship’s mission, no one questions his pain and suffering, least of all himself. As he dies over and over in excruciating pain in clone form — his body freezes, he loses a hand, he is poisoned while being tested for a new vaccine — this is treated as routine. He did, after all, sign up for the job. Eager to leave behind his debts on Earth, he confesses with a smile that he might have scrutinized the paperwork more closely. The ship’s onlookers laugh knowingly at each death: silly, sweet Mickey, making all our lives safer, smoother, more efficient.

About 20 minutes into the film, it becomes clear that Joon Ho thought Trump was going to lose the 2024 election. Mark Ruffalo plays the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall, who hosts an inflight reality competition show and was so humiliated by losing his “re-election campaign” that he leaves Earth to colonize space. An attempted assassination only brings him back stronger. As his followers chant the name of their leader, they stick their arms up in the air, one finger pointing at the sky, echoing a Nazi salute (ahem, “Roman salute”). His wife, the unnervingly poised Toni Collette, resembles Melania in the least charitable interpretation. At one point, when her husband is about to kill Mickey, 17 she screams and screams; but it is not for Mickey, rather at the thought of a bullet hole in her lovely carpet.

Bong Joon Ho says the character isn’t inspired by Musk and Trump, but by a range of “dictators we have seen throughout history”, which would be hard to believe even if Marshall’s supporters didn’t wear red MAGA-style baseball hats that say “the one and only”. There’s no Kenneth Marshall in the book the film is based on; the novel’s autocrat, Hieronymus, is more a maniacal military soldier than an eccentric billionaire. But in the movie version, he wants to colonize space, make babies with the women on board with “the ideal genetics”, and he’s constantly throwing tantrums. Sounds pretty familiar.

Suggested reading

How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Richard Hanania

Satire succeeds best when it touches a nerve of truth. Parasite, Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film from 2019, exploded the fantasy of upward mobility by showing an upper-class family’s vampiric relationship to their servants. Its bloody conclusion is a depressing catharsis of just how little hope there is for improving your chances. But where Parasite benefited from a subtle touch — the social critique unfolded gradually to reveal a horrifying picture of the real world — Mickey 17 can be too on-the-nose, at times resembling Saturday Night Live at its flaccid worst.

The Marshall character slides between impressions of Musk and his ostensible government boss, Trump. Writing Mickey 17 three years ago, Joon Ho couldn’t have known how powerful a role Musk would be playing in the current administration, but his determined plans to colonize space have long been clear. The SpaceX boss’s ultimate mission is to “occupy Mars” and develop a city of 1 million people there in the next two to three decades. He has volunteered his own sperm to get the population going, and he wants to retire on the Red Planet.

Though space dominance has long been a goal of American foreign policy, most crucially in the Cold War, Musk isn’t aiming for any kind of national leverage: he wants to leave Earth behind to make a new society centered on himself. It’s a “backup” plan for humanity, but it will be a colony of children born from his own genetic material.

Musk isn’t alone. Instead of countries vying for extraterrestrial supremacy, Musk’s foremost space rival is Bezos, who is set to launch a bizarre all-female rocket to space this spring with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and Katy Perry on board. Bezos hopes to industrialize space, moving the manufacturing concerns “that stress Earth” away from it. Both men have built huge company towns in Texas, where thousands of workers live to build their rockets.

Musk, meanwhile, wants to bio-engineer a new version of human that can survive in Mars’s burning temperatures, an idea close to the new cloning technology that props up Joon Ho’s movie world. For Joon Ho’s Musk-Trump composite character, Kenneth Marshall, the impulse to “purify” humanity can only be achieved by abandoning it, and any successful society requires masses willing to be exploited to get things done.

Like Marshall, who is quick to abandon his promises on Earth for better chances in space, it’s fair to question how invested space fanatics like Musk can be in making American society better, when he hopes to leave it as soon as he can. More likely, he views space as a stellar business opportunity, ripe with untapped resources and with no laws or regulations to get in your way.

What Joon Ho shows us is how powerful figures normalize the exploitation of those who work for them to prop up their ambitions, something Musk is no stranger to. Tesla’s “giga-factories” have been accused of rampant sexual harassment and safety violations, and one lawsuit alleges a worker told his wife “I’m going to die in this factory”. Predictably, Musk thinks trade unions “create negativity in a company”. Bezos, our other keen space pioneer, uses algorithms to push his Amazon workers to breaking point; and those who work in his American factories are regularly, and seriously, injured. This kind of undervalued, exploited labor isn’t born from futuristic scientific experiments or any kind of dystopian future. It’s just ordinary people being walked all over today.

Suggested reading

Speculative futurism sells us a lie

By Stuart Whatley and Nicholas Agar

Yet the filmmaker is too nakedly partisan for his jabs at Musk-Trump to land. Indeed, the Trump-Musk amalgam can often serve as a distraction. The deeper, more productive critique embedded in the film has to do with the mistreatment of nameless multitudes, who damage their bodies and give up their lives so that those in higher social classes can enjoy themselves. We don’t need breakthroughs like cloning to normalize the extreme exploitation of workers, because there are Mickeys all around us.

Asked in a recent interview why even his Korean-language films are so popular all over the world, Joon Ho guessed it is because “except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language”. Storytelling in space can make the familiar feel alien. That’s the brilliance of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, Alien, which harnesses fear out of the anxiety of pregnancy.

In its best moments, Mickey 17, does the same: by transposing exploitation into futuristic clones, the film indicts the present-day exploitation of our fellow human beings. It’s a worthy reminder that if we leave space — or Earth for that matter — in the unchecked hands of oligarchs, we might end up doing astonishing things, even as we export our worst human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the ability to turn a blind eye.