The outrage was immediate. Flaubert was hauled before the courts on grounds of obscenity. His crime was rejecting idealism, showing life in its inglorious and alluring undress. But he was acquitted because the society he captured so perceptively was more guilty than he.

Post-Flaubert, many novels were written with righteous social purpose. Some, such as Zola’s Germinal and much of Dickens, brought about political change. Yet this movement, realism, was still an “ism” with the distortions and biases those prisms are susceptible to. It is still fiction. At its best, fiction is indeed the telling of lies to reveal deeper truths. What happens though if the intention to reveal a deeper truth is not present at all? What happens when we are swamped by fictions? In excess, any medicine becomes a poison.

The realm of politics is one beset by fictions — sycophancy, propaganda, spin, solipsism, the colossal distance between rarified worlds and street life. It has been ever thus. Yet the recent swerve of politicians into an infantilized Lalaland has felt particularly jarring. It now feels as if they actually believe the fictions they evoke and certainly expect us to. Earlier this year, the Labour MP Stella Creasy opposed changes to Home Office guidance on refugees, claiming, “Frankly, this process would deny Paddington Bear — he did the same thing, he came by an irregular route, but we gave him sanctuary.”

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The Brutalist's fatal flaw

By Darran Anderson

In the US, this lapse into sentimental fabulism has been taking place for some time. For years, Democrats have clung hubristically to The West Wing, particularly Martin Sheen’s fictional President Jed Bartlet, like some alternative universe where Trump didn’t happen. There was more than a hint of the Kennedys to Bartlet, bolstering the “what could have been” Camelot myth that haunts American liberals. Once, there may have been a nobility to such legends, but The West Wing obsession merely revealed the smugness, complacency, denial, and callous aloofness of the Democrats that helped spawn President Trump. For when fiction becomes delusion, the comfort blanket becomes a straitjacket.

What’s needed then is a hefty dose of gritty uncompromising realism. A cultural reset by telling it like it is. The Netflix knife-crime drama Adolescence appears to be such a moment. It is well-shot, acted, the subject — in which a child is radicalized on the internet — is devastating, and it is generally superior by, admittedly low, mainstream standards.

Yet there is something off from the beginning, with the 13-year-old protagonist appearing more like the cherubic Pears Soap bubble boy than a murderous incel. Of course, physiognomy is deceptive, but the intention was clear from the beginning — our sympathies were being purchased on questionable terms. The implication is clearly, how could such an innocent doe-eyed boy do such a thing? This appeals to white liberal middle-class viewers, cracking open a bottle of white and penitentially subjecting themselves to an “important” series. It does so by chastising them, one of the bourgeois’ prevailing kinks, but also by terrifying them into a moral panic, and by providing a pat answer to a quagmire of a problem.

The response to the show has revealed how far we — and our leaders — have fallen down the fictional rabbit hole. It has been treated as if it were a documentary. In a more innocent time, this could be forgiven, but not now.

From behind the curve, Keir Starmer led the way, placing this work of fiction at the heart of the Government’s attention and proposed future policy. He has encouraged the series to be shown in schools and parliament, and voiced concerns of “a problem with boys and young men”. There has been no shortage of actual violence in society, its unpalatable realities demanding urgent attention. The figures for knife crime in the UK make for grim reading. Knife Crime Statistics | The Ben Kinsella Trust – over 15,000 in London alone in 2023/24. Yet Starmer and his administration have only been shocked into action by a fictional miniseries. As a result, they are now campaigning not against gang culture, Islamist radicalization, the collapse of the extended and nuclear family, the blight of fatherlessness, the economic deprivation that fuels crime, drugs and violence, the ghettoization of communities — but against the spectre of the online Manosphere. They have found a conveniently hateful hate figure in the guise of Andrew Tate, and a convenient stooge in the alienated white working-class boy, one of the few demographics it is now acceptable to deride and exclude.

There’s a cyclopean simplicity to Adolescence and its ilk: one explanation, one solution, one villain. This chimes with the wave of articles that fuel this moral panic. This is, accordingly, an apocalypse of young boys and smartphones, as if girls aren’t susceptible to social contagion. Regardless of the undoubted impact of being terminally online on young boys (or any of us), this stands as a monumental example of concern trolling. We know from previous moral panics (comic books, Mortal Kombat, gangsta rap, video nasties, satanic panic), it leads nowhere. Indeed, some (stranger danger, paedogeddon) have led us to our current dire situation: kids stuck indoors, stuck on parent simulator tablets and devices, with the added development gap of lockdown warping their pliant minds. Self-declared progressives now find themselves the inheritors of censorious “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. All of which is predicated on them hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need.

The subtitle of Madame Bovary — “Provincial Manners” — is rarely mentioned but it is apt. For all their metropolitanism, elite liberals often live in villages within cities, celebrating multi-ethnic culture the way a visiting diplomat or an aloof travel writer might — the food, the music, the color. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly pointed out that this was a clique far more parochial than anyone from the “provinces”, where you are forced to be with people who are different. In wealthy parts of a city, you can choose circles of friends who think the same way, with the threat of exile for anyone who deviates from in-group conformity, which, unsurprisingly, is a collection of compelling fictions.

The other reason for the primacy of fiction is more insidious — control. The damage to free speech under specious weaponized hate-speech legislation is overtaken only by that done to equality under the law by the new sentencing guidelines in favor of ethnic, cultural or faith minorities. Those of us concerned about the Overton window crawling endlessly Right should recognize it is not some rebirth of fascism but rather the collapse of the liberal-Left into illiberalism.

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By Poppy Soweby

Few among us would lament Andrew Tate being ushered from the stage and therein lies the danger. Who is next after that fails to solve anything? The truth is such campaigns don’t solve anything but simply obfuscate and misdirect. Their quick-fix solutions will do nothing about the underlying factors, the soil of despair, alienation, rage. So, others will step in — Islamist mullahs, gang leaders, misogynists, groomers and grifters of various types. Andrew Tate is not the creator of the alienation and debasement, he, and his kind, are the exploiters of political and social failures. The red pill only works when boys are already feeling disenfranchised. Where the damage began, and who profited from it, will remain obscured and unchallenged.

For them, nothing will change because the political class will not change. It does not care that generations of working-class boys will emerge into a world that has no place for them, even as it relies on them materially. They face economic precarity, the dismantling of industries and trades, and are effectively locked out of creative industries monopolized by the rich. If non-white, their marginalization will be co-opted or treated as the sum of their existence. If white, there is the bonus of being discriminated against for their “privilege”. It is arguably even worse for girls, if grooming gangs and their cover-up is anything to go by. The aloofness of the powerful, snug in their own fictional world, sows a whirlwind for others, with the victims, and their stories, vanishing like the murdered girl Katie in Adolescence.

It’s scarcely a surprise, then, that those in whom society has no investment tend to reciprocate. And there is little to suggest that Labor will address any of the underlying economic causes of alienation, crime and violence. Taking phones away just isn’t going to cut it. Meanwhile, we are like Bovary, believing untruths. Until we face the true stories we do not want to hear and set aside our comforting fictions, others will remain locked in tragedies of our making.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

This spring saw the publication of a book by Kaczynski’s neighbour in Montana, and this summer Apple TV released a podcast on the case. He’s also been name-checked by Right-wing influencers clearly trying to keep up with the zeitgeist, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. Carlson last year praised Kaczynski’s “smart analysis” of systems and large organisations, while Masters recommended Kaczynski’s manifesto in a podcast interview in March, saying “there’s a lot of insight there.” Over 25 years after he was arrested, there is no end to our interest in the Unabomber. Why do we still find him so compelling? And why is Kaczynski cool now with very online types, from Right-wingers on 4chan to “anti-woke” leftists on Reddit?

While the recent Unabomber retrospectives mostly rehash his life and the facts of his case, the current zeitgeist revolves more around his ideology. Kaczynski’s manifesto argued that technological progress — the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences” — posed an existential threat to humankind by turning people into “engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine”. Stripped of their autonomy by a faceless, unaccountable system, humans endured psychological suffering as they were forced into “over-socialization”, Kaczynski’s term for a state of being in which the industrial society’s codes and mores have replaced a person’s innate selfhood.

Zombified in this way, people blindly applauded technological advances which spelt societal and environmental doom. There was no hope of fixing the current system. The only option remaining, in Kaczynski’s view, was to overthrow it completely through revolution — by any means necessary. Though Kaczynski repeatedly emphasises the non-political nature of his revolution, he has a lot to say about political movements, particularly Leftist ones, which he saw as cadres of over-socialised do-gooders preoccupied with irrelevant identity concerns. Conservatives weren’t much better: they were “fools” who failed to understand that technology was destroying the traditionalism they prized.

Gen Z and younger millennials see the truth in Kaczynski’s central critique of technology, and its deleterious effects on society. Surrounded by screens from early childhood, addicted to near-constant media consumption, often lacking basic in-person social skills, many sense a broader problem in their own individual capture by the tech borg. They’ve grown up in an era marked by mounting terror about climate change, and in which conventional politics seems woefully insufficient to solve any problems. So Kaczynski’s manifesto resonates.

Though he could never have imagined such horrors as TikTok in the Nineties, the society he describes — atomised and materialistic, one that has forfeited freedom in favour of technological progress we’ve been tricked into wanting — chillingly resembles our own. Sure, he cribbed a lot from French philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose book The Technological Society deeply influenced Kaczynski. But there’s a disquieting reason why Kaczynski is a household name and Ellul, outside of academic circles, is not. Fans tend to either be defiant about the terrorism itself — what better way to offend normies? — or they view it as an unfortunate side plot, perhaps not realising it’s the only reason Kaczynski’s ideas ever attracted notice. “I honestly wish Uncle Teddy wasn’t a terrorist and instead just published the manifesto and let it get popular decades later,” wrote Reddit poster “nabberstonguemyanus” earlier this year. “Then we could openly endorse it and not be called incel psychos.”

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Kaczynski’s recent popularity also corresponds with an epidemic of isolated, socially unskilled young men, many of whom appear to be living mostly online. The term “NEET” — not in education, employment or training — has spilled out from the realm of economics research into common usage. The proportion of NEETs who are young men has been increasing in both the US and the UK. Despite sterling credentials and a promising academic career, Kaczynski chose the lifestyle of what would now be called a “NEET”. In doing so, he became free to enact his revenge on a system he hated and from which he’d felt alienated even as a child. Few of today’s NEETs could, or would want to, deploy Kaczynski’s methods. But they admire his refusal to be judged by society’s standards and relate to his inability to fit in. Few have the wherewithal to leave society entirely, but many may dream of it.

Kaczynski grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, one of two boys. He was a gifted student and enrolled at Harvard at age 16. Lonely, awkward Ted struggled socially and participated in a cruel series of experiments run by a psychology professor with ties to the CIA. Kaczynski and the other participants were subjected to degrading interrogations disguised as intellectual debates and aimed at breaking their confidence. Kaczynski later called it the worst experience he’d ever had. Traumatised and increasingly paranoid, Kaczynski went on to obtain his Ph.D from the University of Michigan, then to a prestigious professorship at the University of California-Berkeley. Kaczynski’s disillusionment with society hardened at Berkeley, where he decided he could no longer countenance studying or teaching mathematics since it contributed to scientific and technological progress. He left Berkeley in 1969 and floated around for much of the Seventies, sometimes living with his parents and holding down temporary blue-collar jobs, before moving permanently into his 10×12 cabin in Montana.

Beginning in 1978, he planted or mailed 16 bombs mostly to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He sent his manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post (and Penthouse, though that always seems to get left out) promising to end the violence if they published it. With encouragement from the government, who thought publishing the document could help crack the case, the Post did so. Kaczynski’s brother David and his wife Linda recognised Ted’s writing and alerted the FBI, who arrested him at his cabin in April 1996. Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus. He spent 25 years in ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Colorado known for housing high-profile or particularly dangerous inmates, before being moved to a medical facility late last year.

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There’s a strange thrill to the story. How many of us believe so deeply in our philosophical principles that we would give up all our modern comforts? American culture is strongly influenced by the myth of the frontier loner, fiercely independent and living on his own terms. We fear this type, but we also respect him. What makes Kaczynski unique is that he had it both ways, finding freedom in seclusion while also fulfilling that other very American compulsion: to be noticed. Unlike other wilderness hermits such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Kaczynski influenced society even more by dropping out of it than he would have otherwise. McCandless’ Kerouackian journey ended grimly in a broken down bus in the Alaskan woods where he died of malnutrition. Kaczynski made himself world-famous and forced the public to reckon with his ideas. He hasn’t even seemed to mind prison, from where he has exchanged letters with supporters and even fallen in love with a female pen pal. He’s continued to influence politics; a 2018 story in New York Magazine described his dealings with a faction of radical environmentalists.

That view — of the Unabomber as a John Brown-esque maverick driven by a higher ideal — is one way to look at it. Another way is to consider Kaczynski as a deeply lonely man driven to violence as much by personal grievance as by principle. He was unable to form relationships with women, an incel in other words. Kaczynski’s bonds with his family were strained and he eventually cut his parents out of his life entirely, blaming them for pushing him to attend Harvard before he was mature enough to handle it. His brother David’s 2015 memoir is an often gut-wrenching read.

It’s hard not to feel for young Ted, so unprepared and unformed. “His confidence in his intellect was not matched by any visceral confidence in his worth as a person, and over time the divide would only grow larger,” David writes, describing Ted on his way off to Harvard. “His self-confidence became infected with doubt, recoiled, and then redoubled toward arrogance and grandiosity.” It’s poignant to read, in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation Kaczynski underwent in 1998, that as late as age 45 he still held out hope of meeting a partner and even contacted a local psychologist in Montana to help him learn to build a relationship. Apparently the bombing campaign wasn’t enough to fill a deep emotional vacuum.

Knowing this history gives a new dimension to the Ted trend. In valorising him, fans get to feel edgy and subversive for portraying him as a freedom fighter. But they can also relate to the bitter, friendless individual Kaczynski really was. Some are aware of this. “Ted Kaczynski AKA The Unabomber was one of our brethren,” wrote poster “Redpill Robert” on a large incel forum in 2020.

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It’s difficult to empathise with Kaczynski as a person, even if one were willing to set aside his murders to do so. David Kaczynski writes of Ted’s cruelty towards their parents, of hateful letters written over a period of years as he minimised contact. He didn’t attend his father’s funeral after the elder Kaczynski killed himself. Wanda Kaczynski coped by concluding that Ted had been warped by trauma stemming from a hospitalisation as an infant. Ted refused to reconcile with her even as she lay on her deathbed. His resentment towards his parents is an obvious subtext to his manifesto, in sections where he deplores modern child-rearing and schooling. “It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study,” Kaczynski complains.

Even in his journals, Kaczynski acknowledged the personal nature of his plans. “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge,” he wrote in 1971. “ I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.” He considered the possibility that his crimes would “stimulate public interest in the technology question”, but equally mused that they would “repel” most people and cause a backlash. In the end, of course, they did both. Kaczynski came across as morally repugnant and arrogant, but he succeeded in forcing his ideas into the mainstream.

There’s a mini-Ted inside all of us. Fumbling at an automated self-checkout kiosk while a computerised voice chirps at you; clicking impotently to make a YouTube ad go away; receiving an email about one’s information being compromised in a widespread data breach; being served a targeted Instagram ad moments after googling something related: we all know the kind of helpless rage these moments inspire. For members of the younger generations, whose development and social lives have been shaped to a degree unprecedented in human history by technology, Kaczynski represents a lost alternative. Most of them will never commit a violent act; Tedposting will have to do for now.

More and more, it’s becoming conventional wisdom that our constant exposure to screens and digital stimuli is bad. Efforts to do something about it crop here and there: some Silicon Valley parents forbid their children from using the very same devices that industry sells to others, and the Chinese government announced last year that it would limit children to three hours of online gaming per week. Among adults, phone addiction is so commonplace that people have begun to lock their phones in boxes to get even a small respite from them — the necessity of this an example of the kind of technological servitude Kaczynski feared. There’s an increasing sense of having lost touch with nature, a sense of the world and its societies being diseased. The Unabomber nostalgia wave is a symptom.

But there are limits, ones that are now being stretched to the point of deterioration by the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing”. Referring to a broad category of practices aimed towards maximising your attractiveness, looksmaxxing follows the same ideology of “optimisation”, where every facet is quantifiable. Attractiveness, in this reading, is not subjective, but rather dictated by millimetres of bone and degrees of “canthal tilt” (another term for eye angle placement). And increasingly, this obsession with surgical levels of improvement is creeping into the vocabularies of teenagers.

What’s curious is that this is happening at a time when beauty standards are allegedly becoming more flexible than ever. Most young women, after all, have been raised in a culture that claims to embrace all bodies and faces. No longer, as many Dove campaigns seem to say, do girls need to starve themselves to a perpetual size 0. Have acne? Throw a convenient star-shaped patch over it and head off to school. Crooked teeth might even get you a modelling contract.

Of course, the reality isn’t quite that wholesome and carefree. Sure, braces might not get you bullied anymore, but social media has allowed us to find flaws we hadn’t known existed. Meanwhile, the pool of people to compare ourselves with is no longer confined to those within our immediate community or those exceptional enough to be seen on TV. Rather, thanks to social media, we are exposed to an endless array of individuals, attractive or otherwise, and have been given a new language to label and scrutinise not only them, but ourselves.

Yet over the past decade, such discourse has been marked by a glaring absence: men. Although periodically a trend like “dad bods” might come along, brands rarely champion for widened acceptance towards their aesthetic pressures. It’s into this vacuum that looksmaxxing first took form.

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As KnowYourMeme explains, the term emerged in 2015 on forums like 4Chan and Reddit among incel and manosphere-adjacent groups desperate to improve their social and romantic standing. The term soon creeped into other corners of Reddit in the early 2020s with subreddits such as r/TrueRateMe, where users share pictures of themselves seeking honest opinions on their appearance. During this time, Reddit itself became increasingly mainstream: between 2018 and 2024, its monthly active users jumped from 331 million to an estimated 1.2 billion.

Meanwhile, TikTok also proliferated, presenting not only an addictive feed of comparison but a new platform for looksmaxxing and its philosophy to grow. Here, we’re shown unlimited hours of beautiful people paired with detailed explanations of why they’re beautiful, and, of more importance, why exactly we don’t look like them. Your jawline isn’t square enough. Your cheekbones aren’t prominent enough. Your nose is too wide. Your skin is too dull. Your lips are too thin. Your face is just asymmetrical enough that, whenever people gaze upon it, they will not see a worthy mate. And crucially, all of this can be quantified with precise traits and measures.

While looksmaxxing is practised by plenty of young women (one could argue women have long been participating, just not under that precise term), it is most rigidly pursued among young men. For women, our options may be more expansive: not only are the majority of skin and haircare products marketed towards us, but makeup offers us a culturally acceptable form of day-to-day improvement.

Absent of these same opportunities, it seems that men have applied looksmaxxing with more of a stringent, pseudo-scientific approach. In one TikTok from January, for example, an anonymous creator rates the attractiveness of influencer SyrianPsycho, a fellow looksmaxxing TikToker with 1.7 million followers. “Syrian has equal facial thirds, almond hunter green eyes with low set, thick and positively tilted eyebrows. He has excellent jawline visibility… he has a good nose shape and good chin projection. Syrian’s main flaws are on the jaw region, his lower jaw is slightly recessed and his gonial angle is on the higher side. He has a narrower than ideal lower third. His midface is on the longer side. Syrian is a 7.5 out of 10 facially.”

The video is filled with comments from fellow young men saying that if SyrianPsycho only scores a 7.5, then it’s “over” for them in comparison.

But through looksmaxxing, of course, any of this has the potential to be fixed. A person can “softmaxx” by getting a more flattering haircut, losing weight through diet and exercise, or improve their skincare routine. If this isn’t enough, they can “hardmaxx” instead — add filler to their lips, have the bones in their face shaven down, undergo excruciating surgery and months of recovery in order to become three inches taller. Through the help of men such as SyrianPsycho, who sell online courses on looksmaxxing and “self-improvement”, they, too, can be attractive.

It is possible, though, that as the language of looksmaxxing — and inceldom — enters the dominant lexicon, it becomes defanged. Searches for looksmaxxing topics on TikTok yield a blend of advice, criticism and jokes. While some young people continue to look towards looksmaxxing creators for insight into how to improve their perceived flaws, others have transformed it into a meme. Now, ironic references to canthal tilt likely outnumber earnest ones. For some, though, the jokes are a means of coping: “Eyebags detected, time to ropemaxx,” one TikTok with just under 1 million views reads, alluding to hanging oneself.

Ironic or otherwise, the damage may still be occurring. With guys like SyrianPsycho naming their courses “Mogwarts” — a reference to “mogging”, or being significantly more attractive than somebody — parsing what’s genuine becomes a challenge. As this all trickles down to younger audiences and becomes filtered through even more layers of memes and internet references, perhaps the true threat any of this presents has become niche. “Mewing”, for example, which refers to the practice of attempting to enhance one’s jawline through various facial exercises and tongue placement, has become a joke even in elementary schools. Among kids, mewing has become associated with a specific gesture and facial expression of pursing their lips, putting a finger up in a “shhh” symbol and then pointing to their jaws. Last week, Parents.com wrote that mewing has “taken over classrooms”, with many teachers lamenting how “disrespectful” the trend is.

Of course, every generation has had their childhood jokes that adults just didn’t understand. I was eight, going on nine, when Napoleon Dynamite was released and “Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner” entered my lexicon. I remember my mother being appalled by how my friends and I would repeat the line. But we didn’t even understand it. The Tina, who was described as a “fat lard”, was a llama in the film. We weren’t calling each other “fat lards”, but simply quoting the film of the summer.

I think of this now as my niece, 11, has begun making her own jokes about mewing. That she, a young girl who does not have her own mobile phone and isn’t even old enough to have an interest in makeup, would be aware of anything remotely associated with this phenomenon frightens me. Is she growing up in a culture with increasingly rigid beauty standards, despite all the talk of body positivity? Or is this just her generation’s set of Napoleon Dynamite-esque jokes?

Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in between. Was I not, even at that young age, already concerned with my body? And would I not have felt shame if I’d been something like a “fat lard” myself? After my niece showed me her rendition of the mewing meme last week, did she not stop to ask if her jawline needed improvement?

Be it through jokes or otherwise, the culture of looksmaxxing among young people reflects a broader anxiety towards beauty in an era where some would claim these standards to be flexible. It’s as if as some parameters have shifted, we’ve responded by drilling down with even more intensity on others. What good does body positivity do when everyone around you is assessing their faces with protractors?

My obsession is with the cowboy game Red Dead Redemption 2. Its world is a microcosm of a late-1800s America, in which you play a gunslinging outlaw — hunting for animals and bounties, robbing trains and rustling horses in the malarial swamps of Louisiana and the lush heartlands of Oklahoma. It is a utopia of sorts, and one of the prize assets in the stable of independent publisher Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. More than anything, it is innocent fun. After all, the victims of my blood-soaked bank jobs aren’t real. Or, at least, I thought they weren’t — until I went online.

I played the main, offline, “story” version of this game for a year, becoming so fixated that one friend tried to stage an intervention to stop me banging on about it. But by then, I was too far gone. I could no longer resist shelling out an extra £6.99 a month for the online iteration, with its expanded plotlines and features. I expected more of the same — though in this version, other gamers play with you.

In the main game, you play as a man. In the online version, you may choose a female avatar — and you can create her in your own image (in my case blonde, overly made-up and probably quite vain). I called her Martine Horsese, and her steed would be Hoof Hefner. Take note, “gamer girls”: a dose of irony is needed to retain a modicum of cool when diving into dorkdom. But the smirk was wiped off my face the moment I started playing. In this new world, all the worst things women fear men would like to do, were there no consequences, happen — all the time, and to you.

As you go about your business, posses of male characters — almost certainly men, given their gamer tags: fightclub247, meatgrinder2001, bitch_flayer — lurk behind you. They stab you, they shoot you, they bind you in ropes and carry your hogtied, still writhing body on the back of their horse. They dump you in abandoned houses, where they take turns to jump on you — the closest simulation of rape the system will allow. Someone called Messi69 will “emote” by spitting at your body. On the voice chat, or in your message inbox, you will be told they can find you, that they will rape and kill you, that you’re a whore.

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In a world where players can do almost exactly as they want, why do men keep choosing to rape? Until the 2010s, online gaming was still a niche. Then it exploded: Call of Duty launched online in 2012, GTA in 2013, Red Dead in 2018. We are now living, one critic said last year, in the “golden age of the online multiplayer”, where players have never been more connected. You can now have unscripted conversations with other gamers, and, rather than being PacMan or Mario, you can play as yourself — or an idealised version of yourself — and act beyond the strictures of a heavily enforced plot. You can do, in other words, almost exactly what you want. It is this, the plugging-in of fantasy to real-life social networks, which has created a space for the darkest human urges to be played out, over and over, with wearying predictability, on the usual victims and by the usual suspects.

Our flourishing incel culture arguably has its roots in a brutal online civil war in 2014, known as “Gamergate”. In this woman-hating frenzy, forums of men and boys mass-coordinated harassment campaigns against female players and developers, from doxing to rape and death threats. It was a response to the perceived suffocation of gaming culture by diversity proponents, worst of all feminists — and an explosion in the proportion of female gamers, which by then had reached up to 48%. One critic wrote: “For a campaign that wanted to take politics out of gaming, Gamergate has injected gaming deep into the veins of our politics.”

I am lucky that in my real life, in which women hold court at dinner parties and are at least as witty as the men, equality seems a given. But the incipient misogynists of the next generation cut their teeth on games which allow them to attack and intimidate anything even purporting to be female. You can block, you can report, but the next time you log on, it will happen again. And I’m a grown-up: I hate to imagine how a 13-year-old girl must feel shutting her laptop to a dark bedroom, having been debased online by knife-wielding strangers —perhaps those very same boys who suffered through double maths with her that morning.

There are many who think that the explicit content of video games encourages this. In GTA, players can drive close to prostitutes to engage their services. An encounter boosts the player’s health, but costs money; luckily, you can kill your prostitute afterwards and rob it back. But if studies are to be believed, these virtual acts have no bearing on our real urges. Gaming is no more likely to spawn a generation of sex-buyers than it is to nurture gangsters. It seems unlikely, therefore, that it would encourage in-game abuse between real players. Games are a mirror for an increasingly brutal male sexuality, not a cause.

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How the Nineties are haunting millennials

By Kat Rosenfield

The trials of the “gamer girl” matter far more than we realise, for this is what boys and men do when they think society isn’t watching. The next generation — already buffeted towards extreme misogyny by Andrew Tate, incel culture and society’s utter saturation in porn — are living out these ideologies in cyberspace; 76% of boys in the UK aged 12-15 game online. It is a training ground, and a virtual arena for roleplaying abusive tastes.

We should, therefore, understand gaming as a prism to see something much larger, much more horrifying — that certain corners of male sexual culture have mutated into a febrile arena where there are no women, just whores; no sex, just rape. In this world, female characters become cyphers for the women of real life — those who dump you, laugh at you, ghost you on Hinge. And while you know nothing about the players behind the screen — not even whether they are in fact women — you are allowed to hate them, and to act on that hate. The world of gaming is a petri dish in which gender relations play out — the worst fears of feminism, in pixels.

Recently, the real world has started watching. In January, British police opened an investigation into a virtual “gang rape” of a girl under 16 in the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s VR utopia. Since then, online sex attacks have become enough of an issue for Interpol to issue a report urging police forces to “define what constitutes crimes and harms” in the Metaverse.

All these are serious concerns — and we should welcome higher scrutiny. Yet I do not believe that we should censor, ban or fret about games themselves beyond the usual, reasonable restrictions on harassment and bullying. After all, the unreality of it, the freedom, is why we play, and why I will continue to game. So, ladies, dust off those controllers and cancel your plans — for there is a deliciously guilty pleasure to shutting out real life and becoming utterly absorbed. But remember that the fascination of virtual worlds is that they are never entirely so; as strange and untethered the universe of a game may be, the shadows of our own dark realities always creep in.

Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.

“The wider effects on public discourse have been chilling. Many… have started to self-censor… In theory, progressives campaign in the name of diversity and inclusion. In practice, they destroy open debate and suffocate those who hold different views… In theory they say they want to protect their democratic rights. In practice, they destroy all trust in democracy.”

Except this isn’t Rufo. This, in fact, is the extremism expert Julia Ebner, writing in her new book, Going Mainstream: How the extremists are taking over, on how the fringes of the far-Right have taken over the mainstream. I simply substituted “progressives” for “the enemies of progressive liberalism” and “diversity and inclusion” for “free speech”. The alarmism was all her own.

We have reached a curious juncture in the culture war where the most entrenched combatants on either side have come to believe that the most deranged ideas of their enemies have politically and culturally triumphed, conquering the mainstream. Both believe that their sacred way of life is under existential threat from dangerous and deviant ideas that have marched from the margins to the centre. Both believe that some form of counter-revolution is needed to stop the rot. Both, bewitched by the excesses of their adversaries, have succumbed to the very derangement and loss of perspective of which they accuse the other side.

The crucial difference between Ebner and Rufo, however, is that Ebner bills herself as an expert and academic, while Rufo is explicit and unapologetic about being an activist with political aspirations. I won’t comment on Ebner’s credentials as an academic or extremism expert, but she’s certainly not a conventional one. For a start, it is rare for an extremism expert to be the subject of a long and lavish feature in a leading national newspaper. “I infiltrate incel groups posing as a man: my life undercover,” ran the headline of a recent Times magazine piece on Ebner, accompanied by two glossy photographs of her, brandishing her weapon of choice: an Apple laptop.

Clearly, the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of going behind enemy lines is a big part of Ebner’s appeal. Equally clearly, it isn’t something she feels particularly bashful about: “Views based on data + undercover research,” her Twitter bio says. In an earlier book, Going Dark, Ebner put on a blonde wig to disguise herself (she was meeting a far-Right activist in a café in Vienna). This was one of five fake identities she used as part of her research for that book. “There is an adrenaline rush in doing any kind of undercover work,” she told a Guardian journalist in 2020.

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In Going Mainstream, Ebner deploys three new fake identities: a French-British mother of two toddlers who is “opposed to Black Lives Matter, climate change action and Covid vaccines”; a white American incel who is “is fed up with feminism”; and a pro-Russia Bavarian whose “social vacuum” is filled with German QAnon and anti-vaxxer groups on Telegram. As Ebner explains, she uses these aliases to “infiltrate movements that I wouldn’t be able to join using my real identity”. One might well recoil at the use of “infiltrate” here, since Ebner doesn’t so much infiltrate any particular “movement” as marvel at and “fact-check” the misapprehensions of the extremists she comes into contact with.

In any case, this still leaves the larger question of whether Ebner has any right to deceive these people, however odious they may seem. There was an (arguably more ethical) alternative: like most researchers and journalists, she could have just requested to interview the extremists. This may well have given her a much richer perspective into their lives.

In choosing to do “undercover research”, as she calls it, Ebner is fundamentally and irrevocably at odds with the academic community in which she now finds herself. She is currently doing a PhD at Oxford, where she studies online radicalisation. And deceiving human research subjects is not only frowned upon in academia, but is strictly forbidden and potentially career-ending for the academic who engages in it. It has been this way for some time, certainly since the controversy that engulfed the American sociologist Laud Humphreys, who went undercover for his book on men who visit public restrooms in search of sex with other men. More recently, Peter Boghossian came under trenchant criticism for hoodwinking the editors of several academic journals as part of a hoax intended to expose the intellectual lunacy of grievance studies. Boghossian resigned from Portland State University in September 2021.

Ebner, who is scarcely a junior researcher, must surely know the stakes here, yet the insouciance with which she discusses her undercover approach is quite extraordinary. “Adopting a fake identity,” she writes in Going Dark, “is not unlike developing the character in a novel.” Or acting. According to The Times, Ebner’s spell as a children’s TV actor — she played “the part of a villainous bicycle thief called Lady Lila in an Austrian children’s TV show, Tom Turbo” — helped her “to develop her research abilities”.

As evidence for her thesis that “extreme ideas have conquered the mainstream”, Ebner doesn’t so much conduct research as selectively gather material from news websites and progressive NGOs and think-tanks to confirm it. The picture she paints of contemporary Britain is particularly bleak, and if you had never visited these shores and with only Ebner’s book to go on you could be forgiven for thinking that the UK is a freak show of racist football fans, misogynist cops, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and despicable “Terfs”. In her discussion of racism in English football, she cites an Economist article on how non-white players performed better when stadiums were empty during Covid lockdowns. “Experts linked this to the absence of racist abuse during games,” she relays, accepting this finding at face value and neglecting to add that the research was carried out in Italy.

But the cardinal error at the heart of Going Mainstream is that it conflates Right-wing populism and even liberal opposition to radical progressivism with the beliefs of violent extremists and mass-killers. Tucker Carlson, for example, is accused of purveying the so-called “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, an idea that “has inspired multiple deadly terror attacks in recent years”, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Carlson, of course, has never sought to justify, much less called for, the use of mass-murder to halt migration to the West, but in Ebner’s rendering there is little daylight between Carlson and Tarrant, the former simply the mainstream incarnation of the latter. Ebner doesn’t flatly say this, but she assuredly implies it.

Insinuation is also the means by which she seeks to tarnish gender-critical feminists. “Transphobia is not limited to online commentators,” she writes, citing the Labour MP Rosie Duffield as an example of a “high-profile” politician who has “lent legitimacy to anti-trans attitudes”. Immediately after quoting Duffield’s comment that trans women are “male bodied biological men”, Ebner seamlessly transitions to Vladimir Putin and his “defence of traditional family values”. Duffield, apparently, is on Team Putin. As for Ebner, it’s very clear whose side she is on, because she takes pains to tell us. “As a cis-gender woman I refuse to yield to those voices who want to sow divisions in the feminist and LGBTQ communities,” she writes.

Ebner’s elisions and exaggerations also extend to the political power and cultural prestige of those she denounces as extremists. “Andrew Tate is an example of toxic masculinity that has made it to the mainstream,” she writes, despite him being a globally reviled figure, albeit one with a huge online following. Similarly, she describes “dangerous” Jordan Peterson as “an establishment figure”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he been ritually vilified in legacy media outlets and faced numerous cancellation efforts.

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Towards the end of the book, Ebner approvingly cites her fellow extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who in 2018 published a book with a near-identical thesis. Last month, Miller-Idriss came to public attention for an article she had written on “the intersection of extremism and fitness” and how neo-Nazis were using gyms and combat sports to lure in new recruits. The piece was roundly mocked, prompting Miller-Idriss to respond on Twitter by insisting that “I was a high school & college athlete. I work out several times/week. Fitness is key to my own well-being…” In Going Mainstream, Ebner has her own Miller-Idriss moment when she suggests that the UK parenting platform Mumsnet is a hotbed of extremist radicalisation. “Many parents who come to Mumsnet for knowledge, advice and support find themselves in a breeding ground for transphobia,” she remarks, citing one user called “Mike” as an authority for this statement.

While much of Going Mainstream is taken up with curating and correcting the most extreme views of anti-progressives, Ebner also interviews — using her real name — radical activists on the Left, including the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion’s London offshoot and a Black Lives Matter activist from Brooklyn called “Dr J”. Here she praises their idealism and bravery and resilience. There is no fact-checking. There is only credulous deference.

As a guide to how people become extremists, Going Mainstream offers scant illumination because it’s rooted in a tremendous epistemic arrogance that sees extremism as a deviation from the cosmopolitan liberalism to which Ebner subscribes. From her perspective, people become extreme because they have fallen prey to disinformation or are working through some psychological issue, and that, were it not for this, they would be on the side of the angels. And until they realise this, she seems certain that they should be “deplatformed” and that “harmful content” on social media should be removed.

It is here that her tactics bear a striking resemblance to Rufo’s, who, as a recent appointee of Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of New College of Florida, hopes to dismantle its gender studies department. Both Ebner and Rufo would no doubt be horrified at this: their political views and judgements are radically at odds with each other. But in their alarmism, selectivity and censoriousness, they are surely kindred spirits, transfixed and perennially triggered by the Twilight Zone-like unreality of the extremists they’re obsessed with.

Despite having one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of gun ownership, Serbia had never witnessed a mass shooting until last month, when a 13-year-old boy killed nine fellow students and a security guard at his elementary school in Belgrade. It was the deadliest school shooting in Europe in 15 years – and it was followed by another spree, just one day later and a few miles away, when a 21-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire as he drove through three villages south of Belgrade, killing eight.

Although a number of American gun-control activists have praised the seemingly swift response by President Aleksander Vučić, the shootings have prompted the largest protests seen in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. While Vučić hastily announced stricter measures, his authoritarian government’s deployment of 1,200 police officers to schools — as well as its threat to bring back the death penalty — were seen by many locals as both insufficient and heavy-handed. A Serbian minister’s claim the school shooting was caused by the spread of “Western values” further infuriated protestors, who accused him of instrumentalising the tragedy in line with a pro-Putin agenda.

In this way, the present crisis illustrates the failures of the authoritarian Vučić government — and, by extension, also of Western intervention in the region. But it also shows the grim success of a particularly American brand of individualistic, sexist rage.

Certainly, the immediate response by both the government and opposition has been a world away from the endless debate in America, which had seen nearly 200 mass shootings in 2023 by the time of the Belgrade massacre. But as Biljana Djordjevic, an opposition MP in a green coalition, tells me, the crisis occasioned by her country’s dual massacres is “bigger than these two tragedies” alone, and represents a potential “moment for this country to change”. Mass demonstrations at the shootings have prompted demands for resignations at the top of government and reforms of the government-controlled media ecosystem. The largest protests since Vučić came to power bespeak a deeper anger with his highly centralised rule, corrupt and inadequate service provision, and lack of democratic norms.

In Belgrade, few doubt that the powerful interests focused around Vučić are trying to prevent any such change from taking place. Last weekend, the president brought his supporters onto the city’s rain-swept streets. Memes on Serbian social media mocked the buses shuttling Right-wing nationalists into the capital, and the provision of free drinks and snacks as an inducement to attendees. (Vučić-branded cereal bars were freely available, with packets of Smoki, the delicious and insanely popular corn puffs, handed out only on request.)

While addressing a rain-drenched crowd, Vučić resigned the leadership of his dominant Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). He made it clear he will remain president while launching a new, centralised political force with which he intends to cleanse Serbia of what he called “severe diseases”. Prominent among those “diseases” will be the “vultures” and “hyenas” the president has condemned as attempting to politicise the shootings.

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Demonstrators parroted government lines – that this was a “gathering”, not a protest; that the event had nothing to do with the recent shootings; and nor was it a rearguard action following the ongoing anti-government protests, which brought tens of thousands of people to the same streets. “This is not related to the shooting,” insisted Ilya, 32, one of a group of muscular, shaven-headed men lined up in front of the stage where Vučić was set to speak. “We just want to show we support our president. If he calls us, we will come.” 

In practice, the “gathering” was a show of force, bringing together pro-government hooligans, war veterans, state employees, Serb nationalists from Serb regions of neighbouring countries, and pensioners in pursuit of free nibbles. The event coincided with a flare-up of violence in Kosovo, provoked this time by ethnically Albanian authorities in the breakaway region, thus providing Vučić with a convenient foil for his calls for national unity. Scores of Serb protesters and Nato soldiers were subsequently injured in clashes. 

It is clear that many Serbians are angered by what they view as the government’s self-serving response to the shootings. A uniquely diverse range of opposition parties — centre-Right, liberal and Leftist — plus various political movements have backed the ongoing anti-government demonstrations. “I’m in favour of a complete ban on weapons,” said Biljana Stojkovic, co-chair of Leftist party Zajedno (Together), “but the presence of policemen in schools can only increase fear and abnormality.” Djordevic notes that the Belgrade shooter came from wealth and the second gunman’s father was an army General, meaning that both could still have access to guns, regardless of official controls.

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In a clear contrast with the pro-government “gathering”, the angry protesters huddling under umbrellas were immediately and volubly political, linking the shootings to what they call a “culture of violence” and impunity emanating from the government. “Why are we here? After 10 years of dictatorial rule, repression, closed media and brainwashing, why do you have to ask?” Slobodan, 52, tells me. Like other demonstrators, he is quick to demand Vučić’s removal, liberalisation and a concomitant pivot towards Europe, away from what Slobodan calls “Eastern despotism”. (Serbia has been on the waiting list to join the EU since 2009, a major stumbling block to its membership being its refusal to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence.) 

Indeed, Western policy plays a crucial rhetorical and geopolitical role in shaping Serbia’s ongoing domestic debate. In Serbia, criticisms of state policy are typically articulated through appeals for a pivot towards the West, which are in turn rebutted and echoed in reverse by the government’s supporters. “The issue is the immediate reaction, the claim the system has not failed,” says Djordjevic, arguing that the minister who blamed “Western values” mere hours after the massacre intended to distract attention from government failings. She highlights the second shooting, conducted by the general’s son sporting neo-Nazi insignia, as instead demonstrating the role of nationalist, Right-wing ideology in facilitating the ‘culture of violence’ blamed for the killings. “Blaming ‘Western values’ is a way to promote Putin’s values in Serbia, as a contrast to democracy,” Stojkovic adds. 

Ever since the collapse of Tito’s “third way” socialism path between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the Serbian Left has struggled to articulate alternatives to Russian-sponsored revanchism without looking to Europe for inspiration and support, with predictably limited results. Actual European accession, and subsequent investment, remains essentially off the table. As such, the liberal opposition’s courting of Europe has resulted in few positive steps toward the democratisation protesters believe could prevent more shooting tragedies. “We just have to wait for the EU to help us to move forward. Right now we are stuck in a vacuum,” says Stojkovic.

Meanwhile, there are other US “values” that may underpin the Belgrade massacre. As a prescient analysis published just two weeks before the school shooting suggests, ultra-misogynistic ideas promoted by “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate — who chose the Balkan nation of Romania as a hideout prior to his arrest on rape and human trafficking charges — have found an enthusiastic audience among young Serbian men. NGO-led efforts to promote gender equality have struggled to make significant inroads, with feminism and LGBT rights characterised as “Western”, therefore liberalising, therefore destructive influences.

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It’s striking that eight of the nine fellow pupils killed by the school shooter were girls. Though Djordevic cautions it is too early to ascribe definitive motivations to the shooter, the hallmarks of a US-style school shooting motivated by a particular confection of entitlement, resentment and “incel” ideology are readily apparent. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the poisonous notion that young men have a “right to sex” with whichever girl they please constantly recurs as a motivation behind recent US school shootings. (On a US-based “incel” forum, the shooting was rapidly praised by both US and Serbian posters.)

As in America, the idea that young people’s hardships are the fault of a political culture that denies them opportunities for conquest has proven considerably more compelling than the liberal rights order with which the misogynistic ideologues are in constant, self-perpetuating battle. Neither Tate nor Vučić offers any real solution to the genuine challenges faced by the new generations over which they hold sway. But in their own way, each is able to harness and profit from their followers’ misplaced anger. And in both cases, the Left has long struggled to come up with a compelling, organised alternative to their opponents’ strident battle-cries. 

Whether Serbia’s nascent protest movement will indeed prove able to “institutionalise the change people feel in their hearts”, as Djordevic’s claims, remains to be seen. What is certain is that Serbia, like the United States, is in need of political proposals and cultural role-models reaching beyond current polarities. And in both nations, the criticism of a liberal order which has failed to follow through on promises of a better world for the new generation should not preclude the critique of those who prey on young men’s worst impulses.

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”

We don’t know yet what motivated Salvador Ramos, the teenage gunman who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, last week, but we do know that like most shooters, he was a misfit and social outcast. Early reporting suggests that he spent recent months harassing teen girls on social media, “repeating girls’ names until they paid attention to him”, and expressing to them his desire to get his “name out there” like the Canadian murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, was also an oddball with a history of making threats, although his immediate motives seem to have been more ideological than social or sexual. Even so, in the course of his white supremacist diatribe, he blamed “weak” “European men” for the degeneracy of the West and concluded that “strong men are needed to fix it”.

Whatever the nominal motivations behind them, rampage shootings are nearly always a product of wounded masculinity. “They are the most masculine of crimes,” says Ralph Larkin, a criminologist at John Jay College who has studied mass shootings for decades. “Can you think of more than four or five female mass shooters? There aren’t any.” Shooters, Larkin says, are “marginal males who feel they have been wronged by society, and so they pick up a gun. There is always a sense of violated entitlement, and I don’t care whether it’s school shootings or racist shootings.”

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How America went berserk

By Bari Weiss

Modern mass shootings, according to Larkin, began in 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former Marine with an undiagnosed brain tumour, murdered his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower in downtown Austin, Texas, and shooting 14 people to death. Larkin speculates that the sudden rise in these shootings was a reaction to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and the corresponding rise in the status of women — a point on which some of the more historically minded murderers would no doubt agree. “We’re talking about toxic masculinity here.”

Toxic masculinity, of course, is a somewhat slippery concept. Colloquially, it refers to the elements of traditional masculinity — competition, stoicism, aggressiveness, physical strength, a willingness to resort to violence — that fit awkwardly or not at all into modern liberal culture. A 2019 explainer in the New York Times defined it as “a set of behaviours and beliefs” that men are socialised into from a young age, including “suppressing emotions or masking distress”, “maintaining an appearance of hardness”, and “violence as an indicator of power”. More than a few articles have flagged toxic masculinity, combined with Americans’ easy access to guns, as one of the causes of mass shootings.

These elements of masculinity can no doubt be “toxic” in the wrong circumstances — the problem is with the assumption that they are purely a product of cultural scripts, rather than reflections of something inherent in men. Francis McAndrew, a psychologist who has studied mass shootings, told me that while socialisation plays a role in encouraging some forms of male violence, it does not create it out of thin air. This is particularly true for young men, who are ultra-sensitive to status competition, which historically would have determined their ability to attract women and form alliances with other men. Young men, McAndrew says, have been selected to regard adolescent social hierarchies as a matter of life and death.

“Today, you can go to college or move to a new city,” McAndrew says. “But when we were evolving, whatever happened during adolescence was a life sentence. And if you established yourself as a bad dude that nobody messed with, that could work to your advantage. Our minds are still stuck in that past of needing to be paid attention to. And the guys who don’t get that experience all kinds of dark emotions. They feel left out, they feel like losers, they feel desperate, and they need to make a statement.”

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For these alienated young men, guns and violence can be intoxicating. According to the “challenge hypothesis”, male testosterone and aggressive behaviour surge in response to “situational cues that represent either a threat to a male’s status or a signal that competition with other males is imminent”. Handling a gun acts as one such cue, especially for men who are not used to them. “If you pick a powerful weapon and you perceive that combat is imminent, you get a spike in your testosterone levels,” McAndrew says. Given that marginal males tend to have low testosterone, which can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression, this spike can be euphoric, as shooters like Harris and Rodger attest. “The solution,” McAndrew says, half-joking, “is that everyone should be allowed to own high-powered weapons except for men under the age of 40.”

Mass killings are also, themselves, a way to achieve status and notoriety. McAndrew notes that for ideological spree killings, like the Buffalo shooting or jihadist attacks, the ideology “organises and channels” the killers’ rage, providing them with a community, an audience, and a sense that they are contributing to some important cause — in other words, status and a measure of celebrity for people who feel they are invisible. And status and celebrity, even of the worst kind, have their benefits. According to a 2018 story from the Florida Sun-Sentinel, Nikolas Cruz, the far-Right loner who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was inundated with fan mail from female admirers after being arrested for his killing spree.

This should not come as too great of a shock. According to the sociologist Nathalie Paton, rampage shootings represent a perverse expression of some of our culture’s dominant values, including self-expression, autonomy, and authenticity. “Nowadays the social norm is to ask each and every person to pursue individuation, to become autonomous,” she says. “But it’s a paradox — when you ask everyone to be original not everyone can be, so they have to go to extremes like violence. It becomes a form of empowerment, a way to pull away from social norms that are imposed.” As she wrote in an article from 2017: “The very project of a mass shooting not only allows the reversal of social roles, but ultimately it becomes the guarantee of subjective liberation.”

The shooters, Paton argues, highlight another contradiction in the dominant ideology. Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.

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These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are. “Individuality” is wonderful when your true self is a tall and handsome swimmer with an unexpected love of classical cello, or a beautiful girl who likes to go backpacking with her friends. But who, really, is someone like Salvador Ramos, an odd-looking boy who disturbs nearly everyone he talks to, whose hobbies include shooting people with BB guns and throwing dead cats at strangers’ houses? Does anyone, really, want someone like that to be himself? I doubt it.

In his novel Whatever, in which he first advances his idea that sexual liberalism is a system of social hierarchy no less cruel than economic liberalism — now a cornerstone of “incel” ideology — Michel Houellebecq introduces us to the character of Raphael Tisserand, a man so stupendously ugly that despite his good salary and desperate efforts, he is still a virgin at 28. One evening, after Tisserand has spent hours at a club trying to charm a young women only to see her depart with a handsome black man, Houellebecq’s narrator offers Tisserand a knife and urges him to use it on the couple. “When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then you will truly be the master,” he says. But, after following the pair to the beach, Tisserand is unable to follow through on the murder and decides to drive back to Paris. He dies in a car crash that night.

Our society seems to have its own generation of Tisserands. The problem, in America, is that ours have guns.

The concept of the incel election first went viral a few months ago after a thoughtful piece by S. Nathan Park described the influence of People Power Party’s Chairman Lee Jun-seok – a conservative pundit and “anti-feminist” – on young men, and the potential impact of this demographic on the presidential election. Subsequent articles speculated not only about whether this victory signifies the end of gender equality in South Korea, but whether this election is a harbinger of things to come.

But before everyone gets carried away, a corrective. This election has nothing to do with incels; the voters in question were probably not incels; misogyny is not unique to incels.

It stands to reason that the high rate of “sexlessness” in Korean adults – particularly young men, though it’s high across genders and age groups which is probably indicative of a nationwide unipolar depression — may very well alter people’s overall sense of well-being, fulfilment and belonging in the world, and thus, their political beliefs as well. But there is no evidence that the issue of sexlessness or celibacy played any role in this election. Despite their best efforts, not a single journalist was able to furnish a quote from anyone hoping to finally get laid under the Yoon administration. So we’re really not talking about an “incel movement” at all. And when a term has implicit associations with violent extremism, flippantly using it to describe a group of young men whose views one finds abhorrent is ill-advised.

Unfortunately, the term has become shorthand for exactly that: angry young men with bad political takes. These are men who feel marginalised, who don’t have families, who are struggling to find purpose and their place in life. Many of them are unemployed, underemployed, or struggling in school. In the West, they’re often described as white or working class, and they live in progressive, economically developed societies. They probably also live in a society where income inequality is growing and unemployment rates are high.

That profile fits for incels, at least for the media’s portrayal of them, and it fits for the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, and also for extremists on the far Left – such as Antifa’s Black Bloc. Details about race and class vary depending on the cultural context, but the fact that young men with nothing to lose is the demographic most likely to embrace a radical or subversive new political ideology is consistently true, and it has been throughout history.

In The True Believer, published in 1951, Eric Hoffer brilliantly described the conditions that compelled people to join “mass movements” of social or political protest with Twenties Germany as the backdrop. Mass movements appeal to people who feel powerless and unappreciated in their lives and who tend to externalise their frustrations rather than looking inward. The group most likely to embrace a radical new ideology is one Hoffer called the New Poor, who may in fact be middle class, but perceive a recent loss in income, social status, or security that was out of their control.

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Hoffer’s account was written in response to the turn toward Communism and Fascism, but extreme or subversive political movements have been drawing in a new crop of New Poor with remarkable agility over the past decade, with the aid of technology. Social media and alternative platforms have given independent content creators and their ideas exposure to a global audience of like-minded fans who can instantly communicate with each other. These platforms have also contributed to and benefited from a climate of hyperpolarisation by promoting provocative, contentious speech.

Indeed, most of the “anti-feminist” ideas espoused by Yoon and his supporters during the campaign should be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the online ecosystem known as the Intellectual Dark Web, or the Manosphere, or parts of the Alt-Right: the advantages of social programming and affirmative action in favour of women, the suggestion that the pay gap is not real but the result of women’s lesser contributions, the issue of false reporting of sex crimes, the fact that men are conscripted for military service.

When applied to the United States, some of these arguments may seem exaggerated — but they do have an essence of truth. Data about rates of false reporting are inconsistent, but it does occur, despite #MeToo’s directive to “Believe women”. Family courts often rule in favour of women; the criminal justice system gives men harsher sentences for comparable crimes. These facts are generally ignored by feminists and frequently cited by their opponents.

Anti-feminism, like the other identitarian ideologies that have risen to popularity over the past decade, is characterised primarily by feelings of victimhood experienced by the in-group, and hostility toward the structural powers and privileges afforded the out-group — rather than actual hostility toward members of that group, as in overt misogyny. Anti-feminist groups are not necessarily misogynists for suggesting that if equality is the goal, then it might be time for men to get a push in some areas. Thanks to gains made by feminists in the latter half of the last century, women are outperforming men in many areas where they once lagged behind, or were not even allowed entry, such as higher education, where women currently comprise 60% of students. Whether this is due to an inherent difference between the sexes that allows women to better utilise certain aspects of the system, or a structural difference that directly benefits them more is an interesting question, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. When the current system similarly favours men, we rightly recognise it as sexist, and wouldn’t call its opponents “incels”.

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Of course, in South Korea, where the deeply patriarchal society is already much more divided along the gender line, anti-feminist talking points don’t land the same way. The country has a 35% pay gap between men and women, and is ranked lowest among the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the “Glass Ceiling Index”. Two years ago, police uncovered a widespread network for trading non-consensual sexual images over Telegram, and Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, died in a probable suicide amid rumors of sexual harassment complaint against him. Most troubling of all is the fact that despite a very low overall homicide rate, women in South Korea represent more than half of the victims, in stark contrast to the international average of 21%. High-profile events and statistics like these sit uncomfortably alongside tirades about how the wage gap and most sexual assault reports are all fake news.

Over the past six or seven years, populist candidates have been exploiting the grievances of young men all over the world, often with traditionalist messages that are underpinned by anti-feminist ideas. This resonates, in part, because most young people have issues with dating and the opposite sex, and unhappy young men almost certainly do. In Western countries with large immigrant populations, race and immigration are more potent issues than gender, partly because these countries have always had more equality between the sexes than traditionally Confucian South Korea, which has virtually no immigrant population, and where the reverse is true.

President Yoon is married and is certainly not an incel, and probably doesn’t really much care for this. But politicians opportunistically exploit the deeply held grievances of their constituents, appeal to their basest impulses, fears and prejudices. Not as a matter of ideology, but of political expediency. So Yoon pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in his campaign, which is unlikely to happen in a democracy like South Korea without a lot of bureaucratic gridlock, and even if it does, it’s unclear what programs would actually be affected or how. But, then, even his liberal opponent promised to remove the word “Women” from the Department’s official name.

Right now, though, there are more important issues to consider. Yoon, who was a prosecutor for 27 years and has no previous experience in politics, has voiced strong opinions about issues of foreign policy, expressing a hard line on North Korea, and a stronger alliance with the United States than with China, compared with the more diplomatic position taken by the previous administration that his liberal rival pledged to continue. Given the war in Ukraine, and current tensions with China, his position has been praised by the Washington Post as “a welcome turn toward the US”, and the Wall Street Journal as “an opportunity for closer security ties between Seoul and Washington”. Maybe in light of the recent eruption of conflict on the world stage, it is more important to focus on the foreign policy of the new “incel” president, rather than jumping to the conclusion that stunts from his campaign trail are putting human rights under threat.

Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

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Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

Mattis was thinking of the philosopher’s Meditation on First Philosophy, championed the importance of doubt by hypothesising that everything he thought he knew about reality might be an illusion created by an evil demon. Of course, The Matrix is about a lot more than that. The Wachowskis themselves have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard, whose 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation appears in the movie. The phrase “desert of the real” comes from its very first page, although the man himself sniffed that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce”.

Critics and fans have suggested numerous other influences: Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Dick, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre and even Doctor Who. The essays in the 2002 book The Matrix and Philosophy contradict each other to hilarious extent: It’s Buddhist! It’s Christian! It’s Marxist! It’s postmodern! Yet none are wrong exactly because the movie is a mash-up of ideas, not a thesis. When the Wachowskis were asked in a web chat how many of these perceived allusions were intentional, they replied in the teasing spirit of a Sixties Bob Dylan press conference: “All of it.”

In the week that Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the franchise, opens, it’s worth remembering that before The Matrix was released in March 1999, it was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic, another film about virtual reality starring Keanu Reeves.

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But it was no Johnny Mnemonic. Raking in almost half a billion dollars, it proved that Hollywood could tap into the new immersive nature of gaming, paved the way for the superhero imperium, and (to the immense benefit of Christopher Nolan) made explicitly philosophical non-franchise blockbusters a going concern. Better still, and despite two widely disliked sequels, it became a cultural touchstone. The Wachowskis talked about “making mythology relevant in a modern context” and they succeeded in spades. The Matrix has become a modern myth and, like any myth, it has been interpreted in radically different ways.

The brilliance of The Matrix is that it can make anybody feel clever. It signals that it is about something profound but the basic conceit is very simple. You could grasp it by knowing your Descartes or just by listening to Queen: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Reeves’s character believes he is a coder called Thomas Anderson, living in a boring 1999. In fact, he resides comatose in a gooey pod in the late 22^nd century, where he serves as an organic battery for humanity’s new AI overlords. His life has been a simulation, a dream, the Matrix. Waking up is a kind of rebirth. At the end, he tells those damned dirty machines that he will usher in “a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible”.

The Matrix was perfectly timed. The AI law enforcer Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains that the Matrix takes place in an infinite 1999 because it was “the peak of your civilisation”. Movie-goers in that period would have had a different impression. There were multiple examples of what the critic Joshua Clover calls “Edge of the Construct” movies, in which “reality” is revealed to be a hi-tech charade created for nefarious purposes: The Truman Show, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor. Then there were what you might call “Work sucks” movies: Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space — in which the cubicle is a prison cell.

“That decade was so comfortable,” Mattis told Raftery. “The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind’s eye: something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, ‘There’s something missing here.’” It’s no surprise that the film’s climactic song is Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, the band who soundtracked the enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle a few months later. Still, there’s a temptation to tell the filmmakers of 1999, y’know, things could be worse.

The Matrix also reminds us how new and raw the internet felt in 1999. Even with the first dotcom boom in full swing, online culture retained a freewheeling, anarchic energy. For many message-board users, the internet was an opportunity to craft a new identity from scratch and an online community could be far more rewarding — more real — than one in “meatspace”. Even within the Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives a double life as the hacker Neo, the hacker being the quintessential cyberpunk hero.

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One consequence of online culture that was already evident in 1999 was the spread of conspiracy theories. The Matrix, in which everything Neo knows about his life is indeed a lie propagated by a malign conspiracy, was a timely text. The last movie to use imagery from Lewis Carroll’s stories so prominently was Oliver Stone’s JFK. “This world has the Matrix all over the place,” Lana Wachowski said at the time. “People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out for themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system of thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical.”

These are worthwhile questions to ask but the answers aren’t always pretty and the cult of The Matrix has taken a sinister turn. In 2012, a group of men’s rights activists founded a subreddit called TheRedPill. In The Matrix, the human explication machine Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) gives Neo two pills and a choice. “After this there is no turning back,” he says thrillingly. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Neo’s choice is a fable of courage, self-discovery, empowerment and radicalisation. To TheRedPill users, the idea of a world which favours men is the simulation and systemic bias against men is the reality. Feminists are the Agents, I guess. You can see why men’s rights activists might relate to Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) assessment of Neo: “I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.” He’s the discontented nerd who becomes a kick-ass messiah.

The metaphor has achieved broader popularity on the Right, from incels to Infowars, and QAnon to full-blown neo-Nazis, so much so that when Maroon 5 called their 2017 album Red Pill Blues, they had to clarify that they were simply Matrix fans and not fascist conspiracy theorists. Ironically, the red pill represents being awakened, which is also the meaning of woke.

There are, of course, other readings. To one group of fans, the red pill bears a suspicious resemblance to the brand of prescription oestrogen that was popular in the Nineties. Lana came out as a trans woman in 2012 (after a decade of rumours), followed by Lilly in 2016. Inevitably, this gave rise to the theory that The Matrix is a trans allegory, in which the “splinter in your mind, driving you mad” is gender dysphoria, names and bodies are mutable, and Morpheus is Neo’s therapist, guiding him into his new identity.

In 2016, Lilly approved of this theory in the-more-the-merrier terms, “because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static” and “the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work”. Four years later, however, she went further: “That was the original intention but the world wasn’t quite ready.” The androgynous character Switch was originally intended to be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” Lilly said.

Yet this alone doesn’t justify one Atlantic writer’s bald claim that the film itself is “an allegory of gender dysphoria, as its creators have repeatedly said”. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mention of a trans subtext in any of the books about The Matrix published prior to Lana’s transition. The tortuous passages about it in gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce’s Trans are a good illustration of the problem with taking this idea too literally. To quote the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that.”

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An allegory is a story where the author’s message is coherent and undeniable. A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations. In a revealing 2012 New Yorker profile, Lana Wachowski remembered being confused and frustrated as a child by the black monolith in 2001 until her father told her it was a symbol. “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since,” she said. “Something clicked inside.” It’s not just that the monolith is a symbol; it’s that Kubrick refused to explain what it symbolised. It is more myth than allegory. In a single interview, Kubrick could have made the movie half as interesting.

The Wachowskis are not so taciturn. Last year, when Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied “Taken!”, Lilly tweeted back: “Fuck both of you.” I can see why the sisters might want to reimpose some authorial control over the meaning of The Matrix now that “all of it” includes some horrific stuff. Like Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, they’ve seen their work appropriated by the far-Right and that can’t feel good. But the price of creating a modern myth is that it can’t be controlled — and any attempt to do so can only diminish it.

As some viewers prepare to unravel the ideas in Matrix Resurrections, it’s important to remember that the first movie is not a philosophical treatise but a wildly entertaining Hollywood spectacle. Of all the answers the Wachowskis have given to the eternal question “What is The Matrix about?”, my favourite is the most flippant: “It’s about robots vs kung fu.” True enough. If it weren’t also about that, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

In the days since, much of the coverage given to the attack — both in the UK and abroad — has focused on the new type of terrorist threat posed by “incels”, or involuntary celibates. The police, for now, have ruled out terrorism and links to far-Right groups as motives for Davison’s actions; what drove him to such violence remains unclear and the investigation is ongoing.

And yet, at least in the way much of the media has covered this tragedy, the matter is all but settled: Davison was an incel, another young man driven to violence by a nefarious online movement that breeds terrorists.

But as someone who has spent years researching incels, such assuredness leaves me uncomfortable. Though the language changes from one news outlet to another, their reports are all essentially the same: “Plymouth shooter was a product of a violent, misogynistic ‘incel’ subculture.” The pieces tend to include quotations from former or current government officials, or experts in terrorism or gender-based violence who explain the danger facing our communities when thousands of young boys are radicalised online, just like Jake Davison.

The source of all this speculation is Davison’s digital footprint, the collage of his social media presence, including a now-deleted YouTube channel and a now-suspended Reddit account that chronicles a long history of isolation and self-doubt. He was a frequent poster in various Reddit communities, known as “subs”. Some were popular with incels; a few were “photo-rating subs”, where users are encouraged to rate each other’s appearances.

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Interestingly, despite the certainty of many who have described him as an “incel”, Davison was also active on an anti-Incel “watchdog” sub, and two others dedicated to debunking the tenets of the incel ideology known as the “Black Pill”.

Of course, these things are never black and white. Davison certainly talked like an incel, using their terminology  and citing concepts from evolutionary psychology popular in “black pilled” circles. He uploaded a number of confessional-style video bogs lamenting his lost youth and his inability to lose weight, as well as the crippling insecurity that prevented him from talking to girls. In one video, he spoke emphatically about why women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance, to be “picky” for reproductive reasons. Just days before the attack, he claimed that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

But most of his videos just showed him lifting weights. In one, entitled “Older vid when I was a bit leaner”, he starts posing to the camera, with an Eminem track blaring in the background.

Still, according to the definition provided by incels themselves — a man unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship despite desiring one — Davison would have met the criteria. He was a virgin at the age of 22, and had never had any kind of a girlfriend.

But Davison himself did not self-identify that way. The one time he mentioned the word in a video, he paused to clarify that he did not include himself among their ranks, but considered them “people like [himself]”. This detail appears to have been lost on much of the media — as have Davison’s broader criticisms of the incel movement.

Three months ago, he described on a Reddit thread how much of the misogyny of the incel movement was “just toxic negative bullshit” and explained how he was excited for the end of lockdown, to begin driving lessons and start socialising more. Soon after, he responded to a post in the same subreddit by a depressed 17-year-old, encouraging him to overcome his insecurities, stand up to bullies, and not “let the blackpill or whatever shit you read online drag you down”.

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Davison’s final post to the site, written just two days before the attack, was less optimistic. He explained that he was a loner by nature, something which he used to accept. But now he felt that he should have tried harder. “It’s vital you try your best to integrate with people, fit in and establish a solid social life and develop socially you can’t afford to be a loner as a young person it will only destroy your life,” he wrote. He sounded defeated but introspective, like someone taking accountability for his choices, not “echoing” an ideology.

None of this is to say that Davison wasn’t influenced by, or protective of, the incel community. But does that mean the media is right to ascribe his horrific attack to that relationship? I’m not convinced it’s as clear-cut as that.

Indeed, it’s striking just how inaccurate and irresponsible some of the commentary by self-appointed incel experts has been in recent days. Take the claim, made in the Guardian a day after the tragedy, that incels “actively recruit” young men, recalling the tactics used by extremist groups such as ISIS. I’ve spoken to dozens of incels for my research, and not one of them has suggested this happens. Overwhelmingly, these young men find the content on their own, which isn’t difficult to imagine for young people with internet access.

Most are “lurkers” who do not even interact with other members of the community. They also do not “actively incite” acts of violence, such as an “Incel Uprising” or the “Beta Rebellion,” as has been suggested. Unlike in other groups, who offer the promise of some kind of reward for such actions — the caliphate, the ethnostate, or eternal salvation — there is no common goal that binds incels together or mobilises them toward violence.

That is not to minimise the potentially toxic effect of a fatalistic, misogynistic echo chamber in which misery and failure are celebrated, or to deny the possibility that some very vulnerable individuals with a predisposition toward violence might come across their community and use it to ascribe their vengeance to some greater purpose. The murder of ten people by Elliot Roger in 2014 tragically demonstrated this is possible.

But the coverage thus far has focused on the “incel angle” to the exclusion of everything else, at times even cherry-picking details in a way that feels intellectually dishonest. For if we’re going to look at the case of Jake Davison honestly, we have to look at the whole picture.

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We know that an assault allegation from September of 2020 led police to seize Davison’s firearm and revoke his licence the following December. It was returned just a week before the attack, for reasons that are unknown. The Independent Office of Police Conduct is investigating the decision to do so.

We also know that Davison’s mother, Maxine, and other relatives reportedly “begged police and NHS to help him with mental health problems — he had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit disorder — though the timeline is unclear. Neighbours have commented that he was “a troubled soul”, who had always been very quiet and close to his mother, but had recently begun to clash with her.

For now, that is all we know about this devastating atrocity and the man who committed it. Yet somehow, armed only with (understandable) indignation and a few hot takes from social media, we seem to have lost sight of the perpetrator behind this awful attack, preferring instead to blame the atrocity on incel culture. In some ways, this is an understandable response to tragedy. It is more comforting, after all, to seize upon a simple explanation — in this case that incel culture is to blame — than accept that the situation is more complex.

But doing so makes it impossible for us to have the more important discussion about how we got here in the first place — and why certain men are drawn to incel culture. What is it about these communities that makes them appealing? Is it our increased isolation and lack of human contact? Or is it, as incels suggest, the fact that they feel marginalised in our current “woke” culture? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but if my research has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t help incels — and, in turn, protect our daughters — until we have that honest conversation.

The contestants have been selected, not only for their beauty, but also for their particularly casual attitude towards romantic love. “I don’t really do relationships” says one, while another claims to have sex with a different woman every night. All are accustomed to effortlessly attracting suitors with their Instagram-perfect good looks but, as time goes on, we discover that they are less confident in their ability to form lasting relationships. This is, supposedly, the high-minded intention of the show: to teach these shallow young things how to form meaningful bonds without recourse to sex.

Of course the real appeal to viewers is schadenfreude. How deliciously satisfying to watch vapid, beautiful people told that they can’t have exactly what they want all the time, although I must admit that I found myself feeling more tender towards the contestants as it became clear how psychologically fragile they all were. No one acquires a body like that without excellent impulse control, and yet it seems that an ability to resist refined carbs doesn’t translate well into an ability to resist lust, perhaps because the challenge for these young people was less physical than it was emotional.

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When one woman failed in her efforts to persuade a fellow contestant to break the rules, she seemed to crumble, having never before experienced sexual rejection. What do you do, when the only thing you’re good at is attracting sexual partners, and you’re not allowed to do that any more? Like all reality TV, this show places people in painful situations, and then lets the camera linger on their pain. But, unlike other reality TV, this shows pretends to be noble while tormenting its contestants.

Too Hot to Handle is a product of our times. The contestants arrived on set expecting to have sex with people they had just met for the entertainment of a TV audience. And, for the first 12 hours, before they learned the true premise of the show, they got right to it, with the camera zooming in on undulating tongues and kneading hands. This is a show that feeds on the toxic combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism encouraged by social media. It also relies on, and then manipulates, the expectations of our hypersexualised culture.

How quickly things change. In 1994, Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ posters were blamed for causing traffic accidents, with passing motorists distracted by Eva Herzigova’s boosted cleavage. A generation later, sexually explicit advertising is just wallpaper on the streetscape, barely even noticed. Graphic sex scenes in films have also been normalised, so much so that the idea of cutting away as characters kiss, leaving the rest to the imagination, now seems bizarrely old fashioned.

In her bestelling book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy described the environment for modern teenagers as like “a candyland of sex…every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree.” That was in 2005, when audiences could still be shocked by Big Brother contestants fumbling under the covers, whereas Love Island has long since jumped the shark when it comes to showing real sex on TV.

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Of course, we mustn’t fall into the trap of assuming that our forebears were models of sexual propriety. For men who can afford it, prostitution has always been a source of sex on demand, often tacitly condoned. And, for men of particularly high status, sexual access to social ‘inferiors’ has frequently been accepted as a perk. But, for everyone else, and particularly women, our culture of easy access to casual sex — both real and virtual — is historically unique. The availability of reliable contraception and the decriminalisation of abortion has freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, radically altering sexual politics among heterosexuals. Meanwhile, the arrival of the internet has heralded a new era of access to online porn, with an attendant shift in sexual norms.

Which means that, several decades on, hypersexuality doesn’t have the ability to scandalise us as it once did. In fact, it has become rather boring. Our culture has gorged on sex, so much so that it’s easy to glaze over when yet more taut flesh is paraded before us. The cleverness of Too Hot to Handle, and the secret to its success, is that it recognises this fact. If we can’t be surprised by sex any more, then what can we be surprised by? Chastity.

The continuing influence of the NoFap movement is a testament to this overloading of sexual stimulation. Founded in 2011 by the American web developer Alexander Rhodes, NoFap encourages followers to give up both porn and masturbation (‘fap’ being slang derived from the sound of a man pleasuring himself). Followers — overwhelmingly male — are offered freedom from the addictive power of porn, and the consequent sexual dysfunction that is shockingly common among young men, alongside more dubious promises such as greater energy and mental clarity. In general, NoFap adherents are not interested in feminist criticisms of porn, and in fact there is plenty of misogyny within the online community, with women often portrayed as succubi. Instead, NoFap is a movement orientated around self control as a masculine virtue.

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This may be starting to sound familiar. NoFap is not an explicitly religious movement, but it undoubtedly draws from Christian themes, and Christianity is unusual among religious traditions in applying expectations of sexual continence not only to women, but also to men, framing the ability to resist the body’s demands as a sign of spiritual integrity. As the UnHerd contributor Tom Holland argues in his latest book, Dominion, we mustn’t underestimate the importance of Christianity in shaping our contemporary moral ideas, and the Christian emphasis on sexual restraint, however inconsistently adhered to, continues to resonate in our secular times.

Christians have often interpreted sexual impulses as opponents to do battle with. Saint Augustine writes of his body as an adversary:

“I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. The enemy held my will in his power and from it he made a chain and shackled me.”

Expressing the same idea, one of the Too Hot to Handle contestants speaks of her desire to challenge her willpower by resisting sexual desire: “I want to test my limits.” These old ideas lie in wait for anyone who wants to pick them up again, with or without any kind of religious framing, and indeed the vocabulary of chastity has already been put to good use by the diet industry, with much talk of temptation, indulgence, and sin. Much like dieting, which can only exist within an environment of abundant food, this form of self-denial can only exist within an environment of abundant access to sexual pleasure.

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And we are living through an era of unprecedented sexual abundance. Historically, it is not uncommon for periods of Bacchinalian excess to alternate with periods of austerity, for instance the randy Georgians, reacting against their Puritan forebears, and in turn condemned by their Victorian grandchildren.

But then the Georgians didn’t have The Pill or the internet. Our culture is more pornified than any that has come before, so much so that perhaps we are about to hit a ceiling, no longer capable of adding any more breasts or buttocks to our screens or public spaces. And, in a culture that still honours Christian moral ideas, we shouldn’t be surprised to see a reaction against the decadence of hypersexualisation. When viewers become bored with a particular style of plastic sexiness, producers are forced to innovate, and may call upon older ideas about sex and the body that remain meaningful.

Too Hot to Handle offers up a lucrative combination of these two impulses, giving us the opportunity to drool over beautiful bodies, while simultaneously idealising chastity, or at least pretending to. And by playing with both hypersexuality and puritanism at an historical moment in which they are in tension, this shallow, exploitative, and compelling show, now tipped to be more successful than Love Island, may just have struck gold.

As so the word has gradually crept into the vocabulary of every internet troll — partly I suspect because we still judge people by how much sex they have, or not in this case. We still view men who don’t have sex as failures in some way.

Incels are therefore an easy target. For men, calling someone an Incel implies something positive — a certain sexual abundance — about one’s own existence. For women it has begun to function as a putdown that ruthlessly dismisses unworthy suitors while simultaneously expelling them from the community of the good as misogynistic and creepy.

In the past decade there has been a three-fold increase in the number of men who have not had sex in the past year. In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Centre added Incels to their ‘Hate Map’, describing them as “part of the online male supremacist eco-system”. Countless articles have appeared in the media equating inceldom with “toxic masculinity”, misogyny and violence. Most begin from the assumption that Incel ideology, so far as it exists, is a product of men’s domination over women. It is a backlash against feminism; the whingeing of men who have been taught by the tyrannical patriarchy to believe they are entitled to ownership of women’s bodies.

There is invariably some truth to this. The rise of the online ‘Manosphere’ is  a reassertion by men of traditional gender roles from which they benefitted immensely. The most notorious Incels, who have gone on murderous rampages, have indeed been narcissistic and entitled men. Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old Incel who murdered seven people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Rodger epitomised entitled masculinity. Shortly before Rodger carried about the massacre, Dale Launer, a friend of Rodger’s father, gave the boy some not terrible advice for building relationships with women on his college campus. Rodger’s response is revealing. As Launer recounted to the BBC:

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“As I told him, ‘When you see a woman next time you’re on campus and you like her hair or sunglasses, just pay her a compliment.’ I told him, ‘It’s a freebie, something in passing, you’re not trying to make conversation. Keep walking, don’t make any long eye contact, just give the free compliment.’ The idea being you might make a friend if you make someone feel good.

“I said to Elliot, ‘In the next few weeks — if you see them they’ll likely give you a smile — and you can smile back and eventually turn this into chit-chat.’

“I got in touch with him a few weeks later and asked if he did it. He said ‘no’. And when asked why not, he said, ‘Why do I have to compliment them? Why don’t they compliment me?’” [emphasis mine]

Rodger felt superior to others and referred to a “Day of Retribution” when he would kill those he was envious of — ‘Chads’, men who sleep with lots of women, and ‘Staceys’, feminine and attractive — as well as those who did not see the value he believed he possessed. He probably had a narcissistic personality disorder.

However Rodger was an outlier. Most Incels are non-violent and use the forums they frequent as a support group, a place to vent — often toxically — against a society which they feel has rejected them (at least when it comes to intimacy). It is this which inceldom is largely concerned with: intimacy rather than sex. Most have given up on dating entirely. Some embrace an ideology they call the Black Pill — a spin-off  the red and blue pills from The Matrix — which contains misogynistic tenets but adherence to which is not a requirement to be an Incel. The Blue Pill is the existing state of blissful ignorance; the Red Pill seeks to understand the system and manipulate it to its advantage; those who take the Black Pill accept the Red Pill’s tenets about women and society but resign themselves to a life of frustration and alienation.

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Black pill ideology is often misogynistic and occasionally deadly. According to the Black Pill women are shallow and driven entirely by hypergamy — that’s to say the desire to hook up with a man of superior status to themselves whether in terms of looks, money or power. As with several other Black Pill assumptions there is an element of truth to this: women do tend to date “up”. However the Black Pill takes this concept to its deterministic absolute: on the forums Incels obsess over height and looks as if nobody who isn’t 6ft 4in with a six pack ever gets a date.

This is undoubtedly a convenient rationalisation for some. It’s easier to sit at home on the internet and lament the callousness and superficiality of wider society than it is to begin the long and arduous process required to become a more attractive man.

But the dating scene of 2020 is also radically different to the dating scene of twenty years ago, and this is a factor behind the growing number of Incels. The decline of traditional marriage has played a part. In the past there was greater societal pressure on women to ‘settle’ with men who they may not have been in love with or even sexually attracted to. The concept of arranged marriage, still popular in eastern cultures, where people pair up on the basis of suitability, is significantly different to our modern, Hollywood-style conception of idealised pairing on the basis of sexual attraction and finding ‘The One’.

Women are the sexual selectors on modern dating apps, where men are abundant and therefore of lower sexual market value (SMV). A friend and I ran an experiment on Tinder last year where we set up a profile purporting to be an attractive woman. In less than 24-hours the profile ran up over 2,000 matches. Tinder and similar apps are effective for the stereotypically good looking male. But the majority of men make do with few matches, often with women they are not attracted to. A recent study of Tinder found that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men”.

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As I recently noted for UnHerd, our promiscuous culture bends toward the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule whereby 20% of men date 80% of women. I wrote: “Women compete over the most desirable men, while the rest are increasingly turning towards porn and — before long, no doubt — sex robots.”

The sexual revolution and the gradual erosion of the pressure to settle down (what Jordan Peterson has referred to as “socially enforced monogamy”) has encouraged women (quite reasonably) to seek out the best partners for themselves. Some men refuse to reconcile themselves to this new reality. Others struggle in a digital dating environment where superficial qualities are prized to an extent that was not true in the past. In the world of online dating, which is how 40% of couples  in the United States meet, looks, height and social status are usually pre-requisites for matching with someone at all.

Offline, many Incels lack the basic social skills required to navigate relations with the opposite sex. According to an internal poll carried out on the website Incels.co, 26% of users of the forum said they had some form of autism. Flirting, which requires an innate understanding of nuanced sub-communications and unspoken sexual tension, does not come naturally to these men.

Moreover, mainstream dating advice for men is useless at the best of times and consists largely of feel-good bromides (often written by women) extolling men to ‘just be yourself’ or to let ‘fate’ take care of it. Real-life dating coaching, which takes clients out into bars and clubs in order to learn how to interact with women in a non-platonic way, is laughed at by the mainstream and dominated by charlatans calling themselves ‘pickup artists’.

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Inceldom touches a nerve in wider society, which I suspect is why we have few conversations about it. All of us treat people differently on the basis of their physical appearance, however altruistic we may believe ourselves to be. As a recent article in Vice, which drew on a comprehensive body of research, noted: “Attractive people are generally assumed to be more intelligent, more trustworthy, and have better social skills.”

We shy away from talking honestly about this because to do so would be to acknowledge that there are some areas where true ‘equality’ — the ideal we strive for in most areas of political life — is unattainable when it comes to hooking up. The topic of sex and dating is already a minefield where egos swim amidst the unspoken and adversarial mating strategies deployed by men and women. There is very little altruism and equality when it comes to finding a mate. The sexual act is discriminatory by definition.

And it is leaving increasing numbers of men on the scrapheap. Some identify ideologically as Incels out of frustration. Some out of entitlement. Many seek to blame women’s supposedly unrealistic standards for their inability to form an intimate relationship. For others the situation is still more complex.

Incels arguably have something in common with the Japanese hikikomori, defined by Japan’s Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry as those who have “remained isolated at home for at least six consecutive months without going to school or work, and rarely interact with people from outside their immediate family”. Japan has around one million hikikomori.

Inceldom fits within a broader trend towards alienation and reclusive behaviour in modern societies, fostered by technology, changing dating preferences and — among other things — easy access to pornography. We don’t have our own hikikomori problem in the west just yet, but Incels are a growing phenomenon that society would do well to better understand — even if that is less satisfying than throwing the word around as an online insult.

A controversial new film, The Rise of Jordan Peterson, is full of testimonies such as this one from vulnerable young men who have found something — peace, solace, direction, perhaps? — in the work of Canadian professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson.

Back in 2015, when filmmakers Maziar Ghaderi and Patricia Marcoccia began making a film about Peterson, he already had a sizeable following on the back of a series of YouTube lectures. The filmmakers had originally intended to look at this, but mainly on the professor’s close friendship with indigenous artist Charles Joseph, a Kwakwaka’wakw carver.

Then, in 2016, halfway through making the film, Peterson exploded into the mainstream for quite a different reason.

He posted a YouTube video critiquing Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code which added gender identity and expression to the act’s protected categories. Within a month of being posted, the video clocked up half a million views, propelling him to intellectual superstardom. Ghaderi and Marcoccia decided to change tack and explore the subsequent controversy.

In his response to Bill C–16, Peterson argued that it was wrong to force university staff to address students by their preferred pronouns – ‘they’, ‘ze’, ‘zir’ – on the basis that the path to authoritarianism begins with “attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory”, as he phrased it at the time. The video provoked a furious backlash, as documented in the film, with some students and trans activists at the time calling his comments “unacceptable, emotionally disturbing and painful”.

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What's so unethical about my Jordan Peterson movie?

By Patricia Marcoccia

The film navigates this controversy with nuance and sensitivity. It is a thoughtful examination of why his fans love him and his critics detest him. The filmmakers spend time with Peterson, his family and the young men (though there are woman too) who find solace in his work. At one point, a man rushes up to Peterson in the street to thank him for pulling him out of his depression. Such occurrences happen frequently. But the filmmakers – who describe themselves as left–of–centre politically – spend equal time with the trans activists who feel hurt by Peterson’s objection to Bill C-16.

The film is not a straightforward narrative of good versus evil; you come away with no sense of being browbeaten by the directors into taking a particular point of view. And it is this which appears to have angered the film’s most rambunctious critics, who worry that someone may watch the film and conclude that Peterson is not entirely wrong about everything after all.

Peterson’s superstardom is, to a large extent, built on the wrath of his opponents. At one point in the film, a rabble attempts to use white noise to drown out a speech Peterson is making. To them, Peterson’s opinions are ‘literal violence’, a contorted intellectual rationalisation that the radical left uses to shut down disagreeable opinions.

I’m not the biggest Jordan Peterson fan in the world. I found his reluctance to use the pronouns favoured by trans students to be churlish and petty. I also found his conflation of alternative pronouns with Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism hysterical. There may be something sinister about the trans lobby’s insistence that biological reality must fall by the wayside in order to accommodate something as vague and poorly-defined as gender identity. But it is not the road to the Lubyanka.

Moreover, Peterson comes across at times in the film as narcissistic and conceited, at one point relaying a dream he had in which he appeared to save the world from totalitarianism.

In my opinion, the film pretty much skirted over the real story: the story of his audience. What explains his runaway success within a certain demographic? It’s something that lies at the root of much that is disrupting society at the moment.

Peterson appeals to young men who lack direction. His work is replete with admonitions to “set your house in order” so as to live a meaningful life. “We require routine and tradition,” Peterson cautions readers in his hit book 12 Rules for Life. “That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown – and that is also not good.”

The self-help side of Peterson’s work has brought him massive success, even though much of his oeuvre is unexceptional. Underpinned by a folksy Christian conservatism, the videos deal with mythology, Jungian philosophy, anti-totalitarianism and self-help, with a strong emphasis on personal responsibility. They have titles such as ‘How to stop procrastinating’, ‘Advice For People With Depression’, and ‘Jordan Peterson on the meaning of life for men’ and have racked up tens of millions of views between them.

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Why won't Jordan Peterson heed his own advice?

By Tom Chivers

But the advice he hands out also goes some way to explaining his unpopularity among the bien pensant Left. His YouTube content is very much of the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ variety. Such a message has obvious limits (for an idea of why, see my own book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain). But more significantly, it does not sit well with a culture that increasingly valorises self-flagellation and performative outpourings of self-pity.

Peterson’s lower–middle and working-class followers, who naively take to heart his folksy injunctions to better themselves, are an affront to the notion that real change only comes about through political activism. Left-leaning intellectuals detest self-help, which to them reeks of aspiration. A person should focus on changing the system and not personal betterment, they argue – which is easy enough to say when you aren’t the one languishing in financial and spiritual poverty.

Peterson, though, speaks powerfully to those who find themselves adrift at a time when traditional institutions and structures are increasingly viewed as suspect and even tyrannical. There is a generation of men who were born into fatherless and chaotic families, bereft of stable jobs and meaning, who are being told to stay put and focus on ‘changing society’ by the affluent Left. Their masculinity is impugned as ‘toxic’, while hypergamy (turbocharged by social media) makes it increasingly hard for them to find a date.

Is this burgeoning male resentment really just a thwarted sense of entitlement, as Peterson’s critics suggest? To a point it is. There was always going to be a reckoning for white men once women and other ethnic groups were empowered. We are living through that backlash.

Peterson may be right to dismiss the social constructivist nonsense which concludes that gender is entirely a social construct (a wealth of evidence suggests otherwise), a view he shares, ironically, with trans activists. Yet he would do well to empathise with women’s fears of this being used as a trojan horse by chauvinists and misogynists to justify and entrench inequalities in the workplace and the home. Peterson has also come out with some disturbing remarks around ‘enforced monogamy’, remarks which seem to imply that life was better when women could not access birth control and divorce their spouses.

But regardless of his shortcomings, Peterson is tapping into a genuine phenomenon, the effects of which we cannot ignore. There’s a problem brewing for a generation of men. They are angry, directionless, and, perhaps most important, sexless.

Our promiscuous culture increasingly bends toward the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule whereby 20% of men date 80% of women. Women compete over the most desirable men, while the rest are increasingly turning towards porn and – before long, no doubt – sex robots.

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By James Bloodworth

In just a decade, there has been a three-fold increase in the number of men who have not had sex in the past year. The rise in online dating — encouraged by corporations with a financial interest in keeping people glued to their smartphones — has exacerbated the trend. To quote a recent study of the popular dating app Tinder, “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men”.

This kind of thing was ameliorated in the past by the type of socially enforced monogamy that is romanticised by Peterson. Yet it produced legions of unhappy women who were pressured into ‘settling’ with a man who was by all intents and purposes their inferior. The sexual revolution turned the tables. And invariably, there are men who resent this and believe that the world owes them intimacy.

And this is where I part ways with Peterson. Is it not for the men left behind by the dating market to up their game, instead of complaining about it on Reddit or longing for a halcyon era of obedient wives?

Easier said than done of course. But Peterson counsels precisely this model of self-empowerment when it comes to economics — he rallies against the “aggrieved victimhood” of those living in poverty — however he appears to shift responsibility to women when it comes to sexual inequality.

Peterson’s desire for a return to monogamous norms also contains within it a set of contradictions. Romantic idealism — which continues to prop up our (still broadly) monogamous culture — must shoulder some of the blame for the mercurial rage of many isolated men. From an early age, society bombards both sexes with unrealistic expectations around romance. Individuals are conditioned by Hollywood movies, popular magazines and soap operas to let ‘fate’ take care of their love life. “Just be yourself and it’ll happen eventually,” runs the advice.

For men, who are still expected to initiate most romantic encounters, this is atrocious advice. What if  ‘being yourself’ hasn’t worked in the past? What if women on dating apps find you unattractive? What if crippling anxiety prevents you from even starting a conversation with a woman?

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Men are expected to understand these things automatically. When many do not, society shows little sympathy, dismissing them as pathetic losers – the word ‘Incel’ has itself become an online insult in recent times.

Insofar as Peterson provides young men with an alternative to the bottomless despair of the Incel movement, he does so by encouraging them to see beyond their own solipsistic rage.

Stop whining on the internet. Stand up straight. Leave the house. Join a gym. Learn how to hold eye contact. Start small (tidy your room) and build momentum on the back of every seemingly insignificant victory.

It is easy enough to sneer at this sort of folksy advice from the lofty heights of a job and a relationship. Yet it seems a better bet for some than the idealistic alternatives provided by the mainstream (‘be yourself and you’ll be fine’) and the fatalistic despair of the Incel movement (‘you will never be good enough’).

Had the film looked at some of the issues outlined above, rather than just focusing on an argument over pronouns, The Rise of Jordan Peterson would have been a more compelling prospect. It is male resentment that is driving much of the populist tumult that is shaking democracy, and it is male resentment that underlies the runaway success of Jordan Peterson. The film features quite a few clips of fans relaying to the camera how Peterson’s work has helped them, but a more in-depth look at this aspect of Peterson’s appeal would have been welcome.

For those who are tired of the usual polemical attacks on Peterson — which for the most part deploy bucket-loads of conceit and sarcasm in order to avoid engaging seriously with anything he says — it was refreshing to watch a film which laid things out in a straightforward manner.

The viewer is given room to make up his or her own mind. Though as evidenced by the rowdy protests against the film, we live during a time when even this is considered revolutionary.