I didn’t feel particularly bad, though, because I didn’t respect models. How was being pretty and standing still a real job? This was 2008. The supermodel era, with all its absurdity and magnificence, was over. Big-haired glamazons had been replaced by malnourished, wall-eyed teenagers. And in terms of news (and industry) value, models had been deposed by reality stars and other tabloid darlings. High fashion still needed the catwalk, but for the mass market, fortuitous placement in a paparazzi shot was worth more than anything.

There was one woman who caught this vibe shift. In the 2000s and the 2010s, she would be synonymous with the concept of modeling — in fact, she was probably the most famous model in the world in that era. The last supermodel standing. But by then, she was retired from the fashion industry, and though the public still identified her with her past career, she was in a new business now: the reality TV one. She was Tyra Banks, and the show she produced and fronted was America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), which ran from 2003 to 2018.

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The format seems obvious now, because it established the template for so much reality TV to follow. The first “cycle” followed 10 young women who aspired to become, per the title, America’s next top model. Week by week, they received coaching from industry experts and were put through challenges that, supposedly, prepared them for the travails of the fashion industry. At the end of each episode, a panel of four judges would assess the contestants’ performance: whoever was considered the weakest would be dispatched from the competition.

The girls lived together in an apartment, with cameras on them at all times. This was a high price to pay for admission, but then the prize seemed worth it. The winner would walk away with a modeling agency contract, a magazine shoot and a deal to represent a cosmetics brand — and though the agency, the magazine and the brand would all change over the course of the show’s existence, this remained broadly the same for the entire run. This was, in theory, a golden ticket.

Importantly, it was a golden ticket that was within reach even if you didn’t match the conventional image of a model. In her early career — long before she reached the heady heights of being the first black woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s prestigious annual “swimsuit edition” — Banks had been forced to beat the streets from audition to audition in order to secure bookings, and often faced rejection because she was black. Part of the pitch for ANTM was that it would diversify the narrow aesthetics of fashion.

Now, because this is the cycle of content for anything that was popular in the Noughties, ANTM has received the “reckoning” treatment, in the form of a three-part Netflix documentary called Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. In it, we learn that the girls who competed were viciously body-shamed; one clip shows “runway coach” J. Alexander conducting a weigh-in of contestants while wearing a shirt printed with the slogan “don’t feed the models”. The models suffered dangerous, painful and absurd conditions in the challenges (one contestant was hospitalized with hypothermia after a shoot in a pool). The show blacked up contestants for ethnicity-swap challenges — not just once, but repeatedly.

Keenyah Hill, who competed in cycle four (2005), recounts how she was sexually harassed on-set by a male model during a photo shoot. But the most devastating story belongs to Shandi Sullivan of cycle two (2004). On a trip to Milan, she was paired with a male moped driver for a day of castings. At the end of the day, the producers invited the drivers to drink with the contestants. Sullivan, who hadn’t eaten all day, blacked out; when she came to, her driver was having sex with her. It sounds, and looks like an assault, but it was broadcast in an episode called “The Girl Who Cheated”.

All this is horrifying, but none of it is new: every one of ANTM’s missteps was filmed, edited and put on air. The framing of the Netflix documentary is that, during lockdown, a whole new, and younger, audience discovered the show. The backlash came fast: Banks was accused of normalizing blackface, enforcing racist tropes and emotional torture. It’s also true that many past contestants have now gone on the record to talk about their experiences on the sharp end of reality: obviously, it is significant for Sullivan to tell her story in the documentary.

The phrase “in plain sight” comes up a lot in reckonings with the sins of Noughties media. In Channel 4’s 2023 Dispatches on Russell Brand, much was made of the way his sexually explicit comic persona mirrored the allegations of sexual assault against him. (Brand is currently awaiting trial on multiple charges including rape, which he denies.) In 2021, when Britney Spears’s conservatorship hearings revealed the level of control she was placed under by her father, much commentary pointed out that her public behavior had always been at odds with the narrative of her as a happy performer who had recovered in the care of her family.

Nonetheless, both those cases — and others like them — relied on information that had never previously been available to the public. In the case of ANTM, almost everything that people are appalled by was right there on the screen all along. The show did not conceal its cruelty. The incident in which two contestants were forced to go through extensive cosmetic dentistry or be thrown out of the contest was a narrative arc, not a shameful secret. The bloody extractions and drilling, the painful application of veneers, happened on-screen.

The cruelty of ANTM was always the point. The show’s most iconic moments were all, ultimately, ones of humiliation and bullying. The scene in which Banks screams “we were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you” at a contestant who she deems to have “given up”, while the contestant mutely receives the barrage, has become a meme. In the documentary, Banks concedes that she may have gone too far in that moment; but as an entertainment industry professional, she surely knows that she went exactly far enough for her audience.

There’s a maddening refusal to take responsibility from the show’s creative team, who all claim to have no control over the show they were making. With impressive chutzpah, Banks says in the documentary that she was not involved in the construction of Sullivan’s “cheating” narrative, even though a clip from ANTM shows Banks baiting a tearful Sullivan into a conversation about infidelity after the incident. But there’s also undeniable truth when Banks points out that the deranged challenges came about because “you guys” (meaning the audience) “were demanding this”.

ANTM was an instrument for humiliation as entertainment, and the only people who appear to have believed ANTM was about launching modeling careers seem to be the girls who competed in it. They were duped. Perhaps you could argue, as some of the show’s former creatives do in Reality Check, that the brutal conditions, the relentless objectification and even the the sexual harassment were fair preparation for industry as it then was, but very few contestants went on to have modeling careers, never mind to be “top models”.

Those who did pursue fashion careers say the show was more of a hindrance than a help, and several changed their names to shake the association. (Winnie Harlow, perhaps the biggest star to come out of the series, competed under her birth name, Chantelle Young). Reality stars were perceived as tacky and shabby when the show first came out: Kim Kardashian is a couture muse these days, but it took until 2014 for her to be deemed worthy of a Vogue cover. By then, ANTM had lurched even further into the gimmicky and extreme.

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Banks was successful as a model, but she was a genius at reality TV. “I do feel like I can feel and taste what people want to see,” she tells her interviewer in the documentary, and — however monstrous she appears at junctures — she is correct. Her participation in Reality Check suggests that, right now, she can feel and taste that people want to see contrition. In recent years, revisiting the iniquities of reality TV past has become a genre in its own right, with documentaries dedicated to trans bait-and-switch dating show There’s Something About Miriam, weight loss contest The Biggest Loser and the treatment of Big Brother’s Jade Goody, among many others.

But the big lie of the “reckoning” industrial complex is that audiences have moved beyond the manipulation and cruelty that marked the media of the Noughties. When I finished watching Reality Check, the Netflix algorithm auto-recommended that I start Love is Blind. In 2024, Love is Blind was the subject of a New Yorker report by Emily Nussbaum that asked: “Is Love is Blind a Toxic Workplace?” Participants alleged that they had been emotionally exploited, exposed to dangerous situations and unfairly edited (changes the production team denied). Maybe, two decades from now, Love is Blind will get its own appalled documentary, and the makers will repackage themselves as contrite victims of a distant era’s morals.

Princess-baiting is a traditional sport for the British press — think about how Sarah Ferguson was treated — but in the Noughties there was a particular savagery in the media’s attitude to famous women. This was the era of “Crazy Britney” and “Slutty Paris” and “Trainwreck Lindsay”, when no gossip could be too vicious and boundaries only seemed to exist in order to be breached. As girlfriend of the next-king-but-one, Kate was in for a rough ride.

In part because of that media environment, but perhaps more out of fear that Kate would attract a similar circus to the one around Princess Diana, her personal life was aggressively defended by the palace from very early on: in 2010, she received an estimated £10,000 payout from a photo agency over privacy invasion. In 2012, British outlets reportedly turned down topless paparazzi photos of her. A French magazine ran them, and five years later, Kate was awarded €100,000 in damages.

As a princess, she appealed to us because she was closer to being a “regular girl” than any of her predecessors. People could be as snobby as they liked about her “new money” parentage, and William’s friends allegedly were, but you could hardly say that picking spouses from the upper classes had been a storming success for the generation above. But despite her status as a commoner, as a public figure, every effort was made to keep her in the closest possible thing to fairytale seclusion.

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Since Kate entered hospital for “abdominal surgery” on 14 January, those carefully guarded borders have become a liability. Only three photographs of her have emerged in as many months: two fuzzy paparazzi shots of her being driven by her mother and husband, and a portrait with her children issued for Mother’s Day. That last was intended to quiet the manic conspiracising around Kate’s three-month absence from the public eye. Instead, it turned into a week-long PR disaster after photo agencies issued a “kill notice” over obvious and inept manipulation.

In response, an already suspicious public entered a red-string fever. There was greenery in the background: did that mean the picture was actually from last year? (Look outside: it’s been a mild winter and an early spring.) Had Kate’s face been montaged in from another photo shoot? (Only if the royals have access to more advanced editing software than anyone else in the world, in which case you’d imagine they would have got the small matter of Charlotte’s cardigan sleeve correct.)

But this frenzied and dubious speculation feels less gratuitous when you remember that the royals really are concealing things. Wild theories rush into the void established in the name of “privacy”. Meanwhile in America, where UK privacy law holds no sway and the royal rota access system is irrelevant, the media freely wades into gossip and rumour that the British press can only prissily hint at. This week, for instance, Stephen Colbert gave a salacious rundown of the “Rural Rivals” situation on The Late Show. All we can do as onlookers is await information.

Kate’s predicament is specific to being a princess, but its origins lie in Noughties tabloid culture. Her brother in law, who received probably the hardest treatment of anyone in his generation of royals, dealt with it by eventually skipping the country. Kate, lacking that option, remains caught in a public image that’s been irrevocably shaped by that decade of coverage.

At least by the time she was engaged, the “Waity Katie” story had been reinvented as a triumph of feminine grit. The couple had briefly broken up before reconciling, and in a Telegraph profile of the princess-to-be, this was characterised as “Miss Middleton [making] it clear to him she would not be taken for granted”. Was it sexist? Manifestly. But royalty — an institution based on breeding and legitimacy — has the sexism baked in, despite our recent experience of living under a queen. And the longer Kate demonstrated her dignified resilience, the more truth you could say there was in the caricature.

Nonetheless, she won, and the media’s change of heart became complete: Kate was now to be protected and cherished at all costs. When Hilary Mantel wrote a critical essay about the Princess’s public image, the British press lost the run of itself entirely. The Mail called it a “venomous attack”, the Sun a “bizarre rant” (both, remember, had been pushing “Waity Katie” stories just a few years earlier). Yet if you look back at what Mantel actually wrote, it’s barely contentious at all:

“Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana … Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

Being thin and biddable were the exact things that people liked about Kate. It was why she could later be cast in competition with Meghan: if Meghan was all LA pushiness, Kate was the epitome of home counties stoicism. It’s why, until her recent vanishing, press coverage was relentlessly fascinated with her skinny royal legs: “Very pale, very slender, both fine-boned and finely-toned,” salivated the Mail in November — at which point, given she was only a few weeks away from major surgery, it might be reasonable to assume that she was already seriously unwell.

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Kate’s disappearance fascinates precisely because it is the “messy deviation” she was never supposed to commit. Depending on your class politics, she was either a sappy Cinderella, gratefully happy for her elevation; or a girl Gatsby who had scrambled her way into the gilded centre and intended to enjoy all its benefits. In neither version was she ever likely to represent an existential threat to the system she was now attached to.

Royalty, though, is a contact sport played with the whole body, and now Kate’s body has betrayed her. For all the pomp and dignity attached to the monarchy, there’s a robust physicality to the job. Traditionally, bedchambers would be the heart of royal business — a king would entertain his most powerful guests in the same place where he slept and fucked. In the Tudor court, the most esteemed role was the Groom of the Stool — that is, the courtier who helped the king to shit.

This is not an environment where “privacy” can mean quite what it does for other people, and even in our modernised monarchy, the last queen recognised that she had to be “seen to be believed”. The Waleses have attempted, ineptly, to replicate the modern way of doing celebrity — carefully issued press shots, their own curated “behind the scenes” footage designed to present a deeply stage-managed kind of “intimacy”. But what washes for Beyoncé will not wash for a princess, when the public instinctively feels a constitutional claim on the royal body; and anyway, even Beyoncé had to make an album about her husband cheating on her when the rumours started running too hot.

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The clumsy photoshop of the Mother’s Day picture matters because it underlines the suspicion once articulated by Mantel: that Kate is simply too good to be true. An image of perfection substituted for a real woman, while the real woman seems to have been whittled into a cypher. Even when we could see her, she was somewhat difficult to believe in. The bargain of hereditary monarchy is that the flesh is traded for power — not symbolically, but actually, particularly for the queens and princesses whose wombs will carry the line. The longer Kate is out of view, the easier it becomes to wonder whether that’s a trade anyone should humanely be asked to make.

The barriers set up to protect her — or at least, to protect her image — were designed for the last era when the press was truly powerful. Now Kate must navigate the full force of being internet famous, caught between the physical demands of the royal body and an online version of herself that, insubstantial as it is, can be recruited to the wildest kinds of viral fictions. If Diana was the People’s Princess, the last week has made Kate into the Crowdsourced Princess — a much weirder and much less enjoyable role to play.

A glance at the Radio Times schedules at the time of writing demonstrates the hegemony: a daily array of mostly quiz-based formats, running from lunchtime onwards: Countdown, The Finish Line, Tipping Point, The Chase, Pointless, Richard Osman’s House of Games, Popmaster TV. Of these, only House of Games is celebrity-only. TV quizzes are apparently democratic: civilians get to appear on the screen. We can all access our 15 minutes on a quiz show. They are a spectacularised form of open combat for the age of the knowledge economy. And the apogee of the form is that great British export, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 25 years young this month and the quiz-show-format-colossus. Bestriding the globe, it is made in 107 different territories and in more languages besides (there have been nine different language versions for Indian audiences alone).

I must confess an interest: over two episodes broadcast on 31 July and 7 August 2021, I appeared in series 36 of Millionaire, winning £64,000 — 20% above the average, which is £50,200, but that doesn’t account for those who don’t make it into the chair. Much too late for an evening with Chris Tarrant, I was instead interrogated by Jeremy Clarkson, who seems self-referentially informed by this sense of zero-sum competition. Who better to test contestants than a presenter who has nurtured a pugnacious, gloves-off public image, a Seventies denim dream of unleashed masculine libido? In deference to the high-capitalist information economy that governs its mechanism, he’s encased in a suit for this gig. Plus, it helps that he increasingly resembles an Easter Island statue reimagined as a totem to Mammon.

But, for those who have experienced Millionaire, the Clarkson face-off is the last round in a long process. And perhaps one of the most under-sung aspects of the show, and certainly its most ruthlessly competitive, is the fastest-finger-first round, in which contestants compete for the opportunity to play for money by being the fastest to correctly order four options, hitting buttons on a keypad. Of six contestants per episode, only a maximum of three make it into the chair. The most likely outcome is that you go home with your travel expenses in a brown paper envelope. Millionaire is, like most TV quizzes, a game of chance, jeopardy structural to its success.

It represents the perfect distillation of the quiz form that was honed over the 20th century. The whistle-stop history is that it transferred from radio to TV in the early 20th century, with the first quizzes being BBC spelling contests for school children. Unconstrained by such Reithian ideals, the commercial US market rapidly developed new formats geared towards prizes which, with the creation of ITV in 1955, were copied over here. The $64,000 Question, adapted for the British as The 64,000 Question, crossed the Atlantic in the Fifties, awarding a carefully rationed top prize of 64,000 sixpences.

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Postwar consumerism, of course, is the economic base to this cultural superstructure. Goods and cash have not only formed prizes, but also the content of the knowledge required. Think of the memorisation conveyor-belt round in The Generation Game or the explicit consumer-good valuation games Sale of the Century and The Price is Right. As this indicates, one key to the success of the quiz format is its ability to hybridise, most obviously by combining the requirement for knowledge with elements of chance, but also with other, more atavistic forms of competition. Take The Krypton Factor, which required contestants to be able to complete assault courses and challenges of co-ordination as well as answering questions. Or Blind Date which, despite its entertainment window-dressing, was a competition for a partner. Should we ignore the evolutionary resonance? I think not.

As has been argued since Joseph Huizinga’s influential thesis Homo Ludens (1938), play is a constitutive aspect of human society. “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Competitive play is, in short, an essential human activity, predating civilisation. Despite the fact that its rewards, in strictly economic terms, are minimal, we take time off from more materially-rewarding activities to play, and always have. But what is curious about TV quiz shows in their contemporary manifestation is that they don’t completely satisfy Huizinga’s description. They are materially rewarding. Indeed, they’ve given rise to an entire professional class of “quizzers”, people like the cool-as-ice Judith Keppel, the first million-pound-winner on British Millionaire, who subsequently enjoyed an extensive career as a chaser on The Chase. Far from idle play, perhaps we should recognise appearance on quiz shows as a form of labour. Certainly in the context of the TV quiz, trivial knowledge is not simply cultural capital — a form of capital which values knowledge accrued in categories admired by bourgeois society — but the key to delivering actual capital.

It’s no coincidence that the quiz show format has grown in parallel to the development of tertiary economies in the developed world, as post-industrial nations have increasingly traded in and valued information as opposed to goods. The skills required by quiz shows are information-economy skills — quite literally hitting keypads fast, being able to calculate approximate probabilities on the fly, a working knowledge of game theory, co-operating with others. Until co-operation is no longer required, of course, at which point clear decision-making and/or ruthlessness might be required. The Weakest Link made this process structural to its gameplay, as contestants were required to identify the poorest performer for expulsion and use the elimination mechanism for pruning the competition. Millionaire is similarly a perfect reflection of its time: a game for the individual, with some concessions made to co-operation in its lifelines.

The most exciting of these is the phone-a-friend lifeline. Believe me from experience when I say that this is also the most fraught — who of your network of acquaintances would you trust not just to know an answer you don’t, but not to over-estimate their knowledge? Who would you forgive if they lost you half a million pounds? Since the advent of the internet, the phone-a-friend lifeline has also become a significant logistical undertaking for the show. Typically, each contestant has two phone-a-friends. With two shows filmed a day, six contestants for each, at any one time there are 24 security guards at residential addresses around the UK watching assorted acquaintances and soon-to-be-disowned friends who may or may not receive a 30-second phone call. And the possibility of cheating is in fact the single-most co-operative aspect of Millionaire history. Ruthless competition for large sums has prompted a number of collaborative efforts to win, most famously Major Charles Ingram, convicted in 2003 of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception”. But there are also syndicates that have formed to provide professional quizzers with phone-a-friends in return for a share of profits.

Millionaire is, then, the exemplary manifestation of late-capitalist economic ethics, a product of the deregulation of prizes in the late-Nineties, which had previously been limited by the Independent Broadcasting Association to the “value of a small car”. As the number of millionaires in Britain exploded, making money quick on the markets or online, every pub-intellectual wanted a shot. And Millionaire displays an aesthetic that perfectly reflects this new political economy. Think gladiatorial arena for the computer age: the circus maximus via Tron. The contestant and quizmaster sit on three-foot-high Pietranera Arco All chairs, an LG computer monitor before each, in the pit of an amphitheatre which houses the audience in seating high above. The colours are black and neon blue, with shards of blinding silver and gold. Contestants have to wear bright colours so that they don’t disappear into the background, and zany patterns fritz the cameras.

This aesthetic is now ubiquitous across prime-time TV, having been imported into the high-octane Syco world of talent shows and idols by British-born set designer Andrew Walmsley, who designed sets for the illusionist Paul Daniels when he was 15. Walmsley, who now lives in Vegas, wanted to shake up the staid appearance of previous quizzes: “They were still using video walls made out of plain glass TV screens, instead of the flat plasma screens. It was so Eighties-looking.” A doff of the cap also to the composers of the music beds, father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. The sound is designed so that its rhythm mimics a heartbeat, while the pitch increases by a semitone for each subsequent question, the music getting higher in line with the stakes. A pyramid scheme of sound and fury and trivia.

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Where does the viewer sit in all of this? They are a voyeur. For an essential element in the playing of the quiz — the jeopardy of getting an answer wrong — has its obverse in the voyeuristic mockery of failure. We experience this most keenly in the reality hybrid game shows that have flourished post-Big Brother. But it was a phenomenon noted as early as 1962 in the Pilkington Committee Report which described watching a quiz as like “watching one man in a large arena being baited”. It’s something we like to watch, just as the Romans liked to watch the circus.

However, the baying mob at the contemporary circus are not in some Colosseum, but safely ensconced in their isolated homes, the spectacle a media-networked communion between siloed viewers gathered at an online water-cooler. As Guy Debord’s fourth thesis informs us: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Those images — chains of ones and zeros — become the units of exchange in a spectacularised society. The producers duly pump them out as gifs on social media, and I treasure mine. I read the Twitter comments responding to my appearance with wry amusement (“the poundshop John Barrowman” is a moniker I’ll happily have etched on my gravestone). And is there a German compound word for being nevertheless flattered by obvious catfishing?

The quiz show viewer can mock the contestant, participate in the quiz with none of the jeopardy, or even roll the dice themselves. Without even leaving the comfort of their sofa, they can text to enter one of the many prize lotteries that proliferate around ITV quizzes. Because what is being a participant in late-capitalism other than taking part in an astronomically high-odds lottery? Perhaps they might even sign up for a 3000:1 chance of participating in the spectacle of Millionaire, momentarily seizing for themselves the means of information.

This was a time when invasion of privacy was de rigueur. Sex tapes made headlines, and no one considered whether their subjects wanted them in public or not. Phone hacking made headlines, too, although journalists rarely admitted in public that this was how they got their stories. Brand, who appeared to have no boundaries at all, was perfectly adapted to the demands of this environment.

Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

On stage and on screen, Brand broke taboos that were already being pushed to breaking point by the indecency the internet was feeding into every home. In stand-up footage from 2006, Brand talks about liking “them blow jobs where it goes in their neck a little bit… them blow jobs where the mascara runs a little bit”. He was talking about the “choking blowjobs” that were being mainstreamed by gonzo porn.

He was also telling us about his own sexual preferences, according to one of the women interviewed by The Sunday Times. She met Brand the same year that he performed that set, when she was 16 and he 31. Towards the end of their relationship, she alleges that he sexually assaulted her by forcing his penis down her throat; after she fought him off, he told her he had “only wanted to see your mascara run”. (Brand denies committing any criminal acts.)

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It wasn’t just his predilections that made Brand right for the Noughties. It was also his talent for making himself into an easily recognised caricature: the priapic man-child with the dandyish wardrobe and the sky-high hair. A cartoonish distillation of Byronic swagger and Kenny Everett nerve. Amy Winehouse was probably the only figure with a more distinctive iconography, and people would sometimes joke that they looked alike.

But such cartoonishness could serve another purpose. Maya Angelou wrote: “When people show you who they are, believe them.” But what if someone shows you a version of who they are that is so extreme that taking it seriously would be tantamount to missing the punchline? In the Noughties, there was no bigger faux pas than missing the punchline. Playing an overblown version of the predator can be an actual predator’s most effective camouflage.

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson defined the raw, hypersexed look of the Noughties in his work for high-end brands and glossy magazines. He claimed his mission was to bring out the “inner porn star” of his subjects (one of his subjects was Barack Obama, who was campaigning for the Democratic nomination at the time). But models claim the “consensual” sex acts he photographed himself performing on them were nothing of the sort. Richardson was dropped by the fashion industry after these allegations, which he denies, were reported in 2017.

When RnB star R. Kelly was indicted for child pornography charges in 2002, he responded, not by purging sex from his music, but by amping it up to preposterous levels, nicknaming himself “the pied piper of RnB”. The music was “scandal-proof”, concluded comic Dave Chappelle in a stand-up segment, because everything that could shock you about Kelly was already in full view. (Kelly was cleared of the initial charges, but convicted of multiple sexual offences against women and girls in later trials.)

This gambit was not a new one. Jimmy Savile had pioneered it, clanking his chains and puffing his cigars and teasing about the things he’d like to do to schoolgirls. (In a radio interview with Savile from 2007, Brand crawlingly begged to meet “Sir Jimmy” and offered to bring along his female assistant, naked.) But the Noughties veneration of knowingness made it extraordinarily effective.

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The no-holds-barred tabloid culture at that time took power away from many female celebrities: invasive tactics meant they had little means of bargaining with the media. But the premium on fame served other public figures well, and someone like Brand was in a position to exercise exceptional control.

That would ultimately contribute to one of his greatest disgraces, when Brand and Jonathan Ross phoned the actor Andrew Sachs during their Radio 2 show and left a voicemail saying Brand had “fucked your granddaughter”. It was ugly and misogynistic, and unforgivably the BBC broadcast it. There were mass complaints, a £150,000 Ofcom fine, and the controller of Radio 2 was forced to resign. Ofcom found that Brand had benefited from a culture of extreme licence, where “the presenter’s interests had been given greater priority than the BBC’s responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy”. When you’re a star, you can do anything, as a man who would be president said in the Noughties.

Brand had his defenders, though. He cultivated a boyish vulnerability that sweetened the corruption. In the remake of Arthur (2011), he takes the role of the eponymous playboy and Helen Mirren plays his lifelong nanny. “He’s merely shaped like an adult,” she tells one of Arthur’s conquests. Mirren extended that indulgence to Brand’s real-world behaviour. “Sachsgate,” she said, had been merely “naughty… schoolboy kind of behaviour”. He was 33 years old at the time of the incident.

Brand would soon be reaching for a more grown-up persona: political activist. His verbal dexterity had always given him a cachet other tabloid regulars did not enjoy: The Guardian used him as a columnist for many years. He guest-edited an issue of The New Statesman. He supported Occupy Wall Street. He wrote a book called Revolution. But Brand’s political awakening did not seem to include a reconsideration of his attitude to women.

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In his material, women still appeared as decorative objects or dangerous temptations: things to be used, or a substance to abstain from. Having caused a minor scandal at the GQ Awards by joking about sponsor Hugo Boss making uniforms for Nazi, he described the event in The Guardian as a microcosm of corporate influence and political corruption, thronging with “birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison”.

Though he railed against oppression and exploitation, there were no signs that he was particularly egalitarian in his private life. “At first when I met him he wanted an equal, and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like: ‘I can’t handle the equalness’,” Katy Perry told Vogue after the couple divorced in 2011. “It was very controlling.”

Brand retaliated with a stand-up riff about Perry being so boring in bed: “I’d be having sex thinking: ‘Think of anyone, anyone else’.” This did little to damage the perception that Brand was not only of the Left, but an asset to the cause. Nor did Sachsgate damage him, nor did Brand’s history of fantasising on-stage about making women cry during sex. Misogyny has rarely disqualified a man from being a socialist hero.

George Monbiot nominated Brand as his “hero of the year” in 2014. “Brand’s openness about his flaws makes him a good leader, and allows those who admire him to be good followers,” wrote Monbiot. “He’s the best thing that has happened to the Left in years.” But Brand’s “openness about his flaws” did not mean he was reformed. It was a strategic move to flannel those who were naive enough to confuse confession with salvation.

In 2015, Brand endorsed Ed Miliband (after previously telling his followers not to vote). “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour — and the Tories should be worried,” was the headline on an Owen Jones column. Brand returned the favour by blurbing Jones’s book The Establishment: “Owen Jones… is our generation’s Orwell and we must cherish him.” The Tories did not need to worry, of course. They won the general election.

But then, Brand’s pivot to politics has always had more to do with his own self-importance than with any interest in effecting actual change. His videos draw viewers down the rabbit hole: their success is in inspiring people to watch even more Russell Brand videos, endlessly clutching at an understanding that Brand, now in full-on messiah mode, promises will soon be revealed to his “awakening wonders”.

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It is too optimistic to say that no one in broadcasting or comedy today could do the things of which Brand is accused. (The allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Dan Wootton, which Wootton vigorously denies, should warn against complacency.) It would, however, probably be harder. Unlike in the Noughties, production staff would be less inclined to turn a blind eye. Runners and assistants would be more likely to refuse to act as procurers, if asked.

A predator looking for a niche would probably not now make DJing or presenting or stand-up their first choice. A predator today would choose to be a social-media influencer: outside restraining power structures, with a direct line to their fans. A medium that allows you to groom thousands of people all at once, inculcating them into a secret world they share with you.

Brand’s transition from mainstream celebrity to conspiracist YouTube guru is perfectly in line with the way fame has evolved. He has always had a talent for turning people into “good followers”, as Monbiot correctly noted. The self-aware degradation of the Noughties in which Brand’s career thrived looks shamefully dated now, but those who hunger for power will always find new avenues to exploit.

All have lofty ideas of station and status and all have these ideas disappointed. All are repulsed by a hostile, progressive world. And all are shown in the process to be (to varying degrees) trapped, spiteful, grasping, status-obsessed and self-deluding. It’s a comic instinct that speaks to something masochistic in the British spirit. Some sense that human dignity really is only as thick as a sticking plaster, but that tearing it back to expose our wounds and prejudices is in fact cathartic — cringe-making yet somehow soothing. It is through these embarrassments of men that we strangely choose to represent and interpret our culture.

Much psycho-historical ink has been spilt on the roots of this national quirk. Is it the bad British weather? Perhaps it’s a sublimation of glories lost, of needing to find a personification for superpower contraction. It’s a seductive theory — while other countries (France) tried to physically cling on to empire, we channelled the loss of ours into making people laugh. Whatever the cause, it has generated a streak of vicious, self-lacerating humour, which always works best when targeted at flawed cases of masculine psychology. It’s a tradition that has a culminating triumph in Peep Show, which marks its 20th birthday tomorrow, and despite its age, is increasingly emerging as the defining British sitcom of the early 21st century.

At first glance, Peep Show doesn’t represent any great advance in subject matter. Mark and Jez, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, are two mid-ult everymen fated by their creators to have a difficult time in work, play, and everything in between — middle-class men behaving slightly badly. Instead, its innovation is chiefly formal. Peep Show is filmed entirely from the perspective of its characters — quite literally in the cheap and crude first series, the actors wearing bicycle helmets with camera-antennae. The viewer is trapped deep in the cockpit of the characters’ minds, following them everywhere, from bedroom to bathroom.

This is accompanied by a script of wonderful linguistic aggression — but only around half of which is dialogue. The other half is delivered as voiceover, the thoughts and thoughtcrimes of Mark and Jez fed straight into your ear. At times, it is like a neurotic ghost train: the show has been described as “an intrusive thought in physical form”. Watching it is to experience consciousness with clunky but near-novelistic intensity. For some it’s unwatchable. For the rest of us it’s addictive.

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Peep Show originally ran from 2003 to 2015, inadvertently forming a Balzacian chronicle of that charmless, formless, nameless era of British life after Blair and before Brexit. It is full of the stuff of that age: iPods, chavs and coffee chains; Bez, Bush and oil wars on TV. It runs the full alphabet of chronological references from Ali G to Zoella, capturing all the anesthetising affluence of the Noughties just before the snap of tumult and hyper-politicisation that followed. A low, dishonest time if ever there was one, characterised by little more culturally than a tabloid-carnival of endless frivolity. And all the while, society’s atoms continued to drift ever further apart and a low of hum of bitterness set in.

Mark and Jez are two such atoms who have collided and glued together, though bound not by attraction but necessity, two university friends who have wound up living together in Croydon. Their friendship is formed of mutual love and loathing, each regarding the other as the worst-case scenario, a motivating example of how bad things could get. But they’re both outcasts and they know it. In a line that Robert Webb regards as the show’s thesis statement, Jez imagines a more “normal” existence, thinking he could abandon Mark and “be in the mainstream of the culture instead of lying like a freak in our weird puddle”. Of course, he doesn’t leave, and neither of them get anywhere, trying and failing to scale the ladders of success they’ve misguidedly selected.

For Mark, this looks like a Blairite update of the dad-on-the-Meccano-box family man. He wants a house in Surrey (and ultimately a “cottage in the Ardennes”), children who learn the viola and ancient Greek, a mid-level executive job, a Mensa membership and a Sunday Times subscription. He is too anxious and self-sabotaging to achieve nearly any of these things. And for much of the series, he projects these expectations onto Sophie (Olivia Colman), a colleague he imagines holds the key to this lifestyle, even though, as he admits, they have “very little basic compatibility”.

This creates the show’s greatest and most agonising plotline: Sophie and Mark’s relationship, accidental engagement (a twin product of “embarrassment” and “fear”), and Mark’s attempts to extricate himself (respectably) from the arrangement, up to and including on their wedding day. This leaves him at the altar saying “I do”, even his attempted jilting a failure, with his bride-to-be weeping beside him. He thinks to himself (and to us): “That’s it. I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined my life. You only get one life, and I’ve ruined mine.” It’s a disastrous tilt at 21st-century bourgeois-dom, later to be further disappointed by menial, manual jobs, further failed (though initially more promising) relationships, and a child born out of wedlock.

Whereas Jez is an altogether more contemporary creature. He’s desperate above all to be celebrity-famous, even, if necessary, just for being famous. Craig Phillips or The Chemical Brothers will do fine (an outtake from the first series even shows Jez’s audition tape for Big Brother). This initially takes the form of trying to make it as a talentless DJ-musician alongside “Super Hans”, his erratic and “crack-addled maniac” bandmate, just one of the pack of eccentrics and one-offs that orbit Jez and Mark’s lives, there to perplex and bedevil them further. When music and the dole give out, he pursues the even more fashionable, undemanding and unpromising career of a “life coach”, delivering catastrophic and unethical advice to his clients, who are marginally more damaged than him.

If Mark is buttoned-up and emotionally barren, a superhuman super-ego of English repression, Jez is his exact double, the “work-shy freeloader” to Mark’s “tight-fisted cockmuncher”. He’s a bohemian with none of the art and all of the mess. At one point, he’s living in a bathtub; at another, he agrees to pimp out his girlfriend to Mark’s boss (after haggling to the exact price of £530). He’s feckless and thoughtless, driven by a pathological adolescence summed-up by his motto of “sucky-fucky” and his “higher law” of “if it feels good, do it”. To which Mark responds, with full David Mitchell panel-show condescension, “Oh, that’s a great law, isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?” At Peep Show’s best, entire episodes can pass like this, the minutiae of life chewed up in perfectly weighted and acted exchanges between its leads. And the quality of the comedy is what sustains such a bleak format, the viewer caught in the bitter-sweet spot of laugh or cry, wince or snort, smile or groan.

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It’s not a classic recipe for a large audience, and while it was on TV, Peep Show only ever enjoyed the dubious honour of “cult” status. Beloved by a few, heralded by critics, and commercially unfortunate. It was threatened with cancellation annually. Remarkable, then, that, in the past half-decade, it has achieved a cultural significance and pop-cultural ubiquity that is rare for any modern sitcom, celebrated at the very top of “best-of” lists. These days there are only two sitcoms one can, in need of auxiliary humour at a forbidding social gathering, quote to some agreeable recognition: The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. The “four naan?” exchange in particular has become so commonplace as to have slipped from reference to irritating catchphrase.

And that’s because the mood of Peep Show has moved from cult to collective. Its cackling cynicism, its unchanging protagonists and its anxious interiority were all original at the time of release, improvements and innovations on the cringe comedy trend. The Office may be the more singular, sculpted achievement, and The Thick of It a greater satire, while Fleabag achieves a level of genuine artistic beauty neither can compete with. But — sprawling, baggy, inconsistent but never far from brilliant — in its totality, Peep Show offers some of the pleasures previously reserved for the English comic novel.

The final frame of Peep Show sees our protagonists slumped at angles to the TV in their flat, both rejected by respective love interests, discussing exactly how they’d murder each other (if the situation arose). For all of its comedy, there’s something existential, something of an English Godot about the scene. And, for better or worse, they sit as our representatives: their schemes for improvement defeated and humiliated. Even if Britain has always found solace in abjection, it’s quite a terminal pair for us to have taken up. Ricky Gervais found the heart to relent on David Brent at the end, granting him that laugh from his colleagues that he always wanted. But, in a world that feels ever more joyless and farcical, manic and dejected, perhaps laughter in the dark is only the natural accompaniment.

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

For the minority of a more severe, moralistic, and joyless disposition, this made him a national-psychological defect to be suppressed, or ideally exposed and exorcised. Before Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump provided such stern competition, it was a small badge of honour on the Left to publicly hate Clarkson. But for many of us (probably a majority at his peak) he was a vulgar treat to indulge. For the length of a Sunday column or an episode of Top Gear, we could wallow harmlessly in the swamp of arrogant prejudice and self-gratification which sits at the bottom of the brain. At a time of minimal collective loyalty, the nation could reliably divide into those two tribes. Clarkson the monster, or Clarkson the geezer. Wokery vs blokery. A version of the same split is fuelling the current Clarkson row, but with the weight of opinion reversed.

Amazon, Clarkson’s primary current employer, now seems to have picked its side. His contract to make TV programmes about cars, farms and larks will reportedly not be renewed. There are rumours ITV may let him go too. We can suppose this is at least partly thanks to the nearly month-long storm over his astonishingly tasteless joke in The Sun about the Duchess of Sussex. For that, Clarkson has been granted no quarter by Harry, Meghan or their supporters. His first “rather put my foot in it” bumble was rejected. The Sun’s own “regret[ful]” memory-holing of the article was rejected. Even Clarkson’s last-gasp, hands-clasped grovel has been rejected, such is his history (they say) of “hate rhetoric”.

But his spiritual and popular appointment to the English is a far tougher thing to dismiss. He is, like it or not, quite a lot of us writ ludicrously, satirically large. Like a 21st-century John Bull: to paraphrase Auden, a self-confident, swaggering bully of meaty neck and clumsy jest. Whatever Clarkson’s professional fate, the question of whether our society can tolerate him has implications for the stomach and sensibility of the national character, of which he is a significant avatar and champion. And his rise and fall reads as a history of a changing English firmament, one in which public morality has come to supersede mere entertainment.

Plenty of time and work went into the germination of such a figure. Clarkson’s early life is a whistle-stop tour of the English class system. He was born rural, lower-middle class, Yorkshire. But, in a wonderful twist of fate, the Clarkson family came into money after his parents won the exclusive rights to sell Paddington Bear dolls, based on the ones they had made for him and his sister. With aspirational intent, Clarkson was sent to Repton, one of the North’s oldest private schools. There, he smoked, pranked and failed his way to expulsion, developing the likeable loutishness which is his career mainstay. And then he jumped social tracks again, entering the lowest rungs of the Fourth Estate at the Rotherham Advertiser.

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A public schoolboy who can still boast that he crashed out of education with a C and two Us at A Level. The ingredients were in place for a broad, classless appeal. But Clarkson really came of professional age in the new meritocracy of Thatcher and Murdoch, a place where common touch came to supersede common background (something also exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage). It was an England of quick, coarse wit, and quicker, coarser money; of the triumphant red-top, and the unrepentant “lad”. It suited Clarkson perfectly. Flush with entrepreneurial spirit, in Eighties London he had the wheeze of syndicating car news and reviews from his own company to the regional press. It was a money-maker which introduced him to motoring journalism and eventually to the producers of Top Gear.

The programme was a staid, genuinely factual affair in those days. And Clarkson’s irreverence and wayward metaphors (a Porsche Boxster “couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom”) set him apart. So cars led only further into showbiz, with a chat show, documentaries, newspaper columns and pop culture ubiquity to follow. By the time he reformatted Top Gear 20 years ago (and made it the BBC’s biggest global brand), he already had the privilege of being recognisable by silhouette alone. The stance: arms-crossed, in male-barbecuing or under-the-bonnet-inspecting mode. And the hair: the curly remnants of the kind of Englishman’s ‘fro which peaked in the Seventies.

England at the turn of the millennium was Clarkson’s home. It wanted entertainment, and it got it from the Victorian circus of Big Brother and X Factor, and from the sneers and stereotypes of Little Britain. Clarkson’s Top Gear, launched in 2002, was almost edifying by comparison. Its open secret was that it was not really about cars. Instead, Top Gear seemed to scoop the ersatz appeal of reality TV and gave you the life you wished you and your mates could live. All the rudeness, ribaldry and exotic travel you could want. And while clearly a masculine offering, 40% of viewers were women. English people weren’t just seeing their grainy selves mirrored back — in Clarkson and his lieutenants they saw a dream life.

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Do they still? After multiple warnings — including for homophobia, xenophobia and the n-word — the BBC reached the end of its tether with the assault and abuse of a producer in 2015. Clarkson was initially undiminished. He was snapped up by a rich and ambitious streaming giant and instructed to make the same programme with more money. He took over Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and his collected journalism continued to be published (standing at eight volumes, the bestselling World According to Clarkson series must make its author the Proust of the pub bores). But the England that Clarkson once charmed was changing. Where once he was propelled by the forces of the contemporary, now he is encircled by them.

The principal feature of England in Clarkson’s imperial period was how apolitical it was. Electoral turnout fell; party memberships were tiny. Referendums proceeded according to plan. And the stability of New Labour’s long summer lent itself to a sense of consequence-free triviality. Under its aegis existed a crude cultural free-play. It was nasty, brutal and ephemeral, but in its own way quite funny, and even forgiving. So when, for example, he compared driving some svelte supercar to “smearing honey on Keira Knightley”, it was just good old Clarkson. Even when he said that striking workers should be “executed in front of their families” (a remark which yielded as many complaints as his Meghan column), it was, eventually and by enough people, forgotten.

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But there has come a point when such lines aren’t provocative catnip anymore, but an embarrassing commercial risk. Once Clarkson could stomp on to any old landmine — from speed limits to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes — and walk away with his popular constituency intact. Now he’d find himself blown into the no man’s land of an interminable culture war. And his nose and instinct for provocation means he can’t keep clear of it. Even his bucolic “Farmer Clarkson” period landed him in the soup. Before this latest fracas, his farm restaurant was making headlines for irritating the Nimbys and planning laws of Oxfordshire, a foretaste of the coming clash over the ownership and purpose of the British countryside.

The rowdy, TV-tabloid moment Clarkson enjoyed is gone. The lives and affairs of the lowest celebrity, from footballer to stand-up, are no longer sub-political fun. And the subterranean Englishness Clarkson personified is on trial, its burly, vinegary instincts held responsible for Brexit and the politics of reaction it supposedly represents. Much of Clarkson’s constituency will dislike both Meghan and the gleeful violence of the column he wrote. But, in his apology to Meghan, Clarkson wrote that it is “hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time”. It won’t wash with Harry or Meghan, but it will have spoken to his fans’ sense of alienation from the new set of rules that turned their hero into an ethical criminal.

My daughter, who wasn’t born when it came out, can recite every line, including the time-capsule references to Dick Cheney’s heart condition and a disrespectful Moby video. As Eminem gobbled up the detritus of American culture like Pac-Man, many of his jokes were doomed to age badly, but you don’t need to clock the allusions to get a kick out of his mischievous vitality 20 years later.

Eminem was so central to pop culture in 2002 that he could legitimately launch an album with a song about the importance of his return. Nobody inspired more arguments. Rappers had inflamed politicians and the press before, but none had done so with albums that sold 25 million copies a piece.

The furore over Eminem’s first album was large enough to be the central theme of his second, and the fuss around that one fuelled the third. A bridge-builder of sorts, he managed to unite Christian conservatives with feminists and LGBTQ groups. The Sun accused him of promoting “torture, incest, murder, rape and armed robbery”. (Not just rapping about these subjects, by the way — promoting them.) The editor-in-chief of Billboard condemned him for making “money off the world’s misery”. Culture warrior Lynne Cheney told a Senate hearing: “It is truly astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honoured by his peers.” Sadly, the line often attributed to George W Bush (“the most dangerous threat to American children since polio”) was a fabrication, but it was sufficiently credible to appear as the epigraph in Anthony Bozza’s bestselling 2003 biography Whatever You Say I Am. At least Eminem’s notoriety predated social media. If Twitter had existed back then, it might have fried his brain beyond repair.

How can rap’s former enfant terrible be turning 50? It wasn’t guaranteed. In 2001, Joan Smith wrote in the Guardian: “Validating his rage, which is what his fans are doing, is hardly going to help someone whose biography suggests he is already some way down the path to self-destruction.” But here is — alive, well and, as of this year, America’s best-selling singles artist of all time.

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Nobody argues about Eminem anymore, which is good for the person but less so for his music. In 2000’s paranoid, semi-sarcastic “The Way I Am”, he declared “I am whatever you say I am,” but now that nobody’s making grand claims about him for good or ill, he seems unsure what he is. After his 2005 singles collection, Curtain Call, he dropped out of sight for four years to wrestle with writer’s block, his grief over his murdered friend Proof and his addiction to prescription drugs. Since returning to music with Relapse in 2009, he has never quite managed to find a convincing second act. The recent Curtain Call II lays bare an ongoing identity crisis as he bounces between throwback provocations, sentimental soft-rock hooks, goofy jokes, lyrical showboating and collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Pink. Some tracks sound great but none has the life-or-death necessity of his early years. “I’m not the person I was at 28,” he told Vulture in 2017. “The passion is still there but the rage mostly isn’t.”

Eminem’s most enjoyable late album is 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a shameless nostalgia trip on which his tongue-twisting virtuosity is not just the medium but the message. When I saw him headline Wembley Stadium around that time, I felt like I was watching an athlete as much an artist. “Rap God” entered the Guinness Book of Records for featuring the most words (1560) in a hit single and included Eminem’s explanation for his initial success: “Simply rage and youthful exuberance/ Everybody loves to root for a nuisance.”

In the same song, he boasts that he’s been having hits “ever since Bill Clinton was still in office”. I’ve read three new histories of the Nineties this year and none of them addresses Eminem in any depth. This is possibly because he debuted at the very end of the decade; but in many ways Marshall Mathers III was a creature of it. Raised in poverty and chaos on the east side of Detroit, he was a teenager during hip hop’s golden age, when microphone technique was paramount. He slogged his way through the independent hip hop scene before finding both his mentor, Dr Dre, and his voice. The whiteness that had been an obstacle (blame Vanilla Ice) became an asset. It enabled him to read as a rock star as well as a rapper, and licensed him to write explicitly about mental health issues. He was closer to Kurt Cobain than Tupac Shakur in that respect, his problems more internal than external. He didn’t deny it. “If I was black I would’ve sold half,” he rapped in “White America”.

The rap battles recreated in his 2002 quasi-autobiopic, 8 Mile, taught Eminem the importance of getting a reaction with every line, and nothing did the job like a bad-taste joke — the more offensive the better. Hence his shock-comic alter ego (or id) Slim Shady. “I’m only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room,” he explained on “The Real Slim Shady”. “The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.” A frequent comparison when he came out with The Slim Shady LP in 1999 was South Park. “Hi kids, do you like violence?” he leered on his debut single, “My Name Is…”, fully anticipating his role as corrupter of the nation’s youth. Shortly afterwards, the question of lyrics and violence, having steadily escalated through moral panics about heavy metal and hip hop, went nuclear with the Columbine High School massacre, as Eminem’s labelmate Marilyn Manson was accused of inspiring the killers.

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Using a technique pioneered by Public Enemy a decade earlier, Eminem performed lyrical judo, turning the backlash to his own advantage. It’s hard to file a case of cultural appropriation against someone who raps, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/ To do black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy.” Tough to accuse him of being a bad influence when he has a song called “Role Model”: “Follow me and do exactly what the song says: Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink.”

Most important, he had “Stan”, an extraordinary feat of in-character storytelling sweetened by a sample of a pre-fame Dido. Here was a song of such undeniable artistry that even the sceptics had to sit up and listen. Giles Foden, the Guardian’s deputy literary editor, compared “Stan” with the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning; Elton John performed it with Eminem at the Grammys. Years later, it gave us a new word for obsessive fandom. “It’s kind of like a message to the fans to let them know that everything I say is not meant to be taken literally,” Eminem explained at the time, with Columbine on his mind.

Two years later, Eminem’s sensitive performance in 8 Mile, with its motivational anthem “Lose Yourself”, made him almost respectable. Anthony Bozza sums up the rapidly changing media narrative: “(1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he?” He attracted fans as unlikely as Barbra Streisand and Daniel Day-Lewis, who used Eminem records to hype himself up on the set of Gangs of New York. Sean O’Hagan wrote in the Observer: “It is not overstating the case to say that Eminem is as reflective of his time as Bob Dylan was of his; and, in his own way, just as trenchant a social commentator.” Seamus Heaney praised his “subversive attitude” and “verbal energy”.

No artist can ride the zeitgeist for long, nor should any sane person want to, so there’s no shame in Eminem’s career dropping from a boil to a simmer. Time may not have improved him art but it has clarified it. First, his talent is beyond dispute. Even in the heart of the storm he was committed to hard work and craft. He has not inspired many (any?) great white rappers but his technique and emotional rawness are audible in the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator.

Second, it is obvious that controversy was not his motor after all. Unlike the many celebrities who fall from grace when their secrets are revealed, Eminem’s scandal was frontloaded and, despite some legal troubles, mostly stemmed from his lyrics rather than his behaviour. He’s not quite Snoop Dogg, who went from a first-degree murder charge to hosting a cooking show with Martha Stewart, but compared to Marilyn Manson, who faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse, or the endlessly self-detonating Kanye West, he looks remarkably stable and content. When it comes down to it, he simply loves to rap.

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Finally, we know what he believes. You might reasonably see in his early work a harbinger of the white male rage that now fuels the alt-right, including the trollish humour that leaves it strategically unclear whether provocation is an end in itself or a vehicle for genuine malice. In the original song, Stan writes fan letters with what sounds like a pencil and records his final message on a cassette. Now he might easily be shitposting on 8chan and fuming about his latest Twitter suspension. Similarly, “White America”’s vision of a ”fucking army marching in back of me” sounds more sinister than it once did: “So many lives I touched, so much anger aimed/ In no particular direction, just sprays and sprays.” We have a clearer idea now of where that anger can spray.

Nevertheless, I don’t think you can blame Eminem for that, any more than you can pin Brexit on Britpop. Crucially, his rage never included racial animus, and he has never swung to the Right. Having recorded a song attacking George W Bush in 2004, he released an anti-Trump freestyle in 2017 and donated “Lose Yourself” to a campaign ad for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Anyone who’s followed my music knows I’m against bullies — that’s why I hate that fucking bully Trump,” he told Vulture. Eminem outgrew his anger, along with his homophobia and misogyny, rather than nurturing it, and he didn’t get lost in his own black comedy. The listener might not always have known whether he was joking or not but he did, and the joke was usually on him.

In “Without Me”, Eminem presents himself as an obnoxious necessity; a fly in the ointment of early 2000s celebrity culture. “Now this looks like a job for me/ So everybody, just follow me/ ‘Cause we need a little controversy/ ‘Cause it feels so empty without me.” Twenty years on, he’s smart enough to realise that we have more than enough controversy and that that fire doesn’t need stoking. Maybe he became a role model after all.

Its innards are amusement infrastructure, geared to big-ticket events: Simply Red, Beyoncé, Strictly Come Dancing Live. But before this incarnation, it was a key battleground in a culture war that first took shape during the Second World War, erupted into factional conflict during the Thatcher years, and has since devolved into scattered, bitter insurgency: the contest over the proper relationship between artists and the state.

The Dome’s tattered corpse is a fitting symbol for a Britain scrabbling for public meaning, amid the wreckage of the cultural settlement that succeeded the last Gilded Age — a settlement now well and truly defunct. But two days after Storm Eunice flayed it came the news of a different structure, yet to be born: the first stately home to be built in England for over a century.

Taken together, the Dome’s death and this putative grand mansion tell the story both of Britain’s tragic experiment with artistic egalitarianism, and also of what came before and may yet succeed it.

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In 1900, England’s richest 1% held some 75% of the country’s wealth. Among many other things, one effect of this disparity was that if you wanted money for the arts, you needed a rich patron. It was war that took the gilt off that age, in a grand conflagration of people and resources that decimated the old imperial aristocracy, even as it minted wealthy new wartime industrialists.

Two world wars also shredded the leisure — and a great deal of the wealth disparity — that shored up the old funding model for cultural life. Fearful for the nation’s artistic future, Britain’s wartime government founded CEMA, the Commission for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Bureaucracies, once created, are tenacious. CEMA was re-founded in 1946 by Royal Charter as the Arts Council — the body that would, five decades on, direct much of the funding for the Millennium Dome fiasco.

John Maynard Keynes, CEMA’s first chair, described its remit as “to encourage the best British national arts, everywhere, and to do it as far as possible by supporting others rather than by setting up state-run enterprises”. But it never quite worked like that. The Arts Council’s first notable success was, in fact, illustrative not of this principle but of the opposite: not a return to independent efflorescence of cultural life, but a new kind of state patronage modelled on wartime collectivism.

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The body was responsible for the 1951 Festival of Britain, an event intended to mark the centenary of Prince Albert’s 1851 Great Exhibition. Albert’s event was self-financing, and made a profit. In contrast, the Festival of Britain was funded by the government, and aimed to showcase all that was “modern, forward-looking and contemporary” in British culture and design, including the concrete South Bank Centre. A public unified by wartime collectivism and eager for a brighter and less bomb-filled future were enthusiastic. It’s estimated that of a then-population of 49 million, around half participated in the nationwide Festival in some way: the high point of a Keynesian social-democratic merger of state largesse and elite cultural progressivism.

Winston Churchill reportedly hated it, describing it as “three-dimensional socialist propaganda”. As soon as he decently could, following his re-election in 1951, he had the Festival’s aluminium Skylon monument demolished and turned into ashtrays: presaging the culture war that was to follow.

By the Seventies, public-sector progressivism and accompanying state largesse had percolated from elite socialist bureaucrats to a broad-based creative class funded by subsidy, increasingly radical in the wake of the hippie revolution, and determined to smash convention everywhere from (subsidised) dramaturgy for children to prostitution-themed exhibitions at the (subsidised) Institute of Contemporary Art. Under Thatcher, the Tories grew ever keener to cut this antagonistic arts counter-elite down to size.

In 1985, Norman Tebbit complained that this publicly-funded arts ecosystem was full of elitism and (more to the point, from a Tory perspective) Left-wing political bias. But the Thatcherite cure for this taxpayer-funded enemy within addressed less the enmity than the funding. Francis Maude argued in 1985 that the postwar state-subsidy model needed to be dismantled, and what creatives needed was a return to the prewar “patronage” model. As this kind of wealth now accrued less to super-rich individuals than to corporations, that meant corporate sponsorship.

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Budgets were cut, and innovations introduced to forge stronger links with business, all turbo-charged by another Tory innovation: the National Lottery. But these innovations failed to defang the progressive arts blob. For the Lottery instantly created a colossal pot of money earmarked for “good causes”, a development which in turn sprouted new cadres of (generally also progressive) arts bureaucrats tasked with dispensing it.

Paradoxically, then, the Thatcher-era attack on government-funded elitism and political bias had the opposite of the intended effect. It didn’t rein in Left-leaning political bias in the arts, or hack the cultural elite down to size. All it did was reduce direct government control over the sector, while entrenching mutual hostility between arts administrators and the Tory Party and pushing anything that showed the faintest glimmer of popular appeal out into the private sector.

Tory arts policy thus achieved less a business-driven return to conservative values in the arts than a selective reorienting of artistic radicalism. This new cultural order leaned ever harder into convention-smashing, even as it dialled class politics back to vague murmurs about the wickedness of capitalism and slapped sponsors’ logos on the flyers. So by the time Blair inherited it, the Arts Council was the perfect vehicle for the public ethos associated with his reign: progressive ideals inflected by commercial funding, aesthetics and priorities.

The man whom Thatcher called her “greatest achievement” continued the anti-elitist push begun by Maude and Tebbit, telescoping all cultural policy — high and low — into a single Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The cheerfully demotic and venal output of the resulting “creative industries” was to be marketed worldwide as “Cool Britannia”. Purportedly a bloom of new British cultural self-confidence, this in practice consisted mainly of strip-mining Britain’s cultural heritage for a content-agnostic, pro-profit anti-elitism powered by corporate “patronage”.

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It’s some distance from the Arts Council’s postwar remit, but this was far from just Blair’s fault. (He didn’t even come up with the idea to build a dome.) It simply reveals the too-great paradox at the heart of state-funded art.

How are egalitarian, taxpayer-funded government bodies tasked with responsible spending and staffed by progressives meant to preserve and nurture a cultural legacy from the age of aristocratic patronage? The Dome itself encapsulated, at a budget overrun of £204m, the fruits of that paradox. “Body”, sponsored by Boots, Roche and L’Oréal; “National Identity”, sponsored by Marks & Spencer; “Our Town Story”, sponsored by McDonald’s.

Tony Blair described the project as “Britain’s opportunity to greet the world with a celebration that is so bold, so beautiful, so inspiring that it embodies at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future in the world.” And it did indeed capture the contradictory nature of budget-conscious, government-subsidised “creativity”.

Start with the sponsorship deal; work backwards to what the content should be; and always, always, choose convention-smashing or corporate vacuity over anything that smacks of aristocracy. No wonder the contradictory radical and conservative impulses of state art have driven the contemporary Arts Councils to a widely mocked statement of content-free inclusivity, which envisions a Britain where all have “access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences” even as it rebrands artists as “creative practitioners” and relativises “high-quality” and “cultural” to meaninglessness.

Storm Eunice hardly needed to flay the Dome’s sunken carcass; the bones of our erstwhile high culture have long since been picked clean. That old high culture, though, was largely the product not of government subsidy but what Aristotle called “magnificence”: “a fitting expenditure involving largeness of scale”.

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For Aristotle, it was a matter of honour for the wealthy to spend huge sums to ensure something “most beautiful and most becoming” rather than according to “how much it can be produced and how it can be produced most cheaply”. And much as the twentieth-century egalitarian in me rebels at the thought, most of what we call “heritage” today is a product of such “magnificence”: the stately homes, the sculptures, the ornamentation, orchestral music and so on.

There are many indications today that as we leave the long twentieth century, the world is returning to Gilded Age levels of economic inequality. There are many downsides to this; but it also signals our return to the kind of world in which a super-rich caste exists who can afford to be patrons on a “magnificent” scale.

Taxing the mega-rich mostly encourages them to hide their wealth elsewhere. But encouraging them to spend magnificently creates not just jobs but also beauty, as well as things that endure — such as the grand mansions and monumental architecture that form our “heritage” today.

Perhaps, then, if we are unable to prevent the re-emergence of this plutocracy, the question isn’t how to cut these giants down to size. Rather, it’s how to reorient them from the mendacious and niggardly “man-of-the-people” minimalism exemplified by the likes of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, toward the kind of magnificence able to reverberate positively through the culture.

Consider the alternatives: that we either remain mired in the Millennium Dome model, in which public artworks serve largely as a conduit for woke capital or state propaganda; or else we simply abandon public culture, and the technologies which now stream personalised content to all our individual screens become the only things we share.

If we’re doomed to a new aristocracy, should we not at least demand that they are magnificent?

What might be most remarkable about this document, and the cultural moment in which it exists, is that this final data point doesn’t necessarily make much difference. The spreadsheet in question belongs to an internet personality known as Aella, who views the physical act of love with the detached curiosity of a scientist and the strategic eye of a statistician. She’s a rare bird, not just in her approach to sex but in how she’s successfully parlayed it into a miniature empire: Aella is a former camgirl, now escort, and an elite member of the 1% on the amateur porn-subscription site OnlyFans, where she once netted six figures per month sharing self-produced photos and videos. 

But while it’s not unusual for someone in her line of work to be good at decoupling heart (and hormones) from mind, when Aella appeared in conversation with sex educator Laci Green at last week’s “Hereticon” thoughtcrime conference in Miami, the presentation revealed less about the niche mindset of the sex worker than it did about how ordinary people struggle to connect in a gamified dating landscape driven by data before passion. In the era of the algorithm, the personal brand, the Tinder marketplace, perhaps all sex carries a whiff of transaction, whether or not any money changes hands. And in a world where young, single people are increasingly taught to be frightened of any threat to their safety — emotional, not just physical — the prospect of true intimacy grows ever distant, ever more impossible.

What’s happening in heterosexual couplings now is also, crucially, about what isn’t happening: a sexual famine amongst Gen Z, who are upending the entire romantic landscape as they come of age. There is less sex, but also less dating, less social interaction writ large without the intermediary of a screen.

This isn’t the free love of the sexual revolution, nor the sex positivity espoused by the commitment-free hookup culture that reigned in the early Noughties. It’s something new, and also something post-#MeToo, and perhaps not entirely unrelated to our contemporary obsession with consent as the primary (sometimes only) framework for determining if a given encounter was good or not. Meeting strangers on the internet went in a generational spasm from being maximally unsafe to the only way to do things, as the existence of dating apps rendered the old ways of connecting not just quaint, but creepy.

Our pre-internet rituals were especially fraught with the risk of approaching someone who didn’t consent to be seen as a romantic prospect. Now, every interaction is preceded by the assurance that your crush has contractually agreed to be lusted-after, that no boundaries are being violated.

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At the same time, the idea of sex as something people do for fun seems faded from the public consciousness, perhaps a natural consequence of too many millennial women having discovered that the utopian promise of feminist sex-positivity was laden with hidden negatives; that being able to have sex free of stigma or slut-shaming still comes with costs nevertheless.

For years, women had been thrust into the role of the bad cop, assigned the unpleasant duty of forever resisting the advances of horny men who couldn’t be expected to exercise restraint or good judgment on their own. But having been released from the social obligation to say “no” lest you be labeled a slut, a new pressure emerged to say “yes”, lest you be tarred with the stigma of the sex-negative prude. The result was a generation of women engaging in sex that was, yes, consensual, but also not much fun, especially when it was happening at the behest of a generation of men whose idea of sex was heavily influenced by internet porn. Women cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually, of course.

When you consider how many women have been foundering around for years in the vast grey chasm of sex that is technically consensual but not remotely enjoyable, it’s no surprise that the act itself took a reputational hit. The emerging perception now is that sex is dangerous, dicey, probably not worth the risk — especially as concepts like “trauma” and “abuse” have expanded to include everything from the sting of a lover’s betrayal to the heartbreak when a consensual relationship ends. (See also: the increased use of the word “grooming”, once reserved for the sexual predation of children, to describe flirtatious relationships between consenting adults.) Under this rubric, the idea that someone might engage in physical intimacy for fun seems practically absurd. Young women in the post-MeToo era are taught that they can’t let their guard down for one single moment, while young men are told that they’re always just one misread cue or mixed message away from committing a rape.

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that this generation would take refuge in the safety of dating apps, or, for that matter, in the certainty of transactional sex. Whatever the pratfalls of subscribing to a freelance porn star’s OnlyFans the way some people used to do with Playboy, paying for intimacy outright at least eliminates the dangerous ambiguity that plagues an ordinary dating relationship, where the line between asking and coaxing, or coaxing and coercion, might shift at any moment and leave you standing with your pants down on the wrong side of the line.

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Whether it’s settling for an imperfect match or turning to OnlyFans to fill your needs, human beings have always appreciated the security and promise of a sure thing. And when an entire progressive messaging apparatus insists that prostitution is the new empowerment, there’s little to dissuade young women from leveraging the minefield of sexuality into a remunerative side hustle — or young men from gravitating toward it as a safer form of sex.

We may not have quite reached the point where making freelance pornography is a rite of passage akin to attending the prom (even if anecdotes from Green suggest that “Do you have an OnlyFans?” might soon become the new “Will you go out with me?” among the school-age set). But will anyone be surprised when some young, enterprising, self-identified male feminist suggests that subscribing to OnlyFans is the only way to ensure proper consent, actually? Are we, perhaps, already halfway there?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a radical shift in how we conceive of sex, sexuality, self. In the age of social media, sexual orientation is something you identify into, a public performance that requires no partner and no physical follow-through. (Consider also the odd proliferation of straight-married women who identify as “queer,” based on what seems mainly like a conviction that they’re just too interesting to be plain ol’ heterosexual.) It’s all identification, no action, a complete decoupling of sexual identity from the act itself. If this is a sexual revolution, it’s the chastest one we’ve ever had.

At the same time, the battle of the sexes has been arguably won by women, who are outperforming men in everything from education to investment. They best boys in high school and outnumber them on college campuses. They go to grad school in greater numbers and earn the majority of PhDs. And while they haven’t yet flooded boardrooms or executive suites, women are increasingly likely to outearn the men they marry — all of which adds up to a total inversion of the old dating dynamics wherein women with slightly less education or earning power made ideal mates for men with slightly more.

Instead, a whole lot of accomplished, educated, highly-paid ladies are competing in a dating pool that contains a scant few high-achieving men — and if they can’t land one, then their options are to date down, or not at all. In this reality, it’s the women jostling for position, optimising their dating profiles, trying to look good to the algorithm that will in turn serve them up to someone as a desirable catch. And the odds are stacked against them: for reasons that will some day make fascinating fodder for evolutionary psychologists, women are far harsher judges of male desirability than vice versa. Studies suggest that about 80% of women on dating apps are in competition for about 20% of the men.

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The whole enterprise highlights the distinction-without-much-difference between selling yourself in the dating marketplace and just, well, selling yourself. Maybe you’re trying to make money, or maybe you’re trying to get married, but it’s the same hustle, more or less. If you’re not keeping a spreadsheet yourself, you’re just a data point on someone else’s. Except here, the disposability is a feature, not a bug. If your OnlyFans affair bores you, you can just unsubscribe; if your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way and vanish behind a block. No fuss. No muss. No breakup. Tinder, like Twitter, is not a real place.

This might make women like Aella the smart ones: if they’re savvy (and lucky), they can work the system to their advantage instead of fumbling around inside it like blind supplicants. Making metadata of human beings will always be better as a business proposition than as a strategy for human connection — which might explain why, despite the lauded safety and convenience of the apps, Gen Z is not only having less sex but also suffering from greater rates of depression and anxiety.

Dating apps, social media, the sexual marketplace where you can pay for parasocial affairs: all of this has been an attempt to organise not just raw data, but raw humanity, to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy. If it’s all just a numbers game, if you’re getting what you paid for, if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

But they won’t get close enough to touch you, either.

And so maybe this is where the next sexual revolution will emerge: among young people who are tired of trying to connect with the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them. Who resent the hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs. Who would rather risk the pain of an old-school heartbreak. Who understand the difference between being empowered and being a control freak. Who know, in their bones, that they would rather be sorry than safe.