But Jellycat no longer markets their soft toys — offputtingly referred to as “plushies” — exclusively to children. Instead its products are destined to be ogled by drooling adults who fill their grown-up bedrooms with anthropomorphized “amuseables”. There’s Rene the waffle, Michelle the mussel, a boiled egg with a bridal veil. There’s a pistachio, a bowl of ramen, a boule of sourdough — all with a vacant, beady-eyed smile and, in most cases, a tiny pair of arms or legs sticking out too. These are fated to deck out the Instagram feeds of grown women, to dangle from a Millennial’s handbag or to be plucked from the shelves with a pair of tongs as part of a bizarre pop-up “experience”. The “chip shop” event at Selfridges in London was a particular hit, where shoppers could blow upwards of £300 on teddy-fied fish, chips, mushy peas and lemon and film embarrassed workers miming the whole affair for TikTok. The obsession is now competitive; one British 19-year-old, Hope Roberts from Bedfordshire, has won the Guinness world record for the most Jellycat toys in a collection: 877 unique items.

Jellycat has saved many a baffled boyfriend in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day: if your better half has no discernible personality or interests, simply drop £45 on an inexplicably animated bouquet of roses and call it a day, brochacho. It has also, if the interviewees of one highly alarming BBC article are to be believed, shepherded customers through the tribulations of Covid. One 32-year-old Chinese woman called Stella says that, during the pandemic, “everyone felt jittery, and no-one knew what would happen”. Thankfully, her growing collection of 120 toys now helps her to “regulate my emotions”. Normalizing collective mental breakdowns — for what else could self-soothing with a hoard of teddy bears in your thirties represent? — has been an extremely successful marketing tactic for Jellycat, which was founded by brothers Thomas and William Gatacre in 1999, as well as for other toy companies. Normal women in their twenties and thirties are roleplaying suspended adolescences by collecting toys — Sylvanian Families, Labubus, Jellycats — and using them as “emotional support” items. There is something deeply disturbing about the idea of this army of self-infantilizing women elbowing toddlers out of the way in gift shops to get their mitts on the latest cuddly toy.

This is particularly the case in East Asia, where many of these “kidult” product trends have taken off in the past five years; pop cultures here have long embraced cuteness — popularized via the Japanese term kawaii — as an acceptable and desirable aesthetic for professional adults. In a region of plummeting birth rates, sexlessness, social isolation and general otaku-esque oddness, regression into the trappings of childhood is an unsettling but inevitable result. It’s as though reclaiming the aesthetics of infancy shields us from the oppressive and difficult responsibilities of being a grown-up, with the soft toy physically embodying the emetic contemporary refrain: “I’m just a girl!”

As many of these blights — sexlessness, birth-rate entropy — have now also taken root in the West, plushie crazes have followed. What Erica Kanesaka, an American professor of “cute studies” quoted by the BBC, refers to as “outdated understandings of adulthood” have been replaced by queasy consumer obsessions that retreat to the material and moral safety of girlhood. In a grim dating culture which alienates both men and women from the promised security of marriage, retreating to the nursery is a kind of apologia for a cozy alternative, however pathetic.

Weird, certainly. But what’s perhaps weirder still is that a British brand has found itself at the commercial epicenter of such a trend: Jellycat generated £333 million in revenue in 2024, more than doubling its total from the year before. The manufacturer, owned by Jelly Holdings, is among a handful of home-grown companies booming at a time of general commercial atrophy: in an unconfident nation beset by weak investment and a groaning tax burden, Jellycat and, depressingly, the porn hosts OnlyFans are standout success stories. If British soft power resides in a quiver of culturally critical brands, then the focus of a bizarre adult soft-toy craze and the profiteers of an amateur pornography pandemic make us a nation of freakish shopkeepers indeed.

Both brands have thrived in a crisis of femininity. If OnlyFans offers brutal, public dehumanization in exchange for potential fame and riches, Jellycat sells the exact opposite: membership of a private, pre-sexual and threatless girlhood paradise, a prelapsarian bedroom scene where your teddies never stop smiling. Both brands have exploded since the pandemic because many women don’t know what on earth to do with themselves; at the extremes are either total degradation or debilitating cosseting, neither of which helps you cope with the real world. Covid accelerated this disaster by pushing everyone online; a drought of real-world interaction has planted a psychotic seed in the culture of femininity.

If you’ll permit a leap, the Jellycat toy also represents something else, something grown-up little girls will remember: the promise of motherhood, of soft little objects to be petted and fussed over, of dollies we pushed around in pint-sized prams. Hopeless in the face of nosediving birthrates and romantic alienation, Millennial and Gen Z women have invented many baby-substitutes: small dogs, house plants, Jellycats. A Dogs Trust survey found that two thirds of young dog owners (aged 25-34) see themselves as “their dog’s parent”. We’re witnessing a generation of Little Edies, playing house and cooing over indifferent pets in a grotesque simulacrum of nurturing. Perhaps this is what makes the spectacle of plushie-collection so unsettling: it turns put-together women into shambling lunatics living ersatz adulthoods.

Soft toys herald a new age of disordered femininity. Jellycat’s success strikes at a pre-verbal impulse: the familiar comforts of the childhood bedroom, where real life seemed so far off and fantasy was couched in cuddly reassurance. The brand may represent a heartwarming British commercial success story or sound the alarm for a failed sexual culture, one in which women denied the dignity of a steady relationship, home ownership and motherhood are offered the paltry consolation prize of a croissant stitched with a smiley face.

Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pa., Weapons opens with 17 children from the same third grade classroom running away from their homes at precisely 2:17 a.m., and vanishing into the night. The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is startled to find only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), in her classroom. The story then unfolds in nonlinear, overlapping vignettes, a structure Cregger patterned after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). 

The first vignette belongs to Justine. An angular, frizzy-headed woman in her early 3os, Justine has a history of professional misconduct (hugging a student—gasp), alcoholism, and promiscuity — making her an easy target for a grief-wracked community desperate for answers. The townspeople’s suspicions send her into a booze-fueled spiral of paranoia and depression. Partly because she loves her students, and partly to avoid being scapegoated, Justine sets out to unravel the mystery. 

Her persecution intensifies when an unknown harasser beats on her door at night and paints “WITCH” in red on her car. This is clever misdirection: Cregger elicits our sympathy for a wrongly maligned woman so we will prematurely discount the possibility that an actual witch is behind the children’s disappearance. The real threat emerges when Justine fixes upon Alex, the sole remaining third-grader, as the likeliest source of information. Snooping around his house, she spies Alex’s parents through a crack in the newspaper-plastered windows. They’re sitting on the couch, catatonic, the home in disarray.

Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is on his own quest to save his son, Matthew, one of the missing children. At first, he suspects Justine (it was Archer, we learn, who vandalized her car), but circumstances compel the two to join forces, and they become the emotional heart of the story. Archer confirms Justine’s suspicions when he learns from home CCTV footage that all the children ran from their front doors in a straight line, converging on Alex’s house.

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Vignettes foregrounding other characters bring us nearer to the truth. A homeless tweaker named James (Austin Abrams), spars hilariously with Justine’s policeman ex-boyfriend Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). A plotline centered on Maybrook Elementary School’s principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), is alternately amusing and terrifying. It’s James, while burglarizing the Lilly home, who is the first to lay eyes on the children: locked in the basement, catatonic like Alex’s parents.

Finally, Alex’s vignette gives it to us in full: his gravely ill great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who had come to stay with the Lillys, presumably to die, turns out to be a witch who uses blood magic to take over her victims’ bodies and feed on their life force. When Alex’s parents prove too paltry a meal, Gladys forces him to retrieve personal items from each of his classmates. With these she performs a ritual giving her control over the children, and summons them to the Lilly home at 2:17a.m. 

Cregger’s writing is magnificent. Each successive vignette scratches our itching questions in unexpected ways, illuminating ambiguities of character and situation, the narrative pace accelerating as the gestalt comes into focus. Allusions to Stephen King tease where the plot is headed and clue us in to its meaning. Gladys appears in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares in garish makeup reminiscent of It’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown, perhaps the most famous contemporary devourer of children. “2:17” recalls Room 217 of the Overlook Hotel, wherein young Danny is assaulted by a rotting crone who attempts to absorb his life force (Stanley Kubrick, in his movie adaptation, changed the room number to 237). Justine’s alcoholism also evokes The Shining, as does a scene when Alex’s rampaging parents poke their heads through holes in a bathroom door. 

Some viewers, primed to look for progressive undercurrents by Barbarian’s portrayal of a #MeToo abuser getting his comeuppance, will be tempted to read Weapons as a school-shooting metaphor. At first blush, this is a plausible interpretation. School shootings are the nearest real-life analog to the disappearance of a classroom of kids, and parents are as powerless against them as the parents in Maybrook. Even the kids’ body-language while running—arms outstretched like the “napalm girl”—recalls the suffering modern weapons inflict on children. During a nightmare, Archer sees a colossal AR-15 suspended like a dark beacon over his home, “2:17” glowing on its barrel like numbers on a digital clock. Is this meant to evoke the weapon favored by school shooters? 

A more nuanced reading, one that gives proper weight to Gladys’s characterization, however, shows school shooting to be a thematic red herring, overshadowed by another theme from Barbarian: the monstrous feminine.

Camille Paglia famously reads the history of Western culture through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus. The masculine Apollonian principle, with its love of mathematical reason and lucid distinctions, seeks to tame the feminine Dionysian, the fecund undifferentiation from which all life springs and, inevitably, returns. Paglia has written: “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface.” The symbol of the Dionysian (or chthonian) is the Great Mother, a primordial figure of myth who births her children only to devour them. She recurs in myths in various forms, some emphasizing her nurturing qualities, others her role as devourer. The lamiae of Greek mythology embody the latter aspect: ancient succubi who subsist on the blood of children, often depicted as women from the waist up, serpents from the waist down.

While the unjust persecution of Justine may warn us against scapegoating women, Gladys’s demonic ministrations scream that sometimes witches are real, and women can sometimes be culpable.

Gladys, wan and grotesquely aged, rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine, and even its more particular instantiation in the lamia. She derives her magic from a potted tree covered in thorns. In a nightmare, Justine catches Gladys on her ceiling. Only her torso is visible, her legs obscured as if buried in soil—like the roots of a tree or the tail of a snake. Her legs are hidden in the same manner when she appears to James in the forest. Underneath her clownishly red wig, her real hair consists of sparse, snake-like braids. (As Paglia has written, “Medusa’s snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.”) Gladys’s use of archaic language (she tells Principal Miller that Alex’s parents are sick with “consumption”) alludes to her being ancient. Then there’s her lair: the front door of the Lillys’ house opens on a beckoning darkness, an orifice descending into the earth.

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Instead of serving as a reference to school shootings, the long rifle in the film is an Apollonian instrument, a symbolic phallus that kills. By contrast, Gladys kills by absorbing her victims’ life force, or by influencing others to kill on her behalf. Even the zombified state of her victims speaks to the horror of the chthonian, which, per Paglia, “we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

It is precisely her chthonian character that makes Gladys so terrifying. Civilization is built on a swamp and might at any moment be subsumed. The Apollonian is powerless before the full force of the chthonian. The ubiquitous Ring cameras installed on Maybrook homes were parents’ attempt to keep the children safe, to control the uncontrollable; but technology cannot save us from primal forces. Archer, a construction manager who, in proper Apollonian fashion, tries to make sense of the mystery by plotting the children’s trajectories on a map, is in the end powerless before Gladys.

It is only when Alex extracts a hair from inside Gladys’s wig and harnesses her blood magic against her, that the good guys triumph. But it is a triumph not of the Apollonian, but of the chthonian against the chthonian: in a scene that recalls Pentheus’s dismemberment by the Maenads in Euripides’s The Bacchae, Gladys is torn limb from limb by the children formerly under her power.

The monstrous feminine is experiencing something of a revival lately, suggesting a rebellion against the ongoing domination of culture by feminist sensibilities. Films like The VVitch, Raw, Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Titane, Pearl, and The Substance are refreshingly reactionary, attesting that female agency has its dark side, that women are capable of astonishing violence against others, and against themselves. “The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant, archetypal realities,” Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae. The repressed, of course, has a habit of returning. In Weapons it returns with mythic, lyric eloquence.

This film about a 16-year-old Brit desperately trying to lose her virginity on a girls’ holiday to Crete strikes me, in some ways, as an heir to America’s Raunch Renaissance of the late Nineties. Back then, movies such as Sex Drive, Can’t Hardly Wait, and American Pie brought us stories of the kinds of sexual obsession that can only be harboured by teenagers who haven’t actually done it yet. As in How to Have Sex, a central theme in these films was the notion of virginity as an albatross, a shameful burden of which you needed to rid yourself at the earliest opportunity. There was one key difference, though: the embarrassed, desperate virgins in those movies were always young men.

A girl was supposed to value her virginity, only allowing herself to be coaxed into bed with promises of love and commitment; if she had sex easily, let alone eagerly, she was invariably punished by the universe, be it with pregnancy, heartbreak, or worse. Watch a slasher film from this era, and note how often the slutty high schooler is the first to die. The message from pop culture was clear: girls were not supposed to have sex. But women, on the other hand, channelling their inner Carrie Bradshaw, were supposed to not just have sex, but have sex like men.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but this seems profoundly weird to me now: that the process whereby you were supposed to go from guarding your virginity with your life as a teen to having sex constantly and casually as a young adult was rarely depicted or discussed. How was a young lady meant to advance from never done it to elite level intercourse, just by moving to the city? How were you supposed to figure out what to do, what you liked, what you and a partner enjoyed doing together? Sex education was no help here — most programmes didn’t even mention the existence of the clitoris — but even the romcom industrial complex conspired to keep us all in the dark: all you would ever see was the couple tumbling into bed at night, and then all aglow the morning after. The sexual learning curve was glossed over, completely.

And, as we see in How To Have Sex, it still is — but now it is not purity to blame, but sex positivity. Pushed upon today’s Zoomers is the notion that sex itself is meaningless, and therefore so is virginity. Once you begin to argue that having multiple partners is no big deal, it’s hard to preserve any significance around having sex for the first time: one progressive sex-ed provider in the UK invites students to think of virginity as “a damaging social construct”. For this, we may thank feminism: women, who risk the most from penetrative sex — often while enjoying it the least — probably benefit from a culture in which it is no longer seen as a special prize to be won. We may also thank the increased visibility of LGBT people, for whom equating the loss of virginity with heterosexual intercourse presents obvious problems.

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And yet, the resulting landscape is one rife with profoundly mixed messages about sex. While sex positivity tells us the act is so meaningless that you should feel no compunction about doing it for the first time with a total stranger, consent culture says it’s so dangerous that you’re always a heartbeat away from being violated and traumatised for life. But more importantly, the shrinking significance of virginity as a concept has made casual sex not only an acceptable way to do it for the first time, but the expected way.

Does this reduce the stigma of being a non-virgin? No doubt. But I’m not persuaded that it’s actually helping anyone figure out, per the movie title, How to Have Sex. Whatever the shortcomings of the pre-digital era in terms of its sexual double standards, teenagers at the time at least tended to learn by doing — by building intimacy through the mutually awkward process of figuring out the alien landscape of another person’s body while they fumbled their way around yours. And alongside the Raunch Renaissance, there was another model for what first-time sex looked like, something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a story which, however otherwise unrealistic, still depicted sex as something people did after they were certain that they really, really liked each other.

Today’s teenagers don’t even have that. They have porn — and hook-up culture, which means your first sexual experience could be with a partner who doesn’t love you, or barely know you. And the weirdest part is, this is supposed to be fun, a paradox that How To Have Sex highlights exceptionally well. The immense uncertainty surrounding a young woman’s sexual debut is painstakingly, and painfully, shown here, and the pressure to be unburdened of the albatross of virginity is only one piece of it. Another is the expectation — for everyone, not just women — that one must be not only as skilled between the sheets as a porn star but also as emotionally detached. In some senses, the Nineties model has been fully flipped: physical intimacy is now par for the course, while emotional intimacy is coded as cringe. That a person could view sex as the physical act of love, which is ironically the one thing that would actually make the whole process less fraught and more fun, is barely nodded at. Tara may not know how to have sex, but she knows enough to know that having feelings for the person you’re doing it with is super embarrassing.

Perhaps needless to say, this does not end well — for the characters in the movie, and often for young women in real life. I want to say that Tara has a uniquely bad experience on this front, but what really strikes me is how not-unique it must be, how common. The whole scene, these dark and pulsing landscapes full of beautiful young people dancing, drinking, sweating, screaming: it makes for great cinema, but how are you supposed to connect with anyone under these circumstances? Even the friendship Tara strikes up with another girl, after getting separated from her friends at a club, is like the platonic equivalent of a one-night stand: the emptiness of the connection stands in stark contrast to her relationships with her friends, even the bad friend who keeps trying to embarrass and undermine her. There’s a moment in the film where one of the girls notes that they need to be more social. “We’re never getting laid if we only hang out with each other,” she says. It’s true, but also: when you see what getting laid entails, hanging out with the girls and eating cheesy chips is clearly the better option.

That is, unless you’re a virgin so desperate to shed the mantle of sexual inexperience that you don’t even care anymore how it happens or with whom. Tara is on a mission — though it’s unclear if it’s a mission she volunteered for or one her friends have assigned to her — and there’s a giddy energy to her early exploits in Crete that’s not unlike the American Pies and Can’t Hardly Waits of the world. For the first half of the movie, her virginity is a burden, yes, but also a source of excitement, anticipation. Every time a boy touches her, you can see the wheels in her head turning: is this how it will happen? Or this? Or this?

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And then it does happen. What’s possible becomes what’s inevitable, and what’s left is all the uncertainty, and none of the sparkle. And while it’s understood that Tara’s choice of partner has something to do with this, that things would have played out differently if she’d held out for a better and more respectful guy, it’s hard to say how differently, when even the best-case scenario is still a one-night stand with a virtual stranger.

This seems to be the biggest problem with the discourse around virginity, which focuses on sex as the end of something — one’s embarrassing virginal status — as opposed to the beginning that it is. Becoming sexually active is like learning to drive: the first time you do may feel significant in the moment, but it’s not going to be your best time, or your most memorable. Tara, like any teenager, would benefit from looking beyond the milestone and asking herself what comes after: once sex stops being about losing your virginity, what is it actually for? And absent the desire to be rid of her V-card, what does she actually want?

In the end, Tara has had sex. But she still doesn’t really know how to.

That we’re talking about Casey DeSantis at all speaks to how unusual she is. For a politician’s wife to be this involved, this early, is virtually unheard of: the primary season doesn’t kick off until early next year, and if current polls are to be believed, Ron doesn’t stand much of a chance. The likelihood that this is all for naught doesn’t seem to have pierced the fantasy, though. It’s tradition for First Ladies to have a signature issue, and on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as Florida Governor, Casey was asked what hers would be; she replied, “I’d like to pick more than one.”

Her new campaign ad contains hints as to what these might be. It’s a fascinating piece of media: one that doesn’t just lean into the culture wars, but treats them with the urgency and gravitas of an actual war. A horror-movie soundtrack plays over washed-out footage of choice moments from the pandemic and beyond: toddlers weeping behind their government-mandated masks, a little girl patting the leather-covered head of a “puppy play” kinkster at a pride parade, a crowd of LGBT activists chanting, “We’re coming for your children!” The message, obviously, is that the only thing standing between us and this ultra-woke dystopia is Casey DeSantis’s husband, who is famous for being shaped like a concrete cinderblock with roughly the same amount of charisma.

Political wives on the Right tend to be supporting players, eschewing involvement except for when they’re called onstage, usually with a gaggle of children in tow, to humanise the candidate. (See, folks? He walks! He talks! He has procreative sexual intercourse!) Otherwise, they are noncombatants, and to strike out at them has always been considered a shot below the belt. Recall that in the early days of the 2016 campaign season — when it was still possible for Donald Trump to shock people — his threat to “spill the beans” about the wife of then-political adversary Ted Cruz was seen as an outrageous norm violation. Even once a husband has ascended to office, the wife’s involvement is viewed as more of a nice-to-have than a requirement. Melania Trump was so uninterested in the role of First Lady that theories began to circulate that it wasn’t actually her, but a stunt double at her husband’s side.

For a political wife to be involved and to also place herself in the line of fire, then, is a relationship model more reminiscent of the political power couples of the Left. Think of the Clintons circa 1994, or, to a lesser extent, the Obamas — both pairings in which the presence of a politically engaged wife gave rise to jabs (from the Right, this time) about who really wore the pants in the presidency.

And here’s where Ron DeSantis’s novel theory about why his wife’s ad triggered the “America’s Karen” barb might contain a grain of truth: “It shows my wife is an incredibly strong first lady, a fantastic mother and great wife, and that threatens the Left,” he said, on Fox News.

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As expressed, this seems like baloney. And yet, if only by accident, it does point at something real: Casey DeSantis is not simply a woman, but an archetype of in-your-face femininity, in a way that is, if not threatening, certainly outré in progressive circles. For all the legit complaints one might aim at the first lady of Florida, the one her critics reach for most regularly is, “I mean, just look at her”. The gloves! The capes! The hair! The eyebrows! The criticism of her personal aesthetic finds two items of widespread consensus: the first is that she is trying to be Jackie Kennedy. The second is that she needs to stop.

Does she, though? Criticising a woman’s appearance seems like a strange way to register one’s objections in a political disagreement, particularly when you’re a member of the tribe which not long ago was decrying the practice as unforgivably sexist. But also: Jackie is the country’s most famous icon of poise, class and femininity. She is the aspirational model of political wifedom, at least stylewise (perhaps not so much the actual marriage). Why shouldn’t Casey DeSantis model herself on her? Because Michelle Obama did it first? Because her husband isn’t a Kennedy, making her basically white trash? Are we doing “stolen valour” on pastel-coloured shift dresses now?

Maybe we are. The candy-coloured capelet paired with forearm-length white gloves certainly hits differently today from how it did in the Sixties. Casey DeSantis’s femininity is of a kind that is often accompanied by the modifier “performative”, the implicit suggestion being that it’s something akin to female drag for women. It’s less an aesthetic, more a costume: a uniform you don before a busy evening of serving the patriarchy.

Here, I have a different theory: that Casey DeSantis’s wardrobe is not about patriarchy, but public service — or at least, I think she thinks of it this way. This is a woman who, as a local TV personality on the eve of her nuptials, held a contest in which she allowed viewers to choose her wedding dress. Casey understands better than most, and certainly better than the last few First Ladies, just what kind of magic can happen at the nexus of fashion and populism. One wonders, then, when people complain that she needs to stop trying to be Jackie Kennedy, what the source of the angst really is. Are they mocking her because she can’t pull it off? Or are they worried because what if she can?

In this sense, Casey DeSantis is a First Lady for the influencer era. Politically involved, wildly photogenic, and utterly cognisant of who her audience is and how to connect with them. That she’s also an exemplar of this unabashed, practically countercultural breed of femininity may or may not be something she did on purpose just to annoy progressives. But the fact that it does annoy them is undoubtedly beneficial to her, and by extension, her husband. Every time she steps out wearing one of those outfits, every time she invokes her status as a wife and mom on the front lines of the culture wars, two things happen. The first is that she makes Ron DeSantis seem not just human, but presidential: it’s “dress for the job you want”, when the job you want is First Lady of the United States.

The second is that she baits her husband’s political opponents, a group of people who would otherwise sincerely describe themselves as feminists, into calling her a tacky bimbo who needs to sit down and shut up.

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That a politically engaged and outspoken woman can now be unironically denigrated as “America’s Karen” by members of the media elite speaks to a growing confusion surrounding how, exactly, we are supposed to feel about middle-aged women who kick up a fuss. Upper-middle class, educated, suburban white women who care more about policy, and family, than they care about party affiliation, were until recently seen as a powerful and respectable swing voting bloc. Politicians have been courting this demographic since at least 1996, when Bill Clinton won with 53% of the “soccer mom” vote by focusing on popular-with-the-ladies issues such as crime, education and family leave. (That Clinton was popular with the ladies himself probably also helped on this front, but we don’t like talking about that.)

But when the issues animating suburban women, from inflation to education to crime, are increasingly coded as Right-wing, so too are the women who mobilise and get loud to effect political change. Yesterday’s applause for the the politically active mom is today’s hit piece on why she’s actually a white supremacist. Yesterday’s icon of empowered feminism is today’s Right-wing termagant, marinating in ignorant privilege and demanding to speak to the manager. And if the progressive side doesn’t want these women, they might at least consider what will happen if its opponent successfully remakes itself as the place where women can go to have it all: a career, and a family, and an empowered voice in politics.

The thing about America’s Karen: she votes.

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

The genesis of this conflict is hard to explain, but the passions it inflamed were real. For all our avowed belief in the equality of the sexes, we still can’t help but assign gendered valences to even our most mundane behaviours and experiences, associations which can sometimes abruptly reverse polarity. Pink was once the boldest and most masculine of colours, until it suddenly wasn’t. Computer coding was the purview of female “calculators”, until it was overtaken in the Eighties by hungry hordes of Tech Bros.

And then there’s yoga: an athletic and spiritual practice originating among Indian men as early as the 10th century, and exported to the West by male gurus, beginning in the Twenties. One hundred years later, how things have changed. The gurus are gone — in some cases defenestrated by the #MeToo movement — and the entire enterprise has been fully subsumed by the same willowy-white-woman-wellness industrial complex that gave us Soul Cycle, Goop cleanses, and 500 different kinds of barre workouts. So complete is yoga’s feminine positionality in the West’s collective consciousness that it is now apparently necessary for niche varieties to crop up just for men.

So we have Broga, “a yoga class geared for men (where it’s okay if you can’t touch your toes)”. And among male professional athletes, per a recent New York Times write-up, we have “Joga”, a portmanteau of “yoga” and “jocks”, which suggests that something new, exotic and very, very manly is happening here. The JogaWorld website concurs: “Similar to Yoga, Joga involves physical postures, breathing, and relaxation techniques. However, where the goal of Yoga is to become more flexible and spiritually aware, Joga’s aim is to enhance performance, improve concentration, and reduce recovery time within the context of an athletic environment.”

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That said, if there’s a difference between improving flexibility and awareness via yoga and enhancing performance and concentration with JOGA, it’s not readily apparent (even if, as I did, you have watched the better part of a 56-minute explanatory YouTube video titled, “How is Joga REALLY Different?”) Much like goat yoga, power yoga, hot yoga and the briefly trendy “vino vinyasa” classes that involved sipping chardonnay between poses, Joga is really just yoga by another name, and marketed to a particular audience. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that we should not tell the men as much, lest we spook them off the mat.

The gender trajectory of yoga is a complicated one, a winding journey through a decades-long miasma of gender stereotypes, fitness fads and shifting, sex-specific beauty standards about what constitutes an ideal physique. Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow and the ubiquity of the phrase “long and lean” in fitness marketing certainly played their part here. But so too has the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and before that, Fight Club — for which the male actors cast as superheroes adopt a much-vaunted and highly publicised fitness regimen that transforms them from normal-looking human beings into walking sides of beef.

The lithe male physique of the Seventies and Eighties, the sinuous grace of a Baryshnikov, or even the androgynous sensuality of a David Bowie, have been side-lined in recent decades. In their place is a creeping conviction: that the ideal man should be so swole that he can barely fit through a doorway without turning sideways, let alone be able to touch his toes or balance gracefully on one leg. One thinks of Kevin Kline in the film In & Out, receiving lessons in manliness from a cassette book: “Men do not dance. They work. They drink. They have bad backs. They do not dance!” the instructions sneer. “Think about John Wayne! Arnold Schwarzenegger! Arnold doesn’t dance, he can barely walk!”

Arnold also did not do yoga (or if he did, he wasn’t telling anyone about it). In fact, for men who look like him, the practice can be challenging: the massive muscles that are so essential to the contemporary superhero aesthetic don’t just compromise flexibility but also create a literal obstacle to various yoga poses that require you to wrap one body part around another. There’s a reason the male gurus who popularised yoga in the US were all built like string beans. But these days, the aesthetic distinction between the body of an athlete versus a movie star versus a bodybuilder is increasingly non-existent; these men all aspire to the same physique, and they all follow the same weightlifting regimen and ingest the same substances (legal or otherwise) to get there.

Meanwhile, the few male celebrities who do announce themselves yogis tend to be, if not exactly effeminate, then certainly not beacons of wholesome, Captain America-style masculinity. It’s a type embodied by Adam Levine, perhaps the best-known of the male Hollywood yoga evangelists, who famously told a reporter from Details: “You know what yoga’s good for? I’ll tell you what yoga is good for: Fuuuu-k-ing!” (all while pointing at his penis and gyrating, apparently). As for Arnold himself, he still seems to consider body awareness and flexibility something of a joke.

Of course, the things that make yoga unappealing to men also make it a natural home for women, who continue to aspire to a sylph-like aesthetic — and to gravitate toward workouts that promise to “sculpt” and “tone” the body without bulking it. At the entry level, yoga is more accessible to women — not just because our bodies are naturally more flexible and hence better suited to bending, twisting and stretching, but because of the vibes. Women are more drawn to group fitness classes in general and to the barefoot, spa-like aesthetic of yoga in particular. So, as night follows day, dozens of brands have cropped up to serve the bougie athleisure-wearing wine mom who is yoga’s perceived consumer base, which reinforces its feminine reputation. And that is not to mention the poses themselves, which do often look most lovely when expressed in the lines of a female body — or at least, a female body that looks terrific in a pair of skin-tight pants, which just happens to be the one currently deemed most desirable by the standards du jour. Put it all together, and it’s no surprise that this spiritual practice designed for young Asian men has now transformed, in the age of influencer culture, into a contemporary showcase for Western female beauty.

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The irony is that yoga’s feminine trappings do not reflect an actual feminisation of the physical practice itself. The traditional yoga poses I teach — many of which haven’t changed for centuries — were designed with a male default in mind and require modification for female bodies, with their broader hips and lower centre of gravity. (“Hop your back foot wider!” I say, as female students struggle to square their hips in Warrior A.) Men may be intimidated (or repulsed) by yoga’s apparent incompatibility with their masculinity, but foundationally, it is still a practice ultimately made for them.

Still, if they need “Joga” — or broga, or whatever — to realise as much, it’s certainly better than the alternative: a world in which they do no yoga at all. Likewise, “bromance” — and its near sibling, the bromantic comedy — represented a silly but desperately needed correction to the notion that men couldn’t enjoy close same-sex friendships without there being something a little bit gay about them. In some senses, this yoga rebrand is just another example of the practice’s infinite capacity to be modified so that people with different bodies, different backgrounds and different limitations can access it.

Here’s something interesting, though: in recent years, as yoga has become synonymous with a particular brand of Western womanhood, it has also become a magnet for cancellation. In public op-eds and private Facebook groups, the yoga world’s self-appointed culture police are eternally wringing their hands over the “colonisation” of yoga by Westerners, or the scourge of those high-end leggings, or the permissibility of “namaslay” shirts. After all, any activity that reliably brings together a bunch of upper-middle-class white women in a single room must be problematic. About the emergence of male-dominated Joga, meanwhile, there has not been so much as a peep.

For women with impressive careers, one legacy of mainstream feminism is that there’s almost nothing you can do that won’t incite people to think of the potential consequences for the rest of your sex. It’s just about the only area of public life left where your womanhood is reliably judged relevant to your fate. Perhaps you’ll get treated as an inspirational female role model, or perhaps — as Gill would have it — you’ll be a cautionary tale for other women. Either way, you won’t just get to be a person, birthing or otherwise.

Generally speaking though, Gill is right to be suspicious of the familiar trope of the “strong female role model”. For one thing, there’s rarely anything strong about it. It seems we can enjoy a thrillingly cut-throat, venal businesswoman as long as she is entirely imaginary — Shiv Roy from Succession comes to mind — but when it comes to the real thing, we apparently prefer them to present as boring, overtly worthy drips, madly hitting “like” on LinkedIn articles about the value of kindness in the workplace, when they are not otherwise busy saving the planet. (Newton-Smith herself says she is “passionate about… climate and biodiversity” in her Twitter bio.)

Meanwhile within the world of women’s magazines, websites and weekend supplements, a profitable sector devotes itself to imposing dewily soft-focused “inspiring” or “influential” role models upon the seething, sweaty mass of female wage slaves. Basic prerequisites include a photogenic bone structure, comparatively high levels of personal grooming and a willingness to comply with a vapid, generic narrative about your “positive impact” that will empty you of all individuality and spark, in the service of promoting various capitalism-friendly feminine ideals.

The two chief mechanisms of the Inspiration Industrial Complex are the awards ceremony and the list. Each is used to manipulate common enough female emotions such as competitiveness, anxiety and envy, but with a twist — it’s all in the name of sisterhood. Might you be a Woman of the Year; a Woman of the Future; a Woman of Vision; a Remarkable Woman; an Uplifting Woman; a Champion of Women or a Powerwoman? Lured in by the opportunities for networking and showing off, nominees dress up to the nines, neck free drinks, take selfies and rehearse heartfelt speeches about staying passionate about what you do, tackling imposter syndrome and paying it forward. Website editors will then make it all look as glamorous and enviable as possible, further demoralising poor saps sitting in canteens or office cubbyholes, scrolling through their half-hour lunch breaks.

The list, meanwhile, is another stiletto-like weapon of female socialisation, implicitly reminding the reader that she is only as good as her last assessment by faceless others. Whether you are a woman in cycling, hospitality, mining, tech, tourism, shipping, social enterprise, supply chain, finance, sustainability, cybersecurity, or Westminster, you’re never safe from being suddenly catapulted into the spotlight of some top 100 — or else cruelly denigrated by omission. Some lists will even rank you in relation to others in your field. The compilers at 100 Top Women in Shipping note that in their 2022 list, “some retained their previous places more or less”, which makes you wonder about the feelings of those who did not.

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Why do women do this to themselves, and to each other? For, I’ll wager, it is mostly women who are organising the awards and making the lists, not men. In most cases the ostensible motive is positive representation of women in male-dominated fields, though this goal doesn’t seem relevant to already female-heavy sectors like social enterprise or tourism. “You can’t be what you can’t see” goes the hackneyed phrase — but equally, if all you see is women tottering about in spike heels and ASOS workwear, ranked like show ponies, mindlessly regurgitating Brené Brown quotes about being authentic and daring to lead, it’s unclear how onlookers are supposed to be inspired. It hardly screams Nietzschean Übermensch, does it?

Women from the past are not safe from list-makers either. Presented as educational tools, lists such as “100 of the most inspiring women from the last 100 years” retrospectively translate complex, difficult, multifaceted human beings into gift card messages. Rosalind Franklin becomes “We have to celebrate our achievements, even when others don’t”; Virginia Woolf becomes “Speak your truth and you could inspire generations of writers”; Hillary Clinton — admittedly, sounding a bit like Napoleon — becomes “Even in the jaws of the most galling defeat, we must learn from our mistakes and carry on fighting for what we think is right”.

The truth is, nobody involved in these efforts is seriously interested in presenting good role models for other women, either in terms of ethics or efficiency — as is plain from the number of times Nicola Sturgeon has appeared on Women of the Year lists. If the three main elements of being an effective role model are, first, inspiring others to desire some goal for themselves; second, demonstrating the possibility of achieving that goal; and third, modelling behavioural skills for how to get there, then awards and lists do none of these things particularly well. Your best hope, rather, is to model yourself on someone you work or otherwise collaborate with, and not a glamorous stranger intoning meaningless platitudes into the ether.

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What rituals like these are really good at is circumscribing what counts as acceptable behaviour for women in whatever career field is being highlighted. Officially, what is celebrated are the sort of pink and fluffy values that might easily end up printed on a yoga sweatshirt: things like compassion, positivity, self-care, inner strength and authenticity. Perversely, though, the eventual result seems to be an increase in narcissism, envy, self-criticism, weakness and the slavish copying of others.

In real life, everyone knows that career success — whether for women or men — requires some degree of aggression, competitiveness, dishonesty and selfishness. Humans are hardwired to compete with each other for resources, after all, and socialisation can only transform the methods, not remove the trait entirely. In reality, women often resent the successes of other women rather than celebrate them. It is telling that Angela Rayner polls as men’s most popular politician, but only seventh with women — while men take all the spots above her.

Still, it seems that such facts can only be acknowledged by women when swiftly followed by self-chastisement. In this suffocating environment, characteristics like aggression and spite get shoved into what Carl Jung called the “shadow” — still present unconsciously, but explicitly disowned and projected onto others. We’ve all seen it — mixing sideswipes with excessive praise, picking fights while claiming innocent victimhood, finding quasi-objective reasons to criticise rivals, constructing “relatable” confessional narratives for social media with just the right level of humblebragging, and so on.

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The shadow side of glossy positivity discourse for women also includes the gossip website, where women go to savagely mock and deride other women under the guise of anonymity — and jolly good fun it looks too, as long as you aren’t the unfortunate subject being discussed. Bitching, backstabbing, gossiping, mobbing — all can make a workmate’s life hell and contribute to a toxic environment. Men do these things too but not as much, because masculine culture isn’t as focused on disavowing the originating traits in the first place.

So, what’s the solution? Tempting as it is to imagine an alternative workplace culture involving mandatory secret Fight Clubs for girls, the very least women can do is to stop sublimating our darker instincts into passive-aggressive rituals and ceremonies that ultimately make everyone feel worse. We could just admit to ourselves that we can be as angry, envious or competitive as the next bloke — without immediately feeling we have to confess the fact on Instagram, “educate” ourselves, chant self-help mantras, or otherwise atone for our sins. We could just — and hear me out, here — get on with our jobs. And if that’s not possible, then perhaps we could start giving out much crappier prizes. If any would-be awards organiser is interested, I hear there’s a warehouse full of Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Selected Speeches of Nicola Sturgeon going extra cheap at the moment.

Cybele’s sidekick and her priests are just one example of the castrated divinities, and mortal men, who appear throughout history and culture, from the sun-god Osiris in ancient Egypt to Freud’s more metaphorical “castration anxiety”. And this figure — and fear — lurks even in the modern world.

A rash of “trend” pieces has sought to encourage men to sterilise themselves — even, in one case, filming the actual surgery. Along with stories about chemicals destroying sperm counts and laboratories creating embryos without sperm, it’s no wonder some men might feel a little paranoid — all the more so since the vasectomy “trend” is clearly manufactured by a PR agency. It’s not strictly castration, but the two are routinely conflated in the popular mind. And this perception is expressed in increasingly colourful terms: for example, Tucker Carlson’s recent documentary, The End of Men, featured plenty of chaps who seem certain that something like a campaign to persuade men to self-castrate is at least metaphorically under way.

These same men often rail against a perceived feminine culture that stifles masculine vigour via mechanisms such as safetyism, victim culture and hatred of hierarchy. And with women now a majority in sectors such college admissions, journalism, teaching and HR, and even scaling the heights of the US military-industrial complex, it could indeed be that this increasingly palpable presence is changing public life in ways that are less than congenial to at least some men.

But the meanings of the castration complex are, well, complex. This most brutal un-manning has carried many meanings in different times and places. Xenophon writes about eunuchs as guards in ancient Persian harems, while the theme of (forcible) sexual continence was echoed in the early Christian era by Justin Martyr, who approvingly recounts a young man’s petition to a Roman prefect for permission to be castrated, so as to prove that Christians were as sexually chaste as they claimed to be. The Byzantine empire prized them as generals, because their lack of progeny meant they had no complicated ties to rival aristocratic families.

And if castration anxiety is rearing its head again, the underlying driver today may be more technology than ideology. When Freud described the “castration complex”, he was living through an age that saw perhaps the most drastic ever displacement of brute physical strength: an overwhelmingly male attribute. Thanks to technology, as Marx observes in Das Kapital, a male labour force could increasingly be replaced in factories with a less physically strong one comprising cheaper women and children.

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Perhaps the fear Freud describes as universal was more historically specific than he thought. Strikingly, the first wave of industrialisation in Russia, from the 18th century onward, also saw the emergence of the first castration cult since antiquity. Calling themselves the Skoptsy — the “Castrated Ones” — this heretical Christian sect conducted religious services reminiscent of the rites of Cybele, while adherents of both sexes amputated all visible primary sex characteristics.

Since the Skoptsy were stamped out by Stalin in the early 20th century, the digital age has replaced the industrial one. In turn, this has arguably accelerated the obsolescence not just of men, but of biological sex, as an ever-growing swathe of work is now knowledge-based and thus equally open to both sexes, while more and more of us socialise in a disembodied way online. And in this context, the interactions of both sexes are long on talking and short on physical violence. Online, that is, both men and women are forced to socialise in a feminine key.

More than two millennia ago, the castrated figure of Attis was used by poets to convey ambivalence about masculine sexuality. For Catullus, Attis is driven to self-castration by Veneris nimio odio, “an excessive loathing of sex”. Ovid, meanwhile, characterises Attis along similar lines — except in this account, Attis is punished for seeking full adult sexuality. In his Metamorphoses, Attis promises Cybele that he’ll remain a boy — but when he breaks this by making love to a nymph, she drives him mad and he self-castrates.

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So as the digital transition forces ever more social interaction into a disembodied, “post-gender” mode, perhaps it makes sense that we’re dusting off Attis and Cybele again. When all our social lives are virtual-only, how is any of us to make sense of our relationship to normal human sexuality?

As our technology lurches into the new and unsettling terrain of AI and biotechnology, echoes of the Skoptsy and the rites of Cybele are once again being heard — along with an increasingly tormented relation to normal human desire and procreation. The “nullo” subculture, for example, seek to “nullify” all visible sex characteristics: icons include the Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama, who cooked and served his penis and testicles for a paying private banquet in 2012, garnished with (what else?) button mushrooms.

Clinics now offer “Nullification” cosmetic surgeries as a “gender-expansive” option. And if you don’t want to pay for bespoke junk, the internet will provide: earlier this year, a basement flat in Finsbury Park was raided and several men arrested, following discovery that a man known as “The Eunuch Maker” was livestreaming consensual male castrations for a paying audience and promoting the events via Twitter.

According to some corners of the weird internet, this isn’t a disaster but our post-human future coming into view. The notorious, pseudonymous 2018 Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper argues that “technocapital” is an accelerating, self-replicating, and increasingly autonomous process to bring about an ultimate victory of the feminine over the masculine principle, with “a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”.

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And while this is unlikely to be literally true, the more respectable WEF-funded futurists are also now wondering now whether runaway technology could bring about the end of humanity (at least, of most of it). Yuval Noah Harari recently warned that because “the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology” such as bioengineering and AI, we may end up with a situation where “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population”. While this future is less luridly rendered than Gender Acceleration’s “sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”, a scenario in which the human majority is dismissed as functionally irrelevant biomass is every bit as dystopian.

But even if escalating uncertainty about runaway technology were driving a few men to film their own neutering, whether on TikTok or the dark web, we probably shouldn’t jump from this to predicting the abolition of sex. We should take seriously the pathological symptoms accompanying our turbulent times — but only as pathological symptoms. Reports of men’s demise are as greatly exaggerated as progressive claims that we can somehow do without sex dimorphism.

And this is because conditions for a dreaded (or heralded) triumph of the technofeminine are very unevenly distributed. For one thing, most women have beloved male partners, relatives, friends and children, and most well-adjusted people of either sexes are revolted by the idea of one sex achieving total victory over the other.

And even those so online they’re immune to ordinary reality-checks may, in due course, be confronted by a more visceral one, should the world grow more unsettled. Throughout history, it’s usually been men who have defended order (and their loved ones), sometimes at great risk to their own safety. And the decades since the turn of the millennium have seen two international financial crises, terrorist attacks, a return of great-power politics, a global pandemic and rocketing inflation. This rolling crisis shows no signs of abating. And only peaceful and prosperous societies have the luxury of pretending we can do without brute force as a guarantor of peace and order.

Hundreds of video clips on YouTube highlight this phenomenon, where “Ben Shapiro destroys transgender arguments”, “Jordan Peterson Debunks White Privilege”, and “Sam Harris demolishes Christianity”. Underneath each one, hundreds of gleeful comments from viewers cheer the orators on. Finally, someone has taken down the arguments they don’t want to believe.

This genre of debate involves unthinkingly disputing every argument made by an opponent, no matter how sensible they are, and, worryingly, it isn’t confined to social media.

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Gina Rippon’s study The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain – which featured on The Guardian‘s ‘Summer reading’ list – is the latest example of this unfortunate genre. The book is concerned with the question of whether the brain exhibits sex differences, and whether they are caused by nature or nurture.

Rippon’s argument is blunt. The idea that “you can describe a brain a ‘male’ or ‘female,'” she declares, “is characterised by bizarre claims which can be readily dismissed, only to pop up again in another form”. She contends that scientists who have studied sex differences in the brain have historically been sexist and have hunted down differences that did not really exist, in an attempt to prove the inferiority of women.

“The so-called ‘female’ brain,” says Rippon, “has suffered centuries of being described as undersized, underdeveloped, evolutionarily inferior, poorly organised and generally defective.” Such assertions were, and still are, so widespread that Rippon admits feeling as though she’s playing “Whac-a-Mole”. She has barely disproved the newest study professing to demonstrate how men and women’s brains differ, when another is published.

Rippon’s opponents, whom she calls biological determinists, argue that we know sex differences in the brain are innate because they are evident even in young infants, before socialisation has had the opportunity to exert its influence. But according to Rippon, “the general consensus appears to be that, once variables such as birth weight and head size have been taken into account, there are very few, if any, structural sex differences in the brain at birth”.

She claims that the emergence of sex differences between boys and girls’ brains as they age is evidence for the role of brain plasticity and socialisation in shaping these differences – that is, if and when sex differences exist at all. If there is “a genuine sex difference, indeed an ‘essential’ sex difference, and hard-wired to boot, you might expect it to be present at birth or certainly to emerge pretty early thereafter”.

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Plenty of popular science authors have taken a similar position to that of Rippon. Cordelia Fine, for instance, asserts that “the notion of fundamentally female and male brains or natures is a misconception”. In her 2017 book, Testosterone Rex, she writes: “In the first year of life, baby boys and girls provide little in the way of evidence that their brains are tuned to different radio stations of life” but “children see that the category of sex is the primary way that we carve up the social world, and are driven to learn what it means to be male or female.”

Let’s consider this argument more seriously. Across our lifespans, despite the fact that our genetic code stays largely unchanged, we develop in remarkable ways. We grow larger and we mature, cells and organs proliferate and become specialised for various purposes, our teeth erupt, fall out and are replaced. Many of these changes occur in predictable ways, because the patterns of the effects of genes are themselves regulated by our DNA. The genes that affect a trait at one point in time may not be the same ones that affect the trait later on, and the intensity of the effects of genes fluctuates in turn. 

None of this precludes the environment from influencing these processes either, so when we observe a difference between boys’ and girls’ anatomy or psychology that diverges as they age, we cannot immediately point to the environment as a cause for this disparity.

For example, can you think of any process that is largely innate that might cause boys and girls to diverge physically and psychologically as they grow older? An elusive word beginning with “p” and ending with “uberty” is curiously missing from the index of Rippon’s 358-page-long treatise.

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It is worth noting that puberty is not the only period of time in which boys and girls diverge in predictable ways. Hormonal surges influence the organisation of neural connections in the prenatal environment, during adolescent puberty, and during a “mini-puberty” that occurs in the first few months after birth. These subtle differences in the anatomy of boys’ and girls’ brains that have developed very early on can also cause them to react differently to the same environments later on, without them needing to experience differences in sex hormone levels subsequently.

This crucial point is not missed by Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, when she explains that “this mini-puberty in both sexes suggests neonatal hormones might also influence babies’ brains. Just as the surge of testosterone before birth apparently organises the brain for later male-type behaviours, so this neonatal surge might create a critical period for launching brain development down the boy or girl trajectory.”

When it comes to disentangling these causes, it seems we are at an impasse — if both innate and socialised factors can cause differences between sexes, how do we know which of them is responsible for an observed difference? The truth is, we shouldn’t be focused on age-related changes alone to inform us about the nature or nurture of sex differences. Simply looking at correlations between traits and hormones cannot elucidate these causes either, especially considering that hormonal levels can be both a cause of behavioural changes and a consequence of socialised environmental factors, such as nutrition and medication.

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Instead, a more accurate way to understand what it means for something to be innate is to imagine the trajectory of an individual over time and how that trajectory might be resistant or sensitive to systematic changes in the environment. The trajectory’s resistance and sensitivity reflect its innateness and socialisation respectively. This perspective is long-established in the philosophical literature on biology.

So we might turn to evaluating how the same men and women might act if they were exposed to a change in environment – a change in socialisation, we might say. Plenty of studies that investigate this do indeed find effects of socialisation on children’s outcomes, including randomised controlled experiments, such as an educational intervention that changed boys’ and girls’ attitudes and behaviours to gender egalitarianism in different ways, and natural experiments, such as boys and girls responding differently to school exams when their stakes were increased. 

Fascinatingly, Rippon herself concurs with this perspective, saying that “your brain may start out on a fairly standard trajectory but can then be diverted by quite small shifts” due to “different events or experiences”. But this does not stop her from making wild leaps in reasoning and frequent insinuations that when sex differences are not apparent at birth, they cannot be innate. When research suggests that 13-18-week old babies exhibit a sex difference in eye gaze behaviour, but newborns do not, she concludes that “social learning may be the primary impetus of the development of gender differences”.

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Rippon exhibits a very transparent bias towards any result that confirms her views. It’s difficult to untangle all the factors that influence our cognitive processes, but easy to selectively criticise or minimise findings that contradict our views and uncritically accept those that do not.

The most egregious example of this one-sidedness is her discussion of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. fMRI is a technique that attempts to detect changes in brain activity in response to a stimulus. In the fourth chapter of The Gendered Brain, Rippon extensively lists the limitations and difficulties that scientists face when conducting fMRI studies and interpreting their results. In fact, she brilliantly explains how difficult it is to find robust examples of sex differences in brain activity using fMRI, pointing out the number of arbitrary and potentially exploitable decisions that researchers have to make to construct brain images, the often small sample sizes, the publication biases, and so on.

Yet only two chapters later, she draws heavily on exactly the same kinds of fMRI studies to describe how socialisation can influence our brain activity through social rejection and stereotype threat – without the slightest critical evaluation, or any explanation of why these methods should be more credible when they support the effects of socialisation rather than sex differences.

Stereotype threat, incidentally, is a topic that Rippon frequently revisits to demonstrate the effects of socialisation on behaviour. It is the idea that informing individuals that people have a negative stereotype of their performance on a task causes them to then perform worse on that task. She states that “stereotype threat has also been shown to have a powerful effect on women, particularly with respect to performance on subjects such as science and maths.” She believes that, “stereotyping the kind of toys that are ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’ can affect the range of skills they acquire; girls who think Lego is for boys are slower at construction-based tasks.”

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But Rippon mischaracterises the findings of the study she cites on the effects of stereotype threat on boys and girls’ performance on a LEGO block construction task. In contrast to her portrayal, the authors describe their main finding in the paper as such:

“Contrary to our hypothesis, girls in kindergarten through third grade were not slower or less accurate in stereotype-threat conditions compared to a control condition [at constructing shapes using LEGO blocks]. They were, however, significantly slower than boys of the same age.”

And apparently unknown to Rippon is that stereotype threat is fairly widely-known to have been afflicted by the replication crisis, with its research suffering from publication bias, its results highly dependent on arbitrary decisions made by researchers, and notably, its failures to replicate findings relating to maths and science performance, the particular findings she draws on.

On the occasions when Rippon evaluates some of the simplistic claims made by critics, her scrupulousness and insight shines through, and the real shame is that she fails to apply this standard of rigour to any research on the effects of socialisation. Just like the video clips attempting to show how “Jordan Peterson debunks white privilege”, the most consistent feature of The Gendered Brain is this reckless, unrelenting one-sidedness.

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The trouble with these debates is not simply that they tie people to a conclusion and make them work backwards, cherry-picking the evidence to bolster their arguments, but that they give people the impression that every argument and every line of evidence must fall neatly on their side of the debate. It is as if conceding on a single point is akin to surrendering, or that thinking up a clever but shallow ‘gotcha!’ is sufficient because it humiliates opponents, causing their standing to crumble like the lightest touch to a house of cards.

So while Lise Eliot might believe that the “basically unisex brain” is “no more gendered than the liver or kidneys or heart”, and Gina Rippon might contend that this book “shatters the myth of the female brain”, the only thing that has been shattered here is any faith I had that debates of this kind could help us arrive at the truth at all.