Substack’s most compelling writer is a sickening cockatrice of the two types, filing bleakly post-moral missives from the trenches of tortured male sexuality. The Worst Boyfriend Ever, for it is he, writes long, granular accounts of his actual sexual conquests. Almost every post features a new woman or five; some are afforded a separate “Slut Review”, while most appear as comedy episodes in broader tales of his travels. He is a self-described “retarded horny clown”, an “awkward antisocial sensitive young freak”, a cheater and a rapist and a racist who variously claims that his blog is “fiction btw” and all completely “real”. He is one of the most popular voices on the site, regularly in the top-30 blogs in the fiction category, but you will feel like you need a shower after reading him. 

If WBE is real, then what we can glean about him is as follows: he’s 27 and white; he used to live in Seattle and now sleeps in his van, roaming around the West Coast and doing lots of drugs and having sex with lots of women who read his Substack. He went to college, and for a time worked in marketing. He’s a dork: he compares himself to a character from the anime film Neon Genesis Evangelion and litters his posts with weebish screenshots and memes. His homeless, druggy, itinerant lifestyle means that, despite his frequent and intimately described attempts, he is “literally too weak to rape now”. His body count, consensual or otherwise, is in the seventies and rising. He has ex-girlfriends, despite the handicap of a “somewhat recessed” jaw. He regularly solicits sex with prostitutes. He loves using the n-word. He hates himself.

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WBE is sometimes very funny and sometimes fairly moving but mostly just shocking. He’s fascinating in the way that only three-car pile-ups can be. Men read him because of the vicarious thrill of watching him live out their own suppressed ids. Women have sex with him because they want to read all about it later in a blog post; they hope he’ll describe them not as the 99% of women he “fucks” in the back of his van (“Fat Ginger Bitch Chicago”; a “tiny little corpse”; “objects”) but the 1% for whom he holds sentimental candles, like a woman called Celine who seems to have a personality. In reality very few escape humiliation; they lie on a spectrum from fuckable (mostly Asians, ideally willing to larp being racist or based or say “rape isn’t real” to amuse him) to unfuckable (like the “ugly autistic retarded BPD former mental patient” he scams out of $2,000). 

He might be an ironic construction: the daydream and release valve for a real writer conducting an experiment on the boundaries of permissible speech. But I think he’s real: he splices his posts with actual pictures of hotel rooms, drinks and dating profiles mentioned in his writing; he shows the women he sleeps with, sometimes anonymized via AI renderings, sometimes not. For this reason, and because of his well-documented appearances at a smattering of disastrous LA readings, I believe the Worst Boyfriend Ever walks among us — a real Adderall fiend, a real rapist, a real vessel of porn-sick Zoomer chaos. If so, he should be in prison; either way, it’s hard not to rubberneck.

WBE deserves scrutiny because he is every Gen Z preoccupation metastasizing in the spirit of one raving man. He is a pornsick, blog-based Clavicular, drenched in the aesthetics of the alt-Right, who has clambered from the gutter of 4chan and Reddit to scare the hoes on pseudo-literary Substack. He takes edgelordism offline, walks the walk. Rape jokes become actual rape: “All the stories are real but I call them fiction, because they’re so dark,” he writes, meaning that when he writes that he “had to wrestle [women] down pry their legs apart and even once contend with tears in their eyes” he is confessing. His biggest fanboys wave these problems away with appeals to personas and artistic license — but if we take him on his word, these assaults actually happened. 

Obviously, this notoriety is good marketing: his blog’s success rests partly on flirtation with legality. Last spring he self-published a first book based on his blog; he has a real agent and real liability, and is publishing what he himself claims to be real evidence. We have become so used to men in public life obfuscating and denying and reframing their misdeeds; maybe all they needed to do was to claim radical, picaresque authenticity, write about their rapes in romans à clef. But for WBE, the jig might soon be up. In one post, he writes that an ex-girlfriend has warned him of a lawyer collecting women’s testimonies for a “Class Action Fuck You Lawsuit against me & my beautiful artistic expressions”. He fears being banned from Substack; it is his livelihood, and he survives on cash and favors from fans. For many readers, keeping up with this baddest of boyfriends is about seeing whether he’ll get away with it. 

WBE has captured an important cultural moment. He embodies an overcorrection of the progressive consensus of the past decade; he is living proof that its tools of cancellation and shame are now completely blunted. Liberal feminism and ubiquitous pornography were always uneasy bedfellows, and inevitably porn — which tramples all humanity in its pursuit of orgasm — won out. So it is that a decade on from #MeToo, one of the most-read underground writers is boasting about how he “struggled” with one woman “for several hours, until her wrists were ‘really sore’ from being held down by me as I unsuccessfully tried to rape her”. The fact is that fans find these vignettes refreshing; one commenter under a rival Substacker’s takedown writes WBE “shines like a beacon of hope in this endless sea of oestrogen and … feminist monolithic culture we find ourselves in”. Some women comment things like “you’re a rapist and you should die”; others arrange to meet WBE and shag him. His blog chronicles the fag-end of ultra-permissive sex positivity: in the dying days of the fourth wave, all we’re left with is lots of terrible, demeaning and dangerous hookups, slurs and pills and Japanese brothels. 

This backlash is hitting the literary world too. Literary culture has lately abandoned its gonzo male rebels in favor of austere and right-on writers like Sally Rooney, with her schoolmarmly moral absolutes. Her style is remarkably similar to WBE’s: arid, straightforward, unbeautified — but a stultifying complacency about sexual politics makes it hopelessly boring. In the eyes of his admirers, WBE is here to remedy literature’s overfeminization with a new, poisonous irony that not only defies hyperliberalism but laughs in its po-face: “I’ve never fucked a girl with so many tattoos… beside my sister. Half-joking. Truth is my sister has a lot of tattoos too and it makes me sad. But at least she’s White.” If masculinity was castrated by post-#MeToo party lines, then blogs in the Substack bro ecosystem (Delicious Tacos is another big name) are drops of water in the desert for long-muzzled men. 

For 10 or so years, punky young men couldn’t say “retard”. Now that the post-2020 backlash is upon us, they can — but they still want to shock. That’s how you get WBE defending his “freedom” to say the n-word, bragging that he’ll write it 30 times before starting a post. That’s also how you end up with his best but most appalling passages, about soliciting then getting robbed by transsexual prostitutes in the Philippines, or seducing the sister of the already-cuckolded boyfriend of a reader stricken with cancer. These installments shock us not only because they are horrible, but because they remove the stabilizers of qualifying ethical commentary — guilt or redemption — that we’re used to. No force holds our hands and shows us This is Bad; WBE rarely shows regret. 

We — I — may want this stuff to be rubbish; the biggest problem is that it’s not. When a masseuse offers sexual services, WBE bemoans too much distraction from his craft (sitting in a cafe on his laptop); he adds: “make it snappy you fucking jappy! She wasn’t japanese she was filipino.” He warns her off his prostate “because im not fucking gay” before she “oil[s] up my beautiful white naked body”. These episodes cross several moral lines, but that doesn’t make the writing bad. On several metrics, his writing is in fact good: it has earned many, many readers; it is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny; it is very difficult not to continue. WBU plumbs the outer limits of autofiction: how will a schmaltzy and tired genre respond when an exciting interloper is a villain? How will we?

My suspicion is that this rightward Substack jumpscare will burn itself out: WBE’s nihilism is poisoning himself as much as everyone else, and like many in his coterie of writerly dirtbags his yelps for attention are shot through with borderline suicidal shame (Christian conversion incoming). His downfall can only be self-inflicted: WBE won’t be banned; he can’t be canceled. Like all internet edgelords he doesn’t give a toss about his critics, those he claims never to read yet cites relentlessly. They are merely “jealous miserable snobs”. He hates himself more than we ever could; he is “completely fucking alone”; he will probably be undone by substances and his unbearable inability to connect with other people. Until then, he’ll be the patron saint of a generation — my generation — reared on the sex-with-everyone-all-the-time spirit of pornography then neutered by progressivism, and now exalting in its own sniggering degradation after years in the wilderness. The Worst Boyfriend Ever will never make it to a university syllabus — but he doesn’t need to. All the students will have read him anyway. 

In his time, Bloom was a kingmaker among poets and fiction writers, who knew all too well that their places on the greasy pole of posterity would be somewhat determined by whether or not he saw fit to include them in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his definitive list of lasting books that was a New York Times best-seller in 1994. John Updike, whose oeuvre was even more stupendous than Bloom’s, might have regretted calling Bloom’s writing “torturous” when he saw that his only canonical book, according to Bloom, was The Witches of Eastwick — and so much for his Rabbit tetralogy, hundreds and hundreds of other novels, short stories, poems, essays, and never mind his face on the cover of TIME magazine when Couples was published in 1968. Philip Roth, on the other hand, made a point of engaging Bloom in a friendly correspondence while the latter was working on his list for the Canon, and was rewarded with no fewer than six mentions. 

However, by the time Roth’s biographer (me) got in touch with Bloom via email — asking for an interview at Roth’s urging — the number had dwindled to two: “Philip and I have been out of touch for many years now,” Bloom replied to me in 2013. “I continue to regard American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater as canonical works of the American imagination. But I believe I have nothing personal to communicate besides my high critical regard for his work, and that is on record.” This was signed “With Regret.” I thought I sniffed a hint of pettishness in this, and was unsurprised to learn, while reading The Man Who Read Everything, that he had indeed taken Roth’s later indifference to heart and considered him “very self-centered.” 

Bloom himself was no slouch in the self-centered department, having beaten an uncommonly arduous path from his humble beginnings as a young Talmudist in The Bronx. “There aren’t any reviews of my Yeats, and I guess I’d better not expect any,” he wrote in 1970 to the poet A. R. Ammons, one of the eight recipients of Bloom’s letters who make up the eight sections of the book. “A number of people have told me it is just too difficult to read, which is discouraging. I’m fated to remain an unknown critic.” Anyone who’s plugged away in this line of work knows the same feeling of Sisyphean futility and, after all, Yeats was Bloom’s fifth cumbrous study of English Romanticism, the field he’d intended to till in those days. Eventually, though, all of Western literature became his bailiwick — a massiveness that he alone, perhaps, could undertake: a “monster” of reading, Bloom could swallow books like so many gumdrops and tell you whatever you needed to know about them. And given that he really couldn’t help himself — he lived to read and write or talk about whatever he read — his freakish gifts were lavishly, at last, rewarded in the marketplace: in 2002, he became the last academic in history to get a seven-figure advance for a book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

Bloom’s latter-day notoriety — as a critic, I mean, not as a would-be lothario — was somewhat due to the main thesis of The Western Canon: namely, that some books are better than others, and a lot of the better kind are written by dead white males. (For what it’s worth, Bloom also believed that Elizabeth Bishop, say, was the best poet of her generation, and Anne Carson the best of hers.) “Shakespeare is God,” he declared, to the dismay of those who thought that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, et al., were to be mined for evidence of historical oppression against women, minorities, and other marginalized people, and that aesthetic merit was mostly a canard promoted by “hegemonic” oppressors. 

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Happily, at the height of his fame, Bloom could afford to address an audience of literate amateurs who simply wanted to know what they should read during their little spans on earth, versus English majors (a dwindling cohort) fixated on race, class, and gender. “What are now called ‘Departments of English,’” Bloom wrote in The Western Canon, “will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.” Even Bloom, of course, couldn’t have foreseen the further ravages of smart phones, AI, etc., on what used to be called The Examined Life (whereas Roth stopped writing novels, in part, because he thought reading literary fiction was about to become as “cultic” as reading Latin poetry). But in the meantime, Bloom made a point of distancing himself from the Yale English Department; his later title as Sterling Professor of the Humanities made him, as The New York Times put it, “a department unto himself.” 

In her introduction to The Man Who Read Everything, editor Heather Cass White points out that Bloom’s transcendent self-assurance was derived in part from his hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.” Evidence of Bloom’s oracular certitude is found on every page of this book, whether he’s telling Ammons that John Ashbery’s first and fourth books of poetry are wonderful but his second and third not so much, or telling Ashbery himself that his poem “Collective Dawns” is “marvelous,” but “Wooden Buildings” is only, well, “good enough” — and so on. “Good enough” was about as damning as the gentle sage allowed himself to be. “The Wilson is good enough,” he remarked to Ursula K. Le Guin, who’d rashly mentioned that she was curling up in bed with Emily Wilson’s new Odyssey translation. “The [Robert] Fitzgerald catches the original somewhat better.” Of course, it went without saying that Bloom had read the original in Homeric Greek, along with all the reputable English versions thereof. 

When it came to his signature conviction, the so-called anxiety of influence — which, said The New York Times, “has something to upset everyone” — Bloom was prepared to go to the mat with even his most formidable detractors. Over time he would elaborate the idea in various ways, at forest-slaughtering length, but the gist was that a poet’s work is naturally influenced by the work of eminent precursors, and the anxious struggle to form one’s own vision — and thus ensure lasting fame — is Oedipal in nature and hence, implicitly, between men. “If you mean influence in the literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one,” the great Northrop Frye replied in 1969, when Bloom first tried running the idea by his revered mentor, “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.” One senses a faint bemusement on Frye’s part, even a wish to change the subject, and when Bloom insisted to Frye that “influence anxiety was not an affect in a person, but the relation of one literary work to another,” Bloom’s “heroic precursor stopped listening,” as Bloom himself pointed out many years later (an anxious relation between works? I mean to say, what? Frye might have wondered).

And therein lay perhaps the main problem with Bloom as a writer and thinker: he was damnably hard to understand. “This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read,” a flummoxed C. S. Lewis wrote in 1962, when taxed to review the young Bloom’s The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Bloom himself was quite aware of the problem — “sometimes I wonder why I write such odd things” — but he, at least, knew what he meant to say, and by God he was going to say it, especially to those he considered peers. Explaining to his friend and Yale colleague John Hollander why he’d adopted “crossings” as a term for poetic “ratios, tropes, defenses” and whatnot, Bloom wrote: “I base it on Augustine’s calling post-lapsarian language the ‘region of unlikeness’ and on the Aristotelian-Ciceronian topica, ‘places’ not ‘commonplaces’ (cf. Curtius, etc.) they became or even memory-places (cf. Simonides) …” It goes on like that, and may be perfectly true for all I know, but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head, as Bertie Wooster would have it. 

But of course, Bloom’s correspondents were largely intellectuals almost as fond of esoterica as he; indeed, Bloom might have met his match in the poet James Merrill, whose masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), was largely informed by 20 years of sessions at a Ouija board with his partner David Jackson, and whose narrators from the spirit world included W. H. Auden, no less. Reading Bloom’s Talmudic reflections on certain aspects of Merrill’s work — “I don’t think that an actual zelem (your astral body or other self) or an actual maggid (other self as ‘instructor’) makes for strong poetry” — I couldn’t help thinking Merrill had found a kindred soul, if a rather too bumptious one. When Bloom went so far as to suggest that Merrill plump for lowercase versus uppercase letters in some instances, Merrill replied a little sternly that “the Authors were in Eternity, and his role was faithfully to take dictation.” Fair enough. 

For the lay reader, it can get a little wearying, but the title reminds us that these are the Literary letters of Harold Bloom, and not what he might have written or said to certain of his comelier grad students. Still, I found myself wishing he’d go to Disney World or something, and almost wept with gratitude when he paused in his Laputan musings to complain about his diet (he struggled with his weight): “I’m trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water, and cigars.” Such a rare glimpse of the personal was for the benefit of arguably his dearest friend, Ammons, whom Bloom wrote avidly throughout his life. White, the editor, wisely chooses a single 18-month slice of their vast correspondence, shortly after their first meeting — when “their emotional and intellectual engagement was at its peak” — the better to conform to her overall method of arranging Bloom’s letters into roughly chronological chapters that each contain most or all of his correspondence with a given poet or colleague, usually because Bloom was in the process of writing a paper about that person’s work and wanted to air his thoughts and gather information. 

For the most part, Bloom used his superpowers for good rather than ill, exhorting his favorite poets to live up to their indubitable genius: “I don’t want you giving anyone, including yourself, the impression that you consider yourself anything less than a very great poet,” he wrote Alvin Feinman, whose first and only book of poetry Bloom had helped publish via Oxford University Press. While Bloom was certainly capable of taking even the greatest poets down a peg or two (“good enough”), one gets the impression that his hyperbolic praise was both heartfelt and an impulse to give pleasure to people whose efforts, let’s face it, are pretty thankless on the whole. “With Miss Bishop gone, you have for me no living peer,” he wrote Ashbery, “—Red [Robert Penn] Warren, Archie Ammons, Jimmy Merrill have written permanent poems, but I would say now that poetically we are in the age of Ashbery, as once it was of Hart Crane or of Stevens.” Bloom’s advocacy was perhaps a poet’s best shot at a kind of slender immortality, so one can imagine Ashbery’s almost broken gratitude (“I feel singularly honored …”), very much in keeping with the mutually fawning tone of these letters. 

Love of the work, for Bloom, usually meant love of the author, and no wonder he took it so hard when Roth (for one) stopped returning his letters. “I was deeply in love with Archie Ammons,” he told his friend’s biographer, Roger Gilbert, and we have no cause to doubt it. Bloom tended to sign letters to Ammons and others — once the initial formality had worn off — with “Love” and even “Love and Homage,” and he was generally effusive in his use of endearments. He and Hollander liked to address each other with some variant of “Foo Foo” (“Dearest Foofy”), while favorite students, male and female, were often called “child” and startled with a kiss on top of their heads. The younger poet Henri Cole, whom Bloom found especially promising, met Bloom in person exactly twice in his life; that first time, he’d arrived for Bloom’s 80th birthday and stuck out his hand, whereupon Bloom pulled him close and pressed Cole’s head to his chest. “Noble bard,” Bloom began a long answering-machine message that Cole transcribed for this book, “it is Harold Bloom, calling from New Haven at about twenty of one on … what’s today, child?” A page or so of warm, well-considered praise follows — “I love both you and your poetry …” — until the machine cuts Bloom off mid-paean. 

Of course, the line between darling man and lech is a dicey business, especially in academia, and Bloom seemed to become more and more heedless as his fame grew, even finding a little humor in his own raffishness — referring to himself as Bloomstaff, say, in tribute to one of his favorite Shakespearian rogues. In 1990, GQ published an article, “Bloom in Love,” that described in mortifying detail (a tandem bubble bath, etc.) the dalliances he’d allegedly pursued with students throughout his long, long marriage to the stoical Jeanne Gould. At the time, Bloom was still fairly bullet-proof and could afford to shrug off the exposé as “a disgusting piece of character assassination.” He was just as categorical in 2004, when the feminist author Naomi Wolf claimed that he’d groped her thigh 20 years earlier. The Yale Daily News described the “veritable media frenzy” that ensued, but Bloom got off easy; 10 or 15 years later he might have been burned in effigy, if not chased through the streets of New Haven by a mob bristling with torches and pitchforks. 

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And so a chastened Bloom became all the more devoted to the Life of the Mind. “Like our ancestors,” he’d written Hollander in 1975, “we must study, we must ponder, and then we do the best we can” (he was a great fan of italics) “when we write and teach.… We live in the mind — as [Wallace] Stevens said.” Such a life has its homely pleasures, but it’s a lonely business at the best of times and became even more so, for Bloom, as the people he considered “close friends” such as Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill — whom, we know from this book, he hardly ever saw in person — died off one by one. 

He would never meet his final and most engaging correspondent in The Man Who Read Everything, Le Guin, who was six months older and just as lonely. “May we use first names?” she shyly inquired when they first got in touch. “I’d like that.” After a two-month flurry of delighted emails, Le Guin mentioned that she’d “run out of steam” after an hour and a half of teaching the day before; she died of a heart attack five days later, and Bloom’s own death came the following year. Let the happy few who read these letters remember him as the embodiment of an ardent brand of bookishness that has passed, and less so for his all-too-human failings, which are common enough (alas) in any age.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Swalwell probably knew he had a problem. Several of them, actually: allegations of propositioning and sexually assaulting staffers and interns had followed him for years. Why, under those circumstances, did he choose to run for governor? The same reason any gambler keeps going after a long winning streak: if you go long enough without losing, you forget you can lose it all in a single hand.

The house, it turns out, always wins. Days ago, the congressman looked like the frontrunner in California’s gubernatorial race, a polished liberal with a strong anti-Trump national profile and impeccable #MeToo credentials. In 2018, few voices on Capitol Hill were louder in opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court; and Swalwell’s argument rested squarely on the principle of “believe all women.” That fall, when President Trump’s Department of Education directed universities to tighten their definitions of sexual harassment, Swalwell tweeted: “Support survivors. Believe survivors. We are with you.”

These maxims lost some of their force as liberals reckoned with the excesses of movements like #MeToo in the years that followed. But they were never entirely retracted. Swalwell’s career, in other words, was unraveled by the very principles he weaponized against others.

In an account first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, an anonymous former intern accused the congressman of assaulting her twice while she was too drunk to consent. (Swalwell’s attorney had sent her a cease-and-desist letter the previous night; this failed to prevent the story from coming out.)

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Then came a second report, this one featuring three named accusers. Their accounts ranged from unwanted touching to unsolicited explicit photos and Snapchat messages soliciting nudes in return. One woman said he exposed himself while she was at the wheel. In a video published online, Swalwell called the allegations “flat false” and vowed to fight them “with everything I have” — though, peculiarly, he apologized to his wife in the same breath. (In an interview with CNN, Swalwell’s lawyer refused to specify what, exactly, Swalwell was apologizing to his wife for.)

Swalwell is hardly eager to apply the principle of “believe all women” to his own case. And he may regret his previous fiery rhetoric, now that women who, in some cases, may have engaged in consensual activity with a powerful man have later claimed sexual assault. But his staff have been less circumspect. By Thursday, when rumors of the forthcoming allegations began circulating internally, staffers had begun to quit. By Friday, nearly all of Swalwell’s top advisors had resigned. And by Saturday, each of the 23 Democratic leaders who had endorsed his campaign, including his closest allies on Capitol Hill, had rescinded their support. 

But the collapse of Swalwell’s campaign, several former Swalwell interns and staffers told me, had begun well before any reports became public. The former campaign intern who described the campaign as “uncomfortable” first grew uneasy at the California Democratic Party convention in February. People from “high circles” in Washington, he told me, were already whispering about Swalwell’s sexual encounters with congressional interns. 

As campaign staffers mulled over the rumors — many still reluctant to believe them — this intern made up his mind. His commitment to the campaign was over. He stayed on in name, but in practice he “just tapped out.” He remained, he told me, only because he was curious to see how the campaign would respond once the story finally broke.

He was not alone. Other staffers, too, had begun growing uneasy in the weeks before the reports became public. Many effectively checked out in the week before their publication. There were no public allegations — at least, not yet. But mere whispers were enough to begin the campaign’s slow internal unraveling. 

Early last week, a source within the campaign told me, the campaign began canceling meetings scheduled for later that week. By Thursday afternoon, many staffers and interns were already writing and sending in their resignation letters, bracing for the big Chronicle story. Some volunteers remained in denial: “There will be no big story published tomorrow,” one wrote in a campaign Signal chat. “It’s all hearsay to get us afraid.” But by the weekend, that position was no longer tenable. According to people in the campaign, a majority of staffers had resigned in response to the report.

I reviewed two campaign managers’ jointly written resignation letter, posted on a campaign Slack for interns Friday afternoon, which put it this way: “We came into this campaign looking to help elect a young principled leader to fight for the next generation and now it has been made clear that is not the case.” Half an hour later, that Slack had been deleted without warning. Several sources close to the campaign found the move perplexing, given that Swalwell, in his non-apology posted to X that evening, said he firmly intended to continue his campaign.

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But everything seems to be shutting down. “No one asked me to stay or defended him to me after I resigned,” a now-departed campaign coordinator told me. He told me Swalwell’s hypocrisy was “antithetical to the values of our party,” and that he wanted Swalwell to resign and admit his wrongdoing. In short, to heed the old Swalwell — the one who believed all women.

One intern recalled the internal Slack going “berserk” on Friday afternoon, though the messages described here are based on my sources’ best recollection, since the whole Slack has since been deleted. The quiet-quitting of the past several weeks had exploded into a staff revolt. “If you still support Eric Swalwell after this, you’re a piece of shit,” one woman wrote. “Hey, I thought we believe all women,” another quipped. There were plenty more remarks in the same spirit. That is, save for one naive intern who asked, “So does this mean we are all done, or is the campaign still going?”

Despite reports of mass resignations across both Swalwell’s campaign and congressional offices, some staffers may stay for reasons that have little to do with loyalty. In a public statement condemning Swalwell and expressing horror at the allegations, senior campaign staff noted that “not everyone — in particular our junior staff — can immediately forfeit their income and benefits without significant personal risk or consequence.” But, as one person who has since left the campaign told me, “this statement should have come from [Swalwell], not his staffers.”

Then there is the matter of secrecy. Swalwell has been mired in controversy over his camp’s insistence that no one in his congressional office was ever compelled to sign a nondisclosure agreement. On the campaign side, a Swalwell adviser carefully told Politico that he had “never asked someone to personally sign an NDA,” though he clarified that the campaign did have a privacy agreement meant to protect confidential materials. 

I’ve reviewed a signed copy of one such privacy agreement. It is a bizarrely skeletal, template-like document, still containing bracketed placeholders like “[TYPES OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION].” Whatever its legal force, given how sloppily it was drafted, the document may help explain why everyone I interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity. 

“I was really hoping that his campaign would go to hell anyway,” one former campaign team member told me. His disgust ran deeper than the sexual allegations. He’d long found Swalwell personally unsettling and inauthentic. “He’s fake anyway, and a very, very weird person,” he added. “Meeting him, you knew something was off, especially after hearing of his allegations. I was hoping [the campaign] would go to the shitbin. The difference between me and [those who stay quiet] is I know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Perhaps Swalwell came to believe that his very public alignment with the politics of #MeToo offered a kind of insulation, that a man who had so conspicuously presented himself as an advocate for survivors would be harder to cast as the villain in such allegations. If so, his calculation now appears catastrophically foolish. A representative for the campaign didn’t respond to my request for comment by deadline.

Swalwell, of course, says he is being railroaded by a rush to judgment. So do a number of anti-woke commentators now rallying to his defense on principle. These are the very sorts of people the old Swalwell would have denounced without hesitation. During the Kavanaugh allegations, he posted “100% #BelieveSurvivors” and insisted that when “separate and independent” accusations all “look the same,” the “arrows point in the same directions.” What, he asked then, were the odds that “three or four women independently, who never met each other, would have similar experiences with one person?” 

Faced now with allegations of his own, that moral certainty has disappeared on contact. His staff, however, appear to have taken his #MeToo pledges more seriously than he ever did.

But today, on the eve of what would have been the centennial birthday of Playboy progenitor Hugh Hefner — and two decades into the era of ubiquitous, hardcore, high-definition internet porn that makes Playboy’s softly lit, artfully posed centerfold look positively quaint, even pre-Raphaelite, by comparison — I must grudgingly admit that the defense of the nudie magazine as literary artifact seems a lot less ridiculous than it once did. Did anyone read Playboy just for the articles? Probably not, and yet there was a time, not so long ago, when they plausibly could have. It was a golden era of great tits and great journalism, where lust and literacy still existed in conversation, rather than in conflict. 

Playboy launched in 1953 with a singular purpose, filling what its creator saw as a gap in the world of leisure reading for men. For the outdoorsman, there was no shortage of content; but for his urban counterpart? A sad state of affairs: there were but two magazines for what Hefner called “the city-bred male”, and these were woefully overstuffed with service journalism. An editorial note in the opening pages of Playboy’s first volume lamented the excessive focus on “fashion, travel, and ‘how-to-do-it’ features on everything from avoiding a hernia to building your own steam bath”, all of which came at the expense of fun. 

“PLAYBOY will emphasize entertainment,” Hefner promised. “Affairs of state will be out of our province. We don’t expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths. If we are able to give the American male a few extra laughs and a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, we’ll feel we’ve justified our existence.”

That first issue, in its time, was most notorious for featuring a pictorial of Marilyn Monroe in the nude — photos taken in 1949 before she was famous, or even a blonde. But today, the most remarkable thing about that first volume is its capacity to transport us back to a world where attention spans had not yet been decimated by the advent of the endless scroll, where a magazine might make for an afternoon’s leisure. 

The centerfold makes for a spectacular gimmick, but most of Playboy was text, and longform text at that; the inaugural issue contained three works of short fiction, journalistic dispatches from the worlds of college football and jazz music, a combination investigative report and opinion piece about alimony with the self-explanatory title, “Miss Gold-Digger”, and a recipe for Cuban chicken. There are also a number of single panel cartoons and a page of quaint, short-form japes that my grandfather would have called “dirty jokes” and a contemporary HR department would call “creating a hostile work environment”:

An elderly gentleman visited his doctor with the complaint that he believed he was becoming impotent.

“When did you first become aware of this problem?” the doctor asked.

The old gentleman replied, “Yesterday afternoon, twice last night and again this morning.”

If this all feels somewhat dated now, it was a durable journalistic model: a combination of bawdy humor, cheeky cartoons, and the ever-present centerfold sandwiched between voicey reportage and short fiction from the best storytellers of their generation. Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever: all of these and more graced the pages of Playboy, without embarrassment. Peruse any issue at random, and it’s hard not to be impressed by the magazine’s stylistic consistency over the decades, even as its substance kept pace with the times. In June 1988, 35 years after Playboy’s debut, the world had changed but what constituted “Entertainment for Men” remained the same: jokes, cartoons, journalism, women. Here is Miss June Emily Arth, all creamy skin and sunlit hair like a John Waterhouse painting, tastefully framed by a David Foster Wallace short story on one side and satire of the upcoming presidential election on the other. 

This frank sensuality, the uncritical and unselfconscious acknowledgment of sex as simply part of the pantheon of typical male interests along with sports, culture, and cool office furniture, makes vintage Playboy feel not just outdated, but like a dispatch from another planet — one where men’s desires had not yet become problematized, let alone subject to interrogation and scorn. Its editorial vision, which placed it at the cutting edge of the media landscape in mid-century America, hit differently in a post-Y2K world. 

The perspective shift was perhaps best embodied by the transformation of Playboy’s founder over the decades — from a young visionary thumbing his nose at the censorious prudishness of a post-war US, to a creepy old man whose penchant for women six decades his junior was as unseemly as his habit of sporting silk pajamas as daywear. By the time he suffered a fatal heart attack in 2017 at the age of 91, both Hefner and the brand he’d created had grown from a modest print magazine into a massive, multi-million dollar, bunny-headed hydra encompassing everything from nightclubs to fragrances to broadcast media and beyond. They were also, however, synonymous with a sort of dirty-old-man sensibility which the incoming generation of progressive millennial tastemakers found intolerable, not to mention repulsive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Playboy magazine has struggled to stay afloat, let alone relevant, in a landscape reshaped by digital technology and rapidly shifting social mores. Its most recent gambit: a quiet launch on Substack, where a mix of archived, classic Playboy material lives alongside newer commissions from contemporary journalists.

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“Welcome to The Playboy Reader, the latest development in Playboy’s 73-year history as a literary institution. Yes, Playboy has always featured photos of minimally-clothed women—that’s not changing!—but we’ve been known for our writing, too,” reads the inaugural post. 

There was of course a moment when this did change, albeit briefly, a dark night of the soul for Playboy in a world beswarmed by digital porn. In October 2015, the magazine announced that it would no longer publish nude photos; “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture,” explained Scott Flanders, the chief executive, at the time. That decision was reversed two years later, but the identity crisis it represented is ongoing — as is the abandonment of the magazine’s original tagline, “Entertainment for Men”. In 2019, a new editorial staff comprising half a dozen socially conscious millennials — zero of whom were heterosexual men — sat for a New York Times interview about the new “brand vibe” of Playboy: “intimate” but not “explicit”, and “cheeky” but not “cheesy”. The article noted that the company was “working to expand into cannabis, skin care, sex toys and sexual wellness”; the magazine, meanwhile, abandoned its straight-male-skewed content in favor of interviews with politician Pete Buttigieg and MeToo founder Tarana Burke. In 2019, the cover famously featured male actor Ezra Miller wearing lingerie and bunny ears.

You’d be forgiven for wondering exactly who this new Playboy was for, a question evidently overlooked by its creators amid their fervent quest to distance the magazine from its original readers. In addition to now being on Substack, Playboy has a new editor in chief, a new president of media and branding, and a new home in Miami. It also, as far as I can tell, remains more or less completely confused as to its place in the contemporary media landscape, or whether it even has one. Playboy has consciously uncoupled itself from its original vision; it is, explicitly, no longer “entertainment for men”. But negative polarization only goes so far in the attention economy, and for now, Playboy has succeeded largely in intentionally alienating its longtime readership in favor of making content that is attractive to basically nobody.

Some of this, to be sure, is about the new prudishness of the digital native. Gen Z, so awash in ubiquitous online porn and yet so peculiarly sexless in real life, is understandably bewildered by the notion of a magazine that is made more for titillation than masturbation, that invites the specter of sexuality to cavort playfully through its pages but also expects its reader to actually read. 

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But if this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Playboy‘s literary appeal, it is even more a misapprehension of men and what they want. Pictures of naked women? Yes, of course, but not only this. Even before the advent of Pornhub and the internet it rode in on, the man who preferred his smut unadulterated would naturally decamp from Playboy to baser pastures; there was Hustler, Penthouse, X-rated video cassettes, an entire rack on the newsstand of B-list publications that contained significantly fewer words and a lot more exposed labia than Hefner’s magazine cared to feature. Playboy valued and published quality writing because its readers were, in fact, readers. They were also men who liked women, and liked looking at them, and saw no conflict between these things because, in fact, there was none.

Today, the consensus seems to be that only a vulgarian could be so comfortable with so little separation between sex and the rest of it, that we are better off for having replaced the casual, ambient eros of the mid century with a world in which sex is both optimized and compartmentalized, guarded by formality and confined to a designated time and place. Behind closed doors; behind the paywall; within the safe and transactional confines of a parasocial and paid relationship on OnlyFans. But if this has been an effective means of banishing sex from places it perhaps doesn’t belong — like the office utility closet — it has also squeezed from the discourse a certain joie de vivre, a certain cheeky symbiosis between high culture and animal instinct, a certain winking acknowledgment of love and lust as powerful forces which (as the song says) birds, bees, and even educated fleas are helpless to resist. 

Maybe it’s too late for Playboy, specifically, outdated as it is in the post-MeToo era, and tainted as it is by the distasteful image of Hef tottering around in a silk smoking jacket and captain’s hat like the cadaverous Ghost of Stag Parties Past. But the readers it existed for — the men who contained multitudes enough to enjoy a spectacular piece of writing on one page, and an equally spectacular pair of breasts on the next? I’d like to believe they’re still out there, still waiting to be entertained. They would read it for the articles, whatever it is; perhaps the real question is whether anyone is bold enough to write them.

For a while, it looked as if Philip Roth was going to adhere to this protocol rather neatly. When he died in 2018, his memorial event at the New York Public Library was attended by Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Mia Farrow; in the weeks that followed, even the most politically hostile obituarists were forced to admit that Roth had been the most important American writer of his generation. Blake Bailey’s 900-page Philip Roth: The Biography was published in 2021, to gushing acclaim from reviewers as distinguished as Cynthia Ozick and David Remnick, and, more importantly, a place on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a big, brash, bawdy celebration of the writer, who, if turbulent love affairs and glamorous friends are considered a reliable metric, had done more living than most.

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Then, in April 2021, disaster struck. At what was just about the height of the MeToo movement, worrying rumors began to circulate about Roth’s biographer. Bailey, it was alleged, groomed female students at a high school where he taught, and later allegedly raped two women (Bailey denied the allegations, and no formal charges were made. He later published his account of the scandal in a book called Canceled Lives). Soon, the story had reached national newspapers; Norton, Bailey’s publisher, withdrew his book. Within a few weeks, however, the discourse had taken an unusual turn. Much of the criticism left Bailey behind entirely and instead turned its attention on Roth himself. “A best-selling biography of a misogynist, written by an alleged abuser, is almost too apt a metaphor,” wrote one journalist. “Philip Roth and His Defensive Fans Are Their Own Worst Enemies,” read a headline in The Nation. It was no wonder, so the allegation went, that Roth had chosen a predator as his biographer. Had they not read him? His novels were littered with wife-beatings, underage seductions, extramarital affairs. He was, everyone suddenly seemed to agree, the misogynist’s laureate.

Roth Studies are yet to recover from this commotion. If you want to get a Roth biography published these days, you have to strike a rather coy, apologetic tone. This, at any rate, is the tactic pursued by Stephen J. Zipperstein in Philip Roth: Stung By Life, published by Yale University Press this week. Yes, Zipperstein argues, Roth did have a lot of sex, but he was first and foremost a writer; the biographer, therefore, must put aside his prurience and focus on the work itself. Accordingly, Stung By Life passes over much of the juiciest gossip that surrounded Roth in dignified silence, and instead offers long, slightly staid summaries of the novels. The success of the biography — and, indeed, the future of Roth’s reputation — appears to be staked on a very old question: to what extent, when all is said and done, is it possible to separate the art from the artist?

Once the problem is framed in this way, it is hard not to be pessimistic about the prospects for both the Roth biography and the Roth brand. Roth was, after all, a compulsive literary self-examiner and self-mythologizer: at least three of his novels contain a character called “Philip Roth”, and a full nine involve Nathan Zuckerman, whose Jewish upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, relationship with his father, succès de scandale with a ribald early novel called Carnovsky, and litany of physical and mental afflictions are clearly modeled on Roth himself. His first real blockbuster, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), took the form of one long psychoanalytic confession, full of ungenerous family sketches that most readers took as barbs against Roth’s own parents, and a memorable defilement of a piece of liver that led one writer to muse on The Tonight Show — clearly showing where she came down on the issue of separating art from artists — that “Mr Roth is a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand”.

Poring over early interviews with Roth, it is impossible to ignore the sheer frequency with which the question of biography comes up. Following the publication of his first truly great novel, The Ghost Writer (1979) — which sees a fictionalized Roth (Nathan Zuckerman) undertake literary pilgrimage to a fictionalized Bernard Malamud via a fictionalized Saul Bellow — almost every interviewer feels the need to open with the same salvo of inquiries: “Are you Zuckerman?” “On which one of your stunning girlfriends is this woman modeled?” “How do your parents feel, knowing they have been so mercilessly stitched up?” Roth, of course, always rebuffs the questions: life is life, and art is art, and any conflation of the two is just readerly laziness. Still, it is hard, reading over Roth’s back catalog, not to conclude that these conflations and confusions were not at least part of his aesthetic master-plan. Roth was particularly fond of quoting Czesław Miłosz’s aphorism that: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” When Roth picks up his pen, reads the hidden admonition, no-one in his life is safe.

There is a case to be made that Roth’s early novels tend to be successful in strict proportion to how much they cannibalize his life and relationships. To my mind, The Counterlife (1986) is the best of the bunch — yet it is difficult to imagine reading this book without some sense of what kind of creature Roth was. After all, in many ways, it is a novel about how mad, neurotic, possessive and irresponsible writers can often be with the other people in their lives. The general conceit is straight out of Pirandello: one by one, the characters in Zuckerman’s work — his brother, Henry, and Maria, the young woman upstairs with whom he has been having an affair — start rebelling against the author who controls them.

In the final section of The Counterlife, Zuckerman moves to England, and begins to dream of a peaceful, domestic existence with Maria, holed up in her flat in Chiswick with a baby on the way. But he can never permit himself this pleasure; he is too insistent on injecting conflict, neurosis, plot, into everything he touches. “You are forty-five years old, and something of a success,” says the exasperated Maria: “it’s high time you imagined life working out.” She does not get her way. Of course she doesn’t: she has fallen in love with a writer, and to the writer, people are just raw material, pawns to be pushed around on a board. “At the point where ‘Maria’ appears to be most her own woman, most resisting you, most saying I cannot live the life you have imposed upon me,” she exclaims in her final letter to Zuckerman, “she is least real, which is to say least her own woman, because she has become again your “character,” just one of a series of fictive propositions. This is diabolical of you.”

A few years after The Counterlife was published and showered with awards, one of the characters in Roth’s real life began to rebel, too. Claire Bloom, Roth’s English ex-wife, who had suffered through The Counterlife’s composition alongside him, released her own account of their marriage. Her ex-husband, she wrote in her wildly successful memoir Leaving A Doll’s House, was not just a neurotic and a valetudinarian, but a gleeful saboteur of every good thing in his life — cruel to Bloom’s daughter, downright libelous to her family, and all for the simple reason, as she saw it, that “too much harmony had become an obstacle to his creativity”. Almost no-one believed Roth’s side of the story — after all, he had just won the National Critics’ Circle Award by casting himself in much the same light.

What is the partisan of “separating the art from the artist” to make of all this? Clearly, Roth’s work cannot really be fenced off from the unsavoriness of his life; it is effective, in large part, because it appears to be a product of that unsavoriness, the spontaneous emanation of a deeply flawed soul. Does that mean, then, that projects like Zipperstein’s are futile? Or is there another way to advance biographical criticism without just resolving into a moralizing whine?

Perhaps we should look to Roth’s own work for guidance. When I read the novels Roth produced in the aftermath of his marriage to Bloom, I am struck by the influence of one writer in particular — not the well-known ur-Roths like Saul Bellow, Kafka, and Henry James — but Louis Ferdinand Céline, a frothing antisemite, Nazi collaborator, pervert, misogynist, and plausible candidate for the most evil writer of the last century. Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995) sometimes reads almost like a pastiche of Céline: a debauched Jewish puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath rages, mourns, copulates, blasphemes, desecrates with a relentlessness that rivals even great Célinian protagonists like Bardamu and Ferdinand. Even Martin Amis — himself not exactly shy about putting the odd male monster in his fiction — admitted he found the character “rebarbative”.

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In a sense, though, Céline rescued Roth. Smarting from Bloom’s revelations, wary of his growing number of feminist critics, the most indignant man in American letters could have easily retreated into a kind of prickly vanity, a defensive management of reputation. Céline, however, showed him that redemption could be sought in a kind of anti-vanity — that great things could be achieved by an artist who was prepared to cultivate a bad reputation, to deform his own personality into horrific shapes, just to make his work seem all the more stirringly grotesque. In an interview with The Paris Review, Roth explained the method. There were saving graces in Céline’s life: his diligence as a doctor, his work with the League of Nations. “But that wasn’t interesting,” said Roth. “His writing drew its vigor from the demotic voice and the dramatization of his outlaw side (which was considerable), and so he created the Céline of the great novels.”

This, I suspect, is what both Roth’s moralizing detractors and formalist defenders miss. Whenever we feel tempted to moralize about Roth’s life, we have to ask ourselves: is this not, on some level, part of the trap he has laid for us? Does he not, deep down, want to be abhorred? Perhaps this is the true value of the newer, “boring” Roth biographies: they remind us that in many ways, Roth the monster was just as much a creation as Roth the distinguished man of letters. Reading Zipperstein’s book, it is hard not to conclude that though Roth left lots of disgruntled women in his wake, the overwhelming majority accused him not of philandering, or deceiving them, but of being selfish — completely unwilling to compromise on his literary efforts, unwilling to surrender even an hour that could be whiled away in his study to anyone. If you wanted to spend time with Roth, it seems, this was something you just had to accept. Your life would be raided and bowdlerized, your family slandered, your most intimate moments submitted by his publisher to the National Book Award committee.

Perhaps we should condemn Roth for this. There is something genuinely deranged about someone who is prepared to deform themselves for the sake of a novel or two, and who treats everyone who crosses their path as raw material for their act. Still, it is stirring, especially in an era when reputation-management rules, when books are pulped for their author’s alleged impropriety and publishing becomes ever more indistinguishable from public relations, to witness one writer be so willingly scandalous, viewing his reputation as an addendum to his art, and not the other way around. If Philip Roth really was a control-freak, obsessed with maneuvering everyone in his life into the narratives he had ordained, then this was not out of vanity, but out of artistic single-mindedness. Any behavior was permissible, so long as it made the Philip Roth Show appear even more dazzling. In this respect, he had a streak not just of Céline, but of the greatest Jewish writers, of Moses and Jeremiah and Maimonides: he knew, deep down, that the flesh is nothing, compared to the word.

The loss of any profound sensibility — whether in fashion, philosophy, physics, film, literature, politics, music, or engineering — is cause to think about its absence and its impact. Valentino’s passing shows us that high fashion has become a feckless and heartless enterprise, afraid of the poetry of universal forms, and, in particular, of the masculine appraisal of the female form and of the synergistic relationship between the male eye and the feminine as a civilization-enhancing ideal.

What Valentino stood for — what his work manifested — was the apprehension of beauty, rather than the presentation of an ideology. His reign from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and his decline through the 1990s and aughts, almost perfectly tracks the radical aesthetic break after 1989, when a confident, gendered view of both men’s and women’s fashion gave way to the shiftless, formless, deconstructed grunge aesthetic that has, in one form or another, predominated for the last 30 years. 

At the street level, the apotheosis of this drab, ideologized style are the hideously baggy women’s sweatpants and jeans that have come to prevail in the post-#MeToo era: low-rise or otherwise garishly revealing — but, crucially, without celebrating the female form.

Valentino’s gift — visible in dresses for stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Julia Roberts, and most radiantly evident in the dresses he made for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — was for framing his subjects in a way that enhanced their elegance without reduction to plainness or over-simplicity. The essence of a Valentino dress might be summarized as decorated elegance, the suggestion that there could be more, that there is more, that the designer could have done. Valentino’s dresses hover at the edge of restraint, just over the line of good taste. 

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To borrow from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Valentino’s dresses were some of the last miracles of a European tradition that risked, aspired to, and was drawn toward transcendence (or what Sloterdijk calls “verticality”). Valentino never fell from grace or respect in the fashion world; rather, the civilization that he designed for ceased to exist. 

The fall of the Soviet Union, especially, freed the West from the reliance on tradition that it formerly used to draw a clear contrast between itself and a revolutionary utopian enemy. During the jaded ’90s, fashion was flattened and became “horizontal.” The red carpet, which represents what a culture wants to see about itself, lost interest in the female form as a miracle and final flower of civilization, and Valentino’s very Catholic vision of beauty, which was not open to deconstruction and moral nagging, fell out of fashion.

To borrow another key idea from Sloterdijk, fashion over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, seems to have become more and more armored, as if clothes were an immune response to a chaotic and dangerous world. Celebrity fashion’s strategic shift toward the ugly, oversized, and ironic might be described as so many inoculations against judgment — protection against any accusation that the wearer might be secretly allied to the old, pre-social justice cult of sumptuousness epitomized by house Valentino in its heyday.

Valentino’s death this week coincides strangely with the eruption of public drama between Brooklyn Beckham and his family — in particular his mother, Victoria, the pop singer-turned-fashion designer whose minimalist, wearable brand, which is clean, neutral, and risk-free, embodies the very horizontality that Valentino must have abhorred. The strange thing about the intra-Beckham spat, however, is that it seemingly began with the choice of Brooklyn’s betrothed Nicola to wear Valentino, rather than Victoria Beckham, at the couple’s 2022 wedding. The younger Beckhams didn’t just reject their aesthetic matrilineage; they embraced something like an aesthetic nostalgia, a desire for a fashion absolute.

And yet the Beckham family beef, which has played out on Instagram, also demonstrates that nostalgia for the vertical, Catholic sense of beauty has no chance of reaching escape velocity. It will be dogged and enchained by the puerility and ugliness of social media culture and, by extension, a celebrity culture that has lost all connection with iconography and ritual.

If the women that Valentino dressed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s stood for aspiration toward a distant and beautiful absolute, then the celebrities who will undoubtedly line up to wear vintage Valentino in the coming weeks and months will stand for nothing other than the lust for clicks and attention. Jackie Kennedy, dressed in Valentino in the ’60s, could only be glimpsed by the public in snapshots that still contained a sense of scarcity, yearning, and symbolism. Images of celebrities on red carpets today are subject to endless recirculation, memeing, commentary, and now AI recreation and modification. If you don’t like how a celebrity is dressed on the red carpet, you can use AI to realistically redress or undress them, destroying any vestigial sense of the sacred, and degrading yourself in the bargain.

The coincidence of Valentino’s death with Brooklyn Beckham’s break from House Beckham, in the context of our menacingly tasteless algorithmic era, suggests that a rebirth of Valentino’s aesthetic spirit will not, ironically, have much to do with celebrities or celebrity culture. Valentino’s greatest designs came about during an era of analog media, before imagery overload became too profound. My guess is that the designer working in Valentino’s mode — with an eye toward the splendor of the human form, the splendor of clothes, and the union of the two — must serve private audiences away from cameras and screens. He must seek after the limited eternity of private memory, not terabytes. Fashion in the future, ironically, might resemble the anonymous design of the pre-celebrity, premodern era: it will be for aristocrats and salons removed from public consumption and opinion. 

“I love beauty. It’s not my fault,” Valentino said in 2008. It was not a fault, but a virtue, and his legacy will long endure for it.

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.

On the day he resigned, August 10, 2021, Cuomo was famously photographed, coffee cup in hand, entering a helicopter alongside his daughter Michaela. His mayoral campaign launch visually called back to that moment. It’s a testament to how rapidly the cultural atmosphere has shifted: though Cuomo remained largely unapologetic, at one point blaming his handsiness with women on his Italian heritage, he did resign. Now, a little more than three years later, the ex-governor is more brazen, expecting forgiveness for his sexual lapses.

He isn’t alone. In 2017, the comedian Louis CK was accused of masturbating in front of female comedians. But since being canceled, he has toured the country, appeared on several podcasts, and sold out a show at Madison Square Garden. Today, tickets to his upcoming Los Angeles performance are going for several thousands of dollars. #MeToo, it seems, is sunsetting along with the woke era.

It would be tempting to look at this turn of events and conclude that #MeToo failed completely. It would also be wrong: the movement succeeded in dethroning big-time, violent abusers and in raising barriers to the sort of harassment that used to be routine in many workplaces. However, the path to redemption created by the movement has been less than satisfactory, especially for accused men without the benefit of money and fame.

The re-election of Donald Trump and events since his inauguration have confirmed the decline of wokeness. For many people, that means no longer living in fear of the Left’s lifestyle and language police. While #MeToo is in some ways a different phenomenon from woke, the two were blended in the public mind, as part of the same culture of accusation and interrogation. But no more. Comebacks like Louis CK’s and Cuomo’s will proliferate amid the vibe shift, even as the collateral of the #MeToo movement is still settling.

Seven years since the movement first emerged, the men accused in #MeToo fall into three categories: the imprisoned, the forgotten, and the forgiven. Those who have been accused, tried, and convicted of the worst crimes, such as Harvey Weinstein with his numerous assault charges, have been managed and dealt with. The forgotten include men who weren’t all that relevant to begin with, like the actor Scott Baio; men only relevant to niche corners, like the former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein; or men we don’t even recall being accused of in the first place, like Morgan Freeman. However, it’s the third category, those whom we’ve “forgiven” — or at least, those men allowed back into the public eye, men who continue to be afforded opportunities, visibility, and money — that we continue to reckon with.

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How MeToo became too cringe for America

By Kat Rosenfield

Most of the biggest villains of #MeToo, those accused of drugging and raping women, remain either in custody or entirely shunned from society. We felt the ripple effects of those men in more recent exposés about Neil Gaiman and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But for some of the rest — those who perhaps made unwelcome advances upon women, made them uncomfortable, exploited their position of power for otherwise consensual sex, etc. — the cultural and political gates have re-opened.

When we look to how our culture has reintegrated men whose transgressions have largely been nonviolent and semi-consensual, perhaps we can begin to trace #MeToo as a broader project, one that remains unfinished. As a movement, #MeToo has succeeded thus far in reorienting how we view both perpetrators of sexual violence and victims. It is indeed harder now for men in positions of power to quietly continue hurting people thanks to that power. For this, #MeToo should be considered a triumph.

Which brings us to the downsides of #MeToo. In some cases, these have been either been overestimated or largely remedied — with some critical exceptions. There is a dominant cultural narrative among #MeToo’s critics that the movement’s biggest impact has been in making young men more fearful of approaching women and pursuing romance. According to Gallup data, however, this has not panned out: young men report being unaffected by #MeToo, while the share of women who “often or sometimes” worry about being sexually assaulted has risen 15%.

As Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life explained: “#MeToo effectively undercut victim-blaming narratives that perpetuated the idea that sexual assault is the result of poor decisions, miscommunication, or unlucky happenstance…. In the wake of #MeToo, there was recognition that sexual assault and harassment were pervasive problems in American society. Many have come to believe it could happen to anyone”.

This, too, is a triumph, but one that requires more interrogation. Women are now more fearful of sexual assault. Are they right to be? Has the awareness element of the campaign made us any safer? Are we ultimately any less likely to be assaulted, and are those who commit assaults any more likely to be caught?

Our legal system rarely convicts rapists, and reporting your boss for sexual misconduct is very different for someone without the resources of some of Weinstein’s famous accusers like Gwyneth Paltrow. But the kind of justice found outside the legal system, in the social isolation of being cancelled, has had awful consequences for normal people, like the Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who took his life after being ostracized for a bad sexual encounter.

Stars with the platform to do so can rebuild their image. In certain cases, like Louis CK’s, their cancellation can even serve as material for their redemption. A politician like Cuomo, meanwhile, will no doubt persuade some voters to overlook his personal shortcomings to save their city from its crises. Whether Cuomo has a good case to make in this regard is a different question. As it is, his pitch amounts to: forget about my personal lousiness — Gotham is going to hell.

Not everyone is so lucky. #MeToo traveled a long way beyond the rich and famous. In our anti-woke era, we have mostly turned away from the routine of cancellation the movement brought out, but the instinct from which it emerged — our desire to uncover and arbitrate the most personal details of someone’s life and to place them under moral scrutiny accordingly — endures. It isn’t just women of Hollywood who experienced sexual violence or threats of it, and it isn’t just famous people whom we place under this culture of surveillance. Perhaps celebrities can be uncancelled now. But what about the nameless?

Alongside Gaiman, the main protagonist — also in the Tortoise podcast series which preceded it, containing some of the same allegations — was New Zealander Scarlett Pavlovich, now a mature student in the UK. We first encounter her as someone with a major crush on the performance artist Amanda Palmer, who also happens to be Gaiman’s wife and the mother of his child. Pavlovich is 24 when she first meets Gaiman, having been hanging out with Palmer for two years following a chance encounter on an Auckland street. Hours after arriving at his house to babysit, he inveigles Pavlovich into taking what she wrongly presumes will be a solo bath in an outdoor tub. He then allegedly subjects her to unexpected acts of nudity, digital penetration and facial ejaculation, and tells her to call him “master”.

Next, Palmer invites Pavlovich to live with her at a nearby property, and she enters into a loose nannying arrangement with the couple, albeit unpaid. Over the next few months there are further allegations of traumatic encounters with the lecherous sexagenarian: episodes of unexpected and forceful sex, as well as beatings with a belt, and the unwilling ingestion of various disgusting bodily fluids.

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Gaiman’s penchant for sadism has been confirmed to the magazine by various former partners, with one woman saying he was always “pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her”. Equally, though, the magazine related that “all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him”. In a statement on his website, Gaiman wrote this week that he has “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”. Though Pavlovich sent texts which suggested compliance with at least some of what was happening to her, she now says it most definitely was not consensual, describing it as rape and assault.

From this distance, it is impossible to say who is right, though the general grotesque opportunism of Gaiman’s behavior seems clear. The arguments about specifics will run and run, and I have no intention of getting involved. I simply point out that ascertaining the truth here is surely complicated by blithe acceptance of a thing called “BDSM”, a practice believed to possess the magical transformative powers of turning scatological acts of torture and degradation into a fun and sexy stolen afternoon.

The author of the Gaiman article, a journalist called Lily Shapiro, nicely sums up the ludicrousness of the prevailing cultural position. Straight after a description of a violent, physically painful encounter, Shapiro explains that “Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which [Pavlovich] says they had not done”. Later, she describes BDSM as “a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it”.

We are supposed to believe this, Shapiro declares, because there are experts that tell us so: “practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture”, who “have stressed over decades” that active consent “is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse”. Say what you like about the progressive’s tendency to think the worst of people, but the image of the sadist carefully doing his homework, underlining passages from dog-eared texts before venturing off to buy handcuffs and muzzles, surely speaks to a refreshing strain of optimism about human nature.

The fantasy that violence somehow becomes neutral or even good when accompanied by a resounding “yes” is crazy when you actually think about it; and is also belied by the heavy emphasis in the sexpert rulebook upon obtaining resounding expressions of consent at every stage, making it look more like a liability waiver than a responsible exploration of what participants really want. Meanwhile, back on earth, the whole point of BDSM is to mess around in the borderlands between yes and no; for what else does dominance and submission mean? Strictly speaking, it doesn’t count as either of these things if consent is fully and unambiguously present.

Aficionados might protest that what is sought is a pretense or play of dominance and submission, rather than the real thing — but presumably not too loudly or often, for fear of losing their erections. In order to be lost in the moment, it helps if you can mentally distance yourself from the recollected “yes” and focus only on the present “no”. And that’s not a fact about BDSM specifically, but more about the limits of immersive pretense; no theatregoer transported to Elizabethan times appreciates a mobile phone going off.

This preferred gap between the submissive’s vocalization of consent and the act itself makes the whole process somewhat risky for the sadist, as Gaiman has learned to his cost. Even in the best-case scenario, between these two moments there is likely to be enough time for the other to inwardly change her mind and so mentally retract her “yes” — thereby rendering what comes next as a violation according to BDSM health and safety protocols. And there is a further complication, relating not to the moment of the sexual act, but later. Namely, given the nature of what is often being done, submitting to a sadist (whether in “play” or otherwise) tends to produce certain desires in the submissive person that are particularly apt for later disavowal, after the fog of masochism has cleared.

This is because psychological as well as physical domination is a conventional part of the modern sadist’s repertoire. (For some reason, academia has an enormous interest in these transactions, thereby offering ample proof.) Verbal aggression and humiliation, insults, gaslighting, negging, and other pressuring tactics are all often priced into the erotic buffet along with pain, and here too the thrill apparently lies in pushing boundaries. Yet in other contexts — for instance, those said to involve coercive control — prolonged exposure to such strategies is recognized as likely to undermine a person’s secure sense of self. Some philosophers even argue that a person’s desires are “unfree” and not part of her “true self” whenever they are induced by such underhand and manipulative methods.

If this is right, there’s little reason to think the same tools must operate differently in explicitly sadistic relationships; a fact which leaves the “yeses” of submissive partners especially vulnerable to later retraction in the cold light of day. Perhaps even worse for ongoing mental stability, the gospel according to sexperts says that acts of punishment are supposed to be alternated with moments of solicitous affection from the sadist: what is grimly known as “aftercare”. Unless you are completely dissociated, it’s hard to think of a more deranging pattern of emotional engagement. Shapiro laments in her article that Gaiman didn’t offer any aftercare to victims, but it was surely a blessing.

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How vanilla is your sexual fantasy?

By Kathleen Stock

Delving into the past, and trying to remember what you actually wanted in some particular situation from months or years ago, is usually not just a matter of fishing about for the memory of some inner feeling. Most of us don’t have good memories for this sort of thing anyway. It is much more likely you will try to consider the situation you were once in with fresh eyes, and work out from first principles what was actually desirable about it (or otherwise). And if now, in retrospect, you find the situation you are recalling positively undesirable — if, say, you now realize you were being manipulated and pressured into doing things which, you now see, were really very bad for you — then there is a chance you might now say you never truly desired them in the first place, even though at the time you said (even “eagerly and clearly”) that you did. And you might even have a point.

To be clear: this couldn’t work as a legal argument, and nor is it an attempt to adjudicate Gaiman’s guilt or innocence. But it is certainly an argument against getting involved in sadomasochism in general. More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

Cue the scorn. The Left-leaning press has derided the shift as merely the rise of “toxic masculinity” and the hatred of women’s rights. The New York Times described something even more sinister, calling it creeping “hegemonic masculinity”.

This reflexive contempt may unintentionally provide an explanation for the reversal. Many young men believe they live in a liberal-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain rather than empathy as their struggles have mounted.

Imagine an 18-year-old voter filling out his ballot for the first time. Looking back over his childhood and adolescence, this young man would feel his cohort are far from oppressors. Instead, they are drowning in problems.

He would have reached adolescence as the #MeToo movement took hold globally. The legitimate castigation of high-profile sexual abusers would rapidly devolve into widespread call-out culture, in which boys and young men were suspected of perpetuating the patriarchy and rape culture. The ordinary clumsiness of youthful love and teenage romantic inquiry was transformed, overnight, into behaviours that were liable for disciplinary action from school administrators.

The start of high school coincided with liberal bureaucrats locking schools down during the pandemic. Left with no other choices, the youth languished at home with online classes and virtual socialising that amounted to little more than doom scrolling. Last year, a study found that two-thirds of young men believed “no one really knows me” and one in three young men had spent no time with anyone outside their household in the prior week. Surveys show that the number of young men who say they lack a single close friend has soared fivefold since 1990.

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Who is behind Kamala Harris?

By Lee Fang

As college approached, the women touted as the victims of society did not seem to be doing so poorly. The gap between college enrolment, which had been building for decades, exploded — 3.1 million more American women entered higher education than men by 2021. It’s not even just a yawning education disparity gap. In many American cities, young women are galloping ahead of men in terms of income.

And new vices seem to prey particularly among this crowd. The recent legalisation of marijuana and online sports betting in many states has fuelled a skyrocketing rate of young men addicted to high potency pot and app-based gambling. Other more traditional compulsive habits, such as video games and pornography, similarly afflict young men far more than women.

Wasted time and lost savings, compounded by a profoundly lonely existence, can also give way to deaths of despair. The young male suicide rate has tripled since 2000, according to a new study published this week. In some communities, the magnetic pull of nihilistic violence and gang crime has a particular allure.

In previous generations, young men yearning for transgressive content and open expression had plenty of safe options. There were endless sources of edgy magazines like VICE, or raunchy late-night comics poking fun at the double-standards and absurdities around us. That changed in less than a decade. VICE transformed into a liberal clickbait farm and then bankrupted itself as internal accusations of bigotry tore it apart, while comedians were cancelled over “problematic” jokes.

The search for verboten ideas and thoughtcrime discussions has shifted almost entirely to places like Joe Rogan’s podcast. It is now among the most popular broadcasts of any type in the country. With over 11 million weekly listeners, the show is where young men go if they want to hear critical discussions with independent-minded thinkers.

Not long ago, Rogan’s show was embraced by outsiders of all types. Having previously hosted Bernie Sanders for a thoughtful discussion about political corruption, Rogan soon after endorsed the socialist’s 2020 bid for the presidency.

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But the popularity of Rogan’s show angered the Left-leaning cultural order, which pushed to have him removed from Spotify and YouTube. Democratic politicians were warned to not appear over false claims that Rogan harboured racist views.

In this light, Kamala Harris’s refusal to appear on the show in the waning weeks of the campaign was more than a mere tactical mistake. It was an implicit endorsement of the cancellation campaign waged against Rogan — a dogwhistle for young men primed in the cancel culture wars.

And Harris’s rise may have reminded young men that they now compete in a world which at times seems stacked against them. As a presidential candidate in 2020, she received zero delegates, yet became Joe Biden’s running mate. And this year, she faced no competition for the nomination. Democratic powerbrokers, backed by billionaires and much of the party elite, simply coronated her.

On the other hand, Trump, for all his swaggering bravado, humbled himself with intimate, highly emotional appearances on podcasts favoured by young men — for example speaking with the comedian Theo Von about his brother’s struggles with addiction and depression before his suicide.

The Trump campaign, for what’s it worth, carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation, keenly aware of the culture wars and its impact. Its closing television advertisement depicted an America silenced by false accusations of hate speech and humiliated into labelling its values as shameful. “Our patriotism was called toxic,” the narrator intoned. “Men could beat up women and win medals but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.”

In many respects, young men have faced down a liberal cultural order that has reduced them to objects of scorn. For a majority of young male voters, the choice to send a message back was clear. Trump is perfectly suited as an avatar of defiance on the campaign trail.

Yet a more positive, policy-based agenda to shore up the material interests of young men may be more elusive. There are suggestions to reform Title IX, the civil rights code that has been widely accused of expelling men accused of sexual misconduct from college campuses without any semblance of due process. Any broad improvement in the economy can lift the economic prospects of young men. J.D. Vance, in particular, has called for the continued deployment of Biden-era spending programmes on chip factories and electric vehicle plants, albeit with stripping gender and race-based mandates embedded into the funding.

That may not be enough to soothe the souls of young men victimised by a pervasive media culture and academic ideology primed to see them as the enemy. A more fundamental change may require reform instead from the liberal coalition groups that make up the Democratic Party. The same activist class and foundation-funded world that decided to scapegoat men in the first place, now reeling from their electoral loss, must reassess the excesses of gender and racial identity politics.

How to champion the interests of women without seeing identity as a zero sum game in which lifting one group up must come at the expense of the other? How to extend empathy to both young men and women? If the 2024 election results are to signal a permanent realignment, such questions can’t simply be swept away.

Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.

It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.

The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.

To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.

Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.

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Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady

By Kat Rosenfield

Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.

At worst, though, this training seems like it was designed in a lab to replace a functional, high-trust workplace with one in which employees are both in constant terror of giving offence and primed for any opportunity to take it: ratting each other out to HR for failing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns, hand-wringing about whether it’s harassment to invite a gluten-intolerant colleague out for a pint, asking formal consent to high-five. And I particularly have questions about the instructional video on gender identity, featuring a montage of daring gender nonconformists such as… a man holding a baby and a woman lifting weights. Should we really be telling people who literally work at a gym that every woman in the weight room is gender nonconforming? Isn’t this crude and sexist stereotyping the opposite of inclusive? Excuse me, sir, but don’t you know that holding your infant child is for sissy girls? A real man would drop-kick that baby through the goalposts at the Big House while shotgunning two beers at once!

It’s strange to realise that all of this has been done in the name of the #MeToo movement, whose original purpose was to raise awareness of how women continue to be held back in the workplace on the basis of sex. It wasn’t just harassment or assault; it was pregnancy discrimination, gendered workplace expectations, the way the inescapable presence of sexuality loomed in the background of our professional lives. A woman who is expected to sleep with her boss in order to advance professionally is in a terrible position, but so too is the woman at the same company whose boss doesn’t want to sleep with her, and whose prospects suffer as a result.

But insofar as this problem can be solved, it’s not by ensnaring would-be perpetrators in a web of red tape; it’s through the slow and deliberate work of effecting cultural change, and the immediate improvement of support for the victims of discrimination. On this front, I’ll grant that the Time’s Up Act isn’t entirely useless. Those who wish to file a workplace harassment complaint now have up to 300 days to do so (it used to be 180 days). And while employers were already prohibited from retaliating against complainants, it is now also illegal to change the terms of a person’s employment after they make a harassment complaint — by relocating that person, for instance — without their consent.

But mostly, this legislation is typical of the extreme do-somethingism that politicians become afflicted with whenever a lot of Americans — and particularly the subset of Americans who walk the red carpet at the Oscars wearing $85,000 gowns — are up in arms. From the War on Drugs to the Patriot Act, moral panics tend to make for bad policy. And in this case, the clarion call of “There oughta be a law!” becomes complicated by the fact that there already is one: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a nationwide edict against workplace discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, one which has been consistently upheld by both the courts and a cultural consensus that women should be able to do their jobs unmolested.

The problem is, there’s a difference between making a thing illegal and writing that thing out of existence; much like thieves, murderers and fake Nigerian prince email scammers, sexual harassers are still out there, harassing people sexually. But rather than admitting the limits of their power to eradicate the world’s ills through bureaucracy, politicians instead conclude that the existing law making workplace harassment illegal doesn’t make it illegal enough. It needs more bells and whistles! More rules and regulations! We need a cursed matryoshka doll of policies within policies within policies, each more unwieldy and elaborate than the last.

This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone. The Weinstein-esque perpetrators at whom the #MeToo movement took aim are not going to be deterred by an extra hour of anti-harassment training, if they even have to take it (most, I would imagine, are getting an assistant to complete it for them). This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.

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The cruel world of yoga

By Kat Rosenfield

It’s worth noting that employees like me are often not compensated for this training, and it goes without saying that we are not meant to model our actual behaviour on it. It’s not just that being maximally sensitive to microaggressions is incompatible with a job that requires you to stand at the front of a crowded room, in spandex, lunging and squatting while two dozen people stare at your body in order to mirror your movements. It’s that fitness is a service industry, one in which tolerating people’s idiosyncrasies, oddities and low-key improprieties is part of the job.

Of course, if I were sexually harassed at work, I’m sure my employer would protect me to whatever extent required by law — but only because it’s required by law, much like the two-hour harassment training, which I’m equally sure the company would point to as evidence that they ought not be held responsible for the bad acts that happen under their watch. We gave them the training! It’s not our fault! Ultimately, these measures are little more than exercises in box-checking compliance, a way for corporations to dodge lawsuits and displace the accountability for workplace harassment onto someone else’s shoulders.

This was never more apparent than in the moment after I finished the final quiz, when I was greeted with a pop-up and a countdown clock: “This course requires you to spend a certain amount of time on your learning experience,” it read. “Please go back and review the course material until you’ve reached the time limit.” In spite of everything, I had finished too quickly; I would need to stare aimlessly at the module for another 30 minutes to fulfil my compliance. Time’s Up, indeed.

All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. 

In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to. 

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Why is Canada betraying women?

By Julie Bindel

Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.

When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”

For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”

Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said. 

Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”

Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”. 

That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.

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At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.

How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”

As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution. 

As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent. 

The message of Twilight is clear. Beyond this normie world is a brooding Byron-Darcy hybrid with a glut of green flags: he is universally desired, he doesn’t fancy anyone else and — oh! — he could kill you, but he won’t. Since 2005, Edward Cullen has been a comfort to teenage girls: the right man will not destroy you; he will instead choose to save you from mediocrity and give you all the trappings — marriage, baby, eternal life? — of conventional happiness. Not so scary after all.

Almost 20 years after the publication of Stephenie Meyer’s first novel, the Twilight generation has grown up. Little girls have become world-weary women, buffeted about by the Grimm realities of dating culture, resentfully growing older than Bella was ever allowed to. With them, their desires have ripened.

Now, Meyer’s disciples have worked up a thirst for darker material. The past couple of years have seen an explosion in fantasy “smut”, thanks to TikTok’s “BookTok” community. The bulging-biceped hero of Mills & Boon has been chased away by a horde of improbable new sex symbols, cheered on by “creators” telling their legions of breathless viewers “Guys — this is the spiciest book I’ve ever read!” The content of these books? I’m embarrassed to tell you. Let’s start with an example.

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Glory Milking Farm is a wildly popular “sweet and steamy monster romance” from the Cambric Creek erotica series by C.M. Nascosta. The book has been dropping jaws across social media since its release in 2021, and concerns the love story of “typical Millennial” Violet, who decides to take up rather hands-on work at a farm for hunky minotaurs (the premise, something to do with manufacturing erectile dysfunction medication for human men, is interesting to nobody, least of all the author). One “out-of-her-league minotaur”, an immortal sentence in itself, takes a special interest and demands private “milking” sessions. Can Violet handle it?

I don’t know, I’m not going to read it. Nor will I link to Amazon, you perverts. But be assured that this is just one of hundreds of monster-porn works pumping life into the publishing industry; we have the Ice Planet Barbarians series about aliens with sex-toy-like appendages, Ensnared (a spider-based porno) and endless iterations of The XYZ Bride (orcs, dragons, whatever you fancy). At the heart of each is the very Twilight-y premise of the beastly, sexy killer who just wants you, but with much more actual sex than we ever got from the Cullen clan.

In these books, heroes exhibit meticulous tailoring to female desires. They are loyal, have unquenchable libidos and boast anatomies which are designed to accommodate whatever acrobatic sexual act the heroine craves. Yes, tastes have become more extreme with readers’ ages — but there is a particular innovation to these monsters which says something about what women really want: in a lot of these books, the “men” can’t bloody speak. They can probe you, tear you open, batter you about — but never chastise, patronise or lead you on.

The risk of slaughter is more essential with non-humans, and helpfully at one remove from the complex politics of the post-MeToo age. This was first and perhaps most notoriously explored in Marian Engel’s 1976 shocker Bear, in which an unfulfilled office worker strikes up a romantic and sexual rapport with an enormous, well, bear. In the end, it nearly kills her with a single stroke of its claw on her back (cute!) — and, having had a taste of the big cuddly bedrock of erotic risk, the protagonist trots back to her old life. These stories are a way for women to confront their desire for self-immolation outside of the oppressive framework of the real world. And, critically, all risk in these novels is purely physical — the emotional side of things is sewn up, guaranteed by what often amounts to a conventional fairytale monogamy arc.

Such monstrous tastes have invigorated female sexuality since long before Angela Carter’s electric — and, for me, world view-shaping — collection of refashioned fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979). In these tales, heroines embark on Kill Bill-like rampages against their oppressors: the protagonist of The Erl King strangles her captor with his own hair, while the mother of the young bride in the titular story races in to gun down the Marquis as he prepares to behead her. The point of Carter’s work went far beyond the tiresome blurb of a “feminist retelling”; her twisted iterations of culturally endemic stories such as Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast interrogate their masculine hostility; they question what all who were once little girls have been whisperingly warned: avoid the woods; do not trust charm; some wolves will bleed you dry.

Some three decades after this gruesomely sensual evisceration of folk stories, Twilight arrived to put them back in their place; Edward and Bella are merely echoes of what Carter, Marina Warner and Carol Ann Duffy had sought to make ironic. The conventionality of modern romances — monstrous or not — may mark a turning away from the radical refashionings of second wave feminism; I could not blame those raised on a diet of Disney fluff feeling let down by the ostensibly liberated but miserable climate of modern dating.

But though as love stories they may be picket-fence conventional, monster romances are anything but when it comes to the action itself. Scanning through a couple of the big hitters, the content of which I will leave you to discover after your next divorce, it occurs to me how very different sex is in female literotica from the jackhammering sterility of male-marketed porn. There is a feminised tenderness to the men/beasts (even when they can but grunt, the grunt is always kind). There is so much emotional intimacy — to the extent that I find this somehow more mortifying than the actual “action”. Even the sex is much more complex: of course, written cues for arousal (swollen this, throbbing that) are almost as formulaic as the various escalating images that make up a video sex scene — but writers try to shake things up physically in a way that puts the variety of men’s porn in the shade (a perfunctory accessory such as a hair bow, quickly removed, is usually all that divides one inevitable pounding from another).

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And, most distinctly of all, women actually bond over their shared erotic interests. Online forums and TikTok pages are dedicated to book-club-style discussions of characters and plots. Perhaps it is the (undeserved) literary veneer to this stuff that removes the shame of discussing frankly weird fantasies; perhaps it is the closed off nature of these virtual communities, the much-vaunted “safe space”. All that is clear is that you certainly do not find reams of analysis on equivalent male subreddits. For this, we must be grateful.

A proliferation of this material — much of it is self-published or simply posted to fanfic websites — has allowed women to explore extremely niche specialities. A glance at the r/RomanceBooks Reddit forum reveals the vast volume of requests: one reader wants a story that is “literally the movie Megamind as a romance novel”. Another desires “merman/water creature romance that DON’T gain magical human legs and ISN’T set underwater”. One can only imagine an erotic reimagining of a trawler net, limp haddock flipping about. Another daringly requests “spanking between the cheeks”. The less said about that, the better.

What would Angela Carter have to say about all this? In her brilliant 1978 interrogation of pornographic archetypes, The Sadeian Woman, she frames porn as “a satire on human pretensions” which “keeps sex in its place. That is, under the carpet.” For Carter, it is a way of reaffirming social mores through titillation — consolidating the myths of the supremacy of men and the vanishing emptiness of women. In a charmingly pre-internet way, she divides the sexes into those who buy dirty mags and videos and those who read “love stories for women’s magazines, that softest of all forms of pornography” which, she claims, are even less grounded in reality and therefore more noxious. A book about minotaur ejaculation may seem a million miles away from the blushing snippets at the back of a Seventies Cosmo, but they share the greatest fantasy of all: that of perfection in relationships, of easy, instant and sustainable passion. As shocking as the action might be, this framework always ensures that, in the end, sex is kept in its place: fenced in by the optimism and security of love. At least dirty mags never lied about that.

One theory of Carters still particularly stands up in the Information Age. She says that whereas violence between men is depicted at liberty in film, “erotic violence committed by men upon women cuts too near the bone”. This anxiety may explain the myriad monsters of modern smut: their beastliness renders the story a kind of pastiche, a way of addressing and enjoying poisonous truths about the physical jeopardy of being a woman without the depressing reality that human men will, sometimes, use their dominance to obliterate us.

The atmosphere is becoming a little feverish: according to Le Figaro, festival organisers are assembling a crisis management team, in the belief that 10 high-profile directors and actors may be publicly denounced at Cannes. It is said that the list of names has already been sent anonymously to organisations that finance French films.

A long-standing omertà — as many refer to it — over the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse in France’s creative industries has finally been broken, and some of the most respected cultural figures of the post-1968 era are in the firing line. The most recognisable of them is Depardieu, who in the last few years has seemed to stagger from scandal to controversy without a pause. Last December, his personal reputation seemed to hit a new low with the screening of a French documentary, Depardieu: The Fall of the Ogre.

The film showed footage of the actor in North Korea in 2018, invited there on a celebratory jolly to mark the 70th anniversary of the dictatorship. Depardieu was relaxed, on good form: he could scarcely encounter a young woman without blurting out sexual comments, a kind of ongoing chatter between himself and his libido, with constant references to his genitals — “I’ve got a beam in my pants!” — her genitals, and the attributes of both. A visit to an equestrian centre sparked a stream-of-consciousness reflection on the sexual pleasure women allegedly get from riding horses, which managed to include a passing 10-year-old girl. His female interpreter, compelled to accompany this honoured Gallic guest of the regime, tried to stay smiling and polite. In North Korea even more than in most places, I imagine, she really didn’t feel she had much choice.

Depardieu was there with his friend, the author and film-maker Yann Moix, a winner of several French literary prizes who crashed into the Anglo-Saxon consciousness in 2019, aged 50, when he said that women over 50 were “too, too old” to love. Equally unbearable, romantically speaking, were “white western” women, he said: in fact, he now preferred dating young Asian women. The predictable outrage had ensued, followed by Moix’s equally predictable defence of the freedom to state one’s preferences and predilections. But compared to Depardieu, Moix was a junior league sexual troll. On the North Korean trip, sometimes he looked a bit anxious. “You picked the short straw with Gérard!” he told the interpreter, in what may have been a stab at empathy. In the end he had chosen not to screen the film he initially meant to make about their trip: it is only glimpsed here, in clips.

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The Fall of the Ogre detailed a number of accusations of sexual assault against Depardieu, on film sets where other crew members had allegedly responded with laughter or turning a blind eye. “That’s Gérard!” people used to say. Another young woman, Charlotte Arnould, who had thought of him as a friend of the family, accused him of sexual assault and rape when she was 22. Questions were raised over earlier press interviews, in which Depardieu suggested he had participated in rapes in his famously delinquent youth, in Chateauroux in central France. The first remark was in Film Comment magazine, in 1978, when he said: “I had plenty of rapes, too many to count.” In 1990, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the actor to clarify whether he had indeed taken part in rape, and he replied, “Yes. But it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.” A column in The Washington Post expressed outrage, but Depardieu said he had been mistranslated, and denied raping anyone. Back then, France had shrugged its collective shoulders.

The actor’s one-time agent Jean-Louis Livi gave a telling response in the documentary. “I know Gerard Depardieu,” he said, “He is neither a rapist nor a predator. He’s a monster, yes. But he’s also a sacred monster. He’s a monument.” It’s an interesting series of statements to unpack. First, a flat and decisive denial: “He is neither a rapist nor a predator.” Then, a disarming admission: “He’s a monster, yes”. But if Depardieu is indeed a “monster”, then how did it manifest itself, precisely what kind of monster was he? No matter: a “sacred” one, apparently, too big and legendary to attack, his talent, whims and eccentricities placing him beyond restraint or criticism; a “monument” to French culture, in fact, to the very idea of France. Attack Depardieu, and you are attacking France itself.

It’s a notion which goes right to the top. When President Macron was asked about the actor, following the screening of The Fall of an Ogre, Depardieu was already under formal investigation for rape. Macron said, correctly, that the judicial process should be allowed to take its course, and Depardieu be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But then he added: “I’m a great admirer of Depardieu; he’s an immense actor…a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as a president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”

That statement of solidarity — “he makes France proud” — triggered fury in French feminists and Left-wing politicians. Yet it also missed the essential point, perhaps deliberately. No-one, even Depardieu’s accusers, has ever questioned his talent as an actor. It’s clear that he brings something exceptional to the screen, a kind of primal energy, an instinctive and restless intelligence which may indeed be partly related to the survival skills honed during his rough upbringing, spent in petty criminality and the hectic flouting of middle-class norms. The question now being asked is whether his status in French cinema should place his alleged harassment, assault and possibly even rape of women beyond social condemnation and the reach of the law.

That question doesn’t only pertain to Depardieu: it goes to the heart of the French cultural establishment. For a long time it was tacitly accepted in French culture that the celebration of male genius and creative self-expression took precedence over the sexual boundaries of women, and sometimes those of children. When #MeToo exploded in America, France stood apart for a time, wary of a spate of denunciations and cancellations. But then stories from French women themselves started to emerge. They were fuelled by a pent-up, long-held female anger at male abuses which had long operated under the cover of a seductive idea of a liberal French culture that was proudly distinct from the punitive, uptight mores of the Anglosphere. Many of them circled painful questions of age and consent.

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Consent was, in fact, the title of the 2020 memoir by Vanessa Springora, a prominent French writer and editor, who said that she had been abused as a teenager between the ages of 14 and 16 by the well-known author Gabriel Matzneff, then aged 50. He first began having sex with her when she was 14, after they met at a dinner party, and thereafter she became his “girlfriend” or his “muse”. Matzneff was open about his preferences for very young girls and boys: in 1974 he published a pamphlet called “The Under-16s” which included lines such as “to sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure”. In another book, in the Eighties, he detailed his sexual experiences in the Philippines with boys aged between eight and 14. For decades, such unabashed revelations did nothing to threaten Matzneff’s apparently secure place within the cultural establishment.

Reputational risk, where it existed, seemed not to await those who pursued children for sex, but those who challenged them. When, in 1990, Matzneff appeared on a French literary chat show, the host quizzed him playfully about his penchant for very young girls, and the author began to expand confidently upon his theme. There was one strongly dissenting voice, however: a French-Canadian novelist called Denise Bombardier, who attacked his behaviour “an abuse of power”, remarking that “literature cannot serve as an alibi”. For this, she was roundly derided by a number of French intellectuals: the late author and critic Phillippe Sollers called her a “bitch”. Her publisher explicitly warned her that “your future as a writer in France will be compromised”; Le Monde, she said later, never afterwards published another article about her books.

The late Bombardier has been vindicated by history, but the elderly Matzneff cuts a disgraced figure: his books have been pulled from shops, and he was stripped of the state aid given to writers. He might be forgiven a degree of confusion at his current pariah status, however, if only because at one time his world-view had so many friends. When he wrote a letter to Le Monde in 1977, arguing that under-age children should be permitted in law to consent to sex with adults, it was co-signed by such luminaries as Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

As Springora did with publishing, Judith Godrèche has now placed a stick of gelignite under the French film industry. At the age of 14, she said, she became the “girlfriend” of the then 39-year-old arthouse director Benoit Jacquot, with whom she stayed until the age of 20. She describes a strange relationship: she was never actually attracted to him, she said, and yet she became his “child-wife”, initially over-awed by his aura of worldly success, his encompassing control, and, she alleged, his domestic violence. The odd thing was, she says, that none of the adults around her seemed to treat it as at all abnormal. In fact, she attracted another adult predator, she alleged, in a situation tolerated by Jacquot: when the film director Jacques Doillon was directing her, at 15, in a film called La Fille de 15 Ans Godrèche says he sexually assaulted her on two occasions, once at the home he shared with the English actress Jane Birkin.

A common theme is of children who felt confused and abandoned by the code of the grown-ups around them. In 2021 Camille Kouchner published a book which revealed that her step-father had regularly sexually abused her twin brother when he was just 14 years old. Her step-father was Olivier Duhamel, a prominent intellectual and politician. Her mother, Evelyne Pisier, was a star of the French Left: a well-known feminist and political scientist who had a four-year affair with Fidel Castro. The family was stylish, wealthy and well-connected: its members prided themselves on not being “prudes”. Boundaries were so far sunk under the concept of “freedom” that the twins at first didn’t know how to process their stepfather’s behaviour. Camille’s brother told her, “I don’t know if we should be angry”. When they finally told their mother, she supported her husband.

Each set of allegations is specific to its case, and the individuals concerned: it is important not to conflate them. But nonetheless there are certain themes common to the culture in which French women have been steeped. The career of Serge Gainsbourg, the famously louche balladeer whom President Mitterrand called “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire” is a case in point. While no-one has suggested that Gainsbourg crossed a line privately, his public persona knowingly toyed with the transgressive charge associated with under-age sex: Lemon Incest, which he sang with his then 12-year-old daughter Charlotte, was an ambiguous paean to father-daughter love; his album “The Ballad of Melody Nelson” is about the adult narrator’s sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. France seemed to agree that Gainsbourg was shocking, charming, sexy, a great seducer. Certainly, his talent was undeniable. But by the end, his provocations looked increasingly crass: a drunken Gainsbourg on a French chat show, pawing the hair of a young, startled Whitney Houston while mumbling “I want to ferk yeu”.

For men such as Matzneff and Jacquot, however, it is not simply that society affected not to look. It did look, and it approved. In fashionable Parisian circles, the ability to seduce and parade the very young was a status-enhancer, signalling a man’s cultural power. Crashing through barriers in plain sight was the sign of a bohemian risk-taker, sanctioned by the spirit of rebellion.

Now the erstwhile objects of that quest for sexual freedom have grown up, and are interrogating who owned the freedom in the first place. They are often women in their forties and fifties, bent on protecting a younger generation, asking why they received no protection from adults themselves. They are pointing out that the concept of sexual freedom, so prized both by strands of the French Revolution and the soixante-huitards, is not owned equally, but heavily subject to status and context. The “freedom” of the child was never remotely equivalent to the freedom of the adult, nor that of the star equivalent to that of the extra on set, paid by the day. That may not invalidate art, but it does place boundaries on the artist. At Cannes, and elsewhere, France’s age of the sacred monster is coming to an end.

This sentence turned up on protest posters, infographics, it was even stencilled across a stone threshold on the campus at Yale University. But that was then. Today, in a review of Ford’s new memoir, One Way Back, its treatment is less than reverent: the New York Times describes it as “a piece of refrigerator poetry suddenly ringing out in the wood-panelled Hart Senate Office Building”.

One Way Back is a meandering, behind-the-scenes look at Ford’s choice to come forward about the alleged assault, which she said took place at a party in 1982, when she and Kavanaugh were both teenagers. It also functions as an airing of grievances — against the politicians, lawyers, and activists who turned her trauma into a political football, but also against those journalists who promised to tell her side of the story, with inevitably disappointing results: “I’d spend hours upon hours walking them through my story. Then their book would come out, and I’d read it and feel my world turning upside down all over again… it feels like the opposite of the justice you so desperately seek.”

Heavy on family anecdotes and ocean metaphors that serve to remind the reader that Ford is both a mother and a surfer, this memoir suggests a desire to take her story back — if not for the sake of justice, then at least for the satisfaction of having the last word. But nothing in One Way Back approaches the insight nor status of the “indelible in the hippocampus” line. Refrigerator poetry or not, this is the nature of memory: the best moments of our lives are ephemeral, slippery, like trying to capture water in your hand. And the less pleasant the memory, the more vivid it tends to be.

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Perhaps this is why I still remember how I felt that week in 2018, as I watched Ford being replaced on the stand by an increasingly agitated Brett Kavanaugh, who blustered and wept and laboured to explain the meaning of, among other things, an Eighties-era joke about butt-chugging. Pages from his high school yearbook had been blown up to poster size for the occasion, like exhibits in a murder trial. It was like a cringe scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, except without the promised relief of eventually getting to laugh. I turned to my husband.

“Christ, this is embarrassing,” I said.
“For Kavanaugh?”
“For everyone.”

Even then, it was obvious that the did-he-or-didn’t-he question would never be resolved. In my opinion, the likeliest theory remains Katie Herzog’s, that what Ford remembered as a traumatic assault was, to the men in question, more like a dumb party prank on the order of drawing a penis on your friend’s face after he falls asleep. Stupid, yes, and arguably cruel, but not the kind of thing you would necessarily remember unless you happened to be the victim. But, then, the issue of Kavanaugh’s culpability was quickly eclipsed by an absolute circus of rabid frothing partisanship. On his side, there were tears, beers, conspiracy theories. On the opposing team — a unified apparatus consisting of Democratic party politicians, the anti-Trump Resistance, and the employees of every mainstream media organisation — it was a full-blown moral panic.

And if Ford’s testimony was both credible and serious, what happened next was less so. It wasn’t just the spectacle of American elected officials poring over dumb, teenage yearbook jokes as if they were unraveling the secrets of the Zodiac killer. It was that publications like the New Yorker, sensing blood in the water, relaxed their standards in order to amplify the thinly sourced allegations that Kavanaugh (or was it?) had flashed his penis (or… was it?) in the face of a woman at a college party — and then relaxed them yet again, this time in the service of the even more sensational, even less credible claim, that Kavanaugh had been seen standing in line at parties to gang rape women who had been incapacitated by drugs. Michael Avenatti — the celebrity lawyer who advanced these wilder claims and who is now serving a 14-year prison sentence for fraud — not only became a fixture on every cable news show, but was even briefly heralded as a leading Democratic candidate in the upcoming 2020 campaign to oust Donald Trump from the White House.

It was, in hindsight, a ridiculous time — but an exciting one, too, with a heady sense of possibility in the air. Even if we couldn’t ultimately derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court (and maybe we could?), we could certainly spoil the moment by publicly humiliating him. Democratic politicians and media commentators alike gleefully pronounced that Kavanaugh might ascend to the court, but it would always be “with an asterisk next to his name”.

The truth, inevitably, proved more complicated. By late 2020, the anti-Kavanaugh craze was replaced with a fresh furore over the Supreme Court candidacy of the religious conservative Amy Coney Barrett. The MeToo movement then flagged and fizzled out, amid a pandemic-era cultural reckoning that brought race, not sex, to the forefront. By 2022, when a 26-year-old man showed up at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a plan to “save Roe v Wade” by assassinating the justice, there was hardly a peep from Kavanaugh’s former antagonists. Being mad at Brett Kavanaugh was, like, sooooo five years ago.

This may explain today’s markedly lukewarm reception to Blasey Ford — who, at the peak of her fame, was sleeping over at Oprah’s mansion, partying with Gwyneth Paltrow, and being hailed as such an icon, a modern day folk hero, that Laura Dern would surely play her in the inevitable Hollywood biopic. Certainly, there was a time when One Way Back would have been released to celebrity endorsements, wall-to-wall-coverage, and a million-dollar marketing campaign; it would have been a seminal text of the MeToo movement, alongside books such as She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, or Ronan Farrow’s Catch & Kill. But these titles, released in 2019, now feel like the demarcation point of MeToo’s steep and inevitable decline, while today, One Way Back has received only a handful of reviews, none particularly positive. The New York Times, in its dutiful assessment of the book as “important” and “lucid”, does little to obscure an overall tone of disdain; the Atlantic’s review is headlined, dryly, “Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again.” What little praise Ford’s effort has received is delivered with the forced cheerfulness of a person accepting a terrible hand-knitted wool sweater, in July, in a colour she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. How thoughtful of you, I… er, I can see you worked really hard on it.

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Some will interpret this change in tone as evidence of wokeness in decline, and of a media class that lost its mind during the Trump years collectively edging back in the direction of sanity. Maybe so. But it is equally possible that this is less about the fall of a given ideology, than the endless churn of the news cycle, in which every Current Thing is a national emergency until it’s replaced by the next one — where being ready to leap anew on each bandwagon is a feature, not a bug. Consider that the power of MeToo in 2018 stemmed not from our sympathetic feelings toward victims of sexual assault, but from a sense that allegations could be used to political advantage, that even the most powerful man might be toppled if credibly accused.

Now consider the impossibility of continuing to believe this in a world in which the leading candidates for president are either the hair-sniffing, forehead-kissing, vaguely inappropriate octogenarian who once encouraged reporters to leer at a picture of his wife in a bikini (“She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?”) — or, the pussy-grabbing, porn star-bribing, thrice-married adulterer who was recently ordered to pay millions of dollars to the woman he was found legally liable for having sexually assaulted. Who, in this moment, would waste their time trying to MeToo either of these men? Better to focus on Trump as a criminal, insurrectionist, threat to democracy; better to paint Biden not as a sex pest, but a senile walking corpse. In the end, our national discourse is governed not by ideology but political expediency; the movements are a means, not an end.

Christine Blasey Ford originally emerged at the perfect time to be hailed a resistance hero: MeToo was still ascendant, Roe had not been overturned, the battle to oust Trump from the presidency was not yet won. But that was then; the country and the conversation has moved on, and Ford’s reappearance on the public stage has not only been met without rapture, it does not even appear to be particularly welcome. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about her testimony is how ephemeral it feels, less a watershed moment in history than an of-the-moment trend — like Eighties bangs, or those pink pussy hats — which we all participated in gamely enough but now find vaguely embarrassing. Most things, it turns out, do not remain indelible in the national hippocampus; most things, once we’ve rinsed them of usefulness, we are happy to stuff down the memory hole.

Some old men lose their edge as they age, while others develop a sharper one. Otto Penzler, the white-haired proprietor of the storied Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, would seem to be the latter. Now 81, Penzler is a polarising figure within the mystery writing community, the kind of person whose name elicits either a grin or a wince. In addition to building from scratch the biggest mystery bookshop in the world, he has edited dozens of mystery novels and anthologies and overseen multiple publishing imprints. At the height of his power, a good word from Penzler could make a writer’s career.

But his good words, his critics note, were reserved largely for white, male, heterosexual writers — and Penzler has a reputation for being less than reverent about the sacred cows of his more progressive peers. In 1991, he publicly criticised the women’s mystery writer’s group Sisters in Crime in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “It’s a negative, flawed concept. It’s an organization that espouses non-sexism but is sexist.” In 2005, he described cosy mysteries as “not serious literature”, adding: “Men take [writing] more seriously as art.” More recently, he excoriated the Mystery Writers of America after the organisation, under pressure, rescinded its plans to honour mystery novelist and former prosecutor Linda Fairstein with a “Grand Master” award for literary achievement. (This was part of a broader campaign to cancel Fairstein over her role in prosecuting the Central Park Five, spurred by a Netflix series that portrayed her as the case’s chief villain; a defamation lawsuit brought by Fairstein against the series’ creators is currently making its way through the courts.)

Among those who dislike him, these incidents are seen as damning evidence in favour of Penzler’s defenestration. A recent X thread, prompted by his upcoming appearance at a mystery event called Bouchercon, bemoans his continued influence despite what the author describes as his “terrible opinions and inexcusable behavior” — although the behaviour in question, as I discovered in the course of reporting this piece, is more a matter of rumour than record. For those who remember the MeToo-era debacle of the Shitty Media Men list, it’s character assassination via whisper network: people will tell you that there are stories, but plead ignorance when asked to relate one. Penzler’s status as a Bad Man is entirely vibes-based. A snub here, a brusque comment there. Once, perhaps, there was a confrontation with a female critic who had panned a book written by one of Penzler’s friends, after she showed up uninvited to a party at his bookstore.

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Penzler told me he doesn’t remember this incident, but admits that it’s in the realm of possibility. “Did I possibly call her a bitch, yes. Because she was,” he says, mildly — and if a comment like this makes you leap up in outrage, you are almost certainly not a person who would enjoy Penzler’s company. He’s friendly but blunt, impatient with foolishness, and — as he is the first to note — his personality doesn’t always play well in a world where people increasingly expect a soft touch.

When I first stumbled across that X thread, it initially struck me as no different from a hundred other minor publishing squabbles: the tiniest of tempests in the teensiest of teapots. But look through the lens of the zeitgeist, and there’s something intriguing here: an evolving and increasingly fraught relationship between the archetypal codger and a culture that no longer reveres him. We used to extend some grace to society’s granddads, acknowledging the possibility that a person old enough to have watched the moon landing live on TV might reasonably, if not wisely, see things differently from the strident 25-year-olds among us. But that grace has been replaced by a conviction that such opinions aren’t just embarrassing in an “old man yells at cloud” sort of way, but intolerable, harmful, toxic — and that a person who holds them needs to either get with the times, or be ostracised from polite society.

Mystery writing, like the rest of publishing, has undergone a reckoning in recent years — and what the diversity activists want is nothing less than a metaphorical asteroid hit, an extinction-level event that clears out the pale-male-stale old guard, and ushers in a colourful new world order. There’s just one problem: metaphorical asteroids, unlike their physical analogue, don’t actually kill the dinosaurs. And while it’s one thing to campaign for the ouster of dead white men from their various places of honour in the sciences, or the arts, or atop the lists of history’s greatest works of literature, it’s quite another to be confronted with live white men — men who’ve worked hard all their lives to get where they are, who do not agree that they have outlived both their relevance and respectability, and who are not about to slink off into obscurity just because the passage of time and the sensibilities of a new generation have rendered both their identities and opinions unpopular.

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This all-encompassing presentism, in which every person must be judged by his worse offences against the pieties of the Current Thing, has found an even easier target than our oldest living citizens: those who are recently dead. It’s a phenomenon that makes for some interesting reads in the newspaper’s obituary section. “Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate and supporter of President Donald Trump who pointedly refused to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic, has died after contracting COVID-19,” reported Reuters in 2020, while a New York Times obituary for former Interior Secretary James Watt informs readers that he “insulted Black people, women, Jews and disabled people”, before it describes his life or contribution to politics. As the writer Oliver Traldi quipped, “before you read about this man’s life, let’s precisely calibrate your sense of to what extent he was on the right side of history as conceived by readers of this absolute rag in the current year”.

Meanwhile, some progressives have taken it as an article of faith that we cannot wait anymore for these living relics to exit the world’s stage; we have to just push them out of the way. This sentiment was palpable in the MeTooings of people like Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Leon Wieseltier, and Frank Langella, as well as the ouster of older white men from positions of influence in media, the arts, and more during the Covid-era Awokening. Even if you didn’t necessarily think these guys had done much — or anything — wrong, there was a sense that perhaps they should just go away on principle, for the sake of the cause. Hadn’t they been in power long enough? Wasn’t it time for them to step aside, and give someone else a turn?

On this front, Otto Penzler makes for an interesting case study: in 2021, he was fired from the Best American Mystery anthology series he’d edited since 1997, and replaced by editor Steph Cha, a young Korean-American novelist with whom he had butted heads over the MWA’s treatment of Linda Fairstein. In most situations like this, the outgoing editor is expected to go quietly, perhaps releasing an unctuous statement about the importance of making way for a new, more diverse generation of writers. Penzler, on the other hand, immediately launched a competing anthology that sold so well it currently stands at #13 in its category on Amazon. “We buried them,” Penzler says — a statement which, though difficult to truly quantify, seems roughly accurate: the 2021 edition of The Best American Mystery and Suspense, the first in 24 years not edited by him, is ranked #1312.

You come at the curmudgeon, you best not miss.

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Of course in a previous, and perhaps less ridiculous, era, this disagreement — Penzler’s opinion of cosy mysteries and the mystery community’s opinion of Penzler — would be chalked up to a matter of taste. There was a time when it was possible to merely dislike someone, for whatever reason, without claiming that your personal animus was actually rooted in a bigger, braver struggle against oppression and isms and phobias. There was also a time when inviting a man to speak at a conference in his chosen field was understood as a narrow acknowledgment of that man’s achievements and expertise, rather than an endorsement by the organisers of his every opinion. Perhaps most important, there was a time when reasonable people would have agreed that if you are still citing the less-than-articulate comment someone made to a newspaper 33 years ago as a top 10 reason to destroy his reputation, you are engaged not in the advancement of social justice but a bizarre personal vendetta.

But in this moment, in which every personal beef is blown up into a proxy war for the ideological soul of the nation — or, in this case, the mystery writing community — the grumpy old men among us are seen less as human beings than reactionary avatars, a blight on progress. The result is a remarkably aesthetic-driven notion of what the proper distribution of power would look like, as with Joe Biden’s 2022 vow to consider only black female candidates as replacements for retiring Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, or the FAA’s strange attempt to stack the deck in favour of everyone except older white men in its hiring processes. But it also explains the furore surrounding someone like Penzler — who, despite his alleged disdain for women, has published, collaborated with, and championed scores of them over the years. This isn’t about the man himself, but what he represents: the bad old days, and bad old ways, which publishing’s self-appointed new guard have found dismayingly difficult to uproot. To get him booted from the Bouchercon stage would signal a shift in the power dynamic. It would mean that the asteroid had hit at last.

To fail to do this, on the other hand, would signal that the identitarian spasm in publishing — and whatever little power and credibility it once conveyed — is already on the wane. For the vibes, they are a-shiftin’ — but the grumpy old man endures.

In the carny argot of the sport, the word for this is kayfabe. Kayfabe is something more artful than a lie and more profound than a fiction. It doesn’t simply substitute a narrative for the truth: it turns the truth into an element of the storyline, and those storylines in turn shape the truth. A kayfabe feud can sour a real professional relationship. Kayfabe romances turn into real romances, and the real romance is written into the kayfabe. The end result is a world where even the most serious possibilities can be inoculated with irony.

The king of sports entertainment until very recently was Vince McMahon, who both ran WWE in real life and kayfabe played a domineering boss character called Mr McMahon. But last week, after four decades in charge, McMahon resigned, following the publication of sexual misconduct allegations against him in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps coincidentally, just days earlier, he’d signed a major deal to take wrestling to Netflix.

The allegations are extensive and distressing: a former WWE employee name Janel Grant claims he took turns sexually abusing her in a locked room with another executive, trafficked her to other men in the company and defecated on her during a threesome. McMahon denies them all, stating: “Ms Grant’s lawsuit is replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and is a vindictive distortion of the truth.”

But these are not the first allegations to be made against McMahon, or the culture of wrestling he presided over. As far back as 1992, Rita Chatterton, the first female referee in what was then the WWF, gave an interview in which she said McMahon had raped her in 1986 then frozen her out of the company. (He denied this.) By then, though, the statute of limitations had expired. For the mainstream media, which had limited interest in women’s allegations anyway, wrestling was a niche concern. For the specialist wrestling press, pursuing the story would have been suicidal — McMahon controlled access, and would hardly indulge a journalist pursuing an unflattering angle. McMahon dictated the storylines in the ring, but he also had the power to control the stories told beyond it.

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A few years later, in 1999, Rena Mero (who wrestled as Sable) sued what was then the WWF: she said she’d been stripped of her championship belt after refusing to do in-ring nudity, and had been pressured to participate in lesbian storylines. The parties had settled, in an agreement that barred Mero from wrestling for three years — and even from using her ring name. As standard, WWE contracts give the organisation copyright over wrestlers’ characters. This meant that if you left McMahon’s kingdom, you’d usually leave your career behind: the “real” you was of considerably less value than the kayfabe version.

So, anyone who valued their wrestling career would be advised to play nice with McMahon. Given that WWE essentially held a monopoly over the sport, your career and reputation were in his gift. It’s understandable, then, that after her three-year ban was up, Mero returned for a storyline where she played the in-ring McMahon’s mistress. At one point, her breasts were exposed on live TV. It was a twist that reduced Mero’s lawsuit to a piece of kayfabe, effectively invalidating her claims and furthermore, those of any other woman in wrestling who might speak out about harassment. Taking your accuser back is, cynically, the quickest way to make her look like an unreliable witness; and as Harvey Weinstein’s victims would later describe, leaving is not a simple thing when the man you’re trying to leave wields absolute control over your profession.

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I knew nothing of these allegations when I was watching wrestling in the late Nineties. McMahon was protected by his power, but also by the convention of kayfabe. Wrestling fans pride themselves on their ability to suspend their disbelief in just the right amount — to confuse the ring with real life was to make yourself a dupe, or a “mark” in wrestling slang. The character Vince McMahon played was a womanising monster, but only the most childishly naive viewer would confuse that character with the man.

It’s the same gaslight logic that has sustained Donald Trump — a friend of McMahon’s and, thanks to the 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires”, the only president to also be a member of WWE’s Hall of Fame. We’ve seen it when Trump has faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct. “Grab them by the pussy” was “locker room talk” — essentially, the kind of thing that the character of Donald Trump would say. Yes, he was found by a jury to have sexually assaulted the writer E Jean Carroll, and further ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages for subsequently continuing to insist that she is lying about it — but in Donald Trump kayfabe, he’s the victim of a leftist conspiracy and this is simply more evidence that his enemies are out to get him.

Kayfabe is a way to talk about the art of wrestling, but really, it’s a term for the ability of the most powerful to impose their version of reality, and confound everyone else’s. And every MeToo story is a story, at bottom, of who is powerful enough to dictate the truth. It’s telling that, for most men, their MeTooing coincides with a decline in their authority. Weinstein was well past his Oscar-minting prime. R Kelly had ceased to be a reliable hit machine, spending more time with his grooming victims than he did in the studio. Jimmy Savile — who was MeTooed before MeToo was a thing — had to be dead first. If Trump seems impervious, it’s because he is, so far, too big to fail.

It’s telling, too, that the men who have paid the highest price for MeToo allegations have often been low in the social pecking order. Stephen Elliott was a minor figure in literary journalism when he was anonymously accused of rape via journalist Moira Donegan’s MeToo-inspired “Shitty Media Men” open-source spreadsheet. The unsubstantiated claims led to his social and professional ruin; when he sued for defamation, that was seen as further proof of his turpitude, regardless of whether he was right. Last year, he reached a settlement with Donegan in which she would pay him damages.

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McMahon has already resigned from WWE once, in 2022, when the WSJ initially reported that the company had made millions of dollars in payouts to women alleging sexual misconduct against him. He was replaced by his daughter Stephanie, and reinstated a few months later, leaving it unclear as to whether it was a real defenestration, or a kayfabe one. But this time, the reality of Netflix’s corporate reputation appears to have imposed itself over the preferred reality of Vince McMahon. At 78, it could finally be the end of his reign.

When the reporters who broke the Weinstein allegations for the New York Times wrote a book about it, they called it She Said. It’s a title that explicitly references storytelling: who is listened to, and who is deemed an unreliable narrator. A “she said” story is one you don’t have to pay attention to, until something changes and suddenly you do. Maybe that’s why the entertainment industry is where MeToo started: it takes a storytelling business to shift a storytelling problem. And maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for wrestling to have its MeToo moment: when one man rules the narrative, his word is not only the law, it’s the (kayfabe) truth.

As far as Hefner was concerned, he was offering women feminism the way it should be. Being a bunny was a way to move beyond prissy morality and claim sexual empowerment. “Women were the major beneficiary of the sexual revolution,” he told Cosmopolitan in 2015. “It permitted them to be natural sexual beings, as men are. That’s where feminism should have been all along.” That was a self-serving definition from a pornographer, but it was one that some women embraced: if feminism was about a woman’s right to choose, they chose to commodify themselves for profit.

But the obituarist was more right about Hefner’s timing than she could have known. Eight days after his death, the same paper published its devastating expose of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults against women, and the #MeToo movement quickly assembled in response. You can’t exactly call it luck when a 91-year-old dies, but if Hefner had lasted two weeks longer, the memorials would have been far harsher judgement about his influence on the 20th century.

#MeToo was, broadly, about sexual harassment; but specifically, it was about the fact that sexual harassment could happen even in industries where women’s sexuality was treated as an asset to be exploited, even in circumstances where a woman might cynically be said to have profited from the encounter. Leveraged consent was not consent. A choice made under pressure was no choice at all.

Perhaps Hefner had sensed the coming reckoning. Six months before he died, he summoned Crystal Hefner — his third and last wife, 60 years his junior — to his bedside, and made her promise to “only say good things” when he was gone. Crystal agreed, but the deathbed setting, the frail old man desperately trying to extend his powers beyond mortality? That belongs in a book — and now her promise is the title of Crystal’s memoir, in which she very much does not limit herself to saying only good things.

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Life in the Playboy Mansion in the late Noughties, she writes, was controlling and transactional. A strict 6pm curfew applied to Hefner’s girlfriends; in exchange for performing regimented group sex, they got bed, board and $1,000 cash a week. To her credit, Crystal is frank about the reason she and other women entered into this high-gloss servitude. When she first visited the mansion for a Halloween party in 2008, she was 21, and Playboy promised impossible glamour and riches. “That ornate front door looked like the doorway to success, to a place that could make all of our dreams come true.”

If you became a girlfriend, you might be able to become a playmate, with a centrefold in the magazine. If you became a playmate, you might be able to parlay that into the kind of fame that Pamela Anderson or Anna Nicole Smith had achieved. Implicit was the assumption that the bad parts of these women’s stories — the stolen sex tape that humiliated Anderson, the drug addiction that killed Smith — could be skipped. In the economics of choice feminism, the undesirable costs of sexualisation were outsourced to the sexualised, never accounted for. Hefner’s mini-harem were forever kept in check by the threat — as Crystal puts it — of being replaced “by another woman with blonder hair, better breasts, and a better nose”.

Hefner had always had a type, going back to the very first issue of Playboy in 1954, which flew off the shelves on the basis of a nude Marilyn Monroe pictorial: slim, fair, busty. Anderson fit this mould, and so did Smith. But whereas in his prime Hefner had made some room for variation — he was, along with everything else, a committed anti-segregationist — by the time Crystal was in the picture, that type had calcified entirely. Photos show him flanked by eerily samey women: femaleness as an entirely fungible commodity. Their hair, breasts and noses all converge onto one ideal, which is to say Hefner’s ideal. This was a work of art as well as nature. When Crystal decided to upgrade her appearance, she went to “the plastic surgeon who did all of Hef’s girls”.

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When multiple women “chose” to turn themselves into Hefner’s fantasy, the result was a brutal kind of physical competition, in which the body itself was remodelled to approach an impossible physical standard — and to demonstrate their loyalty to their master, who was not such a fan of “natural sexual beings”. Women could work within the system and even achieve short-term gains, but the toll of being an object was borne by the flesh.

The women of Playboy were rational actors, certainly, but they were acting in a tiny ecosystem governed by the whims of one man. “Nobody likes a prude, Hef would say, and I could make your own choice about whether to stay or go,” writes Crystal. “After I’d been there for a while, it didn’t feel like much of a choice.”

By this time — the late Noughties — Hefner had become a victim of his own prescience: the America of the 21st century was one he had helped to create, which meant his product no longer stood out. In a Playboy world, who needed to buy Playboy? Nudity was readily available online: why pay for softcore pictures when you could get the hardcore stuff for free? It’s symbolic of how exhausted the Playboy concept was that Hefner ended up selling his mansion to a fan from under himself before he died.

All that was left, really, was the brand. And the obvious way to make money from a brand in the 2000s was to turn it into a reality show. The Girls Next Door had been running for three years when Crystal arrived, stepping into the show as Hefner’s girlfriend number one, although not particularly successfully. As she admits in the book, she was “wooden and quiet”, although in her defence, she wasn’t being paid to be compelling. The deal was between the network and Hefner. He got $400,000 an episode, despite barely appearing. The girls — the stars — got nothing. “It didn’t even occur to me that it wasn’t a fair arrangement,” says Crystal. “I just felt lucky to be there.”

This seems like an extraordinarily unworldly thing to believe, but people — women — who felt “lucky just to be there” were foundational to large chunks of the Noughties economy. It was why girls went wild for Girls Gone Wild, even though they received no more than some cheap beads in exchange for flashing their tits. You could take your portion of the sexual revolution, only if you acceded to it happening on men’s terms.

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Hefner was a pioneer here as well: he built his empire directly on profiting from women’s bodies without sharing the rewards. Anderson has said that being a playmate was “empowering”, but not so much in the financial sense. It launched her career, but in her 2023 Netflix documentary she says she didn’t get a cut from any of the calendars or videos that Playboy sold off her back. And those Marilyn nudes in the first issue? Bought from the photographer for $500. Monroe herself got nothing — a fact that was once seen as proof of Hefner’s business acumen.

And yet, if Hefner was the master of timing, his widow’s book comes too late. Crystal’s isn’t the first book not to “say good things” about Hefner. In 2015, Holly McKenzie — the number one girlfriend before Crystal — wrote her own memoir of the “betrayal and abuse” she experienced in the mansion. In 2013, Jennifer Saginor — daughter of one of Hefner’s best friends — published Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion. Since 2022, the documentary series Secrets of Playboy has racked up an exhaustive 20 episodes. At this point in the #MeToo cycle, the victimisation of women like Crystal is well established.

In fact, she’s told the unflattering story of her time in the Playboy Mansion already — in, among other places, an interview with Howard Stern in 2011, when she and Hefner had temporarily broken up. In the book, Crystal refers to that episode regretfully, saying she “let Howard Stern coax me into saying cruel things about Hef” and “felt awful about it after… like I’d lowered myself even further into a pit of shame and regret”. Yet all she did was share the same truths she’s sharing here — describing the same rigid rules and squalid sex — in a now-unfashionable register. In 2011, she was playing the part of the shameless vixen. In 2024, she’s playing the part of the woman-child, “a kid who went trick or treating somewhere and never left”.

The truth, probably, is somewhere in between. Hefner used women, but he was only able to because women like Crystal believed they could use themselves to extract money and power from the Playboy institution. Part of the genius of choice feminism, from the male point of view, is that it makes women complicit in their own exploitation. Crystal never approaches those subtleties: she says she felt trapped, but then can’t fully articulate why, having broken her engagement to Hefner, she returned to become the last Mrs Hefner.

But it’s the subtleties that would make her interesting. I know Hefner was a goat and a shark. I would much rather read an honest account of the political acumen it takes to become the chief girlfriend, and eventually the wife, of a professionally promiscuous and very wealthy man. But in that sense, at least, Crystal chose her moment perfectly: as his widow, she’s probably the only woman to have made more money from her bargain with Hefner than he made from her.

This scene is from The Long Kiss Goodnight, a Nineties action movie about a mercenary-turned-suburban mum whose past comes back to haunt her. It’s not a particularly central moment, but it does act as an excellent meta-study in the way that Hollywood tropes serve as shorthand, reducing complex characters to simple, and sometimes self-delusional, stereotypes. By having the man offer a doll to the child, the scriptwriters spin a narrative about how we should see him: there are villains and there are villains, and this one, despite having masterminded a plan to explode thousands of people to death, has a soft side. Maybe he’s not so bad?

It’s been two weeks since Hamas began to release some of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7 — women and children mostly, many of whom had been held in the tunnels beneath Gaza for 50 straight days. Since then, I’ve noticed a version of the scene above playing out again and again, especially in the US, and especially online, as people hunt for familiar tropes that might shape their understanding of the story, and of the people in it. These commentators, always Western and often very young, have learned to watch the news in search of a story instead of the truth — and they’re certain that they recognise the typical characters.

The young woman photographed gazing at her captors with seemingly dizzy adoration, for instance, looks an awful lot like the kidnapped princess who falls in love with her roguish captor before joining his revolution. The 9-year-old who returned to Israel with a fixation — not uncommon among victims of group starvation scenarios — on making sure that the people around her are getting enough to eat is the archetypal foundling, raised by so-called savages who taught her hospitality, manners and consideration of others. There’s even a classic save-the-cat moment, that plot device in which a character’s kindness to an animal establishes him as a good guy worth rooting for. If a shih-tzu survived nearly two months under the care of Hamas, how bad could they really be? Perhaps a heart of gold lurks under that villainous exterior. Or: perhaps these so-called terrorists aren’t the villains at all.

“As the Israel regime — with full Western support — is committing genocide in Gaza and massacring women and children, the Israeli female prisoners held by the Resistance are treated with kindness and respect,” reads one representative post on X. On TikTok, commentators are claiming outright that the Israeli hostages clearly love their kidnappers and would have preferred to stay in Gaza: “These people are friends. Don’t even tell me that was acting.”

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In the past two months, much has been written about the oppressor/oppressed framework that the progressive Left applies to the question of Israel and Gaza. Seeing Israeli citizens as white-privileged settler-colonisers is a way of justifying a bizarrely sympathetic, even celebratory reaction to the militants who killed hundreds of civilians. But while the phenomenon I’m observing slightly overlaps, it’s ultimately something different: a particularly American tendency to treat whatever is happening in the world like a months-long entertainment event, equal parts melodrama and spectator sport. Having identified the players on the stage — the heroic underdog, the corrupt superpower, the villain with a soft side — progressives are watching the war in Gaza like it’s a Marvel superhero film.

There are shades, here, of the early days of the war in Ukraine, when arts institutions were hurriedly scrubbing Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky from their programmes, bars purged vodka-based drinks from their menus, and it was difficult to tell where pro-Ukraine sentiment ended and anti-Russian animus began. That binary thinking is a hallmark of fan culture, increasingly the dominant if not only mode of engagement, no matter how serious a subject. Once a person has decided that Hamas are the good-guy underdogs who can do no wrong, any allegations of wrong-doing will naturally be received with incredulity. “Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms,” writes commentator Briahna Joy Gray. “Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits.”

It’s interesting to juxtapose this sceptical response to stories of widespread sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 with an event much closer to home: that moment, just five years ago, when Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of attempted rape by Christine Blasey Ford. What’s striking now is not just the sudden irrelevance of every hard-won #MeToo-era more — a woman’s word was to be believed, until, suddenly, it isn’t — but the way it manifested online. Images of Ford testifying about her experience were instantly remixed into a meme, while the internet set about dreamcasting what seemed like an inevitable biopic.

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Here, too, everyone understood exactly what kind of story was being told — who the hero was, and conversely, who was the villain. The fact that it was playing out in real life, in real time, did not inject gravitas to the situation; if anything, it only more thoroughly crystallised into pure team sports tribalism. Hence, we all agreed that fan-favourite Laura Dern would play Ford; hence, also, nobody saw anything strange about the absolute farce of a congressional hearing in which someone blew up a page from Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook to poster size and analysed its contents like it was a message from the Zodiac killer. Remember the cynicism when Kavanaugh had to explain that “boofing” was a fart joke? He’s lying!, people screamed, in exactly the same spittle-flecked tone that my husband sometimes screams, That’s a foul!, when someone knocks down a player on Duke’s college basketball team.

It doesn’t actually matter if it was a foul. The existence of objective truth is irrelevant in this moment: facts don’t matter, feelings do. Faith does.

This is why Brett Kavanaugh was a liar, whether he was lying or not. It’s why Taylor Swift fans scrutinise footage of her and Travis Kelce like it’s the footage of JFK’s assassination, then confidently declare that they’re really in love (or not). And it’s why a self-described anti-Zionist content creator will look at a picture of a young woman surrounded by the terrorists who shot and kidnapped her — and then post it on the internet with the caption: “Find yourself a woman who looks at you like this.”

Of course, the same type of person who tweets the above will also dismiss stories of sexual violence on October 7 as “IDF propaganda”. Forget the testimonies of the forensic scientists who examined the victims’ bodies, of the soldiers who discovered them, even of the rapists themselves; forget the videos of kidnapped women being forced into cars, their trousers soaked with blood at the crotch; forget the corpses lying naked from the waist down with their legs still unmistakably spread open despite a censor’s blur. None of this will ever be enough to shake the devoted fan’s faith in his home team’s righteousness. The best you’ll get is a shrugging equivocation: if these rapes occurred, they were nothing in comparison to Palestinian suffering.

Maybe this facile, emotionally-driven logic is an inevitable feature of the digital age, where fact and fiction alike are flattened into the same familiar mould, distributed across the same platforms, consumed on the same screens. In this world, it’s increasingly hard to know the difference between news and narrative, an advertiser and an influencer, the prescriptive and the descriptive; even the lines between these things begin to blur as they all tumble around in the same giant bucket labelled with just one word: “content”.

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And in this world, of course people cease to discern, and instead search for an anchor: an archetype that offers a shortcut to understanding. No wonder every conversation about Israel these days turns into a shouting match about who is the bigger villain. Why have a debate when you can impose a narrative?

Make these observations aloud, and someone will inevitably show up to claim that it’s all the fault of progressive ideology, or critical theory, or postmodernism. But I suspect this gives the narrative-clingers — not to mention the rape denialists — too much credit. Postmodernism is much more sophisticated and ideological than what actually fuels this phenomenon, which is nothing more or less than the urge to reduce a complex geopolitical conflict down to something easily understood, with familiar characters and a classic plot arc and about as much moral ambiguity as an episode of Scooby Doo.

It’s about knowing not just what is happening, but what will happen: the good guys will solve the crime, the villain will be unmasked and taken away in a paddy wagon, and a happy ending will follow shortly thereafter. And that blazing certainty feels good, no doubt, when the truth is so unsatisfying: not just that wars rarely end happily, but that this one will surely still be raging long after the radical chic have moved on.

This was a time when invasion of privacy was de rigueur. Sex tapes made headlines, and no one considered whether their subjects wanted them in public or not. Phone hacking made headlines, too, although journalists rarely admitted in public that this was how they got their stories. Brand, who appeared to have no boundaries at all, was perfectly adapted to the demands of this environment.

Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

On stage and on screen, Brand broke taboos that were already being pushed to breaking point by the indecency the internet was feeding into every home. In stand-up footage from 2006, Brand talks about liking “them blow jobs where it goes in their neck a little bit… them blow jobs where the mascara runs a little bit”. He was talking about the “choking blowjobs” that were being mainstreamed by gonzo porn.

He was also telling us about his own sexual preferences, according to one of the women interviewed by The Sunday Times. She met Brand the same year that he performed that set, when she was 16 and he 31. Towards the end of their relationship, she alleges that he sexually assaulted her by forcing his penis down her throat; after she fought him off, he told her he had “only wanted to see your mascara run”. (Brand denies committing any criminal acts.)

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Russell Brand's sexual apocalypse

By Jenny McCartney

It wasn’t just his predilections that made Brand right for the Noughties. It was also his talent for making himself into an easily recognised caricature: the priapic man-child with the dandyish wardrobe and the sky-high hair. A cartoonish distillation of Byronic swagger and Kenny Everett nerve. Amy Winehouse was probably the only figure with a more distinctive iconography, and people would sometimes joke that they looked alike.

But such cartoonishness could serve another purpose. Maya Angelou wrote: “When people show you who they are, believe them.” But what if someone shows you a version of who they are that is so extreme that taking it seriously would be tantamount to missing the punchline? In the Noughties, there was no bigger faux pas than missing the punchline. Playing an overblown version of the predator can be an actual predator’s most effective camouflage.

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson defined the raw, hypersexed look of the Noughties in his work for high-end brands and glossy magazines. He claimed his mission was to bring out the “inner porn star” of his subjects (one of his subjects was Barack Obama, who was campaigning for the Democratic nomination at the time). But models claim the “consensual” sex acts he photographed himself performing on them were nothing of the sort. Richardson was dropped by the fashion industry after these allegations, which he denies, were reported in 2017.

When RnB star R. Kelly was indicted for child pornography charges in 2002, he responded, not by purging sex from his music, but by amping it up to preposterous levels, nicknaming himself “the pied piper of RnB”. The music was “scandal-proof”, concluded comic Dave Chappelle in a stand-up segment, because everything that could shock you about Kelly was already in full view. (Kelly was cleared of the initial charges, but convicted of multiple sexual offences against women and girls in later trials.)

This gambit was not a new one. Jimmy Savile had pioneered it, clanking his chains and puffing his cigars and teasing about the things he’d like to do to schoolgirls. (In a radio interview with Savile from 2007, Brand crawlingly begged to meet “Sir Jimmy” and offered to bring along his female assistant, naked.) But the Noughties veneration of knowingness made it extraordinarily effective.

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By Sarah Ditum

The no-holds-barred tabloid culture at that time took power away from many female celebrities: invasive tactics meant they had little means of bargaining with the media. But the premium on fame served other public figures well, and someone like Brand was in a position to exercise exceptional control.

That would ultimately contribute to one of his greatest disgraces, when Brand and Jonathan Ross phoned the actor Andrew Sachs during their Radio 2 show and left a voicemail saying Brand had “fucked your granddaughter”. It was ugly and misogynistic, and unforgivably the BBC broadcast it. There were mass complaints, a £150,000 Ofcom fine, and the controller of Radio 2 was forced to resign. Ofcom found that Brand had benefited from a culture of extreme licence, where “the presenter’s interests had been given greater priority than the BBC’s responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy”. When you’re a star, you can do anything, as a man who would be president said in the Noughties.

Brand had his defenders, though. He cultivated a boyish vulnerability that sweetened the corruption. In the remake of Arthur (2011), he takes the role of the eponymous playboy and Helen Mirren plays his lifelong nanny. “He’s merely shaped like an adult,” she tells one of Arthur’s conquests. Mirren extended that indulgence to Brand’s real-world behaviour. “Sachsgate,” she said, had been merely “naughty… schoolboy kind of behaviour”. He was 33 years old at the time of the incident.

Brand would soon be reaching for a more grown-up persona: political activist. His verbal dexterity had always given him a cachet other tabloid regulars did not enjoy: The Guardian used him as a columnist for many years. He guest-edited an issue of The New Statesman. He supported Occupy Wall Street. He wrote a book called Revolution. But Brand’s political awakening did not seem to include a reconsideration of his attitude to women.

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Women can't be beautiful

By Sarah Ditum

In his material, women still appeared as decorative objects or dangerous temptations: things to be used, or a substance to abstain from. Having caused a minor scandal at the GQ Awards by joking about sponsor Hugo Boss making uniforms for Nazi, he described the event in The Guardian as a microcosm of corporate influence and political corruption, thronging with “birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison”.

Though he railed against oppression and exploitation, there were no signs that he was particularly egalitarian in his private life. “At first when I met him he wanted an equal, and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like: ‘I can’t handle the equalness’,” Katy Perry told Vogue after the couple divorced in 2011. “It was very controlling.”

Brand retaliated with a stand-up riff about Perry being so boring in bed: “I’d be having sex thinking: ‘Think of anyone, anyone else’.” This did little to damage the perception that Brand was not only of the Left, but an asset to the cause. Nor did Sachsgate damage him, nor did Brand’s history of fantasising on-stage about making women cry during sex. Misogyny has rarely disqualified a man from being a socialist hero.

George Monbiot nominated Brand as his “hero of the year” in 2014. “Brand’s openness about his flaws makes him a good leader, and allows those who admire him to be good followers,” wrote Monbiot. “He’s the best thing that has happened to the Left in years.” But Brand’s “openness about his flaws” did not mean he was reformed. It was a strategic move to flannel those who were naive enough to confuse confession with salvation.

In 2015, Brand endorsed Ed Miliband (after previously telling his followers not to vote). “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour — and the Tories should be worried,” was the headline on an Owen Jones column. Brand returned the favour by blurbing Jones’s book The Establishment: “Owen Jones… is our generation’s Orwell and we must cherish him.” The Tories did not need to worry, of course. They won the general election.

But then, Brand’s pivot to politics has always had more to do with his own self-importance than with any interest in effecting actual change. His videos draw viewers down the rabbit hole: their success is in inspiring people to watch even more Russell Brand videos, endlessly clutching at an understanding that Brand, now in full-on messiah mode, promises will soon be revealed to his “awakening wonders”.

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It is too optimistic to say that no one in broadcasting or comedy today could do the things of which Brand is accused. (The allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Dan Wootton, which Wootton vigorously denies, should warn against complacency.) It would, however, probably be harder. Unlike in the Noughties, production staff would be less inclined to turn a blind eye. Runners and assistants would be more likely to refuse to act as procurers, if asked.

A predator looking for a niche would probably not now make DJing or presenting or stand-up their first choice. A predator today would choose to be a social-media influencer: outside restraining power structures, with a direct line to their fans. A medium that allows you to groom thousands of people all at once, inculcating them into a secret world they share with you.

Brand’s transition from mainstream celebrity to conspiracist YouTube guru is perfectly in line with the way fame has evolved. He has always had a talent for turning people into “good followers”, as Monbiot correctly noted. The self-aware degradation of the Noughties in which Brand’s career thrived looks shamefully dated now, but those who hunger for power will always find new avenues to exploit.

Still, who could ever have guessed that the treble-winner of The Sun “Shagger of the Year” award — the self-confessed owner of a “Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory thanks to the ol’ fame” — might stray into territory which the words “rape” and “assault” would feature? Of course, there was that 2015 Mail on Sunday interview with Brand’s ex-girlfriend, an articulate former model called Jordan Martin, in which she said that during their six-month relationship, in 2007, the star was controlling, verbally cruel and sexually assaulted her. She warned politicians such as Ed Miliband — recently interviewed by Brand — to stay away. But the wider media didn’t really want to hear. Exes, eh? And anyway, Brand was box-office: a quick-witted, motor-mouthed Essex Byron in a fright wig and skinny jeans who made scant secret of his predilections, although his rhetoric cleverly shunted them more towards the seaside-postcard end of sexuality: his helpless eagerness to service a non-stop parade of willing dolly birds — “different women three, four, five times a day. In Ireland, nine times a day” — which had intermittently landed him in the sex addiction clinic, alias “sex chokey” or “winky nick”.

There are no doubt numerous women for whom sex with Brand delivered more or less what was expected: a fleeting encounter with celebrity, and a longer-lasting anecdote. The details that emerged from the joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches, The Sunday Times and The Times, however, were grimmer and more shocking. One was of Brand pursuing a star-struck 16-year-old girl, Alice, now a regretful adult. At first, the fact of taking Alice’s virginity was enough to excite him, she said. Later, she alleged, his kick came from spitting in her mouth and compelling her to swallow it; or forcing her into oral sex until she punched her way free. Another woman said he raped her at his LA house, an allegation backed up by her visit to a rape crisis centre, and text exchanges in which she wrote “When a girl say(s) NO it means no” in response to which Brand apologised. Yet another woman — whom he met at AA and later worked with — described a sexual assault from Brand which she finally fought off, reportedly leaving him furious.

Dispatches is not a courtroom, of course, and Brand has not been found guilty of a crime. But, then, this type of incident often doesn’t make it to court, as both predators and victims are acutely aware. They unfurl in territory with which many women are nauseously familiar, but which a certain proportion of men seemingly struggle to see clearly or take seriously: situations in which a woman agreed to one sexual act but not another; or consented to sex on a previous occasion but not this time round. Situations in which a measure of trust is swiftly and starkly betrayed.

Brand, who denies the allegations of rape and assault, is now married with two children. He has created a bolt-hole from cancellation in his social media platforms, flanked by an army of 6.6 million followers on YouTube alone. From there he accuses the mainstream media, or “MSM”, of having “another agenda at play” and seeking to silence him for asking difficult questions about Big Pharma and other hot-button topics. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have already responded to the clarion call with sympathetic comments. Yet the truth is that Brand himself is a creature of the MSM, as he must know. Mainstream broadcasters and media built him up, flattered him, fawned over him and handed him the keys to the sexual “Wonka factory”. And if its previous record is anything to go by, his spell in what Brandspeak might dub “reputation chokey” may not last long.

A brief list of things that — by a kind of communal consensus — the media has ultimately found excusable in the past: John Peel’s penchant for sex with underage girls (broadcasting genius, and it was the Seventies). Bill Wyman’s sexual relationship with Mandy Smith, then 14 (he was a Rolling Stone, for god’s sake, and it was the Eighties). Jimmy Carr’s Channel 4 rape jokes, such as “what’s the difference between rape and football? Women don’t like football” (if you don’t like “spicy content’” don’t listen). Frankie Boyle’s rape jokes about female athletes, and foully relentless gags about the abducted child Madeleine McCann (ditto: anyway, Frankie’s ‘progressive’ now).

If you’ve been around long enough, however, some things stick in your mind — extraordinary pieces of moral blindness, enabled by the media. One came when Dylan Jones, then editor of GQ, commissioned the late A.A. Gill to write and direct a porn film. What could be more “outrageously funny”, as Jones recalled in 2016, than to see “the country’s best critic immersing himself in the seedy world of hardcore pornography”? Until you read it, that is. Perhaps wisely, the article itself no longer seems to be available online. But it’s included in a 2002 collection of Gill’s journalism. In his other pieces there is room for elegant flourishes of authorial compassion, but not here: the subject-matter — commercial sex — has blotted it out.

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The setting is LA, in 1999, and Gill is busy directing his own lurid script. In his own words, a half-Mexican girl called Clarissa – who is “very young and exceedingly nervous” – is being plastered with make-up for her scene, which is with the “truly, madly, deeply hideous” veteran porn actor Ron Jeremy. He’s “funny and he can act” but is considered so unattractive that Clarissa is getting “a $200 premium to do it with Ron”.

Clarissa’s wary of doing porn, but she’s “grateful for the money”. Why, we don’t know: Gill doesn’t ask. Perhaps he senses that her answer might spark the libido-killing onset of sympathy. This is only her second film, and so she isn’t really listening to Gill droning on quasi-ironically “about motivation and the Method”. Gill is contemptuous, describing her as “such a bad actress” and “not bright”. She is “horrified’ when she sees Ron, who — perhaps mercifully — can’t get an erection, and ends up masturbating on to Clarissa’s cheek. After this young girl finally leaves the set in distress, Gill — having orchestrated the entire grotesque scene — follows her out to ask “Are you all right?”. Ever the English gent.

A coda to the article: earlier this year — due to advancing dementia — Ron Jeremy was deemed incompetent to stand trial on serial charges of rape and sexual assault, involving 21 victims aged from 15 to 51. Allegations dated back to 1996, three years before the making of Gill’s Hot House Tales. The comments beneath the news reports were telling: many were sceptical, asking why Jeremy would “need” to do this, given the numerous sexual opportunities afforded by his work. They appeared unable to consider an alternative scenario: that Jeremy was so steeped in the mores of porn plots — and his own star status in the industry — that he had lost sight of any sexual boundaries, in particular those of consent.

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These real-life stories aren’t about sex, freely if recklessly exchanged in mutual appreciation: the happy, heady original vision of sexual liberation. Instead, to varying degrees, they’re about porn, ego, power, money, cruelty and humiliation. Some men saw the direction of travel early. In 2001, the novelist Martin Amis also travelled to an LA porn set, not to direct a movie but to write about the dynamics on set. Amis wasn’t exactly a feminist saint: he’d once cut a swathe through literary London, leaving women stung by his infidelities, and was sometimes accused of misogyny in his depiction of female characters. But he wrote about the performers with feeling, and in his brilliant and disturbing article “A Rough Trade” he recognised straightaway where the industry was headed: “the new element is violence”.

The thing that Amis feared most in porn’s endless pushing of boundaries to darker places, its taboo-breaking quest for the “polymorphous perverse”, was what it might speak to in the user: that it might draw out the inner “Mister Monster” in him, triggering arousal at something his value-system knew to be wrong. “Porno, it seems, is a parody of love,” he wrote, “It therefore addresses itself to love’s opposites, which are hate and death. ‘Choke her!’ ‘Spit inside me!’ ‘Break me!’”. Amis had perhaps more reason than most to contemplate where male lust, when fused to violence and cruelty, might take society in general and women in particular: in 1994 he discovered that his 21-year old cousin Lucy Partington, an English student missing for 20 years, had been murdered by the sexual abuser and serial killer Fred West.

In the years since Amis’s article, porn has indeed followed his prophecy. It’s more ubiquitous, more extreme and being absorbed in heavier concentrations at a much earlier age. A report by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found that young people were regularly exposed to content in which “pictures of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted at teenage girls”. Earlier this year, the Times journalist Helen Rumbelow wrote searingly about a day spent “watching what the kids are watching” on Pornhub. Of the 32 sites deemed “most popular in the UK”, 12 showed men being physically abusive to women, and 11 featured “pseudo-incest” between step-parents and adult step-children or step-siblings. One of the most popular categories is “teens”: in many videos, young-looking girls, officially over 18, are bound, frightened, or shown with restricted airways. It is deeply chilling to think that — barring actual murder — the stuff of mainstream porn is inching ever closer to the practices of 25 Cromwell Street.

There remain many adult men who instinctively understand the line between consent and its refusal, pleasure and abuse. But online porn culture does not, and its effects have already manifested themselves in real life: in a 2020 BBC Disclosure survey of 2,049 UK men aged between 18-39, 71% said they had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex. One third of that percentage said they wouldn’t ask verbal consent for such acts, either before or during sex.

The 48-year-old Brand is perhaps unusual in his generation for the degree to which he was steeped early in prostitution and porn, starting with the stomach-churning way his father introduced him to sex as a teenager, hiring prostitutes for them both in their shared hotel room. But now hardcore porn is schooling children en masse through their smartphones, while much of the “mainstream media” long ago paved its way by demonstrating that — when it came to women, at least — boundaries of legality and taste could frequently be transgressed at no cost to career. Even as Dispatches puts its spotlight on Russell Brand, the painful reality is that future generations of young women will almost certainly experience much more of the behaviour the programme describes, not less. A.A. Gill and Martin Amis are both dead, but it was Amis who saw the danger and called it correctly. The genie’s out of the bottle: Mister Monster is everywhere.

Now, we live in a radically different world. A world in which a generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for survivors of sexual abuse.

As a sexual assault survivor myself, I fought back tears while watching Paula Scanlan testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee about her experience of being on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team — with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. “I know of women with sexual trauma who are adversely impacted by having biological males in their locker room without their consent. I know this because I am one of these women.”

I felt rage, too. How outrageous that Scanlan should have to defend her desire to be free of biological males in a female changing room. How dare her university send her to psychotherapy in an “attempt to reeducate [me] to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male”? I find it hard to believe that, five years ago, feminists’ rallying cry was #BelieveAllWomen.

Clearly, Scanlan does too. “Let us not forget the viral #MeToo movement that empowered female victims to speak up,” she said. “It trained a spotlight on the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and abuse, including in scholarly and educational institutions … many policies pushed today completely ignore my experiences and many women like me.” In the space of five years, we’ve gone from #BelieveAllWomen to: “Believe all women, especially if they are men.”

How have we regressed so rapidly? Everyone from Oprah downwards preached to my generation of women to listen to your gut; listen to your instinct; listen to that voice whispering “Get out!” Back in 1997, she interviewed Gavin de Becker, whose book The Gift of Fear — a guide to understanding how your instincts about other people can keep you safe — became a bestseller. During her show, he summed it up like this: “Someone who doesn’t hear ‘no’ is trying to control you.”

Oprah looked out at the audience. “Did y’all hear that? Gavin, you need to say it again.”

Such was the impact of the book that, in 2008, Oprah did an hour-long show to commemorate its tenth anniversary. During it, de Becker repeated a line from his book, distilled from a Margaret Atwood lecture: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

I understood this. I was taught to get out of any threatening situation as soon as possible. If you’re alone in a room and a man enters and you don’t feel safe? Leave. If you’re walking at night and feel the instinct to escape? Just run. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because what if you’re right? I was told to ignore that little voice at my peril. My mother raised me and my sisters to scream and run like hell if a stranger asked us to get in their car. “Because if you end up in a trunk, you’re dead.”

As de Becker says: “Can you imagine an animal in the wilderness overtaken with fear and saying ‘Oh it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that every day.” In his 1997 Oprah appearance, he argues that the real information we should be giving women and children is: “Honour your own fear and teach them that it’s important, that their own internal voice is important.”

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The message today’s young women are getting is that if their inner voice says it feels wrong when someone with a penis undresses in front of them, or is present when they undress, in a space designated for women, there is something wrong with them. Scanlan said in her testimony: “We, the women, were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”

It appears that institutions, politicians and progressives are happy to sacrifice women at the altar of inclusivity. They demand we keep quiet when we feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Ironically, instead of teaching us to keep ourselves safe and fear violation, the women’s movement teaches us to fear being labelled as bigots. Paula Scanlan and collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines have been called transphobes for objecting to someone striding around with his penis on show in a locker room designated for women.

We are setting a dangerous precedent. Think about the young women watching the way that Scanlan and Gaines are being treated. They will surely conclude that they must suffer to accommodate the small handful of males that want to make everything about them. They are now being given access to female prisons, domestic abuse shelters, rape centres, locker rooms, spas and public toilets, as well as changing rooms.

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It would be absurd to assume that all trans-identified male-bodied people are looking for ways to abuse girls or women; it is equally absurd — and naïve — to think that male predators won’t exploit this system. But what I find particularly alarming is that it teaches women in general not to trust themselves. It tells us to ignore the discomfort triggered at a subconscious level. It encourages us to ignore our instincts. When a woman senses danger the last thing she needs is for her judgment to be clouded by another fear: the fear of social death if she acts to protect herself.

And all of us who witness the abuse that women who speak up are being subjected to are expected to remain silent. All of us whose little voices are telling us that there’s something wrong with prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety are told we are wrong.

But my gift of fear is telling me to resist being intimidated into submission. To teach young women and my own daughter to honour that voice, that intuition. To stand behind women like Paula Scanlan who are also resisting. And to say, “No.”

I am brooding over words I wrote several weeks ago when describing that species of social embarrassment called not knowing where to look when you pass a school playground of children. “It takes me a moment to remember,” I wrote, “that a man wandering on his own must no longer pause to look at children running races in their mirth.” I did not, I now think, adequately register the sadness of that loss. Scurry from a playground for fear of appearing sinister and we might as well be scurrying from the vitality of life itself.

The worst part of being told you’re sinister for no other reason than that you’re a man out wandering on his own is that, eventually, you begin to fear you might be. But sinister how? What’s the dread clutching at society’s heart? And why is it now clutching at mine?

I hear the children laughing and scuttle past. Here’s the tragedy of it: I am severed from the time when I laughed in a playground myself. The wistful music of continuity is stopped.

How many things are we no longer trusted to look at and admire? I dare not freely name them because that too can be a species of offence. So, I pace the streets with my eyes down, in order not to be surprised by beauty I must not let myself appreciate. The long, brown legs of high-stepping city women in their summer dresses? Eugh! The billowing of someone’s national dress, a fantastical headdress; a lovely child skipping in its self-absorption? Eugh, eugh!

The street’s forbidden fruits, waiting to ambush us the minute we lift our faces. Who are you looking at, mister? Wanna photograph?

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Look up, then, if looking ahead is so fraught. There’s a sculpture on the BBC building by Eric Gill. Prospero and Ariel. Old and Young. Eugh! Or quit the street, on which we all once promenaded, sometimes flagrantly if the night was hot, and seek refuge in a cinema or art gallery. They’re showing an old Woody Allen here. Oh, God — it’s Manhattan. Eugh! And here — we’re in luck — is a Gauguin exhibition, the great painter and his young Tahitian bride. Young! How young? Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!

First the streets are denied us, then art. But take the risk out of art and what’s left but decoration? Do we not look to art to probe the borders of the acceptable? Risk is what explains art’s fearful symmetry. Tiger, tiger, burning bright…

I don’t pretend that there’s nothing on those walls to fear. It makes perfect sense to keep a tiger at arm’s length. Art is dangerous and we are right to stand in trembling awe of it. But what we fear is also, much of the time, what we love. We police the borderland, losing in adventure what we gain in safety. Will we one day have to ban beauty itself, shamed by the desires it will unloose, outraged by the liberties that have already been taken to produce it? Am I — one halting, harmless, rheumy, apologetic, mature man — really that inflammable?

Better I stay indoors. Close the windows against sounds that are not mine to hear and draw the curtains against sights that are not mine to see. That way I cause no one discomfort by appearing to take too avid an interest in what they look like, what they’re wearing, how old they are, or where they come from. Walk on, my children, unmolested by my declining sight.

I am not asking for pity. I have lived my life and looked my full. I won’t say no to looking a bit more before my eyes close altogether, but it’s not only on my own behalf that I lament our visual timorousness — there are those who come after who must also be granted the right to stare and be stirred.

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The art world's lost sense of humour

By Kat Rosenfield

There is, I grant you, nothing new about being told to look away. Or suppressing art, come to that. The Puritans tried to close the theatres in the 16th century, blamed the plague on the lasciviousness of theatre-goers, and finally got their way in 1642. But is there not a specific problem with the idea of men looking — as though the eyes of men are configured differently from women’s — that probably dates to the Seventies when John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was published and the conceit of the “male gaze” elaborated? It was after Berger, anyway, that men began to be perceived as gazing suspiciously, and after the film theorist Laura Mulvey’s analysis of looking as an act of male oppression, that their gaze was pronounced out-and-out exploitative. Where the likes of Francis Drake had circled the globe looking for worlds to conquer, men had now only to lift a paintbrush or wander in off the street to look at a painting to be charged with ravishment and pillage.

Ok, ok, cheap shot. Nothing any of us do is wholly innocent. We are all culture-laden whether we know we are or not. The scrutinising eye can be possessive or pornographic — what man can say he has never looked possessively or pornographically? — and it does make sense to talk of some sorts of representation as invasion. Only consider the shape of the paintbrush or the pen. “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world,” wrote Laura Mulvey. Oof, yes. Or, at least, oof maybe.

Had I been a woman worn out with being prodded by those instruments of male possessiveness, I’d have bought willingly into that. Call a man phallocentric and you had him every time. The more he shouted and bullied that he wasn’t, the more he was. I remember it well. I was there, denying it loudly myself. Of course, there were some — the Andrew Tates of the age — who pumped their muscles and wore phallocentricity as a badge of pride. But the rest of us knew we were on borrowed time. All right, all right, we said, hanging our heads, but how will we ever again let our senses off the rein? When will the fun return? It won’t, Mulvey told us. Fun had done damage enough. Fun had run its course. Thus was Puritanism revived in another guise.

With nothing that was fun or safe to look upon at home, a number of us did what the beaten have done for centuries, kicked the dust of Europe from our feet and travelled to exotic places. But, in the rush to delegitimise, that pastime, too, lost favour. The very word “exotic” marked us as imperialists. Orientalism, the critic Edward Said called it. Colonising what was foreign by finding it picturesque. Byron and Matisse, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Bell, Leonardo and Stendhal, the entire fourth form at my school — all guilty. Old and young, men and women — Orientalists the lot of us.

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There are accusations of Orientalism and its implicit privileging of whiteness all over the walls of the Rossetti exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain. I am in two minds about notes on the walls of exhibitions. Because I am a word obsessive, I read them conscientiously to the degree that I sometimes forget to look at the paintings they describe. Good wall notes can be engrossing and informative. Bad ones — which might be bad for a variety of reasons but are always bad if they conspicuously promote the pieties and prohibitions of the hour — can spoil the show. The notes accompanying the Rossettis swarm around the works like flies, letting nothing alone that might be construed as ideologically outmoded. Rossetti’s painting “The Beloved” is accused of “misimagining” North Africa, while another painting is guilty of “dehumanising” a North African. Just a question, but as these are value judgements: shouldn’t they be up to us to decide?

Remember Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, so hectored and harried by his elders at a family dinner that he might have been an “unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena… [he was] so smartingly touched up by these moral goads”. Exactly how I felt after two hours of curatorial finger-pointing at Tate Britain.

And so we walk the street of pitfalls and perils, eyes averted, shrinking from the finger. But I guess it’s fair enough: what goes around comes around. Now I know how generations of women felt being touched up by the eyes of men. I get it. Mea culpa. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have mis-gazed.

This essay was first published on Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

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It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

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But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

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The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

Yes, you want her, look at her you know you do.
Possible she wants you too, there is one way to ask her.

In the new version of The Little Mermaid, presumably out of deference to our evolving, post-MeToo sensibilities surrounding sexual consent, that line has been subtly changed. In 2023, Sebastian’s advice is: “Use your words, boy, and ask her.”

Not so romantic, but in this case, the question does seem necessary, since Ariel’s feelings are far from obvious. While 1989 Ariel makes it quite clear that she’s keen, our contemporary one, played by the pop singer Halle Bailey, has no thoughts of kissing at all — because, in a truly massive departure from the animated source material, she’s forgotten she needs to in order to win her freedom.

It’s not hard to see how the film’s writers might have talked themselves into giving their new Ariel amnesia: it’s not very feminist to have your heroine spend the bulk of her screen time voicelessly thirsting after a man, after all. But in stripping Ariel of her goal — stay human by seducing the prince — the writers have effectively gutted the character: now, she wanders vacantly through every scene with neither purpose nor agency.

I realise that this is a very adult complaint about a film that is ostensibly for children — but then, I’m not sure children are The Little Mermaid‘s intended audience. Like so many of Disney’s live-action remakes, this movie is for the now-middle aged millennial women who grew up watching (and loving) the 1989 original — only to become scandalised, as adults, by their heterocentrism, their whiteness, their phobias and isms. While Disney World is embroiled in an ongoing conflict with Florida governor Ron DeSantis — a sort of proxy war for the soul of the nation — the Disney content mill is plagued by the same anxieties as much of its adult audience.

The beloved but problematic cartoons from the bad old days remain available on the Disney+ streaming service, but come affixed with a hectoring title card that you cannot fast forward through: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” it reads. “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

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Meanwhile, many of its newer offerings are meant to be part of that future, explicitly catering to progressive sensibilities — and, perhaps equally important, sparking consternation among conservatives. The Little Mermaid — with its vague handwaving in the direction of consent culture, its dutiful nods to the environmental damage wrought by humans on the undersea world, and a black actress bringing the house down in a traditionally white role — is clearly intended to be part of that “more inclusive future”. As is the 2022 movie Lightyear, which featured an, albeit chaste, lesbian kiss, and Frozen 2, which was animated by an anti-colonialist message.

In fact, that heady mix of liberal millennial guilt and Nineties-era nostalgia is an animating force behind much of today’s most controversial entertainment, from the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters to the release of new, sensitivity-edited editions of works by Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine. Kids don’t notice this stuff, but adults do, which is entirely the point: all these choices generated a backlash from the Right, which in turn generated a backlash to the backlash from the Left, which in turn generated months’ worth of frantic coverage from a media establishment that relies on rage-clicks to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, in the quest to make The Little Mermaid inclusive, Disney seems to have forgotten that it should also be watchable, and the resulting film feels at once bloated and muted. Gone are the fish playing musical instruments, the whispering moray eels who recruit Ariel to Ursula’s lair. Bailey, a phenomenal singer, is miscast as a character who is silent during most of the story’s pivotal moments. And yet, more positive reviews, while noticeably cagey about the quality of the film itself, lavish praise on both her performance as Ariel and on the Disney corporation for selecting her. “If these films are to have any purpose beyond being nostalgia-powered cash-ins, it must be to allow all children — not just the white ones — to see themselves as Magic Kingdom denizens,” suggested the Guardian, while a Variety critic adds that, “the most important thing about remaking this particular favourite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel”.

In other words: even if the movie is bad, it has the best intentions. It’s on the right side of history. And isn’t that what matters?

In this framework, any objection to movies such as The Little Mermaid can be understood as conservatives having a meltdown over the mere inclusion of diverse characters on screen. Perhaps this is true in some cases. But I suspect that what people really object to is a Hollywood apparatus that does not seek to entertain an audience so much as hand-hold it to the morally correct conclusions.

When Ted Lasso — a show featuring a multiracial cast, strong female characters, and an uplifting message of sportsmanship, self-betterment, and general decency — became the subject of backlash during its recent third and final season, it wasn’t because people suddenly became incensed by its diversity. It was because it started featuring scenes that could have migrated out of one of those dramatised instructional videos they show during DEI compliance training: such as the locker room lecture about looking at nude photos that followed a massive celebrity leak. If people balk at this, perhaps it’s less because they disagree with the substance of the message, and more because they resent its intrusiveness — can’t a guy just enjoy a TV show without having lessons in moral betterment foisted upon him, Sesame Street-style, by a bunch of actors dressed up as footballers?

At the root of this is the notion that art is inherently political, and hence that every mainstream entertainment property must necessarily double as either a morality play, or a salvo in the ongoing culture wars. For those who subscribe to this framework, there is no opting out; if your film doesn’t announce its politics, a set of politics will be assigned to it by a critical apparatus that is increasingly incapable of understanding art in anything but crude identitarian terms. One of the more incisive reviews of The Little Mermaid, written by Wesley Morris of the New York Times, describes the film as “everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval”. He’s right. And yet, even as he notes that the film is something of a trainwreck — and even as he admits that obsessing over the political correctness of movies like this is “a misery” — he nevertheless insists that it, and the other Disney films like it, are “important, culturally reparative work”. And so he reinforces the idea that art described as “important” need not concern itself with being beautiful, or moving, or funny.

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Critics and creators alike are increasingly caught in the trap of the “important” movie, which substitutes political pieties for a good story and markets itself on controversy instead of hype. Long before The Little Mermaid hit cinemas, progressives understood that they were basically obligated to support it for political reasons; even now, the narrative persists that anyone who dislikes the movie must be a racist troll (that is, unless they’re denouncing it for not being woke enough). And the “important” movie is many things: explicitly moral and painstakingly diverse. Checking its privilege. Centring marginalised voices. Sparking conversations and moving toward a more inclusive future. And yet it is invariably bad in every way — including the ways in which it attempts to do better.

Consider the original Little Mermaid, a story about a young woman who yearned for independence; who made a reckless, impulsive bargain in the hopes of pursuing the life she wanted; who learns that choices like this have a ripple effect well beyond the confines of one’s own life. Now consider the politically correct version of the same story, in which Ariel is conveniently saved, by amnesia, from knowing what she’s done — and hence deprived of any opportunity to own it, to reckon with it. The former story is about a girl who does things; the latter is about a girl to whom things happen. Which of these is supposed to be a vision of female empowerment, again?

This is perhaps the worst thing about Disney’s contemporary remakes: not that they are blatant cash grabs, but that they are infantilising. The original Little Mermaid placed infinitely more trust in its intended audience of children than the new version places in those same children, now that they’re grown up. And while it still includes that moment, at the end, in which Sebastian waxes wise about autonomy — “Children got to be free to lead their own lives” — it’s hard to fathom, after two hours and fifteen minutes of Ariel stumbling like a hapless sleepwalker through her own story, that anyone really believes it.

This was where some women, usually but not always older, rolled their eyes. Did an awkward joke, a bad date, or — as one memorable entry in the infamous Shitty Media Men list alleged — a “weird lunch” really constitute a form of harassment, let alone a cancellable offence? But other women, usually but not always younger, clucked their tongues: it was only because women kept putting up with such behaviour that men kept thinking they could get away with it.

At the time, the younger cohort appeared to the older like a bunch of hypersensitive harpies, retreating to the fainting couch at the slightest whiff of insult. The older, according to the younger, were cosying up to the patriarchy, in a desperate attempt to stave off their own irrelevance.

“We’re tough enough to take it,” said the Olds.

“It’s sad you think you have to,” said the Youths.

This early rift in the movement represented a deeper philosophical disagreement, about the nature and importance of resilience. The narrow question is, when does an annoying man becomes an evil harasser? The broader one is, when does a tolerable nuisance cross the line to become an intolerable transgression?

This question has been on my mind this week, for the most tragic of reasons. On 1st May, a 30-year-old man named Jordan Neely was choked to death on a crowded New York City subway train by a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny. Neely, who was homeless and mentally ill, was reportedly screaming and confronting passengers; he was killed after Penny put him in a chokehold, while two other passengers held him down. Penny, in a statement released through his lawyers, said he did not intend to kill Neely.

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This incident was preventable. Long before his death, Neely was known to New York City authorities as a person who could not manage independent living, and who had been spiralling in recent years, desperately in need of help. For him to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.

That Neely slipped through the cracks is not the only sign of institutional failure here. As ridership on the NYC subway has increased in the wake of Covid, so too have instances of violence, including several high-profile incidents in which people have been attacked or killed. New York City mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021 on a campaign that promised to flood the subway system with uniformed police officers, to combat both crime and the perception that the subway has become wildly more dangerous in recent years.

To what extent this campaign could succeed is not clear. There has always been a baseline level of criminality and antisocial behaviour on the subway; sexual harassment and assault is so ubiquitous that brushing up against it is all but inevitable. I was groped, flashed, or masturbated at probably two dozen times during the seven years I spent living in New York. When a friend moved to NYC last year, I told her that she couldn’t truly call herself a New Yorker until she exited a crowded subway car to discover that someone had ejaculated on her coat. (I was only partly kidding.) It’s not that anyone thinks these things are okay; it’s more that they’re expected, a sad fact of life in a city of 8.5 million people, one of those things you cannot change and hence have to find a way to put up with. You look away, you shrug it off, you don’t let it ruin your day because if you did, it would ruin all of your days.

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Here is where the notion of resilience enters in. New York City residents have perhaps a higher tolerance than most for antisocial behaviour in public places, on the subway in particular. Warm and dry, with a captive audience, it attracts all kinds of colourful personalities: panhandlers and performers, pickpockets and preachers, as well as people like Neely who are in the grips of something darker. Until recently, it was standard practice to meet the arrival of one of these people on a crowded carriage with downcast eyes and silence; there was a tacit agreement that you neither react to nor acknowledge the transgressor. That agreement remained in place as crime rose, and as NYC saw a marked increase in behaviour that, even if it started out as merely weird, could — and did — escalate rapidly to violence. In 2022, for instance, a video did the rounds, of a woman begging for help while a deranged man hauls her around a train car by her hair.

But if it was difficult to know exactly where a tolerance for breaches of decorum became apologia for criminal harassment, it was even harder to identify, after Jordan Neely’s death, where the tacit agreement to tolerate becomes a duty to intervene. How do we know when to stand by, when to step in, when to look away, when to be afraid?

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo — the ones who believed that the solution to harassment lay not in teaching women to be assertive, but in teaching men not to abuse — would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit. If you argue that a woman can be traumatised by bawdy humour in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.

But, no: instead, many of the people who once insisted that men who slid into DMs deserved the complete destruction of their professional reputations became passionate advocates for toughening up when it came to dealing with volatile people on public transit. Coverage and commentary from the Left downplayed the possibility that Neely’s behaviour was frightening; instead, he was “acting erratic“, or “houseless and crying for food“. One viral tweet suggested that tragedy could have been averted with “a dollar and granola bar”. The New York Times guide to navigating similar scenarios on public transit took it a step further, imagining someone like Neely as a wild animal it is everyone else’s duty not to provoke: “Don’t make eye contact — especially prolonged eye contact, which might be perceived as threatening.”

Meanwhile, threads proliferated mocking the notion that New York’s subways might be a dangerous place: “I’ve safely ridden the subway for 23 years and my child has never been menaced by a half naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy,” wrote Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker and journalism professor at NYU. This is a remarkable sentiment, and not just because of its stunning reversal of the MeToo-era catechism that allegations should be believed. Less than a year ago, Spiers was among those advocating for the suspension without pay of journalist Dave Weigel after he retweeted what some perceived as a sexist joke, owing to the way this was allegedly received by his female colleagues (“[Every] woman who works with you thinks you’ve telegraphed publicly that you don’t respect women.”)

To sum up: a man who reposts an off-colour joke is advertising his innate misogyny, to the point where women should feel uncomfortable sharing a workplace with him. But an agitated and clearly unstable man announcing to a crowded subway car — as Neely reportedly did — that he’s been pushed to the brink and is ready to die, or go to prison for life: why in the world would you find that menacing?

This sudden rediscovery of the merits of resilience would have been almost refreshing, if not for the whiplash of its promotion by people who up until very recently were arguing that a tweet made them unsafe. There’s even something to it: the ubiquity of certain kinds of boundary-challenging behaviour in big cities makes it not just impractical but impossible to treat every incident of one-off harassment from a stranger as if it’s the end of the world. And of course, once you’ve survived a run-in with the mystery subway ejaculator, sexist microaggressions are unlikely to faze you: cultivating resilience is how we learn to recognise that a situation can be both genuinely alarming but not materially unsafe, or to make peace with the fact that many things which make us uncomfortable should nevertheless be allowed.

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But this mindset was considered anathema during MeToo. With trauma allegedly lurking just around the corner of every heterosexual encounter, distrust became the default. Not just the default, but celebrated — “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter,” intoned Vox‘s Ezra Klein, in a proto-MeToo celebration of this new, terrified paradigm for intimacy. The idea, of course, was that women already felt that fear, living as they did at the eternal precipice of victimisation by the patriarchy; in a truly equal society, everyone would be scared.

Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly. This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behaviour of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinised in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming”, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.

In the end, neither the malicious glee from the Right nor the aggressive minimisation from the Left are treating this case with the sensitivity it deserves. The truth is, eyewitnesses did report that Neely was behaving in a threatening way, and other people on the train were calling 911 well before his confrontation with Penny, suggesting that whatever was happening, it was a cut above the ordinary subway madness that New Yorkers are usually so good at ignoring. But it is also true that the tragic conclusion of this incident seems, at least in part, like the result of a cultivated fragility — the kind that results when you encourage people to view every uncomfortable situation as a trauma in the making, every unpleasant interaction as a precursor to a far worse harm, every upset as an offence for which there must be consequences. That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.

The original Fatal Attraction was uninterested in these questions, but the new reboot — an eponymous TV series — evidently thinks they’re important. Starring Lizzie Caplan as Alex, and Joshua Jackson as Dan, Fatal Attraction 2023 subverts its predecessor simply by being curious about its villain. Although the first two episodes reproduce both the plot and perspective of the original — Dan sparks a connection with Alex and then impulsively has an affair with her while his wife and daughter are out of town — the show then flips the script in episode three, depicting all these events again, but from Alex’s perspective. In the parlance of the contemporary culturati, it centres her.

Perhaps this was inevitable. We live in a moment in which every bad girl seems destined for a sad origin story. What began as a call for strong, complex female characters has evolved over the years into a conviction that lady villains in particular deserve better — and that their misdeeds must stem not from a deep-seated character deficiency, but from that oh-so-trendy contemporary explanation for everything: trauma. This is how Cruella deVille’s aspirations of dalmatian genocide become the product of a childhood tragedy, while Maleficent — a powerful woman whose name literally means destruction — is reimagined as a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy.

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Whether these reimaginings truly improve the story in question is debatable; I, for one, found Maleficent much more intriguing when she was not a sympathetic figure shaped by suffering, but rather a deranged etiquette obsessive, incensed by nothing more or less than her exclusion from an infant’s birthday party. But there has always been a certain cohort of cultural critics who, under the auspices of feminism, take umbrage at such characterisations — who interpret the existence of a bad female character as veiled commentary on the state of women at large. When Fatal Attraction was first released in 1987, the LA Times review lambasted it for being “hateful” — “a clear attack on women’s sexuality, the independent woman and the career woman”.

Of course, in 1987, this wasn’t necessarily an erroneous assumption. The “career woman”, financially autonomous and sexually independent, was a controversial figure in a country consumed by panic over the prospect of ladies working outside of the home. The central concern surrounding the career woman was less that she would eat married men alive than that she would emasculate her own husband by out-earning him — but still, she made people nervous. If men in the Eighties were frightened of encountering a character like Alex Forrest, they had to be even more worried that their wives might look at her — with her successful career, cool New York City loft apartment, and penchant for acrobatic sex — and find her at least a little bit relatable, even aspirational.

The notion that Alex had a tragic backstory of her own, one that might render her more complex, if not outright sympathetic, was in fact nascent during the filming of the original Fatal Attraction — at least in the mind of the woman who played her. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Glenn Close recalled consulting psychiatrists to understand Alex’s motivations:

“There’s no way for the audience to know what her past was. It’s only hinted at when she looks at him giving the bunny to his daughter and then throws up in the bushes. Nobody would say: well why did that happen? Whereas I asked that and the psychiatrist said if she was molested at an early age, and what she was made to do made her gag and throw up, then that’s her trigger.”

Whether psychiatrists were using this word in this way in the late Eighties, the notion of the trigger is, itself, very now. It also conveniently subsumes any sense of control over a character’s decision-making under a slick veneer of therapy-speak. To envision yourself being set off in the manner of a loaded weapon is a different sort of objectification from the one feminist critics so often excoriate, but objectification nonetheless. A gun, after all, can’t fire itself.

There are signs that the new Fatal Attraction has taken to heart the criticisms of Close and others — and not just when it comes to the portrayal of Alex. The most famous thing about the 1987 film is its ending — in which Alex is shot dead by Dan’s wife after she attacks the couple in their home; but almost as well-known is the fact that this scene was re-shot at the last minute: in the original script, Alex slits her own throat and frames Dan for her murder. Close reportedly hated the new ending, as did several critics who found it tawdry and out of keeping with Alex’s character — and the new Fatal Attraction seems to have jettisoned it in favour of the original. The series features a dual timeline: one depicts the circa 2010 seduction. Another takes place in the present day, where Dan has just been released from prison, having been convicted of murdering Alex.

But rather than a win for the original film’s critics, the new Fatal Attraction may be sending them a cautionary message: be careful what you wish for. In this iteration, Alex does indeed have more depth. We see how her fear of abandonment — the “I hate you, don’t leave me” mindset that is characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder — both poisons her relationships with other people and makes her a fierce, competent advocate for victims of violent crime. At one point, she provides a somewhat brutal reality check to a man who’s being defrauded by his grandson but is hesitant to press charges: “You get to decide if you want to be with the people that hurt you, or alone. But it has to be one or the other, because those are the choices that you have.” One gets the sense that she’s speaking from experience, that as a victim is how Alex moves through and perceives the world herself. She is vulnerable and manipulative, tormented and tormentor. But while seeing the world through her eyes is riveting, it is also deeply unsettling.

As it turns out, to see the fullness of a person does not necessarily make that person good; sometimes, it only makes them more terrifying. Yes, we all contain the capacity for evil. Yes, some people are motivated to do terrible things not because they’re sadistic monsters but because they’re unwell, or desperate, or traumatised from an abusive past. But at the end of the day, we are still talking about a woman who breaks things and hurts people. Faced with the kind of romantic disappointment virtually every person experiences at least once — and a disappointment that is not just ordinary but, considering the married status of her paramour, entirely predictable — Alex chooses to go to extremes.

All of this makes Alex Forrest both a natural yet somewhat uncategorisable addition to the current entertainment landscape. Today’s Hollywood is a place where the only thing more bankable than a female anti-hero is a nostalgia property. But it is also a place where truly dangerous women go to die — or at least, to be rendered toothless by retellings that chalk all their bad acts up to PTSD. They are thus robbed of the agency that made them such interesting and effective villains in the first place.

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There is a fine line between revealing a character’s humanity and excusing her behaviour, a balance that seems to present a particular struggle for television in the post-#MeToo era: writers are too quick to explain away the moral ambiguity of female characters with some kind of sexually traumatic backstory. Critics are too quick to accuse those who don’t do this of just hating women, full stop. Nobody has quite come out and said that women can’t be straight-up villains anymore, but in this tepid, fearful climate, it’s no surprise that people struggle to create female characters: bad, strong, or otherwise.

And yet, if the first two episodes of Fatal Attraction threaten to make you root for Alex — Dan, as played by Joshua Jackson, is so smarmy, and so entitled, that the prospect of seeing him taken down is not without its appeal — the third-episode twist reveals that Dan is not, and never was, the catalyst for what comes next. This is Alex Forrest’s show; this is Alex Forrest’s game. And while all of this makes Alex more interesting, crucially, it does not redeem her. It does not make her relatable.

In fact, in centring Alex, what this new take on Fatal Attraction really does is to hold her accountable. She is human rather than supernatural in her badness. She makes up stories to justify her choices, the way all human beings do. But she is bad: she orchestrates and manipulates. She tests people in the cruel and imperious manner of an Old Testament God, just for the dark pleasure of lashing out and punishing them when they fail her. Because however sorry you are for disappointing her, you can never be sorry enough. Because in her mind, you’re the bad guy.

The Japanese government is considering raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 as part of a package of sex crime reforms. Yes, you read that right, the age of consent in Japan is currently 13, one of the lowest in the world and the lowest in the G7. A justice ministry panel is also recommending redefining rape to make court judgements more consistent. As it stands, it must be proved that not only was sex non-consensual, but that the victim had been unable to resist due to “violence or intimidation”. The new law will allow courts to consider drugging, intoxication, “catching the victim off-guard” and psychological manipulation in their definition. Voyeurism will also be outlawed.

That Japan is only now updating its laws is troubling, as it suggests a society indifferent to the fate of vulnerable minors and sexual assault victims. Just last week, a former J-pop star Kauan Okamoto claimed to have been sexually abused by the now-deceased music producer Johnny Kitagawa when he was 15. He thinks many more boys who worked for Kitagawa were also abused, but were afraid that speaking out would ruin their fledgling pop careers. “I believe that almost all of the boys who went to stay at Johnny’s place were victims,” he told reporters . “I would say 100 to 200 boys stayed there on a rotation basis during my four years at the agency.”

All this appears to add substance to the implications of the “weird Japan” reportage that fixates on the seedy elements of Japanese culture, such as the popularity of disturbingly young girl bands who cavort scantily clad in glossy videos. (Some members of the J-pop band NMB48 are just 14.) But as ever with Japan, things are not what they seem. The salacious Orientalist myth needs to be separated from the more prosaic reality. For one thing, it’s not exactly true to say the age of consent in Japan is 13. Most prefectures (or counties) interpret laws against “lewd acts” to include sex with minors. This means the real age of consent in much of the country is 18 — though penalties for “lewd acts” are generally lighter.

Still, that hardly explains why Japan’s sex crime laws haven’t been updated since the late Meiji period. The answer may lie in Japan’s traditional “black box” attitude to sexual crime. In a culture where direct expressions of opinion or intent are considered impolite and injurious to societal harmony, and everything is caveated or left unsaid, it is often considered too difficult to determine what happens in the “black box” of an intimate encounter between two individuals. The police and judiciary would rather not be asked to get involved — and nebulous sex crime laws that deter victims from coming forward have long suited them. Of course, it also benefitted predatory men.

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Then there is the fact that the public was, until recently, largely unaware of the flaws of the outdated laws. Japan has a low official rate of sex crime at 1.02 per 100,000 citizens (the UK’s figure is 27), and horrific stories of abuse do not appear on the news. Nor does sexual abuse ever feature as a storyline in TV dramas. In the absence of compelling evidence of a problem, the dusty old ordinance remained on the statute books as there simply wasn’t any clamour for change.

That is, until recently. Japan is at its most dynamic and progressive when it feels the world’s gaze upon it, a phenomenon known as gaiatsu (“outside pressure”). Not all Western-inspired protest movements translate to Japan (BLM flopped), but MeToo took off in 2017. The behaviour of celebrities came under intense focus, with particular attention paid to how “talents” interacted with their very young fans. In 2017 the bassist of the band Tokio quit after forcing a kiss on a high-school girl, and actor Keisuke Koide had his contracts for TV dramas cancelled when it was revealed he had slept with a 17-year-old. Then, in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister, was forced to step down after implying that women talked too much in meetings. The director of the opening ceremony was sacked for likening the female star to a pig.

At the heart of Japan’s MeToo movement was Shiori Itō, a journalist and filmmaker whose rape allegations against a high-profile colleague saw her awarded substantial damages in 2019. Her memoir Black Box, published in 2017, became a bestseller, and she has since campaigned to change Japan’s century-old rape laws.

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Ito’s story raised many awkward questions in Japan. Those impressively low crime statistics came under scrutiny: a government survey in 2019 found that only 14% of victims of sexual assault had reported the crime. And the survey only questioned those aged 16 and above. The reasons given were a lack of faith in the police, a belief that their trauma was unimportant, and shame. In a country where stoic endurance is prized and maintaining societal harmony is considered of far greater value than personal suffering, underreporting is a serious issue.

However, there is a limit to Japan’s tolerance. In 2019, a series of technical acquittals in four sex abuse cases involving minors sparked outrage. This included a horrific case in Nagoya, where a man was acquitted despite the judge acknowledging he had repeatedly raped his teenage daughter and had threatened to beat her if she refused. The judgement hinged on whether the young woman could have resisted: the judge ruled she could have done. A higher court overruled the judgement, and the man was given a 10-year sentence, but the dangers of the ossified penal code had been exposed and calls for changes to the law intensified.

Gaiatsu may be a factor in the timing of the proposed changes. Japan will host the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — who was schooled in the US and is on a mission to harmonise Japanese society with Western norms — will not want any embarrassment spoiling his showpiece.

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Kishida has already made efforts to rid Japan, which is ranked 116 out of 146 in the gender gap index, of its chauvinist reputation. Last June’s Intensive Policy for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women required firms to disclose their gender pay gaps; last December, Japan hosted the sixth World Assembly for Women, featuring luminaries such as Malala Yousafzai and Christine Lagarde. Kishida is likely to welcome the justice ministry’s sex crime reforms and push through the necessary legislation swiftly.

This is all well and good, except that the proposals appear to be more about sanitising Japan’s international image than protecting vulnerable young people. The bar for rape conviction will remain high: Human Rights Now have said it will still fail to meet international standards. Whether the new policy will cut through on the international stage is also in doubt. Two weeks ago, thousands of tourists flocked to Kawasaki to attend its annual Penis Festival — much to the mirth of the Western press. But what foreigners often don’t realise is that the defining aspect of Japanese sex culture isn’t, as A.A. Gill claimed, its weirdness — but its secrecy.

Sara Petersen has, by her own admission, been momfluenced. In her new book, she grapples with these fascinating and objectionable women — rich, white mothers who Instagram their lives, often using sponsored content. She recounts how one inspired her to buy a $460 sweater — buyer’s regret soon followed. More unsettling, though, is her confession that momfluencers might have been behind her decision to have another child: “Maybe my longing for a third baby was also impacted, at least a little bit, by momfluencers… who made pregnancy and motherhood look good. I forgot to credit them for being one of the many fucked-up reasons I craved another baby.”

To be any influencer is to perform your real life, and discreetly weave in advertisements. To be a momfluencer, however, means roping your children into the frame, selling their sweetest, saddest, and most awkward moments to as wide an audience as possible. This poses major ethical issues, some of which predate the contemporary influencer era: no one really likes having their childhoods monetised. Much of the argument surrounding momfluencers focuses on the exploitation of minors. But Petersen is more interested in the exploitation of mothers — or, more specifically, the exploitation of the status anxieties that accompany motherhood.

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Petersen self-flagellates for being swayed by these saleswomen, but she can afford to be. As she acknowledges, she shares demographic traits with the women she’s quasi-hate-following: “white, thin, conventionally attractive”, upper-middle-class Americans with giant kitchens. As Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore points out in an Aeon essay: “most momfluencers aren’t struggling, working-class mothers living in public housing and surviving on food stamps, but middle-class women who already exist in material comfort, and whose message to the rest of us is consume, consume, consume”.

If things were different, there would be a feminist case for supporting momfluencers’ endeavours as a way of making parenting lucrative — and increasing society’s respect for domestic work. But momfluencers are not, as a rule, achieving financial independence from their labour: they are making peanuts. We could call them privileged, because they do not need to work. But how do we define need, in this situation? If a woman’s husband makes enough money to support the family, that’s something, for now. But what if his income changes? What if they split up? There was a time when feminism recognised that even women with very gainfully employed husbands are harmed if they fall out of the workforce entirely.

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Petersen writes that her “husband’s job sustains us financially”, an aside that reminds us a serious book author is in the same economic situation as a momfluencer. And this is the case for plenty of female writers. When poet Maggie Smith lamented that her now-ex-husband, a lawyer, prioritised his career over hers, it was hard not to think of the financial dichotomy that almost certainly backed up his assessment. In one sense, this isn’t about sexism, but rather about some careers paying better than others. In another, there’s a reason it’s women who often wind up in these lower-paid, creative, and flexible endeavours. Pregnancy, childbirth, and being the primary carer of young children are all roles which lend themselves to financial dependency, at least temporarily. Momfluencing offers at least the prospect of a middle-ground path: a way to work without having to be separated from your young children or spending your entire salary on childcare.

But it also offers something to more traditionally employed mothers: a dream they might be able to buy into. Much of what Petersen writes about being “addicted to shopping”, as a means of self-improvement resonates more than I’d like it to. Shopping, at least the kind of shopping Petersen describes, is a manifestation of powerlessness. It’s what you do when you’re not getting validation in other parts of your life. It is also the only activity available to you if it’s 3am and you’re feeding a newborn and you don’t have the mental capacity for anything more than scrolling. But all mothers are vulnerable. Once you’re the one in the household buying the practical stuff — a task that tends to fall to the lower-paid partner — why not treat yourself? The temptation is there, even when the money is not, and consumer capitalism exploits it.

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And the backdrop of Petersen’s story is the pandemic, which turned even normal people into very-online neurotics, offering ample opportunities to sink into social media, form parasocial relationships with rich people half a world away, and click “purchase” on whatever they were selling. This was fertile territory for the momfluencer phenomenon, though it persists in the post-lockdown age. It was also fertile territory for the social justice movement that took off in those years. Petersen makes sure we know that, though she buys what the fancy white-lady momfluencers are selling, politically, she thinks they’re awful. After all, they valorise whiteness, thinness, wealth, and other traits that Petersen may personally share, but thinks ought not to be treated as aspirational.

Here it helps to remember that 2020-2021 was the “Karen” era. After some years of #MeToo, pussy hats, and a liberal notion that women are society’s victims, George Floyd’s murder led to a liberal epiphany that it is in fact only black people whose victimhood should count. This meant that white women were not merely part of an oppressive group but, worse, oppressors guilty of seeing themselves as victims. Progressive white women — moms and otherwise — offered up tearful promises to “do the work”, which tended to involve reading fellow white woman Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. White, female influencers — Leandra “Man Repeller” Medine, Emily “Cupcakes and Cashmere” Schuman — apologised for past misdeeds and platformed women of colour. As a good white liberal, Petersen goes out in search of unproblematic momfluencers, and finds them in abundance: black, transgender, disabled, lower-income, or fat, these women are posting about motherhood, too. They’re not influencing anyone to buy unnecessary high-end household items, though: they’re serving a different function, reminding us that being a good parent doesn’t demand being a rich white lady with a design-magazine-worthy kitchen.

A binary springs up: as Petersen presents it, a generic rich white lady’s posting is performative at best, white supremacist at worst. But the minute the poster happens to be marginalised in some way — that is, in a way that registers for today’s progressives — she is engaging in important online activism. I’m thinking especially of when, acknowledging her own “thin privilege”, she gives the floor to a plus-size momfluencer named Mia, whose concerns are arguably too specific to merit an airing. “Mia wishes Kindred Bravely [a company that makes nursing bras, presumably] would do better; she says their nursing bra is incredible but only goes up to size XXL.” Elsewhere, Petersen atones for having purchased a “The Future is Female” shirt prior to learning that the slogan “is widely considered problematic, exclusionary of trans people, and inherently anti-intersectional feminist”. If buying the shirt in the first place was extremely 2016-2017, apologising for having done so was extremely the vibe of the years that followed. Petersen, always, is on trend.

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But she is at her best when she doesn’t write as though trying to appease an implacable sensitivity reader — when she steps down from acting as the voice of liberal white moms, and instead delves into her own specific experience. It’s here that she winds up, paradoxically, getting to the root of maternal self-flagellation. “Most days,” she reads, “I’d rather vacuum the Cheerio crumbs under my baby’s high chair than read a Sandra Boynton book to him. I’d rather scroll through someone else’s tender moments than try to locate my own.”

Confessing that one is sometimes bored when entertaining one’s baby is riskier than acknowledging one’s privilege. It sets things up for a reader to ask whether you actually love your baby, you monster, even though of course you love your baby, that’s not the issue. The issue is that baby-minding, even when it’s your own uniquely fascinating-to-you baby, can be a dispiriting mix of strenuous and monotonous. It should be possible to admit this without it reading as an insult to the baby. (We were all, once, that baby.)

The challenge of being in the moment with even the most delightful baby has no policy-based solution. It’s not specific to American capitalism. It is something experienced by women — yes and some men, but, you know, you know — of all nationalities and demographics. It doesn’t matter how rich, thin, or white she is, or how paraben-free her medicine cabinet. Momfluencers allow their mom-followers an escape from the realities of motherhood by way of a fantasy version of the same. But in doing so, they make mothers feel bad about their lives not matching up to that ideal. That feeling, in turn, summons the credit card. Not that it helps.

This method of bra removal was part of a larger, elaborate set of rules, unwritten but ironclad, whereby the locker room was a place to be naked as little as humanly possible. Being in your underwear was okay, but only if you were clearly making haste to put on more clothing. The bathing facilities, it was understood, were for decoration only and not to be used; people still talked about the time a few years back when a girl named Katie, a transfer student from some other country, or possibly another planet, actually took a shower after gym class one day — here you would lower your voice to a dramatic whisper — in the nude.

This cautionary tale of Katie revealed the true nature of our shared pathology: it wasn’t just that we didn’t want to be seen naked, or to see each other naked. It was that allowing yourself to be seen naked signified something sinister about you. You had to be some kind of pervert, an exhibitionist weirdo who lacked the good sense to be ashamed of your body — which was, of course, disgusting, and should be hidden at all costs.

Obviously, this was not a healthy way to be. Obviously, we all had eating disorders. Obviously, the kids were not, in this particular case, all right — or right at all. It’s strange, then, that in 2023, the neuroses of a bunch of 15-year-old girls trying to hide their developing bodies from each other in an upstate New York locker room seem to have somehow become the basis for a new Western paradigm. Nudity is now seen as invariably sexual, highly suspicious, and probably dangerous, particularly to children.

In the UK, uproar recently followed the release of a TV series called Naked Education, in which a group of adult educators appeared in front of teen students fully unclothed, as part of a lesson about the diversity of the human form. In Australia, a surf club banned members from being nude in its changing rooms — including in the showers — in the name of protecting children from the traumatic sight of naked adults. In the United States, the principal of a school in Tallahassee, Florida, was forced to resign after three parents complained about students having seen a picture of Michelangelo’s David sculpture during art class, stone penis and all. To be fair, this last incident may be somewhat more complicated than the initial reporting made it seem — but the powerful prudery it implies has form. In 2002, for instance, two statues in the Justice Department’s Great Hall were ordered to be shielded by drapes, because Attorney General John Ashcroft was apparently perturbed by the Spirit of Justice’s stone breast lurking over his shoulder in photographs.

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Of course, decompensating over the sight of a naked body — supposedly to protect children — is itself bizarrely childish. It is reminiscent of a scene in Love Actually where an increasingly exasperated Andrew Lincoln instructs a group of giggling schoolgirls that the photograph they’re laughing at — a rear view of several men wearing Santa hats and nothing else — is “not funny, it’s art!” (This job was admittedly not made easier by the fact that at least some of these photos were, objectively, ridiculous.) And there’s something very teenaged, too, about the inability to divorce nudity from its naughtier, sexier contexts — as if nudity which fails to titillate is not just taboo, but actually repulsive. It’s the Seinfeld episode about good versus bad naked (remember: “Naked hair brushing, good! Naked crouching, bad”), all grown up and coming soon to a set of locker room bylaws near you.

It’s not hard to understand how we got here. The mass awareness-raising of the #MeToo movement does not mix well with the ongoing brouhaha over sex and gender education in schools. And with the rare but highly-publicised instance wherein a genuine pervert exploits the availability of clothing-optional environments for his own unsavoury purposes, some people were always going to decide that we’re better safe (and fully clothed) than sorry. But what happens to a society in which the concept of non-sexualised nudity simply ceases to exist? It’s not just art that gets weird; it’s everything.

The importance of non-sexual nudity is less about pleasing the eyes than calming the mind: in this space you can be naked without worrying about what you look like naked. In cultures with fewer sexual hang-ups, nudity can even be an ice-breaker. Among young folk in Stockholm, a friend recently explained, the co-ed sauna can be a first date destination, ostensibly to remove the pressure of wondering if and when you’ll be naked together, so that you can focus on more important areas of compatibility.

I can understand the appeal of this approach, particularly for those who haven’t yet reached that age when going into a hot room naked causes even the normally-supple parts of your body to start melting, Jabba-the-Hutt-like, toward the floor. Even leaving aside the aesthetic benefits of being young, hot and in the nude, there’s also the intimacy of it. Not intimacy as in physical, but the kind where you don’t rush to cover your cellulite with a blanket the second the lights come on. The “I’ll let you see my flaccid penis in a hot room” kind of intimacy. The kind where you are unguarded and unselfconscious, allowing yourself to be seen.

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Meanwhile, the more taboo nudity becomes in America, the more people seem to seek out ever more elaborate pretences for getting naked. Naked yoga classes. Naked dinner parties. Naked bowling nights! (Yes, you can bring your own balls.) Or how about Naked and Afraid, a reality survival series in which the only exciting part of the contestants’ titular nudity is the possibility that one of them, at any moment, might be bitten on the genitals by a venomous snake. Despite the supposedly traumatising nature of naked bodies, it’s almost like we’re aching to be naked, and to see other people that way — in contexts where sex is a distant afterthought.

In a moment when trust is in short supply — not just between individuals in intimate relationships, but on a societal scale — perhaps the desire to curtail nudity stands in for a fear of intimacy, and from the sense that we just can’t tolerate being so vulnerable around people we don’t know well. It’s an irony of our hyperconnected moment that we are more suspicious of each other than ever, more obsessed with catching each other — ideally on video — in violation of whatever social edicts that convey in-group status. Social media has given us an unprecedented window into other people’s heads, only to leave us consumed by fear of all the things we’re sure they’re thinking but not saying. Our most popular social movements, from #MeToo to MAGA, are at least partially premised on the notion that other people are secret sexual predators, or violent bigots, or sneering elites; in any case, they hate you, and wish to do you harm.

But when we set out to “protect” young people from predation by shielding them from the sight of a naked body in any context, what are we really teaching them to avoid, to be afraid of? Just like in that gym locker room all those years ago, the message seems to be not just that it’s dangerous to see nudity, or dangerous to be nude; it’s also that there’s something unseemly about being okay with being naked, be it literally or figuratively. Don’t you realise that your true shape is disgusting? Don’t you know you’re supposed to be ashamed?

Anyway, because teenagers are the way they are, all we’re really doing by shielding them from nudity is allowing their entire education about the normal range of human anatomy to be dictated by the material they seek out on their own — which is to say, by porn. Needless to say, this is a bad way for kids to form a factually accurate understanding of what normal naked bodies look like, never mind what it teaches them about sex. But it also reinforces the notion that the two can’t ever be separated.

Surely this undermines what young people should actually learn about the human body: that it’s not just a vehicle for sexual activity, or an object of sexual desire, but a miraculous machine in its own right, the vessel that moves us through the world and contains everything that we are. And surely what we should strive for is a world in which people can sometimes be naked — not performatively, not gratuitously, but in the unselfconscious way of a person who takes off her sweaty clothes and gets in the shower, because there is a shower, and that is what a shower is for.

This is the thing I’ve realised about Katie, all these years later: she was the only one being normal. The rest of us, nearly strangling ourselves with our own undergarments in our desperation not to be seen naked, were the weird ones.