A bald fact about this most famous of sex pests is that his appetites were, by their very nature, destructive — bad for society and positively pestilential for women. But the lending of his name to that sainted acronym, BDSM, has brought about a rehabilitation which blows the central problem of this muzzled cult wide open: that it’s not at all concerning for men to want to hurt women in the first place, and that instead of addressing these grim tastes, they should indulge them. The moral crisis of sadism is the engine of two parables of celebrity scandal this month, about author Neil Gaiman and the spidery metal rockstar Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), and their frightening magnetism among vulnerable women. The first emerged in a mega-viral Vulture article with harrowing testimony from one principal accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich. The second came in the form of a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked, with accounts from fans, bandmates and ex-girlfriends.

If the testimonies prove correct, both Gaiman and Manson saw sexual sadism as a way to challenge boundaries — a positively sophisticated indulgence, and evidence of their cultivation. But as Angela Carter argued in 1978, de Sade himself was no proto-liberator, no feminist libertine. From its roots, BDSM has served the ill intentions of violent men, and it remains predicated on the violation and humiliation of women to this day. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, the “community” is hot on consent. But as Kathleen Stock argued last week, consent is tenuous in a scenario where arousal requires people to suspend disbelief, to pretend someone is in pain or unwilling. The acceptability of BDSM now, couched as it is in flexible doctrines of consent, cows women into compliance for fear of being labelled intolerant — intolerant, that is, for wincing at the tastes of men who only want to fuck women they can frighten or hurt. In this (allegedly), Gaiman and Manson are in esteemed company — remember when Armie Hammer was accused of saying he would “barbecue and eat” a lover’s ribs?

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The opening scene of the Manson documentary might begin to explain why sadism holds such sway among certain male celebrities. In Manson’s case, it was part of a pompous artistic endeavor: “Marilyn Manson is about transcending morality and sexuality,” he tells admirers in a backstage clip from early on in his career. Beneath his towering form, two young girls inexpertly kiss, awkwardly writhing for the singer’s delight. Grand statements of creative intent like this always seem irredeemably cynical with hindsight; this clip now reads as a group of perverted prats gassing off in lipstick and leather trousers. But the performativity of Manson’s sadism is important: at one point, his satanic persona is described as having a “WWE feel” — that is, an aesthetic of villainy which belies a careful, risk-assessed choreography. But it was not play-acting: according to one ex-girlfriend and accuser, Manson was able to “hide abuse by doing it during sex”, excusing away violence and coercion as part of exaggerated sexual roleplay. Equally, his cartoonish, evil lunatic persona does the same thing: beneath all this white paint, I am a serious artist. I will hurt you, but it’s all part of the show.

Similarly, Gaiman’s towering popularity in the world of fantasy fiction is contingent on the aesthetics of sadism. His message of sainted victimhood, of the way the young and powerless might prevail over their oppressors (notably explored in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane) relies on a preponderance of dangerous, monstrous freaks to be vanquished. Coraline, his young-adult hit, is awash with the blacks and reds of BDSM. The villain at its heart, the Other Mother, has hair “as black as coal” and teeth “as sharp as knives”, dark, red fingernails and a “jagged red slash” for a mouth. He could almost be describing Manson. And it’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavors mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.

An uncomfortable part of the Manson documentary’s “hiding in plain sight” narrative is the naivety of the fans. One interviewee is a woman who, at 14, established a group called the “lunchbox girls”, so called because they mimicked the band’s habit of posing with kids’ lunchboxes. The way she describes her friendship with Manson certainly sounds like grooming — he asked the girls to call him “Daddy”, received underwear pics from a graveyard photoshoot where the teens posed with sex toys and, autographing the girl’s lunchbox, wrote “To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter slut, love Marilyn”. All of this, as an accuser called Bianca says elsewhere, was exciting rather than skin-crawling for the mere fact that it would have shocked their parents.

That’s how things go when you’re 14; indeed, it seems rebellion drove many of Manson’s young fans to buy into his predatory aesthetics. In one clip from outside a concert, a goth girl, who in another era might have been a blushing teenybopper, shouts “I wanna rape Twiggy!”, referring to another member of the band, Twiggy Ramirez. That she was compelled to say this shows how the language of sexual sadism is connected to rock-and-roll rebellion, and so is ultimately “safe”, part of the performance — an “in-joke”. But by definition, the power dynamics preclude this. If the documentary’s claims are to be believed, and Manson did pluck underaged girls from audiences and rape them on his tour bus, that young fan becomes a symbol of his victims’ vulnerability, and her joke about rape is sickly turned in on itself.

Manson’s own view on the matter is a little more straightforward: in an unearthed interview, he told Rolling Stone: “I’m not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.” In this unbelievable defense, Manson says he cannot be a rapist because he’s not into it — he prefers other methods of leaving women with “no choice”. Little matter that this would seem to be precisely the same thing.

The magnetism of metal or goth scenes for awkward and vulnerable young girls is fascinating in itself and has parallels within BDSM. In each case, women seem drawn to these subcultures for their vague promises of being progressive and alternative, a respite for the marginalized and a way to process darkness. The tour-bus accuser Bianca speaks of a sense of kinship with other teens at Manson’s shows, who were invariably troubled, from “broken homes”. There is a similar black-lipsticked brokenness to Gaiman fans who, just as hypnotized as Manson’s, were taken in by his nerd-centric apparent sexiness, described in the Vulture piece as a “penchant for dressing in black, a shock of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of comic books and fantasy novels”. “Women would turn up to [Gaiman’s] signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts,” we are told. One “fell to her knees and wept”. Gaiman’s look — that of the floppy-haired, mild-mannered intellectual — combined with his outspoken feminism was, if the allegations prove true, all part of the act, communicating a certain effete harmlessness.

A world preoccupied with shallowly designating men as “toxic”/”alpha” and “safe”/”sweet” disarms women against the fact that hot nerds are often the worst of the lot, beset as they are by the long shadow of teenaged awkwardness and rejection. Many of those men see themselves as outside of the dynamic of “women and their rapists”; rapists are hypermasculine bullies, but tender loverboys or gangly outcasts would never do that. Manson, conversely, leaps from the pages of a Gaiman novel — a villainous Sadeian caricature. This is not to say that Warner embodies the cruel core of sadism, rather the flatness of its grand claims about breaking taboos and sexual sophistication. If Gaiman’s public face was all children’s charities and comic books, it was equally confected — both men, in light of their respective allegations, were sad, aging clowns whose costumes furnished shameful appetites. In Manson’s case, there is a profound emptiness, a sense of wretched impotence, to his intent to shock for shock’s sake and in Gaiman’s, to his simpering desire for progressive acclaim.

Marilyn Manson, for his part, is no longer shocking anyway: the provocateurs of the 2020s are more about ribald female sexuality than male violence (allow me to introduce our readers to 21-year-old rapper Ceechnyaa, who has gained international fame for the line “I’m peggin’ that man at the back of the bus”). But the inheritance of those Nineties goth sex freaks is still rich, and the cult of violent satanism still has great purchase among young weirdos.

Only last week, a 19-year-old internet forum nerd called Cameron Finnigan was jailed for encouraging a girl to kill herself on camera as part of a Hitler-worshipping satanic cult linked to the Order of the Nine Angles. That same group had inspired 18-year-old Danyal Hussein to kill sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2021. The Order’s tenets, which a brief glance suggests involves Aryans taking over the Milky Way in a galactic empire, are tellingly tailored to sci-fi dorks. Members are encouraged to commit acts of violence and human sacrifice as part of a spiritual endeavor; it is no coincidence that this resonates with Manson’s stated aim to “transcend morality and sexuality”. The O9A, as it’s known, has inspired various metal groups, particularly among provincial Euro-goths, for decades, and satanic aesthetics more generally underpin metal as a genre, if only for its pearl-clutching potential.

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So, sadism continues to hold sway — and is as dangerous for women as it ever has been. The home of BDSM is not cellophane-sheeted “playrooms” at ticketed, consent-centric sex parties. The true consequences of sadism play out in quiet corners, abandoned buildings, internet forums, Hinge dates gone wrong. They play out behind closed doors — and women really get hurt.

In a noxiously “sex-positive” culture which increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls, the only solution is this: we must return to stringency on the simplest demands, and jettison kink/casual-sex apologists. Don’t choke me, don’t hit me, don’t frighten me, don’t use me. Be intolerant, be prickly and uncool, if it keeps you safe. After all, a system in which it is fine to strangle a girl you meet on an app, or (allegedly) make a girl who nannies your young son vomit during fellatio then lick it up, is not one which is remotely feminist, even with that golden ticket, “enthusiastic consent”. Obscuring that fact, and keeping the lines between exploitation and experimentation hazy, is essential for predatory men if they are to continue to intimidate women into silence.

In the arts, the thrilling aesthetics of dark, twisted desire will, and should, always belong — think of the electrifying strangeness of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or the strangled strains of the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. This is no Mary Whitehouse manifesto. But when it comes to the real sex lives of real people, these celebrity stories show us that some men have used the grim utopia of BDSM, and its atmosphere of progressive sophistication, to conduct horrors. So do not be afraid to be disgusted — even if it is at the cost of some weirdo’s grand artistic and sexual mission to, as one of Manson’s school friends glibly puts it, “push boundaries”.

The TA field phone was invented by the Soviets in 1950 and was used by their Army in railways and mining. In post-Soviet times, though, especially during the Russian-Chechen wars, it became more useful as a means of torture. If you want to understand Russia’s gradual regression into brutal atavism, examine the changing uses of its field telephone. The Reckoning Project, a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and researchers who record and verify witness testimonies of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has discovered it in almost every detention site they have visited during the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

While the TA wire is unrolled, Alseryuk is beaten. The 36-year-old construction worker from Balakliya in the Kharkiv Oblast endured this routine for three months. He had joined the army in 2014, after the Russians first invaded — mainly because it was a well-paid local job. And he had given up his commission long before the all-out invasion on February 24, 2022. The fact that he was a veteran was enough for the Russians. Alseryuk was taken from his home in the outskirts of Balakliya and imprisoned in a basement until the region was liberated in September by the Ukrainian troops.

According to the The Reckoning Project’s Kharkiv unit, there were at least 27 detention and torture sites in that region alone. The team interviewed more than a dozen former prisoners and discovered that men and women alike were treated in identical manner: taken from their houses without explanations, handcuffed, blindfolded, and then brought into tiny, cold, wet and overcrowded cells. There, men in balaclavas would interrogate them until they acknowledged their connections to the Ukrainian army.

Then they were tortured.

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Their captors were mainly Russian citizens — sometimes the National Guard or FSB would turn up. Generally, though, the guards were poorly equipped, mobilised men from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics. Sometimes there were no questions; sometimes the prisoners were just tortured. They would be beaten with batons or wooden sticks, shocked with electricity, and sometimes suffocated with gas masks. They would be kept for months without food or medical support. And no one knew where they were. Eventually some were freed — after it became clear even to their fastidiously sadistic captors that they had nothing to say. In truth, they probably realised this early on, but it was never about just information.

After the 2014 occupation of Crimea and the Donbas, Ukrainians knew that it was best for any activists, politicians, and independent journalists to leave the Russian controlled territories. But civilians could stay if they kept a low profile, which many did because they needed to take care of family, usually elderly parents.

This occupation is different. Russian soldiers have gone out of their way to seek out “disloyals”. Their definition is loose. Having a cousin in the army counts — though this doesn’t narrow victims down: according to official statistics around 40% of Ukrainians have a close relative serving in the army or law enforcement. Civil servants are also suspect — a common job in provincial towns — along with firefighters, schoolteachers, NGO workers, or even those who are physically fit and of fighting age. Local collaborators are helping the Russians: flying the Ukrainian flag before the war is enough to get you rounded up.

Things were particularly brutal in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. After the Russians invaded, in March 2022, residents would attend weekly peaceful rallies against the occupation. Olga, a 36-year-old photographer and SMM specialist was an enthusiastic participant. She lost her job and started helping local volunteers buy and deliver humanitarian aid to the residents of the city. She attended the rallies and kept Ukrainian symbols at home, as well as raising money on social networks. Shortly before her arrest, she took a photograph of the Antoniv bridge and the pontoon crossing but — crucially — did not supply the photo to the Ukrainian authorities.

On September 29, she was sorting food packages with two other volunteers when five men in military uniforms and balaclavas, carrying assault rifles, broke in and abducted all three of them. They were taken to the basement of building 15 on Pylyp Orlyk street. Olga was held there for 24 days, and subjected to five or so interrogations, during which time, she was shocked and physically abused.

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Her captors spoke Russian, but with Ukrainian accents, which led her to believe they were soldiers from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. During the first torture, two clamps were attached to her body through which an electric current was passed. The pain was so bad, she cannot say how long the torture lasted. The next day, they showed her postcards and bracelets with Ukrainian symbols on them that they’d found in her house. That day, they had decided simply to toy with her. Her interrogator told her that he wasn’t in the mood to torture her, but she could rely on him tomorrow. “You’re a cunt,” he spat at her as he left.

Over the course of lengthy and various interrogations, Olga was beaten across the head and ribs, smacked around the head, and electrocuted. They were asking the same questions over and over: “Did she ever go to Ukrainian-controlled territory? What did she buy there? Where did she get the money?” They also forced her to strip to the waist and were about to place clamps on her nipples and earlobes, until one of her captors decided it might kill her. She believes she was kept in detention — unlike other volunteers, who were released — because of her frank pro-Ukrainian position and the photos of the bridge and the pontoon in her camera. For the occupiers, this was a “crime” more serious than volunteering. Taken again to the basement for questioning, they put clamps on her fingers and the electrocution lasted longer than ever. She vomited from the pain.

The Russians weren’t fussy about who they tortured. They even brutalised priests. They took the Abbot of Kherson’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church one day after he was falsely accused of inciting hate speech. Six or so men arrived at his church and spirited him off. During the interrogation, he was asked about everything from church hierarchy to the contacts in his phone. Then, his interrogators beat him, put a cap over his face and wrapped it with tape, making it almost impossible to breathe; later his hands were taped so tightly that he lost all feeling in his fingers. The abbot was shoved across a table and beaten on his knees with a hammer, and then on his chest with a baton. He fell in and out of consciousness. At the end of the interrogation, he was told that Ukrainian media had already reported his death. Eventually, he was forced to write a statement agreeing to cooperate with the Russians, and freed.

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When I arrive in Kherson, the Russians have gone from the city, but are shelling it constantly and viciously from across the river. In an apartment, just off the city centre, I meet Oleksandr Diakov, a 48-year-old entrepreneur. He limps across the small living room to greet me — a problem with his leg was significantly worsened after his capture by the Russians. He is clearly traumatised and exhausted — though anger at his treatment seeps through as he recounts his ordeal.

He, along with five friends, had been passing information to the Ukrainian security services. And the Russians had got wind of it and were tracking them down. Two were captured first. And Oleksandr managed to evade them until he was eventually caught, along with another two, after the Russians bugged the apartment they were meeting in. “I was taken to pretrial detention centre, which is where the torture began,” he tells me, starting to silently weep. “The head of the centre had the nickname ‘Evil’ — he was totally sick. He would get drunk and torture people just for fun.” Evil used electricity. He would ask people if they knew the Russian national anthem,and if they didn’t, he would shock them. Every time he switched on the electric current, he made people shout “glory to Russia”, “glory to Putin”, “or glory to [Russian Defence Minister] Shoigu”. They would be electrocuted, denied food, cigarettes and sleep. Whatever took Evil’s fancy.

There were 21 cells in the centre. Most of them were designed only for three people but the Russians generally kept six or seven in each one. Diakov’s cell number was 19. He starts to cry again as he forces himself to relive the torture. “I counted 17 days there, sleeping on the floor without a mattress. It was so humid that many people have since developed lung problems. There was not enough air to breathe. One of the other prisoners was a policeman who was also tortured with electric shocks. He had two wounds from where they attached the cables that started to rot and develop abscesses.”

The FSB were especially brutal. They were angry at Oleksandr for giving information about not only military targets, but also where FSB were sleeping and living. Two men in balaclavas would interrogate him — one always sitting. They put a thick hat on his face so he couldn’t see them. That was taken off for the torture, when they would cover his face with a wet T-shirt and start on it with the electricity. And then they would beat him, taking care to pay particular attention to his bad leg. So bad was the beating, he started bleeding internally and by the end he couldn’t walk down the stairs.

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Toward the end he prayed it would end; that he would die and so not suffer anymore. “I never lost hope that Ukraine would come and release us,” he says. “We could hear the Ukrainian artillery. But they took longer than we expected.” Eventually his leg got so bad his captors took him to a hospital. There, he had surgery and spent a month recovering. The Russians gave him back his phone and told him to install Telegram and to be online constantly so they could track him. They also warned him that if he tried to escape, they would find him quickly. But he slipped out of the hospital and hid for several weeks until the Russians left the city.

Oleksandr’s story — like Olga’s and the priest’s — is not unique; it’s not even uncommon any more. With every territory that is liberated from Moscow, more of these types of stories emerge, variegated in their details, alike in their brutality. The truth is simply that this is life under Russian occupation. This is what the Russians do everywhere they go. This is what they do to their own people inside Russia.

It is just one reason why the Ukrainians refuse to surrender. They know what will come if they do. They’ve seen it too many times already. The war raging in Ukraine is over not only national sovereignty, but also the very essence of decency — for the right to live unmolested and unabused. They can never stop fighting.

Such a description no doubt evokes memories of the worst years of the 20^th century, an era of totalitarian horror that is fast fading from living memory. It is certainly not an image that one would immediately associate with anywhere on the modern European continent. But the truth is that, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such places continue to exist in Russia — as Alexander Navalny, Putin’s most prominent political enemy, is currently finding out.

Last week, the opposition politician was transferred to Penal Colony Number 2 in the small provincial town of Pokrov, roughly two hours’s drive east of Moscow. It will be his home, if you can call it that, for the next two and a half years after he was found guilty of breaking a parole violation from a previous charge of embezzlement in 2014 — although the European Court of Human Rights has described the allegations as “arbitrary and unfair”.

Unlike in Germany, where the death and concentration camps of the Nazi regime have become monuments to the sins of fascism, the spirit of Stalinist oppression so vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has survived in modern Russia, with penal colonies constituting an integral part of the country’s correctional system. In fact, these “corrective labour colonies” are the most common type of prison in the Russian Federation.

Some of the modern labour camps — including the notorious Penal Colony Number 14 in Mordovia — exist on the sites of their Gulag forerunners. Indeed, in many cases all that has changed is their name: from falling under the auspices of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for “Main Camp Directorate”, to today’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Little else has changed, with many of the buildings and facilities in the penal colonies dating back to the time of the USSR.

The offences that lead to incarceration also bear some resemblance to those of the past. Just as the Gulag system imprisoned enemies of the Communist regime, the penal colonies of today are home to dissidents who have dared to criticise the rule of President Putin.

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Similarly, the ways in which anti-establishment figures are treated have also stood the tests of time. Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week: “I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow,” it said. “I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s 1984 and said: ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s do this.’” Navalny went on to clarify that, so far, he has “not seen any violence”, but can still “easily believe the numerous stories that, not long ago, people here were beaten to within an inch of their lives with wooden hammers”.

Such stories are, of course, indeed “numerous”. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the activist group Pussy Riot, was sentenced to two years in the Mordovia camp in 2012 for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, after her group staged an illegal performance in a cathedral in Moscow. Tolokonnikova later recalled how, on her arrival, the camp administrator assured her that they would “break” her will.

Whether Tolokonnikova’s forced labour of stitching police uniforms was intended to humiliate her — she is also an anti-police activist — remains unclear. But that almost seems irrelevant when you consider she was fed rotten potatoes, worked seventeen-hour days, lived in freezing conditions and often had her “privileges” — which included the “privilege” to wash or visit the toilet — removed.

In many ways, even more cruel was the Catch-22 built into her forced labour: fill your work quotas and the quotas themselves will be increased; yet fail to meet them and you’ll be punished. Tolokonnikova learned this the hard way when, disgusted by the appalling conditions facing her work brigade, she demanded that their working hours be reduced to twelve hours per day. The commandant agreed, knowing that this would mean Tolokonnikova’s would not be able to meet its work quota, and subsequently be further punished. As a result, Tolokonnikova twice went on hunger strike over the course of her incarceration. She was ultimately hospitalised due to severe headaches, and given an early release of several months.

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Yet Tolokonnikova, perhaps due to her significant public profile, was arguably more lucky than most; hospitalisation for illness is not the norm for Russian penal colonies. Less fortunate was Ildar Dadin, another anti-Putin activist and supporter of Navalny. After publicly protesting the Putin regime, Dadin was arrested and jailed. Although his original sentence was only for two weeks, Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code dictates that three violations of Russia’s protest laws can result in a prison sentence of up to five years: Dadin was sentenced to three.

On one occasion during his time in a prison camp in Segezha in the far north of Russia — an area which was home to some of the earliest Soviet Gulags, with winter temperatures as low as -15 degrees — Dadin was hung by his handcuffed wrists for over half an hour. On another, he was beaten and kicked by no fewer than twelve prison guards. Like Tolokonnikova, Dadin responded with a hunger strike. But in response, the guards merely stripped him to his lower garments and assured him that another inmate would rape him if did not resume eating.

Dadin doubtless knew that this was no idle threat. Instances of guard-instigated rape in Russian prisons are hardly rare: in 2011, seven prison staff in St. Petersburg were themselves imprisoned for torturing prisoners and forcing other inmates to rape them.

The Russian authorities predictably denied Dadin’s allegations. But his experiences are in keeping with a number of investigations carried out by Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper which has seen at least six of its journalists murdered, including Yuri Shchekochkin (poisoned with radiation for investigating government corruption) and Anna Politkovskaya (shot in an elevator after years of criticising the President).

Novaya Gazeta‘s research uncovered approximately 4,500 of systemic torture in 2018, with the worst instances reserved for political opponents like Navalny. Dmitry Pchelintsev, a member of an anti-Putin Left-wing group dubbed a “terrorist network” by the authorities, last year described how he was repeatedly electrocuted by members of the FSB (the Russian state’s successor organisation to the KGB): “They [electrocuted] me maybe five times without questions – probably to suppress my will. Then they said: [in case] you don’t understand, you’re in the hands of the FSB. We will not play, you have to answer the questions now.” The electrical cables had originally been attached to his feet, but Pchelintsev said that he ultimately gave a false confession when they threatened to relocate the wires to his genitals.

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Does such a fate await Navalny? I am not so sure. Navalny is arguably too prominent to be subject to the worst of the human rights abuses that Russia’s prisons have to offer; international attention on his case is significant enough that even the Putin regime might refrain from murder or torture. Moreover, an increasingly combative Joe Biden seems to have taken a personal interest in the case.

And so, as was the case with Tolokonnikova, it is likely that it will be the people around Navalny who will suffer; she related how her fellow prisoners were discouraged from befriending her for fear of being singled out for punishment.

Yet though Tolokonnikova was undoubtedly a troublesome activist for the Kremlin, Navalny is arguably in a different league. He is, after all, a serious political challenger and a direct threat to the regime, and so it is reasonable to conclude that his treatment could be worse. The guards themselves may refrain from harming Navalny directly, but the system’s prior form suggests that they might encourage other inmates to assault him, perhaps even at the promise of a reward; this would give the Russian authorities the best case of plausible deniability.

In 2010, President Putin declared that The Gulag Archipelago should be essential reading for Russian students. Whether he intended Solzhenitsyn’s work to be read as a lesson in Soviet history or a warning to would-be dissidents has long been a matter of speculation. But which reading is true? Navalny, I fear, could be about to find out.