Manacled and its ilk are foundational texts that define the strange yearnings of hyper-online young women — women who have been yearning especially hard since AO3 crashed last Thursday. Its 11 million users are now withdrawing from their customary dose of steamy fanfic; the site is expected to remain closed for maintenance for a few weeks yet. To my male readers: now is a good time to go girlfriend-hunting in the supernatural section of your local bookshop. It’s Black Friday for maladjusted fantasy foids.

If you can find a copy of Manacled in an internet archive, it’s worth skimming — not because it’s good (it’s not), but because it can be considered a Rosetta Stone for the sexual and romantic hinterlands of Zoomettes. The unmet desires of Gen Z women, now squinting around the dusty stalls of the marriage market, are laid out in technicolor in this strange compendium of snarling villains, whimpering damsels, groaning lovers and smirking captors. The plot, in brief, is this: Hermione finds herself in a Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement with peroxide-blond bad boy Draco after Voldemort wins the Wizarding War. The evil regime assigns her to be a surrogate for Draco; she is kidnapped and violated, but she thoroughly enjoys it. In the end, they have a baby. Things work out.

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Throughout, there is lots and lots of shagging. Often this comes with amusing Potter window-dressing, as if to reassure the reader that they are not simply perusing erotica. In one scene Hermione “cast a spell to unbutton his shirt and robes and then, with a practiced partial-levitation charm, she pulled him up so that he was leaning against her and pushed all the clothing down off his shoulders and arms”. There is endless throbbing and thrusting, lots of hot breath, a million “wolfish” smiles and pounding hearts, even the occasional appearance of a nipple or two. This is the bread and butter of AO3 and fanfic more broadly: torrid romance between an everywoman protagonist and a brutish but tender, misunderstood man. There is constant sexual risk on AO3 — themes of abduction abound, as do elaborate pretexts for gray-area sex like Manacled’s forced surrogacy plot. Dubious consent, known as “dub-con”, is probably the site’s most distinctive theme. 

Launched in 2009, AO3’s rise to prominence was driven by a bizarre wave of fandom around X-Factor band One Direction in the early 2010s, with “Larry Stylinson”, the romantic “shipping” (fantasy) of the apparently heterosexual members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, becoming a key genre. But it wasn’t all gay. At one time, the internet was also brimming with stories about 1D, a mass-market teenaged boy band, kidnapping girls from concerts and turning them into (willing) slaves. Today, there are as many granular subgenres as you can think of: wingfic (essentially rutting with feathers); mpreg (male pregnancy); breeding kink; gay fanfic (yaoi) for the enjoyment of heterosexual women; RPF (real-person fiction) imagining sexual escapades between celebrities; even Drapple (stay with me: Draco Malfoy and a green apple he is shown eating in the third Harry Potter film). As you might have inferred, sex is often described in extremely graphic detail.

As niche and strange as these subcategories become, they can mostly be read as wish-fulfillment by young women cut adrift in a sexual culture which leaves them cold. The median age of AO3 users is 26. One 2022 study found 54% of them identified as female, while 41% identified as “non-cisgender”, a wildly disproportionate figure which I suspect comprises a healthy slice of AFAB enbys, he/theys and so on (basically the demographics of your local mask-mandated lesbian bar). Almost half of users not only read but write on the site. The writing is therefore abundant, fervent and often shit. But literary pretensions are not the site’s aim; instead, the most successful writers are there to quench their thirsty fans with escalating sexy scenarios. It is evident that posting is as exciting for the writers as for the readers; AO3 is a rare repository of free, non-visual pseudo-pornography in an online sex economy which prefers the most graphic, hardcore, and shareable material possible. For the site’s largely female constituents, this matters: these readers are in flight from the mainstream and in thrall to their own, quaintly analog nerd erotica. The very different private habits of the internet’s men and women is our riven sexual culture in miniature.

The curious thing about AO3 is that, as powerful and prolific a cultural institution as it may be, it is largely invisible to the public. Nevertheless, its sexual themes have long since bled out into the mainstream. The boom in fantasy smut — published novels about minotaur milking farms and other such nonsense — is a direct consequence of internet fanfiction. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; the new film Wicker, in which Alexander Skarsgård stars as a sexy man inexplicably made of rattan, is unmistakably AO3 in nature. Then there’s Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romp which was adapted by HBO last year, which not only began as a series of posts on AO3 but has now inspired a whole new genre about sexual tension between competitive, horny men (again, to be clear, most of its readers are female). I suspect most young women today — even those who, like me, never read fanfic — are subconsciously honed by its sexual values: the valorization of taboo, secrecy, extraordinary emotional dramatics and undying loyalty. There are, of course, male-coded fandoms: edgelord X’s current obsession is “Malfoid”, a girl version of Draco who is blonde, evil, hot and from what I gather, mostly a meme. But none are as sincere, and as reliably twisted, as the female fanfic which Malfoid parodies. To read these stories is to peep through a window into a generation’s sexuality — and the view is frightening.

It is troubling for a feminist to realize that lots of her peers have spent years reading and fantasizing about submission, surrender, abduction, and sexual enslavement. Nevertheless, that is what AO3 is all about; the site reveals the furtive and unrealizable desires of girls unsatisfied by the modern sexual settlement. To see fanfic as a revolt against the gains of feminism is too easy, though; instead, we might consider its themes an uplifting consequence, if a slightly unsettling one, of those gains. In the West at least, institutionalized forced marriage, coercion and rape are so unimaginable as to be deemed fodder for fantasy; that women want to daydream about them is testament to how thoroughly they’ve been expunged, how remote they now seem. And like other corners of modern sexuality gatekept by women — heterosexual polyamory, for example — fanfiction is highly regulated. AO3 prides itself on almost never censoring any fiction, however egregious the content. This is justified by the extremely strict enforcement of tagging rules on the site; so it is that even rape content can remain if appropriately labeled. As with so many “queer” and/or feminine-coded sexual subcultures, taboo is permitted only within the most rigidly enforced rules imaginable. 

None of this makes for good writing. But AO3 is nevertheless an invaluable archive, an uncensored record of what women daydream about when no-one is watching. There is perhaps no more unflinching guide to “what women want” than the weird warrens of this website whose uninhibited readers share their desire to be kidnapped, romanced then wedded by a borderline abusive werewolf CEO. I won’t make the case that AO3 tells us how women secretly want to live; instead, it shows up the fault lines in real-world dating, which has been drained of romance by apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps. Women might not want to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated by an erotically insatiable Draco Malfoy; really, it’s about them wanting to be overwhelmingly desired. The scenario is almost unimportant, the more far-fetched the better — the emotional payload it carries is what matters. To be pursued, to relinquish control, to experience and inspire unfettered passion: fanfiction’s underlying tenets are not so difficult to understand. We may deride the genre as weird, subterranean and obsessive — but really these girls’ yearnings are, upon closer inspection, universal.

Yet pain is everywhere in Cartland’s fiction, if you scrub off the makeup and strip the pink away. The critic Peter Conrad claims “the romances she writes are as humid as pornography, though tamed by euphemism: her heroes are all red-blooded rampant phalluses . . . Her subject is always rape.” He’s right. I read Hazard of Hearts (1949), in which Serena Staveley’s father gambles her away to the Marquis of Vulcan and commits suicide by duel. Serena is threatened with rape by Lord Wrotham — “One grows tired of easy conquests, my sweet Serena, and a trifle of hatred will give our life together a spice and a piquancy” — before Vulcan’s tenderness, and his desire to control her, reveals itself. “She quivered for one second before she surrendered herself, utterly and completely. She knew then his strength, she knew then how strong and masterful he would always be and she gloried in it.”

In Cartland’s fiction, as in Cartland’s life, there is no redemption without terror. The first novel is always the best tell of a writer and in Jig-Saw (1927), she wrote, “If only he would lose his temper, be brutal or abusive, Mona felt she would adore him. The eternal considerateness and kindness towards her simply rasped on her nerves.” It makes me laugh to think that this most Establishment of novelists — she became a dame in 1991, thanks to the late Queen Mother — was writing sexual masochism all those years. She made hundreds of women out of paper, like marionettes, and gave them what she wanted, or thought she deserved.

Unhappiness, though, was her essential characteristic; that and snobbery. She was not an aristocrat, but she wanted to be; even Cecil Beaton called her a snob, and he would know. It is hard not to think, reading Hazard of Hearts: Cartland’s truest love was the class system, and that is, as she would say, a cruel master.

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Instead, she was from immaculate Birmingham trade, which surely created the work ethic: her grandfather was a screw magnate, quite literally. He shot himself in the head when Cartland was two and the affluent life shattered: the house was sold, the maids were fired, the money was gone. Cartland heroines are habitually carried off to castles, but Cartland traveled in the opposite direction: from mansion to farmhouse. Her father, James,  was an alcoholic: he did not know how to live without money. Cartland would write her anti-father all her life: men who were not drunks, but “masterful.” Even so, her mother, Polly, ran the family, and she held on to their aristocratic-style life by her fingernails, and with work. When there were plums in the garden, Cartland lived on plums, and Polly sold the rest; at one point Polly opened a dress shop above a pharmacy. For the young Cartland, this trauma was compounded by self-hatred: she felt herself unbeautiful, when beauty was all that mattered for girls. “I have spent many years of my life trying to lay the ghost of that plain child,” she said. “She has haunted me.”

Cartland was haunted by many things: her family fortune was lost to suicide; her father to alcoholism; her two brothers to the Second World War; her first marriage to adultery. It’s hard to imagine such a woman ever feeling safe, hence the fantasies of sexual domination, and nobility. She married at least one man she didn’t love; and she couldn’t love the only real girl she produced over 723 books: her daughter, Raine, who tried to be a mirror of her mother. It was a mistake.

She built the emotional edifice early. Her bizarre face — she used boot polish for mascara — would follow it, as if in sympathy. “Quite early on,” she said, “I learned the best way to survive is to pretend that anything unpleasant simply hasn’t happened.”

But unpleasant things did happen. After the Great War almost a million young men were missing. That generation’s lovemaking was morbidly extreme: her shell-shocked lovers threatened to shoot themselves and left her with “a horror of sympathy.” “I had no wish to be married to anyone,” she said, “I was frightened now of any deep emotion.” When she found out about sex — she initially thought you could get pregnant from a kiss on the neck — she called off her first engagement and married for money instead. “In the spring of 1927, I became engaged to be married to Alexander [“Sachie”] McCorquodale, whose father was chairman of the companies owning the largest printing group in England,” she wrote in her memoir The Isthmus Years (1945). McCorquodale was too rich to function and he drank too much. Cartland, though obliviously, had married her father. “I cried all through my first honeymoon,” she wrote. “He had a terrible inferiority complex. He drank to boost himself up. You can understand it.”

She wrote about her husband in If the Tree is Saved (1929) as if she hated him: “She had loved the back of his neck, but in the strong light from the window it looked purple and patchy, and she noticed with distaste the commencement of a small boil.” And again in For What? (1930). “Unreasonably romantic, she had looked to her honeymoon to create a spell which would change both Alan and herself into fictitious creatures so different from their true selves, that only a child could have imagined such a possibility”. Her marriage failed, she married Alexander’s cousin Hugh, and established the factory of terror and sex.

Cartland did not like women, real or fictional. So she terrorized them, punished them and fetishized virginity: the partial, or anti-woman. This is most obvious in her treatment of Raine, her only daughter. Cartland could not even bear to look at her as a baby: she had a special pram made, with the child facing outwards. When Raine excelled academically, it disappointed Cartland, who did not approve of female agency beyond her own. “Do tidy your hair, darling,” Cartland said, “No man wants a clever woman.” She called Raine “nauseating” — was it the child’s desire for her mother’s love that disgusted Cartland? — and admitted she was disappointed to have a girl: “I don’t think I’ve ever been so thrilled by anything as having a son”. Still, Raine tried to please her by following the trajectory of a series of Cartland heroines: she married an earl, then another earl, and then the son of a marquis. Raine was not mentioned in Cartland’s will, as if she deserved nothing. I didn’t think anything could make me like Raine Spencer, who inherited ugly snobbery from her pinked mother, but The Great Dictator did. She said she finished Das Kapital by 12, and it was “awfully boring”.

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Stephen King's boomer propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

The fantasy she wove to conceal herself was superficially all-consuming: a glittering edifice filled with oddness and magic. According to Sweet, she claimed to be visited by ghosts; that her interior decorator was psychic; that a spirit guide helped her win at roulette; that her friend Lord Moutbatten invented elasticated shoelaces. She pretended she had aristocratic lovers when she didn’t: an extension of her novels. It is possible that she did not believe her fantasies. She told the writer Maboth Moseley, “I believe in being honest with oneself alone. If one told the truth to others about themselves one’s life wouldn’t be worth living.” This is not self-love, but self-annihilation; the language of absolute loneliness.

Towards the end of her life, her self-hatred became more explicit: she projected onto real women as well as fictional ones. She said things like, “Women shouldn’t have character. They should be like pretty chocolate boxes”; and “a stupid man is preferable to a clever woman”; and “Women . . . are not as intelligent as men, and they have awful squeaky voices”. When she was told the piles of Cartland heroines contradicted her own life — that she did have agency — she denied it. When Melvyn Bragg told her she was a career woman she replied: “When my [second] husband died I’d only written thirty or forty books.” When Alan Whicker told her, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone less in need of protection”, Cartland retorted, “You’re horrid to me. I just want a nice strong man to look after me.”  We can’t know if she meant it, or if it was part of her strategy of concealment: I doubt she knew herself.

“This was the mask of a woman who could not quite see her own face,” Sweet writes: because she did not want to. “Reflection on these matters would have required Cartland to stop the machine, and the machine could not be stopped, because the machine was Cartland”. The most prolific romance novelist who ever lived was also the purest and most imaginative kind: the self-hating kind. Sweet has mastered Cartland, and with tenderness: it’s impossible to imagine her response. “That stupid sadness,” she told the psychiatrist Anthony Clare disgustedly, “that’s wrong. You’ve got to go on.”

‘The Great Dictator: a Life of Barbara Cartland’ is published tomorrow by Hodder & Stoughton 

Emerald Fennell seems to have approached Wuthering Heights in a similarly improving spirit. I must say I haven’t read Emily Brontë’s novel myself — though I was assured that wouldn’t be a problem when it came to following the film, and may even confer an advantage when it came to enjoying it — but I’m guessing the stable-room bondage scene, depictions of public masturbation, and corpses with erections were all Fennell’s tasteful additions.

In fact, a little research suggests that whole epochs within the novel hit the cutting-room floor in the journey from bookstore to screen, with characters ruthlessly conflated or excised altogether, so as to accommodate all the steamy sex scenes that Brontë thoughtlessly forgot to arrange for her protagonists.

On the promotional circuit, Fennell has repeatedly emphasized the deep impression the novel made on her as a teenager, and her film contains touches overwrought enough to bear that out. As has been noticed, the film unfolds more like a fan-fictionalization of its source than an adaptation: the surrounding structural architecture of plot and character developed only to the degree that they can be taken for granted as a stable context for erotic wish-fulfillment. Even the title, which comes wrapped in coy little scare quotes — “Wuthering Heights” — seems an attempt early on to manage expectations. Though, of course, it’s not as if simply pleading guilty at pre-trial is a way of absolving yourself of a crime.

There is a peculiar cultural assumption that plumbing the detail of one’s sexual fantasies inevitably yields stark or revealing information about the self. To “explore” — like Sally Rooney and swathes of prestige TV — the dark allure of BDSM, and the supposedly psychologically complex interplay between affection and violence, is taken as a surefire way of advertising one’s artistic sophistication.

If Wuthering Heights achieves nothing else, it should be to put that particular misconception to bed, as it were. The inclusion of a BDSM scene seems a gratuitous, and slightly feeble, provocation. And if conceived as a quick-fix way of infusing Cathy and Heathcliff’s melodramatic love story with a sense of psychological depth — well, it fails.

Long stretches of the film consist of exactly the sort of breathless, derivative, fleeting encounters you might expect it to on the assumption that you were not watching Wuthering Heights, but something operating at a somewhat hazier degree of removal: an attempt to depict the erotic shadow cast by the book in the mind of a half-remembered adolescent reader.

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Zadie Smith has nothing to say

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We watch while, as if on an endless reel, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie chase each other pointlessly across windswept moors. There they grapple with each other. Kiss. Lick each other’s faces. Breathe meaningfully. Look searchingly into one another’s eyes. The weather being what it is, they are forever getting caught in the most torrential downpours, and neither of them ever thinks to bring an umbrella or to wear clothes that don’t quickly go transparent.

They cry and mewl and pout at each other, break for a costume change, and then do it all again, striking postures of indignance and hurt as they growl about their feelings and heave their respective bosoms. They stand stoically by Cathy’s father’s grave, the wind tearing camply at her black veil, then, practically within sight of the funeral party, reunite with animal intensity. Occasionally in fits of love-stricken anger Robbie will beat her girly fists on Elordi’s manly chest. When all other ways of communicating their profound bond have been exhausted, they stick their fingers in each other’s mouths.

Throughout, there is virtually no suggestion of the existence of a wider social world, the whole film instead an unrooted universe of total mutual self-absorption. The effect is a flattening realization of the montage of imaginative sexual fantasy. Sitting there, watching it, was like re-enacting the closing scene of Cinema Paradiso, except that instead of the touching variety of rescued black-and-white embraces, it’s just Elordi and Robbie sniffing and licking each other’s faces again and again.

Fennell’s attempt to not merely adapt a book for the screen, but somehow conjure up the imaginative impact it had on a teenage reader, faces considerable challenges. Polemicists of a cultural-declinist bent may be tempted to say this is because of the greater imaginative richness of the reading experience. But actually, some of the obstacles are to do with its comparative impoverishment.

There is something deceptively shallow about the contents of imaginative simulation: the kind of activity one gives might give way to in reading a novel or idly embellishing the romance of its protagonists. The internal spotlight of wandering imaginative attention makes fantasy feel rich from the inside, but it is a richness that relies on an illusion: a mistaken impression that one’s mind’s eye “sees” in more detail than it really does.

Many people are surprised to learn that vision itself relies on a similar cognitive trick: while the brain generates the illusion that the entire visual field is in focus, in reality the fovea, the central one or two degrees of the visual field, is tiny, equivalent in area to a thumbnail held out at arm’s length, the rest of the visual field implicitly filled in by a process akin to a simplifying inference.

Whether because of their inherent shallowness or otherwise, many of us come to realize it is a naive mistake to expect others to be as attached to our fantasies as we are. It is notoriously boring to hear others describe their dreams. In the same way, attempting to depict an object of fantasy can destroy its deceptive, impressionistic power. Most people are familiar with the dissatisfied feeling that a character played on screen is not at all how they imagined them — even if it is not always easy to put your finger on just how they depart from the under-specified but perfectly cast original.

Imaginative fantasy, then, has a propensity to crash-land when realized in the flesh. That propensity may only be greater when it comes to the kind of romantic escapism Fennell has tried to make flesh in Wuthering Heights. Writhing with Heathcliff on the moors, licking and gasping and striking a pose: from the inside of the teenage mind, these may grip one as the very heights of erotic profundity. Flattened onto the screen, they can seem like withering lows.

Of course, it’s not as if film, the standout expressive art form of the 20th century,  is too limited a medium to evoke romantic fantasy in a viewer. But to do such material justice probably requires something other than Fennell’s trademark style of campy overstatement, of which the lavish aesthetic and anachronistic latex costumes are only the most obvious manifestations of a general inability to exercise creative restraint.

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The great porn panic

By John Maier

Some films can be almost novelistic in their tendency to invite an imaginative contribution from the viewer. Writing in 1972, the screenwriter Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” for the peculiar effectiveness — the near-meditative quality — that was sometimes achieved in films of Ozu, Bresson and others, many only then being screened in LA for the first time. Schrader’s theory was that these filmmakers had learned to direct in such a way as to trigger introspection. The characteristic technique was to withhold — something akin to the intelligent use of empty time and space.

Into that space the engaged viewer is forced to contribute something of his own. Made to “add their own egg”. Of course, Fennell might argue she was trying to make a very different kind of film to those Schrader was watching; nevertheless, her Wuthering Heights stifles imaginative engagement in the very act of attempting to control it. Hers is a film in which all of the eggs are added on the viewer’s behalf — not least when Cathy is made to crack half a dozen of them into Heathcliff’s bed as an early provocation, and Elordi kneels there, plunging his fingers gormlessly into the gooey mess. (As ever no prizes are on offer for guessing subtext; there wouldn’t be enough to go round!).

The idea that information might be strategically withheld to creative effect is not a distinctively cinematic insight, of course. At the sentence level, Hemingway’s theory of prose seems to have been that there was imaginative danger in over-specificity — that it is in general an illusion that, as one modifier is piled on after another, resolution increases. Better to take advantage of an intelligent reader’s tendency to make an imaginative contribution of his own. Emerald Fennell, on the other hand, prefers to make films where all the adjectives are left in — italicized, underlined and in scare quotes too.

No doubt, in the contemporary attention economy, the natural tendency is to favor Fennell’s lurid approach over more hands-off alternatives. As Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently recounted in a widely publicized interview, it is now de rigueur for Netflix to helpfully suggest that a film’s characters verbally reiterate the plot at least three of four times, and that large set-piece action scenes should be used to “grab” the viewer’s attention in the first few minutes.

Perhaps naturally suited to the cultural moment, Fennell has never shown any temptation to act on the maxim that less is sometimes more. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance a moment longer”, shouts Nelly at a bed-ridden Margot Robbie towards the end of the film, and it is difficult for the audience not to share the sentiment. The risk, in the end, in simply “grabbing” your viewer’s attention, and training it on the banal contents of an adolescent fantasy, is that you unwittingly reveal how shaky and under-developed those materials can be.

Lauren was eventually booted off the show — probably, fans speculate, by producers who hoped to limit her humiliation. But she wouldn’t go quietly. Instead, she burst into tears and begged Harrison to leave with her, uttering the immortal phrase: “I think everything we’ve had for the last 10 days is real.” Twenty-four hours later Harrison, no doubt encouraged by producers in the wake of the Women’s Aid statement criticizing the show’s “unhealthy patterns of behavior”, decided to quit to win her back. In a final scene also probably set up by producers, he apologized to Toni, crying manfully as he said he’d be “mortified” if someone treated his little sister as he had treated her. Off he went into the Spanish night, wheeling his monogrammed suitcase into a dubious future and preparing to face a British public who had come to hate him. Covert clips of him mopily journeying home, filmed by Brits on their way back from their own Mallorca holibobs, appeared all over TikTok over the weekend. It seems that Love Island, which acts as an annual record of British sexual culture, has finally killed off the fuckboy.

Harrison is not the first Love Island “boy” to choose a path of romantic villainy, nor will he be the last. But his shaming has been exceptionally vitriolic this year. Why? Well, a few short episodes ago Harrison, who the other male islanders have nicknamed “Young Bull”, made a critical error. He had sex on TV.

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Lauren met Harrison in the Lynx-fug of Casa Amor, where new girls must “graft” the boys at all costs in order to win a spot in the main villa. Because of the format, each year Casa Amor becomes little more than a brothel: the men know the women will make themselves sexually available to secure their places on the show, and even the ones in solid couples take advantage of this before returning to their “wifeys” anyway, albeit covered in love bites. When Harrison brought Lauren back to the main villa, she sensed him slipping through her fingers in the magnetic pull of cabana girl Toni — and so did the one thing that could be relied upon to keep him. She had sex with him. Unfortunately, this didn’t work: the next day, he abandoned her, leaving her a puddle of tears. Learning of their clinch, Toni told her: “It’s really off-putting to me. How can he do that to somebody?” Lauren replied: “I don’t just sleep with anyone… it’s not like a kiss or something. It’s a big thing.”

We should not let the importance of this moment pass us by. In one sense it is trivial, a conversation between two wannabe reality stars about a man whose name we will soon forget. But in another, it signals a revolution in how women today are supposed to talk about sex.

Let’s be clear: if this exact tryst had happened 10 years ago, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But the era of the swaggering fuckboy is over; the sun is setting on his randy reign. Between 2007 and 2017, the proportion of 18 to 23-year-olds who’d had casual sex in the past month dropped from 38% to 24% among men, and from 31% to 22% among women. In the years since The Atlantic published its 2018 cover story about the “sex recession”, young women have dreamt up increasingly bizarre ways to reframe chastity, from “boysober” and the “nun phase” to the 4B movement and “voluntary celibacy”, generally inflected with the vibe of wellness or healing.

What we’re seeing is a revolt against a culture which has taught young women to make themselves available to men in order to be liberated, telling them that sex is “no big deal” — and so we mustn’t complain about being blatantly used for it. Hook-up culture, supercharged by the progenitors of Love Island — Geordie Shore, Ex on the Beach — celebrates those who have “no-strings” sex as not being uptight or needy. Women’s magazines coach readers to be “sexually adventurous” in order to retain a man; sex columnists encourage women to indulge their boyfriends’ fetishes not because they desire it themselves, but in order to “affair-proof” their relationships. Girls are encouraged to act out their partners’ favourite porn scenes, have anal sex, be choked and slapped, for the prize of keeping him around a bit longer. The greatest insult is being “frigid”. Attention and affection from men, we are told, is a trade deal: our part of the bargain is putting out. Fail to do so, and you deprive him of a sacred entitlement. Like a hungry animal, he will stray and pounce on another, more liberated woman. He can’t help it: it’s in his nature.

But all this has begun to tumble. As Lauren put it, scrambling for the final scraps of her dignity on national telly, sex is a “big thing”. The rewards of availability at all costs are meagre; rejection hurts more when you realise you’ve literally been had. Casual sex, as I’m sure Lauren discovered, is rarely good anyway — but the liberal taboo on being cautious about who you sleep with mistakes discernment for prudishness, and wisdom for the desire to control women’s bodies.

These attitudes will be familiar to those who read Jia Tolentino’s takedown of Louise Perry’s book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, in the New Yorker last month. Perry’s advice, targeted at younger female readers, is to “avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know, or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut”. Tolentino calls this sensible suggestion “fundamentalist”. Perry’s counsel to avoid men who are “aroused by violence” is met with a sneer as Tolentino notes that she includes “things such as spanking and choking”; what a square! Tolentino seems to say. In response to the book’s underlying advice to be careful about who you sleep with, Tolentino makes a single smug observation: “I have been with my partner for 16 years… this central relationship in my life… would not have happened if I had followed any of her advice.” Never mind that this fact has precisely nothing to do with casual sex, and that her age, 36, automatically alienates her from the book’s intended young readership who will face pornography-twisted sexual realities far worse than any generation before them.

What many women younger than Tolentino have realised — those TikToking their celibacy journeys, or blogging their boysobriety — is that the doctrine of sex positivity is no longer fit for purpose, and the whoring of its male profiteers is grotesque. What advice would sex-positivity fans have for Love Island’s Lauren, whose reasons for sleeping with Harrison we can never truly know but which certainly looked, at least, like a last-ditch attempt to keep her man? Would they have anything to say to her red, tear-stained face after she realised she’d been shagged and bagged? Would they congratulate her for having been “adventurous”, after bonking in a dorm room full of people with cameras beaming the whole thing out to the British public?

Sex positivity is a maximalist ideology: more sex is better, and any constraint is negative. But in the coming years, as pornography and misogyny continue to warp sexual dynamics, women are likely to become more prim as a self-protection measure. When the risk of a casual encounter becomes greater — sexual violence, for example, becoming a normal part of many men’s repertoires — the understandable response from many women will be not to bother. And as encounters become more cynical with the continued growth of dating apps and the consequent lack of accountability between strangers, women will become more cautious about false promises from men who only intend to abandon them. This is a depressing situation, but paranoia and hypervigilance is the only possible response to a sex-positivity movement which has eroded our right to protest against being used.

Poor Lauren’s future is uncertain. In a predictable face-saving exercise, she and Harrison have reunited (for now). She did not win much sympathy from viewers, who tend to slut-shame rather than reflect on the broader culture which compels women to sleep around. And she lacks charisma, so a television career seems unlikely. But she will be remembered — and, I hope, commended — for the moment that she admitted, on national television, this fundamental fact: sex really is a big deal.

As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.

The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.

Leaking, doxing, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok — regardless of the moral quality of the subjects under consideration — hurts everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.

Group chats, dating apps, emails — or in Byron’s and Cabot’s case, simply being in public with no intention to be filmed — should not be subject to public judgment. This species of story is a distraction from serious issues, and runs cover for the genuinely powerful individuals and entities who materially impact our lives.

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Clearly, there is something in human nature that is primed to gossip, shame, and ridicule (thoughtlessly, automatically). But new technology allows us to give vent to these sordid tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should take seriously the moral warping effect that such stories, and our obsession with them, have on our souls.

The global village is like any village — scolding, punitive, consumed by hearsay, with nothing better to do. While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. So while the particular example at hand might not seem worth this much deliberation, that is my point.

There might be a story here about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer having an in-house affair that might get lesser-ranking employees fired. But what I see surfacing in the discursive arena is not intelligent critique of HR departments and their culture, but a glee at the immiseration of a random person.

If these trends continue — if algorithms continue to work the way they do, and I can’t imagine they won’t — then more and more victims will be dragged out of anonymity for mimetic sacrifice. And as a consequence, meaningful taboos about privacy, shame, and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become fodder for comment and ridicule.

We sorely need new taboos — not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because clearly we have plenty of those already. Rather, we need taboos against aggregating ourselves into idiotic, loathsome mobs, incapable of thinking about what the subjects of our ridicule and these digital stonings might suffer. A wiser perspective would admit that we all, at the wrong moment, are liars, fools, cheaters, charlatans, hypocrites. Let who has not sinned click the “like” or “repost” button.

We all sin, and we might have received grace or mercy under the theocracies of older liberal and Enlightenment arrangements. Algorithmic justice and judgment, however, contains neither the virtues of theocratic society — you could at least avail yourself of religious law, with its exceptions and casuistry — nor of classically liberal society: there is no due process, no appeal mechanism. There’s no mediating structure in the global village. It is instinctive, animalistic, rash, cruel.

The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. If we want to live in a tolerant, sane society, we should turn off our cameras, step away from mimetic digital village stonings, and reflect on our own haphazard and imperfect lives and selves.

This “should” will not come from above: there is no sign that tech companies will change their products to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Self-regulation, at scale, is, as of now, the only answer. The way we talk, write, act, and respond matters. Culture matters insofar as culture is a layer of software that at least partially governs how we use our phones. We sorely lack codes of conduct surrounding technology and our ability to record, dox, and harass each other.

If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not disgust, then it should be; phones come with cameras, but cameras linked to the global cortex are weapons. Using them to film strangers should not be normalized — telling people to put their phones away should. Piling on viral posts about random people who had no intention of going viral should not be normal, either. If Big Tech won’t take them down, then self-restraint is called for. Institutions can help uphold and reinforce these new norms by prohibiting phone usage in as many public spaces as possible.

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There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic. Each of us doesn’t need to take our own badly framed photos of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” when we visit Vienna. There are professional photos and postcards widely available. We could employ the faculty of memory, too.

Codes of conduct are what we might call counter-mimetics; they do have to be injected into social interaction and discourse, artificially at first, before they catch on. That’s what I’m proposing here. We might think something is amusing and worth commenting on or bad and worth scolding, and maybe, in isolation it is. But on the whole, we’re making life intolerable, anxious, and graceless.

It took several centuries for mounted knights to develop the code of conduct known as chivalry to regulate their unparalleled ability to kill or threaten anyone who didn’t have a horse, mail, and sword; let’s hope we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or whatever next-generation AI devices replace phones.

Privacy is a hard-won social good; give it back to others to protect your own.

Welcome to the situationship economy.

Created by algorithms, this is a culture in which social status, geography, money, and convention are empowered to choose for us in ways that resemble premodern mores. Instead of meddling, class-conscious parents, there is now an array of buzzing sensors and guardrails, indifferent to the pulses of romance and demoralizing to anyone who would like to imagine that they are free to choose.

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This was not always the case. The period between 1965 and 2012, roughly between the Sexual Revolution and the rise of dating apps, was a transformative era for American romance. During this time, most of the country adopted the sexual and relationship mores once associated with beatniks and bohemians. Premarital sex and cohabitation became normalized. Marriages lost any vestigial signs of being arranged — whether by parents, pastors, community elders, or extended families — and both marriage and dating became fully marketized.

Gradually, as coupling became shaped more by the market than by community ties, Americans embraced what might be called a cult of choice: the belief in finding the perfect person, a beloved who might have been inaccessible under previous forms of marriage shaped by custom and convention. This led to an explosion of spontaneous desire and also to great unhappiness; mid-century portrayals of marriage were not exactly hopeful or happy. 

In film and literature of the era, this disillusionment is palpable. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) depicts the strained marriage of Maggie and Brick Pollitt, held together only by money and status — an aristocratic Southern power marriage gone wrong. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is similarly pessimistic. Richard Yates’s powerful 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, takes us through the unraveling suburban marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, both of whom dream of art, sex, and bohemia in the city.

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A few years later, Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), views marriage as a trap and fears becoming like her mother. In Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), George and Martha, a couple from the Northeastern elite and a good class match, stay together, but their marriage is desperate and miserable. In Nichols’s next film, The Graduate (1967), Benjamin Braddock is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, a woman of the previous generation, who is trapped in a bad marriage sustained only by alcohol and convention. All of these portrayals, in their own way, echo Madame Bovary — the ur-text for the discontents of the modern bourgeoisie.

There was a clear shift in the emphasis of culture narratives in the Eighties, a period of economic deregulation and globalization: stories of unhappy marriages were discarded in favor of successful dating stories, in which love as a personal, autonomous, market-based solution triumphs. After 1980 — and after the Aquarian, punk, experimental Seventies — something shifted in American romantic culture: middle-class dating and marriage were re-conceived as free choice, without the vestigial social expectations that produced mid-century ennui; dating became liberatory and coupling an achievement, not a sacrifice. 

Sex, dating, and marriage became totally liberalized, subject to the adjudication of the marketplace. A corollary social myth arose in which the liberated choice of partner was the only relationship that couldn’t be socially constructed (though of course, it was mediated silently by the market instead). Culture circled back towards Jane Austen and away from Bovary. The romantic comedy became the primary vehicle through which two individuals navigated class and social pressures to find true love, guided by both emotion and reason, rather than the bourgeois tragedy in which moderately unfree people suffer at each other’s hands.

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When Harry Met Sally (1989) introduces two yuppies who convert friendship into genuine love. Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999) celebrate unions that defy social expectations, pairing Brits and Americans in a globalized culture that allows more choice, more freedom, and more happiness. The deeply romantic Before Sunrise (1995) begins with an American (Ethan Hawke), at the end of a study abroad trip, meeting a French woman (Julie Delpy) on a train; the early-Nineties romantic world is open and exciting and full of possibility. Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) has two yuppies converting a business rivalry into love. The movie begins as a story about internet retail destroying brick-and-mortar bookstores, but love ends up overcoming the trauma of neoliberalism; Meg Ryan, the shop owner, falls for Tom Hanks, the big-box-store guy; romance redeems economic antagonism. Both Seinfeld and Sex and the City, canonical Nineties TV shows, feature successful protagonists who are always dating, never settling.

After 2010, however, the magic ran out, giving rise to today’s neo-feudal order, with algorithms now playing the role of stern parents and village busybodies. The 2010 cult hit Blue Valentine marks this shift: free romantic choice across class barriers leads to tragedy, embarrassment. Yuppie, Boomer optimism is gone; Millennial pessimism has arrived.

In this era, romance is less about love, and more about whether you’ve made it; fame first, pair-bonding second or third or fourth. Lorde’s breakthrough 2013 song “Royals” commences the decade’s obsession with status and status cosplay. In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, career frustrations demolish a loving union. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s seminal series Fleabag is about someone who is basically unlovable or incapable of love.

Charli XCX’s 2020 song “Forever” crystallizes the final transition out of the rom-com economy, in which choice was validated, into the long-gestating situationship economy of today, in which real choice is impossible — and infinitely delayed. “Forever” is sung from the point of view of a fragmented consciousness which idealizes what will never be, and has never been, experienced: rooted, historically mediated, lasting love.

Similarly, the 2020 High Fidelity reboot, starring Zoë Kravitz, takes a beloved Gen-X rom-com and turns it into a depressive, sepia-toned portrait of consumerist dissatisfaction. The market works in the 2000 movie, adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. But in the 2020 TV show, the market is broken. The record-store hipster in the original can still find a love that suits his tastes; in the remake, she can’t.

This breakdown of personal choice mirrors a larger collapse of faith in the systems that once promised abundance and connection.

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The situationship economy — the reversion to caste-like determinism without the definitiveness of arranged marriage — is a subtle and invisible reversal of a period in which culture celebrated romantic choice (the rom-com economy), the culture in which people born between 1980 and 2010 were raised, but not the one they inherited (or helped create). The learned expectation, in other words, is of freedom of choice. But reality — post-iPhone and, increasingly, post-AI — is morbidly deterministic.

As with economic liberalization, the irony of romantic liberalization is that it has given birth to its opposite: a feeling of extreme overdetermination and the submission to the algorithm and to the social logic embedded within it. Gone is the post-globalization fantasy of finding a partner in another part of the world or across economic classes via an Austen-like combination of reason and heady emotion. Trump-era tariffs and economic recalibration register this cultural shift in the material realm.

From 1980 to 2010, singles were entrepreneurs within the romance market; after 2010, they increasingly became raw resources to be extracted and packaged. We have been trained to sell ourselves as products, to expect that our “product” can be ranked, and to believe we deserve products of a similar ranking. Men and women alike, though differently, now obsessively assert their preferences on apps like Hinge: height, weight, age, religion, politics. “No Trump supporters. No one under six feet. No one over 25. Not looking for anything serious.” These aren’t the views or behaviors of people who believe that love is a harmonious pattern of extremely complex attitudes. They are rather the views of people in thrall to a brutal utilitarian logic and a vision of social class as an insuperable barrier.

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The lesson here is that every era of romance, love, dating, and marriage is historically conditioned. Through a secular lens, no specific romantic arrangement or habit can assert itself as the definitive or universal one. Yet, paradoxically, by removing romantic blinders and seeing ourselves as products of social and historical conditioning   — acknowledging that dark truth  — we can pay heed to elements of a common and continuing human condition: our deeper potential to take an active, rather than passive, role in our fundamental commitments and choices.

For Jane Austen is finally preferable to Flaubert; Elizabeth and Darcy to Charles and Emma. The classic rom-coms still delight. There’s something moving about the possibility of two people choosing each other outside of the forcefield of social mores and pressures. But what makes romance funny, what brings delight, and not tragedy, is always an element of cynicism, of world-weariness and foresight on the part of the protagonists; love doesn’t start with illusions; it must construct practical visions to replace them first. Pride and prejudice — or in our case, technological addiction and moral passivity — must be overcome.

New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.

The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.

The numbers speak for themselves. Five of the top-10 best-selling titles of 2024 were written by the category’s two most prominent authors, Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros, according to Publisher’s Weekly statistics from October. Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romantasy books achieved $610 million in sales, up from $454 million in 2023. The category is juicing the statistics on overall book sales, which are in decline, and has contributed to a boom in romance-focused bookstores in the United States.

“It has been amazing and crazy to me how busy we’ve been,” says Cunningham. Katie Steele, the Romantasy expert at A Novel Romance, a Kentucky bookstore, says that demand was so high the owners moved to a new space “10 times the size” after only a year in operation. Steele’s other topic areas are manga, danmei (Chinese novels with male-male, or MM, romance), and queer.

Victoria Gerken, the publisher of Podium Entertainment, a digital-first publisher that has moved into print distribution on the wings of Romantasy, believes the genre has been so successful because it “provides entertainment for its audience that’s not available in any other format”. This entertainment is a form of escapism that allows women whose daily lives have little magic in them to imagine themselves as bold and powerful, starring in an exciting adventure and having great sex. Perhaps it’s the chick version of the thrill that men get from video games. It’s also worth noting that the magical framing allows women to perform girl-power and to be swept off their feet by men (or male beings) who are unapologetically dominant and boast castles and domains, too. Between the genre’s unique pleasures and an audience Gerken describes as “voracious”, she says “it’s a little bit of a perfect storm. The demand has always been there, but nobody harnessed it.”

Just how a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to selling books managed to miss the demand is an interesting question, but it’s clear that the category is being driven by authors and fans, with little distinction between mainstream and self-published titles.

The first breakout Romantasy title was the conventionally published Sarah J. Mass series A Court of Thrones and Roses (#ACOTAR), a young-adult fantasy romance in which a young woman falls in love with a Lord of the Fae. The series began publication in 2015 but blew up online during the pandemic, around the same time its publisher, Bloomsbury, reclassified it as an adult due to its increasingly graphic sexual content.

Yet sales are also being driven by the proliferation of self-publishing platforms, with authors increasingly winning a following as self-published audiobooks, e-books, or print-on-demand, and only later making deals with the corporates. One of the current best-selling titles, Quicksilver, another Fae romance, just appeared in print through Forever, an imprint of Hachette, in December 2024. Author Callie Hart had published several previous series as e-books or print-on-demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace, and it was only after Quicksilver’s success online that she teamed up with the French giant. Podium Entertainment’s Gerken says that “the vast majority” of Podium’s title acquisitions are independently published first.

A January 2025 story in The New Yorker on a copyright infringement lawsuit against publisher Entangled and author Tracy Wolff, the creator of best-selling Alaska-based vampire-romance series Crave, contained a quote that generated some pearl-clutching by writers online. An anonymous writer who’d had dealings with Entangled told The New Yorker that its publisher and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said to her that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. From a traditional viewpoint, that sounds like the death of creativity and a loss of authorial control.

The New Yorker story also reports on several other objections to the genre. It’s allegedly not diverse (often written by socially conservative and photogenic white women with good social-media skills); it moves very quickly, sometimes forcing writers to adhere to brutal delivery dates with little time for polishing their work; and it can be relentlessly formulaic, with the huge volume of titles contributing to the problem.

From a different viewpoint, however, the trend is empowering authors who are able to build their own fan base. Companies like Podium and Bloom Books, a new independent romance imprint that launched during the pandemic, offer the kind of hybrid rights deals traditionally forbidden by major publishers. Bloom’s star client is E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray was originally published as an e-book and print-on-demand title in 2011. It’s one of a growing number of publishers whose business model is to scoop up successful self-published authors, often allowing them to keep their lucrative e-book and audiobook rights, while supplying the kind of print distribution and brand-building muscle that independent writers find difficult to achieve. Authors working with such publishers can sometimes retain creative control of cover design and marketing strategy. And they can reap dream benefits, such as the publisher’s ability to send out expensive influencer boxes or put their work out in gorgeous deluxe or collectible editions, another publishing trend that has synergy with the Romantasy market.

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A perusal of popular Romantasy titles reveals perhaps even more groundbreaking developments. Blue Box Press co-founder Liz Berry, speaking to Publishers Weekly, says of star author Jennifer Armentrout that “she has a capability to drive the plot and romance forward, while mixing character development with high-concept plotting, that few people have”. I found this type of clean forward motion — a grasp of the essentials of storytelling — in all the highly recommended titles I tried. I also found tight writing and world-building, atmospheric and fun detail, crisp conflicts, exciting high stakes, and two engines of narrative pleasure — a romance plot and fantasy-adventure plot — for the price of one.

There’s a common opinion in writing and publishing circles that the reason for declining book sales is that the readers are uninterested in or unable to appreciate great work. However, in the mega-hits of this unusually reader-selected genre, there were few of the errors that make bad mass-market fiction so bad, such as inconsistent characters with unclear motivations, convoluted plotting, unnecessary detail or description, and clunky dialogue. The knack for keeping the finger on the pulse of the story tends to cut away such dross, and the readers, it turns out, can recognize it.

The readers don’t care, however, about most of the rules of good writing. The Romantasy characters I encountered were psychologically consistent, but not necessarily complex or psychologically real. The prose was sometimes laden with clichés. Every broomstick offers an echo of Harry Potter, every magical wall taps Game of Thrones. And the narrative voices are quite simply contemporary, regardless of where in time or space the books are set. Characters in Medieval-ish settings have thoughts such as “painkillers are awesome”. They use the magical equivalent of the internet, love fashion and shopping, have anxiety attacks, and display modern values like girl-power and casual promiscuity.

Romantasy writers are the lawless “bumpkin dandies” found in Melville’s New Bedford, for sure, but they can tell a great story, and I found something liberating in their freedom. If more writers were trying to grab readers directly, literature would be better off.

The definitions that work best are deliberately imprecise. Love is “kind of like when you see a fog in the morning… before the sun comes out” (Charles Bukowski); or “a bright stain on the vision, blotting out reason” (Robert Graves); or “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” (Iris Murdoch). A friend of mine, after considering the question, produced his favourite cookery book, from which he had entertained countless friends and family. Love is a different thing to each of us, and everything to all of us. It leaves us enormously vulnerable: we know what it is for sure when we lose it.

In recent years, neuroscientists have tried to explain love in terms of the brain chemicals that accompany it, which have a powerful influence on our behaviour. Is that sufficient? Can this thing that “looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”, as Shakespeare had it, really be understood as a neurological condition?

This question is at the heart of Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect. It tells the story of two young people who enrol in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. During the trial they fall for each other and then worry whether what they’re feeling is real or merely “chemical”, a side-effect of the drug. Things get even more confusing when one of them learns she’s on a placebo, which convinces her that she can’t possibly be feeling for her lover what he feels for her. If love is a drug, can a drug lead to love? Not while you’re still on it, she seems to be saying.

The Effect is fraught with existential angst about the nature of emotional health and how we interpret what we feel. We learn, for example, that the clinical psychiatrist who is running the trial suffers from long-term depression, a condition she has chosen never to be treated for: she believes that the drugs don’t work, and in line with a particular strand of philosophical thinking views the illness as a grand existential tragedy or the natural state of things. The central conundrum — is love authentic if it’s manipulated by chemicals? — is never fully answered, though the ending gives us pause when the protagonists walk off hand-in-hand and drug-free into their uncertain futures looking a lot more loving than they did at any time during their chemical romance.

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At a certain level, love is all about chemistry. Neuroscientists have found that different kinds of love are associated with different hormones and neurotransmitters. Sexual desire is driven by testosterone, whose main purpose seems to be to encourage us to have sex with as many partners as possible. Romantic love, that giddy, obsessive state designed to win us the affections of a particular partner, is the brain’s dopamine reward system on overdrive — a hit for every Whatsapp message returned, every infatuated thought of the beloved. Meanwhile, those warm feelings of security and connection characteristic of long-term attachment are marked by increased levels of vasopressin and oxytocin.

None of this really cuts it as an explanation. Reducing love to its neural correlates may tell us something about how the brain affects behaviour, but it doesn’t work as an answer to the important questions about what it all means. It doesn’t begin to account for the vastness of the enterprise.

We can learn a little more from a different area of science: psychology. Over the past four decades, the psychologist John Gottman and his team have studied thousands of couples at their “love lab” in Seattle to try to understand the ingredients of a successful partnership. They claim they can predict to over 90% accuracy whether two people will stay together simply by watching the way they communicate: how they manage conflict and how empathic they are towards each other. In the strongest relationships, positive behaviours towards the other person (humour, affection, empathy) outweigh negative behaviours (criticism, defensiveness, contempt) by at least five to one. Love is kind: we can agree on that at least.

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We can agree also that kindness, and therefore love, requires selflessness, a deliberate reaching beyond ourselves in recognition or consideration of another. Iris Murdoch called it unselfing, the capacity both to imagine the lives of others and to find them beautiful. It is quite different to the popular idea of love as some kind of union or fusion, the notion that two lovers must complete each other. This is upselfing rather than unselfing. Not only does it set impossibly high expectations, it also regards a relationship as a vehicle for satisfying our own needs. Such an approach is unlikely to lead to love. Better to start with the thought that the other person may want something very different from us, and then do our best to provide it.

For all our selfless efforts and good intentions, some love affairs may simply not be destined to turn into loving relationships. It can be very difficult to find someone with whom we are truly compatible. How can we raise the odds of picking a winner at the start?

Psychology can help us here too. Certain shared traits have been found to be indicative of strong relationships. For example, couples who stick together tend to share a similar level of general intelligence, and a similar level of attractiveness (as rated by others). Psychological studies have also demonstrated the importance of shared values. Values are a measure of your moral and cultural outlook, the way you see the world. Disagree too much in your attitudes towards things like fidelity (are you happy for your partner to sleep around?), idealism (liberal or conservative?) and family (how important to you are your relatives?) and you’re in for a rocky ride.

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A few years ago, I ran a dating website called 21Pictures where we paid close attention to these kinds of findings. The aim was to use insights from psychology to give people the best chance of meeting someone compatible. We designed the website to match people on their core values, rather than on their interests, habits, and other preferences that most dating sites rely on (these are far less significant to compatibility). We also encouraged users to make more intuitive choices by getting them to describe their lives in pictures, since pictures are better than words at conveying the kind of contextual information that potential partners find useful. We wanted to make online dating as much like real-world dating as possible. 21Pictures ran for just a couple of years and had only a few hundred active users, but we had some success: at least one couple who met on the site ended up getting married.

One thing we pondered at 21Pictures but never had enough data to investigate was the extent to which people’s expectations for relationships or love are shaped by their background or culture. Evidence from anthropologists suggests there is an effect, though only up to a point. Culture seems to have an influence on the kind of person we prefer as a mate: for example, young people in China, India and predominantly Muslim countries prefer their partner to be chaste, in Western countries not so much. Likewise, the relentless idealisation of romantic love that permeates the West is less evident in Asian and other collectivist cultures, which emphasise family ties and community responsibility over individual gratification (at least publicly).

In general, however, anthropologists believe that the basic experience of love is universal, driven by innate biological mechanisms. One study from the Nineties found that romantic love was commonplace in 147 of the 166 cultures it looked at (the researchers said they failed to measure it in the other 19 due to “ethnographic oversight” rather than cultural norms). The expression of love can be thwarted temporarily by the dictates of totalitarian regimes (China under Mao) or religions (the Christian Church in Medieval times), or by the constraints of mental illness. But as a possibility, it seems to be indestructible.

This transcendent quality of love is heartening since it is perhaps the one enduring truth that everyone can agree on. Love is as universal as grief. The inevitability of it unites us all, even as we struggle to understand it.

The YouTube influencer SheRa Seven’s advice for young women is as sharp as the wings of her black eyeliner. To single ladies, she offers the following on sex: “The longer you hold off, the more that he will like you.” To married ones: “Don’t give it up every time he want it. Make him wait, make him work for it still. Gotta make him chase!”

This chaste strategy, promoted by straight-talking female influencers with lush lips and eyelash extensions, is everywhere at the moment, proliferating under TikTok hashtags such as #feminineenergy and #lawofattraction. The women who swear by it have been compared with the pick-up artist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, which has provoked a whole host of articles explaining why this comparison is extremely wrong and offensive. But it’s easy to see how these women might serve as a sort of funhouse mirror to the manosphere pick-up artists.

And yet, the advice pumped out by SheRa Seven and her kind appears to have much less in common with its contemporary male counterpart than it does with the self-help gurus of eras past. At least superficially. “Gotta make him chase” is just a reboot of “play hard to get” — a central tenet of one of 1995’s bestselling books, The Rules. Subtitled, “Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right”, it effectively schooled young single women in the art of entrapping — that is, enticing — a man. The rules number in the dozens, but they all circle the same fundamental thesis: that a woman must use her feminine wiles to stoke a man’s prey drive, just as hunters use fake rabbits on a string to train their hounds.

On this front, The Rules differs very little from the advice of contemporary dating influencers — or indeed the archaic courtship norms that ruled before the sexual revolution. And as with the YouTubers whose CashApp usernames are prominently displayed on their video content, then as now there was a certain amount of grift involved. A Time magazine article from 1996 announced: “The Rules is not just a book; it’s a movement. Around the country, Rules Girls are… paying $45 a pop to attend Rules seminars and forking over $250 an hour for phone consultations with authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider — neither of whom is a credentialed anything.”

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Of course, the influencers would say that their own lives are credential enough. They are, after all, the patient-zero success story for the strategies they’re selling. In the Nineties, the women who wrote The Rules held up their own successful marriages as proof that their method worked; today, in a YouTube video entitled “How to receive princess treatment” with one million views, TheWizardLiz says: “I want you to look at this video and think, whoa, if Liz expects this much from her partner, then maybe I can expect my partner to at least give me some respect.”

That this brand of self-help is having a resurgence right now is hardly surprising. The sexual revolution, whatever its benefits, also blew up virtually all the social structures and strictures that used to regulate romantic entanglements, leaving young people to navigate a lawless, chaotic landscape in which there’s no guarantee that the person you’re sleeping with even likes you, let alone intends to commit. Almost every trend in this sphere — from the demisexuals who insist that requiring an emotional connection before sex represents a protected identity category to the ubiquitous therapy-speak that turns ordinary disappointments into pathologies — represents an attempt by young women to reestablish some sort of order, to make their romantic and sexual lives make sense. And when young women are less likely to be looking for Mr. Right than hunting for the red flags that reveal a man to be undateable, it’s not hard to see the appeal of imposing a rigid framework on the whole endeavour, even if that framework is rooted in manipulation and pretence.

And yet, there is one major difference: for the Rules Girl, all this romantic espionage was ultimately a marriage plot. Yes, there was a material element — the big honking diamond ring on the book’s cover isn’t exactly subtle — but there was also the question, right there in the subtitle, of a man’s heart and how to ensnare it. The endgame was love, marriage, a committed partnership. The endgame was finding your person.

The new Rules-esque paradigm, on the other hand, wants little to do with that. The woman who successfully employs these methods isn’t loved; she’s pampered, paid for, and worshipped like the goddess she is. If marriage is mentioned, it’s as a business arrangement, one in which the woman trades her presence — and, if her husband plays his cards right, sex — for being kept in the manner to which she’s accustomed. Men are meant to be milked for all they’re worth and summarily discarded the moment they step out of line. One of the movement’s biggest influencers, Chidera Eggerue, actually got her start as an evangelist for the “dump him” school of feminism, which is exactly what it sounds like. The central thesis is that any relationship which makes demands on a woman’s time, energy and attention — which is to say, every relationship, ever — is better off terminated so that she can focus on the only thing that truly matters: herself.

Posting under the moniker “Slumflower”, Eggerue bemoans the “internalised misogyny” of heterosexual women who yearn to fall in love, who see any value in it at all. “YOU are the beginning and end of everything wonderful that could ever occur in your life,” she has written. Other influencers, such as SheRa Seven, insist that romantic love itself is a lie and a pipe dream; if you want to experience real love, she advises, your best bet is to have children.

Given how hard it leans into a certain variety of hardline gender stereotyping, you’d think the business-minded dating strategy peddled by influencers would overlap with the burgeoning trad movement, represented by antifeminist commentators such as Pearl Davis. (Davis is the purveyor of such spicy-hot takes as, “Can we at least admit a chick not being a virgin on her wedding day is equally as bad as a man cheating??”) In fact, it has far more parallels with a mainstream, #MeToo-era, progressive view of relationships — one in which love and lust and fondness are replaced by a bleak, transactional vision of romance, in which the only meaningful currency is power, and the only thing that matters is who is wielding it.

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As such, perhaps it’s no surprise that some people — including the influencers themselves — insist that there’s something feminist about all this. Mainly, this seems like the result of confusing power, the kind a woman can wield over a man through manipulation and subterfuge, with the empowerment of women at large. So if the man is reduced to an object — say, his wallet — and the woman gets what she wants, the woman wins, and hence… feminism? As one outraged letter to the editor from a reader who took exception to the Andrew Tate comparisons insisted: “Some women tackle power inequalities in society by the manipulation, exploitation or indeed humiliation of men, but this takes place within the context of the gender hierarchy where men retain pre-eminence.”

Granted, if you imagine that women are the eternal underdog in a relationship landscape ruled by patriarchy, it’s possible to convince yourself that literally anything you do at the expense of a man — including batting eyelashes until he buys you shoes — is a form of female empowerment. Just ignore the part where it reinforces rather than subverts every gendered stereotype of women as hypergamous gold diggers. This is how men who manipulate women’s psychology to get them into bed can be derided as loathsome misogynists, while women who take a similar approach with men are yass kweened all the way home.

But they’re both playing the same game; indeed, they couldn’t exist without each other. And more than that, they’re making the same mistake with their suspicious, mistrustful approach to the opposite sex. The pick-up artists instruct that women need to be tricked into giving up sex, their sole asset in the dating marketplace; the dump-him feminists do the same with men and their money. What both fail to understand, or maybe don’t want to, is that the desire for love and companionship doesn’t break down along gendered lines. Most people want to fall in love. Most people want to find a partner. And most people understand that these desires are not grotesque weaknesses, but a normal — and, if you’re lucky, wonderful — part of the human experience.

Into this swamp of heteropessimism wades Curtis Sittenfeld, with the new novel, Romantic Comedy. Her protagonist, Sally, a writer for a late-night comedy show, invents the “Danny Horst Rule” — to describe the propensity of her male colleagues to date out of their league. (The character after which it is named is a thinly-veiled avatar for Pete Davidson; Night Owls, the comedy show, for Saturday Night Live.) Women in the industry, Sally notes, never manage to do the same.

“Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models,” reads the blurb. He and Sally hit it off “instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy — it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her… right?”

“… right?”, as they say, is doing a lot of work here. The entire plot of Romantic Comedy hinges on Sally’s supposedly unshakeable belief in her own unworthiness, which makes it very now; the insecure, self-sabotaging heroine is to the 2023 romance what the adorably clumsy girl was to the rom-coms of the Nineties. But what’s more remarkable about the novel is how it straddles two different worlds, and worldviews, when it comes to love: here we have the age-old yearning for a happy ending, right alongside the current vogue for being ashamed of wanting one. Sittenfeld somehow captures not just the current state of the romantic comedy, but of heterosexual romance more broadly — and in doing so, reveals that there is nothing funny about it.

It has been a quarter of a century since a girl stood in front of a boy and asked for him to love her, and 35 years since Harry met Sally. Now, we have Sittenfeld’s Sally, glumly deciding not to break off her tepid occasional relationship with a guy she met online, because “doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment”.

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Sally inhabits the same world, and worldview, as Sittenfeld’s professional, liberal, millennial target reader; their anxieties and preoccupations are also hers, as is their unifying conviction that men will inevitably disappoint you. It is only a matter of when and how. The outing of bad men has come to function as a sort of single woman’s spectator sport, as if the inevitable unmasking of a boyfriend as a liar, a cheater, a serial killer, or (worst of all) a Republican is not just fun in its own right but actually the whole point.

It’s not difficult to tease out the contributing factors that led us here. The highly individualised notion that relationships should be first and foremost about self-fulfilment. The devaluation of loyalty and companionship. A therapised culture that treats the process of falling in love and establishing intimacy as something sinister and pathological. And of course, the pervasive (and not incorrect) sense that someone new is only ever a Tinder swipe away. It’s not a coincidence, in this cynical moment, that our most viral relationship stories are not about falling in love, but breaking up, giving rise to a genre of personal essay that is ostensibly about female empowerment but works much more like something akin to revenge porn.

To air your ex’s dirty laundry in the pages of a national publication is increasingly presented as a radical act of self-care, sisterhood, even social justice. As one refreshingly critical response put it: “Do this and you will be met with a huge wave of sympathy from strangers on the internet. They will applaud you as a brave truth teller, commendably taking a strike for women everywhere, against the common enemy.”

The ex-boyfriends in these essays are liars, cheaters, hypocrites. They are threatened and resentful when a woman succeeds. They are sexually entitled and emotionally withholding. But most of all, they are ordinary. It is understood that what they did to their long-suffering girlfriends is simply what men do to women — or, more to the point, what they make women do to themselves. “The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” wrote one such author in the Guardian. “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.”

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Sally’s failed starter marriage (already over by the time the book begins) could be ripped from one of the aforementioned viral essays: when she flies to New York for her Night Owls interview and gets offered the gig on the spot, her husband, a lawyer, not only assumes she’ll decline, but confesses that he only indulged her repeatedly auditioning for the job because he assumed she’d never get it. Sally, of course, cites this as evidence that her ex “didn’t think I was funny or talented” — as opposed to, say, an awareness of the statistical likelihood of a non-industry professional becoming a literal overnight success in the most elite comedy writers’ room in the country. This penchant for taking things personally rears its head in her new relationship, too: “If I were a hot twenty-five-year-old actress, would you have dropped my hand like that?” she snipes at Noah, after the two are ambushed by paparazzi.

Sittenfeld, surely, could not have imagined how perfectly this book would slot into our current cultural obsession with the shortcomings of heterosexual men. A dim view of romance, of men, and of the women who want them, is ubiquitous enough that it permeates the New York Times review of Romantic Comedy, in which writer Scaachi Koul scathingly describes Sally’s pop star suitor as “a manic pixie dream boy for straight white women of a certain age”. (As opposed to the manic pixie dream girl who populated the turn-of-the-century rom-com.) These men, it’s understood, do not exist in real life.

And yet, a recent, much-discussed break-up piece by poet Maggie Smith gave rise to the fascinating spectacle of, well, straight white men of a certain age, violently competing for the role of real life manic pixie dream boy. “Can you imagine being partnered with a writer as successful as Maggie Smith — MAGGIE SMITH — and you’re pissed off that she’s not doing the dishes enough or isn’t folding the laundry or running the vacuum or doing bath time as much as you are sometimes,” read one representative thread — from a man whose Bumble profile almost certainly includes a photograph of himself in a This Is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirt. “[Come] on man your partner is living the dream, and even if she toiled in obscurity, fuck, support her with your every effort.”

What are we to make of the notion that even in this hypothetical paradise of gender equity, a woman is not respected for her status as an equal contributor to the household, but rather indulged, on the basis of her sex, in a way that we categorically do not associate with adults?

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We can only look back with chagrin, much like the protagonist of one of those Nineties movies. But the sad-verging-on-nonexistent state of the rom-com in 2023 surely stems, at least in part, from the conflicted relationship we have with the love stories we tell inside the confines of our own heads. A book like Romantic Comedy is the product of a world full of generalised complaints about the glut of exceptional women for whom no man can possibly be good enough: these are not stories about men, but about women, and how we wish to see ourselves in the narrative of our own lives. If the novel is a mirror for young women’s anxieties, it’s not an ordinary one, but more like one of those fairy-tale looking glasses that is more likely to tell you flattering lies than the truth.

Of course, we already have love stories about people (men, usually) whose desire for someone (not always a woman) is inextricably intertwined with shame and contempt: Pretty Woman, Brokeback Mountain, Ever After. The idea that the shame and contempt is valid, though, or that the person who feels it can be the hero without ever confronting her hubris: that’s new. When we start out ashamed of who and what we want — and what we want is an entire category of person pre-labelled as “trash” — what kind of stories do we tell to justify wanting it anyway? To get it without loosening our grip on our sense of superiority?

The answer, at least sometimes, seems to be that we retreat into helplessness. Women relinquish their agency in favour of vague mumblings about how we can hardly be blamed for our poor romantic outcomes. As in Romantic Comedy, this defeatism sometimes masks itself as vulnerability. It’s not, though. Sally doesn’t believe she’s unworthy of love. It’s more cynical than that. She just doesn’t really believe in love, full stop. What with all this male power, privilege, and patriarchy swirling like a miasma over our lives, there’s no hope of it. And if the old avatar for romantic regret was Joan Jett snarling, “I hate myself for loving you,” our new one looks more like Taylor Swift moaning, “Look what you made me do” — as she carefully, deliberately shreds the reputation of every man who broke her heart.

Crooner, an angelic-looking 24-year-old YouTuber from Southern California, has a lot of experience with Replika. In 2019, as part of research for his undergraduate thesis, he signed up for a programme that involved early beta testing of the app. He wanted to study the philosophy of AI.

“Replika claims to be therapeutic,” he told me, “but there’s something sad about how it takes you away from other humans. I honestly predict more and more guys will be earnestly falling in love due to AI girlfriends and abandoning real romance.” He very much believes in love. He thinks the internet needs more of it.

I discovered Crooner on Twitter, when we were both tagged in a thread about internet culture. He responded to one of my comments with a link to a YouTube video. “I have a theory about incels,” he wrote.

Crooner’s videos analyse the digital spaces we inhabit. One of them opens with him putting on a shirt and tie, fixing his longish, floppy locks, and then sitting behind an enormous plate of spaghetti and two flickering votives: a candlelit dinner. The word “nervous…” scrolls across the bottom, before a Zoom prompt appears. “Emily has entered the waiting room.” Emily, a telegenic blond, fills the left half of the screen. Crooner offers her something to eat, a gesture across cyberspace, and they go on to discuss her thoughts about Rapunzel, phenomenology, and their shared history of taking e-relationships offline.

This video is part of Crooner’s “E-Girl Museum” series, which features split-screen interviews with female YouTubers. Crooner is very interested in e-girls, who have had a profound impact on his sense of self, his romantic life, and even his creative pursuits. “They’ve been more real to me than IRL girls, in a way, if that makes sense, in the space they take up in my imagination,” he says with direct, cheerful conviction.

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Incels are very interested in e-girls too. So interested, in fact, that on incel forums, which I have spent a lot of time researching, discussion of them is essentially forbidden, restricted to a very specific context: references must be broad, and broadly negative. Anything else is considered “simping” — an offence punishable with a ban. Incels resent the attention lavished on these young women, and endlessly criticise their insatiable desire for attention, their licentiousness, their greed. OnlyFans creators, the ultimate e-girls, represent everything wrong with the world: narcissism, female privilege, sexual depravity, and financial abuse.

But Crooner sees it differently. “They play these roles, maybe a Rapunzel type, or the manic pixie, the chaotic e-girl, who compels the boy to save her. This forces him to shape up. It gives him the chance to become a hero.” He isn’t interested in judging anyone, or in identifying their dysfunction. I tell him that the story of Rapunzel is thought to represent Borderline Personality Disorder resulting from narcissistic parental abuse. He laughs, and then acknowledges that a staggering proportion of e-girls talk about having the disorder “compared to normie spaces”.

“I play this kind of ‘searching lover’ young man,” Crooner explains. “I do some philosophy too, but I’m showing people my quest for the holy grail.”  His videos and his timeline are filled with depictions of knights: young men in medieval armour. One of his most popular tweets bears the image of Leonardo DiCaprio from Romeo and Juliet, dressed in chainmail for the masquerade ball, alongside the Knight of Cups tarot. It says: “You’re not an incel. You’re an Arthurian Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail.” His Twitter handle is @heropilled.

“This is what me and my friends, who I’m calling the e-Romantics, are onto right now: trying to flesh out the right mythos for the incel.” He believes that incels are in dire need of a different narrative about themselves and who they could be.

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Flandalff the White is one of Crooner’s friends, and his aims are similar, though he is more private. “I think there’s a way to help lift men out of the ‘swamp of sadness’ so many are stuck in. I managed to crawl out of it myself, so I feel I may have a few insights that might help.” He is producing a series of YouTube videos based on an 800-tweet thread. Before he agreed to speak to me, he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to characterise him as “anti-incel”. “Incels are my brothers,” he said. “We all sink, or we all float, together.”

Another member of the collective is Tanner, who is edgier than both Flan and Crooner, with an ironic sensibility and a penchant for shitposting. He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself, but he snarks about US politicians of nominal significance, so he’s probably American. In addition to caustically funny satire about “mid-girls” and “coomers”, he writes on Twitter about how Romantic Love was a signature invention of the Middle Ages, a reaction against Christianity. He believes that the e-relationship is “one of the last bastions of romance in the modern age”, because it involves an obstacle to overcome: the distance. “There is a courtship and then a heroic process against the odds.”

After speaking to the e-Romantics, I decided to test-drive some of their content by retweeting it for my own followers, many of whom are incels. They have responded favourably so far to ideas of knights and grails and quests: “That seems wacky. Weird. But fun.” From this crowd, any response at all is noteworthy; one of curiosity rather than cringe is monumental. The e-Romantics seem to be doing something right.

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What they’re doing right would be called, in the field of countering violent extremism, a “counter-narrative”. Several organisations have tried it. The Google-backed tech start-up Moonshot CVE offered the “Redirect Method”, for example, which involved a series of short videos designed to “undermine the extremist narrative” of white supremacism and Islamism. These ostensibly inspirational stories from ostensibly credible messengers were recommended for users who searched certain keywords online. I haven’t seen these videos myself — they’re not publicly available — but after the programme was deployed in 2019, abysmal results were reported.

The alternative narrative of the e-Romantics seems a better fit for incels — better than impersonal propaganda, and also better than the mantra they hear everywhere else: “Just focus on yourself!” We constantly prescribe self-improvement, self-realisation and self-care — elevating and encouraging selfishness as the noblest, healthiest pursuit, while pathologising intimacy and devotion as “codependency” and overearnest attempts at connection as “harassment”. Maybe the root of our relational difficulties is the 21st-century maxim that our most aspirational, “final form” is one of cold, navel-gazing contemplation.

There is clearly hunger for the “hero pill”. The Marvel Universe, and fantasy programming in general, is endlessly expanding. But romantic love is often minimised in these recent iterations — written off as too heteronormative, sexist, ableist. Chivalry is practically a hate crime. But the need to give one’s life meaning, the call to heroism and adventure, is still alive and well in all of us. And in young men, it seems, it can turn into something very dark. Today’s anti-heroes are very appealing. After all, being someone powerful and evil is better than being no one at all.

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Crooner understands where this can lead. “The incel has will but he lacks power, so he manifests his power through ideology, through fascism,” one of his videos explains. But, he goes on, this isn’t the path to happiness. “Have you noticed that fascist statues never smile? They’re not live-laugh-loving.”

I asked Crooner about the dangers of encouraging incels to risk their hearts. Perhaps, for some, the romantic quest might actually be futile; perhaps it will just lead to rejection.

“That’s the quest,” he says. “You don’t lose if you get rejected. A hero has to suffer. You just go on to the next part of the quest. In the meantime, you create. That suffering makes you level up. You can create something beautiful. It’s all about the desire. Keep following that.”

He’s right. Love inspires human greatness. Unrequited love, especially, produces a lot of the best art. And for the e-Romantics, this isn’t about countering violent extremism. They’re not focused on crime prevention or tackling misogyny. They’re just “a ragtag bunch of internet weirdos” without any agenda, who want to change the online landscape so that they can enjoy it more. “It’s our space,” Crooner says. “We live here. Why not make it what we want?”

I’ve had many strange gigs, but being a consultant to the sex industry had the most promise for literary inspiration. Alas, no matter the degree of perversity I surrounded myself with, everything had an air of mediocrity. From brothels to strip clubs to porn sets, it turns out the business of pleasure is as mundane as the business of anything else.

While talking to the owner about the intricacies of “reputational risk”, I caught the eye of the young man heading for the exit (his paramour remained, on the prowl for round two no doubt). I glimpsed his surprisingly anxious eyes. For him, weekday sodomy may have been genuinely transgressive, a moment where his lust overwhelmed all personal injunctions. More than likely though, he was just getting off.

The author and poet Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Anéantir is published today, is renowned for capturing our current state of sexual ambivalence. His novels depict aimless contemporary masculinity, often either institutionalised corporate bores (Extension du domaine de la lutte and Sérotonine) or failed lotharios (Lanzarote, Plateforme, Les particules elémentaires). His most archetypal protagonist is Bruno, from Les particules élémentaires (Atomised, in English), a loner who attempts to sublimate the misery of a broken childhood through hedonistic conquests. His story is a series of bleak, pathetic attempts to gain meaning by attending sex parties with his ageing lover:

Imitating the frenetic rhythm of porn actresses, they brutally jerked his cock in a ridiculous piston motion as though it was a piece of dead meat (the ubiquity of techno in the clubs, rather than more sensual rhythms, probably contributed to the mechanical nature of their technique) . He came quickly, with no real pleasure, and after that, the evening was over as far as he was concerned.

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As the academic Gerald Moore has noted of Bruno: “Nietzsche’s supposedly revolutionary affirmation of life is reduced to the futile but comforting banality of one who hopes that naughty consumption (ice cream!) and unconventional sex are enough to redeem the misery of existence.”

Despite his aggressive ambivalence about sex, Houellebecq’s novels are often lumped within the genre of “transgressive fiction”. Indeed, Houellebecq’s whole persona is seen as a kind of transgression of contemporary norms to many critics. So tightly has this reputation held, that an event was organised in 2018 at which scholars from Australia, England, France, Northern Ireland and Switzerland at the University of London were brought together to “discuss and debate Michel Houellebecq’s cultural transgressions”.

Transgression, as philosopher Michel Foucault defined it in his Preface to Transgression, is a rapture which “opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight…It was originally linked to the divine, or rather, from this limit marked by the sacred it opens the space where the divine functions.”

Transgressive authors of the 20th century generally produced narratives which were virulently anti-social (often sexually graphic and violent); both the junky psychedelia of William S Burroughs and the hip psychopathy of Bret Easton Ellis fit into this mould. The archbishop of transgression, though, is undoubtably the dissident surrealist and “excremental philosopher” Georges Bataille, who not only produced transgressive works, such as his pornographic novel Story of the Eye, but provided a theoretical foundation for the genre in his works Erotism and Literature and Evil.

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For Bataille, civilisation involves a tension between social taboos (norms of rationality, morality and purity) and the desire to transgress into the heterogeneous (madness, evil and filth). “I believe that the Evil — an acute form of Evil — which [literature] expresses, has a sovereign value for us,” he notes.

To cross the threshold from civilised mind into mad ecstasy (even if merely through art), was what gave man a taste of unindividuated nothingness — complete ego-death both terrifying and exquisite. Bataille deemed non-productive sexuality (from orgies to “high prostitution”) to be crucial to this. For him, a brothel was a church. But, as Houellebecq notes in his novels, to the extent that this was ever true, the sexual revolution of the Sixties has led to the de-stigmatisation of sex, rendering it both moral and healthy. Contemporary sexuality is well and truly within the realm of the normative and rational, which is why it is so susceptible to free market transactional logic.

Bataille himself noted that sacred sexuality required taboo: “If there was not in us a prohibition which is deeply opposed to the freedom of our erotic activity, we would not have erotic activity.” But if transgression through virility and violence is now impossible, how then has Houellebecq managed to capture the spirit of transgression? I’d argue he has done it through a particular form of radical honesty.

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Cultural critics who frame Houellebecq as a mere enfant terrible, a provocateur characterised by xenophobia and misogyny, are blind to the deeply spiritual quality of his writing. As a follower of arch-pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Houellebecq’s words hurt, they are painfully true. His ironically titled poem “L’amour, l’amour” includes this cutting stanza:

I speak to all those whom one has never loved, who has never been able to please:
I speak to those absent from liberated sexuality,
from normal enjoyment

Houellebecq’s spiritual pessimism is similar to early 20th century Romanian essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran. Cioran’s cynical aphorisms (“What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself”) sound quintessentially Houellebecqian to modern ears. Interestingly, though, Cioran was also a mystic — for whom nihilism was a passage to the absolute.

The spark of transgression in Houellebecq’s writing, unlike Bataille’s violent sexual drive, is that of raw, emotional fragility. As the (likely self-insert) character of Michel notes in Les Particules élémentaires: “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”

In a 2007 interview with Le magazine littéraire, Houellebecq angrily dismissed comparisons between his work and Bataille, saying: “Pour moi, le sexe et la transgression n’ont rien à voir” (For me, sex and transgression aren’t related), going on to lament “Je n’aime pas cette confusion entre le sexe et le mal qui fait que tous les gens sont hors sujet” (I don’t like the confusion between sex and evil which means real people end up irrelevant).

Following this, Russell Williams argued that perhaps “Houellebecq’s true transgression lies in the extent to which his novels, even in the face of the insidious creep of neoliberalism, consistently champion the outmoded what Barthes terms ‘l’obscénité sentimentale’: old-fashioned romantic love”.

Indeed, despite his cynical view of sex, Houellebecq is an apologist for the self-shattering potential of love. As the character Florent-Claude Labrouste, bemoans in Sérotonine:  “The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.” It is this brutal longing which makes Houellebecq’s novels truly transgressive. He is a hopeless romantic in a world of excess, a sentimentalist in a time of tech-mediated spectacle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening lines to his poem, Loin de bonheur:

The world is disenchanted.
All that has the nature of appearance has the nature of cessation. Yes. And so? I loved her. I love her. From the very first second this love was perfect, complete. You cannot really say that love appears; rather, it manifests itself. If you believe in reincarnation, the phenomenon becomes explicable. The joy of finding again someone you have already met, who you have always already met, forever, in an infinity of previous incarnations.
If you don’t believe in it, it is a mystery.

One such example was in 2018, when one of the housemates, India Willoughby, a TV journalist who was once a man but had transitioned into a transwoman, asked her fellow housemates whether they would go out with a transwoman.

“I believe it’s your choice… I would choose not to,” replied the RnB singer Ginuwine. Willoughby then asked: “You would go out with a woman?” “Yes,” Ginuwine replied. “But you wouldn’t go out with a transsexual woman?” Willoughby hit back. “No,” replied Ginuwine. As the awkward conversation rumbled on, Willoughby suggested that Ginuwine give her a kiss, but he leaned back and said “no”.

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No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

This encounter provoked a social media storm at the time. Some believed Ginuwine was transphobic for rejecting Willoughby. Others insisted he had a right to his preferences. Some even suggested that Willoughby was sexually harassing Ginuwine, by stepping over boundaries he made clear.

Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as “Is it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?” are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they ‘should’ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more ‘open’.

Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are) . But it’s worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or ‘corrective’ rape to “make them straight”. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?

This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, “dating is discrimination”. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?

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Can science ever debate trans issues?

By Jesse Singal

No one should dictate to others who they can or can’t date, love or sleep with. Historic attempts to do so  —  whether through slavery, arcane patriarchal customs or socially and religiously enforced ‘lifelong’ monogamous marriage  —  have led to oppression, trauma, unhappiness and neurosis. Think of the countless unhappy marriages many closeted gay people have had to endure — because they could not be honest about who they really wanted to love, because of the intense social stigma and shame attached to their sexuality. Without the freedom to choose who you date, the modern achievements of personal autonomy and individual liberty are negated.

That said, the question must be asked: are our dating and sexual preferences innocent? Where do they come from? Attraction is a biological impulse, but what lies behind it? Darwinists would say they grow out of our evolutionary origins. Since women are supposedly the ‘choosier’ of the sexes, they choose men who can ‘provide’ for them and protect them. Freudians would say our preferences originate from our childhood. According to the Oedipus complex, men unconsciously choose partners who reflect the most attractive qualities of their mothers (the Electra complex makes the same case about women and fathers.)

Frantz Fanon, meanwhile, would say that forces such as racism and colonialism play a big part in influencing people’s desires and attraction. A racist society constructs certain standards of beauty based on ‘whiteness’, which racial subordinates must conform to if they want to be respected as having any erotic worth. Whiteness equals desirability, so blacks must assimilate to gain recognition and respect. Historically, black women have bleached their skin and relaxed their hair to fit a Eurocentric image — which black men, in turn, have coveted it. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin White Masks:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man…Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Few people would need to read these theories to know that many of us have a ‘type’. You might prefer partners of a certain height, status, hair colour, body shape, and so on (there is even data to suggest that some people are attracted to those who look similar to them.) Such preferences may be oddly specific, and rather superficial, but they are mostly innocuous.

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Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

Some people seek a partner from a similar religious or cultural background — in the hope that this will make it easier for them to relate to one another, or out of a desire to pass on their heritage, traditions and values to future children. This is technically exclusionary for potential partners who lay outside this category — and may even be narrow minded — but such preference is not especially egregious. Still, can predilections mutate into something more sinister?

Because of globalisation, migration, social liberalisation and the rise of online dating, interracial dating has never been more prevalent; the stigma attached to it has mostly dissipated. In 2011 —  the last time such statistics were recorded — it was found that nearly 9% of people in England and Wales were living as part of an interracial relationship (up from 7% in 2001). Moreover, there is data to suggest a correlation between the rise of online dating apps and an increase in interracial relationships.

Yet, there is a paradox. Christian Rudder, co-founder of the dating site OkCupid and author of the 2014 book Dataclysm, which uses data trends to analyse human behaviour, has argued people’s use of online apps doesn’t match up with their professed attitudes. Most people will say, when surveyed, that they are open to dating someone from a different ‘race’; in reality, they tend not to be. According to Rudder’s data, collected between 2009 and 2014 from DateHookup ‘Let’s Meet scores’, women in particular generally preferred men of their own ‘race’.

More brazen are those who, on dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder and Bumble, nonchalantly state their racial preferences on their profile. It’s not uncommon to see caveats like, “Not attracted to Asian men”, “ I don’t date black women”, “I only date white girls” — and it’s difficult to argue that this has nothing to do with racism, which has historically played a role in influencing ideas of who is desirable and who is not.

White women  —  or a particular image of white women  —  have been placed at the top of this aesthetic hierarchy as the paragon of human beauty, with black women languishing at the bottom, portrayed as ugly, unattractive and overweight, and Asian men stereotyped as ‘sexless’, meek and less endowed compared to other ‘races’. American research seems to confirm this, indicating that Asian men and black women are more likely to be excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts as potential dating partners on dating apps.

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The ruthlessness of the sexual marketplace

By James Bloodworth

Herein lies the uncomfortable truth about our so called ‘dating economy’: discrimination is the name of the game. If you are considered attractive or ‘high value’ according to dating market logic, then you have myriad opportunities to meet new people, pursue novel erotic experiences and find romantic fulfilment. You don’t have to be restricted to people within your ‘community’. You can make your own choices and exercise your sexual autonomy to the fullest extent you desire.

But if you are considered unattractive and ‘low value’ then you will be excluded from what Henry Miller called ‘The World of Sex”, a place of freedom and adventure, erotic fufillment and pleasure, and love and companionship. To be deemed undesireable and ‘unfuckable’, of having no erotic worth at all is painful and soul crushing. This shouldn’t merely be sneered at as the delusional whining of losers drunk on entitlement. Human beings need to be loved by others, to pleasure and be pleasured by others, to develop intimate connections with others, to have fun with others. Being the social species we are it demands it. People are not wrong to want it and feel alienated when it proves extremely hard to achieve, because they are not desired by others for being who they are.

In modern society, our erotic selves and sexuality and our innate need for companionship are so intertwined with our personality that to not have the opportunity to fulfil them because you are a sexual minority rejected by the dominant culture, a racially stereotyped, or a socially awkward person is immensely alienating. These conditions will only be heightened even more with the economic decline and further atomisation resulting from Covid-19 and the restrictions meant to contain it.

Yet, discrimination is simply a fact of dating. It doesn’t matter if you are solidly monogamous, polyamorous or a promiscuous nymphomaniac: distinctions are made between those they are attracted to and those they are not attracted to. Dating is not a democracy and nor should it be. This is because choosing potential romantic and sexual partners is rather different from making friends or acquaintances, since these are people who become part of our intimate space, who we may share our bodies and the most personal aspect of our lives with. But, while we have a right to our preferences, we should also be able to critically reflect on why we desire what we desire and what influences it.