Then came a grim reminder of what happens when people entrusted with our breasts fail to regard them first and foremost as parts of our biology. An NHS trust in north-East England admitted that at least 20 women had undergone unnecessary mastectomies in its care. Hundreds of patients suffered harm while being treated at the breast unit of County Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust (CDDFT). One patient is known to have died.

When I read the story, my reaction was not shock or horror but resigned familiarity. This has happened before, and it will happen again. I know, because it happened to me.

I eschew the word “victim”, although medically and legally that is what I am. I prefer “patient”, to give the horror story its proper context. In 2006, I was operated on by Ian Paterson, a charming, reassuring surgeon who had examined what he claimed was a rare type of potentially cancerous lump in my breast when I was 30. He wanted to operate urgently, and I believed that, by doing so, he had saved my life. It was all lies. I was never actually at risk of breast cancer: the lump was just a swollen lymph node, and I should never have gone under the knife. I was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of women who had unnecessary surgery at his hands, and consider myself one of the luckier ones to leave with just a small scar on one breast. Many of Paterson’s patients had mastectomies that they simply did not need.

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The “butcher surgeon” — a media sobriquet I hate for its sensationalism, and respect for its honesty — was sentenced to a 20-year prison sentence in 2017 for botched and unnecessary surgery. As well as undertaking needless operations in both the NHS and the private sector, Paterson was found to have carried out “cleavage-sparing mastectomies”, leaving tissue behind instead of a flat chest wall so that a woman still “looked good in a bikini”. But this meant that the cancer could return — and for hundreds it did. Of his 1,206 mastectomy patients, 675 died. There was an inescapable assumption buried inside Paterson’s actions. Even when a woman was lying on an operating table with her life in the balance, she was treated with less humanity and dignity for reasons explicitly related to her femaleness. The breast was an object for the man to do with what he wished.

Women learn young that breasts do not wholly belong to them. Even toddlers are put in two-piece bikinis, and by about the age of seven, little girls are expected to cover their flat chests for reasons everyone knows but no one will articulate. Well before puberty, I was aware that my chest was different from that of my male peers. During our Eighties sex education lessons, in between incredibly graphic videos of childbirth and awkward explanations of primitive period products, we were taught that the primary function of our developing “secondary sex characteristics” would eventually be to breastfeed. It wasn’t long before boys disabused me of this idea with crude comments and staring. Girls were taught that breasts exist to feed babies, but boys believed their primary function is to feed the male gaze.

I know where they learned this. I grew up in the era of Page 3 “girls”, David Sullivan’s “Countdown to 16” in the Sunday Sport, Benny Hill and Carry On. Prime time comedy was dominated by men who leaned heavily on boobs-as-punchline in lieu of actual jokes. The breast message was clear: you could be either hot — or funny.

As young women in the Nineties, while Pamela Anderson was running into the Baywatch surf, we were sold lies, lingerie, and boob jobs. There was Eva Herzigova’s “hello boys” Wonderbra — designed not for comfort or convenience, but for maximum cleavage, delivering precisely what men want — and the “balconette” bra, a romantic lace balcony from which our mammary Juliets could be courted. In the 2000s, bigger boobs were even bigger business, confirmed by the cultural impact of Hooters, Katie Price and the tragic Lolo (French slang for breasts) Ferrari. Breast implant surgery was surging. Then, in 2004, Janet Jackson’s right breast changed the world forever after Justin Timberlake exposed it to 90 million viewers at a Super Bowl halftime show.

“Nipplegate” led to the creation of YouTube, because a man wanted to share the clip. Two days after the live event, Jackson’s breast became the most searched-for image in internet history, even beating “9/11” for the record of most searches in a 24-hour period. The entire world was lusting after and laughing at a single boob. While Jackson was vilified, shamed and punished, Timberlake suffered no consequences and even performed at the same Grammys from which Jackson was blacklisted.

This was the cultural background against which the NHS produced its 2004 report into potential wrongdoing by Paterson. But that report resulted in no meaningful action, nor did another in 2008 in which consultant and investigator Rex Polson described Paterson as performing these “bikini-friendly” surgeries because he wanted to achieve “an improved cosmetic result”. Whistleblowers were left feeling stonewalled and patients — mostly women — continued to be harmed.

As Deborah Douglas, campaigner and patient of the surgeon, writes in her 2026 book The Cost of Trust: “We live in a society that wants women’s bodies to be a certain way; to have a nice cleavage and flat stomach, to look good in a bikini…The operation that Paterson sold me also prioritized looks. This seemed like a win-win.” Douglas was given a mastectomy with reconstruction and chemotherapy. None of it was necessary.

Few women would choose to have a more aesthetically appealing operation if it meant their cancer could return, but Paterson’s victims were not given the choice. He simply assumed that any woman would prefer some sort of natural cleavage to none at all — the male gaze was more important than a safe outcome.

This was certainly the case for Marie Pinfield, who in 2006 was diagnosed with cancer in one breast. She asked Paterson for a double mastectomy as a precautionary measure, but he said he wouldn’t remove a healthy breast unless she underwent a psychological evaluation. Against her wishes, he performed his signature “cleavage-sparing” mastectomy and Pinfield woke to discover she still had a lot of breast tissue, reduced from a G-cup to a D-cup. She demanded a revision operation, which Paterson angrily agreed to — but even then he would not give her a flat chest wall. It was too late anyway. Her cancer had returned and in 2008 she died, aged 49. Her case is one of hundreds of deaths linked to Paterson currently being investigated by the Birmingham coroner in the largest inquest since Hillsborough. Paterson fought hard not to give evidence to the inquests, causing even further distress to bereaved families, but was eventually forced by the court. He now appears regularly at the inquests from prison via video link, and continues to deny wrongdoing. He will be released from prison in 2027 while the inquests are still ongoing.

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The NHS and private sector wanted us to believe that Paterson was a lone actor, a rogue in an otherwise healthy system, but that is not true. In The Cost of Trust, Douglas warns that “He is a symptom of a system that not only allowed him to carry out his crimes but actively helped to cover them up.” The NHS knew for years that Paterson was doing incomplete mastectomies and prioritizing looks over patient safety, but he was getting the waiting lists down and was seemingly protected by the old boys’ network that has long dogged the field of medicine.

In the cases of both Paterson and the CDDFT breast unit, there are of course multiple factors at play, including the role of the profit motive in the private sector, and the push to reduce NHS waiting lists at any cost. But casting a shadow across all of this — and indeed across much of women’s experiences of healthcare — is something that is now labeled “medical misogyny”: the fact that the entire field of medicine has historically defaulted to male anatomy, neglected research into female medical conditions, and ignored women’s complaints.

The medical establishment is slow to acknowledge this. The British Medical Association produced a report on sexism in medicine in 2021, but it was only concerned with the treatment of female medics rather than patients. The General Medical Council acknowledges a culture of sexism, but again its focus has been on female doctors. Earlier this year, now-former Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced plans to tackle some of the issues. He has since been replaced by Yvette Cooper, whose office did not reply when I asked whether she is committed to those same plans.

It’s a start. But as all women know, misogyny isn’t born in hospitals. Outside the ward doors is a culture — and a media — happier to obsess over the virtues of Sydney Sweeney’s breasts than address the fact that girls are growing up bombarded with targeted ads for breast augmentation (now payable in installments or at a bargain price in Turkey). The key to taking women’s health seriously is to understand the assumptions projected onto our bodies before we even enter the waiting room.

Six months later, she was sacked. “I’m now on the barred list alongside Wayne Couzens and multiple rapist David Carrick,” she tells me.

Her crimes, though, were of a rather different order: remarks deemed sexist and transphobic. Colleagues alleged that she repeatedly referred to men in derogatory terms, regularly stating “I hate men”, “fucking men”, and on one occasion, “all men are rapists”. She also faced complaints for comments about transgender people. The allegations were upheld, and the career of a detective who spent 24 years investigating violence against women and children was summarily terminated.

Critics will characterize Fletcher’s remarks as straightforward misandry, and she herself accepts that some of what she said might be seen as offensive and inappropriate. Her defense, though, is not that the remarks were acceptable, but that they were made in the context of investigating repeated male violence against women, and that they have been judged by a disciplinary standard not consistently applied elsewhere.

The vast majority of male perpetrators of domestic violence and stalking are never arrested — let alone convicted. Just as shockingly, the Government’s early-release scheme will apply to those few who were jailed; soon, these dangerous men will be let loose to continue their war of attrition against their victims. In the meantime, a police officer who put heart and soul into protecting victims of the most heinous crimes has been sacked for hurting the feelings of male colleagues.

Why, then, was Fletcher deemed to be such a significant disciplinary problem?

Partly, this was because she was an outlier in the force — a woman of low rank who nevertheless spoke out against self-ID and what she saw as dangerous practices within the police (including the controversial ruling on strip searches for transgender individuals). She was chair of Northumbria Police SEEN, an independent body set up by women in the force in order to challenge sex discrimination and uphold the rights and protections that relate to sex, as set out in the Equality Act 2010. Her forthright approach to these matters, she believes, set her at odds with the DEI squad.

“From the beginning of this process,” she tells me, “it has felt like they wanted rid of me. And mainly because I do not hold the views of the force about gender ideology. I have been very clear that I believe self-ID is a disaster, and that gender ideology in general is anti-women.”

Context is everything, though, and Fletcher’s determination to speak out was all taking place as the entire police force embraced Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (EDI) policies and training. As Dominic Adler stated in his investigation for UnHerd: “Fantasies of inclusion are colliding with the brick wall of reality”. Indeed, Northumbria Police, in particular, has been criticized for taking its trans rights ethos too far, being seen to take a side in a highly politicized, deeply contested social issue, while internally admonishing those who refuse to toe the accepted line.

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Fletcher’s first “crime” was to express her views about how prevalent woman-hating is across society following Sarah Everard’s murder in November 2021. Some male colleagues, we subsequently learned, became “upset and offended” when she said that the only way to stop night-time rape is to put a nine-o’clock curfew on all men.

“I am upset that Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a police officer,” she tells me in response. “It happened because of misogyny, and that’s the problem that they should be looking at, not me talking about it.” It’s worth recalling that police did suggest a curfew at the time — just one for women.

The next time she ran into trouble was in March 2023, when she complained about online training materials that had been issued as part of the EDI force strategy. One was a TED talk by Sophie Cook, a trans activist and TV newsreader. “He was talking about how he transitioned and how when he was feeling suicidal, he went and bought some make-up, and everything was better after that.”

Fletcher sent emails complaining about the Sophie Cook material. In the emails, she stated that it was offensive and misogynistic for men to claim they know what it’s like to be a woman. She explained in her complaint that she feared the force would “sleepwalk into self-ID, which would be a disaster”. Of particular concern to her was trans-identified men arrested for rape being recorded as female. “How would this work,” she points out, “with our research policy, and our crime recording?” It would completely skew the data about male violence if these were deemed to be female crimes.

Fletcher also complained about a presentation on “The power of pronouns”, delivered by a trans man and another member of the DEI team. Attendees were warned that refusal to use preferred pronouns would cause harm. Again, these were sent by email. And each time, Fletcher says she received an acknowledgment promising to review her complaints and come back to her. “But they never did, they just reported me to Professional Standards.”

When she was finally told by her sergeant that there had been complaints made against her, which would be investigated, she said out loud, “God, this is ridiculous. I’m getting done by the fucking rainbow unit!”

One complainant in the case who was in the room when she made that comment is PC Kevin Thompson, who is gay, and a passionate ally of trans people. In his statement for the tribunal he claimed that: “As a man working in that environment, I felt quite intimidated by her radical views.” It is probably noteworthy that, at the time, he insisted he wasn’t offended, and, indeed, continued to say as much until the gross misconduct disciplinary was being constructed. At that point Thompson, along with various others who had not felt moved to complain when offense was caused, suddenly decided to go on the record.

Given that the police service is now recognized as one of the most institutionally misogynistic institutions in the land, it is ironic that a woman with previous exemplary service has been sacked for making off-the-cuff remarks about male violence and women’s rights. As Fletcher puts it: “Without doubt, these trumped-up allegations came about because the entire force has been captured by gender ideology,” says Fletcher. “They went on a massive fishing expedition to gather as much dirt on me as possible so they could get rid of the big-mouthed feminist.”

The issue, then, is not whether Fletcher’s remarks and complaints were appropriate, but whether they justified dismissal when allegations of far more serious misconduct by male officers have often been dealt with less severely. Of the almost 1,000 officers facing formal internal proceedings for police perpetrated abuse, over half had their cases addressed in standard misconduct meetings — rather than gross misconduct tribunals — and so were protected from dismissal. Indeed, Northumbria police seems to be a textbook study of misogyny in the force. We learned, in 2024, that 64 Northumbria Police officers had been accused of sexual or domestic abuse in the previous four years. And, back in 2015, the chief constable, after also being accused of “rudeness”, claimed that she was treated differently because she was a woman.

It was the same story with Fletcher. “I was sacked because I challenged their unlawful conduct and their discriminatory conduct,” she claims. And she goes on to describe how not one colleague reported her at the time. They were all spoken to later on by a senior officer who was collecting “dirt”, mindful of the fact that Fletcher was repeatedly raising the fact that Northumbria Police has a huge problem with women.

If Fletcher sees her case as a witch-hunt, her fight is not over. She is preparing for an employment tribunal against Northumbria Police on the grounds of belief discrimination, and she will rely on the Forstater ruling, which held that gender-critical views deserve legal protection.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for any women considering joining the force. As Fletcher puts it in characteristically robust fashion: “I feel like I’ve been in an abusive relationship with my employer for about the last five years.” What woman would willingly sign up for that?

The causal power attributed to porn has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Of course, that isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of good and familiar reasons to dislike pornography. A lot of porn is disgusting, tacky and misogynistic; it certainly harms the people who make it; to be aroused by its more depraved varieties is, in a completely straightforward way, a manifestation of bad taste. Perhaps the young, or those of limited inspiration, even pick up hackneyed or harmful sexual “scripts” from what they watch. Sex-positive progressives who try to suppress this knowledge for ideological reasons are usually guilty of embarrassing levels of self-deceit.

Not content to rely on those considerations, however, the present wave of anti-porn journalists usually also make extravagant empirical claims about the potential population-level effects of porn use. For instance, Louise Perry and others have suggested that the rise in pornography consumption has seen rates of erectile dysfunction “skyrocket”, from single to double digits, in recent years. Such claims may have the ring of truth. But is there any hard evidence behind them? Not really. There is a dearth of gold-standard longitudinal data. Much of what does exist fails to find statistically significant correlations between ordinary levels of pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction. The catastrophizing results have to be cherry-picked: in this case, as the science writer Stuart Ritchie discovered, from unrepresentative self-reported survey data collected from Swiss military conscripts.

Even when pathological, rather than ordinary, use of pornography is brought into focus, journalists steadfastly neglect obvious confounding factors. Extreme pornography use is not independent of other kinds of sexual dysfunction. Men who are predisposed to erectile dysfunction for other reasons may also spend more time seeking solace in porn. Men who are intrinsically bad at relationships will both experience relationship failure and end up as lonely masturbators for want of anything better to do. Innately violent men will both mistreat women and be drawn to depictions of mistreatment in pornography. There is nothing ad hoc about invoking such causes: we have independent reason for believing they are operative. Nobody sensible — and, in particular, no sensible anti-porn feminists — believe on reflection that dysfunctional, violent or aberrant men only came into existence with the advent of high-speed internet. They have always existed. An economical explanatory starting point, then, is that porn does not do all that much to fundamentally reshape men’s sexual dispositions. For the most part it reflects, rather than molds, their natures, ministering to impulses they have already, however depressing that may seem. The contrary view — that porn corrupts healthy minds — is a completely blank-slatist piece of speculative psychological theorizing.

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If anti-porn journalists find it hard to accept that starting point as even a live option, it may be because many of them seem, however unreflectively, to be operating with an unreconstructed “behaviorist” background picture of a kind that few working scientists have accepted for about 70 years. This particular anti-porn school of thought conceives of human (or at least male) sexual psychology as a blank slate written upon by the environment, in particular by the internet. Sexual dispositions are thought of as resulting from a process of stimulus and response under conditions of reinforcement learning. The implicit view is something like this: men watch porn and are psychologically rewarded by the pleasure they feel; the association between porn and reward is reinforced by repetition; the effect is that in their sex lives they seek similar rewards, or never seek sex to begin with, or can’t get an erection, or pursue ever more intense versions of the original reward in the form of more extreme porn, or whatever. In its heyday, behaviorist style associationism was an attractively general account of how all learning might take place, but it was widely abandoned in the mid-20th century in favor of paradigms that posited far more innate mental structure, with all behavioral traits shown to depend significantly on genetic factors. Human beings are not blank slates, either in their lives generally or their sexual lives specifically.

None of this is to downplay the evidence, most notably in the form of recent anecdote and survey data, that men can pick up harmful or sadistic ideas, like strangulation, from porn. People engage in cultural learning and imitation of this kind all the time, to both good effect and ill. Acknowledging it requires nothing like a revisionary psychological account of how internet porn “rewires” the mind. In fact, it is the anti-porn behaviorist journalists who would struggle most to account for such unwelcome cultural developments in an accurate way. For many women, as they accurately insist, are repelled by the gross practices that are now ubiquitous in pornographic culture (women’s brains, somehow, resist being “rewired” by the stimulus). Men on the other hand are helplessly “reprogrammed” by all they watch. The motto seems to be: anti-behaviorist psychological nativism for women, rampant behaviorism for men. But that is just silly: a grab-bag of ill-assorted theories invoked as convenience dictates.

Are our journalists and public commentators really so naïve? Anyone worried that the opposition is presently being straw-manned should read Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s recent, well-received, book, Pornocracy. In among some well-taken points about the iniquities of the porn industry is an utterly bonkers theory of human psychology hastily dressed up in the reassuring language of neuro-jargon. Porn, we learn, is so “addictive as to cause brain damage”. The visual spectacle of humans having sex is, we are rather implausibly told, a “superstimulus we’ve not evolved to process”. Consequently, it does not “serve our sexual tastes; it shapes them”. Porn “rewires the brain to be aroused by what the user sees and only by that”. “The more orgasms you have with porn,” we are warned, “the more sexually and emotionally attached to it you’ll become.” (So far, so behaviorist. But if the pleasure of masturbation really had such a radical conditioning effect, one might wonder why homo sapiens didn’t millennia ago become a short-lived species of emotionally-self-attached solitary tossers.) No allowance is made for the possibility that different men might be innately predisposed to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus. Porn has turned men into “wanking automata”. If only it were true that mere repeat exposure to the same stimulus did in fact “reprogramme” the mind, Bartosh and Jessell could stop repeating themselves so much and consider the reader successfully re-wired.

Duly alarmed by their own findings, the authors wonder gravely whether we may be witnessing the “de-evolution of humanity into an ape whose every thought and action is influenced… by the adult industry and its values – Homo Pornographicus”. Nor are they cautious about offering advice on the basis of this measured and careful analysis. Given the risk that you will wake up one morning next to a “de-evolved” porn-addicted ape, it may “make better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner who uses pornography”.

Now, such bold counsel surely calls for overwhelmingly robust empirical backing. What are Bartosh and Jessel’s grounds for their startling claim that porn “has the power to enslave its users”? Helpfully, the entire second chapter, “How porn changed our brains”, takes up the question, gesturing at an “Everest of evidence” to draw on. “When people use pornography,” we read, “they create new ‘sex rewards’ pathways in their brain.” Every time they masturbate, “men experience a ‘spritz of dopamine’ that further consolidate[s] the connection between pornography and pleasure” — “reinforcing the new ‘pornsex’ brain network at the expense of the ‘real sex’ neural pathways”. The result is “irreparable damage to the brain’s dopamine system”.

Those who feel a twinge of doubt as to whether contemporary neuroscience has indeed uncovered dedicated “porn sex” and “real sex” neural pathways in the architecture of the human brain may turn to the chapter’s references. There they won’t find much. Bartosh and Jessel are unable to cite a single probative randomized controlled trial or longitudinal study to back up any of their alarmist claims about the effects of porn. Instead, they repeatedly cite from an anecdote-driven pop science book by Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for promoting non-standard remedies for congenital and neurodegenerative diseases that make use of the “brain’s healing energies”. Later on, a promising reference to “dozens of studies [that] have identified the addictive capability of pornography” leads to the non-peer-reviewed work of an anti-masturbation campaigner called Gary Wilson. He is best-known for giving a TED talk on porn addiction that accumulated 17.5 million views, and which is now prefaced by a disclaimer notifying viewers that the presentation contains “assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology”.

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Polemical overreach often harms a theory more than it helps it. Bartosh and Jessel sidestep obvious responses to their arguments. They misleadingly suggest more evidence is on their side than it is. They ignore evidence that compulsive behaviors have nothing like the pharmacological profile of addictive substances. They risk trivializing the category of addiction by reconceiving all actions positively reinforced by a “spritz of dopamine” as incipient dependencies. And they have their model of porn addiction rely on a strained and somewhat impressionistic analogy between the “extremity” of visual content and stimulant concentration, allowing them to insinuate that men’s initially vanilla erotic tastes escalate insatiably until they all become pornographically-reprogrammed rape fantasists (again, not a phenomenon there is much high-quality evidence to support).

The view that human beings are easily corrupted by imagery is a remarkably seductive cultural trope. Socrates proposed banishing the poets from the ideal city because of their destructive capacity to excite the soul with their fictions. Recent cultural history testifies to our tendency to overestimate the psychological damage done by media of all kinds. The panics of the Nineties and 2000s, over whether video games and R-rated movies disposed their viewers to violence, were remarkably like the porn panic of today. Then too, hysteria far outstripped the arrival of anything close to confirmatory evidence for the theory advanced by panicked columnists and cultural commentators, and such evidence has failed to come to light in the years since. Still, people seem unable to resist the idea that morally depraved media must itself be a kind of poison taken in through the eyes and ears, harming the viewer, despite the striking example provided by the long history of analogous panics whose specific fears now look like relics of parochial concern.

It does no service to the cause of anti-porn commentators that they so often make their arguments depend on shaky psychological presupposition and tendentious empirical conjecturing. But one shouldn’t expect them to stop any time soon. Behaviorist scare tactics provide too versatile a template for cultural critique. And anyway, like the targets of their favorite argument, if there’s one feeling a columnist knows better than most it’s the temptation to set shame and caution aside, slump down in front of the computer, and desperately bash out another one.

The book, which has echoes of American Psycho, is the story of Doughty, a young, handsome, blond blueblood from Darien, Connecticut, who is also a shallow, self-involved sadist, rapist and psychopath. As a child, Doughty fries ants. As a high-schooler he puts cigarettes out on his buddies and passes around Beata, a lower-middle-class girl he’s pretending to date. In college, it’s more of the same until he drops out and moves to New York, increasingly in the grip of alcohol and drugs and ready to victimize women full-time. He pretends to be a real estate agent while insinuating himself into the lives of various women including Beata (now also in NYC, tending bar) and Sophia, a middle-aged publishing executive with a Soho loft. The time period is the late Nineties, though this feels cosmetic; the book’s concerns are contemporary. What could seem more clever in today’s culture than satirizing the very worst, privileged white man on earth?

The premise gleams with made-for-Netflix glamour, but the execution is flawed from the start by Bomer’s ideology, which forces her to be in deadly earnest, and makes Doughty into a walking cliché. “Originally I wanted him to be the devil,” Bomer told Megan Nolan in an interview published this week. “The actual devil, evil incarnate.” As Nolan explains the book, Doughty “represents the male intrusion on female life” and is “the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches.” To these didactic ends Doughty reveres his father and his lineage, believes he has natural advantages over other people, looks down on the poor, and admires his own penis a lot. He is prone to wooden statements about his awesomeness. The book’s humor is supposed to come from the fact that he’s so self-important and dim, he doesn’t realize it’s all a chimera. His mother is an alcoholic (the fault of the horrible men in her life); his father is broke; he himself has none of the intelligence or superior skill he thinks he does. But for this to be funny, there would have to be some pathos or some charm in it, which the underlying ideology could never allow.

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Bomer has also gone astray in choosing to write in a close third-person point of view — the story is told in Doughty’s voice, which could be funny when the reader sees what he’s not seeing. Such a choice works well with sympathetic characters, or those with a compelling personality. But since Doughty is required to be a walking cliché, this can only result in a flood of dull prose. “He liked winning. He loathed losing,” Bomer writes. He’s a caveman grunting out the simple sentences, get it? Or, here’s another ungainly passage: “His father, who often exclaimed ‘I’m the king of the castle!’ when bossing his mother around. He had given Doughty so much… He knew authority mattered more than anything.” Bomer has fallen for the mimetic fallacy, making her prose ugly and dumb to suit the character, and it’s a slog to read.

She also seems to be unaware that satire works by skewering pieties, and that the only pieties on display here are those of her class and station. There is nothing satirical about doubling down on the evil of privileged white men in 2025; it’s the status quo perspective. Nor is the information outside the frame — surprise, the female characters are rich in virtue and humanity! — any more interesting. In this flawed work, the satire rebounds, unintentionally, on the book itself. The Stalker’s true innovation is to present what happens to women when they start seeing men as completely evil. And this makes for some ugly and chilling reading.

Bomer isn’t interested in men or masculinity, Doughty is a cardboard cut-out, and deliberately so. If she were attempting to portray a glad-handing Connecticut-bro sociopath with any degree of insight or flair, she’d have to occasionally allow him to think about stereo equipment or the comparative trunk-space in late-model SUVs. But she doesn’t. Her true interest is misogyny, which she writes about in loving detail. Despite the flat dullness of Doughty’s thoughts, his narrative perspective pays enormous attention to women’s bodies, and an unrealistic amount of attention to the women themselves. The title says it all — this is a perspective obsessed with women (though actually betraying little of the psychological profile of stalking). And it’s an excuse to indulge in an orgy of sexualized hatred.

Beata (get it?) has “the hair of a baby or an old woman,” “tiny breasts,” and, when Doughty gets there by force, “a few fine, long, dark hairs on her pussy.” Doughty’s friend Lew’s mom often wears exercise clothes, displaying “her thick hips, the tight aerobic pants crawling up her butt crack and cupping the U-shape of her pussy.” His college girlfriend has “tits larger than her head, each one a softer, and more fun, larger head.” The prose, notably, gets better in these descriptions. It’s horrible to read, but it’s more creative and there’s more invested in it.

Very little of this feels like male thinking. It feels instead like female self-obsession, female insecurity, female self-objectification, and female body-hatred. On Doughty’s first night at Sophia’s place, he describes her: “She came out of the bathroom in a small silk-looking beige nightie. It was nice. At least she wasn’t fat. Although she could gain some weight. But at her age, it would probably go to all the wrong places. Like her stomach.” This is lifted straight from a woman’s internal monologue. What young man has any idea where women in their 40s put on weight? What young man is obsessed with it? A few pages later Doughty grabs Sophia’s hips and again thinks about her weight and her stomach, now upgraded to “a medium-sized pouch.”

This is all disturbing enough, but it’s also, grotesquely, a sexual fantasy. Doughty, the man with zero virtues, is actually good at one thing — performing oral sex on women. It’s highly implausible, but nonetheless, Bomer endows him with this skill, and writes many lavish, graphic passages describing his methods. The dehumanization of her female characters that this entails — please, describe how the man responsible for my death makes me orgasm, in graphic detail, from an up-close view between my legs — again seems confused, less a critique than a fantasy. An author could, of course, write a violent, dehumanizing sex scene that’s a critique of violent, dehumanizing sex, but they’d need to bring more to it than female pleasure and the generic language of pornography. The major rape scene involving Beata at the end is also, long, extremely detailed, and hot if you like that kind of thing, which many people, including women, do. This is an innovation of a sort, revealing as it does the essential sexual co-dependence of the genders. If you are a woman who hates men and believes their essence is to degrade you, you end up fantasizing about it. What else is there?

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That third-wave feminism has devolved into misogyny porn is on the one hand surprising, but on the other not so much. In Bomer’s earlier work, she had a way of leaning into women’s fears about their bodies that felt empowering. In one story from Inside Madeline, a woman has massive, personhood-defining tits — and that’s it, that’s basically the story. In 2014 this still felt critical and risqué, part of the trend that said women could overcome negative stereotypes by embracing them. The book’s title story is about a voracious fat girl masturbating, which again at its time seemed to be doing a kind of reclaiming work. By openly daring to totally objectify and sexualize Madeline, without trying to please the male gaze, the story seemed like a monument to female power.

However if The Stalker proves anything, it’s that this approach hasn’t worked out. Viewing men in a totally negative light has only enshrined misogyny. And the “empowering” self-objectifying, a decade later, has become self-annihilation, a lesson that leaning into a bad thing does not produce something good, as much as we might wish to the contrary. The book ends in an explosion of gore, with both Sophia and Doughty’s gruesome deaths. Bomer means this as a tragedy for Sophia and a deserved comeuppance for Doughty. But what comes across instead is a mutual death-spiral, with a kind of unintentional elegant logic of its own. By fully dehumanizing men, we fully dehumanize ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a bonanza for publishers, Dworkin is back in vogue. Three of her best books — Woman Hating, Pornography, and Right-Wing Women — are being re-released as Penguin Modern Classics today, giving her a gold plaque in the pantheon of essential feminist writers. Dworkin’s life story is almost as strange and striking as her writing: a Jewish self-describing lesbian from New Jersey who ended up marrying two men, she cut her teeth at uber-liberal Bennington College where she made national news with testimony of an invasive internal examination by police following a protest. She moved to the Netherlands, where she met and married an anarchist activist who beat her and burned her with cigarettes; a spell of poverty after their relationship collapsed forced her to sell sex. She returned to America, made her name as a feminist writer in the anti-pornography and anti-prostitution movement and married the gay activist John Stoltenberg, with whom she remained until she died.

In revisiting her, Penguin is shrewd: Dworkin is having a moment among young women tired of the half-assed, commercial and cowardly endstage of Twenties feminism. Young feminists who have realized it is not, in fact, empowering to sell ass pics have taken up Dworkin with both zeal and relief. On X, a viral tweet recently responded to a post by a pornographic model posing as Joan of Arc, saying “I know a writer who may have had a relevant thing or two to say” about the unironic sexualization of a celibate, androgynous teenager. One black-and-white picture of our anti-porn patron saint has become a stock meme response to hypersexual nonsense on that website. It has become so prolific that there is now even a Batman spotlight variation.

Yet Dworkin’s hardcore approach to the topics of pornography and prostitution is still a bit spicy for some, as I discovered recently while listening to one podcast in which Dworkin was praised for her “bravery” — but chastised for her apparently incidental anti-“sex work” position. The host was careful to let us know that sex work is work and that women should have the freedom to sell their flesh, presumably because she had spent approximately two minutes considering the implications of such a statement, decided it was not worth the risk of being canceled and did not realize, or care, that this cowardice put her in absolute opposition to anything Dworkin ever said or wrote.

Dworkin, after all, is not a “fun feminist”; the main thing most people know about her is that she was hated by many, many men in her lifetime. Dworkin knew what every writer who questions men’s inviolable right to purchase women’s bodies or masturbate over images of them knows: that the first epithet to be slung their way is, ironically, “whore”. Even while receiving abuse, often violently sexual in its nature, from both the pornography lobby (Hustler and Playboy, among other porn rags, continually ridiculed and harassed her) and its furious, horny readers, Dworkin was unbothered. “When a woman expresses an opinion — about anything — and the response is to undermine perceptions of or question her sexuality … the response can be identified without further analysis as implicitly antifeminist and woman-hating,” she says, and she is right. She won the argument.

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But then, articulate, well-read and serious women will always win the argument against those motivated only by a jealous defense of their own erections, for whom the biggest crime of feminism is calling attention to the real lives of the women of their masturbatory fantasy. These lives are a hideous inconvenience, a boner-killer. As one woman interviewed by Dworkin, who knew the physical consequences of having a partner obsessed with porn, attests, “pornography is not a fantasy. It was my life, reality.”

Then, as now, it was not always easy to sort male allies from cynical opportunists. Dworkin knew that the soi-disant progressive men who despised her, among them Norman Mailer and Hugh Hefner, would only fight for women when it came to their right to debase themselves. The heirs of the “flower boys” of the Sexual Revolution — who were all for women engaging with free love in the Sixties but made themselves scarce as soon as feminism began “taking away the easy fuck” — are today the ones refusing to engage with the battlelines of gender, body image or the pay gap. Whether they are pleading the ethical right to choke women without asking, or defending a woman’s freedom of expression only when she is expressing herself by being naked, they only pop up when the debate gets sexy, and so their opinions can be, I think, safely discounted.

It’s a shame that Dworkin’s porn-sick detractors, who never bothered reading her anyway, have come to unfairly dominate assessments of her life. Dworkin deserves to be considered on her own terms, head-on, as what she calls a “serious woman”. Her writing, she promises, “takes power, sadism, and dehumanization seriously” — on this, she delivers. After all, she has earned her place alongside contemporaries Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Shulamith Firestone not by being hated but by being read. So let’s read her.

Dworkin’s genius is for spotting the hypocrisy of Left-wing men, and the shrewdness of Right-wing women in despising them. She understands the “selective blindness” of the Left when it comes to arousal: “Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat … the Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.” She acknowledges, without the politically polarized doltishness we see today, the sagacity of Right-wing women — despite not being among their number — in knowing that “the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression … the most reliable protection against battery; the most respect”. This realism, this practical empathy, is completely alien to liberal feminist discourse now, which sees any glimmer of conservatism as irrational and evil. For this, she must be welcomed back.

Dworkin is well known for taking literally and seriously the meaning of pornography — that it makes of all women porneia, the lowest class of prostitutes in ancient Greece, and that “we are the women in it”. She understands that “the boys are betting on our compliance, our ignorance, our fear”; here, she prophesies the kinksters on dating apps who want to hurt their “liberated” partners. All these strikes are delivered with devastating clarity.

On prostitution, she is just as unyielding: “The model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them,” she savages. The reality of the brothel, something we are now scorned for acknowledging, is that prostitutes “absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt”. Dworkin shows us that questions of “expressions of will”, the defense of naive women and gleeful men, are pointless — society creates the oppressive conditions in which a woman feels compelled to sell her consent, meaning her will is never truly free; it then only bats for her side when she is making a decision which titillates men. Progressives who ignore the realities of prostitution are, we are told with a straightforward, punk disdain, “profoundly immoral”. “Sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy,” Dworkin writes, auguring the era of OnlyFans.

On free love, she is similarly contemptuous: “Its purpose — it turned out — was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful; freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men.” Dworkin is talking about the Sixties here — she describes the women writhing with long-haired comrades at Woodstock and Altamont, being told they must abandon their “sexual repression” when they became “tired” or “cross”, then, a few short years later, schlepping round communes barefoot with the resultant children and no support. How different is this state of affairs from the casualized dating culture we live in today, from which women emerge feeling used, wounded and disrespected (if less commonly pregnant)? I sorely wish I had encountered Right-Wing Women as a teenager. For any future daughters of my own, it will be required reading.

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Most of all, Dworkin is an antidote to fake, self-serving liberal middle-class feminisms, of the kind posited by Florence Given, for whom praxis means selling phone cases which say “dump him”. Why? Because “feminism is not a lifestyle or an attitude or a feeling of vague sympathy with women or an assertion of modernity”. It is about being unpopular and vocal and careful and consistent, and ignoring fashionable, distracting nonsense. Steinem said of Dworkin that she had a quality of “Old Testament” doom to her, and as such was often “misunderstood”. Her voice booms with the prophetic weirdness and unforgiving directness of such a god; now that we are used to politically correct pop feminists of the kumbaya, New Testament mode, this can feel unsettling.

Dworkin is not perfect. She at times writes total codswallop. Her most offensive transgressions come at the end of Woman Hating, where she slips in a few short but emetic passages on incest, bestiality and pedophilia. Her vision of a post-patriarchal society is one which magics away the world’s other power dynamics so that, in a utopian state of “androgyny”, anything goes. This is the bizarre context for this egregious statement: “Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse.” Never has the phrase “needless to say” been so cynically deployed. The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues, with no small whiff of Peter Tatchell. It is difficult to decipher precisely what she means here — this is, after all, a writer who said of the Californian woman who shot her son’s abuser in court: “I loved that woman… I have no problem with killing pedophiles.” The benefit of the doubt suggests she ended her life (this was five years before her death) with the latter view.

These are moments where Dworkin’s context in the wacky world of Seventies radical feminism completely defeats her; at times, she approaches unreadability. She is at points juvenile, writing an extended passage about the patriarchal nature of capital letters: “My publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the pages with garbage: standard punctuation.” She is positively neurotic about the always-oppressive act of heterosexual “fucking”, and her solution, for that state of “androgyny”, makes little practical sense given the pesky problem of physical reality. And in her first book, she takes literally the Freudian psychoanalytical dream theory which can only reasonably be understood to be metaphorical, and so ends up suggesting that “men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb”. This literalism is, it goes without saying, off-putting. Thankfully, it abates in her later work.

These are, I suspect, not passages that Penguin will use in their marketing for this Modern Classics edition. They warn us not to treat people as prophets — just like Greer, Dworkin’s corpus is a body of general brilliance pockmarked by instances of bizarre transgression, probably the result of being stuck in antagonistic theoretical worlds for too long. When Greer used a column in Suck magazine as an apology for rape, framing it as a radical Marxist act of the stealing of assets, she did a disservice to her broader work. Some years later, she retracted her view. Dworkin never did.

Penguin’s hot new old-school feminist sometimes got it wrong — a fact which is likely to perturb initiates into this collection. But on the issues of pornography and prostitution, she is a genius: her words leap from the page into 2025 and demand we expect more. On these ever more relevant twin poles of misogyny, Andrea Dworkin, this flawed, abhorred, ruthless woman bellows down the decades to shock us out of our stupor; you’d be a fool not to listen.

When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More specifically, a nubile young woman who rises from a bathtub to seduce main character Jack Torrance, and then reveals her true form as a sore-ridden, saggy-breasted crone, cackling at her own deceit. 

It’s a scene that I suspect plays differently depending on the viewer’s sex. For a man, the horror comes from identifying with Jack. He, too, is aroused by the youth and beauty of the ghost’s first form; he, too, is appalled when he realises he has been tricked into lusting for old, degraded flesh. For a woman watching, the horror isn’t about what you want. It’s about what you are — or what you will become. You will age into monstrosity, and your only power will be the power to disgust. Every female body contains the terrible fact of its own future.

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

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Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

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Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.

But “misogyny” is also a slippery beast, and not just thanks to many Labour politicians’ well-documented inability to give a coherent definition of “woman”. What counts specifically as hatred towards women is at least somewhat subjective, a fact that led LBC’s Ben Kentish to suggest that the policy might unduly chill speech. But Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, told Kentish that the new provisions would simply be subject to the same test as Islamist or far-Right ideology.

So that’s all fine then, isn’t it? Well, perhaps — at least if this is rigorously followed. But the difficulty with “misogyny” as a metric is that it’s both very emotive, and also very broad. At the risk of stating the obvious, half the planet’s human population is female, and this in turn means you could attract accusations of misogyny for criticising almost any large-scale group or institution. Given this, it would surely be difficult for any politician to resist wielding such a useful designation on Schmittian principles.

Accordingly, several groups outside the political mainstream have already expressed concern about being targeted unfairly by Cooper’s initiative. The far-Left Morning Star, for example, treated the whole extremism review with deep suspicion, viewing it as marching in lockdown with Tory clampdowns on the freedom to protest. Some women’s rights campaigners, too, expressed a concern that the next move would be including trans-identified men in the “women” category, in order to reclassify any accurate description of such individuals’ biological sex as “extreme misogyny” and therefore a matter for counterterrorism.

Others again responded cynically to the announcement with photos of women in burqas, sex-segregated Labour Party rallies, or videos of Islamist men talking about how praiseworthy it is to be jealously controlling of your wife’s behaviour. The aggregate insinuation was that the “extreme misogyny” which ought to be the focus of Labour’s counter-extremism was not the one Cooper has chosen to highlight — and that, in fact, Cooper is content to ignore misogyny from Muslims, or even to protect it in law, preferring instead to persecute Right-wing anons and forum nerds.

Such cynicism is perhaps somewhat understandable, given Sir William Shawcross’s recent independent review of Prevent. Shawcross described the service as good overall, but unevenly distributed in its foci: specifically, “too narrow” in its definition of Islamism, and “too broad” in its definition of the “far-Right”. This was misguided, he argued, given that the most severe and large-scale material threat to British security still came from Islamists.

When even an independent review of British counterterrorism identified some institutional bias in favour of Islamists and against Right-wingers, it is not wholly unreasonable for the latter to feel some concern about new measures that might be used to target them. And yet, taken on its own terms, the Home Secretary’s proposal is not unreasonable either. The subculture to which she is referring really does exist, and can be nasty. Cooper’s statements make clear that the addition of “extreme misogyny” to a list that already comprises Islamist, far-Right, animal rights, environmental, and Northern Ireland related extremist aims to address “gaps in the current system”. And as she makes clear, the specific gap she has in mind is the subculture associated with “incel” or “involuntary celibate” young men.

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Is this really extremism? Surely just being disparaging about “foids” on the internet doesn’t make someone an extremist? In most cases, no it doesn’t; but this culture does sometimes appear to influence or help to inspire real-world atrocities. The first such documented instance occurred in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a murder spree in California, killing several of his housemates before shooting three women outside a sorority house, then committing suicide. He left behind a lengthy manifesto that described his lonely youth, resentment of women, and envy of everyone who managed to have sex.

Nor was Rodger unique. He inspired three copycat killing sprees in 2018, and a US shopping centre shooting and Canadian massage parlour machete attack in 2020; there have been other murders reportedly associated with “incel” ideology, including the Plymouth shooting in 2021 in the UK, where 22-year-old Jake Davison murdered five people and injured two others before killing himself. Clearly, then, sometimes adherents to this ideology do more than just post mean words on the internet. It is sensible for the government to keep an eye on an ideology demonstrably associated with real-world violence, much as they might Islamists who are a bit too interested in explosives, or the kind of animal rights fanatics who call for scientists to be assassinated.

And yet if Islamism keeps recurring in objections to the proposal, this is because it serves as shorthand for a crossover between the emotive issue of women’s safety, and Britain’s broader politics of migration, cultural difference, integration, and policing. Arguably, it was broadly this same crossover that helped spark the recent public order disturbances that prompted Cooper’s review. And one implication of this is that unless our new Home Secretary is unusually scrupulous about impartiality, focusing an “extreme misogyny” clampdown just on “incels” runs the risk not just of unevenly distributing counter-extremism measures, or doling out justice on more than one tier, but — by omission — of actively endangering British women and girls of every culture and ethnicity.

For the reality is that “incel” type “extreme misogyny” really only reads as “extreme” relative to Western egalitarian norms. It’s not difficult, for example, to find progressive articles lamenting the misogynistic attitudes to women endemic in Afghanistan. These are, indeed, the attitudes the West’s failed regime change efforts spent trillions trying to alter, to little avail: hundreds of cases of femicide have been documented since the Taliban takeover, with this believed to be merely the tip of the iceberg. Surely no Westerner would seriously try and argue that normative Afghan attitudes to women are no different to those in Britain — let alone claim moral equivalence between the two cultures where women’s safety, freedom and rights are concerned.

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Similarly there are many extant UN reports and Guardian articles on “gender-based violence” in locations such as India and Pakistan, where extremely misogynistic practices such as child marriage, gang rape, “honour” killings, or deliberate disfiguration of women through acid attacks are distressingly common and often trigger large and furious protests. At the time of writing, for example, India’s doctors are on strike following the horrific gang rape and murder of Dr Moumita Debnath while on duty in a Kolkata hospital.

Of course, there is no need to direct British counter-extremism resources at such offences. Firstly, they are already illegal in the UK; secondly, the incidents I’ve just described occurred overseas. Yvette Cooper might add to this that, by contrast, extreme misogyny is clearly present in Britain, and not yet covered by existing counter-extremism provisions. But while these things are all true, it’s also true that as well as being unenthusiastic about misogyny, Labour politicians tend also to be keen on diversity, and broadly in favour of a generous immigration and refugee policy.

And migrants bring their cultures with them. Indeed, progressive supporters of migration argue that it is beneficial because the resulting diversity enriches the host country. And perhaps it really is true that migrants bring only the nice bits of their original cultures, such as tasty food. But if they bring everything else, as well, what happens when that includes being habituated to the kind of extreme misogyny the West spent futile trillions trying to expunge from Afghanistan? Then it must surely follow that the kind of misogyny normalised in places such as Afghanistan will no longer be irrelevant to British policy, and British women, but will find expression here as well.

On the kind of websites already being monitored by Prevent for “far Right” ideology, and perhaps soon for “extreme misogyny” as well, you will find plenty of voices arguing, from selected news headlines, that such diverse forms of extreme misogyny already are finding expression here. But of course the whole point is that “misogyny” is such an expansive concept that you can cherry-pick cases to support any argument you choose — including against migration.

And this fact, again, highlights its potential to be weaponised in partisan ways: something that should concern anyone who attracts the ire of Yvette Cooper’s Home Office. We can only hope Cooper and Phillips have superhuman powers of impartiality, and will be able to resist the overwhelming temptation to be Schmittian in their imputations of “extreme misogyny”. And we must hope that, even if they won’t embolden the “far Right” by saying so in public, in private our new Home Secretary and Minister for Safeguarding are clear-sighted about the full extent of global cultural diversity, including those aspects with implications for British women and girls, and willing to use Home Office powers accordingly.

Should we discover the new and pliant weapon of “extreme misogyny” is being less evenly deployed, though, this politicisation of woman-hating will come with a bitter layer of irony. For in this case Cooper and Phillips will be exhibiting so casual an indifference to the real-world safety of British women and girls we might even call it misogynistic.

A lot of the most vocal feminists of recent years are obsessed with helping men. In her 2018 book, self-styled Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White declares that feminism “must fight for men who are being pushed into lonely desolation by the patriarchal pressures”. And in her recently published On Our Best Behaviour, Elise Loehnen tells women to spare a thought for the boys: girls might have to suppress our feelings “to function in what otherwise might be dysfunctional relationships or a dysfunctional society”, but “at least we’re allowed to cry”.

For years, it is implied, feminists have focused on women and failed to acknowledge that patriarchy hurts men, too. And men cannot be expected to sort this out for themselves because, well, they’re just men. Rather like remembering birthdays, making doctor’s appointments or caring for elderly relatives, sorting out the patriarchy is something that women must do because women have always done it, therefore making us better at it. In her book, What About Men? — in which she argues that “we’ve neglected our boys” — Caitlin Moran writes: “The advantage women have is that we talk about the patriarchy, and we know how it disadvantages us”, whereas “men haven’t yet started the conversation.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that no one has made these particular observations before — that feminism has thus far ignored men’s inner lives. Of course, one could also argue — with some legitimacy, I’d say — that women ought to be allowed one solitary political movement just for them. But the point would be moot, because the reality is: there have always been feminists expressing concern for men’s emotional lives. The fact that this gains so little acknowledgement is symptomatic of neglect, not of men, but of female intellectual legacies.

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There is an entire PhD thesis to be written on “feminist takes on why men aren’t allowed to cry”, with a special section devoted to “why we keep forgetting this issue has already been noted”. In 1983, for instance, Andrea Dworkin made a speech at an American convention that was entitled, the National Organisation for Changing Men. There she acknowledged the shame and impotence felt by many of the ‘good’ men around her: “Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to don’t want to do but are going to anyway.”

It is a measure of the defeatism that dominates this particular strand of feminism that its early adherents were already offering a critique of its limitations. Granting men more space in which to emote might provide them with more healthy ways in which to interact, but it is not the same as transforming power relations between the sexes. As Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, “men are increasingly aware that their disorders have something to do with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it.” Her suspicion that “the majority of ‘concerned’ or ‘profeminist’ men secretly hope that ‘liberation’ will give them the right to shed tears while exercising their old prerogatives” does not seem particularly off-target. Half a century on, many men might wish to cry about what unfettered access to porn has done to them; far fewer are keen to take on the industry itself.

Do men actually want to save themselves from patriarchy? Dworkin, at the National Organisation for Changing Men, talked of meeting men who would tell her, “what you’re saying about me isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” It’s the Eighties equivalent of #NotAllMen, a phrase now so widely mocked that it feels incorrect to write it without a hashtag. Yet Dworkin’s response was not just to laugh or shame. “I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues.” She asks men to take responsibility — to challenge one another — rather than simply offering up their apologies to women.

Today’s popular feminists see men more as victims than agents. Moran blames the ascendance of Andrew Tate on teenage boys hearing phrases such as “‘Typical men!’ or, ‘Ugh, toxic patriarchy!’”. Amia Srinivasan, in 2021’s The Right to Sex, concludes that “a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better — not just fairer, but more imaginative — than men have been”. Here, the helplessness of the Lost Boy merges with a presumption of over-sensitivity and moral inferiority. I wonder if, when Moran and Srinivasan write these things, they really grasp that men can read them too. If men react badly to suggestions that they are useless as a sex, what benefit lies in finding other, albeit more benevolent, ways to say it? Men are granted no dignity, no capacity to change on their own terms. They are portrayed as weak and petty, so why should they even try?

There is also something deeply and depressingly gender-normative in the expectation that women be better than men. Again, this is something that feminists seem to have forgotten — even if their predecessors analysed its implications. Rich already pointed out in Of Woman Born that, “the women’s movement is still seen in terms of the mother-child relationship”; feminism is seen “either as punishment and abandonment of men for past bad behaviour, or as a potential healing of men’s pain by women”. Either way, it “will ease men into a more humane and sensitive life. In short … women will go on doing for men what men cannot or will not do for each other or themselves.”

Rich wanted this infantilising dynamic to change. But half a century later, Moran is insisting that men can’t be expected to act independently because, “it’s so much easier for women and girls to show love and support for each other”. We are, apparently, just better at this sort of thing, so it’s on us to help men be more human. If this is irritating for women, it is profoundly insulting to men.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of a position that dismisses earlier feminists as insufficiently sympathetic to men is that there are far more parallels between today’s fix-men feminism and genuine misandry. “To be male,” wrote Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto, perhaps the one (known) work of the Second Wave that might genuinely be said to be man-hating, “is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples”. Solanas wrote off men as beyond help; fix-men feminism takes a similarly disparaging view of half the human race, while patronisingly offering to save them. The hostile response of many men to Moran’s book shows that pity is counter-productive; men are not so emotionally illiterate that they can’t understand they are being belittled.

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This rhetoric is dangerous to women, as well as irritating. Fix-men feminism validates the excuses abusive men have used for their mistreatment of female partners — how can he be in touch with her feelings when he’s not even in touch with his own? — while providing good men with a reason to feel victimised. The reason why “I Can Fix Him” has become such a popular parody meme is because we know it isn’t true. The woman who imagines herself “fixing” the Joker is funny; the one who imagines fixing a real-life Tate acolyte is less so. It is not safe for women in toxic relationships to feel they are responsible for men’s responses, nor is it safe for men to be told that yes, if they hate women, perhaps it is because feminists have driven them to misogyny by neglecting their needs. Many men who hurt women really do feel powerless, but placing their redemption in the hands of women is hardly likely to inspire them to change.

Moran has said that her book is written in part as a response to the anxieties of mothers of sons. (She has two daughters.) I have sons, two of whom are teenagers, and the challenges they face offer a constant reminder of the way in which the myth of masculine invulnerability sells both men and women short. Men are not forced into a state of heroic independence, but there is shame, and often rage, when they are forced to acknowledge their reliance on women. I do not see how telling them they are needier than they already are can resolve this. In her 1979 essay Man Child, Audre Lorde described the importance of “teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him”. “Men who are afraid to feel,” she wrote, “must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply.” We can hardly eradicate this toxic maternal dynamic by replicating it.

The problem, then, is not that feminists do not care enough. If we respect men — if we do not see them as helpless, stupid children, dumb Ken dolls, or “a bit like dogs” — we ought to consider them up to the challenge of a feminism that does more than oscillate between mocking and pandering to them. Fix-men feminism views itself as realistic, “muggins here” taking charge because men can’t be better. In truth, it lowers expectations, restricting opportunities for growth. “He can’t change unless he wants to” might be a cliché, but it’s one that today’s feminists would do well to take on board. It may be that the best thing we can do for men is not to make our movement all about them.

Distras has been expressing concern about gender ideology in private since late 2021, but the first time she went public with her opinions was in May of this year. “I’m a woman, and a woman is an adult human female,” she said in an interview with Louder than War, a music website. “I’m a woman that’s experienced domestic abuse.” She later made comments, on Twitter, about how women are silenced for questioning gender ideology: “No amount of rainbows and ‘kindness’ can hide the authoritarianism and misogyny and homophobia that’s on display here, especially in the arts.”

Born in Wakefield in 1987, Distras ran away from home in her teens and, she told me, “stayed with a lot of dangerous people who took advantage of me”. She turned to song writing as a form of escape. Her bravery is remarkable. But as soon as her straightforward resistance to gender ideology became known, she was met with horrendous abuse. Distras has been called every name under the sun, including anti-trans, Nazi, scum, prostitute, grifter, child serial killer, and witch. She soon realised that she had been “marked for life” as a “disgusting terf” — that no redemption would ever be possible. She was told she deserves to be chucked out of the music industry. Her booking agency has said that her attitude towards transwomen could “have detrimental effects on [her] musical career”. Radio stations have stopped playing her songs and venues cancelled her gigs. “If I go back to the industry as it stands,” she says, “if someone had the balls to book me for a gig, I would likely be physically attacked. It’s not safe.”

Having been rejected by the majority of her contacts in the music industry, Distras decided she might as well use her voice to speak out. Alongside five other women, her testimony featured in the Daily Mail about the experience of being ostracised for daring to question gender ideology. One of the first derogatory reactions was from Bragg. “What??”, he tweeted, linking to the feature, which included a photograph of Distras — who usually wears black and leather on stage — wearing a formal dress. “Louise Distras hates trans people so much that she’s willing to dress in a style acceptable to Daily Mail readers in order to have a go at them. What does this have to do with feminism Louise? Or punk rock?”

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Bragg fancies himself a bit of a trans ally. And prides himself on being an all-round anti-sexist bloke. In 2014, he posed with a sign, “I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about men’s violence against women in all its forms,” as part of the White Ribbon campaign.

Back in the early days of her career, Bragg championed Distras as one of a “new breed” of singers, tweeting in 2013 that her song Love Me The Way I Am should be our next Eurovision entry. Another of her songs, The Hand You Hold, is about how what women say and do should matter more than how we look, and she tells me that “Billy for some reason loved that song and that’s why he invited me to go play on his stage” — which she did that year, at Glastonbury, and again in 2017. “So for him to now take a pop at me and start criticising what I look like instead of actually listening to what I have to say means he is the biggest hypocrite.”

But it is not only men who have gone after Distras. In a recent interview with Kerrang!, Phoebe Lunny of the Lambrini Girls reacted to Distras speaking out against trans ideology and the silencing of women: “I will scrap any Terf, any day, in person, with my fists.” In a tweet, Distras pointed to the hypocrisy of claiming to be progressive while “inciting violence against women”. She also condemned Kerrang! for publishing the remarks, saying she is “ashamed my face was printed on its pages. Vile!”

Spoken word poet Amelia Vandergast also responded angrily to Distras’s public statements about being cancelled by trans activists. In a feature entitled, “Wipe away the terf tears: freedom of expression was never permission to perpetuate hate in the music industry”, published in A&R Factory website, she wrote:

“In the recent Daily Mail article, which attempted to portray women as the victims of their transphobic hate, Louise Distras bemoaned the journalists, radio stations, and her booking agency who rightly refuse to have anything to do with her for the self-piteous bile spewed across her social media platforms (anyone got a tiny little violin I can borrow?)”

For Distras, the hypocrisy within the so-called radical music scene is appalling. While the misogyny of trans activists is ignored, women are viciously attacked for daring to defend their sex-based rights. She is one of a growing list of female artists criticising cancel culture — a phenomenon of which Bragg denies the existence.

But Bragg has form. He has dismissed feminist concerns about self-identification and argued that, owing to our incompatible “hardware”, lesbians are biologically ill-equipped for sex with other women and should therefore understand the plight of men claiming to be female. When Maya Forstater was harassed by trans activists in the street, Bragg suggested that she could not possibly have been scared or upset, because she appeared to be smiling. This is a classic sexist trope. Too often, women are told by men to “Give us a smile” when we complain about being sexually harassed by them, and yet women are informed we must have enjoyed the harassment if we attempt to laugh it off.

“I think he’s a misogynist,” Distras says, of Bragg. “I think it’s just plain to see for everybody and the way he is — the way that so many men are in the music industry.” She talks about how uncomfortable she has felt with him, describing him as “creepy”. “He’s everything he says he’s not. His words and his actions just don’t match up for me… The way he goes after women over the trans issue has made it really clear to me that he’s just a misogynist, and that he just doesn’t care about women”. She says what many feminists have said of many men in recent years: “The trans thing is just an excuse for him to bully women with impunity and do it publicly and get applauded for it.”

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Bragg also showed no sympathy for Róisín Murphy, another female singer-songwriter who has faced the wrath of trans activists. After a private Facebook conversation in which she criticised the policy of giving children puberty blockers was leaked, she was admonished by Bragg for holding the wrong opinion. “Them’s the breaks,” Bragg tweeted when it was suggested that Murphy was being punished by having BBC coverage and concerts cancelled. “Think before you post is my advice, especially on issues that are contentious.” This is cowardice.

Distras strongly feels that the music industry used to be about “freedom of expression and freedom of speech”, but is currently in thrall to gender ideology and “totally monotheistic”. “There’s an urgent need to build a new one, with a proper counterculture that isn’t dominated by misogynists like Billy Bragg, where women have actually got a proper say,” she says, telling me she has had numerous messages from female musicians who are too scared to speak out — especially after seeing what happened to Murphy. “It’s well established that violence towards women is a massive problem in the music industry,” says Distras, “and here they are inciting more violence, and the rest of the music industry just applauds them for it and tells them they are stunning and brave.”

“We need more musicians to come forward courageously and without apology. There’s been so much support for me, and there will be for the other women. And the more of us that stand up, the more these men like Billy Bragg will not be so dominant.”

A look at the job advertisement offers clues. The first requirement is: “Practical experience from several years of visiting brothels”, and “experience with escorts is an advantage”. You’ll need a “clean, well-groomed appearance” and a “health certificate”. You have to “enjoy dealing with people” and have “no fear of contact”. The job description is simple: “You will test brothels for service, cleanliness and compliance with safer sex practices. You have fun having sex with the different ladies and then create an evaluation.” Something tells me only a man could do this job.

Many legal brothels employ undercover inspectors, a practice known as “test purchasing”. The aim is to assess the quality of “service” a prostituted woman is providing. If it is found that her performance is lax in any way — for example if she fails to convince the punter that she is enjoying herself, or refuses particular sex acts that he demands — she can be fined on the spot by the brothel owner. This is the reality of legal prostitution: it benefits the pimps and the punters and offers the women no protection whatsoever.

The advertisement for the brothel tester was on a website run by Kaufmich, a business that describes itself as a “social network for sex workers, customers, brothels and companies in the erotic environment”. If you are looking for any type of paid work in the German sex trade, Kaufmich is your go-to website. It also offers tips to punters on everything from the best local “gang-bang sex parties” to sourcing heavily pregnant women who are selling sex.

In countries such as Germany, Holland, and Switzerland — where all aspects of prostitution are perfectly legal — the women are marketed as merchandise, the sex buyers viewed as clients, and the pimps merely managers. At the heart of the project to sanitise the sex trade is the language used to describe it. In the Seventies, Carol Leigh, an advocate for blanket legalisation, coined the term “sex work” to suggest that prostitution is “a job like any other”. I’ve seen this phrase — as well as “sex work is work” and “blow jobs are real jobs” — emblazoned across placards and heard it chanted at rallies to promote legalisation. If prostitution is simply a job, then how can it be abuse? If it is merely labour, how can it be detrimental to wider society?

It’s a nice idea. But in practice, legalisation has left women terrifyingly vulnerable. In Germany, the current legislation imposes almost no rules on the punters. Condom use is supposedly compulsory, but as one woman in a “mega-brothel” pointed out: “Who, exactly, is going to enforce that rule and put one on his dick and stop him from taking it off, as they often do?”

Meanwhile, a high degree of control is imposed on the women. They are expected to be onsite for periods of up to 15 hours — until 3 o’clock in the morning — to allow brothel owners to confidently advertise that there are always dozens of different women to choose from. Partial or full nudity is required of all prostitutes while they’re on the premises. They don’t get to decide what acts they perform: management decides what “services” are on offer; whether “blow jobs are included in the basic rate”.

In German culture, prostitution has been whitewashed. There are many legal pimps on mainstream television. Michael Beretin, one of the pimps running the Paradise mega-brothel, had his own TV show, Redlight Experts, in which he reviews brothels. Beretin had seriously assaulted his then wife when he signed the TV contract. And in 2013, criminal investigators discovered that criminal gangs were operating within the business. Significant numbers of women had been trafficked from other countries. The brothel owners were sentenced to five years in prison.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. No other job on Earth exposes the so-called workers to such extreme violence, abuse and degradation. One 2018 study found that more than 60% had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

And yet, European authorities continue to enable the sex trade. In Zurich, there is a large “sex performance box” zone — a drive-thru outdoor brothel on the outskirts of the city — which is maintained by public money. Every day, local municipality workers empty bins full of used condoms, soiled tissues, and empty tubes of lube. The Swiss government spends more than $800,000 per year maintaining the booths. It is clearly keen to make it easier for men to pay for sex with financially desperate women. In 2014, it was revealed that inmates of La Paquerette, a social therapy department for prisoners near Geneva, were allowed to visit prostituted women being held in a local immigration detention centre. Members of End Demand, a feminist human rights organisation in Switzerland, tell me that the idea behind the visits was that the male prisoners could “let off steam” ahead of being released into the community.

Recent evidence shows that physical and sexual violence against women involved in the Swiss sex market is commonplace. Fortunately, there are moves, supported by a growing number of politicians in the country, to end legal prostitution and criminalise the punters.

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The problem extends far beyond Europe, however. The picture is just as horrific in Nevada, the only state in the US where brothels are legal. I have visited a number of them, and the conditions inside are nothing like the glamorous images that illustrate their websites. Many women both live and prostitute in a single room, where pornography plays on loop. They are not allowed any of their own personal possessions on display, and are only allowed to leave the brothels — which are often surrounded by metal gates — if they are chaperoned by an assistant pimp. This is in case they pick up a sexually transmitted infections from consensual sex.

There is no requirement for the punters to show that they are not carrying a disease upon entering the brothel, but the women are required to be tested every week. Brothel owners typically pocket half of their earnings, while the prostitutes are expected to pay for their own condoms, wet wipes, sheets and towels.

Of course, this is just good business. While in Nevada, I met with the late Dennis Hof (who died in 2018), America’s biggest pimp — he owned the majority of the legal brothels in operation at the time — who refused to accept the label, because he operated in the legal world. “I am a businessman,” he told me. “I have a license to do this.” For pimps, it is all about profit. The wellbeing of the women is irrelevant. All the prostitutes I interviewed in Nevada brothels spoke of using tactics aimed as dissociating from their feelings while having sex with punters, in order to cope. One woman told me she repeated the mantra, during each encounter: “I am not selling myself, but renting out my body for an hour”.

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Prostitutes desperately need protection, but every attempt to unionise these “workers” has failed. Pro-pimp organisations have long been masquerading as “sex workers’ unions” — in 2002, a London newspaper ran a front page with the headline, “Sex Workers To Join Trade Union”. People lobbying for the legalisation of the sex trade had persuaded Britain’s third-biggest union, the GMB, that prostitution was a job and that those selling sex deserved “worker’s rights”. The now-defunct International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) was never a union; it is a lobby group for the decriminalisation of pimping. In the early days, its main spokespersons were two gay men — whose rather unrepresentative voices (at most, 20% of the entire sex market is men selling sex to men) became dominant in the “sex worker’s rights” debate. One of these, Douglas Fox, was co-owner of a large “escort agency” based in north-east England.

Another organisation that masqueraded as a union was the Red Thread, based in Amsterdam. Founded in 1984 — and funded, from 1987, by the Dutch government — even at its height, it had just 100 members, out of the nation’s estimated 25,000 prostituted people. It never fought a single case on behalf of a “worker” in court. What it did do was act as a propaganda machine for legalisation. The Red Thread only lost its government funding when the international media began to report on the evidence coming out of The Netherlands that legalisation had been an unmitigated disaster. Under this regime, Trafficking and pimping has increased, organised crime is rife, and women are not protected from violence.

Those who advocate for the legalisation of prostitution claim it makes it safer for the women. Those in favour of decriminalisation, including many liberals and some feminists, argue that “sex workers” can be protected by unions and health and safety measures. But prostitution is inherently abusive. There is no way to make it safe.

And, under legalisation, prostituted women are inspected and not protected. After all, if selling sex is the same as flipping burgers for a living, there needs to be quality control of the product. This is another gross example of legalisation benefitting men while betraying women: whoever the lucky candidate is for the brothel testing job in Germany, he can easily pretend it is regular employment, while he is encouraged to “have fun having sex with the different ladies”.

Who cares what those ladies are thinking, feeling and experiencing? When women’s bodies become commodities, they cease to be human, and the men who buy and sell them can no longer claim to be humane. That is what the legalisation of prostitution achieves.

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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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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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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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.

What Martin achieved in such a short space of time is remarkable. Like the criminalisation of marital rape, it is a change that forces us to reconsider social norms. When it comes to the body — particularly the female body — what is and is not illegal matters. It shapes how we understand both ourselves and how we expect to be treated by others. Following the law change, guidance on upskirting was added to the Department of Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education booklet. This has not led to the imprisonment of multiple snap-happy teenage boys; its punitive impact is minimal. But as my partner, a teacher, tells me, there’s now an awareness in schools that it is unacceptable to dismiss upskirting on the basis that “boys will be boys”.

So, Martin deserves to feel proud of her activism. Yet in both her recent Guardian piece and her new book, No Offence, But, one gets the impression that she now feels torn. Partly, this is because she is now defined as “the upskirting girl”, her activism reduced to what was, for her, an experience of violation. But Martin also seems to be subtly distancing herself from what she actually achieved. “I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact,” she writes, “but I also have a complex relationship with it.”

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This complex relationship is very obvious throughout No Offence, But. Billed as a progressive handbook offering “a space to explore the problematic, distracting or lazy comments we so often encounter”, its chapters each focus on a particular phrase: “Not all men”, “I see no colour”, “I don’t do politics”. Some are written by Martin, others by guest contributors. The tone is one of preaching to the converted. In her own sections, Martin is keen to emphasise her growth, but she also seems unduly embarrassed by her former self. Both her furious feminist awakening and the visible, measurable achievements that ensued are suddenly positioned as somewhat immature, unsophisticated and, worst of all, privileged.

There’s a certain strand of social justice activism that is not always kind to feminists who get their hands dirty. Ten years ago, when Caroline Criado Perez fought a successful battle to have Jane Austen appear on the new £10 note, her detractors were keen to denounce hers as “banknote feminism”. Criado Perez’s campaign had stressed the importance of female visibility and heritage; her critics zeroed in on the fact that Austen’s image would be appearing on money, something that marginalised women sorely lacked. A straightforward achievement was belittled because it was associated with the Bank of England.

In a similar fashion, feminists who work with, or to change, the criminal justice system can find themselves denounced as “carceral feminists”. “The thrust of the accusation,” writes Julie Bindel in Feminism For Women, “is that those of us that want consequences for men who rape and otherwise abuse women are unconcerned with the fact that the prison system is a problem in general.” The accusers tend to ignore the fact that many feminist organisations, such as Bindel’s own Justice for Women, state that they would prefer it if prisons were not necessary, accepting them only as a last resort, given that no one has come up with anything more effective. As Bindel argues: “It should be possible to challenge the race and class hierarchies upheld by the criminal justice system” without putting women at risk by junking it completely.

Indeed, it is possible. But if one does not wish to bear the taint of complicity, it is uncomfortable. Unfortunately for Martin, she seems to have realised this only after she succeeded in making the world a safer place for women.

Alison Phipps, a sociologist at Newcastle University, has made herself a leading voice against so-called carceral feminists. In her 2021 book Me, Not You, she includes Martin’s upskirting law in a list of things that should be opposed on the basis that they “move us away from our ultimate goals”. (She comments, disdainfully, that the new law was announced “to loud applause from mainstream feminists”, because if there’s one thing worse than being practical, it’s being practical and mainstream.) There’s a perfect world out there, and by making it illegal for a man to stick a camera between your legs and take a photo of your crotch, Martin has apparently made it that much harder for us to find it.

Me, Not You is a difficult book to read, because it is so staggeringly misogynistic. Women who seek legal solutions to sexual violence are routinely compared to racists and fascists, their desire for justice dismissed as an unhealthy reaction to trauma. “Being raped,” writes Phipps, “often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not — it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back… And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us.”

I won’t quote the rest of that paragraph, but suffice it to say that Phipps uses the fact that accusations of rape by white women have been used to justify violence against black men to argue that “allegations of sexual violence” — by which she means real ones, as well as false — are “tools of oppression”.

Rape victims have long been demonised, the narrative being that their violation has left them damaged, vengeful and morally suspect. Think, for instance, of Medusa, known not for what was done to her, but for the literal monster it made of her. Centuries later, these myths are still with us. In Down Girl, Kate Manne describes how the rape victim who goes to court “is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution”. Contrary to Phipps’s claims, imputing vengeful urges to rape victims is not intersectional feminism — or any form of feminism — but the same old patriarchy.

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Then again, in the non-carceral world that Phipps envisages, there would be no rape anyway: “There would be no national borders. There would be no prisons. There would be accountability, but not vengeance. … There would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence.”

One has to admire the chutzpah of a middle-class white woman writing a book that dismisses feminists who engage with the criminal justice system as “bourgeois white women” before offering up John Lennon’s Imagine as a radical solution to injustice. Then again, what is a feminism that retreats from engagement with tainted institutions left with, other than imagination?

In her chapter critiquing the phrase “the police are here to protect us”, Martin indulges in a similar form of straw-manning, only using her younger self, rather than other feminists, as the target: “I believed the police force to be a heroic institution that worked tirelessly to make society safer. They found the murderers and locked them up, they stopped violence before it got out of hand.” Did Martin really have such an idealised vision of the world? Or is it just necessary for her to pretend she did, in order to justify her earlier work? Has she heard the other feminists whispering behind her back, and decided to redeem herself, by rejecting carceral complicity?

I find it hard to believe that someone who went on to achieve so much was ever as naïve as she now implies. And I find it hard to read her undermining her activism. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to be more of a critical thinker,” she writes — meaning “someone who recognises cultural, social and geographical contexts and applies theories”, as opposed to someone whose analysis is “determined mostly by their automatic emotional response, their personal context and existing opinions”. Of course, Martin’s anger at being upskirted was an “automatic emotional response”; her highly successful legal campaign was rooted in her “personal context and existing opinions”. But now, it seems, she knows better than to let her feelings get the better of her.

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How is this anything other than a step backwards? Society has long taught women to consider our emotional responses unreliable, to view ourselves as less rational than men, less capable of seeing things objectively. The feminist claim that “the personal is political” is turned against us, as though somehow, anything that is too informed by what has happened in our own lives cannot be truly relevant to anyone else.

In this feminism designed for utopia, theory is always more attractive than flesh-and-blood human beings, especially the female body, which is too messy, too unsophisticated, too implicated. It is not a coincidence, I think, that anti-carceral feminism finds common cause with trans activism, both movements raging against the inconvenient women who continue to assert the boundaries of their bodies and the validity of their trauma.

This version of feminism is, in the end, not a turn away from complicity with power, but a turn away from women. It tells us to stay quiet in the aftermath of violation, for the greater good; it tells us to bear the costs of doing nothing, so that we may be pure enough for an imagined utopia. It tells us to behave as if we don’t have bodies, as if we can exist somewhere beyond the world as it is. Imagine there’s no upskirting. Imagine there’s no rape. Imagine there are no women. It isn’t hard to do, for some.

It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little bubble at least, people have been saying the site is clinically dead for at least two years — although admittedly I do follow a lot of tired, cynical journalists. And let me tell you, they are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. In real terms, freelance rates are lower than they were in the last millennium. No wonder so many of them decided the only route to solvency was to monetise themselves. Those of us who remained on the Twitter mothership during and after the pandemic watched an exodus of solo shuttlecraft head into the new media business-model troposphere. There they remain in geo-stationary orbit, a flotilla of atomised Substacks.

Everyone seems sort of resigned now to social media becoming less interesting and to us all spending less time on it. Nothing lasts forever. Twitter went from agreeable agora (c.2008) to brittle umbrage mill (c.2012) to enraged existential mobclash (c.2016) to a colourised trench-warfare horror scene. Then, it was sold.

It felt odd. Twitter always had the illusion of being, not publicly owned exactly, but common land at least. It was just there, like the roads and parks and pavements and internet. Suddenly it was worth $44 billion? Oh, but there was worse to come. The self-acknowledged Coolest White Guy on Earth had bought the site. And, excitingly, there was even worse to come. Artificially Intelligent Caligula was about to implement his Plan:

Phase 1: Sack all non-suck-ups and losers.
Phase 2: Wipe 70% off market value (totally cool, hold your nerve bro).
Phase 3: Invite back all the weird angry people previously banned.
Phase 4: Change name from Twitter (lame) to X (super-cool, mysterious).
Phase 5: Introduce frequent ad hurdles to acclimatise users to revenue grooming.
Phase 6: Introduce blue-tick charge to acclimatise users to subscription fracking.
Phase 7: Kick back. Wait for the world to deal with radical vibe shift.

It’s a far cry from those calm, underpopulated early days. Remember being on Twitter then, when it felt like everybody was in a social media sitcom. Silly puns and harmless banter — on one level, it seemed a shortcut to sophistication. There you were at some psychedelic Algonquin Round Table, wisecracking with preposterously accessible famous people as if you belonged there. Bloody hell, Caitlin Moran just retweeted a gag of mine and I’ve got 500 new followers! Ooh, Stephen Fry liked something I said and now I’ve got people in my timeline saying things like “Ahoy old chap!” Oh good, Piers Morgan’s alerted his adoring fans to some crack I made about Test Match Special and now I’ve got a dickhead with numbers for a name saying something horrible about a photo of my baby granddaughter.

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At another level, it was an infant-school playground with randoms tearing around making friends in a hurry. I started to follow a very wide spectrum of people interested in comedy and music and politics and beyond. I now look back to 2008 and realise that the overwhelming majority of my current non-professional friends were made then, on Twitter. We’d meet occasionally in Soho pubs, and everyone was exactly like the online version of themselves.

Maybe it was possible to build a social media community, but how would that work? By simply assembling a genial cross-section of liberal-Left Twitter? No. In a real community, you’re not shouting about Daily Mail headlines in the street. You have no idea what Sheila over the road’s views on Self-ID are, or what the builder at number 36 thinks about Just Stop Oil. I mean, you have an inkling. But their precise positions are not articulated in pithy, unequivocal one-liners in block capitals filling their front windows. I don’t know what your street’s like, but the most we’ve had around here was a Not My King sign and a missing tortoise poster.

The golden age of Twitter, like that of the fabled pre-war Edwardian version, was simply a long summer with benevolent weather. 2009 was the turning point for me. We still had a Labour government, just. My carefully curated Twitter circle was a model village of civilised people, insulated from the hateful wrongness of the outside world. Then, as now, the one thing Twitter was really good at was breaking news, which was the usual slurry of national misery and international catastrophe, with little shards of personal tragedy.

And, inevitably, tragedy sometimes happens to people you don’t like. David Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, who had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died suddenly. Cameron paid a moving tribute to the NHS staff who had cared for him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown (weird, typing that phrase) had himself lost a child, and spoke on behalf of all of us when he offered heartfelt condolences.

Well, nearly all of us. By then Twitter encouraged people to bark their own brutal truth to power. One of the people I followed tweeted with a shrug that the net result of Ivan Cameron’s death was one fewer potential Tory in the world. I stared and stared at it, trying to discern some reflexive, ironic meta-joke I hadn’t quite understood — but no, that was the whole tweet. Child’s death, silver lining. I told the person that it was a horrible thing to say. They refused to apologise, and explained that they struggled with tone. Who was the real victim here?

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow. I started with a few easy ones, including the exotically named Iain Martin, my alternative-reality centre-Right counterpart. I was always getting abused for something he’d written; he’d got mistaken for me a few times.

But I wanted to see what it would be like if you followed only terrible people. For a month, I went experimentally dark. I followed Westboro Baptist church members, Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, homophobes, all the phobes, all personally wounded by the injustice of “these people” just being in their eyeline. Misogynists were everywhere, social media affirming the warning Germaine Greer had sounded half a century earlier — that women have very little idea of just how much men hate them. Now, they had a very keen understanding of exactly how much. There were men, hating them graphically, cruelly, dismissively, in plain sight.

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Sometimes, I tried engaging. A few of the hateful people were perfectly civil. I had several conversations with a cheerful woman from Sarah Palin’s office who had every sympathy for me, living in England under the yoke of Marxism. She told me how the NHS worked (death panels, population control) and how Birmingham was a Sharia state. No guns, that was our problem.

Not many of the other accounts I followed seemed to do light conversation. Confederate Nazis called me the worst thing they could think of (gay) and wished unimaginative ill upon me, with unimaginative swearing. Someone even went to the trouble of opening a Twitter account in my name, simply to post me warnings. The just-for-you revenge Twitter account became a thing. The nastier ones, as always, were targeting women, set up by men obsessed with their former partners. I had my own for a while, bless him. Definitely a him. He followed only me, posted to only me. By the time he sighed his last message, he seemed exhausted by the whole enterprise: “I hope that everyone you ever loved is dead.”

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It’s tempting, of course, to project my own weary old man’s vibe shift — weltschmerz to ennui — onto the blank, threadbare screen. The renamed site may be under new management, but everyone seems to be doing that Unicode “shrug” emoji, expecting not a renewal but a gentle unmooring. Approximately nobody is ever going to call it X. Twitter will remain a vital channel for mutual support groups, for campaigners, for people plugging their work. But honestly, in terms of human interaction, it was always faddish. That was its point. It was born to die.

Twitter and I are losing interest in one another; it can’t even be bothered to pester me with vaguely relevant ads. Like many others, I’m just running down the clock now as it enters its Sunset Boulevard phase. It’s slowly leaving me, not the other way round.

I’ve been campaigning to end the porn industry all my adult life, while Buck has made his living in the porn industry. I don’t accept “transsexuality” as a diagnosis, while Buck is a walking, talking advertisement for it. But he has taken a liking to me, and the feeling is mutual.

The founder of Buck Angel Entertainment, winner of an array of porn awards, and the first transgender man to feature in an all-male porn film, Buck now uses his fame and platform to advocate for sexual freedom. He also speaks out against both the misogyny directed at women who dare critique trans ideology and the use of puberty blockers on children. Like me, he has been labelled a transphobe. And like me, people are constantly trying to silence him.

As you might expect, Buck, now 60, has lived an turbulent life: drug addict, porn star, prostitute. He marvels that he has made it this far. His childhood, though, was a “happy, really normal middle-class” one in LA. He was fortunate to have “incredible” parents who were completely accepting of his “ultra-masculine identity” as he was growing up. He looked like a boy, he dressed like a boy, he played tough and was always in fights. “My parents and pretty much all my family and friends called me the boy name, the name I felt close to. Not the girl name,” he remembers. “In the Seventies, a girl who wore boy clothes was really no big deal.”

But it was a big deal to be a lesbian. And things weren’t so easy at high school, where he presented as a very masculine woman who found refuge in sports. He knew “things just weren’t aligned for me and I just didn’t fit in. I knew I was attracted to women, but it was the Seventies, and we didn’t talk about that”. A straight-F student who liked to sleep in class, Buck focused on running, where he excelled — and would even beat the boys. He won sponsorship from Adidas and Nike, and there was even talk of training for the Olympics. “But in my private life I was struggling because I didn’t know how to be attracted to girls without being called a lesbian. And our coach said that if any of us ever became lesbians, he would never coach us again… We would do secret things [at] hotels. But… it was always like, don’t say anything because we’ll lose our sponsor”.

He was bullied and ostracised and struggled to deal with his sexuality and identity. The homophobia in the sports world was crushing, so he turned to drink and drugs. “This was 32 years ago, before [easy access to] the internet,” he says. Googling “sex change” wasn’t an option. “I just knew I felt like a man”, but he was unable to do anything about it.

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But why not just live happily as a butch lesbian? “I wished I could,” he replies. To this day, I still think, “could I have done that?” In fact, I think of it more today than I ever have with all the new stuff that’s happening and the way they’re pushing kids to transition. But something inside of me said: ‘I have to be a man.’”

It was after he was spotted by a modelling agency that things started going massively downhill: it was an industry in which he was forced to be incredibly feminine, and was judged for what he looked like. He fell into prostitution, and the drug-taking spiralled. Hitting rock bottom, he had to finally admit he could not live as a woman and started to look around for someone who might be able to help him.

In 1990, Buck did find a willing therapist, and two years later took his first dose of testosterone. He was one of the earliest trans men to be prescribed hormonal treatment. He was, as his therapist said, a “guinea pig”. The technology wasn’t around for him to undergo genital surgery, however, so while he had his breasts removed, he chose to retain his vagina. “Back in the day they called transsexual porn “chicks with dicks”. I was like, oh dude, I can be a man with a pussy. I wanted to change attitudes, to show people what difference really was, and how we should celebrate and not hide from it.”

“I am proud that I have reclaimed the words ‘vagina’ and ‘pussy’ for transgender men’s use,” says Buck. “And I’m so grateful I don’t have the bottom surgery. I celebrate my vagina and I don’t feel any less male.”

But if he’s anti-misogyny, as he insists, how does he justify the fact that he made his name and a living from a business that commodifies and demeans females? This is an industry that causes direct harm to vulnerable women, as well as giving boys and men permission to act upon rape fantasies.

There is value in celebrating “diverse sexual experience”, he tells me. Though he does admit there can be “some sick, nasty stuff that happens and anyone who denies that it happens in our industry is not doing us a service”. Buck no longer makes porn, so perhaps it is easy for him to dodge responsibility, but I’m not exactly satisfied with his half-defence of his industry. Can a feminist really be a porn performer and defender given the harms it causes, which worsen by the day with the help of social media? “I will always admit there’s a very deep, dark side to porn,” he says.

He was often treated badly by mainstream pornographers, but says he pushed through until “I started to be on some level celebrated and people started writing to me, not only trans men: thank you for doing this”. And it was a message that could have resonance beyond the porn industry.

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The trouble is, Buck is outspoken and unorthodox and many in the transgender community don’t like that. And he was hated for not having full surgery. He and I both acknowledge how things have changed when it comes to trans activism. The “trans men are men”, “trans women are women” mantras have led to a total denial in some quarters that there is any physical difference involved.

“Back in the day, we never denied our biology,” says Buck. “But I believe our community was hijacked by powerful, wealthy trans women. They have a lot of influence, and I think they’re envious of women. I know this will cause anger and hurt feelings, but I am not here to protect feelings or to hide the truth.” He’s right. In the US and the UK, it is the activists with the most clout, with the money and power, whose voices get elevated. Buck is wary of modern-day trans rights activists. “They’re making us look like fools. It’s disgusting. A lot of it is misogyny — writing out women.”

Then, in 2021, Buck was a signatory to a public statement “Trans Men Fight Back” outlining concerns that “autogynephilic trans women” were “controlling the narrative” on trans issues and had taken a “troubling turn”. The authors pointed to the framing of counselling for gender dysphoric children as “conversion therapy”. They also protested the “erasure of women’s spaces, and women’s language”.

The response was swift and brutal, and Buck was singled out for attack. The open letter in response to his statement was signed by 280 trans activists who cited “transmisogyny, transmedicalism, and mockery of nonbinary identities”. The trans community was urged to target him by “not selling his merchandise, not inviting him to speak at their conferences or on their podcasts, not collaborating with him on videos or essays, until such a time as he has made a full, public apology acknowledging the harm he has caused to trans people by repeatedly spreading false scientific claims”.

Shunned and maligned by the very community he helped to build, Buck struggled to cope. “It hurts,” says Buck, obviously still upset. “I have done a lot of work for the trans community for many years, as I did when I was in the lesbian community. It’s always been very dear to my heart. So, it hurts when a bunch of young people who probably aren’t even trans rake me over the coals.”

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His business selling sex toys and clothing merchandise suffered, as did his advocacy, and the hostility took its toll. “But then I was like: ‘OK, you want to play that game with me?’ And it lit a fire under my ass. On some level that made me want to be here today with you, to try and build bridges. I knew [trans activists] were hijacking and appropriating our community.

“I’ve been a homeless crack addict, but today I got a roof over my head. I got a beautiful partner and a kid. I am not fearful of any of those people because they’re not part of this community. I will not capitulate.”

This is true. While he is deeply sympathetic with all trans people, he will not be deterred from supporting and engaging with those young people who are detransitioning even though this means he is constantly being labelled “anti-trans”. The attacks only stiffen his resolve. In particular, he is hated within a certain section of the community for, unusually, being against puberty blockers for children: “I believe it is dangerous,” he says. Buck didn’t take HRT until his late 20s. In return he’s been accused of causing serious harm to “trans kids” for being dead set against medical intervention for kids.

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“Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder,” he explains to me. “It’s in your brain, not in your body. I don’t want these kids to transition unless they really, really need to do it.”

“Those kids who regretted transitioning got hurt because of our stupid community, and so I’m going to take responsibility for them,” he continues. “I am a part of the trans community, and I feel it is my duty to support them. Affirming a child’s trans identity without questioning it is ultimately harmful,” says Buck. “They need therapy way before they even think about going down this road.”

As far as Buck is concerned, there is a new movement inside a community he once felt such a part of. “An evil force is taking over a space that has saved lives for a very long time. I use this term evil force because it feels as though something has consumed the ability for a healthy dialogue among a diversity of voices, which make up our community.”

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He agrees with me that the modern-day trans movement is motivated by misogyny. “It is so disturbing to see from my vantage point. The bully behaviour is to force women to shut up if they do not confirm that ‘a trans woman is a woman’. The actual physical violence at women’s events by TRAs has nothing to do with trans rights and everything to do with hate towards women.” As he sees it: “If they don’t want to be called men, they should stop acting like men. Since when do women act like insane weirdos punching women in the face?”

I like Buck, and appreciate both his frankness, and his support against the bullying and misogyny of extreme trans activism. But we are worlds apart when it comes to pornography and his firm belief in the notion of being “trapped in the wrong body”. Nevertheless, it is crying shame that someone as interesting as Buck Angel, and with so much of value to add to the debate has been cancelled by his own community.

He is, though, keener than ever to speak out against violent trans activists who target women for defending our rights.

“I live happily as a man,” Buck tells me as we say goodbye, “but I will never, ever turn my back on women.”

If only it were that simple.

“Defund the police” has been the rallying cry of the progressive Left ever since the death of George Floyd in 2020, and has expanded into a policy about much more than race. Obviously the point many feminists make is that since many male officers are sexual and domestic abuse offenders themselves, women shouldn’t trust them. Another is that a large proportion of 999 calls relate to mental health crises — so why are they referred to law enforcement? Meanwhile, making arrests for minor and non-violent crimes — such as burglary, graffiti and low-level acts of criminal damage and public nuisance — locks citizens into a cycle of criminal justice involvement.

Hard leftists in the UK have a tendency to go further: abolish the police service entirely, is their demand, with one activist arguing recently that, “History makes clear that the police do not exist to protect any of us. They exist to have power over us, and like perpetrators, they will use that power indiscriminately to keep us in our place.” The logical conclusion to this argument would be to also abolish all state agencies – including mental health facilities, child protection, and the government itself. It would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s a nonsense, to argue, as they do, that all crime could be dealt with at a “community level” with solutions such as restorative justice.

I emphatically resist these calls. That’s not to say I support the service in its current form. Where I grew up in Darlington, the police were the enemy and rarely protected working-class, downtrodden communities from violence. I saw how the police were complicit in male violence, refusing to admonish perpetrators they related to, man to man. More recently, I’ve been horrified by Baroness Casey’s interim report, which showed that out of nearly 9,000 Metropolitan police officers and staff accused of misconduct since 2013, only 5% were dismissed from the force. Around 1,800 were accused of multiple crimes; less than 1% were sacked as a result. One officer faced 19 allegations, and another was accused of 11 counts of assault, sexual harassment, sending naked images, fraud and leaking information.

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Women have every reason to distrust the police. But the defund the police argument that resources should be reallocated to mental health, homelessness and rehabilitation services makes sense only up to a point. Men do not sexually assault, rape, harass or beat up their female partners because they are homeless, drunk or mentally ill. They do it because they can. Sober, wealthy, landowning men also rape and attack women. In 2021, the chief constable of Merseyside told a reporter that, if he were given £5 billion to cut crime, he would invest only £1 billion in policing, and the rest would go to tackle poverty. But what about those middle-class, affluent, socially respectable men who commit acts of violence against women and children? If we defund the police, who arrests these men?

We know that most violence against women is carried out in the home. More than 100 women are killed every year by former or current male partners, almost always following a pattern of escalating violence and harassment. Reducing police budgets would reduce the capacity for police to respond to domestic violence call-outs and to subsequently implement enforcement measures. Nor can we be sure that funds will be redirected appropriately. In the UK, the majority of police funding comes directly from central government; would you trust our government to make sure those resources are directed to, say, mental health services?

Besides, police will still be first responders to violent incidents, and they have been trained for decades in mental health issues. They know, in theory, when to refer perpetrators to medical services rather than criminalise them. That this rarely translates into practice is because there is a systematic failure of police across the board to implement the powers and measures they have to tackle these problems, preferring, more often than not, to take the easy route.

This isn’t surprising. The force is under greater pressure than ever. We currently have fewer officers than we had in 2009. So you might say that in the UK, there has already been a de facto defunding of the police. This has not translated into improved responses to mental health crises, nor a reduction in violence perpetrated by police towards people of colour. In fact, as Home Office research shows, during 2018 to 2019, police brutality towards black people increased. As Inquest reports, black people are more likely than white people to die in police custody but, to date, not a single police officer has been held criminally responsible.

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Nor has it improved policy towards officers who sexually assault. The Met didn’t seize the chance, for instance, to learn from the case of “Bastard Dave” — and the allegations against Carrick go back to as early as 2002. There are numerous things that could have been done to stop Carrick: he joined the Met despite having been a suspect in a burglary and malicious communications against a former partner a year earlier, and there was no mention of this during the vetting and recruitment process. A year later, he was accused of harassment and assault against another woman. There was no arrest and he received only “words of advice”. Had an investigation been carried out by officers from a different service, Carrick might have been stopped. Even fewer resources would have arguably made that even harder.

I have been sexually and physically assaulted because I am a woman and a lesbian. And having worked in a police station in the Nineties as a civilian supporting police officers during domestic violence call outs, I am well versed in some of their  attitudes towards women. But I have reported all these crimes against me, despite being aware of the force’s shortcomings. I refuse to give up on the service. To defund the police, we would have to believe that the police are beyond reform — and I do not.

So how do we reform the police? With sanctions and consequences imposed upon those who promote misogynistic and racist attitudes or behaviour, and automatic dismissal for officers who commit crimes while serving. We also need to encourage, and properly protect whistle-blowers. Increased resourcing, better training, rigorous recruitment, and probationary periods are all essential changes that need to be made. Instead of defunding an already strapped service, we must radically reform it. And the only way to do that is to refund the police.

I have lived through an abusive relationship and have spoken about it in Parliament. I was reminded of making that speech earlier this week — the daily trauma that inspired it, how hard it was to make and, afterwards, the overwhelming support of my colleagues. That was the Labour Party I joined.

On Tuesday, when two of those colleagues traded that sympathy for aggression, shouting down women in the Chamber, it felt like a very different Labour Party. I was defending the need to protect vulnerable women in single-sex spaces, and had just criticised Scotland’s Gender Reform Bill, when Ben Bradshaw yelled his disapproval at me. Sitting nearby, Lloyd Russell-Moyle went puce — perhaps less surprising — and started to heckle every woman who spoke of their similar concerns. Later, when Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP and friend, spoke of her concerns around safeguarding, he accused her of being a bigot before crossing over to the Tory side of the Chamber to sit on the side benches, very close to her, staring as if to intimidate her.

“I recognise that I failed to control [my] passion”, was how he later “apologised”. In other words, he had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t his fault; it was ours for daring to disagree with him. “Look what you made me do,” as my ex-partner would say when I had caused him to explode — perhaps by doing or wearing something he didn’t entirely like or voicing an opinion he didn’t want to hear.

After Tuesday’s outburst, came the silence. Not from Russell-Moyle, but from Keir Starmer’s office. It’s a cycle I’ve come to know well. First, speak up in defence of women’s sex-based rights. And then, face the consequences. Alone.

The only message I’ve had from the Party since the debate was from the Deputy Whips’ office yesterday — I was chastised for not attending a routine Statutory Instruments Committee sitting because… I was busy being shouted down by two Labour MPs and completely forgot. To be fair, Emily Thornberry, shadow Attorney General, did come out and say that the debate wasn’t “Labour’s finest hour”, before clarifying that this was because it distracted from “the most vulnerable in society, who are trans people”. Keir, meanwhile, said nothing. It was as if I didn’t exist — but, then, perhaps the Leader’s Office wishes I didn’t.

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I should have been the perfect Labour MP. I was a single mum. I was on benefits, which topped up my salary as a Teaching Assistant. I understood hardship, and what ordinary women wanted and needed from politics. The year before I was elected, I earned less than £10,000. On my first day in Westminster, I had to borrow money to pay for the train fare. I was a woman who knew what struggle meant. And I was a Member of Parliament, having turned a “True Blue” Tory seat Red for the first time in history.

So, what did the Labour Party make of my historic win? Well, it was exciting at first. My face was plastered on all the Big Screens at conference. They showed a film of my victory. When Labour’s leading men, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Len McClusky or Ian McNichol joyfully exclaimed “We won Canterbury!”, there were cheers and a standing ovation. They all used that victory in their speeches, but I rarely heard mention of my name. Not one of them had been to Canterbury to campaign. Nobody in the Party had expected me to win. The total outsider, the only red dot in a sea of blue, was only here because of the swell of Corbyn mania. Two years on, when that bubble burst with the Party’s crushing defeat and the rejection of Corbyn, my tiny majority increased ten times.

Then I liked a tweet.

It was fairly innocuous: Piers Morgan had replied “Do you mean women?” to a tweet advising “individuals with a cervix” to get screened for cancer. I think I probably knew there was a chance it would cause me some trouble, but it seemed a safe way to enter this debate publicly. That’s when the floodgates really opened. Faced with a tsunami of online vitriol, including calls for my job and even my life, I then posted a tweet of my own, asking why it was “transphobic” to say that only women have a cervix. What happened next was a blur. I received more threats. The alarm bells went off in Pink News that another Terf was in town (happy to be part of the gang!). Owen Jones issued a grovelling apology for attending my election rally (not as sorry as I am!), while seemingly every Labour university student group called on the Party to stop me being an MP (obviously not students of how politics works!).

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But from the Labour Party — silence. They think the transgender debate is nothing more than a culture-war issue. A weapon used by the Tories to whip up division. It is a smokescreen that has nothing to do with women’s rights. Ordinary people don’t care about mixed-sex changing rooms. Or the prospect of men entering women’s refuges. Or the erasure of the word “cervix”. What this debate is really about, women are told, is bigotry and prejudice.

I know that is not the case.

Then I think of the flowers. After I liked that tweet and started to speak up, the flowers started to arrive: more than 350 bunches in just two days. And there were messages. Thousands of them. From women and men telling me they were grateful for somebody speaking out. From people who voted Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and Green. Every day, survivors of domestic violence still message me, telling me not to stop. Keir may dismiss this as a culture-war issue, but for these women, it is most definitely not.

And I know I’m not the only MP in the party who thinks this — I’m just the only one who feels I have nothing to lose by speaking out. After all, there’s no front-bench job offer for the only Labour MP in my county. Many of us know that self-identifying as a woman does not make a person a biological woman who shares our lived experience. But for obvious reasons, these views are not voiced outside of closed rooms or private and secret WhatsApp groups. Even there, the most senior MPs often do not post a single word; they know exactly what’s at stake and not many of them want to be me. So for now, they mostly remain silent.

For all of Corbyn’s faults — and I was an outspoken critic of all of them — his party’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby, came to every meeting of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party that she was invited to, even when she was going through chemotherapy. David Evans, her replacement, has been two or three times, yet we are the biggest group in the Party, the largest group of women in Parliament, and we all won or held onto our seats against the odds in 2019. Who knows? Perhaps we may even know a thing or two about politics or winning? (His suggestion that us ladies would do well to read the latest doorstep scripts written by staff didn’t exactly go down well.)

Is it starting to look like Labour has a women problem? It certainly is for the 7,000-strong group of women members, councillors and activists who make up Labour Women’s Declaration and had a stall at last year’s party conference refused. It is for Lesbian Labour, who were also stopped from exhibiting at last year’s conference. It is for Dr Karen Ingala-Smith, the formidable feminist campaigner who compiles a list of women killed in the UK each year which is then read out in Parliament by Jess Phillips every International Women’s Day, and who had her membership rejected after she made a few gender-critical joke tweets featuring kittens. And of course it is for me, ostracised for voicing not only my own opinions but those of thousands of others who are starting to question the Party they have dedicated so much of their lives to.

In each case, a woman who dared to voice an opinion was ignored or neglected. One of the traits of being in an abusive relationship is “stonewalling”. The abuser will go quiet for days on end. They will stew, not speak to you, turn their back on you. Trust me when I say I don’t take this lightly: but what I feel now, after six years of being cold-shouldered by the Labour Party, conjures memories of how I felt in that abusive relationship. When I come home at night, I feel low-level trauma at my political isolation.

Sitting on the front bench with Keir are MPs who defended Corbyn or remained silent when the rest of us were calling him out for antisemitism. Sitting on our front bench is an MP who was voted in as a Conservative. Not sitting on the front bench, however, is a single MP who believes that biological sex can’t be erased at the stroke of a pen. To go into a workplace, when nothing you say or experience as a politician or a woman is of any worth — what’s progressive about that?

I may not be quite as radical a feminist as my wonderful friend Julie Bindel, but what I am is a progressive, Left-wing MP who cares about ordinary women, and now wonders whether the party I represent is capable of standing up for them. I am not going to join the Conservatives, or the Lib Dems or the Greens. But this party doesn’t always feel like home. In 2019, it was hard enough trying to convince my constituents that Labour wasn’t antisemitic. In the next election, when they inevitably ask whether Labour is sexist, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do the same.

The full scale of Carrick’s offending began to emerge at Southwark Crown Court this week when he admitted 47 rapes, nine sexual assaults, three counts of coercive control, two of false imprisonment, and a string of other offences. The charges relate to attacks on 13 women in London and Hertfordshire over a period of 17 years. The court heard that Carrick remained a serving officer throughout that time, even though the Met were told about repeated allegations suggesting he was a threat to women. The senior officer who eventually investigated the case concluded that Carrick had an “appetite for degradation and control”. Surely someone should have noticed – and suspended him?

The parallels with the case of PC Wayne Couzens, the Met police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, are staggering. He too had a nickname among colleagues: “the rapist”. Both men served on the parliamentary and diplomatic protection squad, where firearms are routinely carried. Both passed vetting procedures to get onto the squad, despite the allegations against them — rape in Carrick’s case, indecent exposure in Couzens’.

Both men, and this is perhaps the most frightening aspect from the point of view of public protection, used their warrant cards to deflect suspicions. Before attacking a woman in September 2020, Carrick flashed his warrant card to persuade her he wasn’t a threat. Couzens did the same to persuade Sarah Everard to get into his car in south London during a Covid lockdown in March 2021.

Carrick told his victims they would not be believed if they complained about a policeman – and he was right. He forced some women into a tiny understairs cupboard, where they were kept naked and cramped for hours. In all, the Met police received nine complaints about him for a range of alleged offences that included domestic abuse, burglary, harassment and assault. No action was taken.

The question of how Carrick and Couzens came to be on the force and remain there goes to the heart of what is wrong with policing in this country. It is the harshest possible indictment of selection, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures, all of which appear unequal to the task of dealing with even the most flagrant predators. Complaints take years to move through the system, are sometimes handled by colleagues of an accused officer, and appear to start from a point of scepticism towards the complainant.

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It’s not so much a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, as a way of avoiding detection and punishment altogether. The first complaint against Carrick during his police career was filed more than 20 years ago, when he was accused of actual bodily harm against a girlfriend who was trying to leave him. No action was taken and he was reported by another girlfriend in 2004, but the Met’s department for professional standards did not investigate.

Five years later, Carrick qualified as a firearms officer and was almost immediately accused of abusing a girlfriend. The Met was informed but took no action. And so it went on: there were other allegations leading up to July 2021, when a former girlfriend went to Sussex police and accused him of rape. Even then Carrick wasn’t suspended, but was placed on ‘restricted duties’ for a few weeks. It was decided he had no case to answer and he was allowed to carry a firearm again. Carrick has now pleaded guilty to raping both women. He was finally caught in October that year, when a woman he had met on a dating site accused him of rape.

The urgent question that the Met needs to answer is “how many more?” How many other serving officers have been accused of sexual assault or domestic abuse, yet are still serving on the force? An answer emerged just after Carrick’s guilty pleas were reported, when the Met admitted it is investigating 1,000 sexual and domestic abuse claims involving around 800 of its 35,000 officers. Those of us who live in London are policed, in other words, by a force where about one in every 50 officers is under investigation.

The new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has admitted that “hundreds” of his officers need to be sacked. Rowley believes it is too difficult at present to get rid of bad officers, but we are entitled to ask what is being done about the ones who shouldn’t be there. Have they been placed on restricted duties? Rowley inherited this mess from his predecessor, the unlamented Dame Cressida Dick, who appeared to be in denial about the scale of the problem. “Sadly, on occasion, I have a bad ‘un’,” she said after Ms Everard’s murder, falling back on the tired old “bad apple” defence.

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At least Rowley admits it’s worse than that, and he has some notion of how Carrick was able to stay on the force. “We failed as investigators, where we should have been more intrusive and joined the dots on this repeated misogyny over a couple of decades,” he said on Monday evening. He acknowledged that the failures were “systemic” and that senior officers should have been more determined to root out a misogynist like Carrick.

Most of the questions being asked at present are about the role of senior officers, but police forces are supposed to be held to account by elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are paid generous salaries, in excess of £80,000 a year, but it’s hard to see that they have had any impact at all on the culture of misogyny and impunity that exists within so many police forces. Decent officers have been complaining for years that they aren’t listened to or, worse, that their careers suffer if they try to report anxieties about colleagues. Four years ago, the Centre for Women’s Justice launched a super-complaint against a number of police forces, alleging that they were letting off male officers accused of domestic abuse. Some of the women who spoke out were themselves police officers, and one of them described how her partner warned her he had friends in high places. An official response, in June last year, recognised “systemic deficiencies” in the way some forces deal with allegations against officers and staff.

Carrick’s admission of large-scale offending confirms the widespread feeling among women that we can’t trust the police — and that the actions needed to regain public trust aren’t being taken swiftly enough. Three months ago, an interim report into the culture and standards of Met by Dame Louise Casey recognised a raft of failings, including officers facing multiple accusations from colleagues being allowed to stay on the force. Rowley said at the time that the findings of the report moved him to tears, but his remarks about the difficulty of sacking criminal officers make him sound alarmingly helpless.

“We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them,” he said last week. He says he has the backing of ministers to change the police recruiting system, which is an urgent priority in the midst of a drive to employ thousands more officers, but it’s hard to know why someone didn’t think of this earlier. Surely blocking men with criminal records of a history of allegations against them should have been a priority years ago?

Rowley spent much of Monday apologising for failures in the Carrick case, and he knows that the Met will face another drubbing when the final Casey report is published later this year. She has written to the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, suggesting that the non-statutory Angiolini inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard should be expanded to look at Carrick’s conduct and the missed opportunities to identify his pattern of behaviour. “If this is not possible,” Casey adds crisply, “I am willing to volunteer myself.”

It’s hard to avoid wondering why we need so many inquiries, when the obvious course of action is to combine them into one, along the lines of the Macpherson inquiry into institutional racism. I called for exactly that more than 18 months ago, when I was Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, but the result was a resounding silence.

Labour has now promised to introduce new national standards of police vetting, but over a period of decades, a hierarchy has developed in which misogyny and bullying have been normalised. Our perverse police culture is unable to identify burglars and rapists, yet apparently willing to tolerate sexual predators in uniform. What woman would trust them again?

“When you’re writing a story with violence in it, how do you balance the need to entertain an audience against your responsibility to depict the violence sensitively?”

That this question is, itself, question-begging, is never discussed. It is simply a foregone conclusion that the responsibility exists, born of an ubiquitous sense among writers and readers that exploring the dark underbelly of humanity — even through the medium of fiction — is fraught in a way that requires some sort of reckoning. Even those who would grudgingly admit that the depiction of fictional crime on a page has little to do with its real-life counterpart — that the killers and rapists and thieves among us are probably not perusing the local bookstore in search of inspiration — will nevertheless insist that crime novelists are accountable in some nebulous, moral sense. If you write about murder, or assault, or kidnapping, or armed robbery, you must be at pains to treat them with the proper respect — or at least, you need to be seen as such, lest someone think you are not only exploiting these things for their entertainment value, but also that you perhaps secretly enjoy them.

Exactly how to do this is an enigma unto itself. The thrillers and mysteries that make up the world of crime fiction often follow a formula. Countless books have been written about how to construct one, to pace your red herrings and twists and reveals so that the reader remains fascinated, compelled to keep turning the page. But there is no such rulebook for how to plumb the depths of human depravity without crossing the line between a respectful depiction and a lurid one, nor can anyone tell you precisely where that line is (even those who are happy to criticise you for falling on the wrong side of it). Every attempt to sketch these boundaries is a failure, and this is perhaps never more true than when attempted by the writers themselves.

“How do we ethically portray violence in crime fiction?” asked veteran author Don Winslow in TIME magazine in April 2022. If anyone should know the answer it’s Winslow, who has written his fair share of crime novels. And yet the conclusion he reaches, after nearly 1,500 meandering words, is that he doesn’t and cannot know. Far from establishing guideposts for fellow writers or discovering the ethical sweet spot between bloodless cosy mysteries and graphic accounts of bodies ripped apart by gunfire, the writing of this piece accomplishes one thing and one thing only: it demonstrates to the world that Don Winslow Has Really Thought About This.

Whatever one thinks of the term “virtue signalling” (I’m not a fan), it’s hard to see essays like this as anything but a cursory advertisement of the author’s moral bona fides. Having demonstrated them — maybe of his own volition, maybe at the behest of a nervous publicist — he will surely go on to write whatever he would have written anyway.

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This is, of course, what all novelists do, whether we’ve been permitted the benefit of an ass-covering TIME essay or not. Keeping the sensibilities of some hypothetical reader in mind is simply not possible when constructing a work of fiction — partly because it’s creatively paralysing, but perhaps more because every reader has different sensibilities, and predicting what will set any one person off is impossible. (I received dozens of angry messages about the death of a cat in my last novel, while the severed human nose someone pulls out of a garbage disposal ten chapters earlier provoked not a single objection.)

But the more interesting question is why the ass-covering is required at all, and here the notion of responsibility in depicting violence on the page dovetails perfectly with the present-day obsession with authenticity in literature, asking what we owe to the real-life victims of the real-life horrors for which we write fictional counterparts. I was once chatting with a fellow author who was working on a novel about a mass shooting; she had sent sample pages to an agent, only to be floored when the agent asked if she had run her story past a sensitivity reader — a person who, by definition, would have to have survived a mass shooting in order to offer critique.

“Imagine approaching someone who’s been through that and asking them to relive the worst experience of their life, just so I can describe the sound it makes when a body hits the floor,” she said. What she didn’t say, but was understood, was the obscenity underlying the agent’s question. Far from stigmatising the writer’s imagination, we should understand it as something to be celebrated: among other things, it saves those of us who write fiction from retraumatising people who have been through the unspeakable, people who hardly need dramatised accounts of a horror they know firsthand. Is the resulting story less authentic? Maybe, at least by some definitions of the word — though if the reader is lucky, they’ll never have to find out.

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But also, crucially, the multitudes which human beings contain means that imagined and authentic need not be mutually exclusive. One thinks of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, such a fully rendered depiction of the Civil War that many actual veterans were gobsmacked to learn that the author had never himself been in battle. The most remarkable thing about this is not that a man could imagine himself into a textured, visceral rendering of something he hadn’t lived, but that we have somehow since come to the conclusion that doing so is a bad thing.

And then, there’s the question of the role of women in all this. Jokes about the overwhelmingly female audience for crime fiction and true crime alike bump up against the reality that women are also producing this content. The expectation that a writer should agonise over every fictional act of violence, fretting over the hypothetical offence it might cause — is it too lurid or too aloof? Too sanitised, or too graphic? — seems not just unrealistic but profoundly gendered, the product of a broader conviction that women must, whatever they are doing, maintain a baseline level of concern about other people’s feelings. The trope of women as nurturers dies hard, even (or perhaps especially) when the woman in question is writing about the discovery of a partially dismembered rat-bitten corpse in a trash can. If men want to write or read about rats nibbling on a severed human head, well, this is to be expected. But if women want the same, a story inevitably springs forth about why they want it for noble reasons: the rat is a metaphor for the vulnerability women experience in a misogynistic world, and so on. That women are full and complex human beings who take the same dark pleasure as anyone in stories designed to disgust or titillate or terrify us is, apparently, too real.

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Essentially, the quest to control the depiction of violence in works of fiction — or to demand that authors flagellate themselves over it — seems to centre on the uncomfortable fact that the stuff of real-life tragedy is also the stuff of compelling drama, and that the line which separates entertainment from trauma is not just blurred but entirely subjective. What delineates one from the other is not in how the author chooses to describe it; it’s whether the trauma in question is happening to someone else. And while murder is one of these traumas, it is hardly the only one. The list of things we love to read about yet don’t want to live through includes affairs, betrayals, breakups, and estrangements; deaths and disasters; broken hearts and broken bones. One person’s action-packed man-vs-nature survival story is another’s utter devastation as they sift through the wreckage of their tornado-flattened home. One person’s exciting forensic thriller is another’s spouse, parent, or child lying cold and in pieces on an autopsy table.

Novelists capture these moments not for those who have lived through them but those who haven’t, trapping them in a medium through which we can examine murder, tragedy and terror, and experience an emotional response to them. It is like viewing a solar eclipse through a shadow box: the sun you’re seeing isn’t exactly real, but you can consider that little sliver of light for as long as you like without burning your eyes.

Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist“, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.

Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs. 

The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.

One such figure, Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, rose to fame via his self-titled blog and forum. An Iranian-American microbiologist and self-described “late bloomer”, Roosh discovered the PUA community during his senior year of college and “took to [it] like a fish to water”, later using his writing to share this information with like-minded readers eager to get more women to sleep with them. He also self-published a host of pickup and travel guides about the rough and at times nonconsensual sex he had around the world. In 2012, he founded Return of Kings, a site that published articles with headlines such as “The Intellectual Inferiority of Women” and “When Her No Means Yes”, as well as a 2015 piece (which he characterised as satirical) in which he proposed that rape be legalised in non-public settings. His doctrine of “neomasculinity” holds that “a woman’s value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty”, while “a man’s value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character”. 

While Roosh had clearly begun to move pickup artistry into a more politicised dimension — probably because he sought common cause against his critics rather than any deeply held political principles — it was his successors who drove it into full embrace with the Online Right. Roosh, in fact, has had a fairly complicated relationship with the supposed “white nationalist” elements of what journalists were all rushing to lump together as the “alt-Right”, at times defending neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and at others characterising white nationalism as “a frustrated mob that wants to control the sexual choices of all men”. He also feuded with Right-wing activists, such as Lauren Southern, for adding little to the Right besides physical attractiveness. And this stance, combined with his own lack of charisma and decidedly non-“alpha” pedigree, has limited him to fringe status. In recent years, Roosh distanced himself from both the alt-Right and PUAs, removing many of his books from print, and banning PUA and casual-sex talk from his website’s forums in 2019 after converting to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

Mike Cernovich, by contrast, made a far smoother transition from being a PUA to a member of the Online Right, even as he also gradually drifted toward “trad” stances on various issues. His career began as a stock libertarian concerned with “false rape” accusations (he was on the receiving end of such an allegation, and advised secretly filming sexual encounters and building up a texting paper trail to ward them off). But from there, he progressed to investigations of “alpha male” masculinity — he once even praised former president Barack Obama’s “Alpha Male status” — via his Danger and Play advice blog. The site had a broad brief, ranging from nutritional supplements to male body image, but it also offered tips for becoming more dominant in the bedroom, including choking a woman during sex. Owing to a “seven-figure” divorce settlement from his first wife, Cernovich was able to devote considerable time to these online ventures. 

By this point, the worlds of PUAs and the Online Right had begun to blur; there was simply no way for self-proclaimed PUAs to find fair harbour on the Left or in non-aligned spaces. Cernovich, unlike Roosh, made a fairly rapid and shrewd transition from the alt-Right fringe to something of a “happy warrior” for the far-Right mainstream. Piggybacking on the success of his 2015 book Gorilla Mindset (“a book about embracing your gorilla nature to find dominance and power”), he rushed out MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again to capitalise on the 2016 primary success of Donald Trump. From there, he achieved great acclaim fanning the fires of various paedophilic conspiracies and other more conventional Right-wing issues, playing a key role in the early days of Pizzagate and generally using “trolling tactics to build my brand”, as he told The New Yorker.

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Given his openness about his role as a partisan troll, it comes as little surprise that he took greater umbrage at Joe Biden rubbing his daughter’s hair than he did with allegations that Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, a Republican, had sexually abused underage girls. In recent years, Cernovich has expressed uneasiness wheavy metal and hip-hop, believing them to “open demonic portals via a spirit of fear”, and has generally become much more “trad” than he was in his Danger and Play days. He almost certainly wouldn’t have described himself as a PUA, but back then he was undeniably PUA-adjacent. Even though Cernovich became much more culturally conservative, he remains the most successful parasocial political figure from the early days of this demimonde. 

And if the brand strategy exploited by Cernovich has a clear imitator, it must be Andrew Tate. Tate personifies the fusion between Online Right grift and PUA doctrine. He believes, for example, that women “are given to the man and belong to the man” and should be dated as young as possible to minimise “sperm wars” competition with other men, while also maximising fertility. And like pickup artistry itself, he has become aligned with increasingly extreme figures, with appearances on Alex Jones’ InfoWars and a collegial relationship with the aforementioned Cernovich. 

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He also seems to grasp the essence of being a PUA better than any of his predecessors: the point is not to actually sell skills that turn men into alphas who can go on dates with women; it is to use your own methods to pick up legions of hapless beta-male followers who will pay you in money or clout. Everything else is a means to an end; why else would Tate sell his own book while also condemning the men who waste time reading it? Even the alleged sex-trafficking Tate was arrested for in Romania is, in essence, an advanced PUA ruse: a so-called “loverboy” hustle in which women are lured by promises of romance and free housing, then put to work making low-budget pornographic content. If true, this is a long way from some circa-2005, zero-to-hero PUA operator trying to pop his cherry to feel like a real man. 

Was the transition of the PUA and the associated manosphere into its current state — something associated with the Right by opponents — truly inevitable? Counterfactual history is usually of low probative value since one can’t truly investigate events that didn’t occur, but here it seems impossible to even conjure alternatives. The evolving nature of social media communication forced all these discursive communities into mimetic conflicts as a critical part of the platform providers’ business plans, with controversy yielding clicks and cash. 

As this us-versus-them situation developed and deepened, the manosphere became increasingly about men selling tips on how to be men to other men, rather than anything to do with the actual improvement of all these wayward selves. The proof of a salesman’s coolness, his “alpha” credentials, came from the visible record of his likes, shares, retweets, and subscriptions. By choosing to follow some guru’s example rather than the dictates of one’s own conscience, a hapless young man becomes yet another PUA statistic. He is baited, hooked, and abandoned, with nothing to show for his love or loyalty besides a notch in the far greater man’s follower count. By that measure, the largest group of losers in the Tate contretemps consists not of the women he has already alienated or allegedly abused — but rather the sizeable contingent of lost men and boys who set store by his advice.

One man who has done this countless times, to countless women, without their consent, is one Mr Deepfakes. As the founder of the most prominent deepfake porn website in existence, he has chosen to remain anonymous. He built the burgeoning community “from scratch” as a side hustle, after deepfake porn was banned from Reddit in 2018. It is, he claims, a place where “users affected by the ban could go”, to ensure the technology wasn’t unfairly “squashed”. MDF, as he styles himself, cites a commitment to free speech, and a desire to advance machine learning, as his sole motivations.

But in Deepfake Porn: Could you be next? MDF comes across as a man struggling with “the more moral aspect” of his work. On the one hand, he ardently claims to respect women (“100%”!) and insists this principle is reconcilable with his passion project. On the other, he has no plans to tell his wife — who would “probably be against” deepfake porn, “to put it bluntly” — about his work. “I’m afraid of how it would affect her, knowing I work on something like this.” He admits that “the content is actually in a grey area, and I think we’re on a fine line”.

Despite this ethical “indecision”, MDF’s website is thriving. It has amassed more than 20,000 deepfake videos of women loosely defined as “celebrities”, who are divided into 23 categories that include “Cosplay”, “Threesome” and “Asian Celeb”. Each day, an average of 25 new videos are added by a team of deepfake porn producers. There are 13 million original visitors who view this content every month, 10,000 of whom are online at any given moment.

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In these videos, the facial expressions, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies of the deepfaked subject do not belong to the victim whose face we see. They are the creation of a male fantasy. It not only looks like the victim is performing porn, when they never have, but also that they are engaging in the producer’s favourite sexual acts. Their identity is hijacked. When a victim sees herself embodied in the form of a porn performer, she describes it to me as a feeling of extreme disassociation. That is her face, but that is not her body.

Mr Deepfakes rakes in a high four-figure profit per month, mostly from ad revenue. He’s probably earning upwards of $100,000 a year from the venture. This money goes mostly to “maintaining the servers”.

Most of his effort, meanwhile, goes to imposing strict ethics on his website. Or so he claims. MDF recites his boundaries to minimise harm like a script: no porn niches that are “defamatory”; only “celebrities” allowed; the age limit is absolute; and producers must “make sure people know that these are fake videos” by ensuring “every video is watermarked”. But ultimately, MDF’s defence always comes down to separating the videos’ potential consequences from their creators. “We’re not all bad people!”

MDF claims he is simply an advocate of technological progress. He is, he says, facilitating the improvement of AI, while “other communities like Reddit wouldn’t allow it”. It just so happens that the best way to do this is through the “porn niche”: a convenient assumption that MDF treats as an awkward but inevitable fact. The “community” forum, the section of the website where content creators discuss how to improve results, is therefore what he cares about most. It fails to generate any revenue, at least for now. But this is hardly a charitable venture. This “community” is working to develop a tool that’s being used as a weapon against women.

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And the ethical boundaries imposed by Mr Deepfakes fall apart on close inspection. There is no clear definition, for instance, of a “celebrity”. It includes women in the “mainstream media”, like those who appear in “Hollywood films”, but also “social media influencers”. And of course, “politicians are in the public domain”, so they can be targeted too. It is, in short, any woman with a public life. Many of these female “celebrities” already receive so much sexualised publicity in the media that MDF’s community think they are “fair game”. Or in the words of one user on the forum: “If you plaster your face everywhere and thirst trap me into seeking out your visage, then I’m just gonna deepfake you into porn.”

The majority of Mr Deepfakes community are “probably men”, he admits. Male users who are becoming radicalised by getting to “pick and choose aspects of different girls”, and digitally manipulate them into performing sexual acts.

Disturbingly, one regular poster on the site admits to deepfaking his co-workers. “Walking into work after having deepfaked these women, it did feel odd, but I just controlled my nerves. I can act like nothing is wrong, no one would suspect a thing.” The video is for his eyes only, he insists; it now exists on his hard drive, which he sees as merely an extension of his imagination. Asked if he would create a custom deepfake of an ordinary woman for someone else, he replied: “From a moral standpoint, yeah, I don’t think there’s anything that would stop me.” He went on to make a deepfake of someone after a Zoom call.

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The forums on MDF’s site seethe with misogyny, illustrating how utterly ineffective his ethical code is. “She didn’t let me smash her during highschool so cool. ima just deepfake u on porn and masturbate to it? CHECKMATE HOE,” one user writes. “It is never better when deepfake kicks in, and you get to make your dream celebrity be a mindless robot, and obey masters orders,” posted another.

Even those who have built a living on the porn industry are alarmed by the havoc deepfake technology could wreak on women’s lives. “The principal concern I have is how quickly the technology is evolving. It’s like a runaway freight train,” warns Viktor Zafirovski, a reviewer at the world’s largest porn directory website. Not only is it increasingly accessible, but they are getting easier to create.We will reach a point when “everyone will have to be paranoid about sharing their image,” says Viktor. And having made a small fortune developing this latest tool in the misogynist’s arsenal, even the man at the helm of the deepfake porn industry agrees. “It will be so convincing, that eventually you can’t identify what’s real and what’s fake,” MDF says. “You know, it’s scary to me as well.”

Underneath this cloak of concern for women, Mr Deepfakes must know that he empowers misogynists every day. “Porn runs the world right now. And it’s not something that I agree with with,” he says. Regardless, it’s something he leverages, even as he strives to distance himself from the culture he enables.

MDF doesn’t like to imagine how his wife would feel “if she found a video of herself on the internet — or maybe even a deepfake porn video of someone she knows”. But there are hundreds of women who, if they visited his site, might have the kind of horrifying realisation he wouldn’t want his loved ones to experience. The most frustrating thing is, he admits to feeling some discomfort. “I think I need to, you know, look deep down and see what I’m okay with,” he reflects. But his site remains live, and he keeps making money from it.

“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

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For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

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There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

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There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?

During this period, before feminism had had much of an influence, female police officers endured a barrage of sexist comments in the canteen, and out on patrol. Malton’s nickname among her male colleagues was “The Tart”. Nevertheless, she rose through the ranks to become a Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, becoming the inspiration behind Helen Mirren’s character, DCI Jane Tennison, in the hit Nineties crime series Prime Suspect. Now, Malton has written a book, The Real Prime Suspect, which tells the story of Britain’s police culture from 1970 to the current day.

There couldn’t be a better moment for its publication. Awareness of misogyny within the police service has never been higher, public confidence in police attitudes towards violence against women never lower. I found feminism in 1979, during one of the most shameful periods of police sexism, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, an investigation doomed from the start because police decided that many of the 13 women brutally murdered by the serial killer were asking for it. But in the era spanned by Malton’s career, things haven’t changed enough.

The abduction, rape and murder last spring of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens exposed the persistence of misogyny within the service. Indeed, the College of Policing was this month compelled to issue a statement reassuring the public that “officers who abuse their trust to groom vulnerable victims, or engage in sexual impropriety, including harassment, are more likely to be dismissed and barred from policing” (italics mine). The college admits that there are many officers still in post who have been found to have committed such offences.

The Real Prime Suspect documents recent events, and Malton acknowledges that all is not yet fair and equal when it comes to women in the police service. She certainly reveals the roots of the current toxic culture by telling her extraordinary story of success in the days when female police officers had barely any legal or employment rights, and were often seen by male colleagues as inferior irritants. But her book reads as though the bad old days are long gone.

It’s true that the police service Malton left in the late Nineties was a very different service to the one she’d joined. Women were by then serving in most areas of policing, and it was no longer deemed acceptable to openly refer to female officers as “bikes” or “dykes”. A lesbian, Malton chose not to be out at work in those early days — it was already hard enough being a woman in a testosterone-fuelled environment where resentment towards female officers was rife. But her colleagues soon suspected that Malton might not be interested in men, except as hard-drinking companions, and she would regularly be presented with vibrators, because, as she was often told, all women need is a good fuck.

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Despite her treatment, Malton persevered. She had always wanted to become a detective, and, following the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 — which led to a change in working conditions for women as well as equal opportunities with their male counterparts — her dream began to look like it might come true. “You’re the first split-arse DI we’ve had here,” she was told by her superior officer at her first Central London posting. By 1989, she had made Detective Chief Constable.

That same year, I met Malton at a conference. She was representing the Hammersmith and Fulham Domestic Violence Unit; I was campaigning against violence towards women. In a session on police responses to domestic abuse, a senior male officer claimed that things had changed significantly since the days when the crime was seen as a “private matter” between a married couple. Malton leapt to her feet and told her superior: “bullshit!” She then went on to outline every way in which the police were still letting down victims, winning applause from many of us in the room.

We didn’t know it then, but Malton’s life was about to change forever. In 1990 she had a meeting with a “striking, petite woman with a fabulous smile and a cascade of red curly hair”. Writer Lynda La Plante was developing a script for a TV series about a female DCI leading a murder enquiry. At the time, Malton was one of only three female DCIs in the Metropolitan Police. Soon, she began working as script consultant on what was to become the stratospherically successful Prime Suspect.

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Many of the best-known scenes in the show came directly from Malton. In the first episode, when Tennison is, against many of her colleagues’ better judgment, made head of a murder enquiry following the sudden death of her male counterpart, she is addressed by a young copper as “ma’am”. Mirren throws him a withering look and says: “Call me Boss or Guv, but don’t call me Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.” I remember posters in lesbian clubs with those words coming out of Mirren’s mouth in a speech bubble. Tennison quickly became a major feminist icon. But, though Malton was by that point “out” at work, she advised La Plante that the public was not ready to empathise with a lesbian protagonist. Tennison was developed as a heterosexual woman who fails at relationships because she puts the job first.

Another line that ended up in Prime Suspect came from a story Malton told La Plante about the sexist banter to which women subjected, day in, day out. The character of DS Bill Otley, a vulgar misogynist, was based on an officer Malton had worked with, who had once pointed at a female colleague and asked his mates: “Who would fancy that skinny dyke?” But there’s one anecdote that shocked even me, told to me by Malton a few years ago, when we were working together on a Radio 4 documentary about sexism within the police service, Malton told a hilarious but grotesque story about how male officers, after a few Friday night drinks in the police bar, would see how many 10p pieces they could get under their foreskin. “One officer managed £3.20,” she told me.

When Prime Suspect was on air, a number of serving and retired female officers contacted Malton to tell her they recognised the misogyny exposed by the storylines. Thanks largely to Malton, the dire situation for women in the police became common knowledge. But in some ways that makes it even more shocking that male officers are still getting away with it.

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A whopping 70% of civilian police employees working alongside police officers reported witnessing sexual harassment, according to research conducted in 2018 by the London School of Economics. Of the 311,776 Unison members polled (two-thirds of whom were women), more than three quarters reported sexist jokes; one third reported intrusive questions about their private life; and more than a fifth reported inappropriate leering or staring. There were also complaints about sexual gestures and hints that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment.

Meanwhile, as reported by the Centre for Women’s Justice, almost 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported during the three years leading to April 2018. This data covers three quarters of police forces. It shows that police employees accused of domestic abuse are a third less likely to be convicted than the general public. Fewer than a quarter of complaints of domestic abuse resulted in disciplinary action.

Horrifying case studies abound, and there are hundreds we never hear about. A recent Times expose showed that many disciplinaries of male police officers involving vulnerable females are held in private. It has recently been revealed, for instance, that a number of serving male officers shared deeply offensive WhatsApp messages — such as one who wrote that he “enjoyed the need”, while on duty, to physically restrain a very vulnerable and disturbed 15-year-old girl, because he got pleasure from a “struggle snuggle”.

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Still, the impression one could be left with, having read Malton’s book, is that the vast majority of male police officers are exemplary, brave public servants. I don’t accept this version of events. Malton’s story is inspiring, but even though it’s now 25 years since she left the Met, she remains in many ways fiercely loyal to her tribe. You know the saying: once a copper, always a copper.

So, despite the candid scrutiny of old-style sexism in the cop shop, The Real Prime Suspect is a bit of a puff piece when it comes to the police service today. What we need is a book by a retired female officer who is willing to do a warts-and-all expose. Because it is only when the public becomes aware of the extent of woman-hating in the service that root and branch reform will become unavoidable. Let us hope there is a brave whistleblower out there, who can show the nation how much worse our police force is than DCI Tennison’s.

Florence Read: Louise, you have made a case against the sexual revolution. What is it?

Louise Perry: My argument starts from the somewhat controversial recognition that there are some very important physical differences between men and women. Women are the ones who get pregnant; we’re much smaller than men; we’re much more vulnerable to violence in any kind of heterosexual encounter; we suffer all the negative consequences of hormonal birth control.

There are also psychological differences between the sexes, which very strong evidence suggests are at least partially innate. On average, men are much more interested in casual sex than women are, and they’re also more interested in things like watching porn, buying sex — doing all the things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. 

The argument that I make is that even though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, a culture of sexual hyper-liberalism suits men much more than it does women, in terms of their preferences. The sexual revolution encouraged women to imitate masculine sexuality. And that is not good for the well-being of women.

FR: Aella, you are a porn performer. Do you think that you are imitating male sexuality in your everyday work?

Aella: Yes. A lot of what you said I don’t disagree with. Porn is purchased mostly by men. Men are typically the primary consumers of the content that I create. Female purchasers of porn basically don’t exist. A good chunk of women do in fact watch porn, but don’t typically pay quite as much.

FR: What’s the problem with that? Louise, what is your issue with the male-dominated world of sexuality?

LP: One of the ways in which women are quite different from men is: we have a much lower sexual disgust threshold. It’s much easier for us to get “the ick” in a sexual encounter. Women tend to be much choosier about their sexual partners than men are. There’s a very obvious evolved reason for this: up until five minutes ago, we didn’t have access to reliable contraception, which meant that having any kind of sexual encounter could lead to pregnancy. So it makes sense that women have evolved to be choosy about who they potentially get pregnant from: is he going to hang around, is he going to be a good father?

And the problem with trying to override that choosiness — trying to have sex like a man and trying to regard sex as casual: just a leisure activity without any sort of innate meaning or specialness — is that it forces women to suppress that instinct. It often causes distress. There’s a whole genre of articles in women’s mags about how to stop yourself catching feelings — strategies that you can use during sex to dissociate almost, to not bond with your partner. It’s things like: don’t make eye contact, take certain drugs, get drunk. Just look at the orgasm gap: the fact that most women don’t orgasm in casual encounters; women are much more likely to orgasm with long-term committed partners. Often women talk about casual sex as if you have to run the gauntlet: this is a phase in your life that you have to go through, the hook up phase, on the route to a more committed relationship.

FR: Aella, you’ve described yourself as polyamorous. Do you feel that you are in distress?

A: No, not at all. Polyamory has been absolutely fantastic. But I feel like the crux of the issue is: what percentage of women are having a bad experience of casual sex? Is this thing inherently damaging? People are kind of unskilled at casual sex. I went through a couple of different phases of casual sex, and the first phase was pretty terrible, understandably. No orgasms. But if you are told often that casual sex is bad for you, you’re going to re-parse casual sex as having been bad for you.

I lived in a house full of cam girls for a year. We were very close: we worked together, we talked about our deepest hopes and dreams. And we didn’t hide anything; we bitched about it quite a lot. Fast forward almost 10 years. One of the girls happened to date a bunch of men who really don’t like sex work. And she, in my opinion, revamped her past in order to be like, “Ah, that experience was damaging for me”. And I was like: “Bitch, I was there. I heard you talking about it at the time. There was no hint that any of this was bad for you.” When you enter a culture that’s feeding you this idea that you should feel bad about what you went through, you’re going to reverse develop this narrative.

To be fair, this can happen both ways. A lot of people will try to tell women that casual sex was definitely good for them, and they should feel good about it. Any narrativising, trying to tell women what they should feel, is, in my opinion, bad.

My ideal would be to ask women: do you actually like what’s going on or do you actually not? To what degree are you just trying to conform to other people? I think that’s a message that would result in a lot of people realising that they don’t want to have casual sex. And maybe a lot of people realising that, in fact, they do.

LP: I do agree with you that the power of narrative is amazing, and we restructure our memories according to narrative. There is a phenomenon, though — I don’t know if this necessarily applies to camming — but, a lot of women who’ve done in-person prostitution (particularly the worst end: street-based, brothel-based prostitution) say that, when you’re in it, believing a narrative that it’s okay is the way you survive. It’s the way you get through what is a fairly terrible experience.

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FR: There are many jobs that people do that are unpleasant, and they have to do for money. What makes sex work any different, Louise?

LP: The idea that sex is like any other kind of social interaction — comparable to working in a factory, to shaking hands, to making coffee, going surfing — I call that, in the book, sexual disenchantment. It’s this idea that comes out of the sexual revolution, that all of the religious, bourgeois, traditional norms of the past had to be done away with. The idea of sex having any kind of special status, let alone sacred status, had to be done away with in order for people to shake off the oppressive shackles of the past. And I think the problem with that idea is twofold.

One, I don’t think people believe it in the vast majority of cases. They overwhelmingly don’t behave as if sex is like anything else. There are people who do polyamory well and enjoy it. There are also, on any given platform devoted to discussion of polyamory, people really struggling with jealousy — finding it really, really difficult to suppress that instinct to view sex as being unique compared with other kinds of relationships.

And the problem with trying to pretend that sex is just like anything else: if you can’t have a special status for sex, you also can’t have a special status for rape, which we do in law. We recognise that rape is worse than theft — instinctively, and also in our legal codes. We recognise that sexual harassment has a uniquely harmful effect on its victims.

FR: Aella, do you think that sex is sacred?

A: I agree that for some sections of the population, sex is treated very seriously, and in others, it’s not. My guess is that people are much more flexible along the spectrum than you might think.

I worked at a factory — terrible hours — and then I escaped into sex work, and eventually into prostitution. After I did this, I was shocked that people had placed so much meaning on sex, in a way that prevented me from escaping terrible jobs to begin with. Because I didn’t go straight into sex work because of that meaning that people placed on it. And then when I did, I was like: “Fuck that, that meaning that people loaded up on to sex, prevented me from living basically my best life.” And I know a lot of other sex workers who feel the same way. And I’m not saying that everybody should. I also know some sex workers who tried sex work, and they were like: “Shit, I can’t not have the meaning here”. 

My overall issue here is: people are pointing a laser eye at the non-standard, non-normal, deviant types of sexual approaches than they are at the conservative, socially-accepted ones. You’re correct that a lot of polyamory discussions are talking about jealousy issues, but monogamy also has dead bedroom problems. Both are relationship structures that require some sort of negotiation of your desires, and what you can achieve in your life. And both of them have pretty severe downsides. And as a sex worker, I see a huge amount of the downsides in monogamy, from men who come see me because of failures in their monogamous relationships.

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FR: If you were not there to service their needs, do you think they would turn back to their partners and have a frank conversation about their sex life? Or do you think that you are offering them a way out?

A: I would ask the guys that I saw: “Are you married?” And if they said, yes, then I’d ask: “So why are you seeing me?” The general sense that I got was that most of them had wives that weren’t interested in them anymore. Basically wives that had a bunch of kids, or had health issues, and their sex drive was zero. And sometimes I would ask: “Well, have you considered bringing it up with her? Have you talked with her about it?” And the majority of their responses — I’d say 60 to 70% — were horror. They were like: “I don’t want to destroy my entire life.” It was common for guys to be like, “If I bring it up with her, I think she would leave me.”

A lot of the men had been sexless for ten years before finally trying to find a sex worker. Most men don’t feel great about making their wife unhappy, potentially, to do this. A lot of them are risking damage to their life. Most guys I talked to, I got the impression that they had made at least some effort. Some of them, no — some guys were like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit. Our relationship is totally separate from this, and I’m just going to fuck other people, because that’s what I want” — but it was not the majority. In fact, I got the impression that seeing these men actually probably helped save them from divorce, because their other option was leaving their wife because they couldn’t talk. So it was this safe, tiny outlet that allowed them to maintain longer, more dedicated relationships.

LP: Presumably, their wives would have left them if they’d known though. So these were secret encounters. Monogamy clearly has its downsides too, but everything in the whole entire world has trade-offs. I completely take your point that there are some people for whom polyamory is great, there are some people for whom sex work is great, there are some people who are just temperamentally much more suited to non-conventional sexual lives. But I think the other thing that I’m interested in, and which is much more difficult to talk about within a liberal framework, is how this scales.

So one of the things that I write about in the last chapter of my book is the fact that there are all sorts of ways in which societies that have a monogamous marriage system do better than societies that don’t, even though only about 20% of societies on the anthropological record have been monogamous. They tend to be more affluent, they tend to have lower rates of crime, they tend to have lower rates of spousal abuse, child abuse, compared to polygamous cultures.

A: I’m not surprised that this is the case. I would guess that if you compared polygamous cultures to monogamous cultures, monogamous cultures would probably do better.

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FR: Is there an ideal when it comes to how we build our relationships? Louise, do you for example disapprove of Aella’s work as a sex worker? In your ideal society, would OnlyFans not exist?

LP: “Disapprove” is not a word I would use. I think that it is clearly the case that some individuals do well on OnlyFans. Most don’t. I think we agree on the fact that OnlyFans is insanely unequal. The vast majority of women who become content creators are not going to make any real money, and are likely to suffer negative consequences down the track. I think it would be better if OnlyFans didn’t exist. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think it should be banned, because there are obviously all sorts of downstream consequences of that kind of legislation, which might do more harm than good. I think it’d be very, very difficult to ban OnlyFans or similar sites. But I think, on balance, they have a net negative impact on society.

A: Would you agree with OnlyFans if, say, before signing up, a girl got like statistics on how likely it was for her to make various amounts of money? Like, “90% of creators make under $1,000 a month,” or something like this?

LP: I think that would be good. I imagine the platforms would not want to do that, because it’s obviously going to limit their profit-making.

The other thing that I would want a lot of naive young women to be aware of is the fact that even though men are less likely to admit to the fact that they still ascribe to the sexual double standard, they do. And I think that one of the worst consequences of OnlyFans for very many women, which isn’t talked about nearly enough, is the fact that it becomes that much harder afterwards to find a committed relationship, which actually most women say is what they want long term, because men are judgmental about it.

A: My guess is that this is very well-known in women cultures. I’ve joined so many discussion groups where girls are thinking about getting into OnlyFans, or already doing OnlyFans, and a huge amount of that discussion is centred around, “How much is this going to damage my mate prospects? How much should I hide it from my potential mates? How can I do OnlyFans in a way where it’s not going to leak to potential mates?” This, to me, is one of the top things, at least in practice that I have seen women consider. To me it doesn’t feel like an overlooked aspect at all. 

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FR: Doesn’t that suggest we should be driving towards a more sexually open society? Because I suppose if we got into a place where nobody had any taboos around sex work, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that problem.

LP: I think that the nature of human beings is such that we seem to have a very strong instinct towards regarding sex as being special. Men seem to have a very strong instinct towards mate guarding. Trying to dissuade people from feeling this way is a serious uphill struggle. Any kind of political project based on the idea that we can undo human nature is one that’s doomed to failure. I think that we do still basically have minds evolved for a hunter-gatherer life, because that’s 90% of our species’ history.

A: I think that this is probably why women are very into BDSM — because evolutionarily, and historically, you had to be aroused by powerful men in order to survive. But also, to some degree, a lot of it is quite cultural, too. We’ve seen a lot of different sexual structures throughout history. I do think that we have a little bit more flexibility.

FR: Both of you seem to be arguing there that there’s a certain amount of nature involved here and we’re trying to push against nature, and to impose social norms upon it. Is there an argument for letting nature run riot and just allowing people to tap into their most primal selves?

LP: I think the problem with absolute liberation — just allowing people to do whatever feels right to them — is the fact that some people have dark, destructive, horrible desires. Actually, probably a lot of people do. Human sexuality is not necessarily nice and pro-social at all. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage the desires of people when that desire is destructive to others.

The other problem is: one sex is much more vulnerable inherently than the other sex. How you manage that asymmetry is, I think, a question that all civilisations have grappled with. And no one has ever come up with a free-for-all as the best solution, because clearly it wouldn’t actually work.

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FR: Digital sex work might be an answer there, though. Aella is behind a screen: she is, in many ways, invulnerable to male violence, and she is being paid for sexual acts, which she finds pleasurable, I assume. And so, isn’t that a win-win?

LP: Or, a step further, sex robots. Then there would be no ethical issues in terms of consent. It would bypass all of the feminist arguments over sex work that’ve been going on for so long. The focus is normally on the effects on women, though. And I actually think that having a class of men who basically just spend all day indoors, playing video games, and having sex with their sex robots seems like a fairly bleak future for that portion of mankind.

A: It seems nicer if they can have access to real women. I would be sad. I used to do OnlyFans, but to be clear, I’ve also been an IRL prostitute, and have been subject to male violence. But out of all the sex-work forms that I have done, the in-person feels the healthiest to me, for both me and the men. The others feel like some sort of weird, warped version of human interaction that objectifies us both more. And sure, it’s safer to some degree, but you can take steps to be safe in-person. In my opinion, in the healthiest future society, the dominant form of sex work would be human to human, eye contact, skin contact, just like God intended.

FR: What about these sex robots? That’s certainly not what God intended, but it’s a lot safer for everyone involved, isn’t it?

 A: I like the idea of sex robots existing. I think if men can have an outlet that they need that is affordable and accessible to them, this seems good. I’m generally pro people independently pursuing what they want. And if that’s sex robots, then go for it.

FR: But do you think that the skin to skin contact, as you said there, is superior to this kind of digital sex work that we’re talking about?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Because it feels really dehumanising, like I said, for both parties. With OnlyFans, I’m not dealing with a man, I’m dealing with the collection of men. I’m dealing with the statistical likelihood of a man clicking on this thing. It’s very robotic. And similarly, this is encouraging men to treat women the same way. You have like a billion women, and it’s just like cycling through them. You’re not really developing a relationship with any of them.

And again, I am pro people pursuing what they want, in their own time. I’m happy OnlyFans exists. But I noticed it was much better for my mental health to do it in person. It just felt so much better and more fulfilling to be able to touch an individual person.

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FR: There used to be quite high barrier to entry for sex work, if you’re talking about street prostitution. Whereas now, with things like OnlyFans, the barrier has been lowered massively. Is it a good thing that more and more people have access to a sex-work career?

A: Yeah. I know a bunch of single moms or women with health issues — women who are struggling to feed their kids on their own — who said, “Oh, I tried OnlyFans, and it gave me, not even that much money, an extra $300 a month, but now I can pay my rent.” There’s a whole bunch of people for whom their lives are really drastically improved by that amount of money. Typically people who are really disadvantaged in some way. It disproportionately assists the poor, or people I would consider to be lower-class — people who were culturally priced-out of the better paying jobs — which is why I think this worked for me so well. I grew up very, very conservative, no access to education, and so a lot of people are like, “Oh, well you should just go to college and get an education, and then get a job.” For some people, their lives just don’t work like that. And for some people being able to have easily-accessible side income that you don’t need training for, or elite approval or credentials, is incredibly beneficial and life changing. And I’ve known so many women for whom this is the case.

LP: I take that point, although I do think it’s worth emphasising the fact that drug and alcohol addiction is extraordinarily common among sex workers. The OnlyFans end of the spectrum is clearly the much less dangerous, traumatic end of it. But it’s also not representative of the whole spectrum of sex work, some of which is dire. And it’s very, very common for women to end up taking drugs and using alcohol as a way of dealing with the emotional fallout of prostitution. And that means that you’re not actually ending up in a better situation at all: you end up potentially spiralling downwards and getting stuck.

I’m not really a radical feminist at all – I think I can comfortably speak for radical feminists, though, in that they tend to think no woman should be in a situation where she can’t feed her children unless she’s doing sex work. I do recognise that we live in the real world and there are situations where that might seem like the best option. The other problem is that because lay people’s understanding of the sex industry tends to be very poor, it can be very difficult to know how you will find prostitution until you’ve actually done it. So saying at the outset, “I think I’m well suited to this, I think it will be fine. I’ve read through my checklist of warnings, and I think it’s fine,” isn’t actually quite the same as actually doing it.

When you make a move towards normalisation, de-stigmatisation, and presenting this as a perfectly valid career route, you are going to end up with people going down that career route for whom it is an absolute disaster and it ruins their lives.

A: There’s a lot of talk about alcohol and drug stuff with sex workers – which I agree is true, they have much higher rates of drug use. But if, say, we have a world where we dramatically criminalise something like plumbing — like, plumbers are really stigmatised and if you plumb then people are like, “I’m not sure I want to date you”, and if you get assaulted as a plumber, you can’t go to the police otherwise they’ll put you in jail — I would expect the kind of people who would gravitate towards plumbing are people who are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life, and probably have problems with drug and alcohol use. My guess is correlation, not necessarily causation.

LP: I agree with you that clearly the stigma makes all sorts of things worse in all sorts of ways. But also, I’m not convinced that the stigma is an after effect of the law. I think that actually the stigma seems to stick to the sex industry, across time and place. And I think it comes back to this problem of the socio-sexuality gap requiring a prostituted class of women. Most women don’t want to be in that class. It’s very hard to persuade anyone to think that that isn’t a bad outcome for those women and the stigma flows from that.

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A: It feels like you’re implicitly telling women that they should feel bad for these things. I wish I could hear more, “Yeah, some woman are like that and if you’re not, it’s chill.” When you were talking about prostitution I was like, “Well, you should just try it once or twice and see how it works for you, and if you don’t like it, then stop.” If you have a bad experience, it doesn’t seem to me like it needs to be traumatising. But if we treat it with this level of like gravitas, then it’s going to create that trauma in people. And I wish that when I was in a really sex-negative culture, I could have heard more messaging about how it’s okay to be sexually promiscuous if you want to. If I had been surrounded by people giving me the kind of message that you’re giving me, I think I would have ended up with a lot more shame and guilt overall.

LP: I acknowledge that it can seem condescending and judgmental — the anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminism — but we all know that the really brutal attitudes towards sex workers come overwhelmingly from sex buyers. I’m sure there are exceptions, but we know that men who buy sex are more likely to be sexually aggressive, more likely to admit to rape outside of the sex industry. I think the problem with the effort to de-stigmatise, in the hope that we will somehow arrive at a sex industry that really is just like any other industry, is: it is basically based on theory. It’s based on the faith that all of the stigma is causing the problem, not that stigma is attached to the innate problem, which actually has much more to do with the fact that most women find prostitution very distressing and most sex buyers don’t treat the women they buy sex from with proper respect. 

FR: Louise, do you think that you are part of a new movement? Is there a sex-negative movement? You said earlier that you’re not a radical feminist — so what would you call yourself? Are you a conservative?

LP: The key way I guess in which I diverge from radical feminism is I don’t believe in the blank slate. I don’t think that the differences between men and women are a consequence of socialisation. I don’t think that they can be just dissolved away. I think that we have to deal with the existence of these differences on a psychological level as well as a physical level, and kind of progress from there. I’ve arrived at some conclusions which some traditionalists agree with me on — not all of them by any means. I guess maybe this is a materialist form of feminism, in the sense that it’s coming out of the recognition that these material differences exist and we have to make our peace with them.

We are reckoning with these vast material changes. The one that I’m primarily interested in, in my book, is the pill. I don’t accept this idea of the great woman theory of feminist history, where the thing that drives feminist change is particularly charismatic women. There clearly have been charismatic women, but I think the thing that’s driven change for women has primarily been technological — the washing machine, the tampon, whatever you want to name.

And the points, if you look at the history, when you see feminist thinking flaring up, tend to be at the points where you have some important material flux. So you have the internal combustion engine and you have suffrage, and you have the Second World War and the move away from industrial economy and then you have the second [feminist] wave. And I think now, possibly, there is another flare up, and there’s another reckoning with feminist ideas, because we’re seeing the next revolution, which is the online revolution. And it’s really important to be thinking about sexual difference in that space, because it may appear as if we are just these genderless economic units who can all participate in the knowledge economy on a completely even footing and stuff, but actually sexual difference exists. And it will persist until I guess the transhumanists finally have their way.

FR: And Aella, do you feel that you’re an agent of change in this revolution that Louise is talking about?

A: An agent of change? I feel like I just want to defend people like me. It feels, especially in recent years, like I’m fighting against this push of people disrespecting me solely because of my sexual promiscuity and the way that I like to approach sex. And it feels like there’s more shame and judgement about it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m exposed to different places of the internet or if this is actually a movement, but I feel really protective of it. I’m like, “No, I am okay the way that I am.” And I really want to give that message to anybody who’s like me. Living like me can be a wonderful, healthy and fulfilling and you don’t have to feel shame, or like you need to hide. And so if there’s people like me out there, I really want to take a stand and have a bold, unapologetic ownership of that. And that feels like the thing that I’m fighting for.

It is curious, then, to hear that ITV is planning a spin-off of Love Island for the middle-aged. Contestants in the provisionally titled Your Mum, My Dad will be between the ages of 40 and 60, and will, says one insider, “know their minds” and “be capable of intelligent conversation” — these being “ingredients regular Love Island sometimes lacks”. At first glance, this sounds like the path to a more edifying show about courtship, given the emotional advantages conferred by age and wisdom. The average age of a contestant on this season is just under 24, and most of them have been criticised for being either shallow or boring. Presumably middle-aged contestants will be not only more interesting but less nasty to each other — they’ve gone through enough in life not to lose it if a person they’ve been coupled up with for a day chooses not to “pull” them for a chat.

The Sun has also reported (under the headline “RUMPY PLUMPY”) that the contestants of the middle-aged version of Love Island will have “normal bodies”. In some ways, this makes sense: many have voiced the opinion of 2021 contestant Sharon Gaffka, who recently criticised the show for overlooking “midsize and plus size people”. Many brands have cashed in on the push to diversify in recent years. And yet this season the bodies are tauter and slimmer than in the last few.

That same insider also told The Sun: “Times change and the current generation in their forties and fifties still care about how they look, are fit and healthy, into fashion and are ready to let their hair down.” This offers a telling insight into the logic behind the new show. Just as ITV has no interest in filming emotionally mature young people, it has no interest in filming unattractive middle-aged people. If they do, those people will likely, and bleakly, become laughing stocks. From the vantage of youth, 55-year-olds fumbling in a hot tub, however sweetly, are likely to be merely mocked. Twitter will be flooded with a new wave of memes, only these will focus on being ancient and desperate. Becoming regulars on the MailOnline showbiz sidebar is inevitable — and may be worthwhile for those contestants lucky enough to be labelled Milfs and Dilfs.

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Rather than older people being put on the show to introduce a new and more salutary spectacle of what finding love might look like, it is far more likely that, forced into the framework of 20-somethings, they’ll be baited to behave just as badly. After all, the principal audience of dating shows are the young, and they want to be able to relate — not learn how to do better. In fact, the show will still rest on young people’s ideas of coupledom: in a bizarre twist, the contestants’ children will work behind the scenes to get their parents matched up — in what will no doubt become a proxy game for their own youthful dramas.

The application of the Love Island format to older people smacks of a broader trend of infantilising adult sexuality. Emma Thompson’s most recent film, in which she plays a profoundly sexually anxious 55-something, who decides to hire a young rent boy to teach her the ways of the world, is a classic example. As reality TV, surgically-enhanced bodies and vast wealth become ever-more powerfully interconnected with the world of social media, concepts of beauty, attraction and love have been violently skewed towards a young audience, and public portrayals of the intimate lives of older people are being squeezed down to fit. No one wants to think about mums who fuck; they’re only interested in mums they’d like to fuck.

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This is a shame, especially for women. Not only are many women in their forties at their sexual peak, the hard-won accrual of comfortable self-knowledge and the ability to ask for what they want, amassed over decades, puts them in pole position for satisfying eros. Older men, whose sexual prowess will in most cases be in inverse proportion to their libidos, are also capable of more empathetic behaviour. Even dating apps — whose dynamics tend to begin from an infantile or at any rate perfunctory baseline (“looking for fun tonight: whose game?”; “No drama”) — have begun to capitalise on the baroque complexities of contemporary adult sexuality: “grown-up app” Feeld, on which 35% of users are part of a couple, is the industry leader for 30-somethings and older capable of articulating a highly specific cache of desires without repelling the target audience.

But Feeld, too, begins from the simple binary of a left or right swipe, entrenching the sense that a person is indeed the sum of their kinky parts, and that, if you just list the right things, you’ll get what you want. After years of digital mediation, sexuality and its subtleties have been overpowered, made to fit the screen. And the consequences of this aren’t just affecting young people anymore: they’re creeping beyond the generations that grew up on the internet. Sticking older people in the Love Island arena is no victory for them, or for love — it’s the opposite.

She describes a dream of growing old disgracefully, as a reward for being well-behaved. For now, we must “pay our rent and not swear in the street / And set a good example for the children”. When the proper age for being respectable is over, though, the poet vows to “go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick flowers in other people’s gardens”.

Though “Warning”, written in 1961, was voted Britain’s most popular postwar poem in one poll, it didn’t drive a surge in merrily misbehaving old matrons — at least not in the style she envisaged. Instead, at least judging by the press, older women get more invisible by the day. The lack of substantial acting roles for older women is so marked that a campaign to change it received Equity backing last year. And many women over 50 complain about feeling pushed aside and pushed out of the workplace.

A widely-trailed movie, out this week, seeks to challenge this narrative. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a two-hander in which Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed schoolteacher in her early sixties, who hires handsome young rentboy Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). The film documents their interactions over a number of meetings, as Nancy sets out to tick off a list of sexual experiences she never enjoyed with her late husband.

In this, it takes aim at a common experience described by older women: that as far as wider social perception is concerned, as women age we’re no longer seen as valuable. There’s some truth in this, at least at the superficial level of who gets ogled on the beach. According to the founder of dating website OKCupid, while women’s view of what’s attractive changes as we age, men of every age tend to rate women in their early twenties as looking the best.

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Exceptionally beautiful women must feel this keenly. Paulina Porizkova, once the world’s most highly-paid model, clearly does: she told The Times earlier this year how she just doesn’t seem able to pull any more. “I am now completely invisible,” she says. “I walk into a party, I try to flirt with guys and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger. I’m very single, I’m dressed up, I’ve made an effort — nothing.”

There is, in other words, something robustly consistent about what induces men to stop what they’re doing and stare at a woman. The fact that the age of maximum perceived female hotness coincides with the age of peak fertility strongly implies that it has a material basis, something recognised by writer Ayelet Waldman: “I remember reading some study that men can sense a woman who’s fertile, and they focus their laser beam eyes on a fertile woman,” she said. “Well, as soon as you’re not fertile anymore, it’s like they just skip over you.”

Surely this should be so obvious as not to need spelling out. The fact that it isn’t tells us something about how uncomfortable we’ve become at the idea that our bodies impose any constraints at all. And it’s often self-styled feminist women who push hardest against the constraints of sex, challenging the idea that women should be seen as fertile first and people second. Meanwhile, academics and activists alike call for us to envision brave new worlds of sex wholly disconnected from reproduction.

In this context, Leo Grande has been widely celebrated as empowering. Stuff the idea that our bodies constrain us, and that we stop being sexual later in life, it declares — we’ve moved past imagining that sex and fertility are connected at all. Older women can also want, need and enjoy pleasure!

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But in reality, older women are, in this sense, far from invisible. A recent poll announced that the age at which women feel hottest is in fact 53; campaigns such as Rock My Menopause and GenM encourage positive representation of menopausal women, and articles celebrate the joys of dating older women.

The same desire to resist the constraints of biology lurks behind another common theme: the celebration of older people engaging in activities stereotypically associated with youth — especially the “sexy” ones. Last week, for example, the Guardian published an enthusiastic profile of the Sun City Poms, a troop of retiree cheerleaders in Arizona. Last year, a retirement-home pole-dancing class made the news.

Desire, we gather, doesn’t have a sell-by date, and older people still get horny; the French are here as ever, with advice on shagging, the NYT is here as ever to take photos of you doing it. And if you end up catching an STI in the process, there are papers on the need to “educate” healthcare professionals to stop assuming sexual health for retirees is just about Viagra.

But while it’s of course true that older people get horny, in truth the premise of Leo Grande doesn’t challenge what’s behind female invisibility at all. Rather, it entrenches it. For it has very little to offer all those women for whom not having to be sexy any more is not a bug, but a feature. If, unlike the Paulina Porizkovas of this world, you’re among the far larger body of women who’ve made something other than looks the focus of your life, you may well find it a blessed relief when the gaze of male strangers begins to skip you in favour of younger, perkier women. In that context there are many upsides to ageing, including dressing for comfort, men talking to your face rather than your boobs, and (joy!) having lunch solo without being buttonholed by horny weirdos.

In her 1992 feminist classic, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés argued that moving on from youthful hotness is part of a specifically female life path. For those women who have kids (as some 82% do in the UK), she suggests, life is archetypally divided into three stages: maiden, mother and crone. The “maiden” child-free stage coincides, roughly, with the moment of peak fertility that the data shows is so captivating to men. In time, though, that ordinarily gives way to motherhood, a different life-stage with its own role-models and obligations: constricting in some ways but opening doors to new experiences and wisdom. And once the kids are grown up, so begins a new phase of life: the crone.

This figure, well-represented in ancient mythology, is the role Jenny Joseph looks gleefully forward to: wise and mischievous, trailing her walking stick along the railings, and kicking over all those little ways she worked dutifully before to uphold moral norms. Why shouldn’t she eat three pounds of sausages in one go? The crone can do as she pleases, for she’s done her time setting a good example and has the wisdom to show for it. So now she can pick flowers from other people’s gardens and tell children off for misbehaving.

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Leo Grande’s Nancy is a mother on the threshold of cronehood. But instead of donning purple and stepping across to a new stage of life, she longs for something that is, in truth, irreversibly lost: a return to hotness and freshness. Maidenhood. “I’ve never had an orgasm,” she sighs. “There are nuns out there with more sexual experience than me, it’s embarrassing.”

So she buys the illusion of that return from a prostitute. This is, we’re told, a sweet, healing, “sex-positive romance”: “empowerment” as pure transaction, that somehow turns out to be emotionally fulfilling, and not at all exploitative or squalid. The “liberating” message it offers is that even frumpy, wrinkly, saggy middle-aged women who have devoted their lives to public service and their loved ones are not wholly beyond redemption. They, too, can access hedonistic, self-centred gratification, thanks to the sex industry.

Er, thanks.

In the real world, someone like Nancy would be very unlikely to do something as cold, transactional and empty as buying the sexual services of a man young enough to be her son. A retired teacher in her sixties, husband deceased and children grown up, would far more plausibly lean into a busy cronehood doing what many perimenopausal women do: beginning a new career.

I’ve known women in late middle age retrain as therapists, run voluntary groups, read with kids in schools, become priests. The possibilities are infinite. These are the women whose quiet dedication keeps communities turning. For countless individuals, the everyday, humdrum life from which Nancy is shown liberating herself is rich with joy on its own terms.

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But far from celebrating older women, Leo Grande dismisses the vast bulk of everyday female experience as meaningless, miserable drudgery. “I’ve never done anything interesting in my life,” Nancy laments in the film. “You’re the only adventure I’ve ever had.”

It would have been nice, just once, to see a movie depict a female hero’s journey on its own terms. But from the perspective of movie-land, such things are profoundly unsexy. If you made a film that accurately depicted a thoughtful, conventional bourgeois woman like Nancy, taking stock of her life in middle age after decades of giving herself as a wife and mother, it would be “art-house” at best.

So the central message of Leo Grande is that it’s all downhill from maidenhood — but despite this miserable prospect, even frumpy women on the cusp of cronehood can avail ourselves of the “sexual marketplace” to return, however briefly, to the far more desirable state of maidenhood.

But this is a lie, as even Porizkova, once the world’s highest-paid model, can attest. And framing this lie as a positive story means dismissing everything that’s rewarding about any average woman’s life, except the stage where she was young and hot. In other words: setting middle-aged women up to fail, by making everything about us invisible except the sexiness we no longer have. I can’t think of a more insidious, and contemptuous, way of making us disappear.

The young women of today have other expectations, apparently. In her new book Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, Sophia Smith Galer scolds that sexual health service budgets have been cut by 25% since 2014, around the time she left school. She believes this has profoundly affected her life. “The sex myths that I unknowingly subscribed to went on to destroy my first sexual experiences,” she writes. “I spent my eighteenth year viewing my body as a failure… Nearly a decade later, I think quite differently. I see someone who was failed.”

But doesn’t everyone today feel failed in some way? There’s a “there-there” tone to Smith Galer’s writing which seems somehow incompatible with the swashbuckling nature of sex. Indeed, sometimes this book seems less about sex as the slappers of my generation understood it — something which would at least be fun and at best bring love — and more about feelings (preferably hurt ones) and “validation”. Still, despite my initial fears of Wokedom (“We need to be intersectional when we probe our sex lives”), Galer is not afraid to criticise other cultures. It is a relief from the relentless message from certain fauxminists that the white Western world is a hellhole unlike any other for women.

The ludicrous and often lethal value placed upon virginity in parts of Africa and much of the Middle East is examined in grim detail; I’ve never come across anyone who mentioned the lives of women in the West Bank without dragging in wicked Israel, but here we read of “Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank who died of multiple injuries in 2019. Thousands at the time expressed concern that she might have been killed by her own family members on the basis of photos that she had posted with her fiancé.”

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Which is not to say that sex is a day at the nudist beach for Western women either. The author has come up against some grim stuff in her life; though much younger than me, she experienced a sex educator who told her: “Every time you have sex, you will lose your special glue. And when you have lost all of your special glue, no husband will love you.”

But many of the ignorant idiots involved aren’t worth railing at: “Countless interviewees have told me how this (idea of virginity) has affected their actual sex lives, including one woman whose partner told her ‘You can’t get into heaven now’ when they had sex for the first time.” Breast-beating and soul-searching aren’t the correct responses to this sort of thing; a quick knee in the groin and a cry of “Neither can you, Numb-Nuts!” might be a better reaction.

Thankfully there’s a chapter on asexuality because by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be in the mood not to be In The Mood. This is something Sophia seems to understand — “sexlessness… exists perhaps not in spite of sexual liberation, but because of it” — while not grasping that books like these, presenting sex as a vale of tears, might well be part of the problem. It’s only slightly less off-putting than Laurie Penny’s ridiculous new book, Sexual Revolution, which really appears to believe that having queer sex (aka having regular sex but with blue hair) can bring down fascism.

Sex, as a problematic issue for women, was meant to have been “solved” by now. The Pill and divorce lessened the vulnerability which forced us into sexual servitude. The idea of “Free Love” also promoted in the Sixties promised that men and women could come together as free agents, motivated by nothing but pure pleasure — and nobody would get hurt.

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But somewhere between burning bras and online pornography something went awry, and now young women may well find themselves called upon to enjoy being slapped and choked as part of a “fulfilling” sex life. Now, it seems, getting hurt is part and parcel of having sex; as Rousseau might have said “Woman was born free, and she is everywhere in chains.”

And now, the state is increasingly giving hormones and amputations to young people with body dysmorphia. That is a true example of women being “failed” in sexual matters. But the young Smith Galer isn’t interested in inquiring why girls are submitting in droves to having sex organs hacked out of their unformed bodies — so great is their fear of growing up to be the mere Whack-A-Mole of orifices which they see in online pornography from childhood. Consider the admission of teen idol Billie Eilish: “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much”, adding that it made her feel “cool” and “one of the guys”.

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In the face of this, we have Galer’s at times an unintentionally comical blend of sleeves-rolled-up can-do gumption and existential sorrow: “If I do my job right, you will finish reading this book armed with knowledge around sex, relationships and society that you have been both actively and passively denied. I am not a doctor or sex expert — just a journalist who is used to reporting on the fault lines between the spiritual and the corporeal.”

Much as I love my trade, I wouldn’t trust a journalist to give me advice about sex, as I’d presume they’d want to take surreptitious snaps of my subsequent folly and sell it to the papers.  Somehow a profession which invented Love Rats, Threesome Romps and Hot Tub Frolics isn’t quite the one I’d recommend to instruct the nation’s youth in the way of sexual wholesomeness.

I realise that as a louche sexagenarian who, in the words of the old pop song has “seen some things a woman ain’t s’posed to see”, I’m not the demographic this book is aimed at. Of course, all education is a good thing and only a cretin or an exploiter would say that ignorance is bliss. But education doesn’t seem to improve sex either; you can recite all the terms and technicalities and still never understand why X made you want to do Y. You still can’t understand why people risk their marriages, lives, and empires for what is on paper a simple physical function.

That’s why it’s not like just having a cup of coffee, as the swingers liked to say. We know 69 ways to have sex but not the first thing about sexual love — what it is and why it leaves, why it can make us so happy and so sad. At the risk of sounding like an old romantic, getting to grips with the ins and outs of sex is probably the least interesting thing about it.

It was late August 2019 when a message popped up in my Twitter inbox from J.K. Rowling. I had noticed that she had begun to follow me on Twitter a few months earlier, along with a number of feminists, and I was delighted to hear from her.

“I’ve just seen that you’re in contact with Magdelen Berns,” she wrote. Berns was a young lesbian who, after being silenced at her university, made YouTube videos tackling the absurdity of transgender ideology. She was popular, hilarious and informative. I say was; Berns, in her 30s, was dying of a brain tumour. I planned to visit her at a hospice in Edinburgh and had put a call out on Twitter to any women who wished to send her a message.

I knew that she would be delighted to hear from Rowling. A few weeks beforehand, during an excitable telephone conversation, she had already told me that “JK is following me!” Berns was thrilled to have her work recognised by one of the most famous and successful women on the planet, and I was thrilled to carry her message.

I kept in touch with Berns after my return from Edinburgh, until she died in September. Rowling and I also stayed in contact, bonded by our feminism and our “simply not having it” attitude. Then, three months later, Maya Forstater lost her job for stating that sex is real. Rowling was furious, and her tweet to that effect has become the stuff of legend. #IStandWithMaya, she said, and all hell broke loose.

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On one side, British women were galvanised into action. On the other, the fact that this wealthy, powerful, successful and uncancellable woman was not only expressing her opinion, but doing so in public, inspired a tsunami of abuse. For the crime of having perfectly reasonable views on women’s sex-based rights, Rowling was harassed on social media and beyond. There were death threats, rape threats, doxxings, and wild accusations. Each time, they became more and more extreme, and even, in some places, normalised and justified.

During this period, many other feminists came in for the same treatment, but no one with a profile that came near to matching Rowling’s. Under fire from extreme trans rights activists, a core group of us formed a bond. It was, however, not formed in defiance of them, but around the beating heart of our movement; for women, for girls, for our rights and our protections, and against misogyny and male violence, whatever form that eternal chimera is currently taking.

Here’s the rub. The kind of threats and abuse sent to Rowling, to me and to others are designed to make us feel isolated, afraid, alone. Patriarchy is all about dividing women and ensuring we don’t share our experiences. Why? Because when women talk, we realise our experiences are quite similar when it comes to male violence and abuse. We realise that all the gaslighting, all the lies told to us, have a common thread. We realise that the guilt, blame and shame of what happened should not belong to us, but to the perpetrators.

And when we bond like that over our common experiences, in what some of us still call “sisterhood”, we are powerful beyond measure. We support each other, emotionally and practically. We organise, agitate, fight. The haters try to stop us. But what they don’t realise is that being under fire is a recipe for solidarity.

No woman is safe from this kind of attention. Martina Navratilova has a long history of being a very public ally to everybody in the LGBTQ rainbow, and yet was still subjected to foul abuse from radical trans rights activists. What was her sin? She questioned whether biological males should compete against women in sports. But the more they came after us, the closer and more supportive our coven became until one day, another DM dropped into my inbox, again from Rowling, this time to a dozen or so of us. It was an invitation. To lunch.

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Like many journalists, I love a good lunch. It’s not like the old days where it would be a three-bottle job, beginning at 12:30 after you’d filed your copy, and ending with the restaurant chucking you out at 5pm. But there is something extremely decadent about getting a bit lashed of an afternoon, with a convivial group consuming fine wine and food. And that is exactly what happened last Sunday.

The problem? We were all women, and to make matters worse, feminists. The icing on the cake was that Rowling was the host, and her guests all known for standing up against extreme transgender ideology and for women’s sex-based rights. That was bad enough, but the fact that we got up to hijinks, and had the temerity to laugh, and drink wine, and eat pasta, and have a bloody brilliant time, and do it on camera, was simply too much for some people. Can you imagine? The cheek of it.

I’d had enough experience of these things to know, beforehand, that there would be some sort of reaction, but I was genuinely surprised by the scale of it. Several national newspapers, radio programmes and talkshows covered it as some fascinating event rather than just ladies who luncheon. I was not surprised, however, by the sheer warmth of many feminists, and even a few men, who lit up social media with their good wishes for us. Nor was I surprised by the fact that there was a backlash from the blue-fringed brigade; the anger and pure spite was palpable, and once word got out that we witches had got together and had some fun, the pile on began.

First, were the handmaidens. One woman, a well-known author with pronouns in her biography, suggested that we were “patting ourselves on the back for solving feminism because of the mutual dislike of trans people”. Then another woman, a comedian, again with the pronouns, kicked off big time, saying that she had had a “mad, angry cry about the photos of J.K. Rowling at the TERF gathering. It’s disgusting how members of our own community can be so hateful”. And of course, Twitter in all its glory was soon awash with the hashtag #MadAngryCry.

Then the boys joined in. Craig Murray, who describes himself as a historian and human rights activist, seemed to think that our event was disrespectful to a man accused of the rape and sexual assault of two women. “While [Suzanne] Moore was knocking back expensive wine in a shit venue with fellow “victim” J. K. Rowling, Assange was entering his fourth year locked in a tiny cell amongst convicted terrorists.” One wonders whether it is only feminists who should refrain from eating until Assange is free?

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Hen parties, make-up salons, hair dressers, maternity wards are all permissible places for women to hang out, but actual feminists meeting? Those women that refuse to back down when the patriarchal boot is on the collective neck? No chance.

Some of the intensity of this backlash is no doubt driven by jealousy — not just of us having lunch with the stupendous Rowling, but of how much we made each other laugh. Contrary to prejudicial stereotypes about feminists, there is no shortage of funny women in our midst. As can be seen in the countless photos taken at the lunch, we teased each other in the most irreverent way, such as deciding that Rowling was only 66% straight. I mean, come on: very few heterosexual feminists prioritise the bullying and debasement of lesbians by trans activists and other misogynists as she does.

When the photos were tweeted, to great merriment, I suddenly found myself accused of being some type of sexual predator, out to convert our Queen. In response, Rowling wrote: “Appalled to learn that @bindelj sexually harassed me by (checks notes) making me laugh while lunching. I’ve naturally consulted lawyers, but they say my case is likely to fail at trial due to a legal loophole known as ‘this is bullshit’. Devastated. Please send more fake concern.”

And yet for all that we laughed, it isn’t easy being on the receiving end of so much vitriol and hatred, no matter how much support, or wealth, or sisterhood you have. People seem to think that privileged women such as Rowling have no feelings, no ability to feel pain, and no concern for their safety. But this is sociopathic behaviour, sadistic even — laced with a desire to put women on the receiving end in a position where we cannot win.

Well, on that Sunday afternoon, with that group of women, and the friendship and solidarity in sisterhood in the air, we won. Trust me: we had the hangovers to prove it.

In all this, the fall of filmmaker and comedian Louis CK was a blockbuster moment. The comedian’s predilection for masturbating in front of his peers had been an open secret for ages. But now the tide seemed to be turning. A massive story in the New York Times alleged that he had harassed five women, most of them fellow comedians, in the early 2000s. The response was outrage, and more importantly, consequences: Louis CK confessed, apologised, and dutifully vanished from public life for nearly a year.

“These stories are true,” the comedian acknowledged in a statement. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question.”

The damage was not just reputational. It was quantifiable. His new movie, I Love You, Daddy, was abruptly shelved, never to be released. His management company cut him loose; his contracts with FX and TBS were cancelled; his past work was pulled from streaming services. Forbes estimated that the comedian’s immediate losses counted in the tens of millions. And that was before you counted all the income he’d never make now that, as the writer boldly predicted, his career was permanent toast.

It was enough to make even the most coolheaded feminist start to imagine a time, surely not too far off, when the movement would rise to absolute power and the patriarchy would lie in ruins. But this week, Louis CK punched a Grammy-shaped hole right through that little fantasy, by winning the music industry’s biggest award for Best Comedy Album. “Sincerely Louis CK” was the comedian’s first release since 2017, when the story of his sexual misconduct broke.

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At the time of its release, the reaction to the new special was as much a microcosm for the divide between elite tastemakers and ordinary consumers as it was a response to the content itself. Critics mainly complained that Louis CK didn’t do enough to address and apologise for his inappropriate behaviour, while those who bought the album mainly laughed until they couldn’t breathe — a reaction for which they, too, were mercilessly indicted. (Slate’s review of the special scolded that these jokes might have been funny if told by a less repulsive entertainer to a less repulsive audience, before condemning both Louis CK and his fans in a single breath: “Everyone involved in that transaction deserves one another.”) At the time of writing, the show’s Rotten Tomatoes rating from viewers is a stellar 93%.

And yet, those same tastemakers still managed to be shocked, and to take it deeply personally, when the Grammy win was announced. “[Thanks] so much to our industry for once again telling us that survivors don’t matter,” tweeted writer and producer Sarah Ann Masse. To outraged critics, Louis CK’s comeback was like five years’ worth of progress undone.

But looking back, it’s hard to believe we were ever so confident in our ability to permanently separate a massively successful entertainer from an audience that still clamoured for his work. Even when Louis CK began popping up at comedy clubs in late 2018, the response from media folks and comedy scene critics was a chorus of “too soons” — as if their opinions mattered, when audiences at these events greeted him with wild applause.

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Meanwhile, not only did those who’d cancelled the comedian continue to act as if his redemption request was theirs to reject or approve, they also adamantly refused to sketch out a framework for how a #MeToo’d man might return to normal life. When pressed — if not now, when? if not like this, then how? — the answer was a shrug. Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? Eventually, this question would be turned back on the asker: how could you even ask about redemption for cancelled men when their victims were still reeling from the trauma? “How do you come back from having your mentor destroy your career? How to you come back from having your boss ask for sexual favours?” scolded an NPR interviewee. “Those are the questions I think we should be taking up, not how guys get to come back and have the next stage of their careers.”

In fact, in 2018 Louis CK was already showing signs that he’d reached the limit of his willingness to play this particular game of rhetorical Calvinball. He was done apologising when there was no forgiveness on offer, done asking permission to live from people who not only weren’t going to grant it, but were clearly getting off on rejecting his pleas for clemency. In one of his first appearances on stage after the scandal broke, he asked: “What, are you going to take away my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit.”

This line was dismissed at the time as mere bitter raving from a washed-up nobody. Now, it feels like a pretty incisive indictment of the hubris that had taken hold amongst the movement’s most strident activists. After all, #MeToo had already managed to radically dilute the concept of sexual assault to include not just the Weinsteins of the world but also things like ghosting, cheating, or preferring that one’s partner wear a certain type of eye makeup during sexual activity.

Aziz Ansari was #MeToo’d for being too pushy while seeking consent during a hookup and failing to intuit that his date wasn’t enjoying herself. Al Franken was forced out of public life after what has since been widely acknowledged as a politically-motivated smear campaign by a Right-wing talk radio host. Ansel Elgort continues to be dogged by allegations of “grooming” based on a handful of years-old, flirtatious snapchat exchanges by the then 20 year-old with teenaged fans.

So you could be forgiven, as man after man was toppled for increasingly esoteric violations of the rapidly-evolving norms, for thinking that you could cancel pretty much anyone for anything.

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But in truth, the power of #MeToo to hold a cancelled man’s feet to the fire was already on the wane, diminishing with every renewed demand for more grovelling, more apologies, a few more slivers of flesh atop the pound that had already been collected. At the height of the movement’s influence, a choice was made: to be relentless, to rejoice in punishing those who not only transgressed but questioned the orthodoxy, and to scoff at the idea that these excesses might ever come back to haunt us. Had the movement gone too far? No! It hadn’t gone far enough!

It took a while to realise that we had created a toxic culture in which contrition was seen as pointless. And it was, ironically, the greatest gift the movement could give to its enemies: the courage that comes from having nothing to lose.

And now, we reap what we sowed. For all its influence over the discourse, and for all the scalps it’s collected from men who lacked the comeback capacity of someone like Louis CK, #MeToo cannot ultimately stop a popular entertainer from making money off his art — nor has it managed to persuade a plurality of people that the punishment for every weird sexual transgression should be permanent professional death.

One by one, the men we cancelled are coming back — if they ever left. Aziz Ansari is back on the comedy circuit. James Franco is still making movies. Christiano Ronaldo settled a lawsuit after a rape allegation and promptly returned to the soccer field. Ansel Elgort just starred in Spielberg’s West Side Story. The market, not the movement, still holds the power here.

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But more importantly, the refusal of #MeToo gatekeepers to even imagine that the men they toppled might not stay gone forever is exposing the movement itself as something far less groundbreaking than its most fervent adherents might have hoped. The promise of a better, fairer, more ethical framework for women’s workplace equality simply never came to pass — not least because we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon the fantasy of throwing transgressors into the bin and letting them rot. And in our focus on punishment above all, we abandoned the principles that any real, working system of justice requires: of proportionate punishments that fit the crime. Of fairness and humility. Of a path back into grace for those who’ve transgressed but atoned.

Instead, the movement has been reduced to a revenge-seeking apparatus that takes grievances at one end and produces the instant gratification of an internet outrage cycle at the other. We were promised sweeping social change. What we got was a ritual spanking machine. And while some people might be sustained by this, riding the outrage rollercoaster from one cancellation to the next, it’s depressing to see it come to this — even as Louis CK and his Grammy award laugh all the way to the bank.