We dash through the countryside at high speed, swinging round hedges and tripping over potholes. My increasingly sweaty palms lubricate the phone in my hand like I’m gripping a bar of soap. I ask him what model of car we’re in. “You don’t know an [Audi] S3?” he asks with gleeful confusion, turning his gaze to me, and away from the road that throws itself at the neon headlights. “No, I can’t even drive,” I admit. “You can’t drive!?” His confusion is warranted. Why wouldn’t I drive? The honest answer is that I started to learn, left home for university, and never sat behind the wheel again. Among the Lime-bike riding metropolitan set, not having a license would barely register as unusual; it would be virtuous even: one less dangerous car polluting the road. But where I am right now, outside the Tube map, in the suburbs and shires, cars are an essential part of life. I place my hand flatly against the roof as he crushes the accelerator.

We’re hurtling down a dual carriageway toward my first ever car meet. Mostly operated by organized groups, car meets are conceptually lawful but can devolve into unlawful or illegal activities like speeding, stunts, and antisocial behavior. Events like this often occur at night in public spaces like retail parks, public roads and car parks — but can venture into the inner city where the attendant dangers of injury and death increase.

In June 2025, teenager Lewis Samuels was sentenced to five years in a young offender institution and a nine-year driving ban for causing the death of 23-year-old Connor Richards and injuring 11 others at a car meet in Lincolnshire. Samuels lost control of his vehicle and plowed into a crowd of attendees. He was 17 at the time and had only passed his driving test 11 weeks earlier. The case was not an outlier. In Hampshire, police dealt with more than 200 offenses linked to unlawful car meets in just over a year. In Northern Ireland — home to what enthusiasts routinely refer to as an “unhinged” car modification scene — there were twice the number of road deaths in the first four months of 2026 than in the equivalent period in 2025. In a House of Commons debate last year, MP Julia Buckley highlighted how drivers under 24 make up 6% of total license holders but represent 18% of all car drivers killed and seriously injured. This is, overwhelmingly, a young person’s game.

In recent years, various UK police forces have attempted to deter attendees from meets, issuing dispersal orders and written warnings, seizing vehicles and making arrests. In December 2024, the RAC conducted a freedom of information request to all 45 UK territorial police forces. The 13 that responded reported around 500 unauthorized gatherings taking place across the UK up to mid-October the year before. But given this is primarily a working class male hobby that relies on furtive behavior, it is not easy to track. The subculture only tends to penetrate mainstream consciousness via anxious Neighborhood Watch committees, a stray reel from boy racer Instagram landing in your feed, or a tragic local news headline about a teenager killed while speeding.

And yet car meets have existed as long as cars themselves. One of the earliest known examples took place in London in 1900. Organized by the Automobile Club of Great Britain, the “Concours d’Elegance” (“Competition of elegance”) was an opportunity for individuals to exhibit their vehicles and form a community. In post-war America, car meets became mainstream, partly as a result of Second World War veterans with newfound skills as mechanics customizing muscle cars. In the Sixties, The Beach Boys soundtracked hot rod culture: their 1963 hit “Shut Down” is peppered with motoring jargon and tells the story of a drag race between a Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray and a Dodge Dart.

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Britain, meanwhile, developed its own distinct culture. The first known use of the term “boy racer” appeared in The Times in 1968 — the label is commonly reserved for young men who drive in an aggressive manner. Jeremy Clarkson, who has spent much of his career hymning this era of “proper cars”, recalled the rituals of his own youth in the same publication: “One day I fitted the engine with a chromed sports air filter and convinced my friends that it added another 100 horsepower. They would talk about their cars and then the sun would come up and we’d all drive home.” But these were the glory days of the internal combustion engine: pre-Congestion Charge, pre-ULEZ, pre-20mph speed limits, when cars were comprehensible, parking places plentiful and seatbelts optional. Britain now has many, many more vehicles on its roads than it ever has — but they are hemmed in, frowned upon, everywhere and yet on the margins. Nevertheless, one thing remains constant: young men want to push the limits of engineering while sharing the experience with likeminded enthusiasts. In other words, they’re keen to show off.

The operation is top secret. My driver had received the location for this car meet only an hour earlier. All details are provided last minute to a trusted contact list to limit the possibility of police intervention. As the location — an industrial complex of corrugated warehouses and offices — rises into view, the concentration of surrounding speeding vehicles increases, like pathogens, weaving among the flow of ordinary traffic. We turn off an A-road and form a decelerating convoy that joins the dozens of parked cars that barricade the entrance road to the factory district. “It’s the police versus us,” Ben reminds me with Che Guavaran gusto. After coming to a stop, I pluck my fingernails out of the dashboard and stumble onto the wet tarmac.

The air is misted with tire fumes, pyrotechnic smoke, and Elfbar vapor. A barrage of bangs, whines, and bass-heavy music orchestrates my path as I make my way on foot toward the distant jamboree. Fireworks scream into the air and crimson flares erupt from the crowd as dozens of us approach the clouded specters.

I hit a contingent of black puffer jackets and nudge my way through. Two cars are doing donuts on a small roundabout, their tires burning. People cheer. Passengers hang out of all available windows, whiplashed as if riding a rodeo bull. Then the chaos suddenly ceases. The police arrive, on foot. Clad in high vis, they resemble a row of traffic cones as they amble toward the crowd. The puffer jackets disperse, not with the panic that follows a speakeasy raid but with a purposeful nonchalance. They rustle into their cars and the ephemeral hive disperses into the night to reassemble elsewhere. Ben decides it’s best if we both go home.

Disappointed, I approach a police officer. In principle, he says, they’re “All for” this kind of thing. “If you’re seventeen and like your cars [and] want somewhere to go with likeminded people, then it’s perfect.” But he stresses that there is a safer option: “Static car meets don’t kill people. Street racing, doing donuts, and breaking the speed limit does.”

The static car meets he refers to are a more benign part of the subculture. These consist of people driving to an area, parking their vehicles, and talking to one another. There are no races or stunts. Instead, there is a more diverse crowd of attendees (men and women of all ages) and a continual police presence. According to one of my contacts in the car meet world, such an event happens every Sunday in a car park in the center of Milton Keynes. Unlike other car meets: “No one runs it or organises it, it’s just been a thing for so long to meet on a Sunday at that time that people just attend.”

Another source takes me there the following weekend. The sun hasn’t yet set as we navigate the cardinal grid and roll into a car park outside the Network Rail offices. Dozens of parked cars sputter, whine and pulse. Music blares. Pairs of police officers meander. There’s a carnival atmosphere. Even for a non-enthusiast like me, some vehicles are objectively beautiful: Porsches, Aston Martins, and what I’m informed is a Lamborghini Aventador are in attendance. In the far corner, a cluster of discarded motorcyclists mingle among themselves.

The need for recognition is ubiquitous, exemplified by the custom-made stickers of Instagram handles plastered across car windshields. The cars that attract the most attention are not the most expensive ones but, rather, the ones that have the most modifications. A burgundy Audi A3 is encircled by a mob of outstretched iPhones. A woman in her mid 30s, in a clubbing dress and black heels hangs out of the passenger seat. The ajar door, pock-marked with speakers, produces a bass so monumental it explodes her hair like an electrocuted Looney Tunes character. She poses for the cameras and films herself before being led away by her partner, the car owner.

I chat with a group of women sitting in a crescent of fold-out chairs. Some dandle (ear-plugged) babies; others sip tins of gin. None took their own car and most have partners nearby. I am offered some apple cake by a lady whose facial studs put me in mind of a Chesterfield armchair. After coming alone for four years, she has now made friends on the scene. She would be “just sat at home” if she wasn’t here. “Everything else costs money,” she notes. “I love the cars, I love the modifications and I never feel intimidated.”

Night descends. Lampposts and headlights are illuminated. The music volume rises and the frequency of bangs and revs increases. I meet “Ryan” who is in his mid 20s and works as a Team Leader in a highstreet chain’s warehouse. He drives a premium brand of car which he’s modified with a “lowered suspension, more tire grip and some bolt ons”. He claims his vehicle is worth “over 50k”. “The types of cars people bring have definitely changed,” he says. “It started with what people call boy-racer cars, but now, on finance and if you live at home or have a small rent, you can basically drive what you like.”

He has a point. Around 90% of new cars bought privately in the UK are now reportedly financed using personal contract purchases (PCPs). The model is simple: pay a deposit, make lower monthly payments, and at the end of the contract, you either hand the car back, pay a lump sum to own it, or roll straight into a new deal. Buyers like Ryan don’t use a PCP to reduce their monthly payments; instead they use it to afford something flashier at the same cost. The result is that a young person living at home, pocketing a modest warehouse wage and eating his mum’s food, can pull up to a car meet in something previous generations of enthusiasts could only dream of.

What Ryan is driving at is that having a limited income no longer means you must accept a limited speed. He pays over £1,000 a month (over half of his income, working six days a week) paying his car’s finance and upkeep. Despite living at home, he can’t think of anything he’d rather spend his money on. A 2023 survey by the King’s Trust found that two thirds of 18-to-24-year-olds have lowered their career aspirations and expectation for financial security. Half of those surveyed said they weren’t planning beyond the next six months. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are over a million 16-24-year-olds not in education, jobs, or training (NEET).

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What Ryan’s £50K car provides that, say, a one-bedroom flat does not, is a thrill. He regularly races with friends and is “addicted” to the “freedom” that comes with driving fast. I ask him how he feels when people describe his behavior as dangerous and his eyes gloss over. “I’m just being myself,” he says. “I can’t change the fact we find it exciting.”

Stood in the warmth of exhaust fumes and glow of headlights, Ryan regales me with tales of the car community battling the police: driving bans, arrests, daring escapes and close calls. He boasts that “[The police have] been pelted with eggs and flour bombs, had their tires slashed” and shows me a video that appears to show a police officer punching a young man in the face — framed as an unnecessary retaliation. These stories clearly feed back into the culture’s mythos, YouTube-friendly updates of Marlon Brando in The Wild One growling: “Nobody tells me what to do.” In that classic movie, lawbreaking is represented as a tragic symptom of societal failure — but perhaps Ryan is unaware such stories are doomed to end in tragedy.

On the road adjacent to the carpark, a motorbike goads the police by maintaining a wheelie. It’s an invitation to test the boundaries that others predictably accept. The more weathered enthusiasts, however, are not impressed. “It’s so fucked up people start acting like dickheads,” says one. I start talking to “Pete” who is in his 50s and wears wire-framed glasses. He’s been coming to the Sunday meets for over a decade. “It used to be a bunch of fellas, mostly my age, with an actual passion for motoring,” he says. He seems like he’d be more at home at the sort of car meet that involves bunting. He doesn’t seem to realize he is surrounded by hundreds of people just as enthusiastic about motoring as he is. The difference is that, despite their relative generational poverty, car finance schemes have given them access to the sorts of cars it would have once taken half a lifetime to afford.

The atmosphere shifts. “Tyler” tells me the police have “tried clamping down [on this static car meet] for years, tried loads of different enforcements and plans, but nothing works”. Like an oncologist observing a tumor, law enforcement now consign themselves to a policy of watchful waiting. Two patrol cars are parked nearby, there are a dozen police officers on foot, a police van tactically placed near the exit and reflective signs declaring the area subject is to a “public space protection order” — with “car cruising / racing” specifically prohibited.

These orders are one of many tools authorities use to attempt to assert some control. Thames Valley Police Force informs me over email that the difficulty lies in car meets being conceptually legal while the sorts of anti-social behavior they give rise to are not — “and that’s why we monitor them”. The police can issue a Section 59 notice for anti-social or careless driving marking a driver or vehicle for the next 12 months. If they are seen driving recklessly again during that period, the vehicle can be seized and legal action potentially brought against the driver. In North London (a car meet hotspot), Enfield Council secured an interim injunction from the High Court to prohibit car meets across the borough, leading to several fines and suspended sentences. Sussex Police have also developed a dedicated unit called Operation Cruz to monitor car meets. But the question is: does providing boundaried infrastructure provide a safety value — or create an anti-authority culture?

“The police coming does add to the fun,” Ben admits weeks later as we make our way to a different type of car meet far from the watchful waiting of authorities. He says it’s frequently a “bit of a game of cat and mouse”. Often, once the police arrive, more chaos unfolds. As I had seen, police intervention can force the swarm out of the nest and into the open.

A clear stretch of semi-rural road unfurls and Ben quickly seizes the opportunity to speed. The number on the digital dashboard swiftly rises to 160mph and we zoom unencumbered by the materiality of the world. A roundabout confronts us and, like a ship unable to change course, we burst into the maelstrom and rapidly circumnavigate it. Ben reminds me that he “knows where all the [speed] cameras are”. We return to a straight road, and a car materializes directly ahead. Time slows as we hurtle toward its rear and Ben begins to apply the brake. Utterly powerless, my hand slams against the ceiling and I recoil in a futile attempt to gain distance from the seemingly inevitable crash. At the last second the other car swerves away and we fly on unharmed. Ben lets out a nervous laugh: “At this speed your head would detach from your spinal column if we hit something.” His bloodlust fails to reassure me. He’s interrupted by a car driving parallel to us. It matches our (now reduced) speed. The young driver gyrates and cheers after having witnessed the near-miss and gestures for a race. Ben declines on account of my visible terror.

In order to be sent the location for this car meet, Ben had to provide the organizers with two videos filmed at prior events, a requirement he fulfilled. He parks nearby. I am still numb from the near miss, and my distress as I slowly push open the car door counterpoints his exhilaration. Illuminated drones whir overhead, an army of hoods and masks encircle a roundabout. Dozens more spectators are crammed on the central island, marooned as multiple cars kaleidoscopically spin around with no barrier or means to prevent a vehicle from barreling into the crowd. A young driver tells me: “Illegal ones are very safe because they’re highly organized, roads are blocked off and you’ll be called out if you do something dangerous.” When I query the effectiveness of this, he declares: “I’m a good driver, I know I’m not going to crash into anyone.”

This confidence sits uneasily with the reality that people really do get killed at car meets — not to mention the riotous atmosphere. While there is admittedly no alcohol visibly present, men grip firework cannons between their legs and discharge sparks into the already smoke-filled air. I am jostled in a sea of contagious mob-mentality, clandestine thrill and apocalyptic hedonism.

But I have come to believe this subculture is far more nuanced than evidence suggests; as diverse as the areas it inhabits, as multifaceted and difficult to define as it is to police. I met many members who lament the boy-racer stereotype. They see it as a way of keeping working-class culture in its box and resent being forced underground. “If I had somewhere where me and my mates could race our cars for free, I would 100% go,” says “Sam”. Many of the young men I speak to describe a feeling of being constrained by society and unable to get on. The simple act of crowd-sourcing where the speed cameras are provides a semblance of community as well as autonomy amid a system that feels rigged against them.

The car was the democratizing vehicle of the 20th century: a guarantee of social autonomy and freedom. That version of freedom has since been revoked in a Britain, of compounding parking fines, proliferating speed cameras, and city-center congestion charges. The freedom of the open road may be a fallacy — but then so too are the opportunities for these young men to progress, aspire and achieve in life. But it is too convenient, too simplistic to blame social pressures for unlawful car meets. There are questions to be asked of society’s failure to fund third spaces and an economy that hands a generation of lost young men a £50,000 car on finance, but these individuals are not inarticulate victims. They are autonomous adults who choose to endanger themselves and others.

Since my visit to the Sunday meet in Milton Keynes, Thames Valley Police have reportedly launched a crackdown. Nearly 100 vehicles have received their final warning. Attendees and spectators now risk £100 fines. The car meet, needless to say, will move on, burrowing further underground, risking an escalation in casualties and injuries. But the danger isn’t incidental to the appeal — it is the appeal.

***

Note: Some names have been changed. 

She exists in a strange subcultural ecosystem: the reactionary feminine id, emerging like mold in the shadow cast by figures like the Tate brothers, Jordan Peterson, and President Trump. But she’s far from the palatable rebellion of Netflix’s Adolescence.

RFH emerged from the same digital petri dish of the manosphere, fluent in its grammar of outrage and irony. But she inverts its vernacular, posting incendiary feminist content in a voice that calls out the trolls she once aligned with. Her account has become a minor spectacle on X, where she draws both threats and disciples. She is documenting, in real time, what it looks like when a former anti-feminist tries to escape the ideology she once helped amplify; and how the internet doesn’t make it easy to leave.

By the time I called her a few weeks ago — early afternoon — she had already tweeted 14 times. There was one that said, “I am the female Donald Trump,” and another, a reposted meme from a fake WikiHow article: “How to get men to leave you alone.” The answer: “Show them your Twitter.”

She laughed when I brought that up. When men do indeed go running, it shows her who they really are. Or they do the opposite: rage-quote her into a thread with 10,000 likes, tagging friends and followers to come and see what a deranged woman looks like. Sometimes, they go darker: burner accounts, threats. But she insists she doesn’t really care, because she’s there mostly “to have fun.”

She called herself Rad Fem Hitler, twisting the insult “Feminazi” into a parody so grotesque it loops back into being seductive. It stuck, succeeding in pissing people off. She doesn’t want me to use her real name, which makes sense: the whole project is part performance, part exorcism.

Her tweets are lacerating, occasionally brilliant, and often disturbing. When Russell Brand — the former actor, revival-tent star, and accused serial predator — was filmed being baptized in the ocean, RFH captioned the clip, “Put some clothes on, wh*re.” A few weeks earlier, she tweeted, “If I were a gay guy, I would be r*ping so many straight men.” She claims it’s just jokes, and in one sense, it is. But even jokes have a location; and hers live somewhere between trauma and spectacle, sharpened by the language of the Right-wing enemies she had counted as allies.

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On the phone, she’s disarmingly gentle. “I’m kind of in the middle of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t have this entire hate-boner for trans women…. I don’t really care about adults doing these things”. The internet rewards extremism — including the kind she traffics in — but reality rarely does.

There’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in her cruelty. Or maybe it’s righteous anger. She uses the language of the online Right because it’s the dialect in which she first learned to be political, and because it’s the only tongue that seems to stir a reaction. Her fluency with it is part echo, part strategy, part theater.

She grew up in a “normal Republican family” in a Chicago suburb, with a brief interlude in Bahrain for her mother’s work. She remembers her childhood happily, and her parents modeled an equal partnership she’d hoped to find for herself. But her politics came online at the University of Michigan, where she discovered the term “libertarian,” and suddenly, everything clicked. “I think I was kind of a libertarian as a child, I just didn’t know there was a word for it. I remember thinking, why are people not allowed to do drugs? That’s their own business.”

She found, among her fellow libertarians, a bunch of “nerdy spergy guys who probably have mommy issues and don’t like women that much.” (The word “spergy,” in her usage, oscillates between self-identification and diagnosis; it feels defensive, maybe self-hating, maybe affectionate. In a way that’s hard to parse, she includes herself in the insult.) “That was me,” she said. “I was them.” At the time, she called herself an “anti-feminist.”

She ran in the same circles as the Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, who was then running Breitbart. When Trump announced his run, she became a die-hard MAGA fan, because all his talk about “The Wall” was exactly what she felt Republicans had been missing.

She and a friend who worked for Yiannopoulos thought it would be “funny” to go to a Bernie rally and ask for donations for Trump’s campaign. To top it off, the rally was in Columbus, Ohio, and they wore their Michigan clothes, poking at the fiercest rivalry in college football. The plan was to troll everyone: Bernie fans, Buckeyes, liberals, the internet. “A lot of people were swearing at us” but some engaged, and some “thought it was almost kind of funny.”

That friend has since left politics and got the video scrubbed, but when RFH was recently doxxed, people from “back then” remembered it and put it on the internet—a gotcha. Many relics of her Trumpian days have since re-emerged, used as fodder against her. “I’m not in contact with any of those people now,” she tells me, sternly.

Things began to fall apart in 2018. The edge-lord e-Right — which once felt like a self-aware, post-political LARP — began bleeding into real life. Meet-ups turned into romantic entanglements, and RFH witnessed “unconscionable misogyny. There was so much domestic violence and horrific emotional abuse.” One man was trying to starve his girlfriend down to nothing. Some were addicts, and some died. There was slut-shaming, deadbeat fathers, self-destruction. “And somehow,” she added, “it was always the woman’s fault.”

She felt this in her personal life, too. She had absorbed the belief that “marriage was my salvation as a woman … that I had no other real purpose.” So she married a man from her libertarian college circle. She was 25. She got pregnant “immediately.” He wanted nothing to do with the baby. “I felt like I was living a meme,” she said.

Trad-wife life had promised adoration; instead, she was treated like a leech. Her husband’s misogyny, once theoretical, turned violent. When she asked for help, he would scream, “I’m not here to serve you.” The spell broke.

Her slow burn toward feminism began to accelerate. “I would say motherhood is quite radicalizing.” Her former views curdled into suspicion. “They want women to be mothers to just sort of keep them almost lobotomized, away from society.”

She saw it in the way conservatives talked about divorce. “The minute there’s a divorce, it’s like, ‘You just took his money,’ and, ‘You didn’t do anything.’ I’m like, didn’t you just say motherhood is so important?”

She won’t talk about her divorce to protect her child’s privacy. But she’s made the stakes clear elsewhere: “I had to live out the consequences of these ideas,” she said recently in an interview with the UnHerd contributor (and repentant online Rightist) Richard Hanania. “It’s not just an abstract, funny thing. It has real-world implications, and they’re not good. Not for me, or for other women.”

That’s the thing about RFH; her whole schtick is a kind of black comedy about realizing, too late, that the joke was always on you. The thing she’s doing on Twitter isn’t quite politics, but a kind of shadowboxing against her former self: an attempt to climb out of the hole using only the dirt that buried her.

Still, she remains caught between poles. She’s not trying to win approval; she’s trying to balance fury with fluency. She still hates liberal sanctimony, rants about immigration, and tweets like someone who spent too much time on 4chan.

Online fame has presented a double bind for her privacy: since her doxxing, she must defend herself as a “beautiful woman” while also impressing how much a woman’s “beauty” is overvalued. And she is cruel about people’s (usually men’s) lives and appearances, only to reap the same treatment when it’s flung back at her. It didn’t take me long to find men on Twitter talking about killing her, raping her, the size of her bust.

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But for RFH, the point isn’t clarity or persuasion — it’s chaos with a feminist flavor. And it works. She’s built a significant following, with many of her posts going viral, not because people agree with her, but because they can’t look away.

She reminds me of Valerie Solanas — the radical feminist most famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Before she pulled the trigger in 1968, Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a text that called for “thrill-seeking females” to overthrow society and eliminate the male sex. It was dismissed as lunacy, and eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. “I love Valerie,” RFH told me. “She was onto something.” Like much Twitter-speak, they both fall somewhere between dark comedy and a call to arms.

RFH reaped the full Solanos treatment in December. When a teenage girl carried out a school shooting in Wisconsin, killing a teacher, a student and wounding six others, Twitter users alleged that RFH was cited in her “manifesto.” Months on, nothing from federal investigators suggests that RFH, or feminism, had anything to do with the shooting; but that hasn’t stopped her opponents going wild over it.

It made her “sour” on the internet. She says anyone who suggests her calls to violence are earnest is just being disingenuous: “They don’t even believe it. You can’t read my stuff and believe that. There’s nothing in there that hints at some sort of violent takeover of men.”

Still, it lingers, like all internet scandals do. And she keeps going, because, in her view, things are changing. “We’re entering a weird postwar America,” she said. “Young men aren’t dying off anymore. We’re going to see this slow, social collapse.”

“We’re just going to have this big kind of culling,” she clarified. “I don’t mean killing people, but there’s just gonna be a lot of people that don’t reproduce.” Her vision of the future is certainly not what Andrew Tate’s devotees want to hear. It’s not clear yet whether RFH is helping that process or just making it harder to ignore. But she doesn’t seem interested in guiding anyone to safety. She’s more like a lighthouse that flashes on and off, just enough to show you how rough the water is.

Which is an odd regression, because we used to know him so well. Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page, male writers started to compete with each other over who could depict the arrival of sexual maturity in the most appalling, hilarious detail. They would write about themselves at school, themselves in the bedroom and, most perversely, themselves in the bathroom.

As Kingsley Amis later reflected, in the Fifties “to utter or write a swear-word, as they were called, counted as a small act of revolt, the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger”. And at the start of that decade, we had The Catcher in the Rye, a novel which set the thematic tramlines for what was to come (angst, alienation, youngsters vs oldsters). But Holden was a good kid really, his deepest moral sin nothing more than a brief and ultimately chaste parlay with a prostitute. He was overtaken by far meaner younger brothers and, by the end of the Sixties, Philip Roth had produced Portnoy’s Complaint, an unsparing exposé on the dangers of rabid self-abuse. But the greatest and most summative achievement of the lot, arguably retiring the genre in its unstinting imposition of the nastiness, arrogance, misogyny and truth of male adolescence, is Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, published 50 years ago. 

When Amis died in May, there was much handwringing over exactly what order of talent was being commemorated. A virtuoso stylist, certainly. But a serious novelist? A mere literary comedian? James Wood leant towards the latter, bafflingly labelling Amis our latter-day P.G. Wodehouse. And some dedicated fans simply threw out the fiction in frustration, trusting that the true talent had found its way into the memoir, the essays, the journalism. Quite an insult to the author of 15 novels, and quite misguided, too. Obviously, Amis’s true métier was as one of our great novelists of masculinity — specifically, its most resentful, female-fearing and insecure aspects, exactly those which trouble us about our young men today.

It’s there from the opening lines of The Rachel Papers — “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me” — that special brew of what, on the next page, Charles calls “all the self-consciousness and self-disgust and self-infatuation and self-…you name it” that is essential to this species of male adolescence. It is the eve of Charles’s 20th birthday, an occasion which is vital for the novel’s plot: a moment of metamorphosis, a simultaneously elevating and enervating release of “teenage” anarchy, to be replaced with “that noisome Brobdingnagian world the child sees as adulthood”. Charles spies an opportunity for self-inspection, even amid the self-absorption. And what follows is his account of the love affair that he believes has marked the last months of his youth, his relationship with Rachel.

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What follows is a triumph of stylised solipsism. Charles has kept detailed notes on Rachel (as he does on everything else, from his reading for Oxford entrance to the no less scholarly Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis). He has analysed seduction like a lepidopterist and places Rachel under a romantic siege-surveillance, pursuing her with all the sleuth and sociopathy of a lusty Sherlock. She is run through a gauntlet of on-the-cuff speeches, calculatedly accidental meetings and pre-prepared gallery visits (Charles goes the day before, to pick out and make notes upon the most aphrodisiac paintings). And this doesn’t let up at the bedroom door. Amis’s sex scenes are pure adolescence: choreographed accounts of first-person pornography, studies of athleticism and repertoire. 

“I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings,” Charles tells us. “Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work.” Charles (and obviously Amis) recognises that this is something new, an attempt to establish a new kind of sexual frankness that will drain any romance from the act. Post-Chatterley, post-Portnoy, no chastity belt may remain locked and no modesty curtain undrawn. Charles, as Amis himself noted, is scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. Intimacy is reduced to: “Thus, I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns.”

But even more gleefully described is what Charles calls his “adolescentiana”. Asthmatic and scrawny, Charles suffers from a debilitating physical and mental self-consciousness, and regards his body with outright disgust. The Rachel Papers is among other things the great novel of catarrh and phlegm, a tribute to hawking, yacking and barking, of lungs filled with “liquefying gook” and needing to sleep “on a pillow of tissues”. But this doesn’t stop at the bronchials: we hear all about Charles’s “marathon craps”, we see him “peeing lava” after contracting an STI. He shows us his spots in the mirror, cataloguing his “Big Boys” and one “fine double-yolker” frying between his eyes. We even witness him lie “immobile in the bath, like a dirty old alligator — not washing, just steaming and planning”. “Nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets,” Charles and Amis declare around halfway through — a literary self-justification. In the quest for comedy, Amis would shamelessly throw all his poetic might at the most shameful, revealing scene.

It is this aggressive frankness that immediately and irrevocably landed the novel with the charge of misogyny. A fair accusation — an older Amis would archly claim that his early novels were written in his “pre-feminist” period. This is Charles on his mother: “What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes…” On it goes. And it is difficult for the reconstructed reader to know what to do with passages like this, so articulate and so unfunny. Especially since Amis gives Rachel the same attitude towards women over 35: “Scaly faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry… it’s good that they can have families.”

Amazing to think that 50 years ago, this was Amis’s ticket to glittering prizes and public acclaim (of a punk-ish, countercultural sort). If this writing is going on now, it’s utterly marginal to publishing, taking place on dubious Substacks, in the far-off terra incognita of the literary manosphere. There is one possible defence here, hanging implicitly and obviously in the air, which is that Charles has to be misogynistic because nasty young men so frequently are, too. And Charles is a monster born of that caste, cranked by his creator into a Hogarthian triumph of high-art cartoonery.

But Charles is vulnerable, too. He’s revolting, and he knows it. And he’s more than capable of devolving into an anxious wreck, crying down the phone when Rachel briefly gets back together with an American love rival, and plagued by “cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager’s religion”. The Rachel Papers is too often remembered as a freewheeling carry-on, a snide pamphlet stuffed with lit bro in-jokes. But if Amis grants Charles some of teenagehood’s fleeting highs, he forces him through some of its most punishing lows (one section of vegetative, alcoholic despair is simply referred to as “The Low”).  

More from this author

The strange death of Jeremy Clarkson's England

By Nicholas Harris

The disappearance of short-arsed priapics from fiction has not disappeared the aspects of male adolescence they used to satirise. If anything, it has forced them underground, and allowed them to become the blazons of a far darker masculinity. Part of the reason that the manosphere claims its initial sway over young men is by affirming their instinctive (and misogynistic) priors, seizing upon their sensitivities to matters of physical hierarchy and female conquest. These are gendered instincts that our political age is rightly hostile to. But we haven’t examined and disposed of them, only thrown them onto the furnace of the Online Right wherein they are actively stoked and vulcanised. 

One of the tragedies of our masculinity crisis conversation is that it is currently brokered only by cold-blooded sociologists (whose books no young man will ever read) and raving internet gurus, whimpering over their wounded pride. One can look over jealously at the sophisticated conversation the girls have on offer — their platter of dislikeable protagonists, dirtbag Fleabags and sad-girl lit. The boys could do with some of their own bad-boy lit. Not delivered with the insouciance of The Rachel Papers — a fresh and chastened perspective is certainly required. But with its daring determination to plumb the grubby lower consciousness of young men, parsing exactly what about it is noxious and what is pitiful (and what is funny) within the uniquely ambiguous field of fiction. And once that is done, perhaps we can trace our way out of this gender animosity, not with a map we have redrawn but one we have reminded ourselves how to read.