In 2019, O’Neill was barred from working in her native Australia after the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) concluded that she was “misleading vulnerable people”. Styling herself as a “natural health educator”, she had told cancer sufferers that their disease was a “fungus” and could be treated with bicarbonate of soda, and she had informed new mothers that raw goats milk was a safe substitute for breast milk. Vaccines, as far as O’Neill was concerned, were poisonous.

Her authority for these pronouncements was the two years she had spent as a trainee psychiatric nurse. She never completed her qualification, though she saw that as no impediment to launching a career in health. A member of the Seventh Day Adventists, O’Neill organized most of her lectures through the church for the benefit of her fellow worshippers. Her advice is a disconcerting mixture of familiar homespun misinformation and disconcerting theology; she is a perfect example of the religion of wellness.

That HCCC’s verdict should have been the end of O’Neill’s professional life. No more lectures. No more “consultations”. No more training packages. Unfortunately, quackery has no respect for borders. O’Neill may no longer be able to practice in Australia, but there’s nothing to stop her doing so elsewhere in the world. Including in Britain: this month, O’Neill is embarking on a tour of the UK.

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For the low, low price of £700, you can experience five days of O’Neill’s wisdom at an estate hotel in Cheshire. Once attendees have had their fill of lectures, workshops, herbal teas and fruit juice, they get to enjoy a dinner dance — “the perfect way to say goodbye”. For cancer patients who go on to attempt the bicarb cure, they may well be saying goodbye to life itself. A group of doctors has published an open letter addressed to venue management alerting them to the dangers of O’Neill’s misinformation.

Not that this criticism is likely to do O’Neill much damage in the eyes of her admirers, who include the feminist-turned-5G-conspiracist and antivaxxer Naomi Wolf, and the Apprentice-contestant-turned-race-baiter Katie Hopkins. For both, O’Neill is a purveyor of truths that shadowy forces are anxious to suppress. “Big pharma,” tweeted Hopkins, “is more powerful than any government. Has more assets than any military.” Both Wolf and Hopkins seemed to be radicalized by the Covid pandemic, which proved to be a boomtime for health grifters such as O’Neill. In the isolation and confusion of lockdown, O’Neill fostered an avid following on TikTok and Telegram — boosted by the perception of her as a persecuted heretic.

O’Neill herself has leaned hard into this image of herself. On her website, you can purchase a book called (modestly) The Assassination of Barbara O’Neill, written by her husband Michael. The HCCC’s verdict, he thunders, was “an unwarranted smear campaign on a truly humble and caring lady”. Not only that, it was “part of a war on natural health more broadly” being prosecuted by powerful agencies against brave individual dissenters — a “modern-day David and Goliath story”.

The Bible allusion is not inadvertent. O’Neill’s her health claims can generally be traced back to a version of the Seventh Day Adventist theology. Adentism emerged from an apocalyptic cult that was disappointed that the world had failed to end in 1863. Like several religious movements of the Victorian period, the Adventists attempted to reconcile faith with rationalism and social purpose. The faith retains a distinctive focus on health and the body: followers believe that “keeping our bodies and minds healthy and fit are acts of service to God and a visible testimony in this world.”

Once you understand that, it becomes a lot easier to make sense of O’Neill’s health advice. Here, for example, is how she begins a lecture on the digestive system: “I’m very thankful to God that he has given us a liver that is able to detoxify us, and today I’m going to explain how the liver does this, and remember Proverbs 14, verse 6: “a scorner seeketh wisdom and findeth it not, but knowledge is easy to him that understands.””

It feels unlikely that anyone in human history has attempted an exegesis of Proverbs 14:6 based on the liver, but, for O’Neill, faith and health are inseparable. God has granted the human body “inbuilt ability to heal itself”, and when we resort to doctors (she says the “doctor” with the same kind of disgust others might apply to “parking enforcement officer”), we are turning our backs on God himself. You must “listen to the voice of your God in your body”. Much of what the voice of God is allegedly commanding is basic old-wives-tale stuff: a raw onion poultice on the foot to cure a cough, potatoes for inflammation. What goes next to the skin can harm as well as heal; she believes that breast cancer is exacerbated by wearing synthetic fabrics.

Some of her advice is merely eccentric. “What can you do if a child’s got autism?” she wonders in one TikTok clip. “One of the best things is the trampoline. The trampoline rebalances the brain.” Some of it is simply dangerous. Feeding babies raw goat milk will make them sick, if it doesn’t outright poison them (O’Neill later claimed she meant goat milk formula, but that isn’t what she said). Co-sleeping, which she recommends without reservation, is a major risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome. Meanwhile, the O’Neill approach to cancer is harrowingly ineffectual: one patient on the Cook Islands following her advice used a combination of baking soda, lemon juice and boiled water in place of chemotherapy. That man died, of course.

Such apparent setbacks do nothing to impinge on O’Neill’s self-belief. Again, you have to understand her faith to understand her. As she says in one video: “A lot of people are sick. They’re sick because the body will heal itself if you give it the right conditions.” By implication, if you don’t get better, it’s because you didn’t give your body the “right conditions”. You didn’t listen to the voice of God inside you. And if you die, so be it. Not all alternative health influencers are openly religious, but O’Neill’s logic of sin and punishment is a clear echo of the wider movement.

However caring they pretend to be, all “natural health” philosophies, are fundamentally without compassion. Think of the “freebirth movement”, which told women they were failures if they couldn’t go through labor without medical assistance, and callously deserted mothers and babies who were harmed or killed by this approach. Or Andrew Wakefield, whose discredited theories of vaccine-induced autism fed families a toxic mixture of blame and hope: blame for vaccinating their child, and hope that a “normal” child existed underneath the purported injury.

O’Neill’s content is rife with implicit accusations: there is little room for grace. Got cancer? Well, it’s your own fault for wearing petrochemicals. Still got cancer despite the baking soda poultice? That’s down to too much glucose in your diet. Child got autism? You probably caused it by allowing them to be vaccinated (or rather “giving them the V-word”, which is O’Neill’s circumlocution to get around YouTube censorship). You’re also probably making it worse by not giving them enough trampoline time. Every ailment is a morality play.

This should be repugnant. But because it comes masked within O’Neill’s grandmotherly manner, the cruelty can be overlooked. What people hear instead is a heartening message of self-determination. “I am the master of my destiny, I am the one who chooses what goes into my body,” says O’Neill in one of her more rousing moments. It’s a promise that, by living right, you can avoid punishment. It’s an assurance that purity — physical and moral — is within your grasp, if you just try hard.

So much of wellness culture is about, precisely, purification. A horror of contaminants. A belief that you can run your body like a gated community and keep the undesirable elements out, with your liver acting as a kind of security service to clean up any invaders that make their way through the barricades. (It’s never explained why the liver is supposed to be instilled with the will of God when it comes to general “toxins”, but impotent against the forces of nylon.)

This is seductive. Wellness adherents pursue the vision of a perfected self. In the language of health, they articulate a longing to be purged of all their sins, baptized in the holy waters of clean living and moderation. All you have to do, as Proverbs 14:6 says, is believe hard enough: “scorners” will be denied the rewards of both heaven and earth. Only the righteous can be saved, from environmental toxins as much as from damnation. The wages of sin is cancer.

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Even when it’s formally secular, wellness carries the imprint of the Christian culture that created it. The yearning for salvation is an understandable reaction to feeling isolated, confused and disempowered — emotions that were rampant during Covid, feeding demand for O’Neill-style influencers. But you don’t need a pandemic to create those conditions. You can also generate them very effectively by exposing someone to social media: that’s why woo-woo thrives in the wilds of the internet.

But though Christianity’s grammar is deeply embedded in our habits and thinking, it also evolves in response to social change. The original Adventists were trying to reinvent their faith for a scientific age. Now O’Neill does the same for the modern world. Her gospel, like our age, is highly individualistic: your duties are to your own body, not to society as a whole. It is a sad, pinched endpoint for the mysteries of faith. It is also a doctrine that seems sure to flourish. Today, wellness spawns cults, but in decades to come there’s every possibility that one of them could become a denomination.

It is hard to save people from their own psychological foibles. Banning O’Neill from shilling in the UK would be the right thing, but it is harder to stem the demand that gives people like her their living than it is to keep one hustler from practicing. The fault of logic that O’Neill exploits in her followers is too deeply human to be expunged. We cannot be made pure, in reason any more than in body. Which is why quacks like O’Neill will always prosper.

Maybe you don’t have to take that statement completely seriously. It’s less a manifesto, more a declaration that this record is not going to be a retread of Brat’s ferocious celebration of club culture and “365 party girls”. But the idea of dying recurs again and again in Music, Fashion, Film’s lyrics. Sometimes it’s a kind of figurative suicide: “It makes me wanna throw my life away,” Charli sings on “Camera”, as she reflects on the risk that her acting ambitions could come at the expense of her pop career.

Sometimes, death here is the measure of affection: “I’d cry if you died,” she promises on “Magic Metal Montana”, a platonic love song addressed to her long-term collaborator AG Cook. Sometimes, there are shades of apocalypse: in “SS26” (a self-aware skip through the marketing conventions of the entertainment industry), Charli deadpans that we are all “walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.”

It’s completely fitting that, when Rolling Stone magazine asked Charli to suggest a location for an interview, she proposed the Hollywood Forever cemetery. And by the end of the album, death has become literal. “No One Lasts Forever” is built around a sample from a conversation between Charli and the 83-year-old Canadian horror director David Cronenberg. It cuts in midway through Cronenberg describing an incident in which he collapsed. “As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” he says. “I thought about people, I thought about life.”

“Yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years,” Cronenberg continues, “but experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.” The track, and the album, ends in a minute and a half of Cronenberg’s voice looping around the words “they are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” while the music disintegrates underneath him. It’s beautiful, it’s profound, and it’s one of the strangest pieces of pop music ever recorded. 

This isn’t a completely new fixation for Charli: you can see Music, Fashion, Film as a second act to the gothic masochism of her Wuthering Heights collection. Or you can watch her mockumentary, The Moment (an imperfect but also underrated satire on the music industry), which imagines a version of Charli who went all-out to cash in on the Brat phenomenon. As things spiral out of control for the Charli of the film, she veers ever closer to self-destruction, until she goes AWOL, sparking suicide rumors. 

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In the film, this all works out for the best, commercially at least: when the fictional Charli comes back from the dead, she’s hotter than she’s ever been. But she’s also creatively moribund. Her juggernaut success comes at the ultimate Faustian price for an artist. After The Moment’s release, there was a lot of speculation about whether it was intentionally mocking Taylor Swift’s Eras tours. The inclusion of a special thanks in the credits for the Swiftologist, a video essayist who posts critical takes on Swift’s work, suggests that the answer to that is “maybe”.

The alleged Charli-Taylor beef begins publicly in 2024, with the song “Sympathy is Like a Knife” on Brat — an earnest, self-lacerating account of Charli’s feelings of inferiority around another pop star who she sees “backstage at my boyfriend’s show”. (Both Swift and Charli were at one point dating members of the 1975: Swift broke up with singer Matty Healy, and Charli married drummer George Daniel.) 

Swift appeared to respond the next year with “Actually Romantic” on her album The Life of a Showgirl, a clod-hopping and misjudged track addressed to an obsessive hater. “It feels like you’re flirting with me,” croons Swift, in an unconvincing imitation of someone who doesn’t care. Compared to Brat, The Life of a Showgirl sounded pedestrian and self-satisfied, and “Actually Romantic” was one of its weakest tracks. The song reaches an apotheosis of cringe with the line: “It’s kind of making me wet.”

What’s interesting here isn’t so much the ins and outs of two women in their thirties who may or may not have had a falling out (neither has gone on the record regarding their feelings about each other). Rather, it’s the contrast between two different ways of dealing with making it. Since 2022, Swift has settled into an imperial phase that has seen her brutally expunge experimentation and vulnerability from her output. The last traces of risk-taking seemed to leave her body somewhere around the album Midnights. 

If I had to pinpoint the moment Swift stopped being interesting to me as an artist, it would be the 2023 tweet in which she announced a re-recorded version of “Snow on the Beach”, her duet with Lana del Rey: “You asked for it, we listened: Lana and I went back into the studio specifically to record more Lana on ‘Snow on the Beach’.” You asked for it, we listened, as though making pop music were a question of beta testing and tweaking based on user feedback until the product has been perfectly refined. The customer is always right.

This is the absolute antithesis of the Charli approach to creativity, which is to court danger for the sake of experimentation. On “Camera”, she sings about how acting offers the prospect of “Something new and undiscovered/ And something kind of violent/ Daring to fail and being ugly/ I’m inspired and alive.” Charli recently posted Lou Reed’s despised-at-the-time 1975 album Metal Machine Music to her stories. Better, in her version of the creative life, to flop than to fade away: nothing is as frightening as inertia. 

Music, Fashion, Film is several orders of magnitude less confrontational than Metal Machine Music, but like Reed in the Seventies, Charli is facing in the direction of the future. Her post-Brat death-drive caught a mood that has been picked up by some of this year’s greatest pop albums. Worst Girl in America by Slayyyter (an artist Charli singled out for praise in her Rolling Stone interview) is a concept album about a party girl’s rise and demise: the last song, “Brittany Murphy”, is a giddily hook-filled suicide note. 

Even more powerfully, Madonna’s Confessions II is — under the thumping return to the floor-fillers of Confessions on a Dance Floor — a record filled with thoughts of mortality. Having spent the years since the first Confessions frantically outrunning her own age, Madonna at 67 suddenly sounds like an artist coming to terms with both her own mortality and her influence. “People really think there’s a beginning and ending to this thing called life. But energy never dies,” she says over the intro to “Fragile”. It is the inverted version of Cronenberg’s words on “No One Lasts Forever”.

You don’t need to be in your pensionable years to feel that existence right now is precarious. This is an unstable world politically, and a frightening world environmentally: large tracts of Europe and North America have been turned to ash this summer. Charli is correct that art is not going to save us — not music, not fashion, not film. The restless desire to make something new, the impulse to create is still worth following for its own sake. It’s one way of knowing you’re alive. When you’ve accepted that your life is finite, why would you waste it doing the same thing on repeat to please other people?

In the first scene, Price is looking at magazine covers from her glamour model heyday in the late Nineties and early 2000s: Loaded, Maxim, Front. Back then, she went by the pseudonym Jordan, and doesn’t like what she sees. “Ugly. Absolute ugly,” she says. The only time she softens is when she picks up some photos of herself at five and seven. “Ah, she’s quite a pretty little girl. Gentle eyes. Innocent. No idea what was coming ahead of me.”

Her words are slurred and nasal, because her teeth — glaring white and fitted in Turkey, in exchange for an Instagram post — are too big for her mouth. (She’s said that she doesn’t recommend anybody have fake teeth: “I can’t eat a chocolate eclair now in case I pull one out.”) After innumerable tweakments, her face today looks alien, like a Bratz doll’s. She recently had surgery to remove scar tissue from migrated filler. Her breasts, of course, are enormous, absurd. They almost distract from how tiny the rest of her body is: take away the implants, and she would likely be underweight.

All of this, Price insists, is how she wants to be. Back when she was a Page 3 girl with unaugmented breasts, The Sun ran a poll asking its readers whether she should have a surgery. (Headline: “MY BOOBS ARE IN YOUR HANDS”.) 80% voted against. Price ignored them. She also ignored the fact that implants were banned from Page 3, meaning that getting them was potentially career-ending — especially the ostentatiously fake, “stuck-on” ones she wanted.

In one sense, Price made the right decision. Her new body coincided exactly with the needs of the booming lad-mag market. “My pictures,” she says in the series, “were pornographic without being pornographic.” The artificial extremity of her figure turned her softcore poses into obscenities, and the precocious innocence of her Bardot-ish face (the face she now considers ugly) layered on the perversity. Every title wanted her as a cover girl because, simply, she shifted copies. Something about her mix of innocence and artifice made her into a provocation: men want to pick her up and possess her.

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From when she was a teenager, she says in the documentary, she understood how to incite male attention, and she loved it. None of this sounds like it’s about sex for her: the pleasure was all in the power she had to make men look at her, without giving them what they wanted. She explains that liked to be looked at — and she knew her sexuality could guarantee that — but not to be touched. She traces this impulse back to an incident that occurred when she was seven years old, when a strange man molested her in the park near her home.

Maybe as traumatizing as the abuse was the invasive way the police treated her when they investigated, taking away her underwear. “There’s habitual abuse of men against me. Taking advantage of me from a young age for their own self-benefit,” Price says. (In her adult life, she’s revealed that she’s been raped twice, once by a celebrity and once during a carjacking in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, she has PTSD.) There seems to be a direct line between the powerless victimhood she experienced as a child, and the deforming insistence on absolute bodily autonomy that has shaped Price into what she is today.

In 2000, against the backdrop of Price’s vertiginous rise to fame and her cultural dominance, Michel Faber published the novel Under the Skin. It’s about an alien called Isserley who has been sent to Earth. In order to pass as human, her entire body has been surgically reconstituted, causing her constant pain: under daylight, she looks obviously freakish, but in the dark it’s enough (or anyway her gigantic bosom is enough) to captivate men. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though,” thinks one of the hitchhikers Isserley picks up. “Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows — no wonder her top was long-sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that…”

Isserley’s reconstruction means she can’t have sex (“The tangle of knotted flesh between her legs she didn’t touch or examine; it was a lost cause”), making her the epitome of the woman who can be lusted for but not possessed. That doesn’t matter, because she isn’t seducing these men for intercourse: she’s bait, luring humans so they can be processed for the meat market on her home planet. Whatever debased things these men think about her as they sit in her car, Isserley is the one abusing them, not the other way around. Her modified body grants her supreme power.

Whether Faber was directly inspired by Price or not, her image was predatory too. That perception was solidified by the fact that she had a relationship with Pop Idol contestant Gareth Gates when he was 17 and she was 24. His agent told him to deny they were together — Price, they said, was career death to a teen idol like him. She sold the kiss-and-tell story of taking his virginity while she was pregnant with her first baby, conceived with the footballer Dwight Yorke.

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In the documentary, both she and Gates talk about their time together with tenderness and respect: he doesn’t seem scarred by his fling with an older woman, but it’s clear from the way he talks about the coverage that her scorched-earth strategy hurt him personally. Meanwhile, it gave her profile a boost. The more outrageous Price could be, the more the press ate her up. She was a Noughties succubus: a female demon who could be portrayed as seducing men to their destruction.

And in the same way that Isserley’s unnatural cleavage distracts men from everything that should be disturbing about the rest of her, Price’s ever-expanding chest seemed to distract from the fact that there was something not quite right about her. Only occasionally did anyone seem to notice that she might not be OK. Nothing to Hide includes striking archive footage of the comedian Frank Skinner interviewing her in 2001, after she revealed her pregnancy, and — with kindness that belied his new lad image — telling her that she seemed vulnerable.

She was: a year before she had attempted suicide following a break-up. But there was no room for weakness in her public image. When her baby, Harvey, was born, she commodified him as she’d commodified herself, selling photos of them together. In the documentary, she explains her thinking. The level of press interest in her meant that someone was going to make money from pictures of them, so why shouldn’t she be the person to profit?

Similarly, the documentary explains how she cut a deal with a favored paparazzi. She would tip him off so he always got the killer shot of her falling out of a nightclub (now even more disgraceful since she was a new mom), and he allegedly kicked back a share of his fee to her. Price was exploiting the system that sought to exploit her. Later, she would use reality TV to monetize every aspect of her life, including her marriages and her children.

It was clever, and it seemed to give her the thing she’d always wanted: attention and control combined. But her power was illusory. Price was being publicly broken down for mass consumption, and drawing some profit from that process could not stop it from harming her. As the series follows her career, her disintegration escalates — physically (Price has dealt with multiple complications from surgery), emotionally (her private life, lived in public, is painfully chaotic) and financially (she has been declared bankrupt twice).

Price wanted to be desired, and when men desired her, she was hated for it. The tabloids cheerfully had their cake and ate it, first running the salacious details of the Gates affair from Price’s account, and then using his denials to paint her as a liar. In the documentary, there’s footage of her being booed at an awards show when she makes a jibe about the situation. Her actions were calculated to provoke, but the backlash to her provocations still wounded her — especially when it touched on her capacity as a mother. Maybe the nadir of Price-hating came in 2010, when the comedian Frankie Boyle made a joke in his Channel 4 series Tramadol Nights about Price being raped by her son, who was eight at the time.

Price’s fortunes fell with the old-media structures. The lad mags are gone, the tabloids weakened. But her approach to fame was prescient. Total self-commodification is now the rule of social media. The porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips have followed Price’s path of seeking maximum outrage (for example, through their viral gangbang stunts) in exchange for maximum attention. Blue even, horrifyingly, found a way to market her pregnancy, by arranging a “baby shower” where she invited men to urinate on her belly.

Blue and Philips make the same arguments as Price: their bodies, their choice, and they choose to extract maximum profit from themselves. But as Price shows, when you make yourself hard, you make yourself brittle too. Perhaps her successors will be spared the damage that Price has gone through. Perhaps they will be better at protecting themselves, even while they are selling themselves off piece by piece. Perhaps they are able to inoculate themselves against the hatred they inspire in others, in a way that Price was never able to — there is an argument that having access to social media, rather than needing to rely on an often-hostile press, gives this generation of self-exploiters an unprecedented level of control.

I think this is a false hope. However rapacious the media was before the arrival of the mass internet, social-media audiences are even more hungry for drama and liberal with their viciousness. The incentives to flog yourself are as strong as they ever were, and now there are no intervening editorial layers between you and your audience to act as a moderating force. The impulse to extremity goes unchecked, and competition for attention pushes everyone to go further. After all, you could hardly say that social media has been good for Price: just think about her teeth.

For a while, it looked like Price truly had found a way to turn her objectification into a successful cottage industry: her degradation was the means of production, and she seized it with alacrity. Price was the perfect creature for the sexual culture of the Noughties: an effigy of femininity, who existed to be hated. Price has been made to pay and pay for wanting to be wanted.

This could be a metaphor for the internet; but it’s also the set-up for the horror movie Backrooms. Three things make the film notable. First, it’s phenomenally successful: it has just broken $300 million in global box-office takings. Second, its director is phenomenally young: Kane Parsons was 20 when the film was released in May. And third, Backrooms marks the moment that creepypasta crossed definitively into the entertainment mainstream.

What, you might be asking, is creepypasta? And can you eat it? Well, no. Creepypasta is sometimes used as a catch-all term for any horror story published online, but a more precise definition is that it’s a kind of horror story that could only exist online: a collaborative venture into the uncanny that deploys the structure of the internet to generate fear. Creepypastas grow on message boards and wikis, usually created in-character (with users posting as though the fictions they’re describing are real), and are expanded in videos and podcasts.

The term derives from “copypasta”, itself a corruption of the term “copy-paste” that emerged on the image board 4chan in 2006 to refer to blocks of text posted there (copied and pasted) by internet users. A year later, the word creepypasta emerged to specifically designate scary copypastas. That makes them sound like a 21st-century spin on the old chain letters — the ones that instructed you to forward this message to 10 other people, or suffer a horrible fate. But creepypastas have a power to disturb that goes far deeper.

They feed off the glitchy, uncertain way that information is reproduced online. Distortion might be the result of saving and reuploading a picture multiple times, or it might have been deliberately tampered with; or it might, if you’re feeling susceptible, be an authentic document of an unnatural event. Whole horror lores can even be spun out of innocuous bits of media which become sinister purely because they’ve been shorn of their context — like the photograph that inspired the Backrooms creepypasta.

In 2002, an old furniture store was being renovated; because it was 2002, someone decided to document the process on a blog, with photos of the cavernous, yellow-wallpapered space. And that was the end of that, until 2019, when a poster on 4chan put out a call for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”. Someone responded with one of the sickly pictures of the empty store, taken at a slightly odd angle: not scary, but definitely unheimlich. (It would be 2024 before the source of the picture was identified.)

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Someone else replied with a brief but vivid horror scenario that would set the terms for everything that the Backrooms mythos would become: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

From this germ, a whole fictional universe proliferated across Reddit, wikis and Discord. There was even a split in the community between those who were interested in roleplaying and lore-building, and those who declared themselves “truebackrooms”, with an interest in the specific aesthetic that gave the Backrooms image its sinister charge. In 2022, Parsons began uploading his Backrooms series to YouTube — an incredibly accomplished “found footage” horror, which became the genesis of the Backrooms feature film.

One of the particularly unsettling aspects of the Backrooms creepypasta is the idea of “noclipping out of reality”. Noclipping is a concept taken from video games: when an error in the programming allows a character to pass through a seemingly solid object, they’re said to have “noclipped”. So while the concept of being lost in infinite backrooms is pretty horrific, there’s also the unpleasant implication that the real world has begun to behave like a video game. The physical and the digital bleed into each other in the Backrooms.

That’s also true with one of the other breakout creepypastas. Slenderman is a hauntingly tall, skinny and faceless figure who is said to control his victims’ minds. That is, he infects his target’s consciousness as a computer virus does. Like the Backrooms, Slenderman has a known origin: another image challenge, this time on the board Something Awful in 2009. A user called Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen) posted two pictures of children with an elongated, faceless form lurking in the background.

The first was captioned: “we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…” The caption on the second claimed it had been recovered from a library fire, and implied an authority cover-up. It also coined “the Slender Man”. This was explicit, deliberate storytelling using established horror and folklore tropes: with echoes of the Pied Piper, Beowulf’s giant monster Grendel and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Slenderman felt horribly familiar.

Consequently, he captured something in the collective imaginary: it was almost as though he had always already existed, and was just waiting to be named. (When I was a child in the Eighties, I had a recurring nightmare about a character who looked a lot like Slenderman.) Slenderman inspired a long-running YouTube mockumentary series called Marble Hornets; multiple alternate reality games using clues scattered across media and a character in the video game Minecraft. You can take questionnaires to learn if you have the “slender sickness”: headaches, nosebleeds and fatigue are all signs that Slenderman has fixed his malevolent attentions on you.

In 2014, Slenderman was also implicated in the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin by two of her friends who believed that they could become Slenderman’s proxies (and protect their families from him) by providing a sacrifice. The stabbing of Payton Isabella Leutner by Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser generated, inevitably, an international moral panic, some of it justified: just how much were parents aware of the content their children might be consuming unsupervised in their devices? (YouTube, where Weier and Geyser absorbed much of their Slenderman media, did not launch YouTube Kids until 2015. When Weier and Geyser went on their tablets, there was no delineation between age-appropriate and inappropriate videos.)

Some of the coverage around the attempted murder, though, appeared to be under the impression that Slenderman really did have the occult powers of mind-control that Weier and Geyser had credited him with. Overheated commentators acted as though a demonic force had been unleashed into the brains of children by the internet. In reality, though, the two perpetrators were sadly vulnerable girls. Geyser had untreated early-onset schizophrenia with vivid delusions. Meanwhile, Weier had been bullied and isolated until she met Geyser: in her police interview, she explained her actions by saying she hadn’t wanted to lose the friendship.

Weier and Geyser, then, had noclipped out of reality. They were lost in the Backrooms of their shared fantasy. When they were arrested, they had been attempting to walk to “Slender Mansion”, the supposed home of Slenderman which they had decided was actually located in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. In footage of them after their arrests, they earnestly describe Slenderman’s abilities. Within their private game, Leutner had been reduced to the status of a non-playable character — a prop without her own inner life.

Each generation creates the monsters it needs, or perhaps the monsters it deserves: the horror genre is a kind of collective nightmare, where cultural anxieties are given grotesque form. In the 2000s, the idea of being stalked by a faceless humanoid who could manipulate your brain made instinctive sense to internet users: by placing yourself online, you created a digital version of your own psyche that could be rifled through by malicious anons, and abused. Slenderman stole children, and the internet seemed to be stealing them too.

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In the film Backrooms, the monster isn’t a character — it’s a place, and what happens to you when you’re in there. Our current contemporary nightmare isn’t the creature that stalks you. It’s the possibility of slipping into a parallel dimension and never being able to come back. Everything that exists in the Backrooms is an echo of something outside them, but distorted, like degraded digital copies, or AI hallucinations. The characters who enter the Backrooms are initially repulsed by their strangeness, but some end up seduced by them: the Backrooms feel more real than the real world.

For the director, who is young enough to have grown up fully online, this must be a very recognizable kind of horror. Like the Backrooms, the internet is a place designed to make you lose your bearings, as you click from link to link or scroll from post to post until you’re deep down a rabbit hole with no way of retracing your steps. It’s also a place where you can lose yourself, psychologically and morally: an infinite version of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, where every corridor draws you deeper into your own corruption.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that, as well as birthing creepypasta and myriad other forms of internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful have been the factories for some of the most heinous online tendencies. The writer Dale Beran (in his book It Came From Something Awful) describes these boards as incubators for the memeified far Right. 4chan in particular became characterized by a deep nihilism, where anything — from child pornography to suicide to school shootings — could be treated as a joke.

For most, this was edginess without intent. For others, it was a staging ground for real world violence: in multiple cases, mass shooters or murderers have announced their intentions or documented their crimes on 4chan. The distorted norms of the site meant that they expected, and sometimes received, applause for their acts. Maybe the fellow users cheering for killing were evil by nature. More likely, their absorption into the parallel world of message boards had fractured something in their sense of right and wrong.

Though it’s set in 1990 (and its characters consequently use no technology more advanced than a fixed-line telephone), Backrooms is probably the most accurate film about the internet ever made. It’s terrifying, not because its world is frighteningly alien, but because its world is frighteningly familiar: like the characters of the film, we are all constantly being seduced by what’s on the other side of the portal. The online realm is real, even if it doesn’t exist as space or matter. We’re all lost here, and the longer we stay, the more monstrous we become.

This week, the Origin Story podcast, hosted by indistinguishable journalists Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, bravely shouldered the burden of analyzing Rowling over the course of two episodes. Do they succeed? Not remotely. But they do offer a fascinating insight into what happens when a certain kind of progressive man becomes radicalized by Bluesky.

And if you think I’m being patronizing and pathologizing, wait until you get a load of the podcast, which is predicated on the idea that Rowling has undergone a metamorphosis so bizarre, only psychological fracture can explain it. “It’s just such a weird story,” says Dunt. “She gets to say whatever she likes, but year by year, it gets quite a bit less kind until you just see this thing left over.”

Neither host notes that Dunt has referred to Rowling as “this thing”, as though a lack of appropriate “kindness” has turned her into something monstrous. (The “kindness” demanded only flows in one direction — there’s no expectation that trans activists could “kindly” respect women’s boundaries.) Nor do they seem to truly believe that Rowling, or any woman with gender-critical beliefs, should get to “say whatever she likes”. Any deference they pay to free speech is strictly pro-forma.

Despite a cursory show of aiming for balance, Dunt and Lynskey aren’t coming to this subject as neutral parties. They have a point of view, and their point of view is that trans activism is the decent, liberal, commonsense stance: any dissent is at best silly, and at worst (gasp) Right-wing. The assumption which shapes the entire podcast is that there is no legitimate way to be gender critical.

Ten years ago, when Stonewall’s “no debate” position held sway, this was the standard stance in most of the UK media. Today, it has substantially collapsed, but it persists in certain pockets. One of these is Bluesky — the X-replacement social media platform memorably described by Josh Barro as a “containment dome” for extremist Left-wing opinions, and a site where Dunt and Lynskey both enjoy hefty followings.

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On Bluesky, the gender argument never left 2016. Lynskey treats the idea that you can support trans people’s rights while criticizing the politics and precepts of trans activism as inherently bad faith: “It’s very hard to separate those two things considering that, without gender identity, how do trans people make sense?” In other words, if you don’t accept trans people’s understanding of the world, you’re a transphobe.

This is obviously ludicrous. There are innumerable creeds that I don’t share, while also believing that the people who hold them are entitled to freedom from discrimination: Christians, Muslims, vegans, even people who think “two male podcasters giving an etiquette seminar to a woman they don’t know” is an acceptable form of entertainment. If the belief in gender identity requires everyone else to adhere to it, that’s pretty totalitarian.

Dunt and Lynskey find it easy to embrace their own gender identities. In a moment of hearty masculine backslapping, they agree that it would be “mad” to object to the term cisgender. “We’re both cisgender. It’s like, whatever,” shrugs Lynskey obliviously. Oh, do you identify as naturally of the sex class that does less housework and isn’t expected to put other people’s feelings first? How nice for you! (Then, having agreed that “cisgender” is “a really valid and useful word”, neither uses it for the entire rest of the first podcast. Truly, an indispensable piece of language.)

They take the same attitude to the word “terf”. “It’s weird the way it’s treated like a slur and yet it’s not factually inaccurate,” ponders Lynskey, which is exactly the kind of thing racists have historically said about the P-word and the N-word. A word becomes a slur because of the way it’s used — and, as the linguist Deborah Cameron noted in 2016, “terf” is used to make violent threats like “slit their throats” and “every terf out there needs to die”.

But it’s a strange quirk of this podcast: listening to it, you’d have no idea that trans activism contains a long history of misogynistic abuse. At one point, Lynskey refers to Julie Bindel’s 2004 Guardian column, “Gender Benders, Beware” as “viciously transphobic” and “ugly stuff”. What he doesn’t mention is that the column was written in response to a grotesque trans activist attack on the feminist organization Vancouver Rape Relief, for the crime of trying to run a female-only service. (The headline was the Guardian’s own choice: Bindel doesn’t even use the phrase “gender benders” in the copy.)

When it comes to Rowling, there’s not even the tiniest acknowledgment that there may have been an element of sexism in the way she was hounded. The nearest Dunt and Lynskey come to sympathizing with her is in a discussion of the domestic violence she suffered from her first husband — and this comes with an intimation that the experience has made her fragile and unreliable. It’s the classic double bind for the female victim: your experience of male violence disqualifies you to talk about male violence.

And even to refer to “male violence” would likely send Dunt and Lynskey into apoplexy: accurate references to sex are a dreadful taboo here. Throughout the episodes, they act scandalized at anyone referring to a trans woman as male or a man. Lynskey makes an audible “oof” when Dunt quotes Maya Forstater calling Pips Bunce, the gender-fluid Credit Suisse executive who was anointed one of the 100 top women executives in the Financial Times, “a white man who likes to dress in women’s clothes”.

But to anyone not marinated in Bluesky, there is nothing shocking at all about calling Bunce a man. This is someone clearly male who, half the time, wears a suit; who has a wife and a career in finance; and who expects everyone to fall in line with his self-perception and treat him as a woman when he decides to wear a wig. Bunce’s behavior is as male-pattern as his baldness. If Dunt and Lynskey think “man” is the most insulting epithet that could be thrown at him, I’m happy to sit here and call them both men all day.

Dunt and Lynskey are the proverbial last Japanese soldiers in the jungle, still fighting a war that’s been settled elsewhere. According to them, rapid onset gender dysphoria is a discredited “clown car” theory: actually, the increase in girls identifying out of their sex in adolescence without a previous history of gender variance was confirmed by the Cass report. Ah, but Cass too can be dismissed: she’s “not a gender specialist”. (She is, of course, one of the most experienced and respected pediatricians in the country, but what does that weigh compared to a podcast?)

In Origin Story land, autogynephilia — the theory that some men transition because they are turned on by the idea of themselves as a woman — is similarly “discredited”. Who’s going to tell the American critic and trans woman Andrea Long Chu that he was wrong when he wrote that he transitioned “for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”?

In the podcast, Imane Khelif is the “female Algerian boxer”, and it’s sheerest cruelty to point out that Khelif is actually a male athlete who, regardless of DSDs, therefore doesn’t belong in women’s sport. There’s even a throwaway reprise of the once-popular “Michael Phelps’s armspan” argument, which claims that being male in a female competition is no different to any other physical advantage an athlete might have. I wanted to ask Dunt and Lynskey to do clownfish as an encore.

When Dunt and Lynskey absolutely have to acknowledge that trans inclusion has costs for women, they can’t concede that this is built into the system they are endorsing. Referring to the case of the rapist Karen White, who reoffended while held in a women’s prison, they agree that this was an “insane” decision by the prison service: “however trans inclusive you are, it’s quite hard to [say] that a rapist who then transitioned should be put in there without any consideration,” says Lynskey.

Well, it should have been a hard argument to make. And yet trans activists made it, and prison policy was shaped by it. The women who were assaulted are not figments of a terrible Right-wing imagination — even though I and other feminists were called “terfs”, “transphobes” and “genital obsessives” for pointing out that self-identity made cases like this inevitable.

If the terfs had been listened to, a young female psychiatric patient who identified as male would never have been placed on a male ward, where she was raped. (The NHS trust that enforced this “inclusive” policy also deliberately obstructed the police investigation into the crime.) It’s the funny thing about being called trans exclusionary: I know perfectly well why trans people should be included in the services that fit their birth sex. The “kindness” Dunt and Lynskey demand in their idiotic podcast led, in this instance, to a vulnerable trans person suffering the worst kind of violation.

Even the fact that Rowling funds a center for female victims of violence is held against her, because Beira’s Place is women-only and therefore tarnished in the eyes of these reasonable men. Her greatest crime of all, though, is funding For Women Scotland’s Supreme Court case against the Scottish government, which ultimately clarified that the Equality Act protects sex, and not gender identity. The Equality Act also, separately, protects trans people, but apparently it’s intolerable for women to have even one clause of legislation to themselves.

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By writing this, I’m laying myself open to the charge of “obsession”. “Once I see a writer become obsessed with this issue, they cannot let it go. It becomes almost all they write about,” says Lynskey. But this reveals more about his fixation than mine. The gender-critical writers named in the podcast — Jesse Singal, Victoria Smith, Bindel, me, Rowling — all cover a vast number of other topics, from the Super Bowl to surrogacy to celebrity sex tapes to extremely long crime novels. It’s Lynskey and Dunt who are only able to see trans.

I’d be lying if I said I love everything about Rowling’s social media style: certainly I wish she’d spent less time beefing with India Willoughby, if only because it seems beneath her dignity to pay attention to a voluntarily castrated ex-weatherman. But there’s no hidden truth, no sinister “origin story”, about what happened to her. She’s always been fighty on social media. (Remember Indyref? Or Brexit? Or all the times she sassed Trump?) She’s always been committed to feminism.

This podcast is nothing but a whine of fury that Rowling has shown she values women’s rights more than pandering to men’s feelings. I’m sure that Dunt and Lynskey consider themselves as far from the manosphere as it’s possible to be, and yet the message of Origin Story is that defying men makes a woman subhuman. Such chauvinism has always been embedded in trans activism. That’s why so many feminists rebelled against the doctrine, and it’s also why some liberal men have such a hard time giving it up.

She had a brash, snarky style that worked perfectly online and was widely imitated. If conflict was the currency of Web 2.0, West was an expert day trader. Her takedowns were vicious, and viral. Sex and the City 2, she wrote in one of her first breakout pieces, “takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human… and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.” She tore into her Stranger colleague Dan Savage to accuse him of fat-shaming, in a blog post published on the Stranger. She tracked down and interviewed one of her own worst trolls. The internet was her element.

West’s fans tend to love her for what she is as much as what she writes. She became a role model for fat women who chose self-acceptance over self-hate. In 2015, she married the musician Ahamefule J Oluo, and presented their relationship as a “radical act” for body positivity. “[My partner],” she wrote, “is conventionally desirable and I am a ‘before’ picture in an ad for weight-loss tapeworm eggs. It is considered highly unlikely — borderline inconceivable — that he would choose to be with me in a culture where men are urged to perpetually ‘upgrade’ to the ‘hottest’ woman within reach.”

By 2018, West appeared to have everything she could desire. She was also, according to her new memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, devastatingly, dysfunctionally unhappy: “The shift happened imperceptibly, in the two years after Shrill the book came out. I stopped wanting to work. I wrote less and less. I never answered emails. I let professional relationships slip away. I fumbled opportunities. I alienated my colleagues. I stopped seeing my friends. I was afraid to go outside, because I had become a public figure, at least in Seattle… I ate obsessively, just to feel some sort of tangible, reliable pleasure. I was in perpetual physical pain. I stopped moving my body. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sleep.”

Her marriage was no consolation. The fairytale vision she constructed in her writing and social media posts was, she writes, “an optical illusion, a conjurer’s trick, an inversion, a photo negative, a plaster cast for a life that didn’t exist.” She and Oluo only appeared to be contented because they were grimly suppressing any conflict: “we’d never figured out how to talk about anything hard. When things did crack open, he’d get angry and I’d grovel.”

The hardest thing of all? In 2012, in the early stages of their relationship, Oluo had made non-monogamy a condition of being with West. “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” (Oluo is mixed race.) But West wasn’t OK with non-monogamy. When she’d written about the significance of being a “fat bride”, she had been sincere: “Monogamous heterosexual true love had always been withheld, so that’s what I chased. I wasn’t naive; I was furious.”

But she also didn’t feel able to object. For one thing, she was a committed progressive, and in the 2010s, “being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles.” For another, she was afraid she would lose Oluo. (It is relevant that Oluo raised the non-monogamy issue shortly after West’s father died, when she was at her most pliable.) So she struck a bargain, with him but mostly with herself: if Oluo were to have other relationships, she never wanted to hear about them. This willed ignorance sort-of worked – for a while.

Then in 2019, West got a message from a fan who had spotted Oluo in a bar in Seattle, kissing another woman. So much for discretion. But Lindy West is not Lily Allen — and Adult Braces is not the story of how she kicked Oluo out the house and won back her self-confidence. Instead, it’s the story of how West convinced herself that she was also in love with Roya, the woman with whom her husband was having his affair. “I figured he probably had great taste in women,” West rationalizes. Today, the three of them live together as a “throuple”.

West is insistent that embracing polyamory has cured her “codependency”, but her assertions sound hollow. Whatever erotic independence she is theoretically allowed, she doesn’t appear to have pursued it. She is far more convincing writing about her reasons for valuing monogamy than she is in the stilted, formal exchanges she quotes between her and Roya, who is younger and thinner and very much what the “culture” would see as an “upgrade” on West.

In fact, the whole book reads like a desperate, and desperately sad, cope. West is too intelligent to fully repress her insights. “Yes, it was spectacularly unlikely that I would — in a wholly uncomplicated, non-disordered way — connect with my husband’s girlfriend,” she writes. But she swats away the self-knowledge: “I don’t know, crazier coincidences have happened!” This surrendered pose is difficult to reconcile with the fighty, seemingly fearless writer of the 2000s and 2010s.

Whatever happened to Lindy West? And whatever happened to the kind of feminism she represented? These are questions that West appears to be asking herself, intermittently. “Sometimes I wonder if my last couple of years at The Stranger… were the very best of my life — if it would be worth it to go back to the smaller world of a Seattle alt weekly, a big fat fish in a pond I loved and understood, where everyone loved and understood me. I was broke and lonely, but I was myself; I was great at what I did, and I never second-guessed it.”

She’s right. She really was great at what she did. In 2009, West — then aged 27 — reviewed a branch of Hooters, the chain “breastaurant” where female servers wear tight shirts and short-shorts and are contractually required to flirt with the customers. The result was savagely funny and spikily political. “Hooters is like a misogyny theme park,” she wrote, “where… all the women are girls, all the girls who weren’t born ‘empowered’ have cut open their chests and stuck plastic bags of goo in there and sewn ’em up again in the name of making money and making men happy, and no one’s shaming you into treating them like humans with brain-parts.”

Then she added: “It’s like — a friend pointed out later — if someone opened a restaurant called N*****s, and the all-black waitstaff dressed like slaves and step ’n’ fetched you platters of watermelon.” She did not asterisk out the N-word, and it’s shocking to see; not only because the N-word has now become thoroughly taboo (a process that was already well underway by the late 2000s), but because West went on to become exactly the kind of writer who would prosecute linguistic taboos with vigor — a paragon of progressive right-think.

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But the internet that made West successful was a place of roiling social mores. Things went from acceptable to edgy to verboten with breakneck speed — and West was one of the most significant writers in shaping (or at least, narrating) that process. That didn’t mean she was doctrinaire, or at least not at first. Her 2012 Jezebel essay “How to make a rape joke” does not say that rape is off-limits as a topic of comedy. In fact, it lays out several examples of rape jokes that West thinks are funny and have more than shock value.

It’s also self-critical. Revisiting her SATC2 review, and the “rapes it to death with a stiletto” line, she writes: “I chose ‘rape” on purpose at the time — because it’s gendered and jarring and I wanted to convey the severity of my disgust, as a woman, with that fucking garbage movie. But if I wrote that review today, would I write it the same way? Nope… I, Lindy West, am sorry.” The subtleties of her position were missed by a significant male contingent, who duly decided that the best way to punish West for writing about rape was to send her a tsunami of rape threats, largely via Twitter.

Being harassed at that scale is scarring, and when West writes about the experience in Adult Braces, she sounds fragile and wounded: “It turns out that having thousands of people make fun of you and threaten to rape and murder you can make you feel unsafe in certain spaces for way longer than you expect.” There’s a change in her writing around this time. She doesn’t become less aggressive, but she does become more selective about who she will be aggressive towards, as though the lambasting she received has made her more fearful of being rejected by her own “side”. When the British journalist Suzanne Moore was at the center of a horrific Twitter pile-on six months later over a line in an essay that was deemed to be transphobic, West’s recent experience did not make her sympathetic. Instead, it seems to have hardened her attitude. “Trans women are women, and to say otherwise makes you sound like a batty old dinosaur,” she wrote in a snide post on Jezebel.

Having read her for a long time, it seems unlikely to me that West always believed “trans women are women”. Instead, it seems to be an opinion that solidified into conviction some time between 2012 and 2013 — when the social cost of being labeled a “terf” became inescapable. As West says in her piece, she is writing as someone “versed in the current social justice dialog”. If you want to put it another way, she is writing as someone who has learned to second-guess herself. She is less concerned about what is true or fair than she is about what is acceptable to her peers.

You can see this same evolution in the adaptation of Shrill for the screen. In the second episode of season one, first broadcast in 2019, West’s Hooters trip gets revived for her on-screen analog, the character Annie (played by Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant), only the TV version is very different.

In the Stranger piece, West’s interactions with the server (who she nicknames “Professor Boobies”) were stilted and painful, and West is left feeling “fat and condescending”. In the TV version, though, Annie is a respectful tourist of the strippers’ workplace, diligently listening to sex workers in the way that, by 2019, all liberals had been instructed that they should. When Annie asks one (black) dancer whether she finds it undignified to do what a man tells her, the dancer replies: “Men do not tell me what to do. I’ve got a fat ass and big titties — I tell them what to do.”

Later in the episode, inspired by this pep talk, Annie will assert the value of her own “fat ass and big titties” to a disrespectful boyfriend.

There’s no room in here for a critique of plastic surgery. The “misogyny theme park” has been replaced with a female empowerment playground. And there is certainly no comparison here between girlie shows and black minstrelsy — never mind a provocative deployment of the N-word. By the late 2010s, the official progressive line was that sex work is work and waitressing in a breastaurant was no less dignified than serving in McDonalds. There was also a heavy taboo on drawing an analogy between racism and any other kind of oppression; indeed, to do so was considered to be in itself a form of racism. West’s own desire not to be racist was so strong that, as we’ve already seen, her husband used it to pressure her into non-monogamy by claiming that monogamy was tantamount to slavery.

To be entirely clear, I have no desire to return to a time when the N-word was dropped with impunity and rape jokes were background noise — though if I did, I could simply log into Elon Musk’s X. Nevertheless, when reading West’s old Stranger essay, it’s painful to see how much more fun it is than West’s output now. You’d have a considerably better time hitting up Hooters with the 2009 version of West and making jokes about boob jobs than you would obediently receiving homilies about self-esteem from a woman in a thong.

Her retreat to linguistic policing turned her into an exemplar of “conduct book feminism” (as the writer Victoria Smith calls it); and conduct book feminism, it turns out, was repellent to quite a lot of people. Earlier this month, New York Magazine published a report on “The Women Leaving the New Right”. The women’s reasons for leaving a movement they had once assiduously boosted were interesting, if predictable: turns out that when men say women should be subservient domestic chattel, some of them mean it. But more revealing than that, to me at least, were the factors that had drawn them to the New Right in the first place. The journalist Sam Adler-Bell profiles a woman referred to as Anna who rebelled against a conservative background to embrace liberal politics. However, when exposed to the “overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke” in the mid-2010s, she came to find the humorlessness of the Left “more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.”

You can trace precisely this creep of humorlessness in West’s career. But you can also see other things that might have persuaded a woman like Anna that the supposedly feminist Left did not have her best interests at heart.

West cleaved to all the beliefs a female writer was expected to have if she was to avoid ostracism from the progressive mainstream. She adhered to body positivity, even though she suffered terribly from being debilitatingly overweight. She learned that sex work is work and trans women are women — or at least, she learned better than to say she thought otherwise. And she learned that when your husband decides to move his mistress into your home, it’s better to convince yourself you’re also into her than risk losing him.

None of these things are advances for women’s rights. Instead, they are advances for male sexual entitlement which women like West have accepted under the aegis of feminism, because to fight against them would be to set yourself against the men of your own political tribe.

Throwing your lot in with ethnonationalists and opponents of female suffrage, as the women of the New Right did, is not a rational reaction. But nor can you say that staying primly within the bounds of accepted progressivism has worked out well for West. She still couldn’t keep pace. The New York Times review of her 2019 book of #MeToo essays, The Witches are Coming, chided her for being “heavily focused on white, cisgender men while overlooking the fact that white women can be just as invested in white supremacy”.

No wonder West is nostalgic for the late Noughties. Yes, it’s natural to be wistful for the era of your greatest potential — but it also makes sense that West would yearn for a time when she had both the freedom to make mistakes, and the confidence that she could survive them.

The genre of feminism that made West successful also made her, eventually, its prisoner. As she patrolled the bounds of acceptable discourse for others, she also shrank her own realm of the thinkable until it mapped exactly onto her husband’s whims. The feminism of the blogosphere was not a form of politics. It was a form of branding, a spritz of differentiation in an overcrowded market where the best way to get ahead was to clamber over somebody else. West, it’s true, was good at that. She left a trail of the canceled in her wake. But reading Adult Braces, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that all the success this won her has left her more alone than failure ever could.

But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (“We belong together”) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: “It’s best you know what you don’t/ The aperture lets the light in.”

It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn’t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one. 

And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There’s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. “One of them had my ear and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can’t have that, it’s mine.” Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss. 

One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” Not long after Payne’s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. “You are a commodity, and not a human,” Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. “People crack, but I’m surprised more people don’t crack.”

Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of “car crash” status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don’t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently — desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you — must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up. 

One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he’s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne’s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. “Full transparency, it’s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,” he said. “I really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.” Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.

It’s something that Styles went through, albeit in a smaller way, back in 2014 when his breakup from Taylor Swift was widely understood to be the inspiration for her album 1989, though some of the references were relatively subtle. Styles gave his own musical account of the Swift break-up on his self-titled debut album, in the song “Two Ghosts”. But that’s an exception in his discography. Styles’s songs are, in general, intimate but impersonal: they very rarely map onto the tabloid version of his life in the way Swift’s songs do. What they often share, though, is a powerful sense of loneliness — a kind of loneliness that chimes, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fortuitously, with his listeners’ lives.

His second album, Fine Line, was released in 2019, but the wistful longing for contact that underpins it felt authored for the lockdown years. “I don’t want to be alone,” he sighs on the opener, “Golden”. When “Watermelon Sugar” was released as a single in 2020, it made perfect sense that the video opened with the message: “This video is dedicated to touching.” It was already a song about skin hunger, which many of us were experiencing that year. The 2022 follow-up, Harry’s House, was directly shaped by those weird years: Styles has said in interviews that “As It Was” in particular was written about the seeming impossibility of returning to normal after the pandemic. 

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Even in his acting roles, Styles seems drawn towards characters with a deeply melancholy failure to connect. His two leading movie roles (in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling) attracted little praise for his dramatic skills, and it’s true that Styles has never yet managed to be truly convincing when delivering dialog, but both films should be recognized as brave, interesting choices which cut against the heartthrob expectations he carried with him: in the former he played a closeted policeman in Fifties Britain, and in the latter he played a red-pilled nightmare who turns out to have kidnapped his wife and forced her consciousness into a simulation of midcentury American white-picket bliss. 

But what makes Styles such a great artist of loneliness isn’t just that he understands its pangs. It’s also that he finds something seductive in that idea of being alone. The pain is a good pain — the sharpening, purifying kind. It’s notable that the hobby he has to unwind from being a popstar is long-distance running, which is one of the most solitary things you can do. In a conversation with the author Haruki Murakami (also a runner) for the magazine Runner’s World, Styles describes the joy of running like this: “you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.”

There’s something else quite telling in that dialogue. Styles tells Murakami: “I think my favorite thing about you is that I know nothing really about you, other than the work you’ve given to people. So I’m as deeply grateful for the amount that you’ve chosen to keep to yourself as for what you’ve chosen to share with us.” It’s a comment that echoes Styles’s own apparent strategy for surviving fame: extreme, meticulous reserve. It’s a method that echoes the careful distance David Bowie kept between himself and his audience, often using characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) as a screen. Styles’s fashion icon status and arty performances are clearly indebted to Bowie, but this unapologetic self-protection might be the most significant influence that Styles has taken.

One way to describe fame is that it’s the condition of being loved too much — loved more than any one person can bear. For someone like Styles, who has had to survive an entire adulthood of that love, solitude must be the most fascinating thing. For most people, isolation is one of the painful conditions of our age: too much time hunkered down in solitary laptop labor, too many friendships that exist only on screens, too little touch. Styles’s extreme celebrity enforces isolation (when a trip to the shops provokes a riot, all you can do is stay at home), but it also turns being left alone into a luxury. That means that he can find beauty in a condition that, for so many people, is an ugly inevitability. Styles is our perfect pop star because he has found the romance in loneliness.

In a YouGov poll from January — conducted before Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, but after the revelations that led him to lose his titles — just over two thirds of Britons said they were in favor of the monarchy. That’s the same as in 2019, before Andrew’s calamitous Newsnight interview. However much opprobrium the ex-prince attracts personally (he has a net approval rating of minus 87), it seems he can’t drag the rest of his family down with him.

The House of Windsor is, if nothing else, resilient. Its history is a history of crises, every one of which it has weathered: Edward VIII’s abdication; Charles and Diana’s divorce; Diana’s death; the subsequent cataclysmic unpopularity; Harry and Meghan’s resignation in 2020. Every one of these was pitched as an existential challenge to the institution of the monarchy, and none of them ultimately was.

But Andrew could be different. That’s the sense you get, at any rate, reading Russell Myers’ new joint biography of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Catherine: The Intimate Inside Story. The book is, on the whole, spectacularly boring, perhaps because the Prince and Princess of Wales are too. The several paragraphs on the intricacies of Kate’s family’s party planning business, and the detailed breakdown of her nursery schedule, suggest that Myers had slim pickings from which to build his portraits.

That’s not, however, for a lack of sources. Myers (the royal editor of the Mirror) had access to dozens of people from William and Catherine’s inner circle, both named and anonymous. While this biography is unauthorized, it has also clearly been written with a “team Wales” slant. It would be too much to read William and Catherine as a manifesto for this heir to the throne’s future reign, but it’s certainly sympathetic to his and Catherine’s interests. Unpleasantness tends to get glossed over: the false “rural rivalry” rumor of William having an affair, which eventually made it into a Stephen Colbert monologue on US TV, is only alluded to opaquely as “hurtful and often dangerous speculation… untruths and fake news.”

Wherever William and Catherine risk coming off badly, Myers is keen to give their side of the story — particularly in the case of their disaster-strewn 2022 visit to the Caribbean. Throughout the tour, which took place during what we can now term as “peak woke”, the couple were beset with demands to apologize for slavery on behalf of both Britain and the Royal Family. A photo of the couple having an unscheduled encounter with a group of local children was described as “a white-savior parody” (four years on, it looks touchingly organic and rather sweet).

In Myers’s telling, everything that went wrong happened because William and Catherine were imposed on with bad advice. But it was an experience with an important lesson: in his speech at the end of the trip, William broke with protocol to address some of the criticisms. This, writes Myers, was a sign that “William and Catherine would be approaching things very differently”.

Perhaps most significant, though, are the mentions seeded throughout of William’s antipathy towards Andrew. We learn that, after the Newsnight interview, William lobbied Queen Elizabeth and his father Charles to take immediate action. “He never much liked his uncle and wanted him out of the picture immediately before the rot further set in,” says a source. We discover, too, that William was an early adopter when it came to Andrew: “Long before he was embroiled in the scandal [involving Virginia Giuffre], he’d always thought his uncle was a bit of an ignoramus.”

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The repudiation is so total that you might even feel sorry for Andrew, were it not for everything we suspect about his character and personality (Andrew denies any criminality). But there is a delicate balance here. Yes, the rest of the Royal Family has been insulated from association with Andrew’s misdeeds up to this point. The problem is that much of the family’s current popularity derives from that of Elizabeth II. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Andrew was her favourite child, and she protected him for far longer than is defensible.

“The late Queen sought to protect her son from complete banishment, clinging to the hope that he would one day be exonerated,” writes Myers. “Similarly, while acknowledging that his brother could never return to public duties, Charles attempted to honor his mother’s wishes and for a long time stopped short of pushing for Andrew’s complete banishment.” Elizabeth reportedly contributed £7 million of the £12 million settlement Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Andrew had sex with her while she was trafficked by Epstein (Andrew denies this). Another £3 million was taken from the late Prince Philip’s estate, while a further £1.5 million came from unnamed other members of the family: the King recently issued a denial that any of it came from him. It looks, and is, grubby.

That leaves William in a difficult situation. Being Elizabeth’s beloved grandson is an asset, for so long as the public continues to think of her as a benign and morally impeccable woman who shepherded Britain through one century and into another. But if that perception switches — if Elizabeth begins to be seen as a grotesquely indulgent mother who used her privilege to ensure that Andrew’s accuser was paid off rather than heard in court — then the association turns into a liability for William.

Andrew’s conduct has the potential to deeply discredit the whole institution. While Myers refers to the allegations against him, rather prissily, as “a vulgar scandal”, they are more profound than that. The decision to appoint Andrew as a trade envoy (despite what was already known about his worrying associations) points to the alarming cost of habitual deference to the royals. Andrew was already nicknamed “Randy Andy” and the subject of headlines about him “chasing girls”. The government must have realized it was, at best, subsidizing a libertine, even before we heard reports it was bilked for Andrew’s massages.

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The parliamentary maneuvers required to discuss all this in the House of Commons, where criticism of the Royal Family is generally forbidden, puts the lie to the idea of Parliament’s supremacy. The monarchy’s place in the British constitution is underwritten by its shows of deference to our elected leaders — hence the theater of Black Rod having the door slammed in his or her face every year when asking for admission to the chamber on behalf of the monarch. If the public begins to see that as a fiction, the monarchy’s future looks perilous.

The case against Andrew, then, could easily become a case for the abolition of the monarchy altogether. Why, the public might begin to ask itself, should we foster a sub-class of the indolent and entitled — “spares” who are necessary as back-up for the succession, but who almost inevitably become redundant and curdle in their own uselessness. It’s all very well to point to the counter-example of the diligent, hardworking ones like Princess Anne, but there’s no way to stop potential Andrews from being born without tearing the whole institution down. As a secular age made it increasingly absurd for monarchy to rest on the idea of divine right, the royals have claimed authority from its popularity. This has a costly flipside for them: if they’re not likable, or even actively disgusting, their existence becomes hard to defend.

This is why one of William’s most important jobs between now and his accession to the throne is to put as much distance as possible between himself and Andrew: not only to condemn Andrew’s actions (at a minimum, associating with a suspected sex offender), but to make it clear that William was always, always wise to Andrew’s turpitude. Monarchs have always had to be unsentimental about their own family to secure their own rule. Once, you might have had an embarrassing uncle locked in the Tower, and arranged for him to be beheaded (or discreetly strangled) when convenient. Now, the murder is figurative, but no less ruthless.

Myers’s version of William is fair-minded but implacable when the things he cares about are threatened: he is frequently described as “angry” when he perceives either that Catherine has been mistreated, or that someone within the family (usually his brother) has failed in their duties. That’s a trait that will be invaluable as he reshapes the monarchy to fit the sensibilities of a modern nation.

But his greatest weapon may well be Catherine. The descriptions of their relationship offered by Myers are often saccharine to the point of nausea (one source says they embody “love in its rawest, most powerful form”), but there is a hard-edged point to this. Their marriage serves in a way to reconcile the hopes of his bitterly divided parents. Charles and Diana understood themselves, and eventually each other, as victims of the royal machine: both sought to make their sons’ lives a little closer to “normal” than their own had been.

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Catherine is portrayed here as the exemplar of that normality. Not a member of the aristocracy, but a regular middle-class girl he met at university. Not a trembling virgin many years his junior, but a peer and (emotionally, at least) an equal. Not a fairytale princess, but a young woman who takes her work seriously, whether that was her pre-engagement job at the fashion retailer Jigsaw, or her current job as a member of the royals. The snobbish jibes once aimed at Catherine and her family for being new-money social climbers, now look very misplaced.

Strangely, given Myers fetish elsewhere for chronicling every minute detail of his subjects’ lives, there no mention in this book of what I think of as Catherine’s most significant public action. In 2021, after the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, Catherine attended the vigil in Everard’s honor. She did this not as part of a planned media op, but as a private individual, laying her own flowers.

Even as a longstanding royal cynic, I found it moving. Everard was not much younger than Catherine, living the kind of life Catherine herself might have lived under other circumstances; it also showed that she was one of “us”, even though she was now one of “them”. As a gesture, it was modest and compassionate, and the antithesis of everything Andrew has been accused of. More than anything, it articulated the kind of royal she might be. An ordinary princess — the true inheritor of Diana’s “people’s princess” tag.

Breaking the gilded cage that bred Andrew, or at least bending the bars, is good politics: it shows a rejection of the kind of irresponsible privilege that made his misdeeds possible. It also might be a little more humane for the individuals in the cage. No monarchist should feel comfortable defending an institution that has such apparent power to corrode a man’s morals. Our Royal Family will only be able to retain its special status if, paradoxically, it can assure its subjects that it is (in some ways) just like us. But when it is just like us, will we still remember what it is for?

I didn’t feel particularly bad, though, because I didn’t respect models. How was being pretty and standing still a real job? This was 2008. The supermodel era, with all its absurdity and magnificence, was over. Big-haired glamazons had been replaced by malnourished, wall-eyed teenagers. And in terms of news (and industry) value, models had been deposed by reality stars and other tabloid darlings. High fashion still needed the catwalk, but for the mass market, fortuitous placement in a paparazzi shot was worth more than anything.

There was one woman who caught this vibe shift. In the 2000s and the 2010s, she would be synonymous with the concept of modeling — in fact, she was probably the most famous model in the world in that era. The last supermodel standing. But by then, she was retired from the fashion industry, and though the public still identified her with her past career, she was in a new business now: the reality TV one. She was Tyra Banks, and the show she produced and fronted was America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), which ran from 2003 to 2018.

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The format seems obvious now, because it established the template for so much reality TV to follow. The first “cycle” followed 10 young women who aspired to become, per the title, America’s next top model. Week by week, they received coaching from industry experts and were put through challenges that, supposedly, prepared them for the travails of the fashion industry. At the end of each episode, a panel of four judges would assess the contestants’ performance: whoever was considered the weakest would be dispatched from the competition.

The girls lived together in an apartment, with cameras on them at all times. This was a high price to pay for admission, but then the prize seemed worth it. The winner would walk away with a modeling agency contract, a magazine shoot and a deal to represent a cosmetics brand — and though the agency, the magazine and the brand would all change over the course of the show’s existence, this remained broadly the same for the entire run. This was, in theory, a golden ticket.

Importantly, it was a golden ticket that was within reach even if you didn’t match the conventional image of a model. In her early career — long before she reached the heady heights of being the first black woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s prestigious annual “swimsuit edition” — Banks had been forced to beat the streets from audition to audition in order to secure bookings, and often faced rejection because she was black. Part of the pitch for ANTM was that it would diversify the narrow aesthetics of fashion.

Now, because this is the cycle of content for anything that was popular in the Noughties, ANTM has received the “reckoning” treatment, in the form of a three-part Netflix documentary called Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. In it, we learn that the girls who competed were viciously body-shamed; one clip shows “runway coach” J. Alexander conducting a weigh-in of contestants while wearing a shirt printed with the slogan “don’t feed the models”. The models suffered dangerous, painful and absurd conditions in the challenges (one contestant was hospitalized with hypothermia after a shoot in a pool). The show blacked up contestants for ethnicity-swap challenges — not just once, but repeatedly.

Keenyah Hill, who competed in cycle four (2005), recounts how she was sexually harassed on-set by a male model during a photo shoot. But the most devastating story belongs to Shandi Sullivan of cycle two (2004). On a trip to Milan, she was paired with a male moped driver for a day of castings. At the end of the day, the producers invited the drivers to drink with the contestants. Sullivan, who hadn’t eaten all day, blacked out; when she came to, her driver was having sex with her. It sounds, and looks like an assault, but it was broadcast in an episode called “The Girl Who Cheated”.

All this is horrifying, but none of it is new: every one of ANTM’s missteps was filmed, edited and put on air. The framing of the Netflix documentary is that, during lockdown, a whole new, and younger, audience discovered the show. The backlash came fast: Banks was accused of normalizing blackface, enforcing racist tropes and emotional torture. It’s also true that many past contestants have now gone on the record to talk about their experiences on the sharp end of reality: obviously, it is significant for Sullivan to tell her story in the documentary.

The phrase “in plain sight” comes up a lot in reckonings with the sins of Noughties media. In Channel 4’s 2023 Dispatches on Russell Brand, much was made of the way his sexually explicit comic persona mirrored the allegations of sexual assault against him. (Brand is currently awaiting trial on multiple charges including rape, which he denies.) In 2021, when Britney Spears’s conservatorship hearings revealed the level of control she was placed under by her father, much commentary pointed out that her public behavior had always been at odds with the narrative of her as a happy performer who had recovered in the care of her family.

Nonetheless, both those cases — and others like them — relied on information that had never previously been available to the public. In the case of ANTM, almost everything that people are appalled by was right there on the screen all along. The show did not conceal its cruelty. The incident in which two contestants were forced to go through extensive cosmetic dentistry or be thrown out of the contest was a narrative arc, not a shameful secret. The bloody extractions and drilling, the painful application of veneers, happened on-screen.

The cruelty of ANTM was always the point. The show’s most iconic moments were all, ultimately, ones of humiliation and bullying. The scene in which Banks screams “we were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you” at a contestant who she deems to have “given up”, while the contestant mutely receives the barrage, has become a meme. In the documentary, Banks concedes that she may have gone too far in that moment; but as an entertainment industry professional, she surely knows that she went exactly far enough for her audience.

There’s a maddening refusal to take responsibility from the show’s creative team, who all claim to have no control over the show they were making. With impressive chutzpah, Banks says in the documentary that she was not involved in the construction of Sullivan’s “cheating” narrative, even though a clip from ANTM shows Banks baiting a tearful Sullivan into a conversation about infidelity after the incident. But there’s also undeniable truth when Banks points out that the deranged challenges came about because “you guys” (meaning the audience) “were demanding this”.

ANTM was an instrument for humiliation as entertainment, and the only people who appear to have believed ANTM was about launching modeling careers seem to be the girls who competed in it. They were duped. Perhaps you could argue, as some of the show’s former creatives do in Reality Check, that the brutal conditions, the relentless objectification and even the the sexual harassment were fair preparation for industry as it then was, but very few contestants went on to have modeling careers, never mind to be “top models”.

Those who did pursue fashion careers say the show was more of a hindrance than a help, and several changed their names to shake the association. (Winnie Harlow, perhaps the biggest star to come out of the series, competed under her birth name, Chantelle Young). Reality stars were perceived as tacky and shabby when the show first came out: Kim Kardashian is a couture muse these days, but it took until 2014 for her to be deemed worthy of a Vogue cover. By then, ANTM had lurched even further into the gimmicky and extreme.

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Banks was successful as a model, but she was a genius at reality TV. “I do feel like I can feel and taste what people want to see,” she tells her interviewer in the documentary, and — however monstrous she appears at junctures — she is correct. Her participation in Reality Check suggests that, right now, she can feel and taste that people want to see contrition. In recent years, revisiting the iniquities of reality TV past has become a genre in its own right, with documentaries dedicated to trans bait-and-switch dating show There’s Something About Miriam, weight loss contest The Biggest Loser and the treatment of Big Brother’s Jade Goody, among many others.

But the big lie of the “reckoning” industrial complex is that audiences have moved beyond the manipulation and cruelty that marked the media of the Noughties. When I finished watching Reality Check, the Netflix algorithm auto-recommended that I start Love is Blind. In 2024, Love is Blind was the subject of a New Yorker report by Emily Nussbaum that asked: “Is Love is Blind a Toxic Workplace?” Participants alleged that they had been emotionally exploited, exposed to dangerous situations and unfairly edited (changes the production team denied). Maybe, two decades from now, Love is Blind will get its own appalled documentary, and the makers will repackage themselves as contrite victims of a distant era’s morals.

That’s the understanding of the mind that Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) referred to in his (latest) apology for what he described as “a four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life”. (The apology was issued in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.) During this period, Ye identified himself wholly and horrifyingly with antisemitism. He posted images of the swastika on social media; he even bought an advertisement during the Super Bowl directing people to a website that sold swastika T-shirts. He released a song called “Heil Hitler” which sampled a speech by the Führer.

But Ye’s history of antisemitism, and other chaotic and disturbing behavior, goes back much longer than those four months, and so do his efforts to explain it. In 2016, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he now believes his issues started long before that, as he wrote in the apology statement: “Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”

The reaction to this was not uniformly welcoming. Some observers have suggested that Ye’s apology is simply an effort to launder his reputation ahead of his upcoming album releases, and regain some of the commercial opportunities he lost during his years of promulgating hate against Jews. Others have said, reasonably enough, that the damage Ye has done is too extreme for forgiveness to be an option. If you’re disinclined to be understanding, Ye pinning his actions on an injury looks a bit like an attempt to evade responsibility.

Nonetheless, what he’s saying has medical warrant. One study found that, in the year after suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI), 31% of patients developed a psychiatric disorder, and 22% developed a psychiatric disorder they had never experienced before. Neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu told Vanity Fair: “There is no doubt in my mind that the TBI he suffered was a significant and substantial contributory factor to his progressive behavioral and cognitive impairment regarding his impulsivity and lack of restraint on the public domain.” He urged compassion for those with TBI: “They need our empathy and sympathy and not our judgment and dismissal.”

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Standing behind all this is the figure of a man who had the misfortune to become the classic case study of brain injury and personality transformation: Phineas Gage, the American foreman who survived having his head impaled by a metal pole, but was left with scars far beyond the physical.

That Gage lived at all is miraculous. In 1848, while he was working on the railway in Vermont, an explosion forced a tamping iron through Gage’s left cheek and out of the top of his skull, destroying a portion of his brain. The doctor who treated him, John M. Harlow, reported being able to pass “the index finger of the right hand into the opening its entire length”. Harlow kept the risk of infection at bay and, remarkably, Gage recovered his physical health, though he lost the sight in his left eye.

His personality, however, did not come through the experience intact, and this became the most significant part of Gage’s story. “Previous to his injury,” wrote Harlow, “though untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.”

This “new” Gage was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

This may sound familiar to followers of Ye’s career. Since his arrival as an artist in the early 2000s, Ye’s astonishing, generation-defining musical talent has been repeatedly waylaid by bizarre acts of self-destruction, which have become increasingly dark, cruel and inexplicable  over time. It was surprising (but politically semi-coherent) when he went off-script during a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to declare: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” It was outrageous but funny when he crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to say: “I’mma let you finish… but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” This was wild behavior, but wild within the remits of celebrity misbehavior, and it was fun to watch.

But it felt ugly when he escalated the Swift feud in 2016 with the song “Famous”, in which he rapped “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex./ Why? I made that bitch famous.” Adding to the humiliation, the video features a naked body double of Swift. It was, effectively, revenge porn too. There was something vicious, too, about the way he made himself a svengali to his reality star wife Kim Kardashian, posing her in ever fewer clothes. “He’s pimping her,” said a friend of mine at the time. He would do the same thing later, and more disturbingly, to his second wife, Bianca Censori.

When he endorsed Donald Trump in 2018, it was disorienting: how do you go from attacking George Bush Jr over racism, to endorsing the white supremacists’ top pick for president? At Paris fashion week in 2022, he wore a “white lives matter” shirt, alongside his friend (and fellow black Right-winger) Candace Owens. All that, maybe, could be wrestled into a narrative of Ye rejecting identity politics and embracing a role as a provocateur — both things that are not completely outlandish within hip-hop. But when he tweeted in 2022 that he was “going death con 3” on Jewish people, that line of understanding expired.

Something in Ye had fractured, a fracture of personality complete enough that he felt compelled to change his name in 2018. I have spoken to associates of his who feel that the downward spiral began when Ye married Kim Kardashian in 2014 and was absorbed into the circus of her family, exposing him to a kind of celebrity power-gaming that he could neither control nor understand: he was made into a character in someone else’s reality show rather than the protagonist of his own life. I’ve always suspected that the death of his mother in 2007 was his greatest catastrophe. Donda West had been an absolute believer in her son’s greatness: she worked for him, and she protected him from some of the more predatory aspects of fame. When she died aged 58 as a result of complications from plastic surgery, he lost the one person who was able to tell him “no”.

Both those versions of the Ye story protect a “real” Kanye West who existed and made music for a time before a “bad” version of him took over. The new narrative of the traumatic brain injury takes that away: before the crash, there was no Kanye West in the public eye. He was still toiling away for his breakthrough, believing utterly in his own abilities, but unable to get record labels to see him as more than a producer. His debut solo single — the 2004 song that made him a star — was “Through the Wire”, which tells the story of his injury and recovery.

The wire in the title is the one that held his jaw together. He made the song so close to the accident, he’s literally rapping through the wire on the recording, causing him to lisp in an odd, vulnerable way that represented something characteristic about Ye’s art: a shocking capacity for sincerity, a vulnerability within the braggadocio that made him unique. When South Park mocked him in 2009 with the “Gay Fish” song, it nailed that part of his personality completely: the gag in the song is that Ye takes a stupid joke about “fish sticks” so seriously, he reshapes his whole personality around it.

So there is no separating the artist from the illness with Ye. If you love him as a fan, then the only way you’ve ever known him is in his damaged form. Maybe we even owe the art to the damage. Looking at Ye’s career, you could even make the argument that his pathologies made him. Without his impulsiveness, his stubbornness, his imperviousness to “normal” behavior, would it have been possible to achieve all that he achieved? Then again, if he wasn’t an acknowledged genius, would any of these traits have been indulged up to the point of Nazism?

The story of Gage ends badly. In multiple popular accounts, he’s described as growing ever more dissipated, even wicked. Biographies claim he was unable to hold down a job, and was reduced to the undignified life of the freak-show exhibit, always accompanied by the pole that maimed him. But that isn’t quite the picture the archive paints. Much is post-hoc elaboration. Yes, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, Gage is documented as showing many of the behaviors we would now label as “disinhibition”. But it’s also known that in later life, he worked for several years as a stagecoach driver — demanding work that could hardly be done by the wild semi-human he’s often described as. Gage’s accident changed him, obviously, but it did not place him forever beyond the realm of morality. He did, apparently, get better, in mind as well as body.

I cannot argue that Ye deserves forgiveness: that is for the individuals he has injured to decide, from his own family to the global Jewish community. I am not even sure that forgiveness is something he needs from a strictly commercial perspective: the music is so good, Ye has always been effectively cancel-proof. I’m interested less in what the world owes to Ye than in what is possible for him now. If Ye really is a modern-day Phineas Gage, there is hope. The historical record suggests that recovery is possible, with the right support. It may never be complete, but it is real.

The larger question is whether it can be available to someone like Ye. There’s a cruel irony that the biggest block between Ye and stability might be the thing that, for many, disqualifies him from sympathy: his privilege. With so much money, and so many people happy to become enablers in order to bask in his celebrity, there is very little to restrain him. No Donda to tell him when he’s gone too far. No limit to what he can spend in the service of his own ruin. (How many bipolar sufferers must, on learning about the Super Bowl ad, thanked their stars that their manic episodes had never coincided with being a millionaire?) His brain may have been damaged, but nothing can demolish a person like wealth and fame.

***

Lena Dunham knows hate — the petty, unworthy emotions that seethe inside us. In season one of Girls, the HBO sitcom she created and starred in, her character Hannah Horvath goes to the launch of a memoir by a college frenemy. The book isn’t even good, Hannah complains — the author just got lucky because her boyfriend killed himself and gave her something to write about. “Your boyfriend should kill himself. You deserve it,” says her sociopathic friend Jessa, consolingly.

Girls captured millennial womanhood in all its grubby, hateful entitlement — clever, raw, and often insufferable. It was also brutally funny. The trouble is, when the show began in 2012, a large chunk of viewers immediately took against it. They thought Hannah was Dunham. If Hannah was a selfish, self-dramatizing, oblivious horror, it couldn’t be because Dunham was a good writer: it must be because Dunham was simply playing herself on screen. And so her brilliant satire of millennials made her the millennials’ most hated.

One of Dunham’s problems was that Girls seemed so naturalistic, people assumed it was artless. The dialog felt like things real people would say to each other, not the ricocheting wisecracks of Friends; Hannah’s outfits, described as “lovingly disheveled” by the show’s costume designer, looked like the wardrobe of a real 20-something arts intern rather than the designer gloss of Sex and the City. Dunham made it look too easy, like anyone could do it. Some people wondered why they hadn’t been asked to do it.

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Scratch away at all this, and at the bottom you’d find the exact same resentment that Dunham mined for comedy: why this bitch and not me? The splenetic judgment of everything she did reeked of envy — and the not-very-feminist anxiety of women that, with only so much cultural space allotted to women, one woman’s success was blocking the path for the rest. As one critic wrote in The Stranger:

“All culturally literate twenty-somethings who are funny on Twitter and have listened to, like, Exile in Guyville at least three times are capable of writing a shrewd take on what it means to be in your twenties. But Lena Dunham was given the backing of a network giant and a $150,000 per episode salary, and that’s what makes her so hateable. Fuck, for $150,000 alone I could write you a TV show about what it means to be a white woman. Lord knows I’ve watched enough Greta Gerwig films to do so.”

That piece was written in 2018; its author has not yet produced a multi-series, Emmy-winning show — or any show at all. Nonetheless, it was a struggle for some to believe that Dunham had truly earned her status. And though liberal critics at least were mostly too polite to say this part outright, her “unconventional” looks were part of this.

Dunham’s audacity in putting herself on screen — pear-shaped, small breasted, “13 pounds overweight” per Girls’ script and often naked — offended people. All this attention, and she wasn’t even hot! On the Right, people were happy to just come out and say as much. “It’s not every day in the TV world of anorexic actresses with fake boobs that a woman with giant thighs, a sloppy backside and small breasts is compelled to show it all,” wrote The New York Post’s (female) TV critic.

Liberal outlets wanting to indulge the same impulse had to garnish it with righteousness. After Vogue put Dunham on its cover in 2014, the feminist website Jezebel put out a $10,000 bounty for unretouched pictures from the shoot. Jezebel primly declared that this wasn’t about shaming Dunham, but about revealing the tyranny of Vogue’s beauty standards; it sounded phony. Hating Lena Dunham was a micro-industry in the media of the 2010s. A picture of her looking rough would have done big numbers.

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The Jezebel stunt was savage — as Dunham said at the time, “I don’t understand why, Photoshop or no, having a woman who is different than the typical Vogue cover girl could be a bad thing.” But people weren’t mad about the typical Vogue cover girls. They were mad, specifically, about Dunham, about her success, about her elevation. Girls had been celebrated precisely because it was a raw and flawed rendition of life in your twenties; and then people wanted to punish Dunham for her imperfections, political as well as physical.

Hating her was more than a pastime: it was an identity. Dunham was outspokenly liberal and pro-choice, so the disgust for her from conservatives was to be expected. But the richest seam of loathing for her came from her own kind. If you, say, were a young woman — perhaps a young woman in the media, perhaps especially a young woman in New York — Dunham had everything you wanted. Tearing her down felt like getting closer to your dreams. It was also a statement of taste: you knew enough to know that Lena Dunham was bad, actually.

She was hated for being privileged (her parents are both successful and respected artists): what right did she have to portray the grind and hustle of trying to get by in Brooklyn? She was damned for being racist (the first series of Girls was criticized for having no black or Asian actors in the core cast): how dare she call her show Girls as though it was some kind of universal representation when she was only portraying people like her? Worst of all, she was full of herself: when Hannah blustered to her parents that she might be “the voice of my generation — or at least a voice of a generation”, the haters attributed the grandiosity to Dunham herself.

At one point, the dislike for her was so frenetic, Jezebel ran a “not watching Girls recap”, “where we detail the real-life foibles, exploits, and hot and hilarious haps of what we were doing in our exciting, glamorous, and emotional lives in our Brooklyn apartments during the half-hour the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls airs”. The joke was — haha! — that Dunham was being denied the attention lavished on her everywhere else. The bigger joke was that this was just another way for the website to parasitize the traffic Dunham’s name could conjure.

The strange thing is that, while other female celebrities mastered the art of turning hatred into publicity — most of all the Kardashians, with their carefully crafted grasping bimbo personas and their relentless conspicuous consumption — Dunham never seemed to understand this. She had a talent for feeding the rage against her. Just like when she spoke up for a Girls writer who was accused of rape (he was never charged with an offense), only to then retract her defense and apologize to his accuser. The end result: absolutely no one was happy with her, and it could have all been avoided by reserving her judgment in the first place.

She had a wild, unfiltered naivety that was hard to square with her sophistication as a showrunner. Even her nudity had something of this to it. Artistically, all the naked Hannah scenes in Girls were a perfect choice for the show; but for Dunham personally, they had a cost that she never seemed to have reckoned with beforehand. How can you have so much wisdom as a writer and so little self-protection? But then, how can you be a good writer if your dominant impulse is to shield yourself?

Dunham has got warier. Her new show Too Much, which started on Netflix this week, is — like Girls — loosely based on her own experiences, in this case of moving to London and starting a new relationship with a British man. But unlike in Girls, she doesn’t play the lead. “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life,” Dunham told The New Yorker. “Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again.”

Her body has also changed. She’s not a little bit overweight these days: since a 2018 hysterectomy to treat endometriosis, she seems to have grown steadily bigger. There’s a theory, put forward by psychotherapist Susie Orbach in Fat is a Feminist Issue, that being fat can be a kind of self-protection for women who have suffered from objectification and intrusion — a way of putting yourself safely outside the field of the potentially sexualizable. If that holds any truth for Dunham, it would hardly be surprising after what she went through in the 2010s.

Too Much is good, but it’s no Girls: it’s got a seam of treacly sentiment in it, and it feels anxious to be liked sometimes in a way that Dunham at her best never did. In her twenties, she was a blazing talent, and she was despised for it — ripped apart by well-intentioned liberal girlies pouring the petrol of righteousness on their own jealousy. That girl-on-girl violence broke her in some ways. If we never get to enjoy her being that good again, female rage at female success will have to take the blame.

It’s easy now to condemn the media of the 2000s as a theater of humiliation. At the time, though, the prevailing concern was that everyone had become too soft. A generation that had been coddled by an “all-must-have-prizes” mentality had grown up entitled, lazy and egotistical. “In today’s celebrity-obsessed world, every youngster wants to be famous,” as Cowell sneered in his 2003 autobiography — called, in an impeccable piece of branding — I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But… Cowell’s job, as he saw it, was to “prick the bubble of what I regard as this self-absorbed egotism” on behalf of an audience that was sick of the tyranny of talentless wannabes. 

But times change and so, apparently, does Cowell. Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which launches on Netflix this week, is yet another talent show format. We watch Cowell, now 66, as he attempts to create a new boyband to follow in the footsteps of One Direction, the X Factor-forged five piece whose global success marked the pinnacle of his starmaking powers. Since the death of ex-member Liam Payne in a drugs-related balcony fall last year, the band has also become a cautionary tale of fame’s savagery. Shortly before he died, Payne reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” 

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Which helps to explain why Cowell is so keen to be seen to be reinventing himself. The Cowell of 2025 is still tough (“You’ve got to be sort of ruthless,” he says in the trailer), but this is a kinder, gentler kind of entertainment. As he told The New York Times in an interview to promote the new series: “I changed over time. I did realize I’ve probably gone too far… I got that. What can I say? I’m sorry.” To further underline his newfound vulnerability, the series even features his partner Lauren Silverman, with whom he has an 11-year-old son.

The show’s drama rests on the idea that Cowell is putting everything on the line for one more shot at svengali success, but the stakes really are high. The pop culture world that made Cowell has imploded in the past 10 years. He became famous the old-fashioned way: on prime-time TV, with the backing of the tabloids, and the help of disgraced publicist Max Clifford, who had a talent for keeping his clients in the spotlight while squashing stories that might harm their image. In his autobiography, Cowell — playing up the part of the cynical impresario — wrote that “hiring Max was one of the best decisions I ever made”. 

At its peak in 2010, The X Factor was watched by over 14 million. That year, The Sun and The Mirror had a combined readership of over 4 million. Today, the red tops probably have a circulation of less than a million — and more people watch YouTube than ITV. In an effort to grasp the elusive younger audience, the next series is introducing the YouTuber KSI as a judge – a sign of where the real power lies in entertainment. The most recent series of Britain’s Got Talent averaged just over 5.5 million viewers and the last big act to come from a Cowell show was Little Mix, who won The X Factor in 2011.

Meanwhile, the less said about Clifford the better. In 2014, he became the first man to be convicted of historic sexual offenses under Operation Yewtree, and died in 2017 while serving an eight year sentence for indecent assault. The schtick of Cowell’s shows was that they were laying bare the mechanics of the entertainment business, and turning the public into entertainment insiders. While there is no suggestion whatsoever that Cowell has ever been involved in sexual impropriety, cases like Clifford’s revealed a depravity that had been concealed beneath the glitz all along. 

The market has changed, too. South Korea took the manufactured pop model embraced by Cowell and turned it into something even more ferociously disciplined and even more successful. Now, K-pop rules the world when it comes to manufactured bands. In Britain and America, the charts belong to solo girl auteurs such as Chappelle Roan and Charli XCX — artists whose fans love them precisely because they write, record, perform and create their own image with no need for a puppet master like Cowell. 

Even his own creations have turned against him. Jade, formerly of Little Mix, launched her solo career last year with the song “Angel of My Dreams”, a delirious satire of the pop industry, including the line: “sellin’ my soul to a psycho.” Cowell had signed Little Mix to his own label, Syco, so it was pretty obvious who she was referring to. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, Cowell might have thought, if he were given to quoting King Lear, which he probably isn’t. But how apt it is for an aging ruler of a fallen kingdom.

Meanwhile, the tongue-lashing style Cowell perfected is now sorely out of step with contemporary concerns about mental health. In 2019, the TV presenter Caroline Flack — who, among other gigs, had once hosted The X Factor — killed herself in the midst of being prosecuted for assaulting her boyfriend, a case that had captured ferocious and, according to her family, unfair press attention. Her final Instagram post read: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” #Bekind has since been adopted as a social media watchword. It’s an injunction that would preclude making teenagers cry for entertainment. 

And then there was Payne’s death, which happened during the filming of Simon Cowell: The Next Act. In his New York Times interview, Cowell talks about his shock and sadness — “It was just awful, awful.” But when the interviewer presses him on whether what happened to Payne is a sign of the inherent toxicity of fame, Cowell does something curious. He starts discussing his own relationship with celebrity. “I honestly don’t know what is harder: trying to be famous or managing your fame,” he says. 

“Not every day has been amazing, but I’m glad I did what I did,” he continues. “I signed up for it because obviously there was something inside of me saying, I want to be well known. And I would do it all over again.” Is this the self-exculpation of a deeply cynical man? Cowell got to make his choices as an adult with a successful career in the music business behind him. One Direction were still children when they first came into contact with Cowell’s empire. Payne was just 14 when he first auditioned, and 16 when he returned to the show and was cast in 1D. 

No one so young could have known what he was letting himself in for. But even so, Cowell is telling an awkward truth about fame. We tend to talk about it now as a kind of violence done to its subjects, which it is, but it’s a kind of violence that almost never happens to people by accident. To become famous you have to want it, and want it painfully. Want it enough to sacrifice anything — including, most of all, the possibility of ever having a normal life. Want it as much as Cowell wanted it.

Cowell knew precisely how to pierce the souls of his auditioners because he was, like them, hungry for fame. He could be sublimely cruel, because he could sympathize completely with the hopefuls before him. Maybe time has softened him. Maybe fatherhood has blunted his edges. Maybe the death of Payne has given him a reckoning. But he’s still on TV because he still wants fame, and for the aspirants on Simon Cowell: The Next Act, that means he can still be a dangerous man.

For 29 days last year, Slater’s body lay undiscovered on the mountainside. And for those 29 days, his family — most prominently his mother, Debbie Duncan — did everything they could to keep attention on their son, in the hope that he was still alive and might be brought home safely. The kind of attention they got, however, was beyond anything they could have imagined; certainly, it was beyond anything they could control. Slater had become the focus of social media’s “armchair detectives”, for whom his disappearance was not so much a tragedy as a content generation opportunity.

By googling Slater, the armchair detectives learned that in 2021, he had been convicted of violent disorder. Did that fit with the image of the happy-go-lucky young man that Duncan was presenting? The armchair detectives thought not. A GoFundMe to support the family inspired claims from the Miss Marples of social media that the entire thing was a grift, with Slater waiting in hiding until he could reemerge and pocket the lot. (The family says they used the money to fund a private search team and cover their own expenses while in Tenerife.) Or maybe he was dead, but his family had killed him in order to pull off the scam: Duncan was accused of murdering her own son.

Now, Duncan is campaigning for “Jay’s law”, which would in theory protect families like hers from social media trolling. Like most “apostrophe laws”, it feels misbegotten: laws on malicious communications, stalking and harassment already exist, and marking out a special class of victim here would do little to help. Nonetheless, she has the support of her MP, because it’s very hard not to sympathize with what Duncan has been through. Effectively, she’s had her son taken from her twice over. First he died, and then the “armchair detectives” hijacked him.

Of course, if you are one of those “armchair detectives”, it’s actually very easy not to sympathize with Duncan. If you allow yourself to be absorbed into the vortex of true-crime TikTok, where the Slater case continues to do significant numbers, you’ll enter a parallel world in which the only certain thing is that Debbie Duncan can’t be trusted. I watch one young female influencer insisting that “anyone can see [the family’s story] doesn’t add up”: her videos offer wildly conflicting speculation about Slater’s death. As for Duncan’s pleas to be left alone, they receive short shrift. “The family pushed out content themselves,” says the young woman, in a contemptuous reaction video to the Jay’s Law campaign, “but now they want everybody to stop talking about it.”

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Bereaved families are just another species of celebrity. They don’t get to say no. Every parent who loses a child suffers an indescribable private tragedy. But every parent who turns recovering their child into a public quest steps unwittingly into a tangle of pre-authored storylines, and that is especially true for mothers. In 2007, the novelist Anne Enright wrote for the London Review of Books about the widespread hatred for Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter Madeleine disappeared from their holiday apartment in Portugal. Between the still-powerful tabloids, the burgeoning influence of social media, and the incompetence of the Portuguese police (who named the McCanns as suspects on the basis of a highly implausible theory), a strange shadow version of these grieving parents took hold.

As with Slater, there was a missing person, the compelling contrast of holiday pleasure with tragedy, and a silly season news void to fill. Like Duncan 17 years later, the McCanns threw themselves into publicizing the search for their daughter: in the circumstances, what else could they do? Then they were punished abominably for the crime of having their child taken. First, they were judged for leaving their children (including baby twins) in their villa alone while they went to dinner in the resort restaurant, less than 100 meters away. Then they were judged for trying too hard to get their daughter back.

“Disliking the McCanns is an international sport,” wrote Enright, who admitted that she had “disliked the McCanns earlier than most people”. Kate McCann was disliked most of all. She was deemed too beautiful, too groomed, too poised. People damned her for wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair (it was a symbol of hope for Madeleine, she said), for smiling with her twins (the McCanns said they were trying to “stay strong”), and for holding hands with her husband. Kate McCann failed to act as a heartbroken mother was “supposed to”, whatever that might have looked like. (But then, Duncan was later judged for being too scruffy and too common.) Like Duncan, Kate McCann was accused of murdering her own child.

At the bottom of this loathing, Enright realized, was “a recent but potent form of magic”: “Distancing yourself from the McCanns… keeps our children safe.” The more you could prove to yourself that you were unlike the McCanns, the less you had to fear that the same thing could happen to you. There was something affronting about their insistence on being seen. “I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone,” wrote Enright. “In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.’”

The McCanns had unwittingly made a terrible bargain: seeking publicity had been a way to keep the hunt for Madeleine active, but it had also made them famous. As Janice Turner noted astutely in The Times, “in allowing themselves to be creatures of the media, the McCanns have become the Beckhams of grief, prey to the celebrity culture that trivializes all in its wake”. And like all celebrities, the McCanns attracted fans (though “supporters” would be a more tasteful word), haters (like Enright) and obsessives — groups that still persist almost 20 years later, such is the strength of feeling about the case.

At the beginning of this month, a young Polish woman was found guilty of harassing the McCanns. For two years, Julia Wandelt had maintained an Instagram account with the handle “iammadeleinemccann”, through which she promoted her claim to be the McCanns’ lost daughter. She also contacted the McCanns repeatedly, demanding to be acknowledged. That had brought her to the attention of the rival McCann fandoms, and in particular to the anti-McCanns, who tended to claim that the McCanns themselves were culpable in Madeleine’s disappearance. One of them, a Welsh woman named Karen Spragg, was with Wandelt when she accosted Kate McCann in person at the end of last year.

In court, Spragg was described by the prosecution as a “true-crime tourist”; she told police that she believed the McCanns had arranged Madeleine’s abduction. Spragg had befriended Wandelt online and supported her claims. Whether Spragg truly believed Wandelt’s improbable account or not is unclear, but you can easily see how the McCanns’ “rejection” of this imposter Madeleine served the narrative of them as bad, unnatural parents: why wouldn’t they at least want to be certain? (Spragg was charged alongside Wandelt but found not guilty.)

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Watching Spragg smiling as she left the court, it seemed doubtful that her encounter with the law had done anything to cool her obsession. More probably, it had reinforced it: I suspected that, like the Slater armchair detectives, she would probably perceive this attempt to “silence” her as proof that there was something to hide. No matter that the most likely explanation for Madeleine’s disappearance, as with Slater, is the sad, terrible, obvious thing — in this case, an opportunistic snatching by a predator and the disposal of her body. The lure of the conspiracy is too powerful to be quelled.

There are material rewards for influencers in the true crime ecosystem: attention, clout, money (if they monetize their channel). That helps to explain the supply, but not the demand. Why should anyone want to believe dreadful and unlikely things about people like Duncan or the McCanns, when they have already suffered the worst thing imaginable? The answer is, precisely, because they have suffered the worst thing imaginable. To accept that Kate McCann or Debbie Duncan are just like any other mothers would be to accept that what happened to them could happen to anyone.

Which it could. In the real world, a young man can die of one idiotic choice, and a small girl can be lost because her parents were ever so briefly inattentive. In the real world, there is no way to be “good enough” to prevent such horrors: they happen regardless of how virtuous you are. Believing in conspiracist explanations is a literal-minded way of asserting the “just-world fallacy”. It is nicer to tell ourselves that such events can only befall the wicked, and once the wickedness of the bereaved has been assumed, any depraved acts can be attributed to them. Conspiracy-world is a more moral place than the real world, governed by the same reassuringly strict rules of action-and-consequence as a chutes-and-ladders board.

Conspiracy-world is also a more interesting place than the real world. Accidents and abusers are quotidian and grubby. A killer mother, though? That’s a thrilling proposition, a giddily exciting inversion of the expected order where a woman’s function is to love and nurture. The need to hate these mothers of the missing is so profound that the cycle seems irresistible. Regrettably, Duncan is learning, as the McCanns learned before her, that the truth will always be overpowered by the seduction force of a mystery.

Today, 18 months on, there is more discussion of Grande’s body than ever before, driven by her appearance in the movie Wicked (she plays Galinda) and the associated press junket with her and co-star Cynthia Erivo (who plays Elphaba). She appears to be tinier than ever. The Mail called her “fragile”; the Standard called her (and Ervio) “scarily thin”. A friend took her seven-year-old daughter to see the film. “Mummy,” whispered the girl mid-screening in a tone of awe and amazement. “You can see all the bones in her chest!”

But the sport of publicly commenting on women’s figures was supposed to have died along with all the other vicious excesses of the Noughties media. What we now call body shaming used to be a staple of celebrity journalism — not just the bitchy bloggers, but also in newspapers, supermarket tabloids and glossy magazines. “Cellulite”, “muffin tops”, “cankles” and “thunder thighs” were all among the sins that could place a famous woman in Mail Online’s “sidebar of shame” or Heat magazine’s “hoop of horror” (a red circle with which the magazine highlighted supposed physical flaws).

The content creators justified this on the grounds that they were doing their women readers a favour by undoing the mystique of celebrity perfection. “Don’t get us wrong, we love celebrities, but we don’t put them on a pedestal,” said Heat’s editor Mark Frith in 2004. As the cult of size zero grew, celebrity body shaming grew to encompass the “scary skinny” girls such as the Olsen twins and Nicole Ritchie, whose skeletal frames became a matter of prurient concern. The sincerity of that concern can be judged from the fact that it was routinely expressed in the phrase: “She needs a sandwich.”

The ultimate body-shaming concern troll came in 2014, when the ostensibly feminist website Jezebel offered a $10,000 bounty for the unretouched originals of a Lena Dunham shoot for Vogue. “Dunham embraces her appearance as that of a real woman; she’s as body positive as they come,” explained Jezebel. “But that’s not really Vogue’s thing, is it? … It doesn’t matter if any woman, including Lena, thinks she’s fine the way she is. Vogue will find something to fix.” In other words, Jezebel was performing a public service by rooting out photographs of Lena Dunham looking imperfect.

But the language it used was only a sidestep away from the oldest excuse in the book when it came to violating famous women’s boundaries. She wants to be looked at, ergo we have a right to look at everything. It’s just that, in this case, it came veiled in the rising language of “body positivity”: Dunham owed this to her audience. It seemed obvious, though, that Jezebel’s true interest in the originals was the hope that Dunham would look terrible, and that a lot of people would click through to see the full horror.

Jezebel had miscalculated. Dunham accused them of making “a monumental error in their approach to feminism… It felt gross.” And the public mood was more with her than it was with snarky upstart posters. When the pictures proved to have been only lightly edited, the whole thing fizzled out in a haze of disapproval. Magazines and websites pivoted to celebrating bodies rather than judging them. Glamour put the model Tess Holliday (UK size 26) on its cover in 2018; Cosmopolitan featured plus-size yoga instructor Jessamyn Stanley in 2021, with the tagline “This is healthy”.

The turn against body shaming was politically coded: as reactionaries like Jordan Peterson were calling plus-size models “not beautiful”, so the imperative for feminism was to take the body-positive side. That meant, in practice, a taboo on commentary about bodies entirely within feminist-inflected media. As most women know, there’s little more grinding than other people giving you their unsolicited verdict on your figure, and any conversation that takes place on the internet is effectively within earshot of the subject. That went for the thin as well as the fat: “Why is skinny-shaming OK, if fat-shaming is not?” asked recovering anorexic Emma Woolf in 2013.

“There should be no implicit or explicit assessment of any kind,” said the feminist philosopher Kate Manne earlier this year, while promoting her book Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia. For her, even the term “body positivity” didn’t go far enough, and she instead proposed a concept that she called “body reflexivity”. “My own mantra became, ‘My body is for me, your body is for you.’ Our bodies are not there for comparison or correction or consumption. One’s own perspective on one’s body is the only one that matters.”

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Put like that, this seems a clear-cut point of principle. It is also an impossible, unachievable ideal that supposes perfect individual subjectivity. But humans are not like that. Even Kate Manne is not like that. In her book, she writes about the fat influencers whose work she finds particularly encouraging or impressive. Clearly, she has an emotional reaction to their bodies which is inspired by identification with them. She experiences their bodies, in part, as something for her.

In any case, the placing bodies beyond discussion has never been a universal feminist aim. Other intellectual strands have sought different ways of talking about the body instead, trying to move beyond objectification and towards an understanding of the body as a political entity. In Susan Bordo’s 1993 book, Unbearable Weight, for example, she attempts to understand disordered eating in women not as an individual pathology, but as “a ‘crystallisation’ of particular currents, some historical and some contemporary, within Western culture”. This is a long way from Jezebel’s fishing expedition for kompromat on Dunham; but it’s equally remote from the belief that bodies are only ever “for themselves”.

Even when body positivity was at its height, it was an imperfect revolution. Concepts such as “wellness” allowed the dread “diet culture” a covert return; then the rise of semaglutide as a weight-loss treatment placed bodies firmly back in the realm of legitimate topics. How could we not talk about the fact that famous people were changing shape so rapidly and dramatically? But Grande is not a case where anyone would suspect her of medical intervention. She’s been in the public eye since she was 15; she was thin then, and she’s thin now.

The difference is that now, she is alarmingly thin. For this to be addressed publicly is undoubtedly not easy for Grande. “It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page,” she sings on Sympathy is Like a Knife with Charli XCX, and there is no way to have this conversation that isn’t painful to the person being talked about. But to not address it would be perverse, and the duty of care here is not only to Grande’s feelings. It is also to the young women and girls (many of them pre-adolescent) for Grande represents an ideal of adulthood.

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Eating disorders are socially contagious and competitive. Grande insists that her current physique is healthy, but she does not look healthy, and anyone attempting to replicate her waifishness is unlikely to end up healthy. That needs to be acknowledged — not as a judgement on Grande, and not with goading comments about sandwiches, but as fact. To pretend otherwise, creates a situation where young women and girls can self-starve and no one is able to acknowledge it happening. That cannot be the correct outcome.

Talking about bodies is a precarious business. Grande is right that we should be “gentler”. Bodies deserve care, and there is no care in the engagement-baiting judgement of the click mill. There is equally no care in the phoney belief that Grande’s body affects no one but her. And even if that were true — can the only acceptable response to watching a young woman fade be to chide anyone who notices it happening? Let’s talk about Ariana Grande’s body. Gently. Let’s hope she’s OK.

Well, the salacious shitshow of humiliation is now here, in the form of Allen’s new album West End Girl, which chronicles a marital breakdown in excoriating detail. Allen has described the album’s narrator as an “alter ego” rather than a straight self-portrait, but the division between art and life is highly blurred. “There are definitely some things that happened in my real life that are reflected on this record,” she told Perfect magazine.

The opening track of the album (also called West End Girl) establishes that the Girl herself has relocated to New York with her children to set up home with her partner. The situation and location match up perfectly with Harbour and Allen, who has two daughters from her first marriage. There’s even a namedrop for interior designer Billy Cotton, who was (per a widely-viewed 2023 video tour for Architectural Digest) responsible for the decor in the couple’s Brooklyn home.

From that point, it’s anyone’s guess where fact and fiction might diverge. Midway through track one, the Girl is cast in a play in London. This happened to Allen, who made her stage debut in 2:22: A Ghost Story in 2021. The husband seems jealous of this success, and the song ends with the Girl in London and the listener eavesdropping on her half of a telephone call: “Well, if that’s what you need to do, then… I mean it makes me really sad… No, I’m fine, I just want you to be happy.”

It sounds like the Man here is negotiating an open marriage, and the majority of listeners have assumed that this is exactly what happened in the Allen-Harbour relationship. If so, does that mean that the husband’s callous line in “Ruminating” (“if it has to happen baby, do you want to know?”) was originally spoken by Harbour? In “Pussy Palace”, when the Girl sings of finding a carrier bag full of “sex toys, butt plugs, lube”, did Allen make the same discovery? When Allen coos “you’re so fucking broken” and “you’re nothing but a sex addict”, is she addressing Harbour?

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So far, Harbour hasn’t addressed the album or responded to requests for comment from the media. Allen has herself said that the album was never intended as “revenge” and has suggested that the relationship is better now. “We all go through breakups and it’s always f***ing brutal.”  Regardless of how far West End Girl should be understood as memoir, the demolition job on Harbour’s image is undeniable. Stranger Things, the Netflix show that vaulted Harbour from jobbing actor to legit stardom, is gearing up for its fifth season; next year, he’ll be seen in Marvel: Doomsday. In both, he plays gruff but ultimately decent father-figure types. Usually Harbour’s nice-guy presence would be an asset to the promo cycle. Now every junket is liable to be derailed by a question about his dildo stash.

But Harbour isn’t Allen’s only target on this album — she’s also coming for the entire concept of non-monogamy. “I tried to be your modern wife,” she sings on the agonizingly sad track “Relapse”. For the last few years, the message that open relationships are the enlightened path has been almost inescapable. In novels such as Miranda July’s All Fours and memoirs such as Molly Roden-Winter’s More, the non-traditional (read: non-exclusive) marriage is presented as the model to follow for emotionally honest, sexually adventurous partners.

That doesn’t mean it’s presented as being easy — in fact, the classic non-monogamy narrative is a kind of ordeal. In More, Roden-Winter, a former English teacher and mother of two also living in an upmarket Brooklyn neighborhood, tells the story of opening up her own marriage. She describes encounters with men that sound like borderline assault: one of her hookups “forgets” to use a condom. But she also describes emotional turmoil that seems difficult to reconcile with the exigencies of domestic life: consuming crushes, heartbreaking rejections, jealousy. These trials, though, lead to self-knowledge, pleasure and even (paradoxically, monogamists might think) a stronger marriage. “My husband and I both love multiple people,” she explained in an interview, “and it makes us love each other more, not less.”

In All Fours, non-monogamy is a dangerous adventure, but a necessary one. “The marriage dream might have been a fallacy, but it was old and familiar, like Santa Claus. Something had to replace it.” This implies a binary choice: are you going to believe in childish fairytales, or live your own authentic life? The main character and her husband end up co-parenting and co-habiting but romantically separated (July separated from her own husband in the lead-up to writing the book). Despite being fiction, many readers have responded to All Fours as though it were a work of self-help and emulated the heroine accordingly.

Allen’s addition to this canon is very different. The Girl of West End Girl is not liberated by her experiences: she is exhausted, drained and depressed. In “Dallas Major”, she sings about joining the dating scene under a pseudonym. “I’m almost nearly 40, I’m just shy of five-foot-two / I’m a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you?” she sings to a putative date. The arrangement is one that’s been forced on her: “I’m here for validation and I probably should explain / How my marriage has been opened since my husband went astray.” The chorus goes: “And I hate it here.”

Allen, July and Roden-Winter can all be telling the truth about their own respective realities. But West End Girl articulates a criticism of ethical non-monogamy that has struggled to get airtime over the stories of sexy marrieds enjoying their midlife rumspringa: that it offers a framework for coercion, in which the language of “meeting needs” and “consent” and “respect” can all be marshaled by the fluent and confident in order to railroad the uncertain and anxious into situations that they find painful. And as Allen has noted in interviews, the culture of dating apps compounds this by creating the perception that everyone is disposable.

In the song “Madeline”, Allen narrates a conversation with one of the Girl’s husband’s lovers who speaks in therapized clichés: “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now… You can reach out to me any time.” Which is a maddeningly bloodless way to talk to a woman whose husband you’ve been schtupping. But because non-monogamy is often assumed to be morally superior by its practitioners (isn’t it better to openly negotiate than secretly cheat?), it is easy to look down on those who are outside the circle.

Up until 2020, one of the most recommended guides to polyamory was More Than Two by Franklin Veaux. Then, in the midst of #MeToo, Veaux was accused by multiple women of abuse (accusations that Veaux denied). More Than Two now rarely gets namechecked in poly forums, but it’s not clear that the non-monogamy scene as a whole has fully addressed what it means for one of its foundational texts to have this shadow over it. There is, however, a thriving community of people who describe themselves as “polycritical” or “open marriage survivors” (you can find them on Reddit) who are thoroughly convinced that non-monogamy is an irredeemably toxic proposition.

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You might assume that those people would have welcomed Allen’s album rapturously. So far, though, that hasn’t happened — perhaps because Allen is too honest about why non-monogamy doesn’t work. In an album full of startling lines, one of the most jaw-dropping occurs in “Madeline”: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant / And there had to be payment / It had to be with strangers.” What’s disturbing here is the admission that the Girl only acceded to the “open” situation on the understanding that the other women would be treated as throwaway commodities, and ideally for sale.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that polite society regarded the prostituted woman as a “cloaca” — a sewer, through whom all the unpleasantness of men’s excess sexual desire could be safely trafficked while preserving the hygiene of conventional relationships. The kind of “openness” envisaged in the agreement seems to be one where other women are treated as objects in order to protect the marriage from the husband’s resentment. The West End Girl is not quite a pure victim of a man’s manipulation.

Within the narrative of the album, you can understand this as the panicked reaction of a woman scrambling for security in a relationship that has been wrenched at the seams (it seems unlikely that the relationship in West End Girl would have ticked along fine if the husband had simply stuck to these rules). But it’s also an unsettling acknowledgment that a lot of supposedly ethical non-monogamy is built on a highly unethical premise: the idea that third parties to the marriage must be, by definition, inferior beings.

The cult of non-monogamy is built on a promise that the chaos of the human heart can be rationalized away: that jealousy can be transformed into happiness for your partner, that the right combination of words can bring everyone’s desires into alignment. It is, in its most doctrinaire forms, no less of a Santa Claus belief system than traditional marriage, and at least as amenable to exploitation by the sexually unscrupulous. Whatever the truth of the Harbour-Allen marriage, this album is an overdue dose of honesty about the discontents of modern love.

Yet next year, it looks like there won’t be a Food Lovers Festival in Malton. Nor will the town continue to host its monthly specialist food market. The annual Malton 10k — a running event with gourmet snack stations — is also off. Most gallingly of all, there will be no Christmas market in Malton this December, depriving the town’s traders of one of their most important weekends of the year. And all this was announced when traders were already deep into preparations, leaving them little time to make alternative arrangements.

The decision to cancel (almost) all food-related events in the food capital of Yorkshire comes down to one entity: the Fitzwilliam Estate, which owns more than 60% of Malton’s commercial property. The Estate is controlled by Tom Naylor-Leyland. Malton has been in his family since 1713, although it is only a tiny portion of a vast portfolio which also includes the 15,000-acre Wentworth estate, Milton Hall, in Cambridgeshire, and the 17th-century Nantclwyd Hall in Denbighshire. Nonetheless, until recently, it was a portion in which he took a special interest. It was Naylor-Leyland who decided Malton should become a foodie destination; now, apparently, he has decided that should change.

Back in the 2000s, Malton was a typical small British town, fading away as its younger population constantly flowed away to where the jobs were. But Naylor-Leyland saw potential: Yorkshire food was celebrated elsewhere in the country, so why not capitalize on the place it comes from? The estate invested heavily in food businesses, and many producers relocated to Malton to take advantage of the thriving scene. Now those same producers have been hung out to dry by the local aristocrat. The loss of the festival is a particular blow, one local trader (who asked to remain anonymous because he’s a tenant of the estate) tells me: not only did this account for a significant proportion of his takings, but it also brought new people to the town.

“I don’t think this will immediately put people out of business, or if it does, that business was in trouble anyway,” he says. “But what I can’t account for is the slow grind of people not coming to Malton. Without the festival, Malton will end up like any other Yorkshire town.”

For the producers who’ve been drawn in over the last 13 years by Naylor-Leyland’s promises and are now locked into leases, it’s a betrayal, and one made worse by the way the news was delivered: “All local businesses found out through the press and local gossip groups, and there’s no clarity or sense. We still don’t know for sure what’s happening.”

In a statement, the Fitzwilliam Estate (which did not respond to a request for comment for this article) claimed it had done its best to contact all affected businesses, and blamed the cancellation on “rising operating costs”, despite the fact that the last filed accounts show an increase in net assets from 2023 to 2024. But confusingly, the Estate went on to imply that the move away from markets was strategic: “Whilst the events bring welcome footfall and promotion for the town, this is often felt at peaks during the year, as opposed to all-year-round. We are dedicated to making Malton a go-to destination and thriving rural community where businesses can flourish year-round.”

This is, bluntly, nonsensical. The food industry is highly seasonal, and particularly for luxury goods, the lead-in to Christmas is where the profits come from. Producers rely on the feasts to get them through the leaner times. The idea of consumers thoughtfully spreading their posh food budget across the entire year, rather than blowing through it all during Advent, is a bizarre fantasy. The Estate cannot possibly be serious about this.

But the Estate doesn’t need to be serious. Malton is its possession, and it can do as it pleases. Naylor-Leyland has cheerfully played the part of the enthusiastic dilettante, saying in one interview: “I never studied accounting — I probably should have. But if you look at it only that way, you would struggle. You have to connect with people and bring them along with you.” It’s just bad luck for everyone who “connected” with him up till now that he’s decided not to “bring them along” any further.

Besides, Naylor-Leyland appears to have other priorities these days. Though his Instagram is @tominmalton, he hasn’t posted about the town since May this year. Instead, his attention is focused on a very different enterprise: his wife Alice Naylor-Leyland’s “tablescaping” and interiors company, Mrs. Alice, which recently launched in the US.
(Tom Naylor-Leyland is the second-biggest shareholder in Mrs. Alice after his wife, and a director of the company; in her own social media, she likes to refer to him as “Mr Alice”. )

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On Alice Naylor-Leyland’s Instagram, Malton is never mentioned at all. The couple and their children live in a big pile in Cambridgeshire, and own a flat in Chelsea. Alice Naylor-Leyland has also alluded in interviews to a family home in Wales (“stunning”) and her father’s house in the Bahamas (“heaven on earth!”), but apparently the food capital of Yorkshire has never captured her imagination. In fact, she doesn’t seem very interested in food at all: she’s much more enthused by all the non-edible things you can lay out for dinner guests.

Tablescaping, according to Alice Naylor-Leyland, is an “art”. “For my table decor, I am really inspired by the seasons,” she has said. “I use whatever I can find in my garden and then layer with complementary colors and textures.” Luckily for mere plebs who don’t have access to the flora of multiple estates, there is another way to tablescape: buy a £200 box of tat from Mrs. Alice to ensure your guests know you’ve made an effort. Is a dinner party even a dinner party without a Joy of Autumn Decoration set featuring, among other things, three kinds of velvet mushroom and a set of “owlettes”? And while you’re stocking up, don’t forget to pick up Mr. & Mrs. Fall Squirrel (£28) and Tomasina the Turkey (£32 the pair) to complete your look.

What’s most notable here isn’t the fact that adult women are being convinced to buy what are, effectively, overpriced toys you can’t even play with; it’s that the marketing is all US-centric. Brits don’t have “fall”, we have autumn. But then Brits, on the whole, are resistant to this kind of flannel from the upper classes: we know that someone with a houseful of heirlooms isn’t really “inspired” by a polymer pumpkin.

It’s the Americans who are suckers for this stuff: according to a recent interview in The Telegraph, the US accounts for 65% of Mrs Alice’s sales. In the states, continued the breathless copy, “she’s regarded as a Martha Stewart for the Instagram age”. It’s silly to politicize a set of beaded velvet mushrooms (£66), but Mrs. Alice is surely just the ticket for the MAGA elite and those who aspire to join it: conspicuous consumption with the taste stripped out, hinting at a fantasy of elevated WASP origins.

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Alongside the article, there was a picture of Alice Naylor-Leyland dressed in a lavish green ballgown standing next to a table heaving with coordinated knick-knacks, in the grounds of Bath’s Prior Park. “I’m unashamedly into the frills and the fun of dressing up,” she trilled to the journalist. “But then, you’ve got one shot at this life. Why hold back?” It’s an image of purest Marie Antoinette: the noblewoman playing at pastoralism. Meanwhile her family estate’s subjects are left facing an uncertain future thanks to the Fitzwilliam Estate’s act of caprice.

It is bizarre to think that in modern Britain, practically a whole town can be handed down as an inheritance, then reshaped according to the landowner’s whim — and abruptly palmed off when those whims change. But under the skin of modernity, this remains a deeply feudal nation, and Malton is paying the price of that truth. The town has been treated like a table to be “scaped”: tinkered with until it made a pleasing showcase for its owner’s wealth, then bundled back into its box. “The town has been treated as a plaything of the rich and landed gentry,” says the trader I speak to. “He’s done with us, and we need to work out how to pick up the pieces.”

Mrs. Alice sells Americans the dream of gracious British country living, while her husband guts the business model that for 13 years has enabled actual country-dwellers to make a living. It is cruel, but it should not be surprising. Tom Naylor-Leyland was able to present himself as a caring “steward” to Malton, when he should always have properly been described as its owner. Strip away the gentle euphemisms from Britain’s unequal society, and the injustice of it all becomes as crassly obvious as a gold glitter pheasant in the middle of your table.

It’s fair to say that Kirk was not over-mourned in the liberal enclave of Bluesky. Elsewhere, though, he was very rapidly attaining a kind of MAGA sainthood — aided by the fact that his killer appeared to be motivated by animosity to Kirk’s anti-trans views. Anyone demurring from the public performance of mourning risked becoming a target of Right-wing rage. Within hours, Felker-Martin received a call from the comics publisher DC, canceling the series Felker-Martin had been working on and terminating their relationship.

That made Felker-Martin one of the many Americans to have been fired or disciplined for being insufficiently respectful towards Kirk. High-profile examples include late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (whose show was temporarily pulled) and the columnist Karen Attiah (who was sacked by The Washington Post). More concerning are the rank-and-file Americans, from hospital workers to restaurant managers, who either lost their jobs or faced formal sanctions: over 145 by The New York Times’ count in late September, and presumably more since then.

In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, from his 2017 book On Tyranny, by canceling Felker-Martin, DC was “obeying in advance”: intuiting what the powerful wanted, and delivering it. Other writers were quick to identify this as a sinister tendency. “It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”

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People losing their livelihoods for real or perceived political transgressions, however, is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for over a decade — it’s just that, until very recently, the vast majority of the victims were identified with Right-wing politics, and so long as that was true, it didn’t strike those of Gay’s persuasion as an issue. In one egregious 2020 case, a worker for the San Diego Gas & Electric company was fired for making a “white supremacist gesture”: he had made the “okay” sign, unaware that it had recently been co-opted by the alt-Right. In another instance, a senior figure in the American Civil Liberties Union — which literally has one job: upholding the First Amendment — favored banning Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Harm, which describes the social contagion of trans identification among teenage girls.

But asked whether cancel culture existed in a 2021 interview, Gay replied robustly: “No, it does not. Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior… I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake — and we all do, by the way — there should be consequences.” (It would be snide, but not inaccurate, to point out that Felker-Martin’s sacking is also an instance of consequence culture.) Another cancel culture unbeliever was Karen Attiah, who tweeted in 2022 that “‘Cancel culture’ anxiety is not about free speech. It’s about status anxiety.” Concerns about free speech, in other words, were really just concerns about who got to speak — a failure of the once-powerful to accept their new place in the hierarchy. The possibility that the hierarchy might change again and leave the Left on the losing side never apparently occurred.

The intellectual collapse of the liberal Left allowed the Right to monopolize the cause of free speech, even if that position was rarely taken in good faith. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders in this presidency was titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”; at the same time, federal websites were being cleansed of oldspeak terms such as “antiracist”, “trauma” and “hate speech”. This government-directed linguistic purge is more disturbing by far than the “soft” repression of Left-wing cancel culture, but it violates the same principle.

While leftist fury held the ascendance, “civility” was treated as a dirty word. “Tone policing” was a grievous sin. The space between politics and violence was intentionally narrowed. Anyone who held the correct beliefs could engage in the most vicious forms of speech with no consequences whatsoever. Like, for example, Felker-Martin. For as long as he has enjoyed a public profile, he has been vivid and explicit about exactly who he thought should be killed and how. But so long as those enemies were Terfs and so anathema to the US mainstream, Felker-Martin faced zero reputational cost for doing so.

In a statement to Wired magazine, DC’s editor in chief tried to present the firing as non-partisan, asserting that “the tone of Gretchen’s posts, not her personal views, was of concern for DC”. If that’s the case, I have to wonder whether DC had any awareness of Felker-Martin’s social media presence or literary output prior to Kirk’s death. Because, compared to much of Felker-Martin’s lurid and sexually inflected writing, “thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch” is extremely mild stuff. Take this 2019 tweet about the journalist Jesse Singal (a regular target of Felker-Martin’s), the tone of which apparently left DC unperturbed:

“Cis people, fix your hearts* or die.

*Bind Jesse Singal with strong rope and bring him to the quarry at the edge of town. Give him to us alive and unspoiled. Leave, and no matter the sounds you hear, do not look back.”

The motivation for this bizarre bondage scenario is that Singal has reported consistently and fairly on the failures of child gender medicine. That, according to Felker-Martin, amounts to “politely trying to incite genocide”, and this in turn justifies whatever sadistic fantasies Felker-Martin may have. It’s a rationale that invokes a pet idea of the Left’s called “stochastic terrorism”, which maintains that dehumanizing language is a form of violence in itself. Like “cancel culture”, though, “stochastic terrorism” was politicized beyond usefulness: instances in which the Left itself could be dehumanizing never figured in the analysis.

Usually, I would try to argue for a separation between an artist’s social media and their art. But in Felker-Martin’s case, it’s hard to make that distinction because his fiction is very much in the same genre of inventing justifications for violence, and then imagining that violence in pornographic detail. Manhunt is the story of two trans women surviving in the post-apocalyptic remains of society after a zombifying virus has ravaged anyone with sufficiently high testosterone: the protagonists are engaged in a constant hunt for DIY HRT in order to avoid succumbing themselves.

But while the rabid men are dangerous, the true antagonists are the members of a Terf militia, who are dedicated to rounding up and executing any surviving trans women. And it’s when describing the Terfs’ deaths that Felker-Martin is most obviously excited. Imminent violence against women goes hand-in-hand with arousal in Manhunt. When the two protagonists first encounter the militia and are preparing for a confrontation, Felker-Martin writes of one: “Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts.”

In the moral schema of Manhunt, women deserve punishment for holding disobliging beliefs about trans women, even when those beliefs are an accurate reflection of what the trans women understand about themselves. The Terf militia leader inveighs against “Men who take sexual pleasure in stealing our bodies. In wearing our skin,” and this is presented as one of the many misdeeds for which she will ultimately pay with her humiliating death. But given one of the trans woman protagonists elsewhere recalls a teenage crush on a girl with “a body she’d wanted more to hollow out and crawl inside than fuck”, is the militia leader actually wrong?

In one especially unpleasant scene, Felker-Martin imagines the militia leader executing a defector from her ranks by disemboweling her and extracting her uterus, holding it up for the watching crowd with the words: “No life without a womb.” The purpose of this scene is to demonstrate the endless depravity of what, in the book, are referred to contemptuously as “menopausal white ladies” or “sneering middle-class white women”. It vindicates the trans characters’ decision to “kill them all and piss on their corpses”.

The ultimate “sneering middle-class white lady”, from Felker-Martin’s perspective, is J.K. Rowling, and Manhunt acquired a burst of notoriety from one specific scene in which Rowling’s death is narrated. Within the world of the book, Rowling attempted to ride out the infection “at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends”. The “girl-power retreat”, however, rapidly goes south: one of the friends has PCOS (meaning she has higher than usual testosterone), which leads to her contracting the virus and starting a rampage that leads to the castle burning, killing all inside, Rowling included.

In response to outrage at this, Felker-Martin presented himself as a victim of misrepresentation. This is dishonest. The narrative takes pleasure in imagining Rowling’s death — the character who tells the story is “grinning evilly” — and the entire scenario is constructed as a Dante-esque punishment. Within Manhunt, Rowling is destroyed by her privilege, and by her apparently deluded belief in binary human sex. It is sadistic and disturbing, and almost none of the reviews noted this. Manhunt instead received supportive notices from NPR (“brilliantly imagined”), New York Magazine (“full of… messy, beautiful humanity”) and The New Yorker (“tender”).

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The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.

Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualized harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.

Not content with fictionally destroying female writers, Felker-Martin also sought to trash their reputations. He was especially savage about Sandra Newman’s novel The Men, which like Manhunt was published in 2022, and described a world in which every person with a Y chromosome — trans women included — had mysteriously disappeared. This “repellent premise”, according to Felker-Martin, was “fundamentally transmisogynistic” (even though it is not very different from Felker-Martin’s own book, albeit with fewer scenes of misogynistic butchery). That charge fed into a broader denunciation of Newman’s novel. The Men was bombed with one-star ratings on Goodreads even before it was out; an author who defended Newman’s novel was punished by having her own book removed from consideration for an LGBT literary prize.

I wonder whether this is what Roxane Gay would class as “consequence culture”. There was no call for solidarity with Newman like the one Gay would later make for Felker-Martin: no declaration that “every writer” should “stand up for each other”. Newman was deemed on the wrong side of history, and so she was allowed to sink. The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.

Felker-Martin did not agree with Kirk about very much, but they did share an essentially martial vision of the world. Kirk saw himself as a soldier for God, while for Felker-Martin, every disagreement is a war: “I have fuck-all time for a consensus.” This belief, that the only worthy way of life involves bloodletting, has been incubated on both sides of the American divide. Now, under Trump, the Right has the opportunity to crush its enemies, and it is doing so with relish, using techniques that the Left has refined. If this is how the Left rediscovers free speech as a universal principle, it’s been an expensive lesson, but a necessary one.

But a healthy culture needs other values too: it needs moral and aesthetic judgments that do not split along party lines. It needs to be able to say who is, and is not, a good person. It needs to be able to say what is, and is not, good art. Felker-Martin is the free-speech martyr that the Left of the last decade deserves: unpleasant, unsympathetic and almost impossible to defend.

This was a play that people talked about, and not just theatre people but regular people — mothers taking their teenage daughters as a way to warn them about the vicious adult world, husbands and wives weighing the claims of the accuser and accused, women whispering to each other: this is how it is. So what that Prima Facie was, in some regards, more a lecture than a play? It was a lecture that audiences were hungry for.

Now, Miller is back with another one-woman show (well, nearly one woman: there are also two small roles for men) about rape and the law, once again directed by Justin Martin. Inter Alia at the National Theatre stars Rosamund Pike as Jessica, a judge/wife/mother/feminist whose roles overlap, conflict and — by the end of the play — tear her apart.

We first meet Jessica as she bawls the line “the fucking PATRIARCHY!” into a microphone in rock-goddess pose. This is the Jessica of the courtroom: a magnetic performer, a take-no-bullshit queen who uses her place on the bench to make her courtroom a “moral” place. She knows all the tricks that barristers use to trip up victims, and she takes a personal pride in her ability to undermine them, sometimes by simply reminding the complainant that she can take her time to reply (“soft skills,” boasts Jessica). She sees herself a trailblazer for women in law.

But we also see her struggling with the second shift. She tells us how she massages her barrister husband’s ego, sore from the fact that she was appointed a judge before him. And then the big twist, though you can see it coming a mile off: her teenage son Harry is accused of rape, and we learn that he has stumbled his way into the sleazy vortex of the “manosphere”. (Once again, great timing from Miller, given that this is the hot take engine of the moment.) Suddenly, Jessica finds herself relieved by the iniquities of the system, strategizing to discredit the victim, trying to convince her son of the fine distinctions between “moral” and “legal” guilt, full of grief for the innocent boy she once had. At this point, is she a mother or a judge? The insinuation of Inter Alia is that she cannot be both.

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Miller’s method in both plays is brutally effective: animate the political question by turning it into a personal one. It’s also got the sadistic logic of a Dante-esque punishment. How can the thrusting girlboss barrister learn the consequences of her actions? By having her raped so she has to experience the dock from the other side. How can the lean-in lady understand the limits of her worldview? By making her son into a predator and forcing her to fail both maternally and professionally. The sins of the system are visited on the individual woman.

In fact, Miller is so keen to make things hard on Jessica that she inadvertently makes things easy on the audience. The bits of the play that really bristle with energy are when there is doubt about what Harry’s done. When he’s first accused, he tells his parents this is all a mistake. He had consensual (albeit drunken) sex with the girl, but he didn’t rape her; he wouldn’t rape her, he wanted her to be his girlfriend. There is a possibility that this really is complicated, one way or another.

The peculiar nature of a rape conviction, as the play explains in one of its most public information-sounding exchanges, is that the difference between guilty and not guilty rests not in the defendant’s actions, but in what the jury thinks that the defendant thought was happening in the complainant’s mind. If a jury believes that an accused man genuinely and reasonably believed that the complainant consented, then that man cannot be guilty of rape. It is, as Harry’s father says, an offense where both parties can be telling the truth in their version of what happened.

But Harry isn’t telling the truth. By the end of the play, he’s admitted to his mother that he did rape the girl — and not only that, he did it when she was asleep. Now he wants to confess to the police, and Jessica has to decide whether to support him in doing the right thing and ruining his life. A dilemma for Jessica, but not for the audience, who now have access to the objective truth of the incident. This unlikely act of conscience lets the audience off the hook.

While you feel for Harry in his initial confusion and terror at being accused, there’s always the moral peril that you are extending your compassion to a sex offender. Confirming that he is, indeed, a rapist might seem to further implicate the audience; but because he is a contrite sex offender seeking to make amends to his victim, sympathy seems merited. And anyway, can he really be blamed when his parents left him to wander in the deep dark forest of the internet? A harder-edged play would make the viewer squirm more.

Like the TV show Adolescence before it, this feels like an artwork that squares up to the terrible truth of male violence and then ducks the punch. A more ambiguous Harry would be more frightening, but also closer to the truth of what rape is. A boy who genuinely believed, reasonably or otherwise, that what he was doing to a girl was what she wanted. A boy who could be both truthful and dangerous. A boy who didn’t need to perjure himself to be morally guilty and legally not guilty at the same time. As much as Miller’s work wants to confront the nightmare of justice for rape victims, this is the place it cannot go.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Miller is a dramatist, meaning she is great at exposing the razzle-dazzle of the courtroom, and relentless at uncovering the inner lives of her female characters. She’s less adept at getting into the secret brains of men. But that, legally speaking, is where the crime of rape takes place. It is not what happens to a woman’s body that distinguishes sex from rape: it is what happens in a man’s mind, and Miller’s plays have no access there.

In the National Theatre gift shop, you can buy an Inter Alia tie-in tote bag, bright orange and printed with the play’s opening line: “The fucking PATRIARCHY!” This feels very 10 years ago: very Beyoncé dancing in front of the word “FEMINIST”, very “I’m with her” shirts for Hillary, very pre-#MeToo. It’s a throwback to a time, as brief as it was illusory, when the permanent triumph of feminism seemed so close that it could be merchandised into existence. Instead, there was a pussy grabber for president.

By the end of Inter Alia, Jessica’s defiant roar is obviously hollow — when she has to make a choice between her principles and her family, she is the fucking patriarchy. But off the stage, glib slogans and self-affirmations are all there is to offer. As provocative and effective as Miller’s plays are, it is their female characters who are put on trial. Without a serious effort to understand men (including, especially, the most dangerous men), the critique of male violence is an empty project.

Girls captured millennial womanhood in all its grubby, hateful entitlement — clever, raw, and often insufferable. It was also brutally funny. The trouble is, when the show began in 2012, a large chunk of viewers immediately took against it. They thought Hannah was Dunham. If Hannah was a selfish, self-dramatizing, oblivious horror, it couldn’t be because Dunham was a good writer: it must be because Dunham was simply playing herself on screen. And so her brilliant satire of millennials made her the millennials’ most hated.

One of Dunham’s problems was that Girls seemed so naturalistic, people assumed it was artless. The dialogue felt like things real people would say to each other, not the ricocheting wisecracks of Friends; Hannah’s outfits, described as “lovingly disheveled” by the show’s costume designer, looked like the wardrobe of a real 20-something arts intern rather than the designer gloss of Sex and the City. Dunham made it look too easy, like anyone could do it. Some people wondered why they hadn’t been asked to do it.

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Scratch away at all this, and at the bottom you’d find the exact same resentment that Dunham mined for comedy: why this bitch and not me? The splenetic judgement of everything she did reeked of envy — and the not-very-feminist anxiety of women that, with only so much cultural space allotted to women, one woman’s success was blocking the path for the rest. As one critic wrote in The Stranger:

“All culturally literate twenty-somethings who are funny on Twitter and have listened to, like, Exile in Guyville at least three times are capable of writing a shrewd take on what it means to be in your twenties. But Lena Dunham was given the backing of a network giant and a $150,000 per episode salary, and that’s what makes her so hateable. Fuck, for $150,000 alone I could write you a TV show about what it means to be a white woman. Lord knows I’ve watched enough Greta Gerwig films to do so.”

That piece was written in 2018; its author has not yet produced a multi-series, Emmy-winning show — or any show at all. Nonetheless, it was a struggle for some to believe that Dunham had truly earned her status. And though liberal critics at least were mostly too polite to say this part outright, her “unconventional” looks were part of this.

Dunham’s audacity in putting herself on screen — pear-shaped, small breasted, “13 pounds overweight” per Girls’ script and often naked — offended people. All this attention, and she wasn’t even hot! On the Right, people were happy to just come out and say as much. “It’s not every day in the TV world of anorexic actresses with fake boobs that a woman with giant thighs, a sloppy backside and small breasts is compelled to show it all,” wrote The New York Post’s (female) TV critic.

Liberal outlets wanting to indulge the same impulse had to garnish it with righteousness. After Vogue put Dunham on its cover in 2014, the feminist website Jezebel put out a $10,000 bounty for unretouched pictures from the shoot. Jezebel primly declared that this wasn’t about shaming Dunham, but about revealing the tyranny of Vogue’s beauty standards; it sounded phony. Hating Lena Dunham was a micro-industry in the media of the 2010s. A picture of her looking rough would have done big numbers.

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The Jezebel stunt was savage — as Dunham said at the time, “I don’t understand why, Photoshop or no, having a woman who is different than the typical Vogue cover girl could be a bad thing.” But people weren’t mad about the typical Vogue cover girls. They were mad, specifically, about Dunham, about her success, about her elevation. Girls had been celebrated precisely because it was a raw and flawed rendition of life in your 20s; and then people wanted to punish Dunham for her imperfections, political as well as physical.

Hating her was more than a pastime: it was an identity. Dunham was outspokenly liberal and pro-choice, so the disgust for her from conservatives was to be expected. But the richest seam of loathing for her came from her own kind. If you, say, were a young woman — perhaps a young woman in the media, perhaps especially a young woman in New York — Dunham had everything you wanted. Tearing her down felt like getting closer to your dreams. It was also a statement of taste: you knew enough to know that Lena Dunham was bad, actually.

She was hated for being privileged (her parents are both successful and respected artists): what right did she have to portray the grind and hustle of trying to get by in Brooklyn? She was damned for being racist (the first series of Girls was criticized for having no black or Asian actors in the core cast): how dare she call her show Girls as though it was some kind of universal representation when she was only portraying people like her? Worst of all, she was full of herself: when Hannah blustered to her parents that she might be “the voice of my generation — or at least a voice of a generation”, the haters attributed the grandiosity to Dunham herself.

At one point, the dislike for her was so frenetic, Jezebel ran a “not watching Girls recap”, “where we detail the real-life foibles, exploits, and hot and hilarious haps of what we were doing in our exciting, glamorous, and emotional lives in our Brooklyn apartments during the half-hour the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls airs.” The joke was — haha! — that Dunham was being denied the attention lavished on her everywhere else. The bigger joke was that this was just another way for the website to parasitise the traffic Dunham’s name could conjure.

The strange thing is that, while other female celebrities mastered the art of turning hatred into publicity — most of all the Kardashians, with their carefully crafted grasping bimbo personas and their relentless conspicuous consumption — Dunham never seemed to understand this. She had a talent for feeding the rage against her. Just like when she spoke up for a Girls writer who was accused of rape (he was never charged with an offense), only to then retract her defense and apologized to his accuser. The end result: absolutely no one was happy with her, and it could have all been avoided by reserving her judgment in the first place.

She had a wild, unfiltered naivety that was hard to square with her sophistication as a showrunner. Even her nudity had something of this to it. Artistically, all the naked Hannah scenes in Girls were a perfect choice for the show; but for Dunham personally, they had a cost that she never seemed to have reckoned with beforehand. How can you have so much wisdom as a writer and so little self-protection? But then, how can you be a good writer if your dominant impulse is to shield yourself?

Dunham has got warier. Her new show Too Much, which started on Netflix this week, is — like Girls — loosely based on her own experiences, in this case of moving to London and starting a new relationship with a British man. But unlike in Girls, she doesn’t play the lead. “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life,” Dunham told The New Yorker. “Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again.”

Her body has also changed. She’s not a little bit overweight these days: since a 2018 hysterectomy to treat endometriosis, she seems to have grown steadily bigger. There’s a theory, put forward by psychotherapist Susie Orbach in Fat is a Feminist Issue, that being fat can be a kind of self-protection for women who have suffered from objectification and intrusion — a way of putting yourself safely outside the field of the potentially sexualizable. If that holds any truth for Dunham, it would hardly be surprising after what she went through in the 2010s.

Too Much is good, but it’s no Girls: it’s got a seam of treacly sentiment in it, and it feels anxious to be liked sometimes in a way that Dunham at her best never did. In her 20s, she was a blazing talent, and she was despised for it — ripped apart by well-intentioned liberal girlies pouring the petrol of righteousness on their own jealousy. That girl-on-girl violence broke her in some ways. If we never get to enjoy her being that good again, female rage at female success will have to take the blame.

She looked like a woman in mourning for her own professional life. The Government’s climbdown over benefits reform, in the face of opposition from its own MPs, meant that an anticipated $5 billion in savings to the Treasury would now not be materializing. Starmer bought his way out of a defeat, at the cost of landing Reeves with almost certain failure according to her own fiscal rules. (Reeves has since said that she was upset over a “personal issue” and the following day she was back on show, all smiles albeit with cold eyes.)

But back at the Dispatch Box, her boss rattled on only to hand out, not crumbs of sympathy, but the greatest humiliation: when Badenoch asked Starmer to confirm that Reeves would still be in post at the next election, the PM declined to answer, instead making a smug crack about Badenoch’s own prospects. The contrast between Reeves’s crushed demeanor and Starmer’s oblivious chortling was painful to watch.

Whatever the cause of her distress, its effects were politically consequential. The bond markets lurched in response to the footage, increasing the cost of government borrowing. Reeves’s bad day at the office was only getting bleaker. But paradoxically, the jittery traders might have saved her. Why so? Starmer responded by offering reassurance that Reeves would be Chancellor for a “very long time to come”; it seemed to cool down the markets.

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So yes, the scenes on Wednesday were agonizing for Reeves; and yes, she will probably be plagued by that image of her tear-streaked face for the rest of time. But ultimately, it wasn’t Reeves who was most diminished by the events in the chamber this week. We’re used to thinking of tears as the politician’s swansong (both Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May cried when their terms came to an end), but Winston Churchill famously used to blub at almost no provocation at all, and without undermining his authority.

No, the person most damaged by Reeves’s tears is not Reeves. It’s the man who carried on quipping as she cried, too invested in landing the next glib hit on the Opposition leader to consider the discomfort of the woman within touching distance. A full embrace on the front benches might have been a bit far, but he didn’t so much as catch her gaze. In this moment, Starmer looked callous. He looked heartless. He looked inhumane. And at the same time, given the neutering of the welfare bill, he looked deeply deluded.

Starmer had the opportunity this week, one year in to his devastating premiership, to establish himself definitively as a tough yet fair leader. Almost no one believes that the benefits system is working as it stands. Rebalancing it to help people out of the long-term sickness trap and back into work would be popular and morally right. It wouldn’t have been easy, but Starmer could have worked to build a consensus among his own MPs and reassure them that those who truly cannot work would receive the help they need.

Instead, the reforms were introduced in a fashion that seemed both scrappy and grand, with little effort to get backbenchers on side. Maybe he calculated that he could afford to alienate a few of his many MPs; if so, that was a bad misreading of the party’s mood. Large majorities leave a party with idle hands — and in the case of this government, won on a shockingly fragile vote share, idle hands with little to lose.

Many Labour MPs think they’ll be out of their seats in four years. It’s a consideration which means the incentives for obedience are slight. Cynically, MPs who rebelled were ducking responsibility for unpopular decisions which might have cost them their constituencies. More nobly, you might say that they were freed by the collapse of their individual political ambitions to do the right thing: the Government’s own impact assessment said the reforms as originally proposed would push 250,000 people (including 50,000 children) into relative poverty.

For Starmer, though, conscious of the threat from Reform, the cruelty (or perhaps “stringency” would be a more neutral word to use) may have been the point. Operating under the mistaken belief that Reform represents a coherent political philosophy, Starmer has aligned himself more firmly with Blue Labour principles of social conservatism. But Reform is a shape-shifter, unencumbered by internal democracy or even a belief system — it can adopt whatever form is most advantageous to its flourishing.

Hence Nigel Farage’s recent pledge to remove the two-child benefits cap, despite his advocacy for the policy in the 2000s. This fits with Reform’s rising interest in natalism as an alternative to immigration; but fundamentally, its attraction for Farage is that it plays well in seats where his party has a chance of beating Labour. Now, because of the collapse of benefit reform, it seems unlikely that Starmer will be able to lift the cap himself. One failure leads ineluctably to another, and the PM has been left to take responsibility for the punitive measures of the Cameron government.

It’s worth looking, too, at the one landmark achievement of Starmer’s first year — passing the assisted dying bill, which is now almost certain to pass into law. Many MPs who supported that law did so for profound humanitarian reasons: knowing the bill has significant flaws, they wanted to limit suffering at the end of life. Yet in combination with Starmer’s attempt to enforce sweeping cuts to disability benefits, the effect is unsavoury. This looks like a government that would rather kill the vulnerable than pay to keep them alive.

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Starmer, though, has presented his ruthlessness as an asset. In his interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, given after PMQs, he took the opportunity once again to talk about what a ferocious five-a-side footballer he is; how fiercely he cares about winning. This side of his personality was a helpful ballast to the rather limp implications of his hinterland as a human rights lawyer — and came in more than a little handy when Starmer was maneuvering the hard left out of the way.

That’s the Starmer who called Jeremy Corbyn a “friend” in 2020, and expelled him from the party in 2024 (the savagery here was less in the later whacking, and more in the initial pose of amity). It’s the Starmer who, according to Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In, tried to use a loss in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election to eliminate Angela Rayner, with his team portraying her as a diva for wanting security measures after receiving death threats. (Rayner, characteristically, toughed it out.)

But the man we saw in action on Wednesday was not acting on cold political nous. He was simply cold. A man who can’t respond to anguish when it’s a foot away from him can hardly be believed to understand it when it’s happening to the distant strangers he governs.

The cruelest caricature of Left-wing politics was always the do-gooder who could only activate their sympathies in the abstract — the “telescopic philanthropy” Charles Dickens mocked in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, too busy writing letters for good causes to look after her own neglected children. Next to Reeves, Starmer was the very picture of the unfeeling liberal. In a bruising week for him, that image may well be the hardest thing to live down.

“Helen McDougal” is the suspiciously normie name adopted by the founder and operator of Tattle, a message board that acts as a dark mirror to influencer culture. If the currency of influencer culture is likes, then the currency of Tattle is hate. The users of Tattle follow the objects of their attention every bit as avidly as a fan would — dissecting relationships, speculating about what’s going on behind the camera, and tracking influencers’ movements. The difference is that on Tattle, this is all animated by a fundamental loathing of the people they obsess over. It is the home of anti-fandom, of communities formed in antipathy.

According to Tattle’s own description, it’s a “commentary website on public business social media accounts” that allows “commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetize their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, but has a “zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”. According to Tattle’s subjects, this is humbug: Tattle is a factory for libel and harassment, and its favorite targets (like its users) are women. Comments like “play dough arse”, “prime example of disordered eating” and “looks like a sofa” are the norm.

Last week, a libel judgment from the High Court in Belfast was published which confirmed the worst about Tattle. Originally issued in 2023, but subject to reporting restrictions until now, the judgment called Tattle “a site which has been set up to facilitate the deliberate infliction of hurt and harm on others. Its very nature is to allow anonymous trashing of people’s reputations and the people facilitating this are making money out of it… This is clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit.”

The couple who had sued Tattle, Neil and Donna Sands, were awarded £300,000 in damages. But perhaps even more gratifyingly, they were now able to reveal the true identity of “Helen McDougal” — not, in fact, an ordinary woman who wanted to blow the whistle on the corruption of influencers, but a man called Sebastian Bond. Bond is an influencer himself, promoting “healthy plant based recipes” under the name Nest and Glow. The next step for the Sands and other Tattle targets will be to identify individual posters and bring them to court in turn. Their ultimate aim would be to shut the site down, either by direct order or simply by making it too expensive to run.

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The layers here are certainly tastier than the cursed slop posing as food that Bond puts up on his Instagram account. The scourge of influencers turns out to be an influencer. The person behind the internet’s fiercest criticisms of fakes and phonies turns out to be a fake and phony of the first order. And the Tattle users, who take great delight in “doxxing” online personalities (that is, finding and releasing personal documents or information), are now anxiously checking their own opsec, fearful of having their cover blown.

Best of all, though, is the gender reveal. How better to cloak yourself in benignity than by pretending to be a woman? “Helen McDougal” gave automatic protection against charges of misogyny — yes, Tattle might be furiously engaged in the character assassination of any female in the public eye, but it was a female-founded site with majority female users! The latter statement is still true (probably), but there’s a different vibe to it now we know they were all acting in a space owned and controlled by a man.

Not that Tattle’s users ought to be surprised by this act of mendacity. One of the busiest topics on the site is “Gender Discussion” — “Where men & women are born, not worn”, as one poster puts it. The idea that a man would adopt a female persona for deceptive purposes should be very familiar to people who think like this. Tattle is one part of the internet that never got the #bekind memo, and as a result it settled, from early on, into a bracingly realist approach on trans issues.

Even though the site was founded only in 2018, it feels like a portal to an older, more anarchic version of the internet than the manicured lawns of the social networks. One of the first things you’ll notice if you look at Tattle is that it’s ugly. That’s not just in terms of its content, but aesthetically: Tattle is a wall of sans serif text. When threads read 1,000 posts, they’re automatically closed and the conversation has to migrate to a new thread. Navigating them requires much patient clicking to find out what people are talking about.

You might assume this is a fault with the site — shouldn’t a message board want to be accessible to the maximum number of potential users? Actually, I think it’s a feature. Tattle’s jankiness means it takes commitment to participate. The friction-free UX of Instagram, X or Bluesky means that anyone can join in; on Tattle, though, you have to learn the rules of engagement before you can be in the club. Membership is also restricted. According to posters on Reddit, it hasn’t been open to new signups for several years.

That makes Tattle a closed world subject to its own mores. Crucially, though, it’s a closed world that’s visible from the outside. If all the posters on Tattle wanted to do was trash-talk influencers, they could do that on WhatsApp: the appeal of Tattle is being able to do it where people, including the people they’re talking about, can see. On Tattle threads, you’ll routinely see a comment that imagines how the subject would feel if they were reading — or even better, relishing the fact that the subject has angrily acknowledged Tattle’s existence elsewhere.

That kind of behavior tells you a lot about Tattle’s complicated relationship to celebrity. “Of course it is a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground,” said McDougal/Bond in a Q&A from before his outing. But the truth is that Tattle does consistently take the moral high ground: its justification for its existence is that influencers engage in unethical practices, and this ought to be exposed. And as far as it goes, there’s some truth to this.

Influencers do behave in sketchy ways — not flagging ads, promoting unethical products or lying about results — and neither regulators nor the platforms have the resources or appetite to keep up with this. Beyond the legally dubious, there are influencers who promote dangerous health crazes, who exploit their children or who manifest troubling behaviors that their audiences enable. Users of Tattle might also look at the coverage of their site in places like Mail Online (which called Bond the “king of trolls”) and point out that this is hardly an outlet with clean hands when it comes to publishing nasty commentary.

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An amateur influencer watchdog could fill a significant gap, if that was what truly Tattle was. Instead, Tattle is a machine for laundering resentment toward people who are good at engagement. “You want attention?” goes the implicit argument of a Tattle post. “Well, here’s some attention that you don’t get to control.” The best revenge of all? It elevates the posters themselves to micro-celebrities in the ecosystem of the site. They get all the pleasure of name-recognition, and all the satisfaction of shaping public opinion, while being able to keep their names safely detached from the lives they want to protect. As gratifying as the unmasking of Bond might be, it hasn’t so far seemed to herald the end of Tattle, or a demise of trolling culture overall.

In his Q&A as McDougal, Bond pointed out that “If Tattle ever did shut down, another site would pop up in seconds to fill the void and several others already exist.” He was telling the truth about that much, even if his entire identity was a fiction. Bitterness, cruelty and a desire to bond against an enemy are powerful human impulses. So is the urge to claw your way into the limelight — even if only pseudonymously, and even if you have to do it at the expense of the people who are already there.

No one cares as fiercely about fame as those who wish they had some of it, which is why it feels inevitable that the person behind Tattle would turn out to be a wannabe food blogger. But no one understands the brutality of fame as well as a hater, which is why it makes sense that Bond protected his privacy so carefully. The heart of Tattle was Bond’s understanding that loathing could bring people together. Now his name is public, Bond can finally become everything he envied and everything he feared.

But wait, you might be thinking: isn’t Creasy pro-choice, and wasn’t there a drastic move towards liberalization of abortion law this week? To which the answers are, respectively, yes she is and yes there was. On Tuesday, MPs voted to support an amendment to the crime and policing bill which will mean a woman cannot be investigated or prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy, at any point.

Though it will remain a criminal offense for a doctor to perform an abortion beyond the current 24-week time limit, this reform will mean the end of women being cruelly harassed through the justice system for having a “suspicious” miscarriage, or procuring their own late-term abortions in desperate circumstances. It is also, undeniably, a radical move that threatens to undermine the two main guarantees of the UK’s pro-choice consensus: the idea of medical oversight, and the idea of time limits based on “viability”. It repeals sections of the Offenses Against the Person Act 1861, decriminalizing women who procure abortions.

Not radical enough for Creasy, however. The problem is that there were two proposed amendments under discussion. The one that was ultimately passed came from Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi. The other one was Creasy’s, which would have removed criminal penalties for medical professionals as well as women, and established abortion access as a human right. Even the pro-choice campaign and abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) thought that would be going a bit far: Bpas publicly opposed the Creasy amendment, while supporting the Antoniazzi one.

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As far as Creasy was concerned, this was nothing short of a betrayal — not of her personally (God forbid), but of “progressive values” as a whole. After the vote, she wrote a column for The Guardian, in which she accused opponents of her amendment of urging “caution or even capitulation” in the face of the advancing Trumpian Right — “as if we can stop the public being dragged to the extremes if we speak in hushed tones or water down our ambitions for social justice.”

Most people would give their head a wobble at the point they found themselves implying Bpas (Bpas!) were quislings of the pro-life movement. Not Creasy, though. As far as Creasy is concerned, the UK is mere inches from being absorbed into the cultural battles of America, and only she can save us. “In the coming months and years, attacks on progressive values will intensify,” she pronounced, grandly. “As we face them, let this missed opportunity to reform our abortion legislation… remind us all that half measures are not what we are in politics to take.”

Such rhetoric is not just histrionic: it’s recklessly self-perpetuating. Britain is not America, in many things but particularly when it comes to abortion. In the US, abortion has been a highly politicized, highly partisan issue since the Seventies, driven in large part by the electoral clout of the evangelical megachurches. In the UK, abortion has historically had broad support, both across the benches and throughout the public. There are no votes in reopening the choice question.

There are, however, a lot of risks. “Opening the Pandora’s box of abortion reform is something no one should do without the confidence that they are able to manage the resulting chaos. Moves to decriminalize abortion, in response to the continued prosecution of women for having one, could unintentionally enable the restriction of access under a future regressive government.” Who wrote that? Ah yes — Stella Creasy, five weeks ago.

That note of caution was merely the entrée to Creasy’s embrace of maximal radicalism. For Creasy, anything that matters, matters because she can put herself at the heart of it. She attempted to bring her three-month-old baby into the chamber and framed it as maternity discrimination when she was refused (even though she could have appointed a proxy). She campaigned against online abuse by highlighting the fact that she, personally, had been targeted.

It’s depressing to compare Creasy now with Creasy over 14 years ago, when she had just entered parliament and The Spectator awarded her its Campaigner of the Year award for her work on payday loans. Since then, she has become ever more like a celebrity, and ever less like an MP. Her constituents broadly consider her diligent and hard-working, but her attentions are clearly divided between them and publicity. Creasy is the female politician most likely to answer a women’s magazine’s press request: her constituency is Walthamstow, but she was also representing Cosmopolitan, which recruited her to its decriminalization campaign.

You can get a sense of how politically isolated she is from the fact that her abortion amendment was drafted, not with support from other parliamentarians or from reproductive rights campaigners, but from the Good Law Project and Jolyon Maugham. Maugham’s expertise is tax law; the Good Law Project’s most notable achievement has been failing to win almost every case it put its name to. Why Creasy would choose such a partner for the delicate issue of abortion law reform is hard to fathom, unless you consider Maugham’s track record of attention-seeking to be an asset.

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Because Creasy’s amendment did get attention, much of it very negative. Outside Parliament, the anti-abortion group Centre for Bioethical Reform UK (CBR UK) erected giant posters showing a graphic image of an aborted fetus with the slogan: “Your MP is working very hard… to make this a human right.” Creasy, ever on brand, shared a photo of the placards on X with the caption: “This isn’t debate it’s incitement.” (Incitement to what was unspecified.) In fact, I suspect that CBR UK had given her exactly what she wanted: a chance to play the brave liberal, beleaguered by the forces of reaction.

The most unfortunate thing about Creasy’s amendment is not that it’s given everyone a reason to talk more about Stella Creasy. It’s that it flattened the debate about abortion reform into a choice between “extreme” and “even more extreme”. MPs went with the better option, but at the expense of having a full discussion about the overall principle (a principle that was never even mentioned in the Labour manifesto). That cannot be the right way to address matters of the gravest ethical concern.

Protecting vulnerable women from prosecution is a worthy aim, but the Antoniazzi reform is wide open to unintended consequences. Decriminalizing women, but not medics, creates a perverse incentive for scared women unsure about their date of conception to self-administer their abortion. That will lead, inevitably, to a small number of women going through the trauma of an induced late miscarriage on their own. Some will suffer complications. It will only take one horrifying headline for the public to get twitchy, and Nigel Farage is already making noises about reducing the time limit.

Because for all Creasy’s posturing about being the only one to truly recognize the threat from the populist Right, her actions suggest above all an unseriousness. Anyone who truly feared the rise of the reactionaries would see the UK’s abortion settlement as something too precious to be gambled with. Any student of reproductive rights in America would know that the more entangled organizations like Planned Parenthood became in the culture wars, the more inevitable their defeat was. Anyone who genuinely believed Farage could be the next prime minister would refuse to hand him an easy win.

Creasy is treating abortion rights as collateral in her own personal war for relevance. By putting them at stake, she can anoint herself as their champion, guaranteeing her own importance and righteousness. The backlash she is inciting carries a high cost for women who need abortion, but little cost to Creasy: if a future Reform government embarks on a clampdown, she will be able to say “I told you so” rather than own up to her own part in making abortion a frontline political issue. So long as she has the spotlight, Creasy never really loses.

George Osborne was the one to implement the two-child cap, but he didn’t invent it. Nor did Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of austerity-era welfare reforms. In fact, the two-child benefits cap was originally a Ukip policy. The Tories adopted it, and then a cowed Labour opposition declined to oppose it, but Farage the arch-Thatcherite truly believed in it (or at least, he seemed to at the time). Benefits, he argued in his 2011 autobiography, Flying Free, infantilized the nation: “Every welfare payment, grant, regulation, intervention of government in health, parenting and other individual responsibility increases dependence and makes change harder.”

If Farage now accepts that removing the cap would make having children easier for low-paid workers, that’s a tacit admission that the aim of his previous party’s policy was always to make it harder for low-income families to have children. His reversal is an enormous act of chutzpah, and few besides Farage could get away with it. In the most cynical terms, it’s an attack on Labour where it’s most vulnerable: the two-child cap is unpopular in the Northern “red wall” seats, where Reform is already running Labour close on support.

But it’s also an astute reaction to the changing politics of demography. Today, everyone knows we have a population crisis: collapsing birth rates, an aging population, and a fractious reliance on immigration to make up the difference. Framing the removal of the two-child cap as a pro-natalist policy sits very comfortably with Reform’s radical Right-wing populism. In theory, there’d be no need to import people from overseas if the UK was capable of growing its own.

Back at the beginning of the 21st century, when the two-child benefit cap was conceived, anxieties about baby-making had a very different shape. The birth rate was in decline already, but politicians rarely referred to this as a problem. Instead, the big concern was that the wrong kinds of babies were being born. The 2000s and 2010s were terrorized by “pramface” teen mums and grotesquely supersized families living at the state’s expense.

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All this fit very neatly with the Conservative opposition’s thesis of Broken Britain — a state of social decay caused, according to the Tories, by a decade of Labour government. In 2009, The Sun introduced the world to 13-year-old Alfie Patten, who was supposedly “Britain’s youngest dad” having conceived a daughter with 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman. A later DNA test showed the father was actually a (marginally less shocking) 15-year-old boy and not Patten, but by then his angelic face had already harrowed a nation.

Tory leader David Cameron wrote a column for the paper, bemoaning the fact that this was “not a one-off”, and praising a “landmark report” by Iain Duncan Smith “that helped bring these issues on to the political agenda”. That “landmark report” had plenty to say about family breakdown, the rise in lone parents and the alarming spectre of teen pregnancy — but nothing about supporting families to have more children. If anything, the popular belief was that some families should be very much discouraged from having them at all.

Like the Smiths, who became notorious in 2010. A story about them in the Mail was headlined: “$95,000-a-year benefits family of 12 re-homed in a $1,000-a-week house… ‘after they trashed the last one’.” The article prodded the reader to envious comparison: “The money — five times the starting salary of a teacher — goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rent-free four-bedroom house.” And then, making explicit the logic of the two-child benefits cap: “Critics said it was disgraceful that the family pocketed huge amounts of taxpayers’ money and called for urgent reform to the benefits system.”

Thirteen-year-old fathers and families of 12 were extreme outliers who probably said more about their own problems than society in general, but they tapped into a mass anxiety about excess reproduction. The emblem of this was the character Vicky Pollard from the sketch show Little Britain, which ran from 2003 to 2006 — a chavvy schoolgirl who says she’s had “six kids by seven different blokes” and is constantly hoping for a council house, because she believes someone else should pick up the tab for her promiscuity. The snobbery and the misogyny were undiluted. That was pop culture’s idea of a mother (played by a gay man in drag).

There was discourse around childlessness too, but this was very much focused on the idea that middle-class women were delaying reproduction for the sake of their careers, and then being punished for their hubris. “Women want to ‘have it all’,” declared an editorial in the BMJ, “but biology is unchanged; deferring defies nature and risks heartbreak.” Lord Steel, who had piloted the 1967 Abortion Act through parliament, declared regretfully that the law had contributed to an “irresponsible” mood, with women turning to abortion “if things go wrong”. (Exactly, one might imagine, when abortion would be appropriate.)

Given that both birth rates and maternal age continued on the same trajectories (respectively, down and up) it seems that women were not going to be bullied into maternity by rhetoric like this. More successful were the efforts to frighten those who did get pregnant. In 1999, the phrase “too posh to push” was coined in a Mail article about Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) giving birth by caesarean. The moral intent was obvious: women who didn’t have a “natural” labor — which is to say, vaginal and with minimal pain relief — were spoiled, unnatural creatures.

The increase in C-sections was treated as a national disgrace. In 2009 a senior (male) midwife told The Observer: “More women should be prepared to withstand pain.” Without suffering, you could never become a real mother. There was no evidence that maternal demand drove the rise in caesareans, and no evidence that women had contraction-shirking cowards; but there was evidence that women absorbed these attitudes then felt shame and failure for the interventions they needed anyway. In 2022, the Ockenden review found that targets to avoid caesareans left 300 babies dead or brain damaged, and contributed to the deaths of 12 women.

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Given all this, perhaps you could say it’s unsurprising that during this period women started opting out of motherhood. Judged for being too young, judged for being too old, given to understand that both having children and being unable to have children should be experienced as punishments. Add that to the obvious economic pressures caused by dropping out of the workforce, and how could fertility have gone any way other than down?

But all these pressures only added to the general trend of population decline, which is a global phenomenon with two dominant causes. The first of these is female education: the longer girls stay in school, the fewer children they will go on to have (male education doesn’t have the same effect). The second is urbanization: for farmers, every extra child is an extra field hand; for a family with factory or office jobs, more children are just more mouths to feed.

Children are expensive — not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. Only one of those can be subsidized by the government. In theory, modern families should be able to share the load as fathers become more active caregivers. In practice, some research shows that the more paternity leave fathers take, the fewer children they go on to have. One plausible explanation is that once men experience childrearing as work, they decide they would rather do less of it.

Reversing the two-child benefits cap is the right thing to do for the sake of the children currently in poverty because of it, but doesn’t reverse any of those things. No state-level intervention tried in any country ever has. Nordic-style family friendly policies don’t work, but nor does the Right-wing approach of loading families with cash. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán implemented a system of family subsidies that makes the amounts drawn down by the 12-member Smith family look family puny — spending on the program is equivalent to over 5% of the country’s GDP.

All that Hungary appears to have achieved is to encourage families, at very great expense, to have babies slightly earlier than they would have done anyway. The initial fertility boost has now faded to near-nothing. Farage is enough of a student of Orbán’s Hungary to know that his own, comparatively trivial, giveaway will do little for birth rates (though it will lift some children out of poverty). This policy’s chances of success on its terms are negligible.

More significant is what it says about Farage’s judgment of public feeling. He is an arch-populist, and right now he has judged that birth-boosting is more popular than Noughties-style benefits-bashing. Pay attention, too, to what Farage said after his speech. Asked about abortion, he described himself as pro-choice but called the current 24-week time limit “utterly ludicrous” when hospitals will “move heaven and earth” to help a premature baby survive.

It is a push on the door to see what’s permissible: the logic he uses here could easily be extended to hospitals “moving heaven and earth” to prevent a miscarriage, or implant a fetus during IVF. Abortion has been a settled issue in the UK for decades, but Farage can surely sense some profit to himself in unsettling it. If Reform come to power and manage to reverse the Abortion Act, it might even lead to more babies: in the US, states that have enacted abortion bans since the fall of Roe v Wade have seen an increase in the birth rate.

But those same states have also seen a rise in infant mortality, not only from congenital disorders which would once have been reason for termination, but from all causes. The largest differences, concluded researchers, were in “states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes”. Being pro-birth is not the same thing at all as being pro-mother and baby, and only by being pro-mother and baby can any country hope to ameliorate (though probably not to reverse) the fertility slump.

What would being pro-mother and baby look like? It would mean evidence-led, woman-centered care in pregnancy and labor, not moralizing targets. It would mean treating childbearing as a normal thing a woman might do in the course of her life — not her singular purpose, and not a strange indulgence on her part to be grudgingly tolerated. Women who have children are performing a social good, and neither the state nor her employers should penalize her for it. It would mean private homes and public spaces that are fit for purpose and accessible for everyone.

Without those things, all any country has to look forward to is becoming an older, poorer place. The population problem will affect every part of politics in the decades to come, and governments have no choice but to contend with it, however difficult that may be. Farage’s benefits U-turn is the first stirring of natalism as a serious issue in the US. What never seems to change is the disdain and cruelty aimed at the people — the women — who are expected to have the babies.

But now his time in the White House is drawing to a close, and Musk has announced that from now on, he will be spending more time with his businesses (including Tesla, SpaceX and the social network X). Not, you’ll notice, the traditional retiring politician’s promise to “spend more time with his family” — which in Musk’s case would be tricky, given that he doesn’t have anything like a traditional family.

In Fight Club, the narrator complains to Tyler Durden about having an absent father: “Every six years, he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Durden responds: “Fucker’s setting up franchises.” And “setting up franchises” essentially describes Musk’s attitude to fatherhood. He’s known to have at least 14 children with four women, although according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, it’s probable that the actual number is far higher.

Of course, Musk doesn’t use the word “franchise” — he prefers the military metaphor of having a “legion” of children. The mothers of his many children, meanwhile, use another word: “harem”. They talk about being dragged into “harem drama”, as Musk plays favorites and uses his financial power to punish or reward. After one of the babymamas pushed back against a gagging clause that would have prevented her from speaking negatively about him (but not the other way around), he cut her monthly stipend from $100,000 to $40,000.

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Which all suggests that Musk has a pretty terrible attitude to women: they’re there to procreate and to take orders. With one exception: his mother Maye Musk enjoys a privileged role in the court of Musk. She has an apparently close and protective relationship with her son: after the WSJ article was published, she responded to the allegations about the treatment of her grandchildren by calling it “dishonest” and flagging the journalists who wrote it to an X account called “@Ifindretards”.

Musk reportedly uses privacy deals to stop the mothers of his children from publicly associating themselves (or their children) with him. Meanwhile, Maye socializes with the wives and daughters of the Republican elite: a seat next to Melania at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, a luncheon with Ivanka, a ride on Air Force One. She’s the nearest thing Musk has to a first lady.

She’s also apparently free to capitalize on her family as much as she likes. Maye would, presumably, disagree with the idea that she owes her status to her son. She has her own profile as a model — now 77, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2022. She is, incongruously, especially popular in China, where she’s regarded as a “silver influencer” and is in demand for lucrative partnerships with local brands.

She has, inevitably, written a book, which promises “Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” And, equally inevitably, she also offers a self-help course where you can learn her “five rules for life”. It is silly to think that anyone would be fascinated by this if Maye wasn’t the mother of the richest man in the world, but it’s equally silly to assume the benefit only goes one way. Maye lends Musk something that he could never have without her: humanity. Without her, it would be impossible to think of Musk — with his collection of children, his nativist fixations and his obsession with the letter X — as anything other than alarmingly weird. Maye brings a softening lifestyle angle to the dynasty: think of her as “GoopX”.

She even has a backstory that recasts Musk, with all his (kindly) eccentricities, as an object of sympathy. According to her autobiography, she left Musk’s father Errol because he was abusive (Errol denies this). The backstory to the backstory, however, is less helpful: Maye’s father Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Musk was two, was a white supremacist and antisemite who opposed democracy and believed there was a “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization”. 

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Racism is not a hereditary trait (even though it would be funny if it was), and the fact that Haldeman held those opinions tells you little about his descendants. But it’s a useful reminder that the Musk family tree has been political for several generations, and Maye is a political player in her own right. As Wired reported, she’s used her social media posts to support Musk’s lobbying efforts on behalf of his businesses in China, and her own visits to the country (she claims to go almost every month) have been celebrated by members of the Chinese government. 

Until her son’s embrace of Trump 2.0, Maye’s American presence was non-partisan — at her most firebrand, she was the kind of girlboss Democrat who went to Hilary Clinton fundraisers. But as her son’s ambitions converged on Trump, so did her posting. Increasingly, she used her accounts to boost Musk’s interests, which meant boosting Trump. (If she’s sore about Trump’s tariff war potentially affecting her relationship with China, it hasn’t affected her loyalty.)

Musk loves a classical reference, so here’s a new one for him to enjoy. If his children are his “legion”, then Maye is the Livia to his Tiberius, in the style of Siân Phillips in I, Claudius. She is the savvy operator who can make up for his deficiencies, the proxy who can act on his behalf while pretending all to be doing nothing more than “mothering”. She can be his attack dog, and call it maternal instinct — though it’s notable that she doesn’t post about her other two children nearly as often. 

A power mother is a great asset (just ask the Kardashians). That’s true both publicly and privately. Maye is the one who is allowed to speak truth to her son’s power: she told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father”, and grows absorbed with conspiracies and delusions of grandeur. Whether he listens to her is another thing, but at least he didn’t fall out with her — which is what happened to Sam Harris when he demurred from the Musk line on covid. Naughty boys listen to their mothers.

But for Musk, Maye is also a bit of a reputational liability. Musk believes intensely in masculinity: “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway,” he texted to one of the mothers of his children. He has used his enormous riches to create a private world where women are maximally disposable, to be purchased for their reproductive value and maintained at a safe distance.

Meanwhile, Maye is out there telling people to “stop being mean” to her son, as though he were a weedy kid being bullied in the playground and not a billionaire who until recently had the power to direct the US budget. Men might be made for war, but Maye Musk is perfectly capable of fighting her son’s corner. Musk seems to be long beyond relying on women, but really he’s the ultimate mama’s boy.

Which is what evolutionary psychologist William Costello did, posting before-and-after photos of the singer Olly Murs, either side of a “12-week gym transformation”. In picture one, Murs has visible muscles but is a little on the chunky side — a classic “dad bod”, in the thirsty language of the internet. In picture two, he’s straight-up ripped, body fat stripped away and every muscle on show — a lean, honed Adonis at the pinnacle of his physical development.

And yet: almost four times as many women chose the “before” over the “after”. But nearly twice as many men chose the “after” over the “before”, and a lot of them seemed as baffled by the “feminine soul” as Freud ever was. The moment Costello’s post went mega-viral was when another user screen-grabbed the results and shared the image with the caption, “why are women lying about this? like what’s the actual cause?”

In other words: even when several women tell you outright what they want, some men simply can’t believe it. Women must be being dishonest, said aggrieved men in the replies — or if not that, then they must be deceived by lighting or repulsed by after-Olly’s tiny shorts or anything, anything rather than being authentically more attracted to a body that doesn’t look like you could break a nail on it.

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The gods of the discourse are capricious, but the gods of the discourse must be served. Did I ever think I would have an opinion on the sex appeal of Murs, arguably the most inoffensive man in pop? I did not, and yet I nevertheless have an opinion: the before is hotter. “Before” looks solid. “Before” looks like he could pick up a few heavy things without fainting. “Before” looks like someone you could hang out and eat pizza with. “After” looks like someone whose only concern is when it’s time to eat his next egg white omelette.

A ripped physique is for sure impressive, if only because of the obsessive effort it takes to achieve it. But obsessive is not the same as attractive. Competitive bodybuilders alternate “cuts” (fat-loss programs) with “bulks” (which involve taking on extra calories to build mass), meticulously timing the cycle to ensure that they hit the stage at the point of optimum body composition. In fact, it’s impossible to cut indefinitely: at some point, if you keep losing weight, you’ll start losing a noticeable amount of muscle.

Achieving the perfect look for flexing is too brutally restrictive to do for very long. As Murs’ wife Amelia (herself not exactly a slouch in the fitness stakes) commented on his Instagram: “So proud of you… does this mean we get to eat the same dinners again now?!” Which is funny and sweet, but also points to part of the problem with the super-lean male body from the female point of view: any man who attains it isn’t going to have much attention left over for you after he’s given his all to meal prep. Women, on the whole, are looking for relationship material, and relationship material has time for you.

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A woman doesn’t need to know anything about the quest for macros to know what she likes, though. All she has to know is that a man with a reasonable proportion of body fat — not obese, but with a little in reserve — looks healthy, at ease in himself and capable. The evolutionary explanation might involve something about a well-fed man looking like a reliable provider. Maybe part of the reason after-Murs is off-putting to most women is that they can see he’s effectively starving.

The bigger questions are why men can’t take a woman at her word — and why men themselves should be so attached to a wrong opinion about what constitutes an ideal body. Now, I’m not accusing the men of lying about what they like. That would be unnecessary. But I am fascinated by the lengths men will go to in order to acquire a physique that most women find a comprehensive turnoff.

Out in the incel wilds, men discuss the mythical “Gigachad”: a man so humongously swole (and charming and confident, but mostly swole) that he’s irresistible to women. In the sexual theology of the manosphere, the Gigachad is the counterpart to the female Gigastacy — meaning he has exclusive access to the most attractive women. Young men in forums sincerely discuss how they can achieve Gigachaddom, swapping tips on achieving calorie deficit while hitting protein goals in order to achieve that elusive washboard stomach.

The longer you spend reading those forums, though, the more obvious it becomes that the primary audience these men have in mind isn’t female at all. The meticulous dissection of delts, lats and abdominals (and even more importantly, the display of delts, lats and abdominals for the purposes of feedback) is for each other. This is a subculture of men looking at men, and projecting their preferences onto women. If it wasn’t for that last part, the supposed hotbed of frustrated heterosexuality would actually look pretty gay.

Gymmaxxing, as the incels call it, is not politically neutral. It’s Right-coded — so much so that when The New York Times recently profiled streamer Hasan Piker, a socialist who also (gasp) lifts weights, the headline described him as “a progressive mind in a MAGA body”. On the face of it, this is ludicrous, not least because no one who’s seen a MAGA rally is likely to confuse it with Mr Universe. But it is true all the same that the subcultures that are most concerned with traditional masculinity are also the most concerned with the arduous maintenance of a masculine aesthetic, however much they might deny that “masculine” and “aesthetic” belong in the same sentence.

If you want to get not merely ripped but really big, it takes more than diet and exercise. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, adheres to an “anti-aging” testosterone regimen that has enabled him to stay unnervingly hench into his seventies: “its most obvious effects,” wrote Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic, “look a lot like juicing.” Podcasting king Joe Rogan has similarly described taking testosterone replacement therapy, and in both cases there’s a squeamish insistence on a health alibi for an appearance intervention that is not unlike me insisting I want Botox to cure my headaches rather than to fix my wrinkles.

But because masculinity is, supposedly, natural, admitting to taking hormones can seem high stakes. Which is how the fitness influencer known as the Liver King ended up, ludicrously, pretending that his gains were all down to a “primal” diet of organ meat. Even though he had a chest like two basketballs and the tell-tale corned beef complexion of the steroid user — neither of which, it should be noted, are considered particularly desirable by women. Nonetheless, he had a dedicated following of men who bought his supplements in the hope of looking more like him.

One reason for the coyness about steroids is to protect the idea that the ripped body is the product of concerted labor. No shortcuts. To the male gaze, it’s a good thing that the ripped body looks like hard work: it suggests effort that deserves reward, in the form of female attention. Meanwhile, there’s often a distaste for the effort women have to put into hotness maintenance: according to incel lore, Gigastacys can work out, but they don’t need to. Girls aren’t meant to sweat, just to be perfect objects without trying.

Men’s taste in men has nothing to do with what women want. The masculine dream of the ultimate six-pack isn’t about getting the chicks. It’s a fantasy of marble perfection: no softness, no flab. It’s also a cope: if you can convince yourself that women will only fall for the most extreme physique, you’ve already explained away your own sexual failures. Meanwhile, women will carry on preferring the man who looks like he can both flip a tire and eat a cookie without having a panic attack. Despite what Freud thought, women really are pretty basic.

I thought about Levy’s punchy phrase when I read the headlines last week about a “dramatic growth” in churchgoing among young people in the US, mirroring the trend in the US. Twenty years ago, almost no one would have predicted such a revival. Religiosity in the West, and Christianity specifically, was in long-term decline; but more than that, irreligiosity appeared to be on an unstoppable path towards triumph.

Back in the 2000s, atheism felt exciting. It’s hard to credit now, but from 2005 to 2007, I spent many of my evenings in the pub thrashing out the flaws in agnosticism. No, no, someone would be saying as you arrived back from the bar clutching a round, it’s nonsense to reserve judgment on something when there’s no evidence for it. Someone else would quote Bertrand Russell, then the conversation would turn to the possibility of morality absent a deity: maybe atheists were more moral, because they weren’t just following old holy books? And then everyone could feel very pleased with themselves as they took a mouthful of their pint.

Unbelieving was a pleasant pace of rebellion for a young adult in England. We were defying our Church of England schooling, the compulsory “Our Fathers” in assembly, the nativity every Christmas. It was provocation without danger. The last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the UK had been in 1976. No one had been executed for heresy in this country for 300 years. The young apologetics fans who are rediscovering collective worship probably feel something of the same. There are many reasons someone can feel called to church, and one of them is surely the opportunity to make you elders feel slightly baffled and uncomfortable.

When it came to questions of belief, all the intellectual energy was with the “New Atheist” movement, which was determined to root faith itself out of public life. It felt like taking a stand against the atrocities of the time, which all seemed to have their roots in religion. The Catholic Church was embroiled in horrifying scandals of child abuse and cover-up, and the Anglicans had a few of their own. 9/11 had been a harrowing illustration of what “religious inspiration” in practice; the military response from the US and UK looked, to some, like a divinely motivated “crusade”. People who were unreasoning enough to believe in virgin births or paradise for martyrs were presumed to be capable of all kinds of unreasonable activity besides. Hence the title of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

But anyone who believed as fully as the New Atheists did that religion was a man-made phenomenon should have been able to foresee what happened next. New Atheism, it turned out, was not inherently immune to the unpleasant excesses of human behavior: by 2011, a number of New Atheists, particularly female ones, had started to notice that their movement was every bit as man-heavy in its leadership as the Catholic church. It wasn’t even immune from acting like exactly the thing it set itself in opposition to — a religion. And like all nascent religions, it would undergo a schism.

The rupture in New Atheism should have happened sooner, given its awkward coalition of anti-Islam hawks like Sam Harris (who set himself against “the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living”), and anti-war liberals who got twitchy when Tony Blair said he would be judged by God for his decision to commit the UK to war in Iraq. Somehow, though, that shoe never dropped. Instead, the split in New Atheism started in an elevator.

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In 2011, a New Atheist aligned blogger called Rebecca Watson (“Skepchick”) was propositioned in a lift at an atheist conference in Dublin. She posted about it, and received a comment from Richard Dawkins that began: “Dear Muslima…” The substance of his comment was that Watson’s experience was nothing in comparison to the suffering of Muslim women under theocratic regimes, and it implied that Watson should “grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.” Dawkins later apologized for invoking “rivalry in victimhood”,  but by then, the New Atheists had already taken sides.

On one side of the aisle, the old school, who believed that social justice concerns were a distraction from the important work of cultivating unbelief. On the other, the progressives, who thought of atheism as a vehicle for all the other issues they cared about. But it was a clash born of the original mission of the New Atheists, who had wanted more than freedom not to believe; they had wanted to destroy religion as an institution, because they saw its influence as toxic. If atheism was toxic too, the progressives reasoned, it surely didn’t deserve to exist. As the blogger Jen McCreigh wrote: “I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.”

McCreigh proposed the name “Atheism Plus” for the movement she wanted to instigate. As another blogger explained it, this would be a movement that “explicitly focuses, not just on atheism, but on the intersections between atheism and racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social justice issues”. It was, in other words, an early instance of the omnicause. Very quickly, the issues of rationality and truth that had energized the early days of the New Atheists were left behind: facts might be important, but social justice mattered more.

Nowhere was this as obvious as in the way the former New Atheists dealt with trans issues. People who had once loved nothing more than dismantling the existence of the soul found themselves furiously defending the idea of “gender essences”. Rebecca Watson, the woman whose sexual harassment helped instigate the split in the first place, could recently be found “debunking” the Cass Review as “anti-science and anti-trans”. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its 1996 Humanist of the Year award from Dawkins for his skeptical comments about trans identity.

This was a bizarre turn of events, but maybe an inevitable one. The attraction of New Atheism had always been, partly, the thrill of belonging to the elect. Before Gary Wolf came up with the name that stuck, Dawkins and others had attempted to popularize the label “brights” for unbelievers. In an article in The Guardian, Dawkins wondered: “what’s the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?” And then he answered himself like this: “What would you suggest?” The implication was obvious. Religion was for the dim. Smart people were godless.

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The Atheist Plus people thought they were better than the New Atheist people, but the New Atheists thought they were better than everybody else. The abortive effort to make “brights” happen suggests that New Atheism was always more about asserting one’s own superiority than it was about popularizing reason: it was niche by design. In turn, the Atheist Plus people could prove their superiority to the New Atheists through their commitment to frankly improbable ideas. Declaring faith in gender identity was valuable in exactly the same way that believing in the literal truth of transubstantiation or the resurrection can be: an idea so unlikely that only special people could see its truth.

New Atheism was also, let us be honest, quite cringe. In many ways, it was exactly how you would imagine a religion of nerds to turn out. And, although there were many successful conferences and meet-ups built around it, it was fundamentally a very online movement. For an avowedly materialist philosophy, it offered very little in the way of real-world sustenance. I suspect that part of the resurgence of religion is down to simple skin hunger — the need of humans to be in physical contact with other humans.

It certainly hasn’t happened because religion has re-earned its moral authority. Despite the late Pope’s efforts, Catholicism still had plenty of sins to reckon with. The Anglican Communion has barely begun its own redemption — Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury over the church’s protection of the child abuser John Smyth came far too late and with far too little contrition. The lure of the pews comes from somewhere more elemental.

Christianity’s comeback with Gen Z is a backlash to the rationalist certainty in which the millennials steeped themselves, and which proved to be so limited when “rationalism” came into conflict with questions of identity. I don’t go to church and would be a hypocrite if I did (I don’t believe in God), but I do know that standing in a nave for a wedding or a funeral, elbow to elbow with a stranger, joining my voice with theirs, feels more sacred than sitting in a conference room watching a PowerPoint about why God doesn’t exist ever could.

New Atheism promised freedom from dogma so people could forge what Harris called a “religion of reason”; but that promise proved as tautological as it sounded. The collapse of New Atheism into a mirror image of its avowed enemy shows how very difficult it is to do without a god, even when you don’t believe in one. Most people do want some of the answers, rather than to be left to flounder for them alone.

From Santhouse’s perspective, it’s less likely that individuals and their doctors have got better at recognizing ADHD, and more likely that something has happened to the concept of ADHD itself. Like depression, autism and a whole raft of other conditions, it has become far more widely discussed than ever before. As its parameters have been loosened. That allows more people to be labeled, but it also means the nature of the label is changing.

Most people will identify with some of the traits of ADHD — restlessness, fatigue, struggling to focus on essential but unengaging tasks. Now, though, individuals who would once have been considered within the range of normal are being rounded up to confirmed cases, while the most seriously affected have become outliers within their own diagnosis. The name for this process is “overdiagnosis”, and Santhouse’s critique is controversial in itself, because it says something that has become borderline taboo: identifying labels need limiting criteria. Otherwise, they don’t identify very much at all.

The opposing view to Santhouse’s is that ADHD has been historically under-diagnosed: what we’re seeing now, according to this point of view, is correction rather than excess. You’ll find that argument in books such as It’s Not a Bloody Trend: Understanding Life as an ADHD Adult by the journalist Kat Brown, who was herself diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37. First, though, she had to diagnose herself, which she did on social media, after she began to recognize her own behavior in the posts she saw about ADHD.

I’m not interested in questioning Brown’s ADHD status. But I am interested in how deeply she was invested in getting it. “So many people, including me,” she writes, “report feeling deeply anxious ahead of our assessments in case it’s found that we don’t have it and we are ‘just like this’.” When she received the confirmation she was hoping for, Brown felt “vindicated, triumphant — normal… The rest of my life stretched before me, golden and glorious, and bathed in a glow of understanding.”

Had she been denied the diagnosis, she would also have been denied that gratification. In her book, Brown advocates for a definition of ADHD that is as expansive as possible. You can understand why: if getting the diagnosis was so important for her, denying it to somebody else would be a commensurate form of harm. “ADHD is a wondrous constellation that is as specific to the person as their life story… As the recovery saying goes, listen to the similarities and not the differences.”

But what if the differences matter? What’s at stake here isn’t just the reality or otherwise of adult ADHD. It’s also a contest between two different modes of encountering the world — modes which have been falsely, but firmly, politicized. For Santhouse, as a clinician, there is a responsibility to be precise. Loose, capacious definitions lead to individuals receiving multiple overlapping diagnoses with no clear treatment pathway; they can also lead to people who are not particularly unwell being swept up into the category of “sick”, causing them to seek medical solutions to what were not even problems in the first place.

In Brown’s moral universe, those who doubt adult ADHD are on a par with (and probably identical to) those who are skeptical about “climate change… sexual harassment, depression, suicidal thoughts, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism and racism”. Even to query diagnostic creep is to put yourself on the side of the bigots. If you think you have ADHD, then who are the so-called experts to countermand you? (Although other, supportive experts should of course be deferred to.) As a campaigner and a journalist on the liberal Left, Brown’s prime virtue is inclusion, and from that perspective, any insistence on limitations is perceived as Right-coded.

Leaving people out is axiomatically a bad thing. In the 2013 book Excluded, trans activist Julia Serano opens by saying “All of us have been excluded at some point in our lives”, tweaking the universal monkey-brain fear of being ostracized. So when Serano’s main argument comes — which is that “sexism-based exclusion within feminism and queer activism” exists and should be dismantled — the issue has already been decided. Exclusion is bad, therefore someone like Serano (a self-described “bisexual femme-tomboy transsexual woman”) should be included, within both the category “female” and the “queer umbrella”.

In the age of inclusion, the idea of the “umbrella term” has become particularly dominant. “Queer”, as Serano uses it, is an umbrella term, containing everyone from gays and lesbians — the people who originally campaigned for their freedom from legal and state-sanctioned persecution for their relationships — to the moderately sexually unorthodox. Umbrella terms, writes Serano, “are primarily used to form alliances between disparate people who share some obstacle or form or discrimination in common”.

Perhaps so. But the tendency to lump various groups under one label also serves to define the “obstacle or form of discrimination” in question. When a femme-presenting male insists on his inclusion in the feminist movement, he is defining sexism as oppression of the femme-presenting, rather than oppression of women on account of their femaleness. It turns feminism into a movement that should spend more time defending the concept of a “female penis” (the better to be inclusive) than it does on abortion and maternity rights.

In other words, it hijacks feminism for men’s interests. Nonetheless, the injunction to include has been embraced by some feminists, such as the philosopher Amia Srinivasan. In The Right to Sex, Srinivasan warns that “trans women… often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women”. In “exclusionary” terms, this means that some lesbians refuse to have sex with men, even having been willing to state that those men were women.

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Where the injunction to include doesn’t produce outright perversities like telling lesbians to have sex with men, it often generates a hopeless fug of vagueness. CN Lester, a non-binary natal female and author of Trans Like Me, ran into this problem while trying to write an “inclusive” definition of the term “trans”. “Any person who has had to challenge or change the sexed and gendered labels placed upon them at birth to honour their true selves can, by their own or others’ volition, find themselves under this trans umbrella,” writes Lester.

By such a definition, the suffragists were trans: women were not allowed to vote on account of their sex, so to campaign for the franchise was by definition to “challenge… the sexed and gendered labels placed upon them at birth”. Arguably, it’s politically helpful to Lester to corral the widest possible constituency — in the same way that, arguably, it is politically helpful to Kat Brown to corral the widest ADHD possible constituency. The more people your movement can represent itself as acting for, the stronger your democratic case, at least superficially.

But a category also has to share some essential characteristics for it to be a basis for politics. The impulse to inclusion above all is, fundamentally, anti-political because it is insistent on finding sameness when politics is a system for recognizing (and perhaps reconciling) difference: different needs, different claims to resources, different beliefs. Flatten those into the mush of inclusivity, and politics can have no function. If we’re all the same, what could we have to disagree about?

Declining to assert boundaries is, ultimately, an act of radical irresponsibility. You can see that most starkly in one of the most extreme applications of this tactic within the Left: the assertion that even national borders are illegitimate and should be obliterated. This might sound like a belief that no one could hold in earnest. Nonetheless, as some have argued for no borders between the category of male and female, others have argued for no borders between countries — or, rather, no countries at all.

In Against Borders: The Case For Abolition, writers Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha attempt to make the case that “immigration controls are obsolete and should be abolished”. Their argument is not that migration policy should be more liberal or humane. It is that the nation state should be abolished: “borders are used to surveil and control whole populations, migrants and citizens both… Borders harm us all, which is why we must all be committed to their abolition.”

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This is a case they make in all sincerity but not, ultimately, a case they make seriously, because what they are proposing is so nebulous, they cannot fully imagine it. “We do not provide a roadmap for how to get to border abolition. We do not know what that world will look like, and there is no single route to get us there,” they write. The large rhetorical gesture (“abolish borders”) distracts from the need to think about the detailed, difficult issues around statehood. Migrants, it’s worth noting, are often especially attached to the idea of citizenship: they know what it means to be without it.

The creeping idea that simply to have boundaries is a form of harm has cost the Left, in particular, dearly since the start of this century, and forced many of a liberal inclination into untenable positions. You can see, also, the failure of inclusion as a prime value in the confused response to the government’s proposed welfare reforms. If enacted as planned, it seems certain that these will be both chaotic and cruel; but a commitment to the inclusion principle means that, rather than criticize the execution, some on the Left have launched an assault on the very possibility that anyone currently defined as disabled might not properly belong in the category. Overdiagnosis is treated as a Right-wing tool rather than a potentially serious harm to individuals.

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This is a foolish way to argue, and a doomed one. No class can be defended if it cannot be defined. To make the argument that disabled people deserve state support (an argument that the majority of the country would agree with), it’s necessary to accept that there is a group of people who are disabled — and to be able to distinguish them from people who are not disabled. Inclusion may feel like an act of kindness, but the refusal to exercise judgment is really cowardice.

There are many ways of defining a group, and there are kinds of exclusion that are unethical — if they didn’t exist, the charge of “being exclusionary” would have no force. To exclude someone from citizenship on the grounds of race or religion is wrong. To deny that someone is a woman because she fails to be feminine is wrong. To misdiagnose someone is wrong. The mistake the Left has made, however, is to suppose that any of these mean borders, boundaries and definitions are in themselves wrong. Instead, they are proof that they matter. Not everyone can be welcome in every group. Without some exclusion, there is no group.

And knowing where your children are is little reassurance when the media they’re consuming represents something you’re certain is horrific, but don’t quite understand. I think that fear explains the avid response to Netflix drama Adolescence, which across four episodes, each filmed in real time and (audaciously) as one shot, tries to unpick the nightmare of a teenage boy (Jamie, played by Owen Cooper) who stabs a teenage girl to death. The motivation for the attack is initially obscure, but the investigation rapidly fixes on Jamie’s involvement in the online subculture known as the “manosphere”.

In the final episode, which focuses on Jamie’s shattered family, his parents struggle with their own culpability — the degree to which they should have known the path their son was on, and stopped him. His mom (Christine Tremarco) frets about all the time Jamie spent on his computer, unmonitored; his dad (Stephen Graham) remembers how he too has been pushed “incel stuff” while looking for workout content. The series ends with Jamie’s dad in his son’s disarmingly childish bedroom, sobbing: “I’m sorry son, I should’ve done better.”

The series deliberately resists offering backstory that might make Jamie more explicable. There’s no domineering father, no neglectful mother; nothing that might reassure the viewer that this could never be their family. Only a gentle-seeming boy who did well at school and caused no trouble before this one devastating act. Graham, who co-created the series as well as starring in it, says the series is a reaction to the spate of real-life, child-on-child knife crime: the intention was to “hold that mirror up to society and say, ‘Just have a look at this, because it is happening. It has happened.'”

He also says he knew nothing about the manosphere before he started work on this project, and you can tell. The world Jamie is drawn into is never shown on screen. Instead, it is represented through the efforts of baffled adults to understand an impenetrable language of emojis and posting (in one scene, a detective’s son painfully talks him through the meaning of “red pill”). Adolescence is unsettlingly realistic about, say, the simmering anarchy of a school full of teenagers, but when it comes to online, this is a boomer version of zoomer life. It can look at the symbols, but has no way of deciphering them beyond the inevitable cry: “Take away their phones!”

Confronted by something as shattering as children who kill, the only act that feels possible is witness. Adolescence shares a lot stylistically with Gus Van Sant’s 1999 film Elephant, which was his response to the Columbine massacre — the high school shooting in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 and injured 23 (Klebold and Harris also killed themselves, and one of the survivors recently died of her injuries, bringing their toll to 14). Like Adolescence, Elephant uses a real-time structure and long, watchful camerawork; rather than being filmed in one take, it has a looping structure that brings together the last minutes before the atrocity from the perspectives of several kids.

Elephant‘s title was intended as a reference to the impossibility of comprehension. Van Sant told an interviewer he was thinking of the parable of the five blind men encountering an elephant: “One thinks it’s a rope because he has the tail, one thinks it’s a tree because he can feel the legs, one thinks it’s a wall because he can feel the side of it, and nobody actually has the big picture. You can’t really get to the answer, because there isn’t one.” The enormity of the event resists understanding.

A year before Elephant, Michael Moore had satirized attempts to find a simple, singular cause for the shooting in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, which was particularly scathing about media efforts to blame Klebold and Harris’s acts on the boys’ consumption of violent media.  Bowling for Columbine has aged badly for several reasons, not least its elevation of Marilyn Manson (the rock star who was erroneously blamed for inspiring Columbine) to the status of moral authority. Moore was correct that scapegoating movies and video games was inane, but he also deliberately overlooked the degree to which Klebold and Harris were immersed in the aesthetics of bloodshed.

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From the earliest stages of their plan, Klebold and Harris had seen their actions in cinematic terms. One of the missed warning signs of their plot was a senior-year film project they collaborated on called Hitmen for Hire, in which they played hitmen picking off fellow students. They left behind a cache of tapes (nicknamed the Basement Tapes) detailing their plans, and intended for release; these were later destroyed by law enforcement for fear that their circulation would inspire copycats.

And Columbine itself was planned for the cameras. Although the death toll was shocking (especially at the time, when a school shooting was a new phenomenon in America), Klebold and Harris intended it to be much, much higher. They had planted bombs in strategic locations with timers set to ensure maximum fatalities, and maximum publicity. These failed to go off, but journalist Dave Cullen (who has covered Columbine in more detail than probably anyone) describes what was supposed to happen:

“The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the ‘fun’ part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history.”

Klebold and Harris had learned their sense of drama from the films they watched and the games they played. That doesn’t mean that media turned them into killers. (A folie a deux between psychopathic Harris and depressive Klebold probably did that, and Harris specifically may have been dangerous under any conditions. “If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done,” writes Cullen.) But media profoundly shaped the kind of killers they became.

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The failure of Klebold and Harris’s bombs meant they did not achieve the total infamy they hoped for. But they achieved enough to have become cultural figureheads of a sort, to a certain sort of person. They wrote the script for the gun massacres that have since become regular occurrences in the US. At Cullen’s estimate, 54 shootings with 300 fatalities (and many more injured) have been directly inspired by Columbine since 1999.

In September last year, a British teenager tried to join their number: 19-year-old Nicolas Prosper executed his mother Juliana Falcon, brother Kyle and sister Giselle with a shotgun, then headed to a primary school where he intended to accomplish the “massacre of the century”. He was specifically obsessed with Columbine, making him one of thousands of “Columbiners”, as the Klebold-Harris fandom is known. To them, Columbine was an act of nihilistic heroism, and Klebold and Harris are idols to be emulated. With sad inevitability, there has even been at least one shooting in which Elephant was cited as an inspiration.

Few people have pushed back against Adolescence’s implicit thesis that tiny incels turn into killers. Those who did have not come from the Left like Moore (the Left allowed its free speech muscle to waste away during the 2010s, when it assumed that the right side of history had won and all that was left to do was gloat at the losers) but rather from the manosphere itself. Andrew Tate fans in particular seem to have been exercised by Adolescence, with some calling it a “character assassination” of their hero.

Unfortunately for the Tate fans claiming “moral panic”, it is only weeks since the conviction of Kyle Clifford for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, and the murder of her mother Carol and her sister Louise. At the trial, the prosecution revealed that Clifford had spent the night before watching Tate videos; the crown argued that Tate’s self-declared misogyny was a direct encouragement for Clifford’s abhorrent violence.

It is no longer particularly controversial to draw a line from what is watched and read, to what is done. That is partly because the escalation of user-generated content means that those with an interest in violence are no longer limited to material that might come under the definition of “art”. Van Sant had a reason for staging the high school massacre of Elephant, and his reason was to look at the nature of violence and the lives it scars. The Columbiners who make fan illustrations of Klebold and Harris are simply showing their admiration for Klebold and Harris.

Adolescence, notably, doesn’t explicitly show the stabbing that instigates the story. The emotional impact of the assault comes from watching someone else watching it: Jamie’s father is shown grainy CCTV footage of his son attacking the victim. Perhaps a judgement was made here that, in a drama leaning so heavily on the risks of media contagion, it would be hypocritical to offer anything that might gratify those attracted to violence.

For all Adolescence’s will to refuse pat answers, though, I suspect there is still a certain truth about violence that it is not willing to acknowledge. Children who kill do not have a single “type”, as the FBI school shooter threat assessment conducted after Columbine found. There is no checklist you can turn to that tells you who will or will not become a murderer. But there are commonalities among those who do: a history of psychological issues, tensions in the home, an obsession with death.

It was true in 1999 that it took more than a first-person shooter to make a massacre, and it’s still true if you substitute “incel TikToks” for Doom. A child like Jamie who appears to shift from “nice” to “vicious” with no outward signs is rare to the point of being mythical. Despite Adolescence’s meticulous verisimilitude, Jamie is a kind of monster: the ultimate distillation of those parental fears about what might become of your child, lost in the wilds of social media.

But Anderson’s personal world is neither crass nor obvious. It’s a hazy, fairytale place, where a small-town Canadian girl could be discovered on the big screen at a ballgame and launched instantly into fame and fortune, despite never having thought of herself as a beauty. The genre of her inner life is romance. “I think of my life not in years, but by who I was in love with at that time,” she writes in her 2023 autobiography (called, romantically, Love, Pamela).

“I call it ‘soft vision’ like how I look to the camera — looking ‘through’ it — even past it — never a direct stare to the lens but a softened focus.” Not base, but beautiful. Pure. Hopeful, even if that hope is more a function of will than a rational response to experience. Her interests are decidedly wholesome: animal rights, veganism (she published a vegan cookbook in 2024). The Anderson we think we know, and the Anderson she knows herself to be, are very different people.

There’s a version of that mismatch in her acting career. Or “acting”, if you want to be unkind, and a lot of people have been. No one took her seriously, apart from herself. In her first film, 1993’s Snapdragon, she plays “a concubine who happens to have a secret twin”. She prepared by studying the Stanislavski Method.

She was nominated for three Golden Raspberries for her starring role in 1996 comic book adaptation Barb Wire: she won “worst newcomer”, but probably more humiliating was being shortlisted for “worst screen couple”, the couple in question being her “impressive enhancements”. It was the Nineties, so nobody thought to call this “body shaming” and in 1999, she had the implants removed.

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Now, though, Anderson has finally made a film that people agree is good. More than that, they agree that she is good in it. The Last Showgirl is directed by Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford and niece of Sophia. It’s the story of Shelly, the “last showgirl” of the title, played by Anderson: a 57-year-old veteran performer in a glitzy Las Vegas revue called Le Razzle Dazzle, who is forced to confront her own aging and vulnerability when the show closes down.

Shelly believes that Le Razzle Dazzle belongs to the historic tradition of the chorus line. The world sees it very differently: to Shelly’s adult, estranged daughter, it’s just an embarrassing nudie performance. And when Le Razzle Dazzle closes to be replaced with a “sex circus” (because the world sees Shelly’s show, not as art, but as a dated bit of titillation), and Shelly is forced to audition for other revues, she has to hear what people really think of her.

A dispassionate but not exactly cruel director, played by Jason Schwartzman (another Coppola), lays it out for her: she’s not a good dancer, and even if she ever could have been, it’s too late for her now to acquire the technical skills. She was elevated because she was young and beautiful, and now she isn’t either anymore. In another film, this could be the moment that our heroine turns out an incredible routine and triumphs over ageist, sexist expectations. But The Last Showgirl isn’t that kind of film, and Shelly leaves the stage, defiant but nonetheless rejected.

It’s a sad, brutal scene, made sadder and more brutal by the obvious parallels with Anderson herself — parallels that the actress deliberately draws out. She changed Shelly’s age in the script to match her own, so when she shouts “I’m 57 and I’m still beautiful!” at the Schwartzman character, the words belong equally to the faded showgirl and to the former pinup playing her. And like sweet, dreamy, flawed Shelly, Anderson belongs to a sexual culture that is essentially a relic.

The Playboy centerfolds that made Anderson famous are as much museum pieces now as Shelly’s bejeweled and feathered headpieces — pushed out by the “sex circus” of online pornography and OnlyFans. As for Baywatch, who needs to watch beautiful women running around in red swimming costumes pretending to be lifeguards when you can watch women in nothing at all having unspeakable things done to them on demand?

Like Shelly, Anderson sees the institutions of sexual entertainment that made her as essentially benign: she remembers life at the PlayBoy Mansion as “a beautiful and sensual chaos”, Hugh Hefner himself as “the epitome of chivalry, a true gentleman — elegant, passionate, so charming, and yet with that little-boy giggle”. Recollections vary on this point: Crystal Hefner, a Noughties playmate and Hefner’s third and final wife, remembered the Mansion as leaking and riddled with black mold, Hefner himself as controlling and squalid in her own tell-all book, Only Say Good Things.

This rose-tinted view is not because Anderson has had a fundamentally benign life: she was sexually abused by a female babysitter as a child, and her own father was violent and bullying, once drowning a litter of kittens to punish young Pamela for disobedience. Even gentlemanly Hef ripped her off: Playboy made millions from re-exploiting her image via calendars and videos, none of which was ever shared with her.

And, of course, there was the vast public humiliation of the sex tape, made privately with her then-husband Tommy Lee Jones, stolen from her home and released without her consent. Lawyers acting for the company that commercially released the tape argued that Anderson had forfeited her right to privacy because she’d voluntarily appeared naked in Playboy; Anderson neither sought nor received any money for it.

With all this backstory, a more ruthless Anderson could have easily have reinvented herself with a survivor narrative to suit post-MeToo tastes, much as Crystal Hefner did. (Which is not to say that Crystal Hefner is untrustworthy per se, only that she made her rebrand with cutthroat timing.) But ruthlessness is not an Anderson trait, and many of the decisions she’s made as an adult fit her poorly for the role of victim.

Take the sex tape. As a victim of revenge porn, Anderson is obviously sympathetic — and yet her own romantic choices don’t suggest much solidarity with other women who have suffered like her. Her third husband (and in fact fourth, because she married him twice) was Rick Salomon, the professional poker player and semi-professional sleazeball who distributed a tape of himself having sex with Paris Hilton, against Hilton’s own wishes.

Then there’s the matter of sexual assault. Again, Anderson could leverage compassion here, and deservingly so. But when Julian Assange of Wikileaks was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid allegations of rape in Sweden — allegations described as “credible and reliable” by the Swedish prosecutor — it was to Assange, and not his purported victim, that Anderson gave her support. She became a regular visitor to the embassy; she calls their friendship “invigorating, sexy, and funny”. Assange maintains his innocence and the investigation was dropped in 2019.

Anderson is a “bad victim”, if a victim is supposed to be ideologically coherent and pure. But the truth is that I like her more for these choices, however inexplicable I find them; maybe I like her more because I find them inexplicable. They seem, if nothing else, heartfelt. Still, the same question hangs over Anderson just as it does over Shelly in The Last Showgirl: just how naive is it possible to be?

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Like the character she plays, Anderson has thrown herself relentlessly at situations that, in many ways, repeat the exploitation and injury she has already suffered. The audition scene is exquisitely painful because, although the narrative requires us to root for Shelly, the director is unavoidably correct. Shelly’s artistry is, at best, limited. Her sex appeal was her asset, and now that’s almost spent. And all this is true of Anderson too, which spikes the sadness even higher.

What makes Shelly a great role for Anderson is that, finally, this is a part that captures the impossible tension between how the world sees her and how she sees the world. When a romantic character is plunged into a pornographic medium, the result of that mismatch is tragedy, and both Shelly and Anderson have a tinge of tragedy to them. They are women who have been used and discarded, but who still insist heroically on the beauty of things.

Except, for Anderson, there is a second act. She is not pensionless and penniless like Shelly. She can be reborn as an actress who plays a woman a bit like herself. She can even afford to turn her back on some of the labor of femininity that was her profession: in the past few years, Anderson has given up wearing makeup and having tweakments, even for red carpet appearances. The effect is surprisingly powerful, both for revealing the artificiality of regular beauty, and (this part is something of a flex) for revealing how pretty she is unadorned.

At 57, Anderson can receive the respect she was denied when she was young, gorgeous and despised. The real Shellys — the working class of the adult entertainment industry — are more disposable, and their futures more bleak. Maybe there’s something to be said for holding onto a faith in glamour despite all that.

When Pieters asks her earlier whether she thinks of herself as a businesswoman, she brushes the idea away: “People would give me a bit of stick if I said I was a businesswoman.” But as he looks at her laptop, Pieters realizes that a businesswoman is exactly what she is, and he tells her so. More than that, she’s in a business that he understands very well, because (if you set aside the floor covered in condoms and the tax-deductible lingerie) it’s not so far from the one Pieters himself is in as a YouTuber.

His film, though, isn’t just an exercise in voyeurism. It wouldn’t be exactly correct to describe Pieters, aged 31, as non-judgmental. He grew up with online porn, and he considers himself liberal. Even so, he’s clearly alarmed by what Phillips puts herself through. He’s also compassionate: often the only person expressing any concern about Phillips’ wellbeing.

“As someone who’s been a content creator in the online world for 10 years, I’ve experienced some extreme measures taken to achieve online fame,” he tells me, mentioning the Logan Paul “suicide forest” video, in which the YouTuber Paul filmed the hanged body of a Japanese man. “And obviously I’ve taken some extremes of my own.” Actually, Pieters’ “extremes” were mischievous stunts rather than affronts on human decency: in 2020, a video went viral in which Pieters presented Right-wing agitator Katie Hopkins with a fake award in front of a screen with the words “Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy” (read the initials).

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“I think all online creators have a constant pressure on them to keep upping the stakes,” says Pieters. “Gone are the days of production companies or studios or the music industry dictating what creators and artists can and can’t do. We now live in a world where creators are able to choose exactly what they want to do and how far they want to push things, which can obviously be great in some respects, because it opens up so much creative freedom.”

Freedom, though, isn’t an unalloyed good. When a creator is trapped in the economic cycle of delivering what their followers want (“audience capture”), it might not even really be freedom. Pieters’ move into long-form documentaries is a way to escape being permanently typecast in the limited role of “social media practical joker”. “I’m 31 now. I had my time doing pranks and being childish on the internet,” he says.

Getting into Phillips’ story appealed to him because of his own reaction to it: “I thought I was pretty liberal with my views on online porn and adult content creators. But when I stumbled across this story, I was taken aback and shocked.” He also realized that, while lots of podcasters and streamers were keen to talk to or about Phillips, “there was no real conversation happening. It was all clickbait and ragebait.” His own background as a creator, he says, meant he was well-placed to go beyond the voyeurism and try to understand why she was undertaking such a horrifying stunt — and what the effect on her might be.

“There is obviously a point at which it becomes dangerous and some of those decisions might be ones that creators regret,” he says. “What we’re seeing on OnlyFans now, or even just in the adult content creation business in general, is almost this same innovation we saw on YouTube.” That means, in Phillips’ case, an escalation from selling nude pictures to selling hardcore clips to outrage-baiting acts such as the 100-man gangbang.

Her next project, she announced shortly before Pieters released his documentary last year, would be to take on 1,000 men in one day. That stunt was originally slated to take place this month. It is now unlikely to happen on schedule, if at all, with Phillips saying she plans to work up to it with a series of (relatively) smaller events: “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit if you do 300, then 500, then a 1,000. It just makes a little more sense.” There’s that businesswoman again.

Meanwhile, Phillips’ ex-friend and fellow porn star Bonnie Blue claims to have already completed the thousand — and in 12 hours rather than 24. In case anyone thought this wasn’t an explicit act of competition, Blue made a concern-trolling swipe at Phillips: “Seeing someone cry after content is not nice, and not everyone is cut out for these circumstances, so I really wish her all the best.” Content. Such a bland, denatured word for a woman left bruised, sore and raw from repeated penetration.

But content is everything, and everything is content. The arms race (cocks race?) between Phillips and Blue is simply the fulfillment of the remorseless imperatives of the attention economy: a content creator does, or claims to be doing, something so horrifying, it’s impossible for people not to react; that reaction becomes the topic for news stories and commentary (including this); this makes more people aware of the creator, driving more reaction and further coverage. Somewhere in that outrage, the creator can expect to pick up a decent number of new subscribers along with the haters.

From another perspective, though, what Phillips and Blue have done looks like a profound misunderstanding of how OnlyFans works. The porn star, freelance sex researcher and Substacker Aella broke down the business model in a recent post. As a successful camgirl, Aella signed up for OnlyFans early on, and wasn’t impressed. She was used to extracting large sums of money from a small number of men in chatrooms; the market rate for subscriptions on OnlyFans was too low to match her expectations.

Later, though, she realized what made OnlyFans work. During a camgirl session, the men viewing in the chatroom can see each other’s usernames and are competing for the camgirl’s attention: the more money they spend, the more attention she gives them, and the more incentivized they are to give even more money. On OnlyFans, though, the men are all invisible to each other. It also has tools for mass messaging, allowing creators to create the appearance of personal contact at minimal effort. Or as Aella puts it: “OnlyFans maintains the dynamic that made camming so successful — direct, live connection with a girl — but manages to make it feel individualized. Instead of having to pay a lot of money to rank against other men, you can pay a little money and enter a pussy paradise with not a single other man in sight.”

The nature of OnlyFans allows for contact at scale. More contact, in fact, than any one woman could reasonably supply. This, Aella explains, is where agencies step in: while a man believes that he’s chatting away with the hottie of his dreams, in reality, the messages are likely being crafted by a minimum-wage cubicle worker with a rudimentary crib sheet. For this service, the “creator” fronting the account might pay as much as 50% of her takings after OnlyFans takes its cut. In the most extreme cases, the woman is little more than a model fronting a character otherwise entirely confected by a manager.

The shocking thing to Aella was that there was barely any effort to make these chats read as the original output of the performer in question, and the men didn’t care. “It took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that for most men, they don’t care about reality when it comes to their supposedly connective porn,” she writes. “They aren’t tracking you for signs of genuine enjoyment; to them, your personality is simply a vessel with which to certify that your breasts are genuine.”

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Phillips and Blue are effectively forcing their bodies to stand in for the endlessly replicable, digital versions of themselves that OnlyFans allows them to generate. The men who subscribe to them are fundamentally uninterested in their reality or otherwise. What they are paying for is the simulacra of intimacy, not intimacy itself: a digital representation of a woman on which to practice a faint imitation of desiring and being desired, rather than a whole person with whom they might have a relationship.

To put your real, bruisable, nerve-filled body in the place of the avatar is to make a terrible, existential error. The men who have sex with Philips are little different on that account from the vitriol throwers of the manosphere who obsess about how her “body count” diminishes her value and call her a whore. So when Blue snarks that Phillips isn’t “cut out for these circumstances”, perhaps what she means is that Phillips has, despite everything, a stubborn persistence in believing in her own personhood.

“It didn’t seem like anyone had actually taken a moment to speak to Lily as a human being,” says Pieters. “And what we found was, she’s an incredible human being. A really smart, business-minded person. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was doing would have some sort of toll on her, and as much as she ‘loves being a slut’, in her words. I think the documentary showed that there is a real person in there, and some of the stuff does affect her.”

Of course Phillips would cry when speaking to Pieters after her century. She has spent a day being screwed by men who see her, not even as an object, but as the token that stands for the object; and then she finds herself speaking to someone who sees her as wholly human, capable of being harmed and deserving of being cared for. That disjunction is an extreme version of the tragedy that everybody lives when they move between their thin, online self and the full, fleshy existence of the body. If we mistake the one for the other, we will all break the way that Phillips breaks.