What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

They agree, however, that with this one, there’s a newer, calmer, more optimistic Houellebecq: finally, “Houellebecq makes room for love”. With this clumsy ode to the least philosophical Matrix, is Houellebecq perhaps telling us that though it might not look like it, this novel — this sentimental, mushy-penned final novel — is his true masterpiece?

He seems to believe so. As he told Le Monde, “contrary to what a famous formula claims, I think that it is with good feelings that we make good literature”. The murderous misogynists of his earlier books are gone, replaced with a pretty reasonable technocrat who’s nice to his wife (Paul “Raison” — clever!). Indeed, most of the characters are pretty nice. That’s by design: as Houellebecq continued, “the ultimate achievement would be if there were no bad guys at all!”

How can this be the Houellebecq we know and love, the Houellebecq who complained that female readers found it “difficult to accept pure negativity”?

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq has never been known as the greatest of stylists or the fairest of psychologists. When I studied him for an aborted PhD, there were, of course, the requisite titters: he was sexist, he was racist, and what’s more, he was populaire. It’s clear that Houellebecq is an important writer — the most interesting, the most provocative, the most of our time, for better or worse.

Fan as I am, though, his “badness” occasionally frustrated me: could it escape Houellebecq’s attention, I wondered as I read, say, La Possibilité d’une île (2005), that it’s a little unconvincing for a perfectly harmonious couple to calmly and spontaneously dissolve at the very first appearance of ageing on the wife’s previously perfect body?

I don’t know. But now, annihilated by Houellebecq’s 735-page attempt at a less Manichaeian narrative, I mourn the venom. I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.

In the acknowledgments of Anéantir, Houellebecq announces that this will be his last novel. As the title predicts, of course, this is a novel about annihilation. Radical ecologists are attacking Europe, targeting immigrants and artificial reproduction, the only bulwark against the population collapse of the West. Paul’s father is dying. Paul, ultimately, dies. And Houellebecq writes his last book.

On such an occasion, with this strange and sentimental swan song, should we recall what made Houellebecq so wonderful? In a recent defence of Anéantir published in The Spectator, Houellebecq is compared with Balzac, in both his “comparable ambition” and his “tireless work”. This is, of course, familiar to any reader of Houellebecq; not only has he ceaselessly praised Balzac for two decades, but his novels have been peppered with allusions to him.

But Balzac’s ambition wasn’t primarily the psychological complexity of individual characters: his devouring ambition, the one that kept him writing for 15-hour days, on 50 cups of coffee, was to write the complete Comédie humaine of France, the one that would depict in narrative, like a map in lines, French reality from the Restoration to the July Monarchy. These 91 novels, furiously written by a man who had tried to be a respectable, bourgeois lawyer, and ended up wearing Middle Eastern robes and writing through chronic illness, are a capsule of a time of dizzying social and economic change. They are not about people; they are about people in a society. Many of his novels, indeed, were designated “studies”.

So, too, in Houellebecq: like his hero, he gives his characters, at his best, birthplaces, birthdates, and parents. Like his hero, he has an encyclopaedic bent, a desire to explain, a will to knowledge. Like his hero, he wants to understand what on Earth is going on. The laziest critics of Houellebecq dismiss him as a novelist of the patriarchal white male, who doesn’t “recognise that it is societal structures such as poverty, racism, colonialism and inequality that are the source of men’s suffering”. But this is precisely where Houellebecq succeeds: he does recognise that society is making us miserable.

That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.

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How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.

Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.

In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).

In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.

Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.

You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.

And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.

Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.

That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”

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Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés”.

There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.

All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.

The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.

The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.

Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.

In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.

Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.

***

This article was first published in January 2022, when the French edition of Annihilation was released. 

For those too young to have witnessed the great metrosexual panic of the late Nineties and early 2000s, it’s hard to explain just how worked up we all were by the realisation that there were men out there who conditioned their hair and moisturised their faces and wore clothes that actually fit, and yet who were somehow — and here, the mind boggled — not gay. In 2003, “metrosexual” was Word of the Year; in June, it was subject to a writeup in the New York Times Style, under the winking headline, “Metrosexuals Come Out”. By December, it was showing up in everything from celebrity profiles to book reviews to think pieces pondering whether the metrosexual was definitionally metropolitan, or whether men in the suburbs could get in on this new brand of masculinity too. Threaded through it all was a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop: the metrosexuals were into women, or so they said, but they obviously weren’t straight in the same sense as the cowboys, lumberjacks and plumbers of the world.

Like many Style-section pieces, the struggle to define the boundaries of metrosexuality was ultimately more about marketing than identity: “Along with terms like ‘PoMosexual,’ ‘just gay enough’ and ‘flaming heterosexuals,’ the word metrosexual is now gaining currency among American marketers who are fumbling for a term to describe this new type of feminized man,” wrote the New York Times. Then, as now, we weren’t quite sure how men should be; the metrosexual was an early hint that one possible answer was: more like women.

Today, metrosexuals are recognisable as an early prototype of affinity-based identities, the kind that describe how you present yourself instead of what you do (see: the straight-married women in their thirties who have never slept with a woman but self-identify as “queer“). Although some metrosexuals of the early 2000s dabbled in gender nonconformity — with painted nails and skirts and such — in a way that might now be referred to as “queerbaiting”, metrosexuality wasn’t ever really about who these men wanted to have sex with. It was about masculinity, and what that was supposed to look like, and particularly about how this new breed of man would be received by women.

As for this, feelings were mixed. For some women, perhaps the kind who perk up at the phrase “couples spa trip”, a metrosexual boyfriend represented the best of both worlds; for others, these men invited comparisons that tended to make us feel, if not unfeminine, then at least like slobs. In my early twenties, at the peak of the Metrosexual Discourse, I won a trip for two to a ranch in Texas after entering an essay contest in which entrants were asked to describe why their metrosexual boyfriends needed lessons in manliness. I gamely joked about how my boyfriend’s predilection for pink shirts and casual use of the phrase “mani-pedi” were becoming relationship dealbreakers, but looking back, what strikes me is that this was less about masculinity than a bad match. The poor guy didn’t need manliness lessons; he just needed a different girlfriend, ideally one who shared his interest in nail care.

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But the is-he-or-isn’t-he jokes among women also masked a quiet sense of desperation. Most straight men had come to approach matters of grooming and culture with an aggressive indifference: an approach that flew in the face of historical norms. It wasn’t just that the metrosexual had an obvious precursor in the fashionable dandy of yore; being mannered and being marriageable had always gone hand in hand. Jane Austen’s eligible bachelors dressed for an occasion, and even the hyper-masculine James Bond was fussy about the cut of his tuxedo. But sometime in the mid-20th century, those associations began to shift, perhaps fuelled by a Sixties protest culture that recast civilised norms — things like haircuts and suits — as tools of oppression. The masculine ideal morphed from Cary Grant in North by Northwest to something far scruffier, unshaven and untucked.

And once caring about your appearance became square, it was only a matter of time before it also became (homo)sexually suspect, culminating in the Nineties nadir wherein every sitcom couple included a schlubby man paired with an impossibly hot wife. Straight men asserted their straightness via a sort of peacocking in reverse: whoever wore the worst outfit was probably the most heterosexual. Not even the sexiest man alive could make these terrible clothes look good.

One can detect a confluence of factors at play here, including the downstream effects of tech replacing finance as the nexus of male power and influence. Suddenly, the biggest boss in the room wasn’t a Wall Street VP in a three-piece suit, but a gawky geek who had never been interested in clothes nor looked especially good in them. For these guys, disentangling basic male fashion and grooming standards from male sex appeal may have functioned as a sort of revenge — not just against the preppy bullies and jocks of high school, but against the oppressive notion that appearances should matter at all. At the same time, the increased visibility of gay men in elite cultural spaces — art, fashion, food — combined with the casual homophobia of the era to create a visceral sense that culture itself was “gay”, a word that became synonymous with “uncool”.

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And so the heterosexual man of the moment was identifiable not only by his Seinfeldian pairing of ill-fitting jeans and chunky white basketball shoes, but by an adolescent distaste for anything more highbrow than a Die Hard movie. These guys didn’t dance, didn’t cook, and definitely didn’t care about art or films or music. If metrosexuality was about straight men who didn’t mind seeming a little bit swishy, it was arguably an overdue response to straightness having become synonymous with having the sartorial and cultural tastes of a five-year-old. At a moment when raunch culture was on its last legs but the soft boy had not yet made his debut, metrosexuals were like a gateway drug to a new, more mature, sensitivity-trained brand of masculinity.

And once men started to care what they looked like, a massive vibe shift ensued: more stylish clothing, for instance, meant slimmer silhouettes, which meant more time at the gym, which meant that metrosexuals were targets for not just fashion and grooming but fitness and nutrition products as well. We think of them as a sociological phenomenon, but as the New York Times pointed out: they were a marketing demographic first. You can practically see the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of a marketing executive quoted in the original writeup on this emerging category of man: ”The guy who drinks Grey Goose is willing to pay extra,” he said. ”He does it in all things in his life. He doesn’t buy green beans, he buys haricots verts.”

First you make a person believe that spending $40 on shampoo isn’t vain or frivolous; then, you convince him that actually, the shampoo is a form of self-care. This is the logic that has long persuaded women to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year on skincare, makeup and beauty treatments; but it’s also a logic that persuades men to adopt the same neuroses women have long struggled with around fashion, aging, and physical fitness.

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And persuaded they are: men are now seeking out tweakments in record numbers, and suffering from body dysmorphia at greater rates than ever before. TikTok “looksmaxxers” trade tips on proper skincare; Twitter accounts scold men for sartorial crimes like improperly matching a formal tie with a rugged sport coat. Caring about how you look has been fully recoded from a niche, suspicious twist on traditional masculinity to an obligation, as it has always been for women. The sexual suspicion surrounding men being effeminately preoccupied with their faces has disappeared. Indeed, a key tenet of looksmaxxing is that the young men who do it make themselves more attractive to women — and why not, when there’s no perceived paradox between wanting to be desired by women and wanting to behave more like them?

The past 10 years have not only encouraged men to adopt the same neuroses as women about what other people think of their skin and hair and bodies, but to constitutionally reorient themselves toward the feminine. Consider how often are men instructed that they need to be more feelings-oriented, less assertive, more empathic, less status-seeking — or how male sexuality, or even just sexual interest, is increasingly understood as inherently predatory and dangerous. Consider the 2018 American Psychological Association press release which declared that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful”, and all but announced the profession’s intent to wage war on manhood, one 50-minute therapy session at a time. Consider the summer blockbuster Barbie, in which the previously effeminate Ken’s newfound masculinity is presented as both a profoundly malevolent force and an absurd punchline.

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Replacing old-school masculinity with metrosexuality may be the least objectionable way in which our concept of ideal manhood keeps tipping incrementally toward the feminine. Certainly, as a straight woman, I’m in no hurry to return to a time when men proved their heterosexual bona fides by competing to see who could dress (and sometimes smell) the most like literal garbage. But if boys and men are in crisis, as we are repeatedly and reliably assured they are, I’m also not persuaded that recalibrating the entire world toward a more feminine baseline is the best way to avoid that outcome.

The arc of the metrosexual holds lessons here: we have seen the backlash to a world in which being a man becomes synonymous with being a boor, but we have also seen what happens when that backlash curdles into a sense that masculinity and boorishness cannot be disentangled, and hence should both be rejected wholesale. In a culture that can’t conceive of healthy masculinity — a culture that instructs men that the best way to be is more like a woman — some men will conform. But others, finding nothing they can emulate and nothing to aspire to, will revolt — and it will be ugly.

But a lot has changed for pitbull-type dogs since then. Once featured in children’s comedies and military posters as the emblematic all-American dog, they are now controversial in the USA, banned in Britain and — in their emerging, larger, American Bully XL hybrid form — facing calls for a fresh round of restrictions.

So why own a dog like this today? Who looks at the whole range of dog breeds, and thinks: “Why yes, the ideal pet for me is a massive lump of teeth, claws and muscle, that weighs as much as a muscular adult man and has a reputation for aggression”?

Even leaving aside those who breed and train dogs for illegal fighting, there are clearly some cases where a fierce hunting dog or intimidating, loyal guardian is necessary and valued. But these aren’t generally the dogs who get loose and cause injuries. Instead, it’s usually dogs with hunting, guarding and bloodsports origins kept in unsuitable environments. And this phenomenon is growing increasingly common, for the simple reason that nearly every environment is now unsuitable for a dog with these origins.

Over the last century or so, life has grown increasingly detached from the material world — and especially from the more visceral aspects of material existence where dogs have historically often played a role, such as hunting or physical conflict. Sergeant Stubby was unusual as military dogs go, in serving only as mascot: as far back as Ancient Rome, the Canis Molossus was a massive mastiff-type equipped with a spiked collar for use in battle and military dogs are still in use today. But such visceral types of employment have grown less widespread — either for canines or humans. Instead, over the last century, even non-violent real-world material work has drained away. In its place has emerged an “information economy”, with associated ecosystems of service, caring, and administrative occupations.

In this brave new world of de-materialised work, our relation to once-working dogs has also de-materialised. Many formerly-working dog breeds are now bred for exaggerated show-dog versions of their working traits, or kept simply as pets, with owners doing their best to meet the dogs’ bred-in traits and behaviours with work-like activities. Similarly, a great many human social traits that once served a useful purpose have come to seem redundant too — especially where these concern traditionally masculine-coded activities and social forms. For while the vast majority of “information economy” jobs can be performed by either sex, in practice, they often favour more feminine skill-sets and social strategies.

And as we’ve come adrift from our own limits, something akin to the exaggerated traits seen in show-bred dogs has become discernible in how we present sex differences, too: a cartoonish Instagram masculinity and femininity that have grown more exaggerated, like show-dog traits, in proportion to their loss of material importance.

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This has, in turn, loaded new kinds of meaning onto the dogs we keep, and the reasons (overt or unspoken) why we do so. For as the human-dog relationship has shifted from practical, goal-oriented team-work to an emotional relationship based in affinity, dogs’ traits have increasingly become a means of signalling who we are. In this sense, it has probably never been more true that people tend to resemble their dogs — or at least have some affinity to traits signalled by their dogs.

It’s not a coincidence that pitbull-types — once celebrated for courage, stoicism, feudal loyalty, protectiveness, and capacity for aggression — began falling from favour in the Sixties, the dawn of the mass “information society” and the beginning of the end for “traditional masculinity”. Nor is it a coincidence that their loss of status in America hit a nadir in 1987 with the Pitbull that mauled a California toddler to death while guarding a marijuana field. This was, after all, the point when de-industrialisation began to bite, and thus when traditionally masculine-coded traits also began the same trajectory.

Responsible owners of working-breed dogs will go to considerable lengths to accommodate their pets’ inclinations. But suggesting that we might occasionally need to extend the same consideration to (at least some) men will get you burned at the stake. So instead of seeking outlets for all those human traits we no longer have a use for, they’ve simply become low-status. In tandem, Pitbull ownership, and also what’s left of the style of masculinity it signals, is increasingly associated with the (often criminal) subcultures for whom such breeds are still useful as fighting or protection dogs, and where aggression, loyalty and so on remain socially valued. So, too, they also became symbols for what’s left of this style of masculinity. If they have subsequently become fashionable again, this is via the flashy aesthetic and live-for-the-moment worldview (and sometimes also active participation in the criminality itself) that percolates out of the aggressively macho produced in these subcultures.

The Cuban-American rapper Pitbull spelled out this now deep link between criminal chic and dangerous dogs, explaining that he chose his name because they are “too stupid to lose. And they’re outlawed in Dade County. They’re basically everything that I am.” Pitbull, who resembles a podgy Andrew Tate, propagates much the same aesthetic of conspicuous consumption, priapism and machismo as the notorious pimp-cum-influencer: a worldview that Right-wing commentator Scott Greer described in Tate’s case, as “the rap ethos ‘Fuck Bitches, Get Money’”.

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So when we consider who might deliberately set out to acquire a pet whose main obvious role is as a weapon, the most likely reason is that they want to signal an affinity with traits such as agency, power, and a capacity for violence — and, perhaps, also with the flashy, criminal-adjacent subcultures which are now more or less the only fields in which such traits are valued today. Typically, if the monster dog-owner is a man, this is aspirational; or if the dog-owner is a woman, to convey approval of these traits in men.

But even more than the Pitbull from which it was developed, the Bully epitomises the weirdly empty quality of this machismo-as-fashion-identity. It is there in the breed’s evolution toward ever more exaggerated traits, most notably the ultra-wide, low-slung, bizarre-looking Exotic Bully: all ultra-wide chest and short, burly forelegs but correspondingly prone to illnesses. Like bodybuilders who sculpt their torsos for posting physique, even as they neglect functional fitness and skip leg day, such dogs are bred solely for their Instagrammable air of menace.

And this is the Bully’s tragedy: for unlike the fighting dogs on Britain’s existing banned list, the American Bully XL never had a job, not even a grisly one such as dog-fighting or hunting down fugitives. It has no history as a working dog at all. It is in fact, just as much an accessory as a teacup poodle. The main difference is that the physique required to signal a suitably appealing level of dead-eyed menace makes a Bully XL potentially much more dangerous, in the hands of an irresponsible owner, than even the most irate and badly-trained 5lb fluffball.

Such uselessness is also likely a factor in the recent spate of dog attacks. For if responsible owners of non-working exemplars of a working breed go the extra mile to ensure their pets can do something akin to the activities they were bred for, there is no “for” in the case of the American Bully XL except “looking scary”. And this lack of real purpose leaves these dogs especially vulnerable to purchase for an under-trained, under-stimulated and badly-behaved life as a fashion item.

There are no behavioural requirements for an Instagram prop. No wonder the dogs bred to signal machismo on social media so often end up dangerously out of control, and for this alone I’m in favour of banning the American Bully XL. What about the men who feel an affinity with them?

Well, some 70 years of material pressure and cultural deprecation has thus far failed to obliterate the appeal of machismo, producing only its cartoon postmodern reboot. But while these traits seem persistent, could we make space for them? Perhaps we could have all the nice aspects of our physically undemanding, safe, high-tech society while also re-creating more cultural space for the masculine attributes made redundant by technological innovation. My suspicion, though, is that the modern pitch of ease and automated orderliness is kryptonite to these traits.

This, though, is assuming such orderliness will endure. If our assorted modern declinists, doomers, and climate catastrophists are right, civilised modernity is on track for a long slow implosion. And if this happens, whoever remains will once again be struggling to survive — meaning there’ll be no more cartoons or caricatures. The real dogs of war will slink back out of the shadows, along with the men who command them.

Beanie Babies were designed to be a child’s plaything. About the size of a human hand and made to look like animals — although there was the occasional seasonal ghost or pumpkin or snowman — each character came with a heart-shaped “Ty” tag with a bespoke poem inside. That tag became an avatar for the evolving role of Beanie Babies in American culture; as a secondary market began to boom on sites like eBay, a mint condition Beanie with its authentic tag still in place fetched the highest price.

Beanie Babies followed the trajectory of other collectible crazes from the Eighties and Nineties — baseball cards, Hummel figurines, Pokémon — but their rise was stratospheric by comparison, and, eventually, a whole lot more embarrassing. The Beanie Baby Bubble was not just a significant moment in American consumer history but also a uniquely shameful one. The divorcing couple dividing their Beanie collection on the floor of a Vegas courtroom; the drivers brawling for Beanies on a freeway after a Ty truck tipped over and spilled its contents; the petty criminal who went to prison after killing someone in a Beanie Baby buy gone wrong: these incidents say a lot about our country, and our culture, none of it flattering.

Perhaps this is why The Beanie Bubble seems so ambivalent about the man responsible for the national shame of Beanie mania — and so torn on the question of how responsible he actually was. A central paradox of this story is the view it takes of Warner, who it wants to at once blame for inflicting Beanie Babies on us, while also undermining his claims to having made them a success. Was Ty Warner the evil architect behind the bubble, or a bumbling man-child whose greatest talent was stealing the ideas of the more intelligent women with whom he partnered professionally, as well as, often, romantically?

About two-thirds of the way through, one gets the distinct sense that the film views its central subject with what can only be described as complete and total contempt. The middle-aged Warner is discovered weeping, on the floor, in the dark, by Sheila, his bewildered fiancé (played by Sarah Snook). Ty is supposed to become a stepfather to her daughters — but he’s having an existential crisis. “I can’t be a parent. I’m the child. I need to be taken care of,” he sobs, and collapses with his head in her lap. “Hold me like I’m a little boy!”

Sheila acquiesces, grimacing all the while. She’s completely revolted — as are we, the audience — and yet, also sort of empowered. Who really has the upper hand here: the middle-aged man having a blubbering meltdown, or the woman looking down at him as if a large slug had just crawled into her lap?

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The filmmakers can’t seem to decide — or perhaps more accurately, have chosen a framework for Warner’s story that makes it impossible to know. In this way, it’s of a piece with the contemporary trend for retelling a familiar story through a feminist, or at least female, lens; think Six, the smash-hit musical which emphasises the agency of Henry VIII’s six wives, or the storylines from Hamilton told through the eyes of the women who loved him. The Beanie Bubble assembles a cast of women who operated in Warner’s orbit —  the business partner and girlfriend with whom he first founded the Ty corporation; the young assistant who proved to be a whiz-kid pioneer of online marketing; the single mother whose daughters inspired and helped design the first line of beanie babies — and makes them the film’s narrators. According to The Beanie Bubble, every innovation that made Beanie Babies such a wild success was to some degree either inspired by or stolen from one of these women.

In a moment when our culture is so preoccupied with identitarian “centring” of marginalised characters over privileged ones, it’s not hard to see why storytellers like this tactic. The feminist reframe of a familiar tale is cheaper and easier than coming up with something new and original: Ghostbusters, but with ladies! It can even seem radical and empowering, as long as you don’t think about it too hard. As long as you don’t notice that the active ingredient in these allegedly feminist narratives is often, you know, a man.

As for this movie’s central man, he’s at once loathsome and pathetic, more worm than snake. Galifianakis portrays him as paranoid and grasping but also oddly effete. He’s as obsessive about his own appearance as he is about coiffing and tweezing the technicolour fur of the stuffed Himalayan cats that were his inaugural product; his insatiable desire for plastic surgery is a recurring punchline. Maybe the idea here was to highlight Warner’s belief in the power of self-reinvention — “The number one thing about America is, it’s the land of comebacks,” he says early on — but the whole presentation is so campy, so obviously played for laughs, that it comes across as a suggestion that a truly manly man cannot possibly be interested in fake fur and facelifts. If there’s a feminist lens to be found here, it’s from that strain of feminism that seeks to avenge all the women who chafed at traditional gender roles by levying equally harsh judgment against the men who do the same: more a reinvestment in patriarchy than the subversion thereof.

Perhaps more importantly, though, making a sad, incompetent clown of Warner relieves him of agency for his misdeeds in a way that he probably doesn’t deserve. It’s interesting here to compare the onscreen version of this man to the one in The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, the exhaustively researched book by journalist Zac Bissonnette on which the film was based. In real life, Warner was both a more complex figure and also a darker one: he was, and by all accounts still is, a deeply broken person who couldn’t be made happy by enormous professional success, a man ruled by insecurities that made him less ridiculous than monstrous. 

When the movie departs from its source material, what it leaves out is as important as what it includes. That “hold me like a little boy” moment is in the book; it happened more or less as depicted. But another scene, in which Warner’s co-founder discovers that he’s bugged her office to spy on her, waters down what was in reality a pretty horrifying incident. Warner actually bugged the woman’s house, after one of their breakups — and, years later, tormented her with the audio recordings he’d made of her having sex with another man. There’s little question that this mercurial, egomaniacal, manipulative man was possessed of both the talent to create the Beanie Baby craze and the capacity to use it for evil.

Of course, that would be a pretty sinister turn for a movie whose entertainment value derives mainly from watching Zach Galifianakis strut around like the deranged Willy Wonka of all things plush and poseable. And of course, audiences aren’t especially receptive these days to morally complex films or characters, especially when those characters never do suffer much in the way of externally-imposed consequences for the various harms they caused. (Warner was convicted of tax evasion in 2014, but received no prison time; today, he’s still worth upwards of $2.3 billion.) It’s not hard to see why the Beanie Bubble would opt to portray its main character as a flamboyant man-child rather than as a calculating abuser — or, for that matter, why filmmakers would side-line Warner in the story of his own life, in favour of creating a satisfying albeit shallow fable of female empowerment.

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But the truth about Ty Warner and the women he loved (or didn’t, as the case may be) is bleaker, messier, and far more compelling than a made-for-Hollywood narrative allows. Which brings us back to Sheila, whose real name was Faith McGowan. In the movie, that moment when he sobs on her lap in the dark is the beginning of the end. In the movie, she never allows her feelings for Warner to compromise her autonomy. And in the movie, when he betrays her, she not only leaves him, but makes off like a bandit, selling a bunch of discontinued Beanie Babies right before the bubble bursts.

In real life, on the other hand, Faith McGowan died in 2013, leaving behind a home that was, as described in The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, like a shrine to Warner. There was a glass bookcase full of Ty plush toys prominently displayed. She spent the rest of her life clinging to the memories of the man she almost married; he seems to not have thought about her much at all.

Did the filmmakers give her a better ending? By some standards, yes. It’s certainly more fun this way, to trade the complex reality of Warner’s character for an entertaining caricature, and the ordinary tragedy suffered by McGowan — who, unlike her infuriatingly sensible Hollywood avatar, couldn’t reason her way out of loving a man who was bad for her — for a rote fantasy of female empowerment. But not only is the ending not true, there’s something about the way in which it’s not true that feels a little sleazy. A little cheap. A little bit designed to prey on the human yearning for quick and easy satisfaction. Much in the way that Ty Warner and his Beanie bubble did.

On Saturday night, as police patrolled and harassed residents, Exodus, a local collective, put out the message that a rave was taking place outside of town, hoping to lure the rioters out of Marsh Farm. “It looked like Vietnam,” one of the organisers tells me, “and we wanted to fix that.” And, by and large, they did. Just before sunrise on Sunday, he received a call to say that Marsh Farm had gone silent, but for the birdsong and the shuffling of riot police on empty streets.

“It was beautiful,” he says. The ecstasy of the rave had soothed the disorder. Marsh Farm had been saved. But after the party, the comedown.

By the time Andrew Tate moved to Marsh Farm from Chicago aged 11, it was the “worst area of the worst town” in England. He has spoken about his “brokie days” on the estate: about growing up on welfare with his newly divorced mother and two younger siblings; and about defying the odds to become a millionaire kickboxing champion and “the most Googled man on the planet” (he’s eighth). If Andrew Tate has an origin story, it starts here.

Today, the self-styled “King of Toxic Masculinity” is in Romania on house arrest, charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. To many, he is the man who said that women should bear responsibility for being raped. To his legions of young, male fans, though, he is a Nietzschean superman whose journey — and success — is the ultimate lesson: understand his self-discipline, drive and ambition, and learn how you, too, can become like him. For them, his biography is gospel.

“English people are the most violent people in the world,” Tate said in a video last year. And Marsh Farm lends itself to violence. Tucked away on the margins of Luton town, the sprawling estate, now home to around 10,000 people, is dominated by three 15-storey tower blocks, their residents watching over a disproportionately deprived and unemployed warren that stretches for almost a mile.

“Crime was just an everyday occurrence,” someone who grew up on Marsh Farm at the same time as Tate tells me. You had no choice but to accept it. “If the other residents thought you were a grass or too nosy, you would be burnt out. Your car would be burnt. Your property would be burnt. You would have paint put on your house saying ‘grass’.” I’m told it was completely normal for petrol to be poured through someone’s letterbox and lit with a match.

Marsh Farm’s Lea Manor High School offered little respite. When Tate arrived there in 1997, the school was in special measures and due to be closed.“It was mayhem,” says one of his former classmates. In one incident, a boy stabbed another with a pair of scissors; during another, pupils set fire to the art department. If their behaviour was brazen, that’s because they knew they could get away with it. “Students would drive to school in stolen cars — and then drive on to the sports fields and start doing handbrake turns during school hours.”

Where was Tate during all this? “Andrew,” the friend explains, “would be a part of the crowd that was the furthest away and closest to the exit.” He was, as he adapted to life on Marsh Farm, a shy, unassured child: “He was quiet”; “he wasn’t like he was now”; “I wouldn’t call Andrew a geek, but he wasn’t in the cool group.” Back then, he found comfort on the fringes, content with playing with his Pokémon cards and keeping away from the chaos for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long.

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“He had this American accent,” the friend continues. “And everyone would take the absolute piss out of him all the time. He always used to say ‘Oh my god!’ in a really strong accent and everyone would go for him.” Then, after a few months, a boy started to tease Tate in science class — and he flipped. “I remember Andrew giving him a few punches to the face,” the friend tells me. “Everyone was like ‘Fucking hell! Andrew has lost it!’ After that, Andrew started to behave like a different person. He became a rebel and that made a bit of a cred for him.” Another classmate describes how he remembers Tate swearing at a teacher. “He knew that was how you get respected,” he says. “That’s when the change started. If you can talk the talk and walk the walk, that’s when success comes.”

So Tate learned to swagger. He often describes how, when his family moved to England, he became the “man of the house”. Clinging on to the high of that first fight, he decided what kind of “man” he wanted to be: one who gets what he wants. His friends describe how, at around this time, they used to wistfully watch other residents driving through Marsh Farm in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, desperate to join their ranks. “However, as we got older,” one explains, “we found out it was bullshit. It was just people renting the cars for weddings and whatever else.”

Unlike the others, though, Tate clung on to that dream, partying hard but also working hard to drag himself up. He worked on a fish stall; he sold windows and solar panels; he even returned to Lea Manor High, working as an IT technician before being fired after having sex with the Head Girl.

He thrived, meanwhile, in Luton’s kickboxing rings, a sport he’d taken up in 2005. There, he was King Cobra, who within four years was ranked number one in his division in Europe. But success in the ring wasn’t enough — unless it was garlanded with some sort of status symbol, it was meaningless. “I still remember the day when he bought his Aston Martin DB9,” a friend says, after Tate won £10,000 in a fight. “That was when we started to call him ‘Top G’ [“Top Gangster”]. Because here was a Marsh Farm guy who was renting a one-bedroom flat with his brother — and now he was driving an Aston Martin. He was just starting his businesses and he wasn’t doing fantastic, but he wanted that look. And that is exactly what he got.”

For many, this is where Tate’s first chapter ends and the next begins. And if the first was about aspiration, the next was about escape. He launched a lucrative cam-girl business; he became a four-time kickboxing world champion. When he appeared on Big Brother in 2016, his biography said: “Andrew believes that a man should be able to sleep with as many women as he wants to, but that does not apply to women.”

He then moved to Romania, a place where “corruption is far more accessible” and the #MeToo era had not “destroyed the safety of men”. There, in a warehouse outside of Bucharest, he built a palace and filled it with women, supercars and dumbbells — a monument to his belief that, regardless of where you come from, self-belief and conviction can make you a God. Tate founded an online university where he preached his message. “You are either a disciplined individual or undisciplined individual,” as he would say. “You’re a G when you suffer.” That is the gospel, according to TikTok.

But is it true? What about those boys left behind in Luton? Well, many of them suffered but few became Gs. Tate was “one of the lucky ones”, his childhood friend admits when I ask about the rest of their class. He wasn’t drawn into petty crime. He left. And the unlucky ones? Some are unemployed; others sell drugs for a living. Others were snared by the sordid Carson Grimes.

“Everyone knew about that guy,” Tate’s classmate tells me. “He didn’t actually live in Marsh Farm, but he was the man you went to with stolen goods.” Theft was the least of it. What a handful of local boys knew then, and everyone knows now, is that Grimes was also a modern-day Fagin; a serial abuser, groomer and rapist.

The majority of Grimes’s victims were boys aged between 10 and 14, already lured from broken homes into the peripheries of Luton’s underworld. From there, Grimes drew them into his vortex, promising gifts of money, food and a home that was safe. They were given alcohol and cannabis, and then crack and heroin — it was intended to make them weak; to numb them. Like Tate, these boys were trying to escape. Perhaps, for a moment, they thought they had.

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“Andrew and I were in year seven or eight, and it was mainly happening with the year 11 lot,” the friend says. Whether they knew it or not, they would have known at least one of Grimes’s victims; one schoolmate at Lea Manor who remembers Tate only recently told his family that he had been abused. Twenty years later, he is an alcoholic and suffers from severe depression.

Grimes was at his most predatory in the early 2000s, yet was only arrested in 2018. He was jailed in 2021, convicted of 36 offences against nine children: “class-based stereotypes and prejudice” had “deprived his survivors of justice for many years”, said a detective on the case. Their murky pasts — addictions, criminal records, spells in prison — made them unreliable. Would a jury believe them? And so the authorities looked at their bruises and looked away. Since Grimes’s conviction, at least 11 more victims have come forward. Few doubt that there will be more.

Today, Grimes still haunts Marsh Farm: in both the lives of his victims and the malign current that crackles through any defiled community. Yet when I ask residents if they remember him and his house of horrors, they often look confused: “Which one was he?” One man starts telling me about the paedophile living a few roads away. Another mentions a man who stares at children on buses.

“Women and children can’t walk through the woods at night because of all the stuff that goes on,” says a mother waiting to pick up her 10-year-old daughter from school. “A woman got attacked by two men near here a couple of months ago.” One of the teachers tells me she is hoping to leave the area: “I don’t want my child growing up around here.”

It’s not just that the estate is unsafe, she says, but that there is no community. “People are no longer organised together,” one resident tells me. Even in the Nineties, another explains, “if a woman was being attacked, every man would beat up that person”. Today, “the first thing someone would do would be to pull out their phone and film it”. And this sense of societal breakdown is now built into Marsh Farm. Five years ago, the only pub on the estate was replaced with more council housing; a small shopping centre and market were also knocked down, while almost every parent I speak to bemoans the absence of a community centre for their children.

Amid such fragmentation, criminal activity on Marsh Farm has become more atomised, too. Gangs still operate, but mainly fight with rivals on other estates. Occasionally, Marsh Farm is targeted: cars are still burnt and gang shootings still take place in broad daylight — the most recent in April this year. Unlike in the Nineties, though, the daily outbursts of violence have been replaced by the anomie of low-level crime; adults offering you drugs; children offering you drugs; someone who has just injected themselves with drugs. Their pain is self-inflicted and aimless. A world of rioting has become one of withdrawal.

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On Marsh Farm, this is the comedown that followed the rave. Little has been done to remedy it. In 2011, an old microwave factory on the estate was turned into a police station, but there is no front desk for people to report crime. Residents complain it is just for show, and almost everyone points out the miserly police presence on the streets. One shopkeeper across the road from the station tells me that, after his shop was robbed during the middle of the day, it took three days for the police to arrive. When I visit the terraced house where Tate grew up, and where his mother Eileen still lives, the road is empty, apart from a topless young man speeding a dirt bike up and down the cul-de-sac. “He’s always doing that,” a neighbour grumbles.

I later knock on Eileen’s door, though she doesn’t answer. Instead, her neighbour thrusts her head out of a window and demands that I leave. She tells me that Eileen doesn’t want to speak to journalists who “twist” the truth about her sons, so I post a note with my phone number on it. A few days later, a representative for Tate gets in touch to explain that he doesn’t want to comment.

Should we be surprised? Why challenge the gospel when it’s already been handed down? Andrew Tate escaped Marsh Farm; that’s all you need to know. His story is about how to escape — not those who can’t: those former schoolmates, the victims of a paedophile, or the five lost boys I find skulking around one of the estate’s parks. 

The youngest of them looked 13; at least one was high. When I ask them about Tate, they laugh uncontrollably, almost competitively. “Top Geeeeeee,” croaks one. “He’s just saying it how it is,” says another. “He’s just doing his own thing,” adds the croaker, before trying to sell me some drugs.

What does Tate’s gospel have to teach them? These lads spend their day staggering around Marsh Farm, looking for trouble and occasionally finding it. But that’s about it. Not a single Lamborghini or Ferrari drives past — and if one did? Like most of those boys before, they would gawp and croak, and then go back to doing nothing. There is no ambition. There is no hope. They are would-be rioters turned into zombies.

It is hard to imagine them being radicalised by Tate, let alone following him out of their estate. He is not their Pied Piper and they are not his rats — just boys paralysed by neglect. A lost generation, perhaps, but one that has no interest in being found. If Marsh Farm is where Tate’s gospel started, it is also where it ends.

But Times columnist Caitlin Moran is bolder. With her new book, What About Men?, she goes where few women have gone before. Having noticed that young men seem to be in crisis, she now attempts to get inside the mind of the modern male in order to help him out.

Early signs suggest that it’s not going down brilliantly with the Other Side; even the Times reviewer has reservations. And the Twitter commentariat is enjoying posting outraged screenshots of excerpts. “Patronising”, “shallow” and “one-dimensional”, have been some of the verdicts from men so far.

I’ve read the book, and though the intentions behind it are admirable, I agree that it has problems. Moran apparently thinks not just that masculinity is wholly cultural, but that there’s only one version of it, entirely based on her husband, his mates, and some sons of her friends. Every bloke in the world likes rock music, wears disgustingly decrepit gym gear and won’t talk to his friends about fatherhood or relationships. Equally, she seems to think that all women are exactly like she is — dorky, warm, garrulous and funny. They dish out copious tea and sympathy, enjoy avid discussions of pop culture and bodily functions, and bond over how terrible the Seventies were.

She reduces the issue of whether any behavioural differences between the sexes are partly due to biological factors, to the straw man of whether there are “massive differences between male and female brains”, ignoring the potential influence of smaller brain differences, or of pre-natal and circulating sex hormones. (And this in a section where, two pages later, she observes without any apparent sense of tension that “girls develop their fine motor skills earlier than boys”.) She flat-out denies that there are “any major differences in the language skills of boys and girls”, ignoring swathes of evidence that suggest otherwise for early childhood. I’m not saying such questions are definitively settled in either direction, but it smacks of laziness to pretend they are.

She also takes a “creative” approach to explanations of behavioural difference, as exemplified by her Just-So story of how the male conversational style developed (that is: heavy on banter and technicality; light on in-depth analyses of the couples on Love Island). Boys start school at a disadvantage to girls because they can’t hold a pen. A catastrophic chain of developmental events then unfolds, according to our author. While girls race ahead with their communication skills, boys lose confidence, start reading comic books rather than Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, and take refuge for their lack of ability to understand the social world in jokes about gay people, and descriptions of the internal combustion engine. For the unreconstructed sexist who suspects that women should steer clear of scientific explanation, Moran’s approach here is unfortunately likely to serve as further confirmation.

And then there’s the relentlessly ribald writing style. I’ve never positively wished for sensitivity readers and trigger warnings before, but there’s a first time for everything. Demystifying sex for the reader is one thing; making him grimace so hard his face seizes up, another. If, as Moran seems to think, bedroom preferences are formed by exposure to certain scenarios early on in life, hers seem to have been shaped by reading too many Viz magazines. I came away from the book mostly thinking we need to Make Sex Sexy Again as a matter of national emergency.

For instance, on women (and I apologise in advance for this), “if we’re very ‘vocal’, and loud, during sex – ‘YES! YES!’ – it might be because we’re aware we’re doing fannyfarts, and don’t want you to hear the party vag-sounds that are happening ‘down there’”. Male ejaculation is “Nature’s splendid custard-y firework display”. Whereas men allegedly never discuss their genitalia, we women “tell each other, constantly, to rejoice in our minges” (we do what?). Moran recounts how she once spent a whole afternoon, stoned, talking to her husband’s testicles and “seeing how they reacted to my varying chats”. (Spoiler: they shrivelled). If this prose is really aimed at teenage boys as it sometimes pretends to be, let’s just say that the birth rate is not likely to improve anytime soon.

Other parts are more successful. She is right that young men increasingly struggle with body image issues, that most internet pornography is violent and soul-destroying, and that false whispers about sexual misdemeanours can ruin a young man’s life. She tries hard to be sympathetic about all this, as well as to the idea that young men are beset by images of “toxic masculinity” in a way that is messing them up. And there’s even the odd hint that prevalent feminist approaches might be part of the problem — including her own in previous books.

Post #MeToo, one legacy of mainstream feminism seems to be the policy of shouting at all men about how terrible they are, in the hope that some of the generalised opprobrium sticks to the right candidates. At the same time, men’s ordinary sexual impulses — sometimes irritating, sometimes welcome — are denigrated and treated as inevitably threatening and sinister.

No finer example can be found than in a National Rail poster campaign running at the moment, which thunders: “INTRUSIVE STARING OF A SEXUAL NATURE IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND IS NOT TOLERATED.” Everyone knows which biological sex this sinister pronouncement is aimed at (hint: it’s not the one batting her eyelashes furiously at you over her free newspaper).

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The fallout from the new puritanism means that sensitive, empathic young men often feel terrible about any sexual behaviours not formally agreed with a partner in writing beforehand; while society continues to do nothing meaningful to stop the sort of hardened offenders unlikely to be influenced by poster campaigns in trains. Youthful coping strategies in response to all this undifferentiated guilt-tripping may include heading towards Andrew Tate videos or heading towards the gender clinic, but either way a different and more nuanced way of doing things would be a lot better.

And it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former, she makes a good stab at it — though, by her own admission, most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.

That young males newly acquainted with massive amounts of testosterone should crave an exciting hero’s journey for themselves is another fact she tries to explain with a Just-So story about acculturation: they’ve read too many comic books about superheroes and “nothing about ordinary teenage boys, trying to learn how to become happy, normal men”. So there you have it — we can combat the allure of Andrew Tate and his ilk by enticing teenage boys to read more boring books. Speaking as a mother of sons who would consider reading comic books a chore when they could be destroying aliens onscreen instead, I’d like to know how she proposes we go about this.

Despite this chapter, throughout most of the earlier stuff, there’s still a barely suppressed sense that Team Woman — or as she has it, Team Tits — has most of the answers, and that members of Team Testicles might get there too if they try hard enough. At one point she suggests, with a characteristically liberal use of italics, that: “Everything that, culturally, is seen as ‘female’, is something anyone can have. These are all things anyone can learn. These are all things anyone can gain. Women weren’t born knowing how to be amazing friends having super-deep conversations about anxiety, and sorrow. Personally, I just learned how to do it from watching The Golden Girls.” Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less.

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Moran is right, of course, that women aren’t born knowing how to understand the complex emotional states of others, in order to be able to listen properly and console them. They need experience, and perhaps also guidance, to activate this capacity. Some women can’t do it at all, while many men can. Still, that doesn’t mean that, across the entire female population, the enhanced capacity of women to understand social relationships isn’t somewhat biologically influenced. To treat feminine traits as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that.

In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse, and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden. As usual, the devil is in the detail. How to Be More Like a Man would be a bold title for any feminist writer, but I’m not sure we should entirely rule it out.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

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While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

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What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

The Times last week reported that steroid use in the UK has increased tenfold over the past decade, while recent studies have shown that 2% of Canadians, and between three and four million Americans, have used steroids in their lifetimes — with roughly a quarter of those users reporting “psychological dependence” on the otherwise-non addictive drugs.

I have been on the periphery of the strength and fitness culture for my entire adult life, and steroids have always been part of the athletic game: if you want to win, not just at bodybuilding and powerlifting but at any sport, you take performance-enhancing drugs. Initially, I had primarily positive views about the drugs: steroids, I thought, were merely a means to an end, a way of getting stronger and increasing functional capacity, something reams of academic and anecdotal research have confirmed they do. However, I gradually learned that the individuals using them in this way are few and far between.

That small pool of people largely consists of pro athletes, driven by financial incentives or competitive instincts to pursue every conceivable advantage. But recreational users have always outnumbered professional users, whose livelihoods depend on athletic performance. And that gap has only widened as these drugs have become available everywhere from internet forums to legally operating testosterone clinics. Their pull is irresistible: a relative of mine who never played sports or even took to the bodybuilding stage was arrested for felony possession of steroids in 2014. 

These recreational users are trying to win a different kind of game. When I started investigating steroids, an increasing number of users were following in the footsteps of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, a Russian-born Australian who built a following on YouTube at the end of the Noughties. One of the first notable influencers to emerge on the now ubiquitous site, Zyzz preached a gospel of “aesthetics”, relying on steroids consumed in conjunction with exercise to develop a physique similar enough to his idol Frank Zane’s that it would win him the undying admiration of his followers.

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The key difference, of course, was that Frank Zane — whom I interviewed a year ago — was a professional athlete, training his body to win bodybuilding pageants, and Zyzz was merely someone who wanted to look the part. Zane detested selfies and self-recorded footage, believing it to be deceptive and no substitute for up-close, objective inspection of another person’s body; Zyzz relied on these methods to project a particular self-image. Taking steroids arguably made him weaker and sicker, not stronger. Zyzz died after a cardiac arrest aged 22, the victim of a congenital heart defect and cardiomegaly — an enlarged heart — worsened by the drug use that, like many fitness influencers including the recently disgraced Brian “Liver King” Johnson, he had spent the majority of his career denying he used. (Zyzz’s deception was exposed a month before his fatal heart attack, when his brother Said was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids.)

Zyzz’s early death should have made him a cautionary tale. Instead, he became a “muscle martyr” beloved by other fitness posters. People like my felonious relative saw him and wanted to be him, while emerging social media platforms provided convenient playgrounds for their carefully-curated exercises in brand-building narcissism. I’ve now interviewed hundreds of users, and the reasons for their use all arise out of some sense of absence, some internal emptiness. A gay user whose steroid-abetted transformation I profiled explained to me that he wanted to transition from being a chubby, schlubby teen to a “hyper-masculine” man. Others said they added mass in the hope of “becoming someone”; all that hypertrophied flesh would obscure an essential lack of self. Several steroid users who were attending bodybuilding pageants merely as spectators told me how eager they were to be mistaken for competitors, that passing for one would constitute the highlight of their year. 

“The first casualty of steroid use is the truth,” the fitness journalist and bodybuilding competition coach Anthony Roberts has told me repeatedly. Even if steroids are obtained with a perfectly valid prescription, there is still a cultural taboo that prevents most users from admitting to using them. As Roberts tells it, lying is the oldest and most effective performance enhancer of all: lying about what you take, how much you take, what else you take — because steroid use, for many, is but a small part of a drug-filled lifestyle. Certain fitness influencers, in addition to denying or at least staying silent about steroid use, have gone even further, inflating their on-screen workouts with the use of fake weight plates and exaggerated claims about their performance.

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Meanwhile, they are risking their health. Heavy steroid users are already uniquely susceptible to cardiovascular problems — and so many influencers are using steroids in excess of what a physician would prescribe for therapeutic use. Those with pre-existing heart problems, like Zyzz, are uniquely vulnerable, particularly in recent times. During the pandemic, each widely-publicised bodybuilder death was met with waves of accusation: at first, it was the evil virus that did them in, then it was the “clot shot”. Never mind that most of these so-called “recreational users” are teetering on death’s doorstep at all times, aware that even a common cold could stop their engorged hearts.

Bodybuilding prodigy Dallas McCarver, for example, died in 2017 with organs so enlarged that they strained credulity, and a recorded testosterone level of 55,000 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range for a male falls between 300 and 1,000 ng/dl, and the highest recorded testosterone level captured in a failed Olympic drug test was 20,000 ng/dl). So, as they near peak muscularity, and fame, these bodybuilders are also nearing the end of their lives. Their spectacular bodies serve as both temple and tomb. 

Hours of conversations with men like these have led me to believe that their behaviour is, in part, a response to the socioeconomic situation in which we find ourselves. Since the early Eighties, in the West, deindustrialisation has proceeded apace and the world of finance has become dominant. To people coming of age, it might appear as if nothing is made anymore but money. Farmers and manual labourers, such as the steamfitter captured in Lewis Hine’s famous 1921 photograph, sometimes exhibit a high degree of muscular development related to their jobs. By contrast, middle-class workers, performing increasingly less strenuous work for more than a century, have to actively cultivate muscular physiques to project power for which there might be little purpose — beyond showing that they aren’t subject to the degenerating tendencies of their age. In the absence of any tangible construction projects, the only thing that you can gain approval for building is your body — a body that is both an “aesthetic” calling card and a prison for your enlarging viscera and solipsistic thoughts.

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In more recent years, there has been much commentary on declining male testosterone levels. Blame is assigned to everything from poisoned food to sedentary lifestyles. Some pundits, such as manosphere influencer Mike Cernovich, have urged men to set aside $80-100 a month for testosterone replacement therapy. Whereas Cernovich’s cohorts would most probably deride the prescription of SSRIs for depression, or oestrogen for transgender-identifying individuals, they accept a pharmaceutical solution for the crisis of masculinity. At least testosterone administered in a clinic is accompanied by regular blood tests that can detect cholesterol issues and other problems before they become dangerous. But it is still another of modernity’s many panaceas: here is a weekly or biweekly needle to the thigh or buttocks that will make you feel and perhaps even look like someone you are not, but feel entitled to be — or at least appear to be, on social media.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are tragedies. They are disordered responses to a kind of existential emptiness, a world in which our identities are all we have left to display and sell. And we know, deep down in our hearts, that such a meretricious product is worth nothing at all. 

It’s true that men are more likely to let abuse and stalking continue longer than women before they seek intervention by the police, and anecdotally the reasons they give are fear of being seen as unmanly or fear of not being taken seriously. (Although, of course, of course, victims of interpersonal violence of any gender have long been frustrated by their attempts to seek justice or assistance.) And it’s also true that men are less likely to be acknowledged as the victims of violence in interpersonal relationships, heterosexual or otherwise.

But the new Men’s Rights Activist, the online version, goes beyond pointing out these troubling structural realities, which stem from all sorts of societal stereotypes about men’s strength, physical and emotional. Instead, he points the finger of blame — publicly doubting accusations against prominent men while escalating every perceived harm done by a woman.

And so, of course, Johnny Depp has become a hero in the eyes of the MRAs. One of the biggest priorities for the movement is to prove that women make false accusations of rape and abuse against men, and that making such an accusation is a way of getting attention, fame, and protection. Depp’s decision to sue ex-wife Amber Heard and the newspaper The Sun for their claims that he abused her has given a platform to their crusade. Many see him as serving this larger cause, proving not only that men can be victims of domestic violence, but also that women make false accusations.

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Why are we locking up abused women?

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Amber Heard, in their eyes, is a “witch”. Turning the language of online feminism on its head, the MRAs accuse her of “toxic femininity”. Just as the phrase “toxic masculinity” was created to explain how traditionally gendered behaviour by men — aggressiveness, callousness, sexual transgressions — were actually harmful rather than something that should be nurtured and rewarded, “toxic femininity” suggests that traditionally female sins — playing the victim, lying, crying to manipulate — have been tolerated for too long. Amber Heard, sobbing on the witness stand, represents the red-pilled man’s most cynical fantasies of womanhood.

The first generation of the Men’s Rights Movement grew out of men feeling demonised by feminists, and the same is perhaps true here. In recent years, the discourse around toxic masculinity has been intense — and often pretty meaningless. Depp’s case has become a rallying cry for all the presumed men “suffering” this discourse — the men whose strength, assertiveness, and sexual prowess was now deemed problematic, the Depp trial has been a platform for aggrieved men to hold forth on “toxic femininity”.

The social media edition of the gender wars depends on gross generalisations. On Twitter, hashtags like #MenAreTrash go viral for any variation of betrayal and violation — from rape to not texting back to taking up too much space in public. MRAs have responded by co-opting and reversing the accusations — not only has toxic masculinity become toxic femininity, #MeToo has become #MenToo.

And sometimes this raw display of heteropessimism intersects with celebrity breakups, especially when “toxic femininity” is on display. This is the result of a parasocial “stan” culture, in which the traditional one-sided relationship people have always had with the powerful or the famous gets twisted into a fantastical attachment, where a celebrity becomes both an imaginary friend and a stand-in for their fan’s own identity. The idea is that, if good things happen to this person, those good things are or could possibly happen to me; if this person is vindicated I, too, will be vindicated; and if bad things happen, like a romantic break-up or some other problem, this is proof that my life will suffer similar indignities. Certain figures — Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Warren — have become notorious for their online fanbases, who will harass their exes and their critics on their behalf.

Johnny Depp, meanwhile, has become a stand-in for every man who gaslighted, rejected, or abused; Amber Heard a representation of every woman who has feigned hurt, made false accusations of abuse, or lied and cheated, whether real or imagined. This isn’t Depp against Heard; it is man against woman.

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Louis CK won't be cancelled

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And it’s worth noting that the case taking up so much media and online attention is not about what Johnny and Amber have actually done to each other, it’s about the stories they’ve told. It is not a criminal trial meant to adjudicate the abuse accusations made by both Depp and Heard against each other over the years. It’s a defamation trial centred around a personal essay Heard published in the Washington Post about abuse she suffered at the hands of an unnamed romantic partner.

That essay landed at the height of the MeToo movement, as accusations against figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh and Louis C.K. saw powerful men being sent to trial, investigated in the press, or fired from work. The rhetoric at the time was that it was important to “Believe Women” when they accused men of abuse. Heard got a lot of media attention — which was exactly what she wanted: she’d been asked to write the essay by ACLU to promote the cause of domestic violence, and she in return asked that the essay be published in time to promote her film, Aquaman. What benefited her career harmed his: despite not naming Depp directly in the initial essay, it was widely assumed to be about him, and Depp was, like many men accused of abuse against women, suddenly dropped from projects, most notably the next in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the Fantastic Beasts series.

This is, I suppose, what some men would call “toxic femininity”. It is an inconvenient reality that famous women can sometimes monetise their personal stories of abuse and survival. Many feminist activists have tried to deny or downplay the professional advantages of victimhood, for fear that misogynists and abusers will use it to downplay accusations. But those denials can often have the opposite effect, creating a backlash effect.

Even as some of Heard’s accusations began to fall apart, many online feminists supported her side of the story and used her essay as a jumping-off point to either talk about the abuse they themselves had suffered or to draw attention to the serious harm done to women in romantic relationships every year. If Heard was seen to be lying or exaggerating, it would be “bad for women,” as if one false accusation by a celebrity calls all accusations women make against their male partners into questions.

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Everyone, in short, is making this case about themselves, and ignoring the obvious fact that these two individuals have obviously both done terrible things to each other. We are, of course, more used to seeing these individuals on our screens as characters, rather than real humans. People are watching the Depp/Heard trial like a film; they’re there to be entertained. And in television shows — including documentaries — victims are predominantly shown as being passive and naïve like in so many Lifetime movies, or sexually stimulated by the violence as in Big Little Lies, or as meek women who are pushed into warrior mode with a need for vengeance like in The Burning Bed and the very many rape revenge horror films. There are many ways to control, dominate, intimidate, and violate in romantic relationships, and it’s often more complicated and messy than your average television show is willing to depict.

On social media, too, one person has to be a clear victim and the other a clear aggressor. But the legal system is ill-equipped to deal with this. It aims to prove one person guilty and the other innocent. Perhaps that binary is inevitable in any public forum. But activists serious about addressing the problem of domestic violence should resist it, not fuel it.

When an anonymous account only takes an extreme position — “all women are deceitful liars” or “most rape accusations are made by women who consented but then experienced regret”, it’s tempting to swing to the other extreme: “actually, women are perfect angels who would never lie”. But while propaganda might be useful in radicalising the people who already support you, it will do nothing to convert your enemies. Trying to turn Amber Heard into a role model will only come back to bite feminists.

You can see where they got the idea. Putin is clearly invested in portraying himself as a literal strongman. He’s posed shirtless, riding horses and doing judo on camera; there have been photo shoots with tigers and bears. He’s spent years building an image of strength and daring, both as a person and as a leader. (Meanwhile his new nemesis Zelensky became an overnight heartthrob when Twitter discovered that he appeared on the Ukrainian equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in a hot pink suit.)

But using the very Western, very modern framework of identity politics to discuss deep-rooted geopolitical tensions is shockingly irresponsible. The Right often condemns such behaviour, accusing the Left of being decadent or frivolous. And they’ve got a point.

Identity politics have become hegemonic; any news story that can be viewed through their lens seems instantly worthier of our attention. A debate about whether a legal decision or a politician’s speech has racist or sexist implications will generally get more traction than whether it contributes to income inequality or environmental degradation. And so its vocabulary has been trotted out to convince people that they need to take the conflict in Ukraine seriously — more seriously, for whatever reason, than the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan or the 3 million people displaced by conflict in Yemen (which only makes headlines when Angelina Jolie gets involved). Accusing Putin of “toxic masculinity” reels in people who support women’s and queer rights, which have been truncated in Russia, in the same way that the hashtag  #ukraineisgeorgefloyd reels in those whose primary concern is racial justice.

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That’s not to say that the concept of “toxic masculinity” is empty. It emerged from feminism as a shorthand for the idea that certain masculine traits once heralded as beneficial — chivalry, strength, competitiveness — could be potentially oppressive, especially when they metastasise into violent behaviour against women and other vulnerable communities. And it can be useful in critiquing what we look for in a national leader — a role that has typically been filled by men. Force and self-assuredness have previously been seen as desirable; asking whether they are “toxic” allows us to see how these qualities can shade toward authoritarianism. It can also help us see that qualities once associated with weakness — eagerness to compromise and maintain peace — are in many ways beneficial.

The focus on identity politics more broadly has also highlighted previously under-examined aspects of authoritarianism, like the fact that it is often disproportionately harmful to women and the LGBT community. When a state turns repressive toward gay rights or reproductive rights — either through restricting access to abortion or by forced sterilisation — it can indicate a dangerous turn. Authoritarian governments often try to control rigid gender roles and demonise “deviant” sexual behaviours.

Still, a focus on identity politics can crowd out other criticisms. And it can also be used to shut down criticisms completely. It is tempting to see a government that ostensibly protects women and other marginalised communities as ethically “good”. But it’s common for governments that have faced accusations of corruption or wrongdoing to fight back with symbolic gestures toward these communities.

The Right-wing Colombian administration, headed by President Iván Duque, has faced a year of street protests for its economic reforms and police brutality. It recently decriminalised abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy: a huge victory for women’s rights groups. Sarah Schulman has documented the way Israel has used its progressive queer rights policies to shore up its international reputation after it was damaged by its treatment of Palestinians — an act she calls “pinkwashing”.

And Israel, she points out, is hardly the only nation to use identity politics to cloak its less progressive reforms. The United States celebrated gay marriage while conducting drone warfare in Yemen; it called the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg a feminist triumph while passing legislation removing social welfare programmes for mothers and children.

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Part of the problem is that toxic masculinity is squishy language, used to describe everything from war crimes to taking up too much space on the subway. There have been several high-profile cases where a corrupt or otherwise objectionable politician has been attacked for exhibiting toxic masculinity — while his other, arguably worse decisions went unpunished or unacknowledged. The debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court mostly turned on one accusation of sexual wrongdoing decades ago against one woman; but it was his “toxic masculinity” that led many to believe he was not fit for the powerful position he now holds, whether or not he was guilty. This line of argument overtook any other objections one might have about him occupying a seat on the highest court in the land: his participation in the George W. Bush administration’s torture programme, for example.

A similar problem arose with New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, who ultimately had to step down because of allegations of unwanted touching. He maintains that even if his behaviour was inappropriate at times, it was never criminal — further proof of his toxic masculinity, some feminists would argue. But in all of this his role in the New York’s unnecessarily catastrophic pandemic is ignored. Obviously sexual assault and the violation of interpersonal boundaries doesn’t reflect well on a person’s character, but Cuomo was terrible for all the New Yorkers who voted him in, not just the women who worked for him.

But clearly the US is not ready to confront its Covid failures — the confused messaging, the crumbling public health system, the lack of compensation for job loss, the massive fraud that was committed via its Paycheck Protection Program. These things led to unnecessary suffering and death. Similarly, it’s worth wondering whether, had Kavanaugh not been accused of sexual assault, his other transgressions would’ve gone unconfronted. There would have had to be a widespread conversation about the torture and unjust imprisonment of those designated enemies during the war on terror. But the media, the justice system, and politicians of both parties supported these ethical transgressions. And we still can’t seem to close our Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

And now that Cuomo is trying to stage a comeback, based on the image of a reformed man (reformed for his misogyny, not for his pandemic policies), we should pay attention to the way “toxic masculinity” can be a gift to the men accused of it, because it downplays their other crimes. As useful as the accusation of “toxic masculinity” can be as a political weapon, it can also have a nasty rebound effect.

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Critics often suggest that identity politics have created brain rot in the West. Lionel Shriver wrote in The Spectator that Putin felt free to invade Ukraine because we’ve gone soft: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations … — it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes. We’re not scary, because we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.” Ben Shapiro made a similar accusation on Twitter, blaming Russia’s invasion on “The West” being obsessed with “exploding the gender binary”.

But they, too, are trapped in this conversation about identity politics, even if in an adversarial mode. They can’t stop referring everything, even serious geopolitical matters, back to a battle about pronouns and racial discrimination.

Of course, they’re right to point out that our conversation about Ukraine is blinkered. Like the culture war, this war is framed as a battle between good and evil, and this simplification allows us to ignore the fact that it has roots in centuries-old discussions of territory and autonomy. It’s about the meaning of nationhood, which is not always straightforward.

If we faced that, we’d also be forced face our own hypocrisy, as nations that feel free to violate airspace whenever it suits us. If we weren’t distracting ourselves with condemning the insecurities of one dictator, we might consider that our democratic countries, too, have let economic concerns drive international policy. We have invaded sovereign nations. We have killed civilians.

Or perhaps we’d find another easy answer, to help us ignore awkward questions.

The novel may be a release from a major press (Little, Brown), but its author isn’t famous; nor is his offering — a fragmented piece of autofiction about a 30-year-old named Sean Thor Conroe writing a book called Fuccboi — particularly mass-market. So why the histrionics? Well, Conroe received a six-figure advance for this first novel.

Yet while such a sum will always raise eyebrows, especially envious ones, Conroe has been subjected to levels of vitriol unusual even for the literary “community”. The dope on Conroe circulating among the disgruntled (no six-figure advance) is as follows: Conroe is nothing less than a privileged, wealthy, white-passing impostor, who, Barry Lyndon-style, has passed himself off as a dejected, pitiable, impoverished victim of white supremacy (he’s half Japanese) and capitalism (he’s a former delivery boy). That is to say, he is the kind of wretch who passes as a literary idol for the publishing world’s exacting commissars.

For a time, the indie winds were in Conroe’s favour, and praise was doled out. But since that cheque — some wager, because of it — the tides have turned. In a post entitled “Fuck, Boy!”, Sam Pink, a writer and painter of working-class extraction, put his allegations bluntly: “[I’ve had] my entire work stolen from me.” To wit, Pink accused Conroe of swiping his telegraphic, slangy style — a blend of Soundcloud rap (“side bae”, “ex bae”, “editor bae”, “peripheral bae”, “autonomous bae”) and leaden Instagram self-care argot (“This sharing permitted, even encouraged, me to consider my own patterns./To even recognize, in the first place, that patterns were created by tangible actions”). Pink is disgusted by this “offensively appropriated” “fake slang from an ivy league kid.”

Conroe, predictably, claims to be speaking in his real voice. In his acknowledgments, Conroe writes:

Ty ty ty to Giancarlo DiTrapano for not only letting me write how I talk, but encouraging me to. 
            That shit there.
            Man.
            I can’t even.

For what it’s worth, Conroe does talk like that. I briefly met him when he attended a reading at my apartment, though he seemed uncomfortable and often stepped outside to smoke in the cold. As I later learned, two other guests were the respective publisher and author of an essay accusing Conroe of, basically, slumming it. The battle, as always, is about stolen victimhood, and the writers, as always, respond by punching up their “trauma” and playing down their “privilege” to stake a claim to what is, after all, an unimpressive and even grating style.

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Authenticity aside, when Hanson O’Haver, in Gawker, dumps on Conroe’s use of “laundered rap slang” and Jonah Bromwich’s New York Times review includes a pro forma condemnation of the same as “cringeworthy”, one wonders: where have they been? Do they remember the Beatniks? Elvis? Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”? White and white-passing Americans appropriating African American slang is nothing new; what is new is skittishness to publish writing that does so. Surely, then, however unappealing you might find this hyper-contemporary style, his publisher deserves credit for taking on the political risk accompanying its use by a man not immediately identifiable as an oppressed racial minority (Conroe is, again, half Japanese).

Similarly, Fuccboi is admirably daring in its gestures toward political relevance: it’s easy to see why a publishing house would have thought this book relevant to today’s crisis of liberal masculinity. As our narrator puts it, “How tf was I privileged./I couldn’t do shit. Not only that, no one allowed me to show/admit I couldn’t.” He yearns to be “one of the good ones”; to seem “so woke and self-aware and self-deprecating about how dumb ideas of alpha-beta masculinity were”. Yet given the intense censoriousness of his “woke” circle, who accuse him of “getting lost in the men’s rights tunnel”, writing is his only “way to start tackling repression and shame” — to avoid becoming like a school shooter, or even Hitler.

Despite the title, he seems to be a pretty good guy (and pretty continent, too: only one act of fornication, in over 350 pages!). The worst things he does are listen to Joe Rogan, watch some “low-key red-pill videos”, very noncommittally question the reality of the gender pay gap, and equally casually say “bros over hoes”. The only slightly developed conservative thought is one regarding his relationship with his “ex bae”, where he reflects on her abortion: could anti-natalism perhaps be nihilistic? Could neoliberal feminism perhaps be careerist? Well, yeah. Ultimately, the “anti-woke” side of this book is so anodyne that one wonders whether Fuccboi, like the narrator’s pre-Fuccboi manuscript, may not have been a bit too edited-for-acceptability.

And yet I think this book is earnest. If anything, its issue is not a lack of authenticity, but a surfeit thereof. It will be obvious to those who finish it that Fuccboi is the genuine stream of consciousness of the author, spilled with little self-censorship onto the page. All of this is presented with what one hopes is an at least slightly satirical sense of self-important militancy, as when the narrator explodes to a perfectly polite stranger: “I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.”

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The problem, then, isn’t that Conroe’s parents were rich (which I have no cause to believe is the case), or that he didn’t, as Pink claims, “earn” his audience by publishing online before getting the big deal. The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation, as well as the self-aggrandising cult of martyrdom — increasingly by self-diagnosed mental or physical illness — with which my generation shirks the responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind. But though Fuccboi is playful and lively, often funny and sometimes moving, and certainly of its time, it does not fully succeed as a work of art.

The current crop of young writers is less ambitious and less accomplished even than the minimalists and dirty realists — Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel — they are (likely unknowingly) imitating. In that earlier generation’s writing, the chaotic hedonism of the everyday attains emotional depth and significance; characters are complex and differentiated, and struggling to form complex and differentiated relationships with each other. They have more than names, characteristics, and the occasional impulse; they have feelings, thoughts, and sometimes, even, ideas.

But where there once was narrative that made life seem complicated, moving, and significant, indie literature today primarily comprises trite, essentially ecological descriptions of an already familiar scene, devoid of any coherence or meaning. Men write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.

Both contingents write in a mode of blasé detachment that has become achingly stale. They are averse to or incapable of subjectivity and depth. What little allowance is made for human feeling is exclusively of pharmaceutical origin. These are not works of art; they are simply unremarkable descriptions of unremarkable lives.

In the glib generational determinism so popular today, one excuses this shallowness of character and failure to depict any interpersonal conflict as a “real” and “relatable” mirror of the “autism” of the young generation (indeed, this self-serving self-ID is so common that forums for the autistic and their caretakers use the acronym AA for “actually autistic”). However, these writers, and the thinly disguised stand-ins that populate their autofiction, are not autistic. They are merely permanent adolescents, incapable of empathising with any experience outside of their own and comfortably withdrawn into a profound egotism.

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Similarly, one excuses their unambitious and unintelligible style by reference to the influence of “online” life on young minds. However, the more accurate explanation for this monotonous sea of uninspired cliché is that these writers do not read anyone except their friends, nor do they aspire to much readership beyond them. And that’s probably for the best: readers deserve better than for 20-somethings functionally addicted to psychotropics to describe their existence in turgid, unorganised prose. The generalised inability to execute the most basic fundamentals of modern narrative is not a product of an autistic or digital zeitgeist; it is a product of lazy and illiterate writers.

Does Fuccboi fall under this umbrella? For all its flaws, Conroe resists the suicidal renunciation of many of his peers. Perhaps this, in part, is why his coevals have so passionately denounced his novel as cringe: Conroe unapologetically does care about literature, in his own guileless and heartwarming way. Perhaps it sounds silly for him to talk about “That Art Life”; perhaps it feels awkward and uninformative to read his emails with Sheila Heti. But at least, unlike so many today, he believes that writing could serve a function beyond identity work or courtship, and at least expresses interest in authors outside of his immediate coterie.

In that sense, he is the exception. Of course, this nihilism is reflective of the current mood of the world. But its consequences are more severe: if our authors are as distracted and superficial as anybody else, and our literature as unnourishing as TikToks or memes or tweets, why on earth would anyone read? Much like the humanities’ wan retreat to the “digital humanities”, this attempt to stay relevant — I’m not a normal book, I’m a cool book! — will only doom the medium to total obsolescence.

They’d be less confident if they’d watched a clutch of chicks grow up, as we did over lockdown last year. Our little flock of backyard chickens now includes four hens and one rooster. He’s insufferable. I’ve watched his obnoxious personality blossom, in stark contrast to the docile hens, and I can only describe him as an absolute cock — both literally and figuratively. He is aggressive, domineering, territorial, horny, and very, very loud.

It would be difficult to find a creature who more completely epitomises all the traits we’re encouraged to condemn these days, under the catch-all term “toxic masculinity” But as well as being amused by his problematic machismo (and ridiculous hat), I’ve developed a grudging respect for his attitude. He takes his duties as chicken patriarch seriously, and is insufferable mostly because he pursues these duties with bird-brained single-mindedness.

He’s protective of the hens, stands guard while they eat and will fight anything he considers a threat to them – including us. Full-blown military assault by him is a mixture of comical and genuinely unnerving, as now he’s an adult he has spurs. He wields these sharp protrusions from the backs of his legs like a pair of sabres, fluffing up his neck feathers and flying at you spurs first, whereupon you have to win or he’ll attack you every time you go near him.

In humans, this kind of belligerence is the male-coded trait quickest to be filed under “toxic masculinity”. Regardless of how things are for chickens, though, we’re told that aggression in human males has nothing to do with biology. Instead, the explanations for phenomena such as males’ measurably greater propensity to commit violent crime are explained by theories such as bad role models, economic stress or gender role identification.

Having watched the rooster and the hens develop so differently, I find this less than convincing. It seems far-fetched that humans should be the only sexually dimorphic species on the planet in which sex has absolutely zero impact on attitude or behaviour.

“So what?” you might say. We may have some evolved instincts, but unlike chickens, humans can modulate these according to different social and cultural norms. Certainly, in many historic contexts, social pressure has leaned toward punishing not aggressive males but those who weren’t aggressive enough. This was the case until very recently: 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers in World War 1 were shot for cowardice.

And further back in time, some societies took these traits to extremes. The 13th-century Old Norse Saga of the Jomsvikings recounts exploits of such cheerfully macho ultra-violence they make my rooster look chicken. In one such episode, Svein Buason, a Jomsviking due to be executed, asks his enemies to hold his hair away from his neck so it won’t be bloodied as the blade falls. He then jerks his head, causing the blade to fall and cut off his enemy’s hands. It doesn’t get much more macho than using your own inevitable death to troll the enemy.

Contemporary culture, though, has swung the other way, and would rather deprecate than celebrate anything with a whiff of old-school masculinity. This is perhaps understandable: we live in a peaceful and high-tech society, and once-adaptive male-coded traits such as violence and physical risk-taking just aren’t useful like they were to the Jomsvikings. Indeed, in a society where employers prioritise soft skills, collaborative working and low levels of overt conflict, such traits are actively undesirable.

This is all fine, provided you believe human nature to be completely malleable. We just need to train boys out of being cock-ish. But the signs are not especially promising. In 2017-18, there were 7,905 permanent exclusions from schools (mostly for violence), of which only 1,787 (23%) were girls.

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Some argue that the cure for this is working harder at teaching boys to eschew toxic masculinity. But what if a baseline of aggression is baked into human males, as it is in cockerels? Even if such tendencies are somewhat responsive to cultural cues, they may not be absolutely so. And if this is the case, efforts to eradicate “toxic masculinity” may be futile or even counter-productive.

Certainly, many of the young men on the receiving end of such social-constructionist efforts are responding by rejecting not stoicism, aggression and competition but the mainstream preference for cooperation, empathy, and non-violent negotiation. You can find some of these men in internet subcultures that revere traditionally cock-ish traits and cultures such as the Vikings and Spartans, while chafing at what Bronze Age Pervert, one of the more prominent voices in these realms, calls “matriarchy”.

In such groups, Jomsviking-style machismo, or even the World War 1 sort, is far from nearing extinction through social engineering. On the contrary: it’s increasingly self-aware and mutinous, and views the war on “toxic masculinity” as a conspiracy to subordinate the natural vigour of males. And men who have adopted a version of this worldview are increasingly opting out of the moral mainstream in more concrete ways too.

It was relatively easy to pretend the 20,000-odd Western fighters who joined Isis were motivated mainly by religious fervour. But this is less persuasive in the case of the hundreds of right-wingers who flocked to the recent conflict in the Ukraine, choosing their “side” seemingly at random and on occasions even shooting at each other.

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What do they want, though? Consider the Viking raiders so idolised by such subcultures. These, reports the 17^th-century historian William Camden, were drawn by lot from communities with too many spare males, and encouraged to go raiding in no small part because they were a nuisance at home. And they didn’t just want gold and women; they wanted glory. It’s not inconceivable that people such as  Craig Lang, wanted for murder in the USA but feted as a hero in Ukraine for his role in the conflict there, went in search of something similar.

This is not to condone such actions, but to wonder: what are the alternatives? In On Combat, Lt Col David Grossman compares peaceful, productive, empathic citizens (sheep), sociopathic aggressors (wolves) and those with “a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens” which he calls “sheepdogs”: those who fight to protect their own.

For Grossman, there’s honour in being a “sheepdog”. But well-meaning blank-slatist efforts to re-code all combative traits as “toxic masculinity” are now having the side-effect of rendering the “sheepdog” type suspect as well. Today, male-coded belligerence and stoicism are under fire even in quintessential “sheepdog” institutions such as the military and police.

But if, as I suspect, a measure of cockerel-like attitude is ineradicable in at least some human males, this may well backfire. If such men are now unwelcome even in the mainstream military and pseudo-military institutions that previously valued their personalities, we may find ourselves not in a safer and gentler world after all. We might just discover we have more Craig Langs on the loose.

Lang is relatively unusual in seeking out combat. But the underbelly of the internet is full of men violently hostile to the norms of a “feminist” mainstream that deplores the things they value, and who daydream increasingly vividly about the search for glory. Perhaps they will confine this to the realm of fantasy forever. But perhaps they won’t.

None of this is to offer an unqualified endorsement of these traits, which have many downsides. But wouldn’t we be better-advised to seek constructive roles for the men who possess them, rather than trying to “educate” (in other words shame) “toxic masculinity” out of existence. Especially if the alternative is a growing subculture of men who have gone beyond daydreaming online about “Vikings”, to actively seeking to recreate their violent, restless and hypermasculine world in the 21^st century.

Our rooster has a job to do, and we value him for it – even though he is a cock. But for men whose personalities tend toward aggression, protectiveness, competition and stoicism, what honourable roles are left? We’d be foolish to shrug our shoulders as such men lose hope of being valued as protectors, and start looking for glory as wolves.

Yet even back then there were audible rumblings of discontent from men who believed that feminism had “gone too far”. Shortly after my mum had been stitched up at work (an experience depressingly common to many women) the men’s rights activist Warren Farrell published The Myth of Male Power (1993), in which he argued that men — not women — were being systematically disadvantaged by a female-centric conspiracy.

In her latest book, Men Who Hate Women, the feminist writer Laura Bates has delved into the stomping grounds of the latest backlash, immersing herself in the manosphere, an internet subculture where “the hatred of women is actively encouraged, with sprawling, purpose-built communities of men dedicated to fuelling and inflaming the cause”.

The manosphere is made up of pickup artists (PUAs), involuntary celibates (incels), men’s rights activists as well as “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW). PUAs try to lure women into bed with tactics and manipulation, whereas incels blame women’s sexual liberation for their failure to find a partner. Men’s rights activists express what Bates calls a “nostalgic yearning for ancient societal rules and stereotypes”, while MGTOW aim to live their lives free from female contact, though whether this is a conscious choice on the part of the men involved is a matter for debate. According to Bates, these movements form “an interconnected spectrum of different but related groups, each with their own rigid belief systems, lexicons and forms of indoctrination”.

It was journalist Neil Strauss’s bestselling book The Game that first brought pickup artists to mainstream attention in 2005. Prior to that men congregated relatively unscrutinised on underground forums where they shared tips for bedding women (Tom Cruise’s character in the 1999 film Magnolia was purportedly based on cheesy 90s seduction guru Ross Jeffries).

There were two subsequent backlashes against “game”. The first came from feminists, notably during the Julien Blanc scandal of 2014 in which videos emerged of the “Real Social Dynamics” dating coach apparently encouraging students to choke women. But there was another backlash from what would later come to be known as the incel community.

The latter had their nascent beginnings on the forum “PUA Hate”, which was shut down after misogynist mass murderer Elliott Rodger was revealed to have been a member of the site. There have been several incel mass shootings that have targeted women but also men viewed as successful with women. Posters on PUA Hate believed they had been conned by the pickup industry and adopted a rigid worldview which sorted men into a fatalistic hierarchy where those at the bottom had no hope of ever finding a romantic partner.

Incel forums drip with misogyny and Bates provides copious examples: women are blamed for denying men sex while threads speculate on “the mandated redistribution of sex, the keeping of women as sex slaves or the widespread massacre of women and girls”. Furthermore, Bates takes aim at conservative commentators such as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for indulging the incel narrative: Douthat has speculated about a potential “redistribution of sex”.

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Jargon from the 1999 cult film The Matrix permeates the contemporary manosphere. In the film, the protagonist Neo is offered the Red Pill as a gateway out of The Matrix by rebel leader Morpheus. In taking the Red Pill, Neo can escape the computer simulation in which most of humanity lives. However, in the process he must confront a set of harsh truths about the world. Alternatively, he can swallow the Blue Pill and retain a sense of blissful ignorance. Adherents of the manosphere claim to have taken the equivalent of the Red Pill. Normies — who put women on a pedestal and behave like “cucks” and “simps” — are blue pill-ers, blithely following “gynocentric” norms.

The original men’s movement was born in the 1970s. Occasionally the sheer earnestness of the manosphere impugns its seriousness, from the tree-hugging, weekend warriors of the mythopoetic men’s movement and Iron John, through to Canadian clinical psychologist/self-help guru Jordan Peterson expostulating in high-pitched tones about lobsters.

But there has always been a dark side. Bates has been sexually assaulted in the past and she relays in horrific detail how she has been subjected to a daily barrage of hate mail (including threats of rape and murder) from enraged men aggrieved at her feminist activism. “For nearly a decade, men have sent me daily messages, often in their hundreds, outlining their hatred of me, fantasising about my brutal rape and murder, detailing which weapons they would use to slice my body open and disembowel,” she writes.

Why, Bates asks, are these men so angry? Partly because we are living through yet another anti-feminist backlash. Manosphere communities assiduously peddle the myth of the bogus rape allegation —when in reality the average adult man in England and Wales has just a 0.0002 per cent chance of being falsely accused of rape in a year. Moreover, many men resent women’s sexual freedom as well as the entrance of women into the labour force.

Bates has visited British schools nearly every week since founding the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012, and rather disconcertingly has noticed of late that some boys have begun to espouse Red Pill ideas gleaned from the manosphere.

Even the communities that make up the manosphere appear to have grown more extreme in recent years. There was always a dark side to the “seduction community”. It came marinated in assumptions that women were overly emotional and naturally duplicitous. But geeky men venturing out onto Sunset Boulevard in top hats and feather boas (peacocking) with pocketbooks full of canned conversation starters — “Who lies more, men or women?” — seems quaint compared to what came later. Today the pickup community is marinated in Red Pill ideology, partly as a result of YouTube and its polarising algorithm. In the years after The Game was published, Erik Von Markovic (AKA Mystery) with his cheesy magic tricks was replaced by characters like Roosh V (real name Daryush Valizadeh) who writes that “My default opinion of any girl I meet is ‘worthless dirty whore until proven otherwise’”.

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Bates frequently compares the incel movement to other violent extremists such as Jihadis. In the study of extremist movements there is a careful line to tread between condemning the ideology while examining what attracts people to it in the first place. As with incels, violent Islamist movements are characterised by a pathological hatred of women. In recruiting new adherents, jihadists often target deracinated second-generation migrants, feeding them a story of domestic prejudice, rampant promiscuity and imperialist western interventions in the Middle East.

Similarly, it is important to ask why young men are being drawn to incel ideology. The internet is one reason, as is the lingering societal assumption that men have a God-given right to sex. Yet paradoxically for someone of the Left, Bates echoes uncompromising War on Terror rhetoric when she writes about incel radicalisation. “I am not particularly interested in a ‘redemptive’ narrative for incels,” Bates writes. “What incel beliefs… are actually about is terrorism”.

But surely it’s pertinent to ask why there has been a rapid rise in the number of angry, sexless men in the early twenty-first century? Since 2008 the number of American men under 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled. Bates makes no mention of this, nor of the increasingly winner-takes-all sexual marketplace generated by the retreat of monogamous norms and an increasingly polygynous, app-dominated hookup culture. While it’s important not to slip into victim-blaming rhetoric that sees the problem as women’s sexual freedom, the challenges facing unattractive, low-status men seem hardly to register on Bates’s radar.

Similarly, there is little examination of what drew men to the ‘seduction community’ in its heyday. Misogynists who wished to assert tyrannical power over women were certainly ubiquitous in the genre, as Bates makes clear. “Instead of being open to women’s feelings and needs, acolytes are taught to ignore and deny them,” she writes. Yet it is obvious from the testimonies of some who gravitated towards pickup forums — often after typing a banal cry for help such as “how to get a girlfriend?” into a search engine — that many had grown frustrated with useless mainstream advice to “just be yourself”. Men are expected to just know how to conduct themselves during courtship and many don’t. Moreover, dating is often paradoxical: what people say they want in a prospective partner is often different from what they emotionally respond to.

The manosphere encourages men to be uncompromising emotional robots. As Bates convincingly demonstrates, this is immensely damaging to women. It also produces emotionally stunted men. “When feminists talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ we mean the enormous potential damage posed by an outdated version of what it means to be a man,” writes Bates. Those attempting to reanimate a rigid, dogmatic version of manhood for the 21st century confuse force with strength. They also come across as overcompensating for deeper insecurities: see US President Donald Trump bombastically playing down his COVID-19 infection.

Yet Bates seems to approach the topic of masculinity from an assumption that gender is entirely socially constructed. I’m not sure this — sometimes referred to as the blank slate — is helpful. Bewilderingly, she lists “strength”, “physical prowess” and the pursuit of “money and status” as examples of “toxic masculinity”.

There are certainly toxic incarnations of all of the above. However, it seems unlikely that men try to cultivate athletic physiques and pursue power and status entirely as a result of brainwashing by western capitalist patriarchy. Every man from high school age up knows that masculine, high-status men receive the greater share of attention from women. Moreover, outside of the rarefied ideological bubble of the social sciences it is widely accepted that this is partly a product of millions of years of evolution and sexual selection. As the Mary Harrington writes for UnHerd: “Females in sexually dimorphic species don’t choose mates at random but select for traits that will give their offspring an advantage of some kind.”

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A similar point was made (albeit in a more humorous manner) in Grayson Perry’s recent and well-received critique of contemporary masculinity, The Descent of Man:

“When I talked to a women’s therapy group, several members bemoaned the lack of real ‘manly’ men in middle-class circles these days. But when I quizzed them about this, they admitted that they only wanted him in the bedroom department; the rest of the time they wanted a nice sensitive chap who would clean out the cat litter without being asked. Good luck with that.”

Despite Perry’s scepticism, this really isn’t too much for women to expect from men. The manosphere won’t like it — housework is for “cucks” after all. But it also runs against fashionable notions — regrettably espoused by Bates who dismisses everything which hints at gender being partly a product of evolved preferences as “pseudo-science” — that we can do away with masculinity in toto.

Harmful gender stereotypes abound and it is important to combat them. But assuming masculinity will fade away — to be replaced by some genderless utopia — is no more plausible than the Marxist belief that greed and avarice will vanish once the state takes over the means of production. It simply flies in the face of masses of empirical, cross-cultural evidence. Perhaps more pertinently, it also contradicts the lived experience of the majority of men, which in turn helps fuel the resentful grievances of the manosphere.

Why do 999 calls shoot up at Christmas and in the summer holidays? Because abusive partners find themselves at home with their families for a few days. Imagine, then, what’s going to happen when these angry, frustrated and violent men are shut up inside for weeks on end because of the coronavirus. The nation’s pubs are closed and there isn’t even any live sport to distract them.

According to the ONS, an estimated 1.6 million women suffer domestic abuse in England and Wales in a normal year. (Men are at risk, too, but the statistics show that women suffer more repeat incidents and more severe injuries.) With the lockdown, all those women will have even fewer opportunities to ring for help or go online for advice. In some places, they can’t even escape to the park to make a discreet phone call for help or support, because they have been shut. Thanks Hammersmith and Fulham. But this council isn’t alone in its short-sightedness. Very little has been done to address the problem. In fact, it has barely even been acknowledged by Government.

It’s as though our ministers live in a rose-tinted world where home is the safest place to be, oblivious to the mass of statistics that tell a different story. We know that domestic abuse — the type that gets reported to the police, at any rate — is linked to deprivation, insecure employment and over-crowded housing. And those in the least secure jobs, the cab drivers and construction workers who are mostly self-employed, are the immediate losers amid the pandemic. They’ve had to wait 10 days longer than employees to find out what the Chancellor proposes to do for them. Frustrations and tensions will have been ratcheting up.

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We also know that anxious, depressed men are likely to turn to drink, with a quarter of victims of domestic violence reporting that their abusers were using drugs or alcohol at the time of an attack. During lockdown, a spike in alcohol abuse is inevitable — and people are already drinking more. Off-licences are being allowed to remain open, following reports that some supermarkets can’t cope with increased demand for beer, wine and spirits.

It’s not as though we don’t know what to expect. In China, a police station in the worst-affected province received three times as many reports of domestic abuse in February, compared with the same period last year. Some governments, notably those of Germany and Spain, have acknowledged the probable impact of coronavirus lockdowns. The German family ministry has posted emergency phone numbers for anyone experiencing ‘conflicts arising at home’, offering counselling to teenagers, pregnant women and victims of domestic abuse. In Spain, the government has set up an instant messaging service and an online chatroom to provide immediate support to victims. Such measures are welcome, even if they fall short of providing desperately-needed emergency accommodation.

When Boris Johnson was asked about the risk of a surge in domestic violence a couple of weeks ago, he replied with his usual combination of bluster and bragging, insisting that he had just put “record funding” back into councils even though the money wasn’t earmarked for — and is unlikely to be allocated to — services for victims of abuse. But the truth is that organisations trying to help women escape violent relationships were in dire straits before the coronavirus sent the country into quarantine. It was already the case that two-thirds of women in need of a refuge place were being turned away, forcing them to move in with relatives, risk becoming homeless or stay with a man who had beaten and raped them.

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Some of these women may now end up being killed in their own homes. Domestic homicides were already at a five-year high before the epidemic broke out. The latest Femicide Census makes sombre reading, listing 149 killings and demonstrating once again that that women are most likely to be killed by a current or ex-partner; in cases where perpetrator and victim were known to each other, more than half of the deaths occurred in households with a history of domestic abuse.

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s masculine War Cabinet should flick through it. The statistic that should really worry them is the fact that 68% of such killings took place in or immediately around the family home – the very place where they’ve told women to isolate.

During Gov briefings am I the only one thinking ‘where are all the women?’ Why are there no senior women in the “war cabinet” or used to convey those critical messages? Equality means better decisions. Don’t pack the women away during a crisis.

— Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 18, 2020

In Greater Manchester, there have already been reports of abuse linked to the lockdown, according to Beverley Hughes, deputy mayor for policing and crime. Avon and Somerset police, too, reported a 20.9% increase in domestic abuse incidents in the last two weeks, from 718 to 868. And Police in Cumbria have asked postal workers and delivery drivers to look out for signs of abuse.

But thus far, despite an array of individuals and organisations — including Women’s Aid and the recently-appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs — pleading for some sort of Government provision, little seems to have been done.  The only concession the Government has openly made is to exempt those fleeing a violent relationship from lockdown enforcement fines.

But there’s absolutely no mystery about what the ministers could and should do. They urgently need to provide extra financial support for victims’ organisations to help cope with increased demand; they should instruct the police to check on households with a known history of domestic abuse; they should use domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) to get the worst abusers out of their homes; and they should use empty hotels to provide emergency accommodations for women and children. They should also do everything within their power to promote the services that are already available for these vulnerable women.

As the scale of the pandemic was starting to become apparent, the Prime Minister boasted in the House of Commons that his Government has an “outstanding record in tackling violence against women and girls”. It was a dubious claim before coronavirus changed the landscape of the UK, emptying the streets and sequestering the population behind closed doors. It looks even more suspect now as thousands of vulnerable women look forward to the next few weeks not just with the anxiety we all feel during a global pandemic, but outright terror.

We were in Edinburgh and I convinced her that clambering up Arthur’s Seat in the snow would be worth it. Nearing the summit, she slipped on the ice onto her belly. We’d already had the first symptoms by then, but it’s still something that plays on my mind.

The symptoms grew over the weekend — from spotting to bleeding, and what she describes as a “stormy feeling” in her tummy — and with them our healthy optimism morphed into denial. Eventually, the reality of the situation forced itself upon us and we rushed to the nearest hospital.

When we made it to the right place — after traumatising a happy couple looking forward to finding out their baby’s sex — the sonographer told us bluntly that if there had been anything living ‘up there’, it had passed. It would have been tiny and easy to miss in the mess; at six weeks, the pregnancy had still been in its early stages. We were sent home with condolences and a leaflet.

The leaflet’s science and statistics were reassuring: one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage; the vast majority of people who suffer a miscarriage go on to have a healthy baby; our age was on our side (we were both in our late twenties). The leaflet also took us through the emotions we might be experiencing. It was pretty accurate. For me there was a dull, aching sadness; an emptiness where there had been excitement and hope.

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Miscarriage is extraordinarily traumatic. A recent study found that one in four women who suffered a miscarriage met official criteria for probable post-traumatic stress disorder a month later. This news triggered many women to share their devastating experiences.

But it is not only women who suffer the psychological impact. Notably absent both in the research and in the cathartic articles, vox pops and social media posts is the male experience.

Men are an afterthought. Our trauma is obviously less physical and direct. But the father’s loss is still unquestionably painful — and our secondary role in pregnancy and miscarriage adds further layers of confusion and guilt to the grief. Mothers frequently worry about their grief for a child they never met being unjustified; fathers often feel even further removed — and as such that their pain is not reasonable, or even in some way not real.

Traditional expectations of masculinity also dictate that men should be strong for our partners — rocks for them to lean on — and so repress our emotions. Complaining about my own pain feels selfish, to talk about the pain of men androcentric, when that of your partner, of women, is more direct and acute. This is reflected in the lack of resources and communities by and for men affected by miscarriage.

Ali discovered a wealth of resources and communities by and for women with difficult fertility journeys. I searched for male equivalents; they did not exist. There were occasional special episodes or guest appearances, but there simply wasn’t anything by and for men.

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We need to start sharing our stories.

At the time, Ali and I decided against telling anyone else, and started trying again at the earliest opportunity. In June, we booked a holiday to Cornwall. Ali had fallen pregnant again, and our 12-week scan was booked for when we came home. We’d organised a barbecue the following weekend, bringing together our respective parents and siblings, to break the happy news.

Again, the same symptoms — that stormy feeling — built. We drove an hour and a half to Plymouth for an emergency appointment with a GP, who made us a next-day appointment at a hospital in Barnstaple.

I held on to hope, right up until the sonographer confirmed what Ali already knew. The foetus had died at nine weeks.

As her body had already begun to “deal with it”, he recommended letting things take their natural course, rather than opting for surgery. So we went back to our holiday cottage. But when it — literally labour — started, there was no question that Ali needed proper pain relief and hospital care. The paramedics were incredible; in hospital, the nurse found a flip-out bed for me, so I could sleep by Ali’s side during the night of contractions.

At around 4am, lying in a cardboard bedpan was a little translucent, gelatinous blob, something halfway between a prawn and a dim sum, which should have been our daughter or son. I should have cuddled it seven months later, skin-on-skin in the hospital; I should have taken its photo on its first day of school; I should have embarrassed it at its wedding.

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How toxic is Scottish masculinity?

By Julie Bindel

We were sent home with condolences and that familiar leaflet.

This time, we told our families, having decided to go ahead with the barbecue that was supposed to be a celebration. Talking about it was awful, but having someone else to share our emotions with made the burden that much lighter. I thought about sharing it with my friends, but was unable to talk about it without completely dissolving; I told myself it was to spare them the anguish and awkwardness of having to console me, but it was more to do with macho pride.

The statistics were less reassuring this time — only 2% of women miscarry two times in a row, and miscarrying as late as we did was similarly rare. I used Google as a crutch, feeling useful and proactive in looking up all the potential causes of recurrent miscarriage, what tests would be done if we had a third (the NHS requires three consecutive miscarriages before looking into underlying causes).

I found a study that linked ease of conception with recurrent miscarriage — that the woman’s body was insufficiently ‘picky’ about the likelihood of an embryo developing properly and let doomed embryos latch on and grow. We had conceived on the first try each time. I shared this with Ali — she was devastated, feeling I was blaming her (or at least her body). I wanted desperately to understand everything about miscarriage, perhaps subconsciously hoping I’d stumble across something that would somehow fix it; Ali just wanted someone to share her pain.

We considered whether to start trying again. Both optimistic by nature, we now felt pessimistic about our chances of having a baby. I had always assumed I would have a family, and prioritised my family life before everything else. What was the point of my career, my house, my life if it was not a pathway to having my own family? It stirred dark questions about whether life is worthwhile for its own sake. The thought of conceiving was now a scary one — not in the momentous prospect of becoming a parent, but in the prospect of not becoming one. But the only thing scarier than trying again was not trying again.

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When we got our third positive pregnancy test of the year, my reaction was anxiety as much as joy. At 11 weeks, we convinced ourselves that it was over — Ali felt a ‘stormy’ feeling, morning sickness had dissipated and her breasts were no longer swollen. Not wanting to wait, we paid for a private scan to confirm the inevitable — cruelly, it was located in (now defunct) Mothercare; we had to navigate aisles of prams and tiny shoes and babies on new mothers’ hips to seemingly confirm the inevitable. Instead, we saw a heartbeat for the first time.

Ali is now approaching six months pregnant, but every time there’s confirmation that Baby is still there — every ultrasound or kick through mum’s tummy — I get emotional. I still think of the babies that weren’t, who should be here by now. I’m still anxious where I would once have been purely excited.

And talking about these emotions is difficult. As a man, it means fighting deeply internalised, unspoken taboos — especially since pregnancy is traditionally seen as a ‘women’s issue’.

I still worry that I’m making it all about me — that my grief is somehow in competition with my wife’s.

And I’m of course aware that comparatively we’re extremely fortunate — to have found it so easy to conceive in the first place, and to have reached the stage we’re now at (though nothing is ever certain, and assuming Baby is born alive and well, I’m sure I’ll remain constantly anxious about his or her wellbeing long into adulthood).

But men have seemingly spent forever finding excuses for bottling up their emotions. Talking about our experiences, and encouraging others to share theirs, is the only way to break that cycle.

So opens a rather brilliant and fun documentary on a topic that fascinates me: the ‘ideal man’. Many of my male friends — both gay and straight, have told me that masculinity is like a prison, giving them little flexibility in how to live and behave. Increasing numbers of us — whether male or female — are trying to work out what it means to be a man these days. Stereotypes are being challenged and gender roles supposedly more fluid.

In her new documentary, The Ideal Scotsman, Rachel McCormack looks specifically at Scottish masculinity. She explores the Scotsman in all his incarnations — from the ‘hard man’ of the Glasgow knife gangs, to today’s tearier version (Andy Murray, take a bow).

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McCormack, a proud Glaswegian, has long been fascinated by men in kilts. I’ve seen first-hand why: I accompanied her on a trip to Edinburgh while she was researching a book on women and whisky, and witnessed how she is generally treated by the male-dominated whisky industry. She wasn’t once phased by the often outrageous sexism she was subjected to; but she did challenge it firmly and reasonably while drinking the blokes under the table.

“Public life in Scotland”, she tells me, “is overwhelmingly male and unfriendly to women.” That’s why she decided to make the film. “I wanted to see what Scottish men were doing with all the space they are taking up”. Men are 50% of the population, she says, but they dominate public life.

But is that specific to Scotland? In many ways, yes, she says. “Despite our changing political culture, Scotland is still overwhelmingly male.”

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The best-known expression of Scottish masculinity is probably that represented in the 1995 film Braveheart, a fictional tale based on the life of William Wallace, who led the Scots in the First War of Independence against King Edward I of England. The film emphasises the machismo of Wallace and juxtaposes this version of a man with the heavily homophobic depiction of the English Prince Edward and his male companion — all make-up and feminine attire. The message here is that proper Scotsmen are hard and heterosexual and have a passionate love for their country. Nationalism is what true men fight for.

McCormack wanted to see if that is still the case. She tells me she was particularly “interested in what the male is like now that there is no hard industry to shape that ‘hard man’ caricature we remember. How do they see themselves and their position as men in Scotland today?”

And so she talks to actors, historians, writers, and even a celebrated male ballet dancer. She tracks the Scottish man through time, too, starting with the Highland Chiefs and ending with Rab C. Nesbitt and the uber violent Begbie in Trainspotting.

Throughout the documentary, McCormack manages to have intelligent and meaningful conversations with both hairy-arsed geezers and the new wave types; she gets them all to really think about what it means to be a man today.

And she finds that things are changing. Tough young men such as ballet dancer Chris Harrison and writer Chris McQueer have a much healthier outlook on life. “Harrison is one of the bravest men I have ever met,” she says, “a heterosexual ballet dancer when he was growing up in rural Stirlingshire was not something that would have been allowed to exist easily and it is very obvious he had a really hard time.”

Harrison is a great interviewee. In the film he talks about how it is now much easier for Scottish boys to do ballet — but stops short of attributing that change even slightly to himself, which one undoubtedly could.

McQueer, in turn, talks about the generation of working-class men being brought up mostly by single mothers, who don’t want to be like the older generation of men. “They didn’t want to disappoint their mums and their grans,” says McCormack. “I found that really sad as it appeared the only way to cut out a toxic legacy was if the men disappeared.”

In fact, one of the most interesting things she discovered was the way sons relate to their fathers. She said she noticed a particular “emotional repression” present in many father-son relationships.

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This really resonated with me. And it isn’t peculiar to Scotland. As a feminist who has spent all her adult life campaigning to end male violence towards women — one woman is killed every three days by a former partner — I am constantly confronting the reality and repercussions of toxic masculinity. All those men who assault women are, in the main, given permission to do so by the indoctrination and perpetuation of sexist stereotypes.

Behaviours are handed down from generation to generation. Boys are bullied in order to become ‘proper men’, taught to fight, told that women should be kept in their place and are simply sex objects. On a more common — if insidious — level, the casual normalisation of gender roles in the domestic setting, such as leaving the housework and childcare to women, is far more common than many so-called ‘modern men’ would like to admit. We feminists are, in a way, a man’s best friend. We know that men can choose not to be dicks and we are fighting to tell them as much.

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So it was refreshing to hear that there is a younger generation kicking back against the particularly rigid stereotype of the Scottish ‘hard man’. It is clear from both the film and from my own observations as a feminist that today, at least for the younger generation, masculinity isn’t nearly as restrictive as it was.

McCormack agrees. “It does seem to be changing dramatically,” she says. “The younger generation seem in a much better position to cope with life, like women and have a more pleasurable life.”

Thankfully, the stereotype of the Scottish man is shifting from that of Rab C. Nesbitt — the angry, lazy, middle-aged man with stubble and in a dirty string vest — to the point where male ballet dancers and pro-feminist sportsmen such as Andy Murray can get a look in.

Which isn’t to say that my work is done. When instances of male violence against women and other men falls to a record low; when fewer boys look to hard-core pornography for their sex education, and a few more of them pick up a vacuum cleaner and nappy every now and again — maybe then we will be able to feel assured that toxic masculinity is becoming obsolete. But until then, it is alive and, unfortunately, kicking hard.

The Ideal Scotsman can be watched on iPlayer.

Acquaintances and colleagues reveal that the perpetrator, whose actions have official sources scratching their heads, has been sending out warning signals for months, if not years. It happened in August this year, when a 24-year-old man who murdered nine people in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, turned out to have been previously suspended from high school for writing a list of boys he wanted to kill and girls he wanted to rape. Some of the teenage girls targeted by Connor Betts had refused to go on dates with him.

“There was a kill list and a rape list, and my name was on the rape list,” a former classmate recalled. A few years later, in the run-up to his rampage, Betts provided vocals for a ‘pornogrind’ band called the Menstrual Munchies, whose song titles include “6 Ways of Female Butchery”. Like many mass killers, Betts included a female relative — his only sister, Megan, 22 — among his victims.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that both mass murderers and terrorists hate women. Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 left behind a video and ‘manifesto’ railing against women who wouldn’t go on dates with him. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, had previously turned in work full of violent fantasies, stalked female students and was caught ‘upskirting’ in class. Robert Dear Jnr, a domestic terrorist who murdered three people in Colorado Springs in 2015, had been accused of domestic violence, voyeurism and rape. I found many more examples when I was researching my book Home Grown, which looks at the history of dozens of men who went on to kill complete strangers.

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Despite all this, the post-attack trajectory from official incomprehension — what on earth inspired this apparently blameless individual to commit such an atrocity? — to a grudging admission of missed warning signs has become horribly familiar. It’s so routine, in fact, that I had begun to think I was used to it. But the sequence of events that followed last week’s horrific massacre at police headquarters in Paris — described as “a scene of extreme violence” by France’s anti-terrorist prosecutor, Jean-Francois Ricard — has me almost lost for words.

On Thursday, a civilian computer expert called Mickaël Harpon, 45, left his office near Notre Dame cathedral at lunchtime and purchased two kitchen knives. He then returned to police HQ, one of the most security-conscious buildings in Paris, and began hacking and slashing at colleagues in a rampage that lasted seven minutes. Four people died and a fifth person was gravely injured before Harpon was shot dead by a trainee police officer who had joined the force only six days earlier.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, France’s interior minister, Christophe Castaner, claimed that the attacker had “never shown any behavioural problems” or given the “slightest reason for alarm”. Yet it quickly emerged that Harpon, who had converted to Islam a decade earlier, had suddenly started refusing to speak to female colleagues about 18 months before the attack. I am resisting the urge to use block capitals here: this is not normal behaviour. Refusing to interact with women, other than family members, is a classic sign of a type of misogyny associated with Islamist extremism. How was such a huge red flag missed in a department whose very purpose is combating terrorism?

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It’s all the more startling because the scene of the crime was a police intelligence unit charged with tracking extremists. They had more reason than almost anyone in France to know that extreme misogyny was a missed warning signal in one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in recent years, the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January 2015 in which 12 people died. The younger of the two perpetrators, Cherif Kouachi, had made a point of refusing to stand up in court before a female judge when he appeared on terrorist charges; his elder brother, Said, was sacked from his job with a local authority because he refused to shake hands with women.

By last Saturday — that crucial third day from the point of those who study such ghastly events — the idea that the massacre at police HQ in Paris was a purely criminal matter completely fell apart. The prosecutor, Ricard, revealed that Harpon was a radicalised Islamist who slit the throat of at least one of his victims. At police HQ, he was known to have expressed support for Islamist murders, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre. And, with a sickening sense of inevitability, we also learned that he had been taken to court in 2009 on charges of domestic violence.

The murder investigation is now in the hands of anti-terror police, a development that should surprise nobody. But the wider question of why misogyny is so often tolerated, misinterpreted or excused needs to be answered.

It isn’t just an issue for the French authorities. After Connor Betts’ list of potential rape victims was discovered at his school in Ohio, girls who were considered to be at risk were contacted and warned by the authorities. But Betts reappeared at the school without explanation a few months later, resuming lessons as though nothing had happened. Police records relating to the incident were sealed and later expunged, so it isn’t known why he didn’t face charges which might have prevented him acquiring firearms. The local school district has refused to release records that might show why he was re-admitted.

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In the UK, the violent misogyny of the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, also failed to make it into official records. In May 2017, 22-year-old Abedi deliberately targeted a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande, who has a big following among teenage girls; this horrific attack resulted in the deaths of 22 people, three-quarters of them women and girls.

Five years earlier, Abedi had earned a reputation as a bully at the college he attended in south Manchester, targeting female staff and students in particular. Things took an even more alarming turn when Abedi punched a Muslim girl in the head for wearing a short skirt, yet he wasn’t charged with assault; the incident, which took place at college and in front of witnesses, was dealt with via ‘restorative justice’ where the perpetrator agrees to sit down with and apologise to his victim. This unequivocal evidence of an Islamist-inspired form of misogyny wasn’t even referred to Channel, the strand of the Prevent programme designed to deal with radicalised individuals.

After writing a book about misogyny at the beginning of my career, I know how often it is normalised or explained away. But that was a long time ago and it’s become clear, in the intervening period, that misogyny is even more dangerous than I originally thought. The men I’ve mentioned in this article made no secret of their contempt for women, openly displaying it at school, in college and at work. They rightly believed they would get away with it — and they went on to murder 35 people in three countries, as well as injuring hundreds of others.

If police and counter-terrorism agencies want to forestall future attacks, they need to recognise extreme misogyny as a warning sign — and put individuals who threaten and abuse women at the top of their suspects list.

Why was anyone surprised? Supercars, fists, bleeding and dead flesh – what’s the difference? Clarkson’s id is hungry. It must be fed.

But not on Top Gear, which has had four seasons without the man. The next begins on Sunday with what is called, by the production team, “emotional depth”. Whatever that is, it will distinguish the show from Clarkson’s current resting place – The Grand Tour on Amazon, where he continues to boast about his gift for changing gears.

There is a new team of presenters – Freddy Flintoff, Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness. McGuiness said, “there’s hugs and nice bits such as what we thought about Ethiopia”. Harris said, like a survivor of family therapy, “we hug each other. We didn’t hug each other before”. Flintoff promises, “honesty”.

But can they do it? Will viewers want it? More than 4.5 million of them left with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. Can cars – and specifically supercars (who watches Top Gear for a rebooted Honda Jazz?) – be uncoupled from heat and thwarted lust and intoxicated masculinity? Will Top Gear simply stop drooling over the Ferrari Lusso GTC4 (men like fast cars) and start drooling over the VW Up! (women like reliable cars)? Will they attempt mindfulness, with cars?

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By Douglas Murray

I don’t think you can untangle cars from rage. That is why Jeremy Clarkson is the greatest motoring journalist there is. He is almost a car. He punched a colleague for food; the combustion engine broke the world. Its roar – the sex growl – is mere pollutant. It’s an exhaust: what a metaphor.

I learnt to drive at 40. I waited so long because I feared cars; I thought they were the spirit animals of angry men. I was always day-dreaming on buses, which are a more female form of transport: meditative and collaborative. When I got married my husband forced me to drive. It took five years to learn not to put the hand-brake on at each roundabout. I failed my practical test so many times I had a favourite test examiner. He was called Dave.

When I finally passed my test, I got a job reviewing cars, particularly supercars. (A supercar is, essentially, a car that is better than it needs to be. And cars are better than they have ever been. If you doubt this, drive a Morgan. Or rather don’t. If you crash it, you will likely die).

My job was revenge on Dave at Garage X, who sold me a written off Vauxhall Corsa at full price. When I learnt this, my response was not masculine – beat him, eat him, threaten him with Trading Standards  – but feminine. I said I was devasted and he gave me £700 back (from pity, not fear).

Why wasn’t I more like Clarkson? What would he have done to Dave of Garage X? Sometimes I think the rest of my life has been and will be revenge on Dave of Garage X. And what became revenge on Dave of Garage X became revenge on all men: I would take what they wanted for myself. I fantasised that I would drive into Garage X in a Rolls Royce Ghost and invent a spurious problem with the indicators. But in the end, I didn’t.

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But a succession of supercars has been delivered to my house by men called Dave: Aston Martins, Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon (which was designed as a military vehicle for the Shah of Iran but is now updated with Disco lights for Covent Garden wankers). They were a drug I took to as I have taken to every other drug: with fanatical devotion.

I think I am not a very good reviewer of cars. I pride myself on not learning what torque is. I battle to squeeze a factoid, or a number, into a review: length of wheelbase, the time it takes to get from 0-60 mph, turning circle, and all that. That is how men usually speak about cars, because they cannot articulate the emotions they summon. They would rather dress up as Vikings. Except Clarkson, who does it all non-verbally: with squints, farts and, eventually, his fists.

I can articulate the emotion. I can measure it, in the same way that you know an art work is great without knowing why exactly it is great, by how high I get when I am in the car. I am a recovering addict and I know when I am being drugged. (What, for example, do they put in Pringles, which are not nice?). The day of the Goodwood media day, I got very high driving an orange Bentley GT and then a blue McLaren Spyder and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. So, I review my own highness.

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The car that makes me most high is the Aston Martin Superleggera (super light). It has blah torque, and the ability to make the sexual currency of a fat middle-aged woman rise by 20,000% in six seconds, which is immensely disorientating, and very pleasing, although, as with all drugs, when I am on them I cannot do much else.

I read What Car? but I cannot see the words. I am too busy dreaming. In supercars, I am hot – or, at least, I feel I am, which amounts to the same thing. I am skittish. Of course, it is my midlife crisis. When I set out in a supercar, my husband makes me wear my wedding ring, or I would park outside Screw Fix (or any builders’ merchant) all day. If you have ever felt you have not had enough attention from men your life, park outside Screw Fix in a new Aston Martin. Myths, as John Tolkien said, are true.

Cars are the greatest and most destructive drug we have yet abused. That is their wonder and their terror; why else would someone spend £250,000 on a Ferrari Lusso GTC4, which has only two doors? The idea of gentle, emotionally available cars and attendant criticism is a nonsense. It ought to be suppressed.

Toxic masculinity didn’t damage Donald Trump’s chances, showing that millions of people still respond positively – or at least indifferently – to the near-parodic version of masculinity on display at his rallies.

Such behaviour, which takes traditionally masculine traits and exaggerates them to disastrous effect, isn’t innate to men, and is rejected by a growing number of them. But when it’s sanctioned at such a high level, we shouldn’t be surprised if individuals further down the food chain copy it and make similar assumptions about how they are entitled to behave.

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The UK, like many modern democracies, has a raft of laws that commit our society to sex equality. But the way people actually treat each other in private is another matter. Domestic abuse is widespread, suggesting that toxic masculinity taken to extremes continues to define and distort many intimate relationships.

At the same time, our understanding of the phenomenon has expanded: since 2015, the law has recognised non-physical forms of domestic abuse, such as keeping women short of money and ‘gaslighting’, a type of psychological manipulation that encourages self-doubt.

What’s gone underreported is the relationship between domestic violence and murder statistics. Men do become victims of domestic abuse, but they’re far more likely to be killed by strangers; fully half of female murder victims are killed by a current or former partner, compared to only 3% of male victims. Two women die at the hands of an intimate partner every week, according to official figures.

A significant proportion of those deaths involve ‘over-killing’ – the use of much greater force than is needed to kill the victim. It featured in two-fifths of cases recorded by the Femicide Census in 2017, including one where a woman was struck 40 times by an axe and another where the victim was stabbed 175 times. The following year, when the public conversation was all about knife crime, the number of domestic homicides in London more than tripled to 29.

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By Joan Smith

It’s a depressing fact that there isn’t outcry over these murders, harking back to a time when violence in the home was dismissed as ‘just a domestic’. It’s worrying, too: it’s gradually becoming clear that the impact of such high levels of anger, aggression and assaults isn’t limited to the private sphere.

In the US, where mass shootings without an obvious political motive are common, the link between what happens behind closed doors and acts of public violence has been showing up in research for some time. One of the best-known studies, carried out by an NGO called Everytown for Gun Safety, found that the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member in 57% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014. In many of these cases, the victim had suffered abuse for years.

Devin Patrick Kelley, who had convictions for violence against his first wife and his step-son, was trying to kill the mother of his estranged second wife when he opened fire in a church in Texas in 2017, killing 26 people. Nine days later, Kevin Janson Neal riddled his wife’s body with bullets and hid her under the floorboards before rushing out of their home in rural California and murdering four more victims. The young man accused of killing 14 students and three teachers at his old school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 was well-known to the police because his adoptive mother called 911 so many times, pleading for help when he verbally and physically abused her.

Violence in the home doesn’t always stay in the home – and a similar pattern has begun to emerge in relation to terrorism. People are surprised when I tell them that all four fatal attacks in the UK in 2017 were carried out by men with a history of domestic abuse; they’re even more taken aback when I explain that the same background turns up in relation to terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Australia. That’s because the public thinks about terrorism as ideological, carried out by men who’ve been radicalised by Salafist videos or neo-Nazi propaganda.

The truth, as I’ve discovered while researching the histories of dozens of terrorists, is that many of them began in the same way as mass shooters: abusing their families – and, crucially, becoming desensitised to the effects of violence – behind closed doors.

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Last week, harrowing accounts began to emerge of the final moments of the eight people who died in the terrorist attack on London Bridge and Borough Market in June 2017. Two members of the gang, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba, are known to have abused female family members – his wife in Redouane’s case, and his elder sister in Zaghba’s. The ringleader, Khuram Butt, had previously tried to leave his pregnant wife to fight for ISIS in Syria, but was prevented from leaving the UK by members of his family. He led the London Bridge attack just weeks after his second child was born, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless.

Two weeks later, a right-wing extremist, Darren Osborne, staged a copycat attack, ranting about killing Muslims and driving another rented van into worshippers leaving a mosque in north London. Osborne had shown no interest in politics until a few weeks earlier, when his partner had finally had enough of his abuse (one of his many convictions was for ABH against her) and threw him out of the family home.

So many terrorists are men who have been abusing women for years before they become killers. And it’s not hard to see how domestic abuse lays the groundwork. Few men escalate their behaviour to the extremes of violence, but those that do are accustomed to terrorising women and children – and enjoy the sense of power that goes with it. Don’t forget that some of the ‘foreign fighters’ who turned up in Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS admitted that they were attracted by the idea of owning ‘sex slaves’, surely the most extreme form of domestic violence it’s possible to imagine.

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Toxic masculinity is creating a pool of men who are susceptible to the propaganda of terrorist organisations – men who are responding positively to messages legitimising the use of lethal force against civilians.

Shocking as all this is, some good might come of it. Terrorism isn’t usually perceived as male violence – with all the connections that implies. But once we understand the link, we’ll have a tool to help us identify dangerous individuals before they launch an attack.

Eighteen months ago, MI5 revealed that it has a list of 3,000 active suspects who might be in the process of preparing a terrorist outrage, along with 20,000 others who have been investigated but aren’t believed to pose an immediate threat. The demand on resources is enormous, given how many agents are needed to watch just one individual. But those with a history of domestic abuse should be the highest priority.

Paradoxically, while toxic masculinity is facilitating terrorist attacks, it could also be one of the biggest warning signs for counter-terrorist agencies. Keeping tabs on it may be a means of saving lives.

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists by Joan Smith is published by riverrun on 16th May, £16.99

Then, over a few days in January, a number of things happen. The American Psychological Association issues new guidelines to all of its practitioners. These guidelines are the basis for how to deal with women and girls who they encounter in their professional capacities. The new guidance tells its members that there are certain harmful aspects of femininity that need to be challenged, suppressed or removed. These include very basic feminine traits which some women have in abundance, and others do not have at all. Traits such as caring, cooperation and motherliness. Despite the fact that these are probably ineradicable, they are ones which the APA has nevertheless identified as being in need of expunged from the female of the species.

Then, a few days later, a company which makes feminine hygiene products starts a new advertising campaign. It is aimed at those who use its products – but its message seems strangely hostile to its target audience. Indeed, it appears to largely show them at their absolute worst. For example, there is a segment near the opening that highlights the phenomenon of women who will use their sexuality to manipulate people and get their own way, or who will go to any lengths to get pregnant. It’s behaviour that is surely not emblematic of women as a whole, and yet that is what the advert would appear to be saying. What would women feel about this? Would there not be a degree of anger as well as confusion?

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All this is merely to reverse recent events. The APA recently released guidelines for how its members should specifically deal with men and boys. An article explaining the rationale claimed that 40 years of research showed that “traditional masculinity – marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression, is undermining men’s well-being”.  To tackle these “traditional” aspects of masculinity, the APA had produced some new guidelines in order to help people in practice “recognise this problem for boys and men”.

In its guidelines, the APA defined traditional masculinity as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence”.

The APA gave very little idea of how this rewiring might work even on its own terms. For instance, if competitiveness is indeed an especially male trait – as the APA suggests – then when is such competitiveness toxic and harmful, and when is it useful? Might a male athlete be allowed to use their competitive instincts on the race-track? If so, how can he be helped to ensure that off the track he is as docile as possible?

Might a man facing inoperable cancer with stoicism be helped out of this harmful position so as to be less stoical? If ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ are indeed male traits then when and where should men be encouraged to drop them? Should a male explorer be encouraged to be less adventurous, a male firefighter be trained to take fewer risks? Ought male soldiers be encouraged to less connected to ‘violence’ and be more keen to show weakness? If so when? By what mechanism should male soldiers be reprogrammed to use their useful traits and skills when society badly needs them but have them squeezed out when society deems them problematic?

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For its part, Gillette chose to launch its new advertising campaign not with the statement ‘The best a man can get’ (as used to be the strapline) but rather something along the lines of ‘The best that men can be’. Yet what it focused on was every negative male trait from young boys fighting to bullying and the problem of unwarranted male attention towards women. As though these are traits specific to men, and which all men are at risk of falling victim to.

In short, Gillette chose to show men at their worst and then suggest that by using Gillette – with its new ethical and moral code – we could all make ourselves better.

The APA guidance and the furious Gillette fallout illustrate a number of things. In the case of Gillette, it’s the skill of marketing campaigns which get everyone to talk about a product (even negatively) for some days and thereby increase brand recognition. Perhaps we should all begin to recognise this as the corporate advertising equivalent of trolling.

But there has also been fallout because these stories also point to one of the biggest culture wars of our era – the usefulness or otherwise of certain masculine traits. Few people would deny that the traits the APA lists as especially male (adventure, risk, violence) can be exercised negatively. Somebody being violent against someone they think is looking at them in the street is an example of a negative application of the violence trait. On the other hand, from the rugby pitch to a war zone, there are plenty of occasions where violence can be harnessed to the good of everybody.

Turn it around and you can only come to the same conclusion. Characteristics more often listed as feminine (which doesn’t mean they characterise all women, but that they exist disproportionately across the mean in women) include empathy and sensitivity. Both of these characteristics can – like violence and adventurousness – be used for the good.  They can also (though this is less often said) have less favourable effects.

As Yale’s Paul Bloom in his Against Empathy: the case for rational compassion has shown, empathy can have enormously negative consequences. The idea that these characteristics are enough in and of themselves (and the more the better) can blind people to the fact that sometimes taking a difficult decision requires steel-heartedness. For example, it may be more compassionate to give money to an alcoholic than to stonewall him. But which is the better course of action?

If the APA and Gillette were merely stressing the importance of the worst aspects of people being reined then that would be one thing (though the question of why a vast multinational corporation should be among those doing the lecturing would still linger). But the impression being projected is something else. It is not that certain masculine traits can – like all traits – be taken to extremes and go bad. It is that the traits themselves are wrong and that the people who hold them must as a result either re-programme themselves or be reprogrammed by others.

Specifically it is a pitch to feminise men. Which is as bizarre as an organised campaign to make women more masculine. For sure, it is the sort of thing that a post-modern cultural-studies professor might find interesting. But for many men – especially young men trying to find their way in the world – it is a message that is flooring in a world that is already complex enough to navigate.