On this episode, I speak to novelist and cult literary icon . Han is the author of Incel: A Novel, published in 2024 — a searing, existentially bleak portrait of a young man alienated from society, and at war with himself.

The novel made a huge impression on me, bringing to mind the vivid prose and themes of early Brett Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik, the nihilistic novels of Michel Houellebecq, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. It’s an important and powerful debut from an incredible author, which is why I chose to write about it in my new book, Crisis Masculinity.

On his blog Decentralized Fiction, ARX-Han shares literary analysis, reviews and essays, often focusing on what he calls ‘Androgenic fiction’ — stories about men, their lives and beliefs, and the cultures they move in. We talked about incel ideology, the current state of publishing, and the vanishing subject of male interiority in fiction.

This episode is available as a video version at the bottom of this post, but with a static image for the guest. ARX-Han is a pen name, and the author chooses to keep his identity a closely-guarded secret. For that reason, you’ll hear his words through a voice changer. I’ve added captions to the video, and you can read or download the transcript here. To stay up to date with video episodes, subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube.

Reading recommendations from ARX-Han

We start by talking about the genesis of Incel: A Novel, and the way it blends satire with a bleak depiction of the main character’s inner voice and thoughts. This tonal balance, and the tight first-person focus of the text certainly nod to some of ARX-Han’s literary influences, particularly Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Less Than Zero. Unlike these novels, the protagonist is not the scion of a wealthy family — he is more akin to the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. A young man disillusioned by and disconnected from society, and bonds of friendship, he spends his time masturbating, dreaming of violence, and attempting (without much success) to get laid.

This is a very believable and not unsympathetic portrait of what called “unfuckable hate nerds”, as this quote from his piece for Tablet Magazine describes:

What does it feel like to be a young man? It feels like you are Kafka’s cockroach, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. It feels like you were drawn by Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb. You are an Untermensch, a particle, a stew of envies and resentments, a festering sore. You look, from below, at the happy and lovely and rich. You creep, alone, along a wall. You masturbate as if your life depended on it.

ARX-Han calls the character’s mindset and worldview “scientistic nihilism”, the reduction of human relationships and desire into measurable, quantifiable categories, as mapped in the incel’s belief in a hierarchy of “chads” or “alphas” (high-status males who attract women easily) and “anons” and “betas” (involuntary celibates, cut off from society and therefore the opportunity to have sex).

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This also describes the primacy that the incel framework assigns to the act of having sex, as opposed to the goal of establishing a meaningful relationship with a woman. His term defines the way in which these young men are influenced by the algorithm, where popularity, relevance and status are distributed to those influencers with the most transgressive messaging, such as Andrew Tate. It is a system with fixed inputs and outputs, where transforming oneself from an ugly, unlovable “beta” to a desired and successful “alpha” can be achieved through the use of pick-up artists techniques like “negging”, or the transformation of the face and body through drastic means, as “looksmaxxing” influencers like Clavicular promise. Here’s a Guardian article from this year that gives a primer on Clavicular, for those who haven’t encountered his particular brand of borderline-psychotic “influence” yet.

The term also describes the effects of a dating pool defined by algorithms through the use of apps, which as ARX-Han describes, flattens the human experience of romantic connection into a menu system, where sex or companionship can be “ordered in” with a few button clicks. Like social media more generally, ARX-Han believes this represents a totalising “metricisation” of desire, reducing what should be the most meaningful of experiences to a leaderboard with winners, losers and rejects vying for position in a digital status hierarchy. All of these trends are examined in the novel, and in our discussion — for me the key to understanding this is that it reduces everything to a zero-sum “competition,” the foundational mechanism of capitalist commodification, which as ARX-Han says, presumes that everything is a “marketplace” where “value” is determined through status games.

In an essay on his blog, ARX-Han defines this condition as “hyperliquidity”:

I can feel the speed of cultural evolution is accelerating because social media has radically increased memetic liquidity; that is to say, it’s made the transmission of social norms and behaviours hyperliquid. One has the sense that Zoomers are in a state of continuous cultural anxiety because there is no social superstructure that can confer a sense of stability… Hyperliquidity is a property of the modern app-based dating market where attractive people can effectively order other human beings like commodities in a way that fundamentally degrades the human condition.

In his view, this has ushered in a “post-romantic” era, where humans behave not like beings with agency, but as “biological computers” which respond to data-driven inputs. He connects this to evolutionary psychology, an influential but much-criticised approach to determining human behaviour, which goes back to the ideas of (among others) Charles Darwin and E.O. Wilson, the latter of whom wrote one of the core texts, Sociobiology in 1975. Wilson's work was criticised by Stephen Jay Gould and others for flirting with eugenic concepts of biological determinism and “race science.”

We go on to talk about the incel as “the quintessential literary subject” sitting at the intersection of several cultural “gigatrends”. The first is alienation, driven by technology and changes to social organisation. The second is automation and industrialisation, which affect the subject’s self-esteem by making them economically unviable (or at least precarious).

Another trend is the “metricisation” mentioned earlier, by which all human activity can be measured, predicted, and then monetised. Finally, he mentions secularisation — the erosion of all traditional spiritual systems in favour of a scientific, materialist view; driving cultural fissures, and provoking a crisis of meaning, whether we are aware of it or not. For ARX-Han, these trends drive the creation of a “permanent underclass” of (specifically male) people, who are — or who feel — that they are no longer economically, socially or spiritually necessary in society.

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Next we discuss the term “androgenic literature” — novels written from the perspective of a male character, or that focus specifically on male interiority. I allude to ’s excellent analysis of literary trends, where the male protagonist — especially those with an “unlikable” tendency to express their pain and anguish — are no longer considered viable or marketable, by either publishers or readers. Kanakia writes:

… the central problem of the white male writer is that you’re raised with some mythology of yourself as a powerful person, but at some point you realize you’re actually weak and impotent. Yet you’re in a culture where in order to succeed, both professionally and personally, you need to project power. So you end up feeling weak and insecure. White male writers would like to convey this struggle in fiction, but… fiction is subject to the same problem. Female readers are repelled by men who seem pathetic, and if your protagonist is too self-loathing or weak, then women won’t want to read them.

ARX-Han mentions Tucker Max and Chad Kultgen as examples of “crass” androgenic literature, noteworthy for their work’s extremism and blunt portrayal of male American norms and characters. He goes on to underline the importance of “voice” in fiction, and speculates on why this has become an undervalued commodity in fiction markets. Because novels like those by Max and Kultgen are harder to find these days, the term “androgenic” itself can be read as an “extremist” position; people imagine androgenic novels will focus solely on problematic or extreme male characters.

For ARX-Han, it is correct to observe that characters and experiences like this can be part of androgenic texts, but it is not what defines them. He mentions Dryback by as a poignant portrait of the interior life of an ageing millennial as a good example of androgenic fiction which does not focus on a mass shooter, killer, or abusive male character. He also offers a rare exception to the contempt the publishing industry has for androgenic fiction, in the form of Flesh, David Szalay’s Booker-prize winning novel about the life and troubles of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK. Read a short interview with Szalay by here, and a longer profile at The Guardian here.

I mention ’s excellent debut The Wayback Machine as another example of beautifully-depicted male interiority, and a book that the mainstream publishing industry would have jumped at in the late nineties and early 2000s. We contrast this with the popularity of autofiction, with its tendency towards self-mythologization and diaristic prose. ARX-Han compares these lazy tendencies in modern autofiction with the brutal self-exposure of a writer like Yukio Mishima, one of his biggest influences. For those unfamiliar with Mishima’s work, the novel Confessions of a Mask is a good place to start, or you can track down a copy of Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader with a soundtrack by Philip Glass.

In the case of modern autofiction, ARX-Han’s suggestion is simple — write a memoir as good as Blake Butler’s Molly, which confronts the hard truths of his relationship with his wife Molly Brodak, a poet who ended up taking her own life. This is a huge contrast to the tropes of promiscuity, drug use and narcissism that tend to dominate celebrated autofiction books in the 2020s. It’s also a huge contrast to the misanthropic main characters of Michel Houllebecq, who ARX-Han points out are often mirrors of the author’s own nihilism, but exist within carefully-built literary worlds.

After the break we talk a little about ARX-Han’s thoughts on male identity, and how it is shaped by tribalism, and therefore race. His thesis is that sexual jealousy and competition have a racial component, even when this isn’t consciously known or openly acknowledged. A writer of Chinese origin, ARX-Han’s protagonist is white, and obsessed with racial hierarchies, reserving particular contempt for people from Asian backgrounds. We relate this to the wave of far-right protests in the UK, where many attendees stated they were trying to “protect our women and kids” from immigrants. ARX-Han believes this instinct is a hangover from an earlier, more tribal phase of Western society, and will be hard for us to reject or overcome in the near term.

We talk about morality in fiction, and his approach to this in Incel: A Novel. ARX-Han speaks about the ending of the book, which is a masterful moment where the protagonist’s tight, limited perspective is challenged by another character (I’m trying to describe this without spoilers). He explains that this ending came about after some feedback from beta readers, and that it helps to keep the ending somewhat ambiguous, resisting an absolutist moral reading. It also underlines the hints given throughout the book that the protagonist may be autistic — something ARX-Han wanted to leave unanswered for the reader.

ARX-Han also briefly considers the question of free will versus determinism, and how the novel explores this — he recommends the philosopher Gregg D. Caruso as an interesting modern source on this argument. Here’s Caruso on free will and consciousness. ARX-Han is a determinist by instinct, hence the novel’s lack of an absolutist moral framework, which would depend on the existence of free will.

We finish by discussing some of the recent media on the manosphere and adjacent topics, including the drama Adolescence, and Louis Theorux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere. Because both of these are British programmes, he feels that they are somewhat behind the eight-ball when it comes to their analysis of these trends and figures. He connects the focus of these programmes to the grooming gangs scandal, and makes the point that it would be difficult to make a programme about those events without further stoking inter-ethnic tensions. He’s as interested in what these programmes fail to address as he is in the phenomena they explore.

Bringing it back to manosphere figures like Andrew Tate, he points at the influence of evolutionary psychology on bloggers like Chateau Hartiste and Rollo Tomassi, who in the mid-to-late 2000s laid the foundations of manosphere ideologies. From there, ‘black pill’ and incel communities and influencers constructed a model based on their approach to biological determinism, simultaneously flattening the ideas behind the early writing into dumbed-down, short-form video, and making them more mainstream. He considers the people Theorux spoke to to be mere “clowns,” and not worthy of too much consideration, except as an example of maximalist viral spreading.

There may be an audiobook of the novel coming soon, and ARX-Han is working on what sounds like an interesting new novella. Hit the button below to stay up to date with his essays and new work.

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Here are some more articles by ARX-Han to read:

• A review of Chris Jesu Lee’s Asian-American Psycho

• On artistic courage in fiction

• On poverty, suffering, and fiction-writing as a character-building exercise

• On ‘New Wave fiction’

Next up: Greg Blackman

In a slight change of order from my original plan, my next guest is a legend of the UK soul and hip-hop scene, and a brilliant multi-media creator — Greg Blackman has worked with luminaries such as Lack of Afro, Genesis Elijah and the Dutty Moonshine Big Band among others. His powerful voice and creative approach to lyrics are unique, and recently, he’s turned his hand to audiobooks with the new satirical horror series Nothing Works Anymore. We’ll be talking about that project, his storied music career, and his advocacy for mental health awareness.

Here are a few other things I’ve been up to recently:

• My new book Crisis Masculinity is now available for pre-order, based on my year-long web series of the same name.

• I spoke to Mark McG of You Call That Radio about the book and its themes in late July — it was a great conversation.

• I’m planning book launches in Edinburgh and Glasgow in September or October — details to follow, hopefully in my next post.

• For Revol Press, I recently spoke to author Kirsten J. Lee about her forthcoming book Death and Things: The Existential Labor of Queer Objects.

Until next time… look after each other.

— Bram, Glasgow, August 2026

Shot in the Glasgow Subway system, with ‘Sky Taxis’ Tickle has created a rich visual world to tell the story of an alienated worker hypnotised by malign technologies, labouring at the bottom end of a hypercapitalist dystopia.

Like most of the artists, writers and filmmakers I know, both Tickle and PCPQ are independent artists with incredible talent, vision and passion. With little to no support from institutions, funders and the media in Scotland, they’ve carved out a niche and a reputation for themselves as consummate, talented artists. This video raises the bar for both of them, delivering a conceptual punch along with an addictive ear-worm of a tune.

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Check out a few more projects from each of them:

• Tickle’s albums Tickle McNichollTM and This Is Hip-Hop

• PCPQ’s albums Music For First Contact and Music For Hypercapitalists

You can catch them both tonight (Friday 24 July) live on You Call That Radio discussing the song, the video, and their future projects.

My series on male identity, Crisis Masculinity, finished in July. Today, I’m thrilled to officially announce a print and audiobook edition supported by Bidrohi Books. Check out the awesome cover above, which (along with the logo) was designed by Rich Bullimore of Motion Rich.

The collection will include:

• two more essays by me, not published in the online series

• all the guest essays

• an additional essay by a very special guest (all will be revealed!)

If you’d like to get yourself a copy and support my writing:

• You can pre-order a copy now

• I’ll be selling a limited number of copies at Darren McGarvey’s Edinburgh Fringe show Performative Male on 8 August, where I’ll be in conversation with Darren about the book’s themes

• I’m planning book launches in Edinburgh and Glasgow in August and September (details to follow)

• Crisis Masculinity will go on general sale on 10 September

It’s been a wild ride publishing this series here on Substack, with a few of the essays reaching a much bigger audience than Strange Exiles episodes, and some fantastic discussions in the comments section. I want to take the chance to thank the people who made the publication of the series possible — especially my paid subscribers.

My deepest thanks go to Gareth Farmer, Kelda, Mark Quigley, AJ, Marc Galligan, Steve Barnes, No Investigues, Gary Lindquist, Julie Laing, Andrew, Julia Nye, Sunniva Hunter, R. G. Rader, Johnny Cypher, Darren McGarvey, and Mike Watson of Revol Press for their vital financial support. A massive thank you to all of my free subscribers too, for all of your comments, feedback and criticism.

Speaking of paid subscribers, all of the people named above will get a personal thank you in the book’s acknowledgements, and a free copy of the book in the post. I’ll email you all soon to ask for an address. If you’d like to continue financially supporting me to publish more standalone essays, more series, and more podcasts — thank you! If you’re hopping off the paid tier now the series is done, that’s also fine — I hope you’ll stick around and see what comes next.

I'd also like to extend my sincerest thanks to the authors who contributed guest posts. These essays deepened and expanded the series in ways I'd not even considered. Thank you , , , , , , and .

Speaking of what comes next, after the podcast passes 50 episodes, things will slow down a bit. I'm working on my next book for , and need to get my head properly into the first draft. I also have a couple of fiction projects cooking which I'll stay tight-lipped about for now. So the next year may not feature monthly shows or essays — hopefully the wait will be worth it when a new book drops in 2027/28. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

The world of small press and independent publishing is fiercely competitive. Margins are narrow, and achieving reach to make people aware of your work is a rigged game at the mercy of algorithms, populist/poptimist trends, and the mercurial tastes of the average reader. Any author like myself who works in that space faces an uphill battle. If you want to support me, and the book, in other ways, here are a few suggestions:

• Pre-order a copy

• Share this post using the button below!

• After you’ve read it, or received your copy, post about it on your socials

• Review the book on Goodreads or Amazon

• Tell your friends! Nothing beats word of mouth

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Here’s some early praise for Crisis Masculinity from two magnificent Scottish writers, both of whom have offered me enduring support and encouragement:

“Gieben's work is urgent and essential — it opens up the big difficult questions in an increasingly intellectually locked down society.”
— Ewan Morrison aka (multi-award winning novelist, author of Tales From The Mall and For Emma)

“A testament to Bram’s editorial eye, this eclectic essay collection brings together an impressive range of voices to examine the systems shaping modern masculinity. It is challenging, illuminating, and essential reading for any man willing to reflect deeply on his place in the world.”
— (Orwell Prize winner 2018, author of Trauma Industrial Complex and Poverty Safari)

You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them. You can’t close them. And you go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted! You hear me, you fucking faggots? A-B-C. A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING!1

- David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

The hit Netflix TV show Adolescence premiered in 2025, bringing a moral panic about the “manosphere”, incels and knife crime into the heart of mainstream discourse. This tale of a radicalised young boy who murders a female classmate after falling under the influence of ideas from the manosphere was a taut, claustrophobic thriller, but it attracted some criticism from those who had researched these three separate but intertwined phenomena for simplifying the issue, and in places, missing the point — mainly by conflating the issues, rather than addressing any of them in depth. William Costello breaks down some relevant statistics about incel violence:

Incel violence is… extremely rare. For context, there are approximately 20,000 active users of the largest incel forum (Incels.is), and approximately 59 people worldwide have been killed in ideologically motivated spree killings by incels… Research consistently indicates most incels reject violence. One study showed that 80% of incels completely rejected violence, with low rates of approval of extremist acts… Incel endorsement of violence appears comparable to other nationally representative samples.2

In other words, the spectre of violence committed by radicalised young men has attracted a lot of attention, but thankfully, mass killing events like those perpetrated by Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian are vanishingly rare. What Costello’s analysis elides, however, is the everyday violence perpetrated by boys and men, and rarely prosecuted by the state — rapes, domestic abuse, coercive control and more generalised forms of misogynist abuse are still a central experience in womens’ lives, and it is difficult to estimate to what degree incel culture, or influencers like Andrew Tate, have made things worse.

As Laurie Penny argued in a 2026 piece for The Guardian, the rise of Tate was predictable. She draws a line from revenge porn and threats against female public figures in the early 2000s and 2010s to pick-up artists, Gamergate, and finally to incels, the red pill, Tate and his clones. She concludes: “The rage and alienation of men abandoned by post-crash capitalism was channelled towards a common cause – one ripe for co-option by the worst possible actors.”3 Penny is right to draw these comparisons, and tie them to capitalism’s failure to fill the void of “positive” versions of masculinity. Bad actors like Tate are opportunists and hucksters. They prey on the psychology of threatened masculinity by emphasising strength and dominance, but do nothing to challenge the logic that dictates that violence in male culture is endemic. They tell their followers that the world is a tough place, and they must be tough to endure it. This is a sales pitch, but it is not strictly speaking an untruth. Statistically (and again, these statistics only represent recorded crimes), the substantial majority of victims of male aggression are men themselves. As Mary Harrington observes:

Between 2010 and 2024, 570 homicides were recorded in the UK, of which 156 were female and 414 were male: a male-on-male homicide rate nearly three times higher than for women.4

This chimes with what feminists like bell hooks, Amia Srinivasan and others have argued — while male violence against women is a problem for society and for all women, who must often live in a state of watchfulness and fear, there is no denying that the vicissitudes of patriarchy and the violence they breed harms more men than women, statistically speaking. It is on men, then, to fix their hearts or die.5

Of course, patriarchy itself will do everything it can to prevent young men from realising the ways that it harms them, and their responsibility to make change. Even those who do recognise these two factors at play in their own lives and psyches are often not motivated to extend that realisation to their friends and peers — to do so would be a transgression of what Michael Kimmel calls “the guy code”,6 and could come with serious repercussions for the individual who dares to break it. Harrington suggests:

In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free programme of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.7

The discussion in the wake of Adolescence tended to be about boys, and what society could do to save them from themselves, and influencers like Tate. But as Costello points out, the phenomena the show explores are distinct, with distinct causes, even if they all relate to what feminist writers describe as the patriarchy.

He observes:

Adolescence conflates distinct manosphere groups. For instance, a female detective dismisses the incel issue as “that Andrew Tate shite.” But this overlooks important ideological distinctions: ‘red-pill’ content, like Tate’s, promotes traditional gender roles and sexual dominance, whereas ‘black-pill’ incel ideology is rooted in fatalism, rejection, and perceived sexual worthlessness. Lumping them together erases these key differences and risks obscuring how and why young men engage with each worldview. To be fair to the writers, they may here have simply been reflecting the actual adult confusion around the topic, rather than their own. But as a result, the show fails to deepen the understanding of this online world among adult viewers.8

Feminist writers too are often tempted to conflate and universalise these distinct ideologies, especially when trying to understand the motivations of incel killers. The examples offered by Eliott Rodger and Alek Minassian are so extreme they tend to draw out hyperbole, even from level-headed commentators. Rather than address what might have drawn Elliot Rodger to murder women, or his radicalisation online, Amia Srinivasan chooses to focus on the ways in which he was correct to assume that women scorned him, in part because of his extreme beliefs, and in part due to him not playing by the (implicitly patriarchal) “rules of the game” when interacting with women.

She writes:

Rodger was a creep, and it was partly his insistence on his own aesthetic, moral and racial superiority, and whatever it was in him that made him capable of stabbing his housemates and their friend a total of 134 times, not his failure to meet the demands of heteromasculinity, that kept women away.9

Srinivasan focuses on Rodger’s affect, and his effect on women — she defines him as a “creep”, marking him different and therefore “other” to the median ideal of a well-behaved or moral man. By referring to him as such, she suggests that his sexuality was too forward, too sinister, or too “other” to achieve success with women — an argument that plays into Rodger’s own stated reasons for the killings, which he laid at the feet of women who had rejected him. It was precisely being considered a “creep” with no social value, rather than a masculine, admirable “Chad” (to use the incel term for an attractive man) that inspired his murderous project of revenge. Srinivasan prefers to refer to “whatever it was in him” that permitted this violence as if it was unknowable, and unconnected to the way the world perceived Rodger — as a creep.

In order to understand incel crimes like those Rodger perpetrated, we must ask more difficult questions. We must deal with Rodger’s interiority; the way he felt, rather than how he was perceived. Instead, Srinivasan undermines this approach. She writes: “… at the very least, Rodger’s grandiosity and homicidal rage should tell us that his social marginalisation was overdetermined.”10 Because Rodger’s manifesto proclaimed his superiority, we are asked to consider whether he truly hated himself. But this seems self-evident — after murdering two young women and three young men, Rodger committed suicide. To treat his murders as a celebration of patriarchal and misogynist values, rather than an extreme example of what happens to someone who is brutalised by them, seems short-sighted — even at the risk of pulling focus from his victims. Rodger and incels like him are young men who are considered by society (and by themselves) to be “unfuckable hate nerds”, as the writer William Deresiewicz puts it. His article for the magazine Tablet pulls off the trick of allowing the reader to attempt to inhabit the mindset that would drive a young man to actions like Rodger’s.

He writes:

What does it feel like to be a young man? It feels like you are Kafka’s cockroach, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. It feels like you were drawn by Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb. You are an Untermensch, a particle, a stew of envies and resentments, a festering sore. You look, from below, at the happy and lovely and rich. You creep, alone, along a wall. You masturbate as if your life depended on it… Their behavior is disgusting, it is inexcusable, but what do we think is going to make them stop? Telling them to comb their hair, to put down the Xbox, to get a life? Reminding them that they’re unlovable and worthless? They know that already; that is precisely the problem.11

Deresiewicz is correct to identify a splinter at the heart of male identity, one that becomes even more pronounced as boys hit puberty, and the rigid policing of gender norms collides with an incipient awareness of sex and sexuality. In company, boys reinforce the crass patriarchal and heterosexual norms to which they are expected to conform. But they are only allowed to question those norms if they do so alone, as Nina Power writes:

… maleness is often felt as a kind of isolation, an understanding of the indifference of the world to your very existence. [...] Male isolation is often encouraged by a broader culture that positions the individual man as a totemic, untouchable being for whom the world is a hostile place, with no succour… We have become accustomed to imagining that the man who thinks, thinks alone.12

One writer who has done more than others to explore the dark and unpleasant truths at the heart of the incel mindset and experience is the novelist Arx-Han, whose edgy, underground 2023 debut Incel: A Novel attempts to reckon with the root causes of male disaffection. The novel is directly comparable to books such as Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho or its inspiration (also mentioned above by Deresiewicz), Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. The novel foregrounds a young man whose dark thoughts and conclusions about life, society and masculinity propel him almost inevitably towards violence. Writing on his blog, Arx-Han unpacks what makes the figure of the incel different from his literary predecessors, and “the quintessential subject of modernity.”

He writes:

… the modern incel… is a young man who has searched for meaning but found it absent. If he is alive right now, he has lived through a late-USSR style collapse in nearly every possible dimension of meaning: religion (killed by science), state (killed by oligarchical financialization), community (killed by industrial capitalism), art (killed by homogenization), family (killed by the preceding three) and lastly, love (killed by inceldom). Wealth does not count as a sufficient source of meaning. In modernity, the only ritual of masculinity that remains for the young man is to have sex… If he is unable to achieve this, there is essentially nothing left that is socially prescribed… This dynamic exists against a background of intense atomization and loneliness that is already a feature of our urban societies.13

The “atomization and loneliness” to which he refers here are not just the chauvinistic “mask” that bell hooks and other writers describe as a prerequisite for those attempting to survive, or at least go unnoticed, under patriarchy. It is also a direct consequence of the capitalist injunction that life has winners and losers. As the character of Blake urges in Glengarry, Glen Ross, men must “always be closing” the deal, whether that deal is financial, sexual, or merely a negotiation or conflict intended to establish their position in a Darwinian dominance hierarchy. It is this hierarchy that writers like Jordan Peterson and influencers like Andrew Tate wish to “return” us to; Peterson via a regression to the patriarchal and spiritual values of an earlier (and much-romanticised) era, or in the case of Tate, through the violent exploitation and subjugation of women. The hatred and entitlement felt by incels is categorically a function of the capitalist paradigm Blake’s speech in Glengarry, Glen Ross invokes, not a side effect or an unintended consequence.

Like the film of American Psycho, Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (and the “always be closing” speech in particular) have been embraced by men in corporate culture, or masculinity-oriented subcultures. They do not see (or do not care about) the irony that drives both artworks, which effectively satirise masculinity and capitalist values. Instead, they see an honest, even glamorous admission of the real stakes at play in this “man’s world” of capital accumulation and status competition.

Arx-Han’s novel works because it upends this formula, focusing without pity or favour on a depressed, morose character who would give his right arm to be like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, or Blake from Glengarry, Glen Ross. Perhaps it is for this reason that Arx-Han had to publish himself. As many commentators have observed, not only the world of publishing, but also the world of readers, is increasingly female-dominated.14 Women do not want to read about male characters very much, if at all — least of all depressed, morose men; losers under the terms of capitalism.

Fictional characters that embody masculine traits, no matter how toxic, are considered more interesting by both male and female readers, as Naomi Kanakia explains:

… the central problem of the white male writer is that you’re raised with some mythology of yourself as a powerful person, but at some point you realize you’re actually weak and impotent. Yet you’re in a culture where in order to succeed, both professionally and personally, you need to project power. So you end up feeling weak and insecure. White male writers would like to convey this struggle in fiction, but… fiction is subject to the same problem. Female readers are repelled by men who seem pathetic, and if your protagonist is too self-loathing or weak, then women won’t want to read them.15

It is the very invisibility of unsuccessful, emotionally devastated male characters — like the protagonist of Arx-Han’s Incel: A Novel — that reinforces the capitalist notion that men must succeed, or die trying. Writing on the persistence of hierarchies, nepotism, and the exclusionary tactics that (especially) men use to enforce these capitalist mechanisms, Freddie DeBoer disembowels the notion that capitalism is a meritocracy, and not an “old boys network” run on allegiances which are sustained in no small part by patriarchal codes.

He writes:

… the prestige economy operates through alchemy and innuendo, communicates through Slack channels and off-the-books conversations, rewards deference to insider mores and fealty to in-group status hierarchy, treats actual ability as a tertiary concern, and (especially) amounts to one of those strange games of telephone where everyone is developing a sense of prestige not through their own organic perceptions but by trying to deduce what everyone else thinks is and is not prestigious. It’s all a lousy basis through which opportunity might be distributed; that some degree of status hierarchy is an inevitable part of all human competitive cultures does not make it less lousy.16

Teenage boys, and likely a majority of young men, are all constantly engaged in such status games, and in “trying to deduce what everyone else thinks is and is not prestigious”, politically correct, or acceptable behaviour. This, in essence, is the “crisis” of masculinity, and it is a perpetual crisis. Being a man is about second-guessing yourself, but also others. To doubt one’s own insider status or prestige is a bottomless source of anxiety. Being able to second-guess a competitor confers an advantage, and therefore success. The same mechanisms we use to get ahead in the world are the mechanisms we use to abuse and punish ourselves and each other, because we can never get ahead of everyone. We become convinced that in order to succeed, we must cut out the parts of us that doubt, that feel, that think. We must become machine-like in our pursuit of victory, because that is what makes us strong men.

Michael Kimmel writes:

[Men] believe that the capacity for empathy and compassion has to be suppressed, early on, in the name of achieving masculinity… Most young men who engage in acts of violence — or who watch them and do nothing, or who joke about it with their friends — fully subscribe to traditional ideologies about masculinity. The problem isn’t psychological: these guys aren’t deviants. If anything, they are overconforming to the hyperbolic expressions of masculinity that still inform American culture.

One could argue that the violence of an incel attack is simply an extreme example of this “overconforming”. Young men like Elliot Rodger have accepted without question the Social Darwinist bargain that DeBoer and Arx-Han describe above. Convinced that they cannot win under such a system, that they are forever branded “losers”, they engage in an act so violent that it will bring them another kind of prestige, admiration and validation — even though they themselves will be dead. As Aaron Rabinowitz writes:

Men will not simply ‘suck it up’ and accept lives that feel meaningless to them. They will fight back and force the world to respect them again, at gunpoint if necessary.17

That such a fatalistic conclusion is possible, no matter how rare such violent ends might be, points directly at the reasons capitalism and patriarchy are failing and killing young men at an increasing and alarming rate, even before taking into account the violence meted out to their victims, or the collateral damage done to their families and friends. Responding to the assassination of right wing pundit Charlie Kirk in 2025, Freddie DeBoer points out that young male shooters are driven less by ideology, and more by alienation, and anxiety about their status – meaning their violence is a symptom, rather than evidence of the existence of causal factors like “toxic masculinity”.

He writes:

The young male, socially and economically unanchored, increasingly broke, ineligible for sympathy, ideologically unformed, represents a point of low inertia in the human political sphere. They are not the cause of the system’s instability, but the most visible symptom of its underlying decay. They are the pioneer species of the coming social collapse, adapting to a new, chaotic environment before the more rigid, established structures can. Their actions, while seemingly random and directionless, are a direct measure of the system’s energy state.18

What else can young men do, what other paths can they choose? This is the vital question we must help them to answer. There are of course alternatives to the full-on embrace of patriarchal values, but often, these can be as restrictive as the system they seek to replace.

Writing about the “just a chill guy” meme,19 Magdalene J. Taylor says:

Nobody wants you to be anything but a chill guy, and certainly, you shouldn’t disappoint them. ‘Just a chill guy’ is a complete non-threat, an identity served entirely by its emotional emptiness. We’re uncomfortable with men expressing themselves in any other way, and this meme demonstrates our complete resignation with that reality. Particularly when it comes to sex and dating, being ‘just a chill guy’ takes away any sense of desperation, though this itself is a tell. The chill guy is a passive participant. He represents our current sense of the lack of authority in our own lives, and the imperative to grin and bear it, anyway.20

Even men who reject masculinity are not allowed to display emotions. They must be passive, and offer their allyship to women and those from marginalised identities through a mask that makes them seem unthreatening. While many men would like to consider themselves a chill guy, and unlikely to be a threat to anyone, this is still an identity that also asks them not to feel, much less express their emotions. Taylor argues the “chill guy” archetype is not much of an improvement on the stoic, reserved, stiff-upper-lip caricature of Victorian masculinity. It is less of an identity, more of a flex — an attempt to circumvent or subvert masculine norms, not to reinvent or reimagine them.

As the writer Peter Boghossian puts it:

Generally, we become what we are expected to be, and thus we have raised men whose primary traits are incompetence and sadism. This is toxic to society, and to those men.21

If, as the British commentator Polly Toynbee believes, “Riot hovers ever-present just beneath the veneer of civilisation, a layer of male violence ready to erupt in exuberant hate,”22 then the 2024 riots in the UK that targeted asylum seekers can be directly attributed to the same source as manosphere-inspired violence. But this conclusion reinforces a binary approach to thinking about both masculinity, and the political orientation of men. In the popular imagination, men are either right-coded and dedicated to patriarchy, or left-coded and committed to dismantling it. In reality, most people have complicated thoughts and opinions on the subject.

This duality — and the flattening of debate it produces — serves capitalism, as the writer Jane Clare Jones points out:

Both gender identitarianism… and gender conservatism, with its reassertion of natural hierarchy, are historically, and ideologically, part of one mirror-image mechanism. They are two identitarian sides of the same patriarchal coin, and neither side will serve the actual interests of female human beings. Moreover, both sides need each other for the game of inversion and opposition they are intent on playing to continue, and both sides will… reliably project all their detractors as members of the other ‘tribe.’23

On the right-coded identitarian side, we find Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Both are figures who draw on male shame, cultivating the idea that the patriarchy is under threat, and that they each have a solution for this. While Peterson’s appeal is a fairly simplistic (and increasingly Christian-inspired) push for the return of patriarchal values as expressed in the nuclear family with the father at the head of the table, Tate’s appeal lies in the permission he gives to young men to say whatever they want, and act as they please. For men who feel lost, or carry with them a sense of aggrieved entitlement, especially to women’s bodies, Tate’s message is the most toxic, because the promise is not one of spiritual enlightenment and conservative ideas of the good life, but the dream of the successful “hustler” and entrepreneur.

Katie Kerchner unpacks the manosphere’s appeals:

They leverage the power of wellness and self-help rhetoric in a society that purports to be a meritocracy. And they offer clear answers to some of the most profound questions we all grapple with: Who am I? What is my purpose in this life? What is my role? What gives life meaning? The answers the manosphere provides to these questions are, of course, wrong. But they’re clear answers nonetheless… Conversations about masculinity on the Left often end up playing into the reactionary power of the manosphere by focusing on rebutting what we find problematic: we tell men what not to do, who not to be, how not to act. Rightful critiques of masculinity are incomplete without an affirmative vision of our own to offer.24

These “rightful critiques” are often hard to parse from an avalanche of think-pieces that seek to criticise or feminize masculinity. Such critiques are easy enough for influencers like Tate and thinkers like Peterson to portray as misandry. Their profits are extracted from the space where men consider themselves targeted, criticised and invalidated. Peterson’s drift towards right-wing punditry and soft-headed spirituality undermines the positive aspects of his “self-help” writing, but for Tate, the malignancy of his ideology is both the appeal, and the source of profit.

Zoë Hu writes:

The Tate ethos is a wholly modern one, for it magnetizes sexual violence toward the absolute aim of economic exploitation. Under Tate’s program, women are transformed into gig workers and subjected to an imperial profit motive. At the same time, their bodies are open to sexual and physical torture. They are instruments of financial valorization and also mute objects for male pleasure and domination; they are both the means and the ends, and the man who presides over them can have his enjoyment both ways — directly, through rape, or indirectly, through money.25

Tate’s vision of the ultimate masculinity as “boss and rapist”, as Hu puts it, is more malign than Peterson’s ideology. But what cannot be laid at Tate’s door is the drift towards right-wing nostalgia for the past’s patriarchal values, which can be seen clearly in the swing to Trump in the 2024 US elections. This is Peterson’s take on “manosphere” concepts, inscribed as policy. As an anonymous teacher put it, in the wake of Trump’s second election victory:

Young, well-off white boys from liberal families are being tempted by conservatism simply to protect an archaic idea of masculinity that guarantees them inherent power… a shift back toward traditional gender roles is resonating with them now as progression toward female empowerment threatens their already delicate self esteem.26

David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, agrees. For him, the MAGA movement: “... is about sexual grievance, even more than racial resentment. It is an expression of male disgruntlement that depends on the votes of men — not just any men, but those who feel disrespected and undervalued.”27 Sam Kriss goes further, depicting the gender-coded political division we’re witnessing as a literal manifestation of a battle of the sexes:

Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.28

Other commentators have speculated at length about the factors that cause this feeling of being “undervalued” — some blame the gap that now exists between young women and men in education, with many colleges and universities now taking in a substantial majority of female candidates. Others point at the loss of traditionally “male” jobs to automation and other factors — farming, factory work and other sectors offer scant opportunities and meagre wages. None of these demographic trends fully explain the permissive attitudes towards misogyny, rape and male domination that both Peterson and Tate (as the leading manosphere figures) seem to have ushered in. We must also avoid over-diagnosing the scale and extent of their online radicalisation activities, as Richard V. Reeves points out:

… [Young] men are not being radicalized by the internet, they are retreating to it. The path of male retreat is paved in pixels. Of course there’s good and bad stuff online as in real life. The algorithm, especially when not understood correctly, can mean that young men are being saturated with content that they may not agree with, but starts to shape them in various ways.29

How do we move from “rightful critiques” of toxic masculine traits and ideologies towards an “affirmative vision” of what modern men could be, as Kirchner suggests? Without critiques, we have no roadmap for change. But these critiques can be the trigger for young men to fall into the fantasy-land of the manosphere, where the only affirmative vision available is the pimp, the hustler, or traditional, paternalistic roles. Arguably, feminists have been doing too much of the work here, for decades and more. If we are to create a counter-culture in opposition to, or even within the existing manosphere, it must be men who do the work to envision and create it. The failure to do this work will push men further and further to the right, because we will have failed to address their loneliness and isolation, let alone their radicalisation.

Harry Shukman spent a year undercover with the British far right, funded by the anti-fascist action group Hope Not Hate. He remarked on the loneliness and disconnection that the men taken in by far-right groups expressed:

In discussion groups, in city pubs, at secret meetings in the countryside, many of them spoke about feeling like outcasts. In one organisation, I noticed that most members seemed more interested in companionship than political debate. They described their days of working in dull, unfulfilling jobs, and evenings spent listening to hours-long fascist live streams… Wanting connection is a common reason people give for arriving at these groups, and also what makes it hard for them to leave, even if they’re not enjoying themselves.30

The far-right has always preyed on alienated young men. In Glasgow, where I live, for years there was a problem with hate groups showing up at the city’s Four Corners — an area where homeless and vulnerable youths often gather — to find new recruits.31 Similar stories abound throughout the UK. The problem now is that while the far right’s recruiting tactics have not changed, their sophistication in masking toxic and racist ideologies has grown — and their ideas have been mainstreamed by those who are influenced by “manosphere” figures.

Craig Johnson unpacks this:

Increasing the degree of social power wielded by women and non-binary people means a reduction in the number of socially powerful positions held by men, an important and just goal. But read from the perspective of a young man who has no social agency he can recognise, this can sound like selling him a future where he’s less powerful than his father and grandfather. Without the provision of context it could understandably feel like injustice; as if the rug is being pulled out from under him and his friends. Why wouldn’t they listen to politicians and influencers who tell them that they’re the victims here?32

Johnson also identifies some of the class-related issues that feed into the debate around manosphere influencers, and their appeal. He observes that many of the young men drawn into their orbit “have less life experience than the people criticising them”, often coming from deprived estates, broken homes, or just the harsh, Darwinian battlefields of inner-city schools — as depicted so powerfully in the second episode of Adolescence. In such pressure-cooker environments, deprived of positive male role models, boys are easy prey for everyone from Tate and Tate-lite influencers to the toxic grievance politics of MAGA or Reform, and even fascist skinhead gangs. Simon Copland underlines this in his excellent book on the manosphere, The Male Complaint:

Extremist groups are the first place that attempt to understand young men’s lives, and this act of understanding is often enough to draw people in. Some even join because these groups are the first to invite them to a party, or the first to listen when they express complaints about their lives… They are a space where individuals can create a collective and individual identity.33

In any book of this nature, we must come to the most important question posed by Lenin when considering the path to revolution: “What is to be done?” How do we create healthy spaces where young men “can create a collective and individual identity”? Or as the writer Rachel Hewitt frames the question:

How can you — men — let go of your sense of entitlement to power and domination? How can you stop resenting and hating women when your power is thwarted; when you don’t get your own way all of the time?34

The right, as we have previously established, have no answers that do not depend on regressive ideas about masculinity and society. In the long term, these will prove to be insufficient to address the root causes of masculine entitlement and disaffection, as Christine Emba writes:

… for all the overheated rhetoric deployed to engage men’s sympathies, what’s mainly on offer is the impossible suggestion that they reenact the lives their grandfathers led, followed by encouragement to blame society when that inevitably fails.35

This rhetoric is effective now, and is very prevalent in our culture, rising to fill the void at the heart of the mainstream where men are (or feel) under-represented or threatened. But it cannot last, especially if the left is able to pose a better counter-narrative. Where to start? First we must recognise the weaknesses in the arguments posed by the existing manosphere.

Ben Sixsmith writes:

Whether hostile or sympathetic, all of these arguments were afflicted with the fundamentally destructive premise that masculinity was a problem to be solved rather than a phenomenon to be engaged with.36

Slavoj Žižek has some thoughts on objectivity which may be of use here. If criticism of men is offered (or perceived to be offered) from a position of false objectivity, causing men to reflexively recoil, then we could consider instead how to start a dialogue with radicalised men — without being tempted to reach any kind of fixed resolution.

He writes:

… in an authentic dialogue, there is no pressure to reach a final reconciliation or accord, but merely to reconcile ourselves with the irreducible difference of perspectives which cannot be subordinated to any encompassing universality.37

What Žižek proposes is not an embrace or celebration of difference, but a tolerance of disagreement in an open and frank exchange. Rather than immediately demand of men that they find commonality and universality with women (and other identities), we must first meet them where they live, and listen to what they have to say. Only in an atmosphere free of judgment, where men feel open to discussing their fears and prejudices without persecution, will we find a productive space in which to show them that their fears about identitarian judgement are unwarranted or overstated, and that unity along the lines of class struggle could unite us all. We need to give them better options than the hollow victories of capitalist hustle culture, where Tate promises riches and respect, but based on a Ponzi scheme structure that exploits more than it delivers — remembering that the cars, watches and houses on display in Tate’s videos are rented. We need to show them that the move back towards a patriarchal system that Peterson and others have proposed is impossible — like it or not, that world is gone, and if its retrieval comes at the cost of democracy and civil society, the means do not justify the ends.

As Copland argues:

This mission, whether Manosphere men like it or not, is dying. Trying to live up to it creates constant failure, which… can lead to further despair and violence.38

The project to achieve these aims is urgent, because while Tate and his imitators are winning the game of influence, MAGA and Reform, and far-right, anti-democratic parties throughout Europe and the world are winning (or look likely to gain influence) in democratic elections. By the time young men are living in a Gilead-like autocracy, it will be too late. But alarmism also does not serve us well — this is not Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, at least not yet. We have the time, resources and arguments to show how the eventual terminus of manosphere politics is not somewhere any of us want to live — including vulnerable, angry young men. Who can deliver these messages? It must be us. Men must speak to men.

Feminist writer Sarah Ditum agrees:

… the ‘more’ needed by boys needs to come, ultimately, from the boys themselves. They need the kind of care that can teach them to become carers for themselves, as well as others… Feminism worked for women because women already had the deeply ingrained habit of looking after themselves, and each other. The more men acquire the same facility, the less, perhaps, we will need to talk about masculinity as a crisis.39

To build a positive, men’s equivalent of feminism, perhaps we must do so within the manosphere. As Helen Pluckrose observes: “Those of us who wish to draw boys away from it would be wise not to assist it in presenting itself as a space for outcasts and rebels against the norm.”40 Either we attempt to improve it, or build alternatives, as many influencers focused on “positive masculinity” have tried (though none of them have so far scaled as fast as Tate and his imitators). As others have observed, there are aspects of manosphere culture and ideology that are already positive, and on which we can build. Even Tate’s messaging about self-improvement through exercise has merit, if tainted by the way it is presented, and to what ends.

The worst thing we could do would be to talk about “men’s rights” in a world where no such rights are under threat. It is men’s status that concerns them, and drives their anxiety, not a political movement to undermine their legal rights. Positing such a movement is one of the core tactics that Trump, Peterson and others have used to spread “misandrist” conspiracy theories among their target audience. Nor should we fret too much about signifying that we wish to build some form of “positive masculinity” — this is a framing that accepts a binary where traditional masculinity is inherently “toxic” and that the learning or imitation of “feminine” traits must be inculcated and followed in order to counter it. Most men will respond to this as an act of persecution and erasure. Instead we should counter manosphere politics with good storytelling — social media, journalism and writing are all storytelling mediums, and to influence men for the good we must show, rather than tell. All the elements we need to tell such stories are present in the existing manosphere.

As Nina Power observes, even the most malign influencers promote some positive ideas:

Most masculinist influencers promote objectively healthy behaviour, such as staying fit, eating well and starting a family — Andrew Tate is an outlier even in the “manosphere”... Most men do not wish to be (alleged) human traffickers, nor pimps, nor possess a harem. 41

Aaron Rabinowitz says we must address a “crisis of meaning” in male identities and ideologies:

The common refrain is that men should just ‘suck it up’, and that “loss of privilege feels like oppression” — which is essentially a fancy way of saying men aren’t actually experiencing real problems, just bad vibes. [...] …whenever the issue of men’s feelings come[s] up it is often tamped back down with facts about how things are actually perfectly fine for men right now, so people need to shut up about men’s feelings… we need to abandon the retributive strain of social justice in favour of restorative social justice practices. That starts with recognising that everyone’s needs matter, including the need for respect, and that nobody deserves to suffer, even men.42

This approach of openness and rapprochement must be tempered by realism, unless it risks indulging the more toxic strains of entitlement bound up with current manosphere discourses. As the feminist writer Lyta Gold puts it: “No one is asking men to accept meaningless lives under capitalism who are not also asking women to accept meaningless lives under capitalism.”43 While Gold wryly makes this point in service of an argument that men should pull their socks up and take responsibility, it’s a valid one — a concrete goal for left-wing manosphere engagement should be to help men understand that it is capitalism, and not women, that causes their allo-exploited existence, and the crisis of meaning that leads them to seek out easy answers from either misogyny, or paternalistic traditionalism. We are all in this together, as Sarah Jones puts it:

Men may lack purpose, but that dilemma is not unique to them, as women also struggle for meaning and value. The real culprit is a political economy that renders everyone powerless and insecure. As long as it endures, purpose remains a loose concept, and that allows snake oil to flourish.44

Rage is the most damaging of human emotions. When anger, fear and rage take over, the body floods with cortisol, producing a myriad of horrible, toxic effects. The manosphere thrives on rage, but so does the wider internet. Social media is a garbage fire of inflamed, incensed debate fuelled by fear and sadness, fury and resentment. If we can find a way to tell a story about men finding peace in their bodies and communities, and in radical self-acceptance — whether through exercise, public service, or more day-to-day activities and cultures like fatherhood, community sports, the provision of youth clubs, food banks or other services in communities ravaged by austerity — these will offer examples of ways in which men can thrive. Such projects must be documented online, but not driven or motivated by a quest for likes and engagement.

An offline manosphere could be a place where men embrace each other as a community; a place where we accept and educate each other, and where we can be open about our feelings, our anxieties and our hopes; just as feminists created such spaces for themselves over the past decades. There are flickers of this already in organisations like the UK Men’s Sheds Association, Andy’s Man Club, or even in your local gym. When men gather to focus on self-improvement of a physical kind, they are probably open to conversations about personal, spiritual and political improvements too. But, as the writer Kristen R. Ghodsee observes, men also need to feel engaged in meaningful activities beyond mere self-improvement:

We need institutions that give... men a reliable source of positive self-regard. Ideally those institutions could be put in the service of ending inequality, rather than just distracting from it or acting out its anxieties... A highly active labor movement, for example, would reward values like political leadership, community service, political education, and so on. High unionization rates create whole social worlds with their own incentive and affirmation structures. This could be a powerful social stabilizing force. [...] In the 1930s, unpartnered men at the bottom rungs of society individuated through class struggle.45

The framing of these conversations, organisations and movements requires a careful storytelling approach, with no hectoring, lecturing or admonishment. Men must have spaces without shame, but also without the shamelessness of right-wing reactionary narratives.

As Emba writes:

It’s… important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. [Manosphere figures] find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as ‘toxic’ or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at all. At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making ‘masculinity’ out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable. And the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.46

Perhaps setting out to purge masculinity of all of its toxic aspects is a fool’s errand, or a lost cause. The prevalence of homophobic bullying in schools is a direct consequence of the need young men have to prove that they are not gay, and therefore not feminine. As we have seen, it is this “corrective” bullying that traps men in brutal paradigms of conformity to misogynist ideas about sex and gender. But even this horrorshow, the brutal assault course boys endure as they become men, a state of perma-crisis, could be undermined with positive engagement, and examples that counteract the flattened, rictus-like caricature of the “manly man”. All boys need are good examples. It is simply the case that at the moment, such examples are thin on the ground, or scared to speak up and represent themselves with similarly forthright, compelling, simplistic narratives as those offered by the manosphere.

As Stephen Bradford-Long writes:

Boys can be theater kids and football players; wrestlers and artists; they can dream of being heroes, but a minority will also yearn to be princesses. Men will be poets and ballet dancers; firemen and boxers; caretakers and drag queens. Men can dominate sexually, but they can also be pursued. Men can penetrate, but they can also know the secret pain and ecstasy of being penetrated. None of this is a negation of one’s manhood: it only means that masculinity is wide and many walk through it. Patterns and averages at a population level do not negate the lives of individual men.47

What does this mean for you, as a man? It means that first, you can forgive yourself — with compassion, you can choose to look at the toxic behaviours and attitudes you carry with you, whether these manifest as a reflexive anger at challenges to your dominance, or the negative, judgemental voice you carry within you, criticising everything you do for not living up to a dusty, old, dead idea of what a man should be.

As the person behind the virally-successful meme account Lexaprotagonist puts it in a very funny post about dismal male archetypes, it’s OK to just be yourself, whatever that means, and find your value reflected in the eyes of others:

Caring is cool. Standing for something makes you someone. Let’s be real. There’s nothing wrong with being a man. The issue is how you go about coming into your masculinity and how you stratify the world around you in an age where male centeredness is quickly dissolving from the cultural spotlight. Being yourself is the quickest way to stand out, to make new friends, to find yourself in spaces that you could never be in if you continue to limit yourself to the confines of what you believe a man should be or shouldn’t be. The performance begins once you subscribe to a life that you believe you should follow rather than one that you want to follow in order to please the people around you.48

Secondly, as Lexaprotagonist indicates, it means you can cultivate solidarity with other men — even and especially those claimed by the manosphere or the far-right, who we need to reach and embrace if we are to change their minds and hearts. As Clementine Morrigan, the Canadian feminist and anarchist has put it, “Fuck the police means we don’t act like cops to each other.” If we are to educate, if we are to perform the urgent work of outreach, we must offer our fellow men our hands as brothers, rather than raving at them as enemies. The “cops” in this scenario are politicians, corporations and media figures with more power, reach and influence than us — they sow division, and prey on our isolation. Brotherhood is a powerful weapon against such dark forces. We must move on from polarized takes on gender and identity and move towards some kind of synthesis, or else both “sides” lose, as Celeste Davis writes:

In this war of binaries if men are empathized with, women are not. If we admit women are victims that means men are not. Any petition for both / and thinking is diminished as a mere vote for the opposing side.49

We also need to recognise that the vivid colours of our own pain, though crushingly real, pale next to the suffering of others. I have written honestly about my pain and suffering in these pages, but others — including most women — suffer worse indignities, more tyrannous interventions and predations, than those I have endured. The world is full of pain. Oppression, abuse, grinding poverty, war and famine are commonplace in the world we share. A recognition that suffering is universal is not a personal endorsement or reification of one’s own pain. It is an opportunity to acknowledge that others suffer too; that their pain is ours. To find common cause with others, to try and fight the injustices that cause this pain, is a powerful way to free ourselves from identities that no longer serve us.

If we do so, as Alexander Douglas writes in the introduction to his treatise Against Identity:

We might feel a unity with others that is deeper than identification with them: seeing in them, not something identical to ourselves, but rather other expressions of the same superdeterminate being that we express. It shows the way that we can all be alike in difference — entering the world of others instead of trying to bring them into our own.50

We can look to existing figures, existing stories — including those handed down by feminist thinkers — to help us tell the tale of positive masculinity. As men, we are all in recovery, struggling to navigate or overcome crisis after crisis. In order to find forgiveness, perhaps even redemption, we must first forgive ourselves, our so-called enemies, and even the world, with its many cruelties. Forget closing the deal, beating the “other” and “winning”. Open your heart, open your mind. As Blake from Glengarry, Glen Ross might have put it in a timeline less brutal than ours… Always. Be. Open.

My prescriptions here are modest, and limited. I do not pretend to have the answers, or to suggest a policy or programme that will solve the urgent questions around how we rescue, reform or reimagine male identity. Over the course of these essays, I’ve written about gender, and how our conceptions of it are open to change. I’ve written about the masculine identities we imitate, reproduce and admire, and what that tells us about the kind of men we are, and want to be. I’ve written about my own struggles with identity and sexuality; my experiences of desire and suffering, and of identity-formation. I’ve engaged with discourses around our yearning for fame and recognition, and the instincts we have for self-care and self-regulation. Here at the end, all I am left with are hard questions, difficult choices, and a crude map of our uncertain future as men trying to live well in a complex and shifting world. Where we go next, and how we answer those questions, is up to us — like the state of perma-crisis I have identified as the defining feature of male identity, we will perhaps never find definitive answers.

Perhaps it is enough to say: you don’t have to do this alone. Manhood and masculinity are, among other things, brotherhoods. If the best we can do is show up for our brothers — and our sisters — maybe that is enough.

Further reading

This is the end of the series! If you followed the whole thing, thank you so much. As I've mentioned before, the next step is a print version of Crisis Masculinity.

There will be a special announcement and thank you post next week, where I'll expand more on my gratitude for all of your support, and the engagement with these posts — it's been a wild ride, and I'm overwhelmed by the positive response. I'm also beyond grateful for the generosity and brilliance of my guest essayists — I hope you enjoyed their contributions too.

For the last time, here are a few things I've been reading on similar themes and topics:

• on why “Masculinity” Is a Bad Frame for Describing the Problem of Male Political Alienation

• on “good” men versus “bad” men — you can catch Darren and I in conversation on 8 August at the Edinburgh Fringe

• In case you missed it, ’s funny and horrifying essay on social media advertising and masculinity is free to read for everyone

• Simon Pearson aka on the “cosplay of hardship” performed by grindset influencers

• on what I've described before as “inactivism” — an honest and unflinching essay on ambition, and the comforts of abandoning it

• I'm about halfway through Against Identity by . It's beyond excellent, outlining the case against the identitatian world view, and why our obsession with it doesn't make us happy. I'll be talking to Alexander for Strange Exiles soon, so consider this book your homework!

Scroll to the bottom of this post or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube to watch the video version of this episode.

Reading recommendations from Clare Follmann

Clare starts by mentioning environmentalist Lowell Diller, who passed away in 2017. She encountered him during her studies at Evergreen State College in Washington, and was challenged by his ideas about the suppression of so-called “invasive” species. Her piece for Revol Press is about Diller and his work — read it here.

From that piece:

In the late 2000s, Diller initiated an experiment to see if shooting barred owls would help spotted owls escape extinction. By the time he came to speak to our class, he’d already killed over a hundred barred owls. He said that every time he shot one, he felt like what he was doing was wrong. Diller shared that the first time he had to shoot an owl, he was so overcome with emotion that he nearly couldn’t pull the trigger. As he told us this story, he explained that, though it was hard, there was “nothing else to be done.” And even though two out of five of the sites in his experiment indicated nearly no change after barred owl eradication, Diller argued that it was the best plan available.

This led to the genesis of Clare’s work on invasive species — as she says, Diller was distressed by the policy of killing on species of owls to save another. Clare began to wonder if there was another way to think about “invasive” species, starting with an analysis of the militaristic language we use to frame these problems.

The language used is not just militaristic — it is also nakedly capitalist, as Clare goes on to elaborate. Animal populations are thought of as “stock” — a problem that only gets more pronounced as the climate crisis begins to drive migration. So-called “invasive” species may be fleeing the loss of their natural habitats, which complicates the notion of them “invading” new territories. As Clare points out, the whole discourse of “invasive” versus “native” species is riddled with imperialistic dogma, and conceptual scaffolding borrowed from war, economics and nationalism. Clare is keen to emphasise that some species do cause devastation when they migrate to new territories — but that the language we use to describe this can be unhelpful, just as the techniques for mitigating that damage can be cruel.

Clare’s book proposes a new framework — that of “drivers” and “passengers”. As she points out:

By and large, invasive species are not causing ecological damage — but are rather arriving in the wake of pre-existing ecological damage which is often caused by capitalist industry and development.

A “driver” species might well be considered invasive, and could require more aggressive management. A “passenger” species could just be swept along by the pace of human-driven, “anthropogenic” climate change, and so deserves a different approach. To Clare, the “native” versus “invasive” framing is simply outdated, and not fit for purpose in our current, environmentally precarious era. She wrote more about this in her recent article for Orion, offering five alternate terms we could use to talk about wildlife and environmental stewardship.

Next, we get into the anti-capitalist themes in Clare’s writing. Her hope for how we get to a world beyond capitalist realism rests on the idea that once the climate crisis really starts to bite, we’ll realise how wrong our metrics for measuring progress, achievement and meaning in human lives and society have been. As she says: “Hope is a choice”, but this doesn’t mean we can sit and wait complacently for change, or even disaster. We have to argue for positive change, model it in our lives, and embody it in our practices.

Another key theme the book explores is “plastic words” — these are phrases or words that began as vernacular terms, were adopted by scientists as helpful metaphors or framings, and then re-appropriated in the vernacular (particularly in politics) to become “blanket terms” that describe a natural or scientific phenomenon.

Clare offers a few examples — “management” and “development” are both used in scientific writing, but are business terms (just as the term “resources” can be found everywhere in environmental discourse despite coming from economics). When used to describe the “management” of invasive species, such terms convey the hidden message that the science is settled, and the outcomes of interventions both known and understood. The theory originated in Uwe Poerkson’s book Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. At their worst, plastic words can be used by businesses in the practice of “greenwashing” their environmentally destructive practices.

We go on to talk about how the “invasive” versus “native” discourse mirrors the discussion of race and immigration in Trump’s America and the wider world. The rhetoric around species management hews dangerously close to racist concepts like miscegenation (interracial marriage) and eugenics (optimising evolution through drastic medical interventions, like sterilisation, forced breeding, or gene therapies).

We continue talking about this after the break. Clare sees danger in the porous linguistic border between these two discourses — accepting such framings and language in one arena, she argues, makes the language less shocking in the other. This also connects to the title of Clare’s book — she argues that similar to so-called invasive species, immigrants are often scapegoated and blamed for issues that have other, more complicated origins and causes in economics, foreign policy, and technological change.

We talk a bit more about Clare’s metaphor of “drivers” and “passengers” in light of these insights, and move on to discuss the Indigenous cultures and activist movements that we can learn from if we are to pursue a different ecological path. She mentions the Standing Rock protests, led by Indigenous Americans of the Sioux and other tribes, and the Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta as examples of activist campaigns in recent memory that reached global awareness, even if their success in achieving their aims was limited.

Clare mentions Sam Esmail’s underrated Leave The World Behind as a great example of recent eco-conscious, anti-capitalist filmmaking. It ends with one of the main characters watching the final episode of Friends as the world burns and descends into conflict — as Clare observes, a savage indictment of capitalist realism, where the characters cannot imagine the end of capitalism even as the world ends. She mentions Rob Green’s From What Is to What If as a source of some interesting counter-arguments to the depressive reading of Jameson, Fisher and Žižek’s gloomy aphorism about the seemingly unbeatable logic of capitalist ideology:

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

In response to this phrase, which I’ve considered deeply over the past few years, I wrote these words in the introduction to The Darkest Timeline:

To confront the possibility that we have no future is also to demand that the future be reimagined anew.

While Clare’s research and her conclusions lean more towards optimism, we both share the opinion that the only way to challenge capitalist realism is to start by imagining, building and using systems (be those ideologies, activist frameworks, or cultural practices) that challenge the idea that there is “no alternative” to extractivist capitalism.

I briefly mention the statement by Anthropic developers that the preponderance of apocalyptic scenarios involving artificial intelligence in fiction had increased the likelihood that large language models would become “evil” and Skynet us to death. One can’t help but reflect on the meme of the “Torment Nexus” originally tweeted by The Onion contributor Alexander Blechman, which suggests (as the writer Jeff Vandermeer has observed) the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman have taken the wrong lesson from cyberpunk and apocalyptic SF:

Both Clare and I are keen to hear from listeners about post-capitalist, “optimistic”, hope-punk or utopian science fiction that might act as a corrective to such negative stories — give us your examples in the comments. I mention Vandermeer’s sublimely weird and nature-inspired Southern Reach series as a starting point (although this too has some pretty bleak insights to offer).

I also mention the writing of Arne Naess, originator of the idea of ‘Deep Ecology’, and Jem Bendell, who proposed the practice of ‘Deep Adaptation’ as a way to deal with the irreversible effects of climate collapse. Both of them share some conceptual ground with Clare’s writing, by proposing solutions that admit the scale of the challenges we face, rather than turning to false hope and ineffective activism.

Finally, Clare mentions a few more thinkers and studies that helped shape her theories, including a paper by Nicolas Reo and Laura Ogden that offers an Indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species. She namechecks Poerkson again, and Mark Davis, author of Invasion Biology, as key influences.

Visit Clare’s website to read more of her writing, and to stay up to date about her next book, which explores the notion of “home” in light of ecological and social crises. You can also subscribe to Clare’s Substack, which has links to other podcast appearances and livestreams where she discusses her work. She also wrote a piece about Scapegoat for Revol Press earlier this year — find that below.

Revol Press

Running Wild: Invasive species as a problem of capitalism and colonization

Of all the conservation methods currently utilized by environmentalists, gardeners, scientists, and policymakers, none is so rhetorically vicious or violently merciless as that of invasive species management. Discourse around invasive species is often rife with suggestive language that invokes visions of invading enemies that we must do our part to batt…

Read more

7 months ago · 8 likes · Revol Press

Up next: Greg Blackman

My next guest is a legend of the UK soul and hip-hop scene, and a brilliant multi-media creator — Greg Blackman has worked with luminaries such as Lack of Afro, Genesis Elijah and the Dutty Moonshine Big Band among others. His powerful voice and creative approach to lyrics are unique, and recently, he’s turned his hand to audiobooks with the new satirical horror series Nothing Works Anymore. We’ll be talking about that project, his storied music career, and his advocacy for mental health awareness.

In case you missed them, here are a few things I’ve been up to recently:

• My web series Crisis Masculinity ends this month — I hope you’ll check out the final chapter, which gets to the ‘what is to be done’ part of the argument.

• Look out for news on a print edition of the series, which is coming soon from Bidrohi Books.

• The latest guest post in the series is by , exploring the mixed messages he gets from social media advertising as a quuer-identified cage fighter. It’s brilliant, funny and scary in equal parts.

• I recently appeared on THIS IS REVOLUTION to discuss the series, and the manospere in general — watch that here. A few weeks later I came back to discuss the loneliness economy. Thanks to and for these two brilliant conversations.

• Revol’s latest books are out now — check out Radical Jung by Rob Faure Walker, and The People Are Not One by and .

• I interviewed Tutt and Varn a few weeks back as part of the ongoing Strange Exiles X Revol series. My next guest is another upcoming Revol writer, — look for that in a couple of weeks.

Until next time… look after each other.

— Bram, Glasgow, June 2026

Either Put On These Glasses or Start Eatin’ That Trashcan

Misogyny. It’s here, it’s ‘sphere, get used to it! The manosphere is the hot-button issue of the day, priapically thrusting its way into the collective conscious via thought-pieces, opinion columns and social media reactions. Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary recently validated the manosphere’s cultural importance by going ‘inside’ it, as though children like Sneako and Andrew Tate are lords of a terminal Narnia where the Lion is king and the White Queen is a bitch who doesn’t give them enough pussy. This presentation — as something only the terminally online stumble into — allows us to treat the manosphere as alien, and distance ourselves from its misanthropy. Wrong.

We imagine the bastard spawn of incels as misanthropic morlocks, molemen or C.H.U.D.s, scuttling away into their redpill cults, mewing and statusmaxxing in the darkness. They imagine they have woken up from the Matrix that we normies live in. Neither perception is true. All men are the manosphere, and the manosphere is the true face of our reality, when we don John Nada’s sunglasses.

Why bring up They Live, the forgotten masterpiece of the Hollywood left? Because it’s been 40 goddamn years, and the idea that billboards contain shocking subtext, when vocalised, should not be a revolutionary concept. Yet the ideology writhing under the surface, in the era of targeted advertising, is increasingly more overt and regressive. The same extremism found in Young People Places like 4chan, Discord and TikTok is projected to men on a daily basis, woven into the fabric of our normality via adverts, or recommended and sponsored content.

Outside of the world of influencers and those slaving in the content mines, targeted adverts appeal to the same archetypes and models of masculinity as the redpill reel brigade. Every advert I see online seems to nudge me, wholly or incrementally, into the muscular, emotionless embrace of the neckbeard deathcamp — telling me tales of status anxiety, physical inadequacy and lack of Sexual Market Value. Slap on your Nada glasses and you just see: Buy! Hate! Fear!

In a world where identity is a product to be exploited and sold, these become interchangeable commands. Men’s desires, neuroses and insecurities are packaged up and reiterated as the USP of any amount of shite; from deodorant to shoes, to diet supplements.

What The Hell Am I Looking At?

Part of the cognitive disconnect from the adverts I see may stem from the fact that I am a professional MMA fighter. At least, I’ve got 20-something years of hard work in in this hobby, to the point where I’ve fought at a decently high level. Due to this, and general laziness, my social media is only fighting content; I follow martial arts, I like UFC content, I’m in a couple of local MMA scene groups. But this is a mere sliver of the multitudes that construct my ‘self’ — I have many other hobbies, identify as queer, and my politics are just safe enough to not attract the attention of HUAC — but MMA is the main node around which targeted advertising and sponsored content attach themselves. Thus, I am sold things for a man, a real man’s man. To understand modern men, both “redpilled” and “normie”, we must consider what targeted adverts they are fed, what they are sold, and what image that projects into society.

The recurrent theme of adverts in my social media is staggering insecurity — about gender identity, underlain with some genuinely unpleasant ideas about what advertisers think masculinity is. And yes, before anyone says anything, I’m aware that ads are targeted based on my interests and search results. It is, in fact, possible that I have somnambulistically searched some very weird porn, or blacked out and started liking a bunch of Jordan Peterson content. I may well be reaping the fruits of my own perversions, but I’m fairly certain I never asked for most of this nonsense. Also, like any sane person, I use DuckDuckGo to find my pornography and terrorist manifestos. Get DuckDuckGo today!

So many adverts appeal to the typical insecurities of middle age: hair loss, increased weight gain, diminished libido, inability to maintain fitness. It makes sense for me to be offered a panacea for these kinds of things, because men over 35 begin to worry about them. And that’s okay. Overcoming these worries and being comfortable with the notion of ageing is part of healthy masculinity. Sure, the ads I’m seeing are inappropriate for me, being a pro athlete with an (actually a quite fetching) salt and pepper look, but I’ll let it slide. I’m far too smart to be affected by an advert anyway.

Skull issue

A quick summary of some of the adverts, all screencapped from my social media feed, which appear throughout this article. The first results are just generic AI imagery, clickbaity captions, and a few overly sculpted abs. Hey! That’s Chuck Lidell selling *squints* mushrooms? Sure, Chuck, get that bag, brah. None of this is particularly sinister, though it is kinda crap. Also, in a bit of GPT-ish sycophancy, one ad recognises me as a “busy man”. Of course I am. I’m on that sigma grindset, and it’s nice to be recognised by a brand for my sigmanity.

However, the different men advertising a calisthenics workout have skulls for faces, which is a little weird. It might be an overreaction, stemming from the repeated incidences of American public figures repeatedly wearing overtly fascistic imagery, but a buff Übermensch rocking a skull feels a bit Totenkopf-y. Then again, lets apply Hanlon’s law and assume incompetence rather than malice. Aggressive and violent imagery is sometimes just a part of fitness programs; warrior workout, spartan races, military fitness. Tapping into notions of violence and aggression is just a way to build motivation, and most of this feels harmless. But throughout the ads for fitness, supplements and training, there’s a consistent undercurrent. You are weaker, vulnerable and in constant danger. In Nada-speak: LIVE IN FEAR.

Testosterone, Testosterone and More Testosterone

It’s likely there’s an ouroboros effect at work here; I lingered or engaged to get these screenshots, so I will start to get more adverts for products that boost my masculinity and make me stronger, younger and sexier. But the men grow buffer, the pseudo-science more bro-vert, and the assumed baseline of who they are selling to begins to shift. Previously, I was assumed to be someone needing an exercise program and maybe a wee touch up to counteract ageing. Now I am assumed to be so obsessed with preserving my masculinity that I’d consider regular injections, or may even be injecting already.

Interacting with these ads yielded an absolute deluge of adverts for TRT, (allegedly) testosterone-boosting supplements, and many, many products that root their science in the body’s hormone levels, trying various tactics to attract my purchase power; rippling bodies that appeal to strength and aestheticism, woo-ish green powders that appeal to alternative health, dirty texts — ‘cos SEX and Spongebob memes; becase I’m a millenial, I guess? Be you gym rat, healthy granola-type, fuckboi or just manchild, the message is the same; your testosterone is low, the man-chemical is weak, and shopping is the answer.

Testosterone anxiety and the implied loss of manhood dogs both normie modern masculinity and manosphere influencers. In the mainstream, figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman have promoted or admitted to using TRT. In the redpill fantasy realm, Looksmaxxing godhead and nadir of incomprehensible Zoomer-slang Clavicular has famously turned himself sterile through repeated steroid injections. Ancecdotally, friends have raised the question of their testosterone levels. Men who’ve never even tried to framemog are receiving the message that their balls aren’t virile-manning enough. Put on the Nada glasses, and look at the signs: HEY BETA BOY, BUY MAN!

To be clear, hormone therapy is not inherently bad. Many contemporary masculine figures utilise gender-affirming care; Elon Musk, pro-gamer and God Emperor to the world’s most unfuckable men, clearly has hair plugs and makes use of cosmetic medicine. World’s Hardest Man Pete Hegseth, known for advocating holy war and fatshaming very powerful men, is pretty obviously using plastic surgery to maintain his tremendous physique and youthful looks. As the global war on trans identity ramps up, increased interest in gender-affirming care will surely lead to a greater acceptance of trans rights! The relentless surge of articles and adverts telling people to check their testosterone surely means recognising the diversity of bodies and forms we choose to inhabit, not just shoving AMAB people into one specific mode of masculinity, right? Right?

Funny Fact About a Cage, They’re Never Built for Just One Crew

Of course, when talking about modern masculinity, this article (and Bram’s series) has clearly avoided the subject of women and models of femininity. Typical men. Making it all about themselves. However; dehydrated, airbrushed, AI-tinted forms presented as a societal standard make me feel insecure, uncomfortable and unhappy. That’s not right, that’s women stuff!

Anecdotally, men tell me they feel more pressured to focus on their looks, and that this causes anxiety. Though research results vary a lot, hospitalisations from eating disorders are rising among men. The realisation begins to dawn that patriarchy and capitalism are pushing men into the same prison of anxieties and insecurities that they told women to stop being so emotional about. Men built it and profited from it, and now it has come for them. “You helped to fuel the death machine that down the line will kill you too.” Thanks El, nailed it again. These adverts also present faceless, unattainable female forms, but we’ll get to that in time.

You Want it All, but You Can’t Have It

So why are these unrealistic images capitalism’s fault, other than most modern problems seem to be? Companies generate need by selling you both an ideal that you cannot attain, and the alleged means to attain this ideal. The demand for perpetual growth means that satisfaction is the enemy; men must be sold more aspiration, so that they buy more cures. Thus, the void between the “normal man” and advert-depicted aspiration increases, buoyed on by a lack of modern advertising standards and the access to personal data. At the intersection of clickbait, doomscrolling and a very confused modern masculinity, all we see in social media feeds are our own failures.

The same equation — desire + unattainable = endless profit — is perpetuated by manosphere influencers, most obviously in the looksmaxxing world. Men are told that their aesthetic value is defined by conforming to increasingly painful standards; they should Mew to improve their jawlines, broaden their shoulders to ‘frame-mog’ lesser men, grind harder in the gym to improve their Sexual Market Value. Men are being told that there is a hierarchy in the world, and the route to the top winds along a path of idealised manhood. Influencers are subject to the same the same capitalist ideals as supplement companies; monetise content, raise subscriptions, bring in money.

Much is written about the lack of modern masculine role models, but men cannot construct a sense of self that is based on happiness, contentment and health when surrounded by media that constantly tells them they are unhappy, discontented, and unhealthy. This consistent bombardment of images insisting on inferiority surely plays a role in leaving men — young and old — confused, lost and vulnerable to the manipulations of parasitic influencers like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes and their many imitators.

You Sir! You Look Like You Have Trouble Satisfying Your Wife

Turning on social media and seeing only an endless stream of erectile dysfunction / premature ejaculation treatments when I should see my friends’ lives is undoubtedly depressing, but it’s not just the what that I am sold, but how I am sold it that makes social media feel like a mask-off manosphere nowadays. The language of consumerist culture has become more blatant, and targeted adverts just say the quiet part out loud. I know my consumer profile is linked to getting punched in the head, but if even I had CTE, these ads would feel insultingly blunt. However, it is unclear whether this is due to increased confidence in corporate, data-driven messaging, or a presumed lack of media literacy on my part.

Take a look at ads from Menerals, who fused the words “men” and “minerals” to great effect. Take a look at Primal Viking. Note the strange patriotism / Sinophobia beginning to creep in with American Made / Not Made in China. In case we forget that women are also the enemy, their products are also made by men, to prevent women spilling excess oestrogen into the mix.

Observe also the increasingly conservative tone. Things used to be better. Your grandad was an ‘ard man because he lived long ago. Vikings lived longer ago, so were even ‘arder. Men who grind™ are too tough to need sissy hospitals.

Fellas, is it gay to require medical checkups?

In dopamine-fixated scrolling culture, adverts have also become much more callous and are happier to state your inadequacies — it’s not tiredness, it’s “shrivel up and die”. However, the winner of the award for most blatant messaging goes to the ads selling you ejaculate-maxxing products. Advertising in the digital age is saying the quiet part out loud with greater and greater confidence. Subtext is for cowards. I slip on the Nada glasses and it just says CUM. GALLONS OF MANLY CUM.

Start at Goop, End at Goebbels

Compared to intravenous medicine, the Primal Viking and Menerals products are fairly unthreatening (please let’s not talk about the cum stack), but the language and messaging are hammering the same reactionary conservatism as those selling TRT and peptides. The supplement industry is leaning hard into the woo-to-fash pipeline, blatantly selling right-wing ideals under the guise of self-care and holistic well-being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the same tone struck by manosphere types like Fit and Fresh or Hamza Ahmed. We want you to be better, to be stronger and more resilient, to find happiness and financial security. By the way, here’s why women’s biological nature makes them untrustworthy and feminism prevents you from being happy.

This kind of two-part logic drift is a form of Funneling — a real and much written about, if somewhat nebulous concept — wherein engaging with one kind of content will cause algorithms to show content that drags towards one ideological extreme. As with influencers, so with adverts — linger on this kind of Mostly-Harmless content, which sells on the merits of reaffirming masculinity, and darker and weirder content will start to emerge: content which objectifies women, asserts my physical weakness and sets impossible standards of masculinity.

Tall Men Fuck More

Perhaps we should move on from the supplement adverts, because of course supplement adverts are going to tell you that you lack something. That’s not a function of capitalism or patriarchy, that’s an inherent function of, well, supplements. What other things are men sold online? Shuri-what-are-thooose.gif

What the hell is going on with these two adverts? They’re everything we’ve seen before combined into one incoherent mess. There’s a blurry fitness model, who is now so tall that four women are subserviently crouching in front of him (why are they crouching if he’s taller?). In another, there’s a sentient thumb enlarged in photoshop to show the devastating effectiveness of, er, lifts. Real men, of course, care nothing for aesthetics and glossiness, so in the second image, the model wears military-adjacent fashion and practical jorts; he stands ready to spring into war at any moment. Also, he’s enlarged in photoshop and shadow-sculpted to draw attention to his explosive muscularity. There’s a light appeal to science and rationality by calling a heel “technology”. As we know, bros like tech and science, unlike women who are emotional and easily manipulated, A reminder that men are currently buying testosterone supplements because balls = man, and that ten years ago, men’s health influencers were insisting that soy made you gay and effeminate. Science!

The World’s Greatest Shoe adverts also remind the viewer who they are aspiring to be, by invoking “CEOs (…) Celebrities (…) Legends”. It’s emblematic of the current male zeitgeist that this combination of imagery is self-contradictory and incoherent; content is meaningless, fear and outrage are products to sell, vibes are all that matter.

“Boost height by 9cm, get an unfair advantage.” In this world that men are sold every day, the aforementioned lack is quite simply, a lack of sex. You don’t fuck enough. You’re physically inferior. You need to use “unfair tactics”, which sounds suspiciously similar to the repugnant pick-up artist concept of “the game”. In the world men are being sold, you are in a constant battle for female attention. And you. Are. Losing.

It’s time to talk about Sexual Market Value (SMV), and I really wish it wasn’t. On Reddit and in many aforementioned Young People Places, men calculate their ability to attract women based on a their SMV. This is a not-very-complex calculator taking into account tangible factors such as age, body type (including height) and income, as well as slightly more bro-scientific concepts like “alpha dominance” and “style”. According to these metrics, one can offset an unathletic (lol, no), short physique (okay, yeah) with high income or Alpha Vibes (hmm). Oh, and cock size (no comment). Max, sorry maxxx, out your score and you will be a more valuable commodity, able to fuck more. Though the volume at which they state it varies, every advert that I’ve screengrabbed from social media has been based around enhancing one of these values, selling me idea that this is manhood and it is under threat. The Nada glasses now only show me Zoomer Nadsat: FUCKMAXX YOU LOW SMV MOID.

You Can Buy Anything on the Internet

Sex sells. We’ve known this forever. Ea-nāṣir probably used suggestively-shaped copper, though most people point to the late 1800s as the emergence of “sex sells”, with car parts featuring scantily-clad women. I grew up in the lad’s mag-era, with the Lynx Effect advertising of the 90s and early 2000s. The text was “smell nice and women will fuck you”, but the subtext was “Men’s success is measured by how much sex they can have” and “Women’s desire is purchasable”. Possibly more insultingly: “Women’s desire is purchasable at a very low price”. Similarly, In America, Carl’s Jr. has consistently made Skinemax-level softcore a prominent feature of its ad campaigns, famously defending it in 2011 by saying that: “Ugly models don’t sell burgers, pretty ones do.” Same shit, different brand.

I bring these up because both campaigns relied on the overt subtext (if such a tautology is somehow possible) that sex is a commodity, women are a product and men should buy to be better. This is relevant because their campaigns were rightfully trashed in the media; because people saw these adverts and pointed out how blatantly offensive this messaging was.

Except there is no offence on the internet; it is a libertarian paradise where you are welcome to look at anything else. With the immense freedom provided by targeted advertising and sponsored content, sex starts to sell harder. When only people who are funnelled to your adverts will end up seeing them, advertisers have more freedom to make wilder promises and objectify women more.

How does this manifest? Like masculine identity, the models of femininity are also wildly unattainable and reduced to sexual characteristics; women’s faces are usually turned away or blurred, diminishing their personality, but amplifying ARSE. There is a pseudo-scientific understanding of their bodies and libidos, which is about as reliable as the pseudo-scientific understanding of men. Every single woman I showed these ads to immediately responded with: “Whoever wrote this has never met a woman in their life.” Clearly, I am a beta male who needs some big boy shoes and a cum-stack to attract a better class of woman.

Definitely a Fembot

In some adverts, women have just been replaced with AI, which is never too tired, and always willing to tell you how big, strong and T-maxxed you are. We’re no longer being told that products are a route to sex, we’re being told we can just outright buy it in whatever shape and size we want. Instead of height-boosting, grinding and genital engorging to compete for women, it is simpler to just skip the middleman and create a submissive, infantilised (it’s AI girls, not women) version of them, made from Reddit posts and wilful copyright infringement. It undercuts all the messaging of the other adverts, but this inconsistency and goalpost-shifting is endemic to both the manosphere’s culture and to capitalism. “Your body, my choice”, says the man who’s never had sex. Put on the shoes to attract women, says the hydra selling AI dolls that replace women. Masculine and feminine identities, when soaked in the ambient radiation of advertising, or exposed to the meltdown that is the manosphere, mutate into a sloppy mess of impossible wants, incoherent theses and… Pure. Fucking. Aura.

Laugh? I Nearly Bought One.

With the proviso that this is a sampling of adverts which represents recurrent trends, and not anywhere close to all of them, let’s take a quick recap of how the male, middle-aged, combat-sport enthusiast might be financially exploitable. Deep breath.

He grinds and is busy man; he aspires to be sigma, and maybe even achieves it sometimes. However, his hair is falling out, he is too short for women to notice him, he desires a more buff body and he yearns for a nebulous “past”, somewhere between the Vikings and the 1950s. Worse, his testosterone is low, he needs supplements for a variety of physical inadequacies, he has erectile dysfunction, he is unable to sexually satisfy his partner (possibly because she is a robot). With this partner, who currently fakes orgasms, he wants to be having more sex and when he does, he wishes to ejaculate like the Bellagio Fountains. Also, the only way that he can comprehend anxiety is that it’s like a bear attack, the manliest anxiety-inducer.

Of course, the defence is that no-one takes adverts seriously, but given that it is widely agreed that adverts shape young people’s brains… er, yes they do. In this churning sea of tailored products, the self becomes weaker and weaker, as the imperative to BUY MORE BE MAN gets louder and louder.

There are a few other trends I haven’t recorded here, either because they were variations of the same, or because I didn’t think to screenshot at the time. However, there was a stretch of time when Master Ken-esque self-defence programs were a distinct trend in my feed — “Protectors only need apply”, “Be the real man your family needs”, “Here’s why your brazilian jiu jitsu won’t work in the streets” — followed by some influencer confidently explaining that his sub-Krav Maga system would allow you to defend yourself in daily life. Invariably, these were very, very white men selling the notion of “dangerous people” in “the streets” who could throw themselves on you at any time. The solution seemed to always be purchasing more knives and concealed weapons than the other person. This trend stuck out because it didn’t try to lure with the prospect of sex, or prey on insecurity of self, but instead sold the advert’s mark on the idea that the outside world is full of danger, violence and threats. The subtext being that the world is red in tooth and claw, and true masculinity is the ability to wield violence most effectively. Now buy my violence-wielder course! In just seven days, I can make you a man!

It felt meaningful because was even more brazen in it’s messaging than the testosterone-boosters, dick stretchers or magical midget shoes; it is the distillation of consumerist marketing. It sells the solution to an imagined threat, one with undertones of populist rhetoric such as misogyny, the family unit or white supremacy. The influencers of the manosphere follow the same model. Andrew Tate famously sold his Hustler’s U memberships for $50 a month. Ashton Hall, known for his laughable viral grindset-morning routine video, charges a minimum of $3300 for a year of coaching. Clavicular allegedly makes $100,000 / month via streaming. This is a man who promotes, amongst other things, “bonesmashing” to make women lust after you more. From the self-defence courses, to Andrew Tate, to Chuck Lidell’s marvellous mushroom powder, all of these artificial, malignant influences are an end product of capitalism. They target the worst parts of self and amplify it to capture purchase power.

Chew Bubblegum and Kick Ass

Even a cursory trawl through how products are marketed to men tells us that modern masculinity is sick, confused and unwell; we are regularly told we are inferior, threatened by the existence of other men, intimidated by women and desperately, desperately in need of panacea to fix ourselves. Capitalism has reduced us to the thinnest sliver of our own selves, and projected back an ever-unattainable vision of it. We struggle uphill, Sisyphean; after frame-mogging muscles, cuboid jawlines, alpha grindsets, “genitals like those of donkeys and emissions like those of horses” (Ezekiel 23:20). Responsibility is laid at the feet of influencer culture for shaping young people’s lives and creating the Male Lonliness Epidemic™, but I’d argue that as much blame should be laid on Meta, Google ads and their ilk. Or at least, we can say that they reinforce each other. In the unregulated digital spaces where we live more and more of our lives, human contact diminishes in favour of dancing with tulpas spawned from our own worst ideas.

In the face of such a nihilistic existence, we must look for new male role models. John Nada began his rebellion against oppressive consumer-drone culture by promising to “chew bubblegum and kick ass”, which is manly as all hell. Shy of booting in doors while wielding a pump-action, you got any actions we should emulate, John?

Yeah, that’ll do it.

References

• https://futurism.com/health-medicine/andrew-huberman-trt

• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-testosterone-boost-a-womans-sex-drive/

• https://www.npr.org/2025/12/12/nx-s1-5639883/fda-testosterone-treatment-martin-makary

• http://theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/08/social-media-misinformation-driving-men-to-nhs-clinics-in-search-of-testosterone-they-dont-need

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/style/clavicular-looksmaxxing-braden-peters.html

• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/202502/why-eating-disorder-hospitalizations-are-rising-among-men

• https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/mog-maxxing-clavicular-take-over-the-internet-rcna258999

• https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/01/testosterone-panic-trump-kennedy/685820/

Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself… If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.1 — Slavoj Žižek

If wellness is the condition we aspire to because it makes us productive workers in the hypercapitalist system, then celebrity is its purest expression. In effect, celebrities and rich elites represent the idea that reaching an unattainable level of wealth is the only way to liberate oneself from the need to work (or to work very much). At the heart of this is the fetishisation of wellness, and its attendant cults. The celebrity body, moulded by intensive personal fitness training or plastic surgery or both, is the apex and the avatar of the capitalist wellness cult of which we are all members.2

This is an impossible orthodoxy. It is not enough to be a productive worker. We must be fit, we must be strong, we must be healthy. We must be moulded and sculpted, edited, in order to deserve to live in the real and the now. At the same time, our obsession with the celebrity breakdown — the figure fallen from grace and their subsequent, Lazarus-like rise to redemption — serves as both a Christ-like hero’s journey narrative, and a parallel for the way we treat and define those with aberrant mental health.

In reality the celebrity is a parasite, just like the rest of the moneyed elite. Their wealth comes not from extractivism, but from the stockpiling, gatekeeping and mortgaging of all myth, glamour and abstraction. Their symbolic weight is abstraction in the form of physicality. Celebrities embody the physical transformation into a carefully-curated, hyper-mediated “self” that one is able to project — if one has the money to afford personal trainers, hair stylists, make up artists, bespoke tailors and private shoppers.

For all that wellness cultists like to talk about the empowerment that comes from self-love and acceptance, the advocates of this philosophy are often celebrities whose entire income depends on the approval and worship of the media and its hypnotised followers. The celebrity is a parasite who lives in our dreams. As the physical manifestation of wealth, they squat in our minds as ideals to attain. They are the end result of a desired physical transformation from ugly duckling to beautiful swan that is promised to all those who “win” at capitalism. Celebrity of the hyper-symbolic type enjoyed by wellness cultists like Gwyneth Paltrow is sustained by the idea that someone like her is a “gifted artist”, but look no farther than the minor circles of the celebrity cadre peopled by reality TV stars, influencers, “real housewives” and others who have stepped through the looking glass of nebulous, brief pseudo-fame for proof that the symbolic appropriation of even a plastic, shallow iteration of that symbolic power confers not just wealth, but admiration from vast swathes of us. This is before considering the warping, toxic effects that the celebration of such vacuous standards and empty, purely symbolic power has on the psychology and the values of the young people we are raising to replace us.

Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism:

Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.3

If this is true, then celebrities are its purest avatars, the patient zero of the outbreak. Not because they best represent the triumph of the hypercapitalist system, but because they symbolically embody its economic savagery. The idea that one can “become” or “transform into” a celebrity is a wish to escape one’s own perceived physical and economic imperfection; a perception created wholesale by the impossible, abstract ideal the celebrity represents. The dream of escaping the economic oppression so unfairly imposed upon you by the system is what sustains that system. Nobody wants to disable or dismantle a capitalist system that promises them the reward of celebrity, no matter how fleeting. If celebrity is a dream of escape from the predations of capital, celebrities are also the jailers at the gates.

The elevation of the celebrity and the cult(s) of wellness are two halves of the same whole, and their linguistic vector is the phenomenon of “toxic positivity”. The term can encompass any number of alarming political ideologies and arguments. Toxic positivity lends itself perfectly to purity politics. It allows you to ride the wave of such a spiral in relative safety. If advocating a position can be framed as “positive” then all opposition can be framed as “negativity” — reducing complex political discourse back down into a moral conflict between right and wrong, dark and light. For celebrities, their existence increasingly depends not just on them being on the “right side” of a political argument or movement, but often engaging in compelled speech. They are required to frame their often unbelievably privileged upbringings as nonetheless containing “struggles” they have had to “overcome” in their “journey”. The narrative contortion of image and speech that conveys their “public image” is one of a managed, anodyne positivity tempered with patently false, usually sentimental opportunism. Just read their social media responses to any given tragedy or hot-button “issue” — even and especially if written for them by a “team” of (probably unpaid) interns. Their statements do two things, and two things only — they bolster the brand and its reach.

Like all of those currently engaged in cultural production, the celebrity is an entrepreneur, and their image is their corporate avatar; their logos. Those in the entertainment and influencer industries, or in the business of selling fake exclusives to paparazzi, are trading on their image as a day-trader would speculate on currencies and stocks. The reason celebrity culture is by necessity encircled by gatekeepers is that the fabulous wealth promised is something to be gambled upon; fame is a futures market. Only “the right sort” are supposed to enter the circle, so the rugged entrepreneur, the self-made star, commands more narrative weight than the (arguably more powerful) dynastic heir, or bloated industry dinosaur. Obsessed with youth, the culture always needs fresh faces, fresh meat — and how they look, how they sound, and what stories they enact and embody are carefully controlled; custom-designed to entrance us. This is as true of the push for more diverse and representative casting in recent Hollywood blockbusters as it is of the decades of white supremacist myth-making and gate-keeping that went before — the aim is to represent an unattainable economic supremacy to the oppressed worker as an attainable dream.

Meanwhile, in the neoliberal economy, even minimum wage jobs have become precarious. We are all (or soon will be) “gig workers” — subject to sudden firing or wage-docking at the whim of employers who recognise that it is their market, not the worker’s. This imbalance of power between worker and employer worsens exponentially as inequality increases. Companies like Uber do not exist as a “disruptive” solution to mass under-employment and wage stagnation. They are parasites who exploit the precarity of workers oppressed under these conditions.

No wonder we spend our lives dreaming of escape in the bright, flickering glare of TV screens, watching the artificial bodies of programmed avatars enact our dictated fantasies of “freedom”. As social credit systems and the integration of social media data aggregation and targeted advertising algorithms increasingly reduce us to strings of predicted data, and as our every thought, action and word becomes linked to our ability to earn, purchase or get credit, we must consider the reason we fetishise the celebrity and the entrepreneur. Both are prisoners of capitalism, and yet their worship accelerated economically, culturally and politically under the ideology of neoliberalism. This is no coincidence, as Stephen Metcalfe writes:

‘Neoliberalism’ is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.4

That belief in competition applies to wellness cults too. The “perfectly well” person is implicitly not just morally, physically and spiritually superior, they are also better people in whom we should all “invest” our time, money and attention. The wellness cultist is the embodiment of the neoliberal entrepreneur, to whom we all aspire, as Byung-Chul Han writes:

As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class — instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.5

Those unable to remain “well” enough to pursue impossible dreams while labouring under exploitative conditions have “failed” in that struggle. They have insufficiently adhered to the discipline of wellness. They have allowed themselves to become unproductive; they have spent more than they earned and now languish in debt. They are at the mercy of the state, greedily claiming a pittance they feel they have not earned, no matter how many years they spent paying taxes. We live in an attainment society, all driven to burnout, just as Byung-Chul Han says.

At the head of the capitalist wellness cult sits the celebrity — the ultimate entrepreneur, self-made avatar of wellness. Even their falls from grace, their failures, are an opportunity for victory — Iron Man emerging from rehab to claim his golden crown and a dump-truck full of dollar bills. We like to imagine ourselves as everyman Tony Starks, lounging in limousines, leaning against Italian sports cars, finally having earned our spot on MTV Cribs, surrounded by the signifiers of wealth — and finally in our perfect bodies. This dream of ourselves as the winners of capitalism is what drives us to ignore inequality and pursue our selfish ends. Capitalism tells us not to commit to anything — except to follow the money, as Louise Perry writes:

The atomised worker with no commitment to any place or person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of the market. This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs are because she has no connection to a particular location; she can do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection on grounds of faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule. Then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness, thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency.6

The celebrity has this important difference from the atomised worker, or even the ruthless and efficient entrepreneur — their most valuable commodity is the self. The self, for a celebrity, is what produces the surplus value that enriches them and brings them status. That status is unavailable to the worker — in the past, workers responded to this with organisations that brokered using collective power. In the era of social media, even the most committed Marxist or socialist will likely spend more time on social media platforms than they will on collective actions. Whether they admit it or not, this activist has one thing in common with the celebrity — they want to be seen as important. They want to matter. They want status. The self of such an important person can only be truly appreciated in reflection. It only exists when observed.

We all want to be seen. As Nina Power writes:

The internet encourages us, men and women alike, to make icons of our bodies, to push for a kind of infinite and impossible recognition.7

If we feel unseen, overlooked, oppressed or marginalised, this leads to a kind of status dysmorphia — the feeling one was born into the wrong level of fame, wealth, or acclaim; or that one’s suffering has been insufficiently acknowledged or recognised. The solution our culture offers is the assumption of “identities”. Those who see themselves as influencers or celebrities are engaged in identity politics in similar ways to the various configurations of marginalised intersectional groups that can be “identified with” in categorical and structured ways. For both sets of people, it is a kind of role play — and both are political roles when publicly performed. Again, celebrities exist; trans people and gay people exist; neurodiverse people exist. These identity markers are useful to describe individuals. But the rigid categorisation of these identities into so-called “communities” means they can be joined, can be adopted — put on like outfits. The quest for “authenticity” is what guarantees its simulation. Whether celebrity and reach, or the recognition of the self within a community is the goal, both promise a path to status through identity. As these identities are further commodified by capitalism, it is becoming impossible to tell whose identity or “profile” is authentic, because even authentic avatars are simulations of the real thing. All we have are cults, varying only in their levels of gatekeeping, the rigidness of their politics, or barriers to entry defined by race, gender, sex, sexuality, class or economic status.

This applies to the story of “trans-racial activist” Rachel Dolezal just as it applies to highly-paid actors who sell a myth of themselves as self-made when they are third or fourth generation Hollywood “royalty”. Our identities are not symbols of community, they are masks we wear. Communities are spaces we share, where actions occur — not a marketised Darwinian space where individuals compete for status while role-playing as saints or kings. Communities require solidarity beyond mouthed platitudes. They require consensus and compromise, which is incompatible with the promotion of the self. Real communities are not usually built by people whose identity is driven by a sense of aggrieved entitlement, nor do they thrive when those people are revered, admired, and allowed to lead. This entitlement is the hallmark of celebrity and wealth, which would separate itself from the mucky mass like us if it could. We should not talk of communities until we can remember what they are. Communities built on identity are more like crowds — susceptible to sway and crush and stampede; reservoirs of incipient violence.

With the arrival of social media came the opportunity not just to participate in the kind of public speech enjoyed by celebrities and other public figures, but the false promise to democratise it. Just as the illusion that sustains celebrity is the dream that anyone could attain it, the illusion behind social media is the promise that any voice can be amplified; can be heard. Every time you type out a status update, you allow yourself the thrill of that promise — that this could be the one that goes viral, that everyone sees. The post that shows you in the light you see yourself in — your perfect, embodied self. The viral post that makes you fucking rich. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to afford that lip filler. Maybe you’ll finally have time to focus on sculpting those abs. Maybe then you’ll finally show them. Maybe they’ll finally see.

As Haley Nahman observes:

To witness and be witnessed… is crucial to our sense of identity. It implies a level of interdependence: you do not exist in a vacuum, but in relation to other people. But our attempts to digitize that experience — of community, of humanity — don’t quite capture what it feels like to be alive or belong. Instead, we get spectacle; life as performance of life, in which we seek a sense of self through being cast in the right role.8

Nahman is right to identify our rehearsal of our carefully-curated opinions, humour, and even our artistic outputs on social media as a narcissistic performance, and in some sense we all recognise that we have been given a new stage; that we can experiment with how we represent and interpret ourselves as we dance on it. But we no longer view that experience purely subjectively, as individuals experiencing minor or major fame or recognition. Our view of ourselves is mediated through the imagined gaze of the Other.

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The comedian Frankie Boyle, who has himself experienced celebrity, controversy, and indeed mental health struggles, writes perceptively about our warped sense of “self”:

In late capitalism the ‘self’ is no longer the ego. It’s our brand identity. Most of what we do is not to serve our ego, our own idea of ourselves, but actually to serve our status, other people’s idea of ourselves. We’re the first completely market-oriented generation in history and it has destroyed our ability to be free and conscious. We’re not the people we pretend to be.9

The people we “pretend to be” are the people we would like to be perceived as. They are the optimum version, which we “market” to others just as we would a product or service. We are human beings masquerading as commodities. Our communities are merely demographics. As Nahman concludes:

The unspoken goal is to love yourself the way you love the main character in a movie. That is, from a distance, in two dimensions. Under this purview the self becomes an object, like a celebrity posing on the red carpet, or a minimalist frying pan. The ‘reality’ these TikTok users are attempting to capture is a Hollywood facsimile of it — hyperreality… There’s something distinctly postmodern about the fact that our compulsion to consume makes us want to consume ourselves. That as commodities, we feel more real.10

This is how Fisher’s notion of “zombie capitalism” applies to the “open access” media and its utopian promise of celebrity-for-all. We consume ourselves. We believe we are performing for an audience of others, but truly we perform for our inner gaze, like kids singing pop songs in the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone. Nobody can truly become a meaningful public figure, an agent capable of changing or challenging capital, in an era where we are unable to see others — to recognise their plight or empathise with them, without considering how it reflects on us; what it says about us.

When we say we are having moral thoughts, or performing moral speech acts through our online avatars, often we are pandering to our own sentimental feelings about how we should or would like to be seen by others. This makes us vulnerable. Any attack on our self-curated avatar is not experienced as an attack on us as individuals, but on the way we see ourselves. This is why internet debate is so reactive, and often toxic. It’s a conflict between people who see themselves as ideals. As Laurie Penny writes: “There are none so emotionally blind as those who look at a person standing right in front of them and see a mirror, not a window.”11

This also leads to conformity, both morally and aesthetically. Conformity always leads inexorably to control. It leads to ostracisation of the non-conforming, the licensing of speech and thought, and the sanctioning of “un-persons” and justified targets. This is the destination of all online identity (even if the real-world fallout of such division lags behind the thermonuclear exchanges between online avatars for a short period). In our desperate race to be seen, to matter, and to conform enough to meet that goal, we express nothing less than the desperation of our own economic insecurity. We have nothing, so we must look fabulous and say the right things, so that we are liked. Many Generation X figures have criticised this pose, including novelist Brett Easton Ellis:

When you don’t have the cushion of rising through the world economically then what do you rely on? Well, your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked. And this creates its own kind of ceaseless anxiety... No negativity — we just want to be admired. This is problematic because it limits discourse: if we all just like everything... then what are we going to be talking about? How great everything is?12

Indeed, wellness cults are all about “how great everything is”, as are all utopian systems built on the false promise of a better, more just and equal, or less complicated world. Just as the poisonous conspiracy theories of Q-Anon and Trump’s MAGA movement offer an explanation for a brutal and divided world riven by change and chaos, wellness cults offer the ultimate salvation for the individual — a chance to lead by example, to live better, be purer.

The goal of wellness is not health, it’s transcendence. Not into enlightenment or spiritual equilibrium, but to its emblematic representation as “ethical” fame. Every celebrity UN ambassador, every Insta-model hawking greenwashed facial cleanser is engaged in this game. To the toxic positivists of the wellness cult, self-improvement and self-enrichment are the same goal (or at least not mutually exclusive). The reverse of that is also true — economic failure is also self-inflicted, the result of a failure to earn or to achieve, not the result of an unfair and exploitative economic system which insulates the wealth of wellness cult shills just as it does those of billionaire bankers and CEOs.

If an individual has a responsibility to maintain their own health, and if any failure to do so must culminate in a redemptive journey to “beat” or “overcome” their illness or condition, then any evidence of the relation between our mental health struggles and capitalist realism is completely obscured by that narrative. There’s no better proof of this than campaigns like “Time to Talk Day”, which encourage those in the workplace with mental health challenges to come forward and share their story (or even better, their struggle, their journey). This places the emphasis squarely on individual responsibility for health and recovery, and completely elides the role of the employer, states and society in producing the conditions of burnout, illness and breakdown.

The framing of “talk” as the solution to mental health challenges is an excuse for inaction. Writing in particular about the stigma men face in discussing and analysing mental health crises, Ashley Thomson argues13 that “talk” is indeed the “trickle down economics” of mental health discourse. It’s a distraction, an illusion — a spectacle that promises much, but in reality delivers only for those already privileged and able to access support.

How many people suffer and die waiting for adequate mental health care while public funds, time and resources are spent on promoting corporate wellness initiatives like Time To Talk Day? Instead of conformist adherence to wellness, which allows employers to pay lip service to a duty of care while minimising their exposure to giving adequate support to sick employees, we need more provision, faster response times, and help for people before and after they hit crisis. ‪But try accessing mental health services and you’ll face months or years waiting time unless you are suicidal or observably psychotic. The system is threadbare, and focused not on change and recovery but on crisis management, and rapid reintegration into productivity. Only your job matters.‬

Corporate or state wellness initiatives are a way of shifting the onus of responsibility for care, recovery and explanation of chronic conditions back on to the people who suffer from them. It’s to salve the consciences of the neurotypical. Those who suffer from chronic mental health conditions spend their whole lives talking, explaining, analysing, reprogramming, learning, practising, rehearsing, managing. These are the skills you learn in recovery. Wellness initiatives demand they also hold themselves accountable to people who have never, and will never, walk in their shoes. ‬For those with a mental illness, it is always time to talk, apologise, explain. By making people who may well have no access to real or adequate treatment for mental health difficulties “confess” their struggles, while offering nothing beyond the dull promise that they will be “heard” and their voices “represented”, these “time to talk” solutions are more likely to reinforce people’s feelings of inadequacy and marginalisation — especially for men, as Thomson argues:

What a turn to conversation and confession as solutions to men’s mental health overlooks is that men’s unhappiness is depoliticised when it is individualised. That men might then turn to each other with this framing in mind robs this situation of its potential to suggest the political reform of the society that almost certainly played a part in the creation of that unhappiness.14

In reality, under capitalism, the likelihood of a person recovering from or managing their mental illness is mainly dictated by economic status. As Thomson points out, those who can access “talking therapies” are already in less need of these public interventions that instruct us to talk — they are the class who benefit most from the exploitation that Fisher argues plays a part in the production and causation of affective disorders in workers.

Thomson writes:

With rare exceptions, they are white, well-educated and conversant in the languages of personal wellbeing, mental health and self-development. They have people to talk to, people who also speak these languages. These are not universal vocabularies, but rather ones bound up with race, privilege and class… Talk is not a model that scales — unless you are talking about how to radically redistribute society’s resources so that everyone has access to them, understands how to use them and is in contact with people with whom they can use them.15

Unable or unwilling to “talk”, the person who suffers alone is therefore blamed for their unwillingness or inability to heal or recover. Their isolation is seen as self-imposed. Any relapse, or difficulty with that recovery is taken as a sign of weakness — a failure to adhere to the enjoinder to look after their own mental health, and “just reach out” if they feel suicidal. Far from helping, public campaigns to encourage “talk” merely compound the stigma. It’s the epitome of Thatcherite ideology — to blame poverty on the poor, and ill health on the sick.

Mark Rice-Oxley, writing in the Guardian, offers his readers a preventative measure against the depression “epidemic”: “Don’t try so hard, lower expectations a little, stop judging yourself, change your relationship with your thoughts.”16 This reads like a modern update of Benjamin Disraeli’s conservative conception of society: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Those of us unlikely to achieve the apex of the hypercapitalist dream are to opt out. Rather than active participation in all competitive, neo-Darwinist capitalist activities, Rice-Oxley recommends that we turn off, detune; stop trying so hard (presumably to make way for the elites). Here’s some pills... ever read the Sutras? So-called “self-care” becomes another instrument of oppression.

True healing from an experience of suffering is not something one can achieve alone. You need solidarity from the other human beings upon whose lives yours is interdependent. You need a measure of empathy, beyond having your subjective experience “heard” and “represented”. It requires humanity, as the actor Wil Wheaton, who has suffered from lifelong chronic depression, writes:

It’s one thing for me to stand here and tell you that you’re not alone in this fight, but it’s something else entirely for you to prove it. We need to share our experiences, so someone who is suffering the way I was won’t feel weird or broken or ashamed or afraid to seek treatment.17

Wheaton believes we should talk, but that this talking should lead to better outcomes. He recognises that support for those who speak truthfully about their conditions is often mere lip service. Real mental health crises require treatment, and as a society, we aren’t even prepared to fund and resource that sufficiently. Instead, we fetishise self-care, and pat ourselves on the back for a meaningless solidarity we quickly abandon when confronted with the profoundly mentally ill. There is no self-care that can heal the psychological scars of poverty, oppression, and exploitation which are the daily lived reality of the majority of people under capitalism; nor the mental health conditions which (as Fisher argues) are its direct result.

People who talk about “work life balance” are full of shit. How can there be balance when out of a potential seven days, we work five? Most of us grub away for two thirds of our lives tinkering with other people’s important business while our own dreams, skills and talents fester and rot — all dreaming of escape; of transformation that will never come. Even those who find their future in family and community, in culture or creativity, and all of the things that truly produce the love and light in our lives, are vulnerable to the predations of capital. Most of us are exhausted and struggling to keep up, one paycheck away from disaster. We all allow ourselves, once in a while, to ask how things might be different if fate dealt us the right hand — the big job, the big break, the big win on the lottery. The sum of money, whatever that is, that would put us beyond the reach of the need to ceaselessly earn and spend.

The wellness cult and its fixed-grin Botox ghosts want to tell you that you are your health, your wellbeing, your sense of self. Marxism shows the truth — under capitalism you are your job; you are the net worth of your economic labour. Placing the responsibility on you to earn and provide for yourself while promising riches that will never arrive is the lie behind the capitalist’s proffered reward of fame, of wealth, of the perfect body. Mental health and “wellness” discourse is the feint, the distraction — it’s the trick played on us by capital that allows us to absorb blame, shame, and self-reproach when we “fail”. It is the instrument of our capture, the reason we stay humble and dream. We are told to aspire, but in reality maybe Rice-Oxley is right, and there is only the acceptance of our serfdom.

Nobody wants revolution. We’re kept placid and cowed by working hours just long enough to exhaust but not destroy. We buy shiny things to distract us, and dream of being shiny people. We are the middle children of history. No future, just product launches. No past except nostalgia. No present except envy and regret. No wellness for us… unless we join the cult. Perhaps the only measure of control we can have amidst the chaos of this rigid system is a faith in our own ability to adapt, overcome, and advance. Not through the production of competitive advantage, but through knowledge of self:

In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly no doubt, but beneath the surface agitation, we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.18

David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars explores wellness in the context of the Hollywood elite. At first glance a character study about the ethical and moral decay of the rich and famous, this is definitively an entry in the horror genre. These characters are haunted, metaphorically and literally, by ghosts of their trauma. Equally, each of them is fixated on some positive, ambitious vision of themselves in a perfected state. This pursuit of perfection makes each of them monsters.

The horrors in Maps to the Stars manifest simultaneously as supernatural entities, and very real instances of child murder, incest, exploitation and parental abuse. The protagonists are all guilty of something. Several are guilty of one or more of the worst crimes we can imagine, especially because they involve cruelty to children. Yet none of these characters is especially malevolent. Their cruelty is incidental, dished out almost indifferently; often as a consequence of their own pursuit of wellness, or their disastrous reactions to recovery from addiction or trauma. Their worst crimes proceed from ruthless, acquisitive ambition.

Each character is fixated on their own “map to the stars.” For Robert Pattinson’s callow limousine driver, that map leads to the bottom rungs of the Hollywood system. For Julianne Moore’s broken, ageing celebrity actress, it leads back to awards and glory, and perhaps making peace with her past. For Mia Wasikowska’s scarred, schizophrenic personal assistant, the map leads into the territory of madness, delusion and obsession, framed around an obsessive relationship with both the texts and imagery of classic Hollywood, and her brother, a child star who she has idealised despite his own collapse into spite-fuelled addiction, and eventually murder.

Wellness and trauma are entwined in this film. The famous image of Moore screaming while she holds a lotus pose on a yoga mat perhaps best expresses what Cronenberg has to say about the ways in which trauma responses can make us into monsters. What he leaves in tension or unresolved is whether what prevents recovery for these flawed protagonists is their wealth and privilege, or their obsession with it. Wasikowska’s character, who lives half-in and half-out of a dream-realm in which poetic lines from an old film prophesy her marriage to her brother in a transcendent suicide pact, is in some sense the only character exempt from the tortuous dichotomy of bodily and spiritual perfection versus moral and spiritual devastation, corruption, and ruin. Her escape into psychotic fantasy is the only true equilibrium, the only true peace, that any of the characters find.

Cronenberg’s son Brandon has become a much-hyped emerging director in his own right, his second feature Possessor offering glimpses of a talent with as much potential as his father had in the 1970s and 80s when he was carving out a niche in the body horror genre with his own aesthetic, which critics came to call “venereal horror”. Where Brandon’s directorial choices in Possessor share many of his father’s fleshy obsessions, the film also presents a bleak, psychological, surgical take on science fiction tropes, placing it firmly in the realm of “biopunk” — a cyberpunk variant with roots in physical transformation and body horror.

His follow-up, Infinity Pool, attempts to channel some of these themes into an “elevated horror” that satirizes the colonial values of rich American tourists, the presence of wealthy gated communities in impoverished nations, and the acceptance of violence as a form of therapeutic release. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, devolving into psychedelic orgy scenes and tonally odd meditations on the submissive / dominatrix relationship between Alexander Skarsgård and a smoldering, deranged Mia Goth. While the film would like to be seen as a statement on the avarice of elites and their predation on poorer populations and cultures, it falls prey to its own imagery. Perhaps it also lacks a vein of self-awareness — Brandon Cronenberg himself is inevitably part of the “nepo baby” conversation around generational influence and opportunity in Hollywood; a theme his father explored in Maps to the Stars through Julianne Moore’s character, daughter of a Hollywood icon, who Moore intends to play in a biopic despite enduring sexual abuse at her mother’s hands.

The theme of elites using the poor as violent fodder for the cathartic expulsion of their own toxic excess, ennui and avarice is much better explored in J.G. Ballard’s novel Super Cannes, which at the time of writing is rumoured to have been optioned for a lavish TV adaptation, led by none other than Brandon Cronenberg. In Super Cannes the elite corporate employees of the Eden-Olympia business park descend on the French riviera to rob, assault, rape and kill; all in the name of achieving psychological and physical health. Ballard describes these attacks with the French word “ratissage” — coined first to describe the violence meted out by French military police in occupied Algeria to the Arab population in the 1940s.

The Super Cannes raids are directed and coordinated by a classic Ballardian Colonel Kurtz-figure, the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose. The dose of “controlled psychopathy” Penrose prescribes to his elite, wealthy patients makes them happier, stronger, healthier, and crucially, more productive:

The flow of adrenaline, the hair-triggers of fear and flight, had retuned the corporate nervous system and pushed profits to unprecedented heights.19

After dishing out beatings and abuse to Arab immigrants, the executives are inspired, revived; able to re-engage with the capitalist “real” of profit, exploitation, and market domination, just as they are with their own libidos. They have rediscovered what Jacques Lacan called “jouissance” — excess enjoyment, generated by the escalating transgression of moral and social norms, in an attempt to go beyond Freud’s “pleasure principle”. Wellness, too, is portrayed by Ballard as a form of sybaritic excess that conceals the degeneracy of Western society. For Ballard, violence is the ultimate destination for the pursuit of wellness, and its ultimate end product. The violence of the ratissage is justified by the benefits the custom generates, in terms of profit. Western, elite wellness, for Ballard, is the same as psychopathy. Wellness conceals cruelty and deprivation. It is empire in different clothes.

As Penrose says, in a speech that feels both prophetic and inevitable:

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy… Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.20

Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho also explored psychopathy in the context of wellness. In the “greed is good” context of Reaganite capitalism, lost in the savagely competitive and deeply conformist world of the financial elite, Ellis’ protagonist Patrick Bateman first attempts to find perfection in his own body, shaping it like sculpture through punishing exercise regimes. His attempts to consume the media, food and clothes of the elites he moves among are also attempts to embody a perfect ideal.

All the while, his trauma and disaffection fester. They can only explode in bouts of misogynistic violence which he experiences as frenzies; his violent instincts barely under control even as he stalks the expensive restaurants and corporate offices of Wall Street. Like Julianne Moore’s character in Maps to the Stars, and like the damaged, listless, enervated elites of Eden-Olympia, psychopathic violence or cruelty is what enables Bateman, for a time, to feel the benefits of catharsis and recovery.

Like a Wilder Penrose patient, Bateman measures out doses of violence to enable him to live in the world of the elites, and yet he remains undercover. His wellness is fleeting, fragile, and illusory. Even at the novel’s conclusion, when Bateman confesses to his crimes, nothing about the system that has broken him changes at all. The elites are in control, and as Infinity Pool tries to communicate, they are immune from having to face the cost of their wellness, happiness, and catharsis. It’s a cost counted in the bodies Bateman drops; in the beaten faces of the prostitutes in Cannes’ Rue Valentin, and the ghosts of murdered children who haunt the celebrity avatars of Maps to the Stars.

The pursuit of wellness can deliver peace, but it is delivered on the backs of the exploited, and those with nothing. This is as true of exploitative tourism in the so-called “third world” as it is of the therapy and wellness industries, no matter the fact they are often couched in the language of vaguely-defined Eastern spirituality, and the greenwashed marketing-speak of environmental concern. It is not the celebrity, not ourselves, that is sick — it is our culture, our values, our willingness to turn a blind eye to suffering and lack. Until we heal those wounds, self-improvement and wellness are worse than masturbation. They are more akin to a psychotic break — a flight from reality into dangerous delusion, often at the cost of the lives of others.

Is the vision of Infinity Pool, where rich Western citizens can kill the poor with impunity for sport, really all that far fetched? If our civilisations crumble, will the rich suddenly see the lives of the rest of the world as having dignity, value and personal sovereignty? Or will they kill us without blinking? How many bodies would the ambitious step over to reach the stars? How entitled to that fame, that wealth, must they feel — and when they get it, what will they want next? Wealth and fame are indeed an infinity pool, its edge just a false horizon. Plunge deep, and at the bottom, there’s only greed, exploitation, death, and dead bodies.

Further reading

First, some news. Absolutely thrilled to announce I'll be part of ’s Edinburgh Fringe show this year, in dialogue about the manosphere, male identity, and masculinity under capitalism. Come and see us on Saturday 8 August at The Stand, and check out the guests for the rest of the run.

Here are a few things I read and enjoyed this month:

• My friend interviewed his sensei, Professor Rick Young — some amazing insights here about healthy masculinity and self-discipline.

• I've dunked on intersectionality a fair bit in this series — specifically its application, rather than the theory itself. Here's an interesting interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term.

• Jason Okundaye wrote a piece about “looksmaxxing” that offers a summary of the trend, and explores its consequences.

• Finally, in case you missed it, I was on THIS IS REVOLUTION with M. Toussaint and last month, discussing this series, and a host of other topics. Watch below.

A few years ago, my partners and I went to see a play written and starring our very good friend, Seán Dowling. Their play Unconditional was about a gay couple, two men where one is secretly transitioning to be woman and the audience is ostensibly their marriage counselor listening to their unreliable narratives about what their marriage is like. Co-written and performed by Seán and their colleague Cameron Hurry the characters are never named, only referred to as HER and HIM in the text.

In watching HIM react to HER transition, I felt a deep sense of unease. What does HER say about them, HE wondered. What does it say about his beliefs, and most importantly his identity as a gay man? He cannot deal with her clothes, her hair, the changes to her physical body — all the things that scrub away his perception of the man he married. At one point Cameron says “I miss him”, to which Seán responds, “I am right here.” In watching this I felt a disquiet about my own relationship to masculinity, in particular a historic rejection of the feminine parts to myself — the same as HE was rejecting HER new feminine traits.

In school I did not want to dance, in case it highlighted something about me. I long resisted dressing in feminine ways, putting on nail polish, or even being into guys with long hair. In my younger years I even found the thought of bisexuality confronting, in part, probably a reaction against my first boyfriend dumping me because he decided he was “straight” and not into boys anymore.

This was a misogyny and internalised homophobia that lived deep within me. In many ways, homophobia, at its core is a rejection of the feminine. By taking it up the butt, or getting on their knees, men apparently give up their manhood and become the worst of possible things to become — a woman. It is no wonder that so many gay men reject all things feminine — this is their way of proving they are still a “real man” and in turn showing they can still belong. Gay men will insist they are “masc for masc”, will make sexist jokes about women, and will sometimes shun and shame their own more camp counterparts.

Possibly the most uncomfortable moment for me was when Cameron talks about how important it is to him that he is a “gold star” gay — i.e. they he’d never had sex with a woman. He asks about HER transition, “Does this mean I’m going to be straight? I have to come out again? Learn how to be a top? I’m not attracted to women. I don’t want to have sex with a woman! I’m a gold star motherfucker!”

I thought about myself as a “gold star gay” (although I hate that term) — worried about my old self that used to make jokes about how repulsive sex with a woman would be, an idea I could never fathom. When HE said: “I can’t go straight. I don’t know how they work… I could maybe do the clitoris, but honestly I’m not sure if I could work up the courage to dive down into the… Bermuda Triangle,” I shuddered at some of my former self.

Aligning with the far right

What made me even sadder was realising how aligned this internalised homophobia is with some of the most awful misogyny we’re seeing in the world. I saw Seán’s play just after I finished my PhD on the Manosphere — the online community of men who believe that women are the causes of all problems and that the only way we can fix the world is reinvigorate some mythical version of masculinity.

Read 'The Male Complaint'

The ideology of the Manosphere and the internalised homophobia I see in gay communities is in many ways alike — an insistence that men should be masculine, and a rejection of anyone who breaks that norm. Manosphere influencers teach followers how to be “real men”, using techniques like going to the gym, being more disciplined, “dominating” women, buying fancy cars, TVs, computers etc. and more. Men who don’t do this are labelled soy boys, cucks, or screamed at for being gay. Internalised homophobia is not much different, being another performance of masculinity, often seen on dating apps, where people put things in their profiles like “masc for masc”, “no femmes” and “not a scene gay”.

One of the easiest ways to observe this is through Manosphere influencers often labelling everything they don’t perceive to be masculine enough as “gay”. A recent documentary about The Manosphere by Louis Theroux features a moment where he is walking around the streets of Marbella, Spain, with the Manosphere influencer HSTikkyTokky. At one moment they come up to an arcade boxing machine, which HS hits with force. When Theroux makes his punch, which is weaker, HS screams at him that he’s “gaaaaaaaaaaaay”. I wondered how my younger self would have felt at that moment, my lack of masculinity exposed for all to see. At the end of the documentary, Theroux then shows him practicing this again and getting a better score. While amusing, this is him admitting to similar embarrassment, and a desire to do this better to show he is a real man.

Of course, I am not saying that going to the gym (I go quite a lot) or not being into RuPaul’s Drag Race (I have stopped watching that show here) inherently makes a gay man misogynistic. But the open, often public, rejection of femininity — is where this often crosses a line. Both the ideology of the Manosphere and internalised homophobia are based in a rejection of the feminine — gay men seek to distance themselves from feminine ideas often to shield themselves from homophobia, while Manosphere men do so to consistently prove their masculinity. This is why we can now see so many gay men lining up to the far-right — it is one of the ways they can protect and prove their status as a man despite their original sin of being gay.

Liberating Ourselves From Masculine Norms

Going back to Seán’s play, while I was uncomfortable about my old self, the show also helped me feel a sense of liberation; joy at the shackles I been able to let go of. I often think about a study from way back in 2013 that showed that despite what we might think, straight men are generally more depressed and anxious than their out gay and bi counterparts. The conclusion I came to on this study is that if, and this is obviously a big if, you are queer and able to be out, you can actually be quite liberated.

Straight male sexuality, like that of the Manosphere, is deeply linked to a particular version of a ‘man’ — do anything that isn’t masculine and your sexuality is questioned.

This is where, with work, being queer can be so liberating. The moment you come out you immediately break one of society’s biggest norms. This can start opening doors — if I can question one norm, surely the others are open for discussion as well. This is the journey I took — going from a young boy who was rejecting femininity and wanted a monogamous relationship, to someone who is polyamorous and far more comfortable with expressing the feminine parts of myself.

This can often take a long time, and doing so requires overcoming lots of internalised hatred, and having a supporting community around you. But often the happiest people I know are the ones who have been able to do that work. Queerness can open those doors in ways that are truly liberating.

There is no real resolution at the end of Unconditional. This was both unsatisfying, in a way, but exactly what was needed. The misogyny and homophobia that exists in our society is so deeply embedded that it can’t be solved with a few therapy sessions. But the moment created an opportunity — one where we can question the masculine norms that put straight jackets onto so many men — both straight and gay.

Ali Maloney is a theatre-maker, rapper, performer and experimental sound designer from Edinburgh. His career in these fields has been long and wide-ranging, from the much-missed, fearsomely experimental Anatomy performance nights, to ‘spoken weird’ rap collective Chemical Poets, to acclaimed stage shows like After Metamorphosis, based on the Franz Kafka novel.

Among other things, we discuss his short story in the award-winning collection Nova Scotia Volume Two, his music under the name Harlequinade — including Sileni and CHURCH OF WHEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN — and his latest project, the ambitious audio drama / horror podcast Caledeonian Gothic.

Ali is an old friend and regular collaborator of mine, so this one features a lot of chat about the old days, our linked origins as writers and performers, our shared love of transgressive films, fiction and music, and the new ground he is breaking as a podcaster and storyteller. Strap in, and watch out for the tentacles.

Scroll to the bottom of this post or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube to watch the video version of this episode.

Recommendations from Ali Maloney

The first collaboration I saw Ali fronting was the band Sileni, a two-person experimental hip-hop collective with production from Gung Who, aka Owen Green. This would have been around 2005 or 2006, and acted as a showcase for Ali’s visceral blend of Burroughs-influenced, cut-up horror-rap, and his strong visual aesthetic drawing on video nasties, and the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.

There aren’t many pictures or videos from that pre-social media era, but you can get a strong sense of the alchemy at play in that collaboration by listening to their albums Riders on the Conquering Worm (from 2009), and Codex Teuthis (2014). Ali says he met Owen in 2016, which is either a mistake, or proof the pair have finally perfected time travel in addition to grand guignol horror rap.

Ali mentions some early influences, including Czech stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer, and Guelph, Ontario alt-rap collective Plague Language. Švankmajer’s work is phenomenal, visionary, gross and weird — check out his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland below.

We go on to talk about the formation of Chemical Poets, the three-man acapella rap collective we formed alongside Tickle McNicholl, which eventually birthed a stage show called Twenty Tentacle, and the collection Chemical Poets Manual 01, initially published by Red Squirrel Press. We performed as a trio for a few years, taking part in the growing Scottish spoken word scene, and both Ali and I look back fondly on this as an influential and original project which led directly on to some of our later work. You can watch us at our peak below, in a recording of our 2010 Edinburgh Fringe show.

Ali’s next two shows after Twenty Tentacle were collaborations with Gung Who, and Asthmatic Astronaut, also the producer of the Strange Exiles theme, and one of the main forces — along with Ali, Tickle, myself and a few others — behind our boutique label and collective Black Lantern Clan. Asthmatic Astronaut just released his first new music in a while, the album it tastes like, which you should go and download now. Asthmatic Astronaut was also the producer of Church Of When The Shit Hits The Fan — you can see their video for ‘Under the Last Dust’ below.

The first of these three theatre shows was Hydronomicon (with Asthmatic Astronaut), the second was Ratcatcher, with Mazzula Hula (part of the 2012 SURGE Festival). The third was a Kafka adaptation, After Metamorphosis, with some help from Puppet Animation Scotland (now known as Manipulate Arts), physical theatre artist Lewis Sherlock, and Gung Who.

Each of these shows garnered strong praise in reviews, and saw Ali push further into multimedia devised performance and experimental sound design. Both were influenced by the diploma Ali completed in physical theatre, under tutors including the amazing Al Seed. Ali mentions Seed’s show The Fooligan as a penny-drop moment, when he realised that physical theatre was something he wanted to explore. Read about The Fooligan over here at The Scotsman. At the course, Ali studied various physical theatre disciplines including bouffon, the art of clowning.

Next, we go on to discuss Ali’s contribution to Nova Scotia Volume Two, which came out in 2025 from Luna Press. A follow-up to the critically adored first volume, it was edited once again by Andrew J. Wilson and Neil Williamson, two respected authors, editors and publishers in Scotland with a focus on new, high-concept SF and weird fiction. Read a bit more about the collection over at The Bottle Imp.

Ali’s story, ‘Grimaldo the Weeping’, was (appropriately enough) about a very creepy clown. The collection also features work from such luminaries as comics legend Grant Morrison, novelists Doug Johnstone and Ken Macleod, and weird fiction supremo Chris Kelso (who spoke to me for Episode 38 last year).

Both the Nova Scotia collections, and some of Ali and I’s best performance work, spun out of the writing and performance collective Writers Bloc, based in Edinburgh. Revolving around monthly workshops and crit groups, with regular devised performances featuring the group, Bloc is a fantastic proving ground for emerging talent — as shown by the recent success of current and former members like Rhiannon A. Grist and science fiction visionary Hannu Rajaniemi, among others.

Next we talk about Ali’s style as a writer, and he namechecks Clive Barker and Shaun Hutson as early (way too early!) influences. We get sidetracked by talking about video nasties, and what it felt like as 80s kids to go into a video shop and scare ourselves silly just by looking at the front covers. For both of us, this generated a powerful and precocious hunger for books and films that were weird, violent, transgressive and experimental, from 70s and 80s horror classics like Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street and House, to the influx of hyper-violent manga in the late 80s and early 90s, and films like the cyberpunk / body horror masterpiece Tetsuo.

All of this was tied heavily to the medium of tape — something Ali would go on to explore in his narratives for Caledonian Gothic. He got similar kicks, spending time in the 1980s in New York, from imagining what it would have been like to attend a show by the black metal band Mayhem, and reading the William Burroughs classic Naked Lunch. We discuss the power of the unseen versus exposition and lore, and how films, games and shows like Alien, the recent Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and the game Hollow Knight: Silksong employ this, to varying degrees of success.

We talk in earnest about Caledonian Gothic in the second half of the show. Ali mentions the peculiar tendency of books by the aforementioned Hutson and Barker — but also Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft — to involve the metatextual trope of making the main character a writer. That was an influence that Ali has carried throughout his work in different disciplines, and which is fully realised in the new season of Caledonian Gothic.

He also brings a strong focus of formal experimentation with narrative structure to both this and the first season, which he attributes in part to the David Lynch film Lost Highway. As Ali says, quoting a friend: “It’s a film about a haunting — but the film itself is haunted.” He talks about how this allows him to draw the listener into the story, making them a part of it. In the first season of the show, he achieved this by using a second-person narrative. In the new season, he uses some of the techniques from his performance work, as well as stories drawn from those experiences, to create something that feels both metatextual and ‘real’ for the listener. Sound design is simultaneously a tool for creating atmosphere, and a driver of the narrative itself.

Ali talks about podcasting as a pure audio medium, and the ways he and his collaborators leverage this in Caledonian Gothic. The first season featured an original theme tune by Amber Devereux of Tin Can Audio. For season two, he worked with Asthmatic Astronaut (Devereux’s theme is carried over). As Ali says, this season features a horror story (or stories) that are explicitly about sound — allowing him to take some more ambitious creative leaps with the storytelling.

The season contains an over-arching narrative across loosely-connected, standalone tales. Ali mentions Archive 81 (later adapted by Netflix) and The Magnus Archives as podcasts with a similar approach. Another element is ‘ritual’ — it’s hard to talk more about that at this juncture without giving spoilers, so go and check out the show to find out more about how he carries off these two approaches. It’s available at Bandcamp (see below), and everywhere you find your podcasts. You’ll also find Ali over on Buesky and Instagram.

We finish with a little chat about H.P. Lovecraft, and whether his work has influenced Ali more as a body of writing, or as a fertile seed-bed for genre work inspired by the mythos and aesthetic of cosmic horror, which is largely attributed to Lovecraft. He mentions Jeff Vandermeer’s analysis of the tentacle in the introduction to The Weird, a compendium of short fiction. Ali mentions the Lovecraft story ‘Pickman’s Model’ as an early influence.

Finally, Ali namedrops one of my all-time favourite bands, Edinburgh’s Penpushers. Do yourself a favour and check out their seminal album Last Vestige of Holism (2002) as an example of the currents both Ali and I swam in as emerging rappers and storytellers growing up in Scotland’s most crepuscular city, which birthed The Strange Casse of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Confessions of a Justified Sinner and many other tales of the weird and eerie.

Up next: Clare Follmann

My next guest is author and environmentalist Clare Follmann. We’ll be discussing her book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Gets Wrong, recently released by AK Press. Her writing engages with themes of landscape, ecology, climate crisis, language, and philosophy.

Clare likes to poke holes in dominant or obsolete narratives, and strives to both listen to and help uplift the voices and stories that have been too often cast aside. Her work focuses on finding and planting the literal and figurative seeds that will help support a post-capitalist society that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet.

See you in a few weeks!

— Bram E. Gieben, Glasgow, May 2026

People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system.

— Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power1

What Byung Chul-Han characterises as the “achievement-society” in Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is an inverse of the “control society” described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. While Byung Chul-Han concedes that traditional control societies still exist in the form of totalitarian regimes like China, or even Russia, he argues that in the neoliberal west, they have been replaced by a regime that drives its citizens to “choose” conformity in the pursuit of achievement — leading to burnout, mental fatigue, and a deep and abiding shame that proceeds from the failure to achieve, to succeed; to win. He argues that the system of control and coercion described by Foucault has been replaced by an oppressive “panopticon” effect — a society that needs no secret police or punitive laws and restrictions on speech and freedom in order to maintain control. But the fact that such top-down “control” societies coexist with the Western, neoliberal “burnout” or “achievement” model Byung Chul-Han describes suggests that perhaps the two are less different, and more symbiotic than they perhaps seem.

One key fact suggests the synergy of these two political and psychological models. Both rely on the capture, processing and use of data. Neither the security and military apparatus of the bourgeois democratic regimes nor the totalitarian monolith of China could exist without the huge servers on which their data is stored. The only difference is, rather than enthusiastically consent to and voluntarily participate in their own surveillance as we in the west do, the Chinese are compelled to submit. The technology behind each model is the same, and each follows the logic of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.

For the internet historian Cory Doctorow, this symbiosis between commercial and state surveillance is the reason why stronger laws about moderation and antitrust have not been legislated in capitalist democracies. Despite some scepticism about the scope of Shoshana Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism”, he writes:

... any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and other major tech contractors, US cops would not be able to spy on Black people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the US border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’ unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be attributed to this symbiotic relationship. There is no mass state surveillance without mass commercial surveillance.2

Doctorow calls the scramble to capture data on human subjects and their psychology via social media a “limbic arms race” — because analytics insights are only useful in the short term, surveillance must be total and constant. This confirms we live in a system indistinguishable from a panopticon, as Byung-Chul Han proposes. In a panopticon, at every second, the subject must feel that they are being watched; that their actions are being recorded and observed. In Jeremy Bentham’s original thought experiment, he described a prison with a revolving central column that allowed the guards to observe each cell. As no prisoner would know when or whether they were being observed, they would logically behave at all times as if they were being observed.

The digital panopticon over-delivers on this promise. Any subject of a surveillance state can be monitored by geolocation, purchase-tracking, app use, traditional street surveillance by cameras and satellites, and data analysis in real time. In China, this is used to produce the monstrous effects of their social credit system,3 which analyses citizen behaviour to grant certain discrete “freedoms” — such as the privilege to travel outside of the city where one lives. It also enables the tracking, persecution and imprisonment of Uighur Muslims,4 allowing the state to justify their internment in concentration camps — and their forcible brain-washing — by pointing to minor infractions as evidence of their cultural difference and threat to society. It is the panopticon in service of ethnic cleansing and social control.

Our horror about the control-society-gone-digital that China represents is gut-wrenching and real, but arguably the citizens of Western democracies face an equally unpleasant form of intervention and control in our lives in the barely-functioning democracies we fetishise as “free”. We submit to the surveillance and tracking of our movements willingly. We narrate our lives online, inviting the gaze and the judgement of others — often with the goal of seeking social status, and elevating ourselves to the heights of obtaining a “platform” and some modicum of fame and recognition. We are all subject to brainwashing techniques; through the hyper-mediated images and neuro-linguistic patterns in advertising, to the vagaries of our spectacle-driven politics, to the slogans and hashtags of activist movements bent not on justice or transformational change, but on representation — on being “seen”.

Citizens of a control society panopticon may feel the weight of an oppressive system as it bears down upon them, and their unfreedom may exceed ours. But they do not beg for the policeman’s attention as we do, as Byung Chul-Han argues:

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations. Digital control society makes intensive use of freedom. This can only occur thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure.5

Those who crave authority, and recognition from the big Other of society (the “moral majority”; those who wish to be on the “right side of history”) carry the policeman and his judgement inside them. This “self-illumination” is a performance for the approving gaze of Daddy, but it is we ourselves who enforce and police these norms, enacting violence both literal and symbolic in their defence. Byung Chul-Han seems to misrecognise this holdover from the Foucauldian control society — under neoliberal capitalist ideologies, we are all engaged in policing the borders of the acceptable and the “normal”. Our “failure” to conform to the spectacular images of success, productivity, health and wealth is a source of internal shame. We may not be imprisoned, confined or killed as a result of our transgressions as Chinese citizens might be, but we too are in chains. Compulsion to produce, to achieve, is also unfreedom.

While Byung Chul-Han goes on to analyse the plight of those burned out, driven to exhaustion and otherwise forced to drop out of the hypercapitalist rat race, there is another category he almost elides — the madman, the hysteric, the neurodiverse; the “unwell” person whose psychology is marred by what we have come to describe as “mental health issues” or to characterise as disorders and syndromes. The idea that society sees mental health trouble as separate from personality problematises our societal instinct to judge people’s behaviour, not their intentions, as Dana Fletcher writes:

We’ve grown so accustomed to ascribing a person’s emotional wellbeing to character traits and situational factors that it has become the norm to view any deviations in emotional stability as personal shortcomings. What has resulted is the construction of an unnecessary and formidable barrier against the recognition and adequate treatment of very real and very serious illnesses... It is imperative that we arm ourselves with the knowledge and understanding necessary to dismantle this one-dimensional dialogue that leads people to believe that situational factors and well-coiffed external appearances suggest immunity from the throes of mental illness.6

My own experience of seeking treatment for chronic and recurring mental health issues mirrors this gap in Byung Chul-Han’s writing. It is easier to track the ups and downs of a crisis, of an event, a breakdown, a confrontation or a conflict, than to describe and make sense of a life that repeats these events in cycles. Byung Chul-Han is more interested in “the subject supposed to break down” than in the broken subject. This is in contrast to Mark Fisher’s thoughts on capitalism and mental health.

Fisher writes:

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.7

It has become a commonplace to say that we are living through a mental health crisis, and the data on those seeking treatment for mental health issues in the UK certainly supports this. Fisher’s point about the mental health cost of capitalism is borne out. Services are overwhelmed, waiting lists long, and GPs in the UK are prescribing more and more antidepressants each year. It is absolutely a valid argument to say that our so-called “free” societies are less free than they appear, as Byung Chul-Han goes on to state:

...freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.8

Is Fisher correct, can mental health really be taken as a barometer of capitalism’s true cost? Can we follow Byung Chul-Han’s reasoning, and lay some of the blame for this epidemic on the accelerationist tendency in hypercapitalism, and its latest incarnation as a kind of opt-in panopticon? There are some very compelling arguments in both books for the switch from “freedom to exist” to the compulsion “freedom to achieve”.

Going further, William Davies diagnoses the problem in economic terms:

To inhabit the free-market society that emerged from the upheavals of the 1970s, and which persists today, is to live in a state of constant flexibility and reactivity… In these conditions, individuals must focus less on seeking truth or objectivity, and more on being adaptable. In a society governed by free markets, individuals must consider how to market themselves to potential employees or customers… The context for every life choice is that of competition, how to distinguish oneself from rivals, by qualifications, image-making and management of oneself.9

This logic leads Davies to conclude that “a pure free market ideology installs social Darwinism as the organising principle of society, resulting inevitably in spiralling inequality.”10 But is there something deeper at play, in terms of how we treat the sick, the unhappy, and the vulnerable in our societies? Writer Ashley Thomson makes a strong case for the mental health professions as a form of “trickle-down economics” where the problems of the rich are seen as solvable; a step on the road to “wellness” and mental “health” (and of course, Byung Chul-Han’s productivity and “achievement”). Meanwhile, “mental illness” can be used to stigmatise and deligitimise the poor, the disadvantaged or the marginalised, and justify their plight in political terms:

The psy-professions partake in systematic labelling of deviance in capitalist societies in order to respond to what is politically troublesome… The psy-professions have used this perception of legitimacy to provide quasi-scientific justification for the maltreatment, abuse and warehousing of societal ‘threats’: most regularly women, the homeless, the poor, and religious, racial and ethnic minorities… One of the most insidious aspects of this process of labelling deviance is that it places the fault in the individual. It locates ‘aberration’ as something that exists in your own mind and body.11

Thomson’s logic agrees with that of both Fisher and Byung-Chul Han. The psy-professions may be able to locate the source of trauma, anxiety or depression in a person’s environment, or in their past. They can seek to explore, unpack and make sense of those factors, and perhaps rearrange them in such a way that the patient can get back to, and maintain, a state of “normality”, but that normality is predicated on returning to the role of a functioning, productive member of hypercapitalist society. Only the individual can be “sick” — not the society. And this is true no matter how often the “sickness” re-occurs, as Ted Kaczynski wrote (following the arguments of Jacques Ellul):

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.12

The individual must be ‘cured’ or at least ‘recover’ enough so they can continue to produce. The recurrence of these symptoms, or the inability to solve the problem satisfactorily enough to return the individual to the coal face of capitalism, creates an individual who is by definition an unperson because they cannot produce (or cannot produce consistently). Failure to recover is failure to work.

I have a little experience of this. My diagnosis is Bipolar disorder, type II. Bipolar type I people are easier to diagnose early in some ways, because their manic behaviour often attracts the attention of the state, in the form of doctors or policemen. The second variation is a little more mercurial. Most type II sufferers are adept at “masking” their condition. Many are masters of this, performing a subtle, chameleonic dance around their social anxiety, hypomanic behaviours and depression for years, eluding diagnosis and treatment until the drink and drugs, the wild spending, or the chaos in personal relationships spills over, and the disorder is revealed.

I was comfortable with my Bipolar II diagnosis, even though I was aware at age 15 that the language around “disorders” was stigmatising. A disorder is a dysfunction, a variation from “normal” — therefore it is implicitly deviant. The disorder is located, as Thomson says, in the patient themselves. As I went through various treatments and drugs (most of them wrong, some of them right for a while), it was clear to me that the goal of treatment was for me to function as a self-reliant member of capitalist society. If I could stand, and reach my desk, then I was “cured” (and importantly, free treatment in the form of therapeutic intervention was then withdrawn by the NHS). It was also clear to me that I would never be truly “cured” or “better” — that my diagnosis was a condition that made me deviant, and a risk for employers; that I would have to lie about the fact that I would periodically become so unwell that I was unable to work.

This situation was compounded when in my late 30s, after another crisis that saw me lost in addiction, self-harm and suicidal ideation, I was re-diagnosed with Emotional Intensity Disorder (better known as Borderline Personality Disorder). The psychic blow of this new diagnosis was hard to stand. It’s a condition that is under-diagnosed in men. While EID / BPD is rarely diagnosed or treated in male prisoners, it is assumed that up to 50% of men in jail have the condition.13 For men, it can manifest as controlling and violent behaviour. If you check the list of famous sufferers of Bipolar II you will find artists, writers, painters — misunderstood and tragic geniuses. Check the list for EID / BPD and other “personality disorders”, and you’re in stranger company: Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy.

The re-diagnosis was a strange and painful process for this and many reasons, but the worst aspect of it was the way that people — even people I loved and was close to — began to treat me differently; especially after doing their own research into BPD / EID symptoms. The disorder is characterised by extreme and intense emotions, often driving destructive and toxic behaviour, and often triggered by early childhood trauma. It responds to therapy, but can cause chaos in the lives of sufferers and their families. Toxic behaviours are often motivated by a strong desire to avoid abandonment. With my Bipolar diagnosis, I had a framework to understand the unpredictable swings and plunges in my moods. They were driven by brain chemistry — a little bit of bad genetics, a little bit of shit luck. With BPD / EID however, it was all me. The emotions, the depression — all driven by my reaction to trauma. The patterns of self-destructive behaviour in my life were suddenly self-imposed. Every betrayal or abandonment I had ever experienced was suddenly subject to question by myself and others. I had been diagnosed with a condition that translated as “he makes a big deal out of things,” rather than “he can’t help how his brain is”.

It was a sudden and violent change in the narrative. I was now responsible not just for my recovery, and the management of my symptoms in future, but also for my every past transgression against society, my loved ones, and my role as a reliable agent of capital. I was an unreliable narrator. A breadwinner diminished. Less of a man. It’s difficult to convey how threatening that felt; how much more vulnerable I became, almost overnight.

The difference in how I was treated by doctors was the most marked. As an individual with a diagnosis that indicated I could be a risk to myself and others, it was recommended that I start taking antipsychotics. Having never taken them before, I was deeply afraid of the side effects, from drowsiness and lack of brain function to weight gain. It also felt like this offer of medication was a further measure of control over my behaviour. I would be unable to drink, or otherwise take drugs, and would have to submit to monthly urine tests to prove my sobriety and “earn” my medication.

I was no longer to be considered as an individual managing my own symptoms. I was to be an inmate, permitted perhaps to roam around outside, but subject to regular and invasive physical surveillance. I managed to see a doctor privately, who gave me a diagnosis indicating both conditions — BPD / EID and Bipolar — as comorbid. This allowed me to get a prescription for another type of medicine, used for Bipolar patients. This medication, to my great relief, stabilised me enough to complete therapy. I am in recovery, and perhaps always will be. But I am learning to live with BPD / EID just like I learned to live with Bipolar.

Think about that story I’ve just related. The natural end is that I got the treatment I needed; that I am on the road to recovery, that I am living better and am more healthy. That’s as far as anyone wants to read into the personal story of someone with mental health issues, but for me, it is just the beginning. The first of many such beginnings, each involving the judgement and labelling of my condition, and a new regime of treatment. My illness is an admission of a lack of control. People are keen to empathise, support and show solidarity with the mentally ill. But only if they get better — and importantly, they stay better. To fail to get better, to fail to maintain the recovery myth, is a personal shortcoming. To collapse again and again is self-indulgence, with each return less believed, like the boy who cried wolf. People like to use that specific metaphor, and rarely remember that at the end of the tale, the child is eaten.

I can’t help but think of the thousands of people with BPD / EID who, despite the fact the condition can completely disappear with the right talking therapies, cannot access them. I think of the people without the economic clout to give them wider options, the support and love of family and friends, or the education and articulacy to argue for their own preferred method of treatment, as I did. I think of them blank-eyed on anti-psychotics, trapped in relationships they know are unhealthy but don’t have the tools to leave, or even repair. Their outcomes are manifestly worse than mine. But as I slot back into the capitalist cycle, already anticipating the next breakdown and crisis, am I in any better a position, really? I am still alone with my pain, and the intense emotions. I am still alone if I want to figure out why the trauma I experienced as a child produced the effects it did upon my psychology. I am alone as I try to figure out which of the narratives I have told myself over the years to mask, minimise and conceal my pain are lies, and which are truths.

Treatment for BPD / EID allows you to manage and move through the symptoms, but it does not give you the kind of closure people want in a recovery narrative. People want the happy ending, they want the recovery myth, if they are to listen to that kind of story. They want to know you got better — and if you get worse again, they will think less of you, and be less inclined to help. This is far from confined to people who suffer mentally. Physical suffering with no overarching narrative of recovery is also seen as a sign of weakness or aberration. I think of my friend who was surrounded by people advocating for him, supporting him and encouraging him as he bravely “fought” cancer — neither the NHS nor many of his friends knew how to deal with his anger and sadness when the difficult recovery from the drastic surgery he had undergone made him depressed. They just didn’t know how to heal someone who had already “recovered”. They’d done their bit. The pain of that recovery, and the setbacks it involved, were mostly incomprehensible to them the longer they went on.

My life story is one of trying to be open, honest and real about my struggles in the hope it would help others. But even that openness is linguistically defined by the language of war. It is struggle, defeat, battle and overcoming that we all want to hear about, not defeat, loss, and resignation to pain.

Mark Fisher, a lifelong sufferer from chronic depression, wrote of Bipolar:

(If) schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bipolar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism itself is fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive comedown… without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.14

I cannot help but wonder where Borderline Personality Disorder might sit in Fisher’s hypercapitalist Venn diagram of mental illness. At the centre, with the boom and bust of capitalism’s Bipolar cycle? Towards the fringes, where reality breaks down and schizophrenia reigns? Or is the BPD sufferer not just the capitalist subject herself? Traumatised, then gaslit, then blamed for the trauma, then rejected as unfit — an un-person. Subjected to monitoring should she deviate again.

BPD is a trauma-driven condition, much like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As William Davies writes:

PTSD can develop even when there is no clearly identifiable trauma causing it… economic inequality and political marginalization become imprinted upon the body and its symptoms, creating an almost permanent condition of anxiety. In each case, it is the sustained power inequality that is critical, and the feeling that there is no escape.15

If, as Fisher believed, the symptom is inseparable from the cause, then we must account for the trauma, alienation and “othering” that drives and compounds mental illness in the crucible that we find it, which is capitalist production. Fisher understood this better than anyone when he wrote: “Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channelled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital.”16

The reward for capability is luxury and leisure. The reward for disability is penury, marginalisation and perpetual toil. This is what makes benefit assessments and “fit for work” programmes akin to eugenics. The promised reward of such work — dignity, financial stability, freedom from precarity — are de facto reserved for the privileged and able. For the “capable” among the chronically ill, there is a brutal choice — work in a role which will shorten your life and increase your suffering, or choose a slow death. It’s the logic of the concentration camp inscribed as social policy.

As sufferers, as outsiders, as control subjects, our recovery and treatment are inherently political processes, and we must engage with them as such. To capitulate to the mask-wearing conformity that says the sick must be well so they can work, we encounter only the cold lie wrought into the metalwork of the gates at Auschwitz; the ur-myth of capitalism. The freedom that work promises is a lie. The path through that belief leads only to the furnace.

• An earlier audio version of this post appeared on Strange Exiles in 2023.

Further reading and more information

About 1 in 100 people live with BPD. It is present in roughly 20% of psychiatric inpatients and 10%–30% of outpatients. Roughly 70% of individuals with BPD engage in self-harm. Approximately 8% to 10% of individuals with BPD die by suicide. BPD is frequently associated with depression, substance use disorders, PTSD, and eating disorders. A high percentage of people with BPD report histories of childhood trauma, including abuse, neglect, or separation.

Studies indicate 87% of individuals who complete Dialectical Behavioural Therapy sustained improvements in mood regulation and relationships. Despite this, waiting times for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) in Scotland vary significantly by health board, with some patients reporting waits of 9–12 months or longer in certain areas, particularly for specialized or individual, rather than group, therapy.

If you've also been through this frightening, alienating, stigmatisising process of diagnosis, treatment and recovery, my heart goes out to you. My DMs are open.

Here's some further reading around the topics explored in this essay, and masculinity more generally.

• My original post accompanying an earlier version of this essay has more about BPD, mental health resources and research into these subjects

• Denzel Rust profiles looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular for Static Blue

• Conor Fitzgerald with a fresh take on some of the problems with Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary

• Another incredible deep dive piece of literary criticism from Alexander Sorondo for The Metropolitan Review, looking back at the career of Bret Easton Ellis

• Recent guest essayist Simon Pearson for Anti-Capitalist Musings on the importance of ‘class first’ politics

• And here's a little song by Brevin Kim that lifts me up when I'm feeling down…

Ewan has also written for the screen, and his book How To Survive Everything is currently being adapted for television. He is the author of the blog UNTOPIA. Here, he brings us a deeply personal tale of family trauma and remembrance.

There’s a bag of old photographs that sits in my closet. I probably should put them into one of those family albums, but I don’t care enough to do it, I don’t believe in family enough or I’m not willing to put on the pretence that for three generations we’ve had anything but broken families. There’s a photograph in there that haunts me, no, that’s a cliche, I don’t think of it much, but I don’t like looking at it. His face. This was my grandfather, Jacob.

In the photograph he is a young minister of the Church of Scotland in a long gown and a white dog collar, beside him, his new wife on their wedding day is dressed all in white, it would’ve been taken in the nineteen thirties, they have that parlour light that old exposure photographs have, as if faces are made of China, a certain composure and stillness to them unknown to us today with our jumping around recording everything for TikTok and Instagram.

Imagine that — you pay a lot of money for one single photograph and you stand still for a long time for it to be taken. I’m beating about the bush here, to mix a metaphor.

Yes, this was Jacob Morrison, my father’s father. Church of Scotland minister. Marrying deeper into the ministry. My grandmother Grace’s father was a minister, her father’s father, the moderator of the general assembly. You could not get a picture that more summed up patriarchal Protestant religious authority.

This is the first of the broken men.

Something went wrong. I can’t establish the facts properly because everyone in the aftermath of a traumatic explosion has their own version, depending on where they stood, whose side they were on, how much they could bear of the truth, what lies they had to construct to protect the children. These children being David and Trevor, David being my father, Trevor being his elder brother.

The story I heard is this: the second world war caused my grandfather to lose his faith. Not just in the Church of Scotland. In the Church of God. He renounced his ministry and faith. In some versions he declared this in his church, in front of his horrified congregation, his wife and two small children on the front benches. Words like — I can no longer stand before you as a man of faith because I have lost my faith. I imagine my father’s mouth wide open as his father tells them he no longer believes in the God of love or the God of peace or any God, not after what he’s witnessed, bodies blown to smithereens, communities devastated, bombs that incinerate entire cities.

This is the moment of the break. The explosion of the nuclear family.

From that day on my father’s father was banished from the manse. His mother, horrified that she had married not just a backsliding Christian but an atheist, a God-denier and God-hater. I don’t know what the procedures were in those days. Nineteen forty-eight or forty-nine or maybe even fifty. My father would’ve been eight or nine or ten. I don’t know whether there was divorce for wives of the church, whether church elders came to speak to her and the fallen minister to agree to some separation settlement. The way the story goes is my father never saw his father again.

The apostate was banished. And through my father’s childhood nervous tics and a stutter developed, possibly connected to the trauma of his ejected and erased father. Into his forties still with the trace of that, he’d sometimes tell me of being alone as child in the empty house and how a shadow fell across the glass of the front door. This would have been frosted Victorian glass. Someone, a man, standing outside the front door about to knock. Then the knock did not come. The shadow moved away.

My father liked to think it was his father. It could’ve been a postman. It could’ve been a beggar. It could’ve been someone stepping into a doorway to light a cigarette. In my father’s imagining it was his father trying to summon the courage to see his children again.

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Did I say Grace was exceptionally cold as a mother. She banned her children from uttering the name of their father. She moved to a new house in a new town to hide from her fallen husband and from the shame. I encountered this woman later in life when my father took care of her in her eighties, and she came to live with us. Hunchbacked, half deaf, a shuffling skeleton in a tartan shawl. I never really saw her as grandmother, I preferred an eccentric old woman who lived up the street with her cats. Grace was a throwback to the Victorian era. A God-fearing bible-bashing Calvinist, austere as any fundamentalist. A kind of Christianity you would today see as a cult. Aggressive negativity, fear of the flesh, sanctimony and scorn for everyone she considered beneath her, which was almost everybody, who she marked as sinners, including her own son. This was the environment my father grew up in. A bitter Calvinist woman who could barely be called mother, who wouldn’t hug or hold her little boys. Year after year she wouldn’t let them see their banished father, who, one of the stories said became an alcoholic, became a bum, lived on the streets. A banished member of the church, sleeping on park benches, drinking himself to sleep with beer and sherry, maybe begging for money.

This would be my grandfather if this was true. There’s almost too much to say here and it’s all just fragments.

The story goes, as my father told it, that one day he was told to rush from school because his father was dying. I don’t know who took him to the hospital or whether it was his mother or some other more caring person, a neighbour even. But my father’s telling of the story was all romanticism, sketchy on details. He seemed drawn to the idea that his father was dying of cancer although there’s no direct correlation between being homeless or an alcoholic and developing cancer.

The way my father used to tell the story, always in tears by the end of it, always trying to cling to me when I was a child of also about ten: his father had only said a few things to him on what would have been his deathbed. Jacob told him that he had secretly been coming to see my father play rugby at school, watching from the sidelines over the years. Maybe in a long-hooded jacket. Maybe with a large hat hiding his face. Maybe far from the playing field in the back, in the rain and unseen. He’d been watching my father as a child of nine, ten, eleven, playing without announcing who he was, without interrupting the game, without following him after to say, hello remember me, I’m your dad. Yes, he must’ve watched many games and just walked away before my father’s attention moved from the ball and the scrum and the processes of passing and fouls and finally the end whistle. He’d be gone.

I imagine my father in tears by his father’s deathbed. My father ten, my grandfather forty. Or maybe my father the child was just frozen. Flight, fight, freeze. The waxy skin of the face of a dying man, the foul breath, the dry lips. This can’t ever be your father.

These other words my father reported in his version of the story, also muddled and sentimentalised and soaked in alcohol over the decades that followed: my grandfather leaned over from his hospital bed and said to him, you’re a good rugby player but you’re too cautious. Always get into the thick of it, son.

This being life advice from a man who thought God was dead and who was now dying. That’s the conclusion of my father’s story, as he always told it, always in tears, always with a nearly finished bottle of whiskey or wine beside him. It was only then that this painful, much-added-to memory, would rise to the surface, a story which I should add my mother was rather tired of hearing, just as she was tired of seeing him whiskey and tear-soaked. And of course, why traumatise a child, by telling this tale? Why cling in tears to a small child. The big heavy bulk of him, the booming sound of his crying, so deep and bottomless I felt a fear of falling in my bones. Was it weakness from my father to tell me his sad story, to reveal how broken he was, to pass that brokenness on, just as it had been passed to him. To cling to me as if for help.

Get into the thick of it, son.

Years later I heard another version of the story from my father’s brother’s side of the family. A little correction to what had seemed to me for some time, to be a hole in the plot. I met my cousin for the first time at the age of fifty because there had been a break between my father and his brother long, long ago and after both my father and her father had died within three months of each other around twenty-twelve, so all that business out of the way, we finally got together, the cousin I never knew, and she was surprised to hear that I thought Jacob my grandfather had died of cancer in a hospital ward.

Oh no, she said. It was suicide.

Or in this case, a failed suicide.

Are you sure? I said, I was definitely told cancer.

Suicide explained many things. The causal connection between being homeless, despairing, deprived of the right to see your own children, becoming an alcoholic, sleeping rough. These things did not contribute to cancer, but they can very often be the antechamber to depressive suicide. And of course, then also the sudden call to go to the hospital now, your father is dying right now.

I don’t know by what means this happened. Pills or knife or jumping from a height. But clearly, he had not managed to successfully commit suicide in one go. And whether his life was ebbing from internal bleeding or from liver failure from pill overdose or self-damage through bleeding, it all makes sense that after a failed attempt in which he nonetheless was going to die within twelve to twenty-four hours there would be that emergency call: bring the children now, he has to say goodbye. Hurry.

Not cancer.

And I don’t know whether my father told me cancer to protect me from the truth that my grandad had killed himself or whether others in the family, aunts, uncles, sixty years before had been trying to protect my father from the truth. Who would tell a child his father had chosen to abandon him like that. That he’d found life so impossibly full of suffering he had to exit it and leave his child to the mess he found too painful to endure, telling a child through that violent act that their life was not worth living either.

What a gift from a father to a son.

What cowardice, you hear people say about such men. A terrible act of selfishness to kill yourself like that and leave children behind, with all that burden.

Certainly, my father’s version of the story didn’t add up. I don’t think he lied to protect me, I think the adults in 1951, lied to my father, but over the decades my father was haunted by the hole in the plot.

Did I tell you that I came into possession of the marital photograph of Jacob and Grace, after my father died at the age of seventy-one. I had found it within his things, in a drawer with other photos. It had never been framed. No, on his wall instead, for decades he had a single portrait of Jacob, before he married, before the war. Jacob, maybe aged twenty-two or three, a handsome young man, who would soon become ordained.

Why do I waste my time with all of this? Why bring this back to the surface again. Why not keep Jacob’s wedding photograph hidden in the green plastic franchise superstore shopping bag in the closet?

Perhaps it’s for the same reasons that I don’t take the photograph out of the bag where it sits with fifty others. Snaps from my own childhood in the seventies, my teenage years in the eighties, my own children in the two thousands. An ex-wife. A sister. Why bother to bring this up now.

It’s something to do with the damage, the energy of it. The brokenness of that first man and how it then contributed to the brokenness within my father and then later to me. A fundamental rupture in the story of existence. The death of God destroyed that man and destroyed his family. My father tried in his own way to fix that great rupture, to start again with a new family, to leave the church behind, to condemn it, to live as a rebel, an atheist or at least an agnostic. He failed too. In his turn lived through the collapse of his own belief systems, different ones from his fathers, becoming in turn another alcoholic, another broken man in a broken marriage.

And I too in my turn followed the same pattern. All of it rather like a game of billiards: the impact from one ball hits another and sets it in motion, and then that ball hits another ball that sets it in motion. A passing on of energy, a ricochet, until finally after three or four balls impacting each other in a row entropy takes over, friction acts and the energy is dissipated. It all comes to a stop. Maybe that will happen within four generations or five of my family. Maybe then that first trauma will be over and forgotten.

Images are the system through which energy passes from one person to the next. Images trapped in the mind.

Yes. My father in his twenties stood drunk on a bridge contemplating the jump and the cost to others if he took his own life and stepped away, only to be haunted for the rest of his life by the other self who jumped. And when I was ten, he told me of his own close call with suicide and so passed the ghost image into me. And again, when I was thirty-five, I stood drunk on a bridge and weighed the cost of my leap against the pain it would cause my parents and my children.

The trauma of the image passed down the generations. Or maybe, as they would say today, it’s in the genes.

Why bring this up now?

It’s just a story. A sad story about something that happened to my grandfather in the forties, or maybe the fifties, then happened to my father again in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and then happened to me in the year two thousand and three. The collapse of a belief system. A broken man without a plot to live by, who can’t find a place for himself in society or within this model for life that had grounded all belief and all effort in meaning – a family. A history of interconnected trauma through generations.

Happy birthday, here is my image that you in turn will carry.

A fragment, now that I’m talking of her.

When she was very old, in her eighties, hunchbacked and wrapped in her tartan shawls, my grandmother would sit for hours in front of the black-and-white television watching snooker. I don’t know why snooker. She had no interest in sport. Perhaps it was just the movement, the slow deliberation, the quiet, the insistence on silence while watching it with someone else. I would sit with her sometimes. She kept asking me the colours. What colour is that ball, she’d say, pointing at the screen. The black, I’d tell her. That’s worth seven. She’d nod. Five minutes later she’d ask again. What colour is that one. The blue, I said. That’s worth five. She never remembered. For her they were just men hitting balls until they stopped.

And we would watch together, in her small bedroom, the volume of the TV turned up full to break through her deafness, and these were really my only time of connection with her. And I would explain the rules again and she would not understand them yet again, and the balls would keep colliding or vanishing and the commentator’s voice would murmur on about angles and safety and frames, and she would ask again, what colour is that one.

How strange that I have called her Grace, when in truth her name was Jessica.

Why Grace.

There but by the Grace of God go I.

And why did I forget my own grandmother’s name. Is that a form of punishment of her? Or part of the process of entropy itself?

I recall now where this started. Why I started thinking about the photograph in the closet. It was because a friend asked me to write a piece on masculinity, within the framework of a debate around toxic masculinity and male roles. And I could only think of the church minister on his wedding day. Five years before my father was born. Fifteen years before his failed suicide attempt and then slow hospital death.

Ask me about toxic masculinity. I can tell you that apart from that photo of that church minister I’ve never met a real patriarch, certainly not within my family. All I’ve ever known is these broken men who have lost their faith and who’ve tried to go on living in some kind of contact with their own children, even though the story of the father and God the father, and what any kind of father should be - has abandoned them.

Have you ever heard it said that male suicide primarily hurts women and children? That in fact male suicide is a prime example of male narcissism, violence, and toxic masculinity?

Did you ever hear of the German philosopher from eighteen seventy something, a full generation before the more famous one who declared that God is dead - an idea the famous one may or may not have borrowed from that first lesser known man? Anyway, this man, whom history has largely forgotten, spent fourteen years writing his thesis. In it he explained, guided by the scientific discoveries of his day, the hypothesis - now largely accepted as fact - of the heat death of the universe, the final state being entropy. This philosopher claimed that God had existed before the Big Bang and God made a decision to kill himself through exploding into billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, so that they in turn would all fizzle out and die over trillions of trillions of years. Thus, we, on our little planet, are nothing more than a tiny temporary accidental byproduct of the death of a God that wanted to become nothing. We are the atoms caused by God’s suicide which began thirteen point eight billion years ago.

You probably didn’t hear that this largely forgotten philosopher, when his book was finally complete and published, made a stack of the first edition in his living room and jumped from them into the neck of a noose, breathing his last while still young.

No.

I cannot take my grandfather’s wedding photograph from its plastic shopping bag in the closet to put it in a family photo album.

In this episode I speak to my good friend and all-round Glasgow legend Keira McLean. Keira is an artist, tutor and co-runner of RDW Glass (along with Rich Welsh), who make exquisite stained glass windows, often with a distinctly Socialist twist. Keira makes zines, runs workshops in communities, and has produced some incredible artworks celebrating Glasgow’s left-wing tradition.

Her latest venture, a thrilling piece of workers theatre called The Fire That Never Went Out, is currently in the works — you can read about it here in the Glasgow Times, and we discuss the play as an ongoing work in progress, in dialogue with working class communities around Scotland, and the country’s long socialist tradition.

Scroll to the bottom of this post or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube to watch the video version of this episode.

Reading recommendations from Keira McLean

We start out by talking about Keira’s work with stained glass. At RDW she teaches workshops in the community to spread knowledge and skills about the artform. She also goes out into communities when a new installation is commissioned, working with them to make something that will represent key scenes or figures from that community’s past and traditions.

You can see examples of her work online, including Scotland’s only stained glass window celebrating the miners strike of the 1980s in Kincardine, a work celebrating the life and ideas of Stuart Christie, a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher; a window at art space Platform Easterhouse celebrating the culture of the local schemes; a piece telling the story of socialist organiser and educator John Maclean at Pollokshaws Library, and a window at Glasgow’s Woodside Library highlighting the contributions of Scotland’s suffragettes, focused on lesser-known and forgotten women who campaigned for their rights. We talk about some of these specific works later in the show, and you can see pictures of them on Keira’s Instagram. She also talked to Scottish Indy Pod recently about her work, so if you want to learn more after the episode, watch it here.

It’s fascinating to me that Keira’s work emphasises both the trade and craft of stained glass making, and engages with its history as a form of political and social image-making. As Keira later says, the trade itself is under threat, with fewer and fewer people able to learn how to repair or restore older windows, of which Glasgow has a great many. While conservatorships exist to train new makers, they are often inaccessible to working class people, and there are currently no further education courses.

At the same time, artists like Keira are using their skills to create new works that reject the stuffy traditions of religious and ornamental stained glass in favour of works that connect with the communities in which they are installed, and which tell the story of Scotland’s strong tradition of radical politics. We talk a little about the now-defunct course at Glasgow Clyde College where Keira learned the trade, and her efforts to bring it back. After the show, Keira also pointed me at Michael Donnelly’s definitive history of Glasgow’s stained glass tradition. He was the long term partner of Elspeth King, and worked at the People’s Palace alongside her. The book is called Glasgow’s Stained Glass: Making the Colours Sing, and can be downloaded here for free.

Read here about the Glasgow Museums collection of stained glass from the 1900s, when the city was a world leader in the art and production of these works. Keira mentions the windows in Glasgow’s Cottiers, a former church turned events venue, as a particularly breathtaking example of the work from this era. She also mentions Harry Clark’s work at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and the windows in Glasgow’s City Chambers. Importantly, she sees stained glass as an architectural form of art, something site-specific that speaks to the buildings and communities in which it is installed. It’s this belief that led her to the practice of creating community-led installations for which she has become known. As Keira says: “Stained glass doesn’t belong in a gallery, it belongs to the city… It’s a storytelling medium.”

We briefly talk about Keira’s uncle Jack McLean, a celebrated Glasgow journalist and trade unionist who had a big influence on her outlook and politics, along with her Communist parents. You can read McLean’s obituary here to learn more. She mentions some other key figures in Scotland’s radical tradition including William Gallacher, a trade unionist and politician, Labour politician Mary Barbour, and activist and organiser Helen Crawfurd — one of the feminist figures and suffragettes depicted in Keira’s window for Woodside Library, along with Jessie M. Soga, one of the only documented people of colour involved in Glasgow’s campaigns for universal suffrage.

Some of these figures, and others, are mentioned in Kenny MacAskill’s excellent book Glasgow 1919, about the history and politics of Glasgow’s ‘Red Clydeside’. Later, Keira also mentions the left-wing uprising in 1919 that saw tanks deployed in Glasgow’s town square, as detailed in Tanks on the Streets? The Battle of George Square, 1919 by Louise Heren and Gordon Barclay.

From there, we start to talk about the Craigallan fire, the subject of Keira’s new venture as a practitioner of workers’ theatre. She mentions Bob Grieve, a town planner and professor who became a ‘fire sitter’ at Craigallan. The fire, which legend says was kept burning for twenty years until the start of World War II, was a gathering-place for young people and left-wing activists during the depression, embodying a tradition that goes back deep into Scotland’s roots as a storytelling and outdoors culture. Her play The Fire That Never Went Out tells the story of the Craigallan fire, and examines its relevance for an age that has arguably lost touch with its folk traditions, and its radical history.

Keira mentions a few other key influences on her approach to making art, including seminal industrial band Test Department, and theatre-makers 7:84. We also talk about S.C.U.D. (the Society for Crushing Useless Dick), a zine Keira and I worked on together (which sadly has no online footprint), inspired by the work of Valerie Solanas. You can hear more about my fascination with Solanas in a recent essay for my Crisis Masculinity project. We talk about the resurgence of DIY zine-making culture in Scotland, centred around Glasgow Zine Library, and how this could feed into reclaiming some of our agency and identity back from the online world of clout-chasing and social media.

After the break we talk more about The Fire That Never Went Out. Keira tells the story of the Craigallan fire, situated at the start of the West Highland Way, and how her participation-led approach to the play’s creation has helped shape the production through community workshops and collaboration with local people, and artists like Doctur Normul, a talented Glasgow singer-songwriter. You can watch one of her performances below, with backing from Becci Wallace, courtesy of our friends over at You Call That Radio.

We talk about ‘workers theatre’, which has a strong tradition in Glasgow. Keira mentions Ena Lamont Stuart’s Men Should Weep, first staged in 1947. The show was later revived by 1970s Scottish theatre collective 7:84, established by playwright John McGrath, and Elizabeth and David MacLennan. Read more about the genesis of 7:84 here. Glasgow was also home to other radical and working class theatre groups in the 1970s, including TAG Theatre, based at the Citizens Theatre, and Borderline Theatre, who platformed an early-career Billy Connolly.

These companies, and others like them, took the radical step of depicting authentic working class lives and experiences — something Keira’s work seeks to restore and revive. Keira mentions John McGrath’s manifesto about workers theatre and what it could achieve, A Good Night Out, as a key influence on her approach, along with Peter Brooks’ book The Empty Room. She also mentions the great Italian playwright Dario Fo, who used humour to talk about class politics and working class culture.

All of this fed into the creation of The Fire That Never Went Out, and the formation of the Red Flag Players, alongside other artists and writers like Joey Simons and filmmaker Caireen Stewart. They will showcase some of their work in progress at the next Glasgow International Festival. As Keira says, the Craigallan fire was a place where anarchists, Communists and socialists would meet to talk about revolution, and escape the predations of poverty.

These fireside radicals were involved in the creation of the Carbeth Hutter’s community, led by socialist organiser and Citizens Theatre chairman William Ferris, where returning soldiers from the first world war were granted camping rights. The huts went on to become a place where working class people could come to enjoy the countryside and escape the cities, championed by figures such as mountaineer Jock Nimlin and broadcaster Tom Weir (of Weir’s Way fame), both of whom acted as ‘fire-sitters’ at Craigallan. Keira’s play asks the question, could we have a Craigallan fire today? What would that look like?

Keira talks about the more familiar approach to community engagement by publicly-funded artists and collectives, which tends towards an exctractivist approach, pillaging the stories of a local area or local people to produce bourgeois art for middle-class audiences. This is akin to the approach to community outreach that Darren McGarvey describes in his best-selling book Poverty Safari, which won the Orwell Prize in 2018. We talk a little about how and why the current public funding landscape means middle-class gatekeepers keep working class artists out of the theatre, galleries, and other arts sectors. Keira feels strongly that working class practitioners shouldn’t be required to assimilate into this middle-class cultural space. As she says, quoting Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

We finish by talking about a few more writers, organisers and activists that have inspired Keira’s work. She briefly namechecks John Berger and Slavoj Žižek, but her main recommendations are all drawn from Glasgow’s radical history — past, present and future. She mentions Ian Montague, editor of radical newspaper The Voice. She also praises John Miller and his wife Mary Miller, activists and ‘libertarian theologists’ from Glasgow’s Castlemilk area.

Keira talks about activist Cathy McCormack, author of The Wee Yellow Butterfly; Castlemilk anarchist activist John Cooper and his wife Carol Cooper; and Carol Craig’s book The Tears That Made the Clyde, which shines a light on the poverty and depredation still present in Glasgow’s working class communities. More about the Coopers, and other key figures from Glasgow’s radical past, can be found in the Spirit of Revolt Archive at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. She also mentions her volunteer work with Living Rent, supporting people in insecure housing in the Glasgow area, and the 2021 Kenmure Street protest that successfully stopped an immigration raid, and which is the subject of a new film.

Huge thanks to Keira for an illuminating conversation. I definitely learned a lot about Glasgow’s history from listening to her, and I hope you did too. We need a hundred Keiras, a thousand, if we’re going to make it through the next few decades. If you’re listening in Scotland, watch out for productions and showcases of The Fire That Never Went Out near you very soon.

Next up: Alasdair Maloney’s Caledonian Gothic

My next guest is theatre-maker, rapper, spoken word artist and podcaster Alasdair Maloney. Together, we were members of early-aughts performance trio Chemical Poets, and alternative music collective Black Lantern Clan.

Since then, Ali has produced acclaimed works for the stage, including Hydronomicon (with Strange Exiles theme creator Asthmatic Astronaut), and the long-running Edinburgh scratch night Anatomy.

He returned last month with the long-awaited season 2 of his horror podcast Caledonian Gothic, combining his love of horror with the rich tradition of Scottish folklore, and more eldritch, Lovecraftian themes. You can listen to the first episode below, and read more about the show at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

See you in a few weeks! Take care of each other.

— Bram E. Gieben, Glasgow, April 2026

Content warning: This post discusses suicide, self-harm and mental illness.

Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself… The solitary modern individual and his Freudian superego, a master and a slave in a world of their own. ‘Who do I fear?’ Richard III asks at the end of his play, ‘Myself? There’s none else by.’1

— Adam Phillips

It is difficult to communicate what it’s like to live with the presence of a malignant super-ego. A harsh voice in your head, constantly offering doubts and criticisms. Always tempting you with the “easy way out” — with thoughts and visions of a permanent solution to a temporary (if recurring) set of problems. It’s amazing how used to suicidal ideation you can get — “You should kill yourself” is background noise to me now, it’s just small-talk.

Adam Phillips writes of the superego as a bad friend, terrible counsel. He advises that we ask ourselves whether we would accept such talk if it came from a stranger, or was directed at someone we love. He says we should try our best to counter these negative superego injunctions — but this is not a conversation with a stranger, but with oneself. A malignant superego is more akin to the “dark passenger” carried by the serial killer protagonist of the crime show Dexter. It calls on you to come to darkness, and if its voice is to be quietened, it must be fed. This internal voice is hardly a phenomenon that only boys and men experience, but it is one that feminist author bell hooks acknowledged as intimately connected to the ways in which patriarchy harms men. She writes:

Since shaming is often used to socialize boys away from their feeling selves toward the patriarchal male mask, many grown men have an internal shaming voice.2

By the time I reached the age of fifteen I was confused, secretive, lost in my own inner world. A lot of this was due to not fitting in at school, and being bullied for this or that arbitrary reason — as a six-foot teenager with no fighting skills and a pacifist nature, owner of an English accent in a Scottish playground, I made a tempting target for anyone looking to make their bones in an after-school bout. What I remember most clearly is the intensity of my emotions, the depths of the despair that I felt — and that this could not be explained. I did not believe that I had any right to feel as awful as I felt.

The intensity of those emotions, the difficulty of suppressing them, became overwhelming. The other half of this feeling was guilt, although perhaps I would have struggled to articulate this then. Guilt for being a man — it felt true to say, like Valerie Solanas wrote, that I and all like me were “walking abortions”, things that should not be. Men were responsible for the misery of the world, they were oppressors, that much was clear. I desperately wanted to be anything else. Cultural shame and guilt, too — shame that my ancestors had killed and conquered and enslaved, that I had benefited from this; that I stood on the shoulders of flesh traders and murderers. I experienced guilt as a stain, as original sin. I believed that I deserved to be punished.

One day, I went into the bathroom, and pried apart the thin blades of my dad’s razor. I tossed the snapped plastic remains and carefully hid them under rubbish. A single silver blade went into a matchbox. That night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I drew it across the skin of my left arm a dozen times in small, straight slashes a quarter-inch long. The cuts were not deep. Each stung like a hot wire applied to the flesh, but the pain was brief. With each flash, I allowed myself to experience the full intensity of my feelings. A pressure, a suffocating despair I did not understand was suddenly transfigured into raw, physical sensation. I dried the blood from my arm and slept like a baby. The throb and pulse of the cuts as they healed under my clothes over the next few weeks was a constant reassurance. It allowed my pain to be real; it gave me a right to feel it.

It took my parents a few months to catch me out. I picked up a nasty flu, and while sweating in my bunk bed, my mum saw my arm, covered in cuts. It was 1995, so getting treatment for teenage mental health issues was challenging. The NHS services that were available were oversubscribed. Little has changed in that regard over the past few decades. The significant part, for me at least, was my parents’ reaction. They were desperate to understand how and why I had become like this. When I was younger, and my dad disciplined me, he had rolled out the old chestnut, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” They didn’t understand, now, that this was the problem — I had nothing to cry about, as far as I was aware.

Still, I felt awful. I hated myself. I detested my physical appearance, my voice, my untidy thoughts; this hatred expressed by a loud internal voice telling me I was a terrible, awful thing, reinforced daily in the gauntlet of unkind words and unexpected punches at school. There were no objective correlates for this subjective experience, as far as I or my parents knew. There was no known “reason” for me to be broken this badly. This reaction told me that I was correct to assume I had no right to feel the intense sadness and self-hatred that I felt. It could not be real. I could not possibly be experiencing it. It was all in my head.

It was not until years later, through therapy, that I learned of elements of my childhood history that were glossed over, or brushed aside. Factors such as the prevalence of addiction, suicide, major depression and other undiagnosed illnesses in both my parents’ families were minimised and dismissed — after all, my parents had escaped their childhood trauma, and built me a perfect life. There was a sense that it couldn’t be any of that; that any kind of vertical transmission of trauma and mental illness was impossible. It must have been something I read, or saw someone do. I must have been influenced.

Statistics support the narrative that self-mutilation among children and young adults increased dramatically in the 1990s. In a study conducted in Oxford3 from 1991 to 2000, the incidence of self-harm increased (their definition included suicide attempts, overdoses and other forms of self-harm besides self-mutilation). By the 2000s, it had started to decrease again. It’s hard to draw absolute conclusions from the data, but it certainly felt like the issue was epidemic at the time I was a teenager in Edinburgh. Many of my friends, a majority of them female, engaged in self-harm behaviours. Many were hospitalised. I visited friends in Accident and Emergency and saw them sectioned; their stomachs pumped after swallowing paracetamol, arms and legs and torsos sewn up and stitched.

Was there a form of social contagion happening here? This was long before the rise of social media. The internet was still a slow, stuttering dial-up model that was good for bulletin boards, but not much else. The senior teachers, once they cottoned on to the kids cutting themselves up in the school toilets, certainly saw this as something which had “spread” among a small number of the students, no doubt influenced by the self-destructive performances of our heroes, like Kurt Cobain and Richey Edwards (who had famously self-mutilated and then been photographed by Select Magazine’s Ed Sirr in 1995).

Was this the source of the self-harm “craze” that swept the student body, and the country at large? The year before, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation was the most popular book among my circle of friends, passed around like a secret tract; a few years earlier, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer detailed a similar (if fictional, and twisted) version of Wurtzel’s secret inner world of disaffection and despair, expanding on the aestheticised teenage angst of Twin Peaks. Had these artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians influenced us to become depressed, or to think of ourselves as suffering? Were we “faking it”? Was it “just a phase”?

Since the 1990s, studies have sought to examine whether social contagion plays a role in the spread of self-harming behaviours among teenagers. The 2013 study by Jarvi et al. concludes that social contagion “may warrant considerable empirical attention,” while a more recent 2021 study by Seong et al. conducted in South Korea4 concluded that self-harming behaviours can increase in communities of teenagers connected by social media.

I do not know if self-harm social contagion is real. All I can tell you for certain is how it felt, on my seventeenth birthday, to stub seventeen cigarettes out on my arm, one for each year, and walk home relishing the hot, searing pain. To shed tears and feel I had a right to them; to be addicted to this feedback loop, a solution as horrific as the problem it set out to solve. I have no idea now whether I would have done this had I not been immersed in a community that reinforced and accepted this behaviour. I doubt my fondness for horror comics and X-rated Manga or harsh, atonal grunge bands drove me to it, any more than backwards song lyrics in 80s hair metal spawned a generation of Satanists.

Perhaps the concept of “antifragility” championed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind would have been useful to me then. The ideas in their book, which deals mostly with the question of risk-reduction in child and adult education, are drawn in part from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, an intervention with provable therapeutic benefits. They make the case that activities like unsupervised free play make children more resilient because they learn about social hierarchies and empathy, how to deal with bullies and how to make friends. This line of thinking has a certain appeal, but it’s very close to the bootstrap logic of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, too. All miserable kids need to do is tidy their rooms, sort their bullshit out, grow up.

Haidt and Lukianoff’s arguments are easily flattened into yet another form of conservative Social Darwinism, where the emphasis is placed on the individual to become more resilient, to feel things less deeply, so they require less protection and sympathy. This is akin to Chris Rock’s joke, from his 2018 Netflix special Tambourine:

We need bullies! How the fuck you gonna have a school without bullies? Bullies do half the work. Teachers do one half, bullies do the whole other half. And that is the half you’re gonna use when you’re a fucking grownup.5

There’s a logic to this that dovetails nicely with conservative resistance to “snowflakes” and “safe spaces”, something Haidt and Lukianoff are keen to prove are unhelpful and damaging. Yet even they admit that this “antifragile” approach will not work for all kids; that there will always be bullies who wound so deeply that some children are permanently damaged.

The idea of “permanent damage” is scientifically measurable as well — many kinds of childhood abuse, including bullying, abandonment, proximity to addicts with chaotic lifestyles, poverty, neglect, or physical and mental coercion can be so severe as to cause permanent changes in the brains of abused children. A respected 2012 study by Heledd Hart and Katya Rubia describes and categorises the types of changes that can occur by coordinating two types of data. While you cannot see, at a glance, that a person whose brain has been traumatically altered by abuse is physically different from yours, it is measurable. They found that:

Neuropsychological studies suggest an association between child abuse and deficits in IQ, memory, working memory, attention, response inhibition and emotion discrimination. Structural neuroimaging studies provide evidence for deficits in brain volume, gray and white matter of several regions.6

Everything in our societies tells us to minimise or triumph over our trauma — even the recovery myths that we celebrate, as if they represent a victory over mental health crisis and trauma reactions. The idea is to explore trauma, understand it, and move past it. This is the message reinforced by all of the trauma-driven plots we see in commercial films and TV shows, where a character’s complexity and depth are symbolised by a past event or relationship they must overcome in order to access their “powers” — whatever those may be — and win the day. In the real world, we ask each other to minimise and hide our traumas by reacting unconsciously and instinctively with disgust when we see weakness or emotion displayed. We show our contempt for the traumatised by laughing at the concepts of trigger warnings and safe spaces. How can we be this cruel? Why deny comfort to those who suffer?

For bell hooks, where men are concerned, this comes down to the ways in which patriarchy harms men, which women sometimes fail to acknowledge. She warns of the real dangers inherent in the way men process (or fail to process) their trauma:

Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity. [...] As their pain intensifies, so does their need to do violence, to coercively dominate and abuse others. [...] The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self.7

In recent years, trauma has become something of an industry — whether through trauma narratives leveraged by influencers online, or through the continuing proliferation of self-help and self-improvement books. Victimhood can confer status in the high-stakes games of clout-chasing that occur online. Trauma experiences, mental health conditions and victim status have also become “identities” — entire “communities” have been built up on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms around those who claim diagnoses of ADHD, autism, bipolar, or even dissociative identity disorder.

These identities and experiences can be used to seek fame or clout, and even monetised, as Katherine Rowland writes:

Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual. [...] This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.8

The increased visibility of people who “identify as” having these conditions, and arguably an increasing acceptance of the widespread experience of both mental illness and trauma itself, have come with a cost — their complete commodification by capitalism. This even leads to an inflated sense of self based around one’s condition, as Freddie DeBoer observes in a piece on the “ADHD community”:

What’s wild is the way that the insecurity underwrites the self-aggrandizement, how the specter of societal judgment that people in these various communities supposedly labor under becomes the machinery through which they arrive at arrogance. They are authentically sensitive and vulnerable and at the same time they have a wildly inflated sense of their own self. In the 21st century, all things are possible.9

If suffering itself has become nothing but a “lifestyle choice” for some influencers, then recovery techniques from self-care to therapy have by their nature become just another money-making opportunity to be exploited. This should be unsurprising given how difficult accessing mental health treatments has become, both in the UK’s overstretched waiting lists for NHS appointments, and in America’s prohibitively expensive private healthcare system. The explosion of both self-help content and mental health and wellness influencers — and increasingly, therapy-bots driven by artificial intelligence — can be understood as a direct consequence of this process of commodification, and the legacy of under-diagnosis and treatment of mental health or trauma-related conditions. In the absence of good provision, people self-diagnose, or risk over- or mis-diagnosing themselves. This makes them prey for unscrupulous providers, ill-informed influencer communities that act as viral multipliers for bad ideas, and unregulated industries.

I have been through many types of therapy since my teens. The cigarettes were my last act of self-mutilation. I’ve destroyed myself in countless ways since, of course. The super-ego and I are friends these days, most of the time — except when we’re not. When things are good, he’s an Iron John-type lifestyle coach, a curmudgeonly drill sergeant who helps me stick to exercise routines and say no to the third beer. When things are bad, he’s still a dick who tells me I should kill myself.

The most useful therapy I experienced was Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, which combines a little bit of Zen wisdom with William Friedrich Hegel’s proto-Marxist dialectics, and the best parts of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It’s a series of techniques for looking at the world, analysing the way you see it, and considering opposing “readings” or interpretations of the people and situations you encounter. I’ve found these techniques helpful, even transformative. The key idea is syncretism — the ability to hold in your mind, consider, and potentially reconcile two completely opposing ideas. It’s an attempt to cancel out or short-circuit the “black and white thinking” and catastrophism which are common symptoms of depressive and behavioural disorders — an inherently heterodox challenge to one’s world-view, and subjective interpretation of life events.

DBT was even referenced in the first episode of Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law as the secret to Bruce Banner’s ability to control his own raging, monstrous superego, the Hulk. This made sense to me, in the context of the Marvel universe. Banner’s most iconic line in 2012’s The Avengers was a re-imagining of his 1970s TV predecessor’s catchphrase — where Bill Bixby’s Banner had warned: “You won’t like me when I’m angry,” the modern Hulk confessed: “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” As bell hooks writes, for repressed men like the 1970s Banner, “Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling.”10 For Ruffalo’s Banner, the anger never goes away, but it is controlled. It seems that with Dialectics and Zen, he can hold it in equilibrium. He can control it, let it out when he chooses. He is rational enough to know when that is appropriate.

Perhaps that’s the goal for someone like myself, still struggling to contain, articulate and survive intense emotional shifts that, if left untreated, can and often have led to ruinous actions and consequences in my life. Perhaps the goal is complete control, and self-understanding. Even if that goal’s unreachable, perhaps it is worth striving for. But the fact remains, at times I’m not engaging in a conversation with my superego, but a death struggle. More often than I like to admit, I cannot trust my perceptions or my judgments. I do not know if it is me, or the devil inside who speaks. I fear abandonment desperately, for complex reasons, so I am conflict-averse — if I sense unpleasantness coming, I have a tendency to blow up my life and relationships, and walk away. The techniques I learned in treatment are a process of constant self-gaslighting, just like my first experience of a mental health crisis. Do I truly feel what I feel, or is it just a passing feeling? Do I have any right to feel it, given the privilege I’m sitting in? Should I see things another way, try to talk myself out of another burnout, another collapse, another crisis?

I cannot trust my feelings. I cannot trust my thoughts. Perhaps this is why I see the world the way I do; full of malign actors with ill intentions. Burnout, crisis, breakdown — these experiences are a crucible. Not everyone survives them, those that do are transformed. I try to hold that in my head at the worst points. Depression is deception, but it is also a cold form of insight, revealing the uncaring nature of the world and humanity. My perceptions may be distorted at times, but they contain truth as well as error.

All of this self-reflection was only possible because I was able to access treatment. None of it came to me through online communities, influencers, or even specific books. I was lucky enough to experience the medicalisation of my experiences, and my reactions to them, as a path out from under their control — rather than as an insight into my identity; who I am. I am not my diagnosis, nor does it make me part of any distinct “community” — rather, the label, and my experiences, offer me an insight into how society often still excludes those it does not understand, and whose conditions it cannot or will not treat.

Perhaps the thing that has helped me most is to understand that catastrophism and regret are both caused by a dissociation from the present, from the here and now. To spend time in any imagined future is to set yourself up for disappointment, or to terrify oneself with imagined disasters. To dwell constantly on events, people or experiences that are dead and gone can trap you in inertia and break your heart. The mind replays awful or beautiful moments on a never-ending reel, a hellish torture device like the “exposure therapy” endured by Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A lot can be achieved by striving to live in the moment, to “be here now”, as the spiritual guru Ram Dass suggested. It is not easy. We like to plan, we like to remember. In nearly all cases, mental health crises and “disordered” ways of seeing are a warped mirror to universal tendencies within our human nature. As Anne Amnesia writes in a heartbreaking essay on the USA’s mental health crisis: “Despair is the collapse of forever into the strain of now.”11

Capitalism tells me I am a misfit who should, by all accounts, in fact be a healthy and happy drone. I am “disordered” — the legal records the state retains on me reflect this. This state-defined, medically diagnosed divergence is the cumulative effect of an ever-present inner voice which judged, belittled, cajoled and insulted me from childhood. I have not told you in this essay about every horror I experienced, nor do I feel the need to elaborate further.

Neither am I comforted to see similar experiences play out in front of me on social media in the name of establishing or recognising some alternative “community” — to see those who would set up such republics trapped in a diagnosis they have accepted as an identity marker. The idea that these people would “influence” others scares me — but maybe I am no different to them. Perhaps the dissociation and addictive, reality-altering behaviours I learned in school are just legacy behaviours inherited from a self who is long gone, or a holding pattern established by the addicts and suicides in my DNA; or something I copied from a friend, a pop star, a writer’s words. In some ways, that would be easier to deal with.

I tell myself I learned to dissociate, to disappear inside my head behind an emotionless mask as a distancing tactic to bullying and othering, and darker memories. But I never let go of these crutches. I carried them with me into adult life.

With a sympathy rarely offered to men in feminist theory, bell hooks writes:

Learning to dissimulate, men learn to cover up their rage, their sense of powerlessness. Yet when men learn to create a false sense of self as a way to maintain domination, they have no sound basis on which to build healthy self-esteem. To always wear a mask as a way of asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and well-being. This falseness causes males to experience intense emotional pain.12

I mistook the mask for my face. I felt pursued. The nagging sense of a doom already laid out for me, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The constant questioning imposed by behavioural therapy, and filtered through mood-altering medications, has become my reality, so who’s to say if it is “real”? Am I getting this right? Am I missing something, imagining things? Is that guy staring at me? Can people see my thoughts on my face, spelled out in my gestures, encoded in my words so that they leer like comic book speech bubbles over my head? I’ve spent a lifetime questioning my perceptions. Perhaps that’s all there is.

As Mark Fisher wrote:

The most productive way of reading 'the personal is political' is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It's miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves).13

Further reading

A few texts touching on masculinity for you to read:

• Jason Okundaye in The Guardian on the anxieties behind looksmaxxing

• Kathleen Stock for UnHerd, on Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary

• Theroux's documentary itself is worth a watch (though not without its problems)

• Eliot Rosenstock wrote a psychology-themed response to my series so far, arguing (via analysis of Zoolander) that there can be no crisis of masculinity

He returns this year with Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism for Revol Press.

This guest essay is part of Bram E. Gieben’s ongoing essay series Crisis Masculinity, published by Strange Exiles.

Carl Jung, the father of deep psychology, dedicated his life to understanding the hidden aspects of our psyche. Infamous amongst these parts of ourselves is the shadow, that part of us from which our least desirable thoughts, feelings and actions come. Uncovering our shadow can help us to understand why we sometimes act in ways that we regret or are ashamed of, or even in ways that we don’t realise are causing harm. On the face of it, we might attribute much of the horror in the world today to the shadow — in my book Radical Jung (out May 2026) I explore the increasing privilege of the 1% whose wealth grows unencumbered by the global oligarchy that we live under.

Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that this immense privilege, which “is more often seen in men than women”, functions as a shadow to their increasingly despotic rule over us and the environment. These “privileged and entitled” men:

…become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

This is explored in The Ministry of the Future, Stanley Robinson’s fictionalised account of how humanity grapples with and ultimately makes the right choices to mitigate the global catastrophe of out of control human led climate change. Sadly, this utopia remains a fiction, as precious few national governments or industries are making meaningful efforts to address the climate emergency. Yet, as Trump signs more executive orders for the destruction of the natural habitats that might help to mitigate the worst aspects of climate instability, and as the most aggressive coloniser of our minds Mark Zuckerberg recently said that “most companies need more ‘masculine energy’”, we might understand the destructive rage of our privileged decision makers, and people more generally, as a way to avoid facing those aspects of themselves that are too painful to face. Uncovering these hidden aspects of the psyche — for everyone and not only for our maniacal leaders — was an overarching concern that Jung explored throughout his life’s work.

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While we would all do well to engage in Jung’s “shadow work”, there are other aspects of our psyche that we neglect at our peril. Foremost amongst these are the gendered aspects of our selves. The masculine that Zuckerberg, Andrew Tate and their ilk call for is associated with logic and rationality, the Greek Logos. The feminine, or Eros, is associated with love, care, and desire. These aspects of the psyche are archetypal. That is, they are remnants of the evolutionary history of our mind, and shared by us all. As such, the shadow and gendered aspects of our psyche have a profound and healing ancient wisdom if we can integrate them into our conscious awareness. This “individuation process” of the shadow, gendered, and other hidden aspects of our psyche was fundamental to Jung’s approach. He describes it as:

…a relatively rare occurrence, which is experienced only by those who have gone through the wearisome but, if the unconscious is to be integrated, indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of the personality.

This process is “indispensable” as our conscious agency demands that we understand the source of our feelings and actions. Without this understanding, we are merely the automata of the unconscious ghost in the machine.

Jung, along with his wife Emma, who developed much of their theory around gender, suggested that men were born into the rationalist disposition of Logos and women into the loving and caring disposition of Eros. Through the individuation process, we come to understand that these gendered dispositions always exist as a polarity within us. For those enmeshed in the rationalism of Logos, this is a process of coming to uncover the anima or feminine aspect of themselves. Likewise, those who spend their early life in the caring and loving disposition of Eros uncover the animus or masculine aspect of themselves via the individuation process.

When Jung was writing, homosexuality was deemed to be criminal and a psychological illness. Yet since then, and in the face of increasing opposition from the far right, millions of queered and trans lives show us that we don’t need to tie Logos, Eros, or the animus or anima to biological gender. Though, whether straight, queer, or trans, we ought to hang onto our appreciation of the polarity between the aspects of gender that run through us.

Fundamental to Jungian psychology is dream analysis and interpretation. It is often through our dreams that these hidden aspects of ourselves start to emerge in symbolic form. Jung saw this as a recovery of a way of knowing that modernity had lost, yet could still be found in indigenous cultures and mythology from around the world.

Melissa Lucashenko explores how her indigenous Australian culture receives the constant guidance of “Dreamings”, and the disaster that ensues from Europeans “recognising no Dreamings at all”. A situation that results in our lives being “‘an endless nightmarish struggle for dominance over other men”. This is a situation that anyone alive today will be more than familiar with. Every strata of society seems to be dominated by this nightmarish struggle: welfare systems of care are gutted to enable the flow of more capital to the already wealthy; nature is destroyed for profit; murderous military action is threatened and enacted; online influencers like Tate sell the image of what it means to be a “real” man while systematically exploiting women for profit and sexual gratification — and even our interpersonal conversations are fraught with division.

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Fellow indigenous Australian author and thinker Tyson Yunkaporta observes that Elderhood in his culture “comes with lots of exchanges between Men’s and Women’s business” — a theme that is masterfully portrayed in the 2020 film High Ground, that explores the genocide of native Australians by European settlers. While the Europeans are presented in traditionally gendered roles, the indigenous elders show an understanding of their nuanced and gendered sides. Thus, in the final scenes of the film, the leading elder man (played by Witiyana Marika) advises against violence and retribution, while the leading woman Esmerelda Marimowa calls for anger and revenge; for more destruction.

Following Yunkaporta, we can say that Tate’s promotion of the manosphere, Trump’s environmental destruction and phallic military projection, and Zuckerberg’s call for more “masculine energy” is telling of their immaturity. Despite their extreme wealth and power, these men have much to learn about themselves.

Jung’s individuation process is often brought on by a major life crisis. When we become overwhelmed by the trials of life, we are forced to find new dispositions to navigate our way through. The wealthy are not immune to the internal battles that we all face, and we know of fellow tech oligarch Elon Musk’s mental health difficulties because his discussion of the treatment of his depression with ketamine has received much media attention.

Musk’s choice of ketamine over the increasingly popular use of psilocybin for treating depression is telling of the different psychomimetic qualities of each drug. Ketamine is known for its dissociative effect. In a recent paper comparing the effects of ketamine and psilocybin, ketamine’s effects are described as “partial or complete loss of the normal integration between memories of the past, awareness of identity and immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements”. Psilocybin and its sister tryptamine alkaloids such as LSD and DMT on the other hand are enhancers of our minds, often drawing up distant and forgotten memories. And psychedelic-assisted psychiatry that was developed in the UK by Dr Ronald Sandison in the 1960s and 70s adopted a Jungian lens to work with the archetypal images that were manifest in the trips that these chemicals invariably induce.

So, while Musk may be receiving relief from his depression through his regular dissociative doses of ketamine, he is perhaps blocking himself from the elderhood that could otherwise be brought on by these struggles. In my own practice as an ecotherapist, I often work with patients who are spurred on to major life changes by episodes of depression. Yet I know almost as many who have been diverted from this change of life’s course when the effects of their prescribed antidepressants have kicked in. The effect of the individuation process and integration of the hidden aspects of our psyche is, once we have passed through the initial horror, to lead us towards a more aligned, harmonious and sustainable life. This leads us to wonder to what extent Musk, Tate, Trump, Zuckerberg and others’ destructive masculine behaviour is enabled by medication that stems the initial horror of the individuation process and prevents the uncovering of the archetypal (often feminine) elder wisdom that is so sorely needed to divert us from our destructive path.

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'Radical Jung' with Rob Faure Walker on Strange Exiles X Revol

Bram E. Gieben speaks to writer, theorist and ecotherapist Rob Faure Walker for Revol Press and Strange Exiles. Author of 2024’s Love and The Market, on economics and the Enlightenment, and 2022’s The Emergence of Extremism, Rob returns this year with…

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Publication notes: An earlier version of this essay was published in 2024 as Episode 29 of Strange Exiles. See the earlier post for show notes and reading recommendations. The part of Valerie Solanas is played by Martha Brozyna. The audio was produced with help from theatre director and writer R.G. Rader.

Content warning: This essay contains discussions of suicide, terrorism and violence against women.

S.C.U.M. will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists.1

— Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto

Valerie Solanas published S.C.U.M. Manifesto in 1967, a year before she famously shot Andy Warhol. The book is a delirious, incisive, revolutionary anti-bourgeois tract. The stated goal of her proposed brand of militant, female revolution was a total paradigm shift. S.C.U.M. wanted “...to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”2 Reading these words aged 15, I was all in.

In places, Solanas’ manifesto is as disturbing and darkly funny as any satire by Jonathan Swift, with its frequent calls for eugenic ‘final solutions’ to the “error” of maleness, and indeed the targeted political mass murder of men. Solanas’ work demands to be taken seriously, just as it suggests the impossible, the diabolical, and the undeniable justice of brutally-earned revenge. Perhaps this explains the controversy her writing still causes. The manifesto is a work of righteous fury, riddled with black humour and seeming nonsequiturs. Solanas identifies poisonous, acquisitive, selfish values as ‘male’ — and playful, creative, liberated values as ‘female.’ Often maligned by those who take her work absolutely literally, what Solanas proposed was not necessarily just (or only) the murder of men, and to read it as such through the lens of her shooting of Warhol does her ideas a massive disservice. It was the destruction of ‘maleness,’ the harmful gender role of the male, with all its negative connotations and associated behaviour that she sought.

The S.C.U.M Manifesto describes itself as a revolutionary tract against the dominance of biological males. But it also contains blueprints for the de-gendered, egalitarian, post-capitalist, post-patriarchal society Solanas imagined. In many ways, she was a utopian idealist, especially when it came to human nature. She wrote that “the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music — all with love. In other words, to create a magic world.”3 But that idealism is tempered with razor-sharp critical thinking.

Much is made of her description of men as “walking abortions,” and when she states the case for their inferiority, she pulls few punches: “To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.”4 She believes men are “cripples”, and perhaps we can read that in the contemporary sense. To be crippled by something, an accident or an assault, is an event: something done to an individual, or something that befalls them. Feminist icon bell hooks agrees — she writes: “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.”5 Both writers make the claim that men are emotional cripples because that is how we make them. Elsewhere in her book on masculinity, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, bell hooks writes: “No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.”6 The emotional mutilation that patriarchal capitalism forces men to endure is just as powerfully described by Solanas as the awful oppression of women, and not without sympathy:

Since he has no compassion or ability to empathise or identify, proving his manhood is worth an endless amount of mutilation and suffering and an endless number of lives, including his own — his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory.7

Does this not presciently describe the hate that drives incels and other mass shooters, lost young men caught in the steel trap of an ‘all or nothing’ success-or-failure binary against which capitalism compels them to define their lives? Solanas is not only right about this, but her reading is more sympathetic and useful than most you would encounter in any analysis desperate to locate the radicalisation of young men outside the field of toxic gender programming and the vicissitudes of capitalist Social Darwinism. She is right to say these young men cannot empathise — they have had that beaten out of them. She is right to say they cannot identify — society, for one reason or another, has coded them as lesser men, less than men, subhuman. Losers and outsiders. This is the logic of Capital, which says that each man is responsible for his own fate, and those outside the system earned their places there.

Many of the most powerful passages of the manifesto, for our era, are to do with capitalism itself, and its distinctively male logic:

What will liberate women... from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.8

Solanas is no reformist. She has seen through the illusion of parity, and through the patience demanded by a long-fought war of position. She proposes nothing short of full-scale insurrection, rebellion, boycott and violence. Whether she does this to dramatise the extent and depravity of male oppression of women, or to offer a revolutionary blueprint, is up to the reader to discern. Avital Ronell, in her introduction to the 2004 Verso edition of the manifesto, locates Solanas in both an academic and an outsider, revolutionary context:

... the so-called Unabomber, David Koresh and Solanas are more vagabond, unmoored and alone with their inscriptions, offering a spare cluster of de-institutionalised and depopulated “revolutionaries” [...] Valerie was not meant to have disciples or spawn a new breed of revolutionary… She had no followers. She arrives too late or too early on every scene.9

The manifesto might have been a marginal tract, and it can be read as the product of a disordered mind, but it remains an uncompromising anti-capitalist document. Like the writings of Ted Kaczynski,10 the trauma, instability and violence in Solanas’ life do not overrule the usefulness of those experiences in a provocative engagement with biopolitics, critical theory and ideology. While the manifesto is undeniably paranoid, fractured, and offensive in a very calculated way, it is also an excoriating vilification of capitalism. It is a piece of writing that is frightening in its ugliness and its beauty. It is the product of a mind broken by brain chemistry, by society, by abuse, and forged into cold, steel-eyed purpose. It is prophetic. Her description of the ‘passive’ male could be a description of any passive member of the DeBordian spectacle-society we all now inhabit:

He has no deep-seated individuality, which stems from what intrigues you, what outside yourself absorbs you, what you’re in relation to. Completely self-absorbed, capable of being only in relation only to their bodies and physical sensations, males differ from each other only to the degree and in the ways they attempt to defend against their passivity...11

Even when she dissects the senseless toxicity of masculine roles, she is not without sympathy and humour. In the passage on ‘Conformity’, she nails the purpose of the self-policing, shame-driven, often homophobic bullying men subject each other to:

Differentness in other men, as well as himself, threatens him; it means they’re fags whom he must at all costs avoid, so he tries to make sure that all other men conform.12

That conformity is to a rigidly Darwinian war for dominance, where the losers are discarded as weak ‘un-men’ and the winner takes the (female) spoils: “Men cannot cooperate to achieve a common end, because each man’s goal is all the pussy for himself.”13

For Solanas, it is male or masculine thinking that leads to capitalism, competition, and the stunted potential of the female (human) race. To read this as an indictment of patriarchy and capitalism, as opposed to “men”, is to perhaps understand a little better how Solanas would have liked her manifesto to be read. There is ample evidence for this:

Our society is not a community but merely a collection of isolated family units… A true community consists of individuals — not mere species members, not couples — respecting each other’s individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally — free spirits in relation to each other — and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends.14

This focus on a “true community” echoes something that the feminist scholar Audre Lorde declares in her seminal essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House”. Focusing on the flattening effects that community can have, where unity becomes conformity and sameness, Lorde writes:

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist.15

Community is at the heart of Solanas’ vision too, with a similar focus on a unity of non-conforming women — even if it does come after a protracted programme of gender-based genocide. As Audre Lorde continues, in perhaps the most celebrated passage of her essay: “[The master’s tools] may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”16 While murder might certainly be considered one of “the master’s tools”, this focus on the acceptance of difference and division within a community is key to understanding what Solanas’ proposed utopia might look like — de-gendered, post-capitalist, and egalitarian. As Lorde continues: “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”17

Perhaps the most important thing to ask is whether Solanas is wrong that the roots of capitalism and the roots of patriarchy are the same thing; that they are inextricably linked. From the Right of Kings to the unelectability of Hilary Clinton, all forms of hierarchical male dominance, right up to late-stage capitalism, have depended upon the exploitation of women’s bodies, and the denial of their rights:

Having no sense of right or wrong, no conscience, which can only stem from having an ability to empathise with others… having no faith in his non-existent self, being unnecessarily competitive, and by nature, unable to cooperate, the male feels a need for external guidance and control. So he created authorities — priests, experts, bosses, leaders etc. — and government… There’s no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathising with each other and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.18

This is a form of anti-social Darwinism. It’s not that her writings offer a blueprint for utopia or even rational evidence for the viability of this anti-state, anti-authoritarian thinking. Her writing serves to provoke as much as to describe. She locates these competitive drives in the male form of capitalist identity in order to question everything from the abundance and unfair distribution of resources to the concept of borders, lines and structure itself.

Solanas proposed a radical, empathetic communitarianism that is anti-work, and pro-human dignity. Is this not a world we wish to create? That we find it as a shadow in the writings of a woman broken by life, and vilified by culture and academia, is less surprising than it should be. The violence and depth of her alienation gave her a clear perspective, and she had little to lose by telling the unvarnished truth as she saw it. She even identified the ‘witch hunt’ stage of any ideological purity spiral as a definitively ‘male’, animalistic instinct:

The male needs scapegoats onto whom he can project his failings and inadequacies and upon whom he can vent his frustration at not being female. And the vicarious discriminations have the practical advantage of substantially increasing the pussy pool available to the men on top.19

In advocating for a post-work future, and for automation as a universal human good, she shares an optimistic current in Marx’s writing about what he called “abstract labour”. Broadly, he believed that the advance of automation would liberate workers from the demands and control of Capital — the same argument Solanas makes. In fact, as Slavoj Žižek argues, neither could have envisioned the way capitalism would respond to the decline of industrial and physical labour:

This is the possibility not taken into account by Marx: the very process of the rise of the ‘general intellect’, and of the marginalisation of physical labour measured by time, instead of undermining capitalism by way of rendering capitalist exploitation meaningless, can be used to render workers more impotent and defenceless, using their potential uselessness itself as a threat against them.20

To say that this makes Solanas’ vision of an automated post-work future naive is to miss the point, perhaps. Solanas understood all too well that any true revolutionary project with utopian aims would be sold down the river as soon as it became organised:

No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top. The male ‘rebel’ is a farce; this is the male’s ‘society’, made by him to satisfy his needs.21

She understood better than most academics of the time that the male (Social Darwinist) consciousness will always be engaged in a war of position with no true end goal; will always be reformist, will always place a new king atop the shitheap, and will always denigrate and disempower women. This is the logic of Capital, and therefore the logic of masculinity. The broken male and female products of this process are the armed men and murdered women we encounter today as headlines, briefly breaking the surface of social media gossip before being subsumed in a current of identikit violence, despair and oppression. Culture eats itself, including the revolutions it hopes to inspire with tracts just like Solanas’ own. To think she was unaware of this irony is to patronise her yet again. As she writes: “‘Culture’ provides a sop to the egos of the incompetent, a means of rationalising passive spectating.”22 Could we not substitute ‘culture’ now for ‘activism’ of the online kind? The endless virtual, mediated, capital-D ‘Discourse’? This is echoed in her thoughts on censorship, where censors respond “reflexively to isolated words and phrases rather than cerebrally to overall meanings…”23 Most presciently, she locates in her era’s anti-socialist, McCarthyite currents the masculine roots of the instinct towards ideological witch hunts:

The male’s chief delight in life… is in exposing others. It doesn’t matter what they’re exposed as, so long as they’re exposed; it distracts attention from himself. Exposing others as enemy agents (Communists and Socialists) is one of his favourite pastimes, as it removes the source of threat to him not only from himself, but from the country and the Western world. The bugs up his ass aren’t in him, they’re in Russia.24

For Solanas, her violent tract was written in the sincere belief that love is all that matters, as she states explicitly more than once. So it reads as tragedy when she writes: “... love can’t exist between two males, between a male and a female, or between two females, one or both of whom is a mindless, insecure, pandering male…”25 This exposes the fact she is critiquing ‘male’-oriented (Social Darwinist, capitalist, patriarchal, misogynist) values as they exist in society, and in each individual within it. This is not ‘men versus women’ — it is life versus anti-life; love versus hate. Her manifesto is not a critique of men but of male ideology, of patriarchy and its invidious effects on human interaction. And she never lets go of the centrality of Capital to this equation — she hangs on like a pitbull, jaws clamped tight: “Love can’t flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work.”26

As she moves from critical analysis towards an actual programme for revolution, we pass definitively into the realms of satire or even speculative fiction. Her proposed eradication of males as a biological sex, and the evolution of the females who remain, is pretty close to eugenics — but again she is talking in metaphor about the eradication of maleness and femaleness on the level of gender archetypes, not the dominance of one sex above the other. To take it as a specific attack on men as a sex — and not as an angry metaphorical construct — is a very subjective, solipsistic (and male!) reading: “Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females”,27 she writes. The implicit logic is that we will still produce humans. But they will be cleansed of negative (male) “errors” in consciousness.

In terms of the political revolution she advocates, her solutions are far less wild, far more pragmatic:

If a large majority of women were S.C.U.M, they could acquire complete control of this country within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force, thereby paralysing the entire nation...28

She proposes later in the same passage that women could “declare themselves off the money system, stop buying, just loot and simply refuse to obey all laws they don’t care to obey.” This anti-capitalist rhetoric isn’t even exclusionary — pages later she introduces the Men’s Auxiliary of S.C.U.M (“...those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves”29). This is not the work of disavowal, or the cheap exposé and show trial, of the mea culpa or the public checking of privilege; but rather a group dedicated to the dismantling of the patriarchal system each one of them has internalised.

When she calls for the allyship of “men who kill men” there is a symbolic level on which she demands what must be performed — the total destruction of the toxic male archetype within, which sees itself as the superman, because it knows in its heart it is subhuman. “I am a turd, a lowly abject turd,” the men who are to attend confessional ‘Turd sessions’ are to say. The first step towards liberation is ego death, not performative self-sacrifice, which is just more hubris and ego. As she states later in this section of the manifesto: “Dropping out is not the answer, fucking-up is.” It is not enough for men to ‘drop out’ of maleness by confessing or shopping one another. Maleness must be decisively ‘fucked up’.

She isn’t fucking around either, with talk of strategic political murder, and even explicit cultural genocide. On one level, this is far from satire — it is fury expressed as political extremism, in the imagery and idiom of revolutionary insurgency. Whether or not Solanas ever intended it to be read literally as a revolutionary manual — or indeed whether it would even prove useful as one — is besides the point. Solanas was furious, and this fury stems from the outrage of thousands of years of misogynist patriarchal oppression. It is both valid and expedient. The violence of Solanas’ rhetoric demands a response, not “only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective.”30 She demands a ruthlessness which is called for by the extremity and the omnipotence of the threat posed by patriarchy and Social Darwinism. The response to this can only be swift, deadly and co-ordinated in her view, as she states in the same passage: “If S.C.U.M ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if S.C.U.M ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.”

Her politics is perhaps best described as anarchy on route to (female) communism. As she goes on to elaborate, the S.C.U.M revolution is not just counter-cultural, but counter-structural:

S.C.U.M will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness of the overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. S.C.U.M. is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. S.C.U.M. is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it…31

Solanas’ S.C.U.M comrades will “refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilised society”, but here, her rhetorical project fails. What does that society look like, and who decides what is civilised? Solanas has some ideas — what she proposes is not female supremacism, but a burning to the ground of gender roles. What happens next is mostly outlined in shadows and sketches.

A prophetic theme in her rejection of work and money are the ideas of “fucking-up” and “unwork”. While she proposes these as tactics for direct action, does this approach not describe in general the attitude taken towards the pointless corporate and administrative non-jobs on offer at the tail end of capitalism? Again, perhaps what we see here is an echo of Guy DeBord’s endlessly-absorbing Spectacle, or Mark Fisher’s “zombie capitalism” — it is a system so total it can even absorb unwork and fucking up; an industry of planned obsolescence and unspent potential. She writes:

S.C.U.M. will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork… S.C.U.M. will unwork at a job until they get fired, then get a new job to unwork at.32

This process could describe my own employment in call centres during the late 90s bubble of economic prosperity — a whole generation of over-educated unworkers and fuckups like me drifted from job to job, doing the least possible. Eventually, the bulk of these non-jobs were outsourced, and our generation faced the credit crunch and recession that followed.

The Spectacle can absorb unwork, and will probably use automation to further cow and enslave us, rather than to liberate us as Marx hoped. Solanas writes enthusiastically of the total democracy of “electronic voting machines”,33 and describes the transition to automation as accompanied by “a celebration atmosphere” heralding the dawn of a work-less, money-less society. And yet both conditions are now coming, in the form of huge job losses in the face of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, the shift to a paperless money system and forms of social credit, and the diminishing role of democracies in deciding the future on any meaningful level. As Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum was widely (and wrongly) believed to have said in 2020, “By 2030, you will own nothing, and you will be happy about it.”34

Technological change and increased connectedness will undoubtedly transform democracy, and therefore capitalist ideology, in ways we cannot yet imagine. Yet neither are likely to be driven by the humanising, anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical ethics Solanas hoped would drive such changes. Looking back, her faith in the ability of humans to overcome Capital with the aid of technology is the part of her manifesto that feels the most naive.

Perhaps the greatest reason for this failure to command our technologies, our democracies and our identities lies precisely in the instinct that we are powerless to affect the motion of the Spectacle. “Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise”,35 Solanas writes. This now rings an odd and hollow note. Are we not all shallow, selfish, obsessed, performative “males” now? Are we not condemned to simply “enjoy the show” before our demise? Have we lost control, along with the ethics and revolutionary promise of feminism and leftwing, emancipatory utopian political projects? Is the collective soul, the creative, always-expressing, ever-changing tumult of ‘individuals-connected’ she described just a rat race now, accelerating towards oblivion?

In trying to fit Solanas into a legacy of uncompromising, revolutionary feminism in art or criticism, it would be impossible not to mention the devastating, violent emotional tableaus of playwright Sarah Kane. What she shares with Solanas is an ability to cast an unflinching gaze at not just the moral, ethical or ideological underpinnings of patriarchal misogyny, but at the contents of its violence.

Kane used graphic violence as a cathartic crux of traumatic imagery, locating the horrors of war in the mundane sexual violence meted out with routine indifference to women by men in everyday society. Her work, with its graphic portrayal of sexual violence, demands the same response as Solanas’ vividly imagined revolution. It begs the question of the death of the male, the end of the binary structure to humanity that confines half of us to oppression and fear, and the other half to submission, shame and violence.

As Kane said in 1995 on the BBC’s Start the Week, defending her play Blasted against the tabloid hysteria that was whipped up around its depiction of war crimes and sexual atrocity:

I think it is to do with the failure of the critical establishment in this country to develop a satisfactory critical language. Any play which contains scenes of violence will be seen as ‘a violent play’, rather than a play about violence, because they don’t know how to talk about it.36

Kane identifies a sharp fissure here in the movement of the discourse around violence, resistance, and representation between the 1995 debut of Blasted and the carefully considered semantic police state of some areas of current leftwing identity politics (especially online). In today’s febrile atmosphere, Kane’s play would be so problematic that its transgressive conflation of sexual abuse and exploitation with explicitly male war crimes would likely not even muster the same controversy. It simply would not be produced.

Blasted gets to the truth of the trauma and devastation caused by male violence, and by extension capitalism, precisely because it transgresses both convention, and moralistic dogma. When a bomb goes off in the middle of the play, Kane is depicting the senseless, unexpected violence of misogynist control and enforcement. The play is a chilling but deeply empathetic metaphorical realisation of how it feels to be truly victimised by the system and its (male) agents. The tying together of commonplace misogyny and the horrific military use of rape as a tactic is explicitly political, as Kane explains:

The wall between ‘civilisation’ and what happened in Western Europe [in the Balkan conflicts] is very thin, and can be torn down at any time. I had to find a way of formally making that link… What it needs is what happens in war. Suddenly, violently, without any warning whatsoever, people’s lives are completely ripped to pieces... The form [of Blasted] did exactly mirror the content. For me, the form is the meaning of the play, which is that people’s lives are thrown into complete chaos with absolutely no warning.37

In a discourse so shackled to ideological conformity as our current one, voices like Kane or Solanas would still be exiled back to the fringe positions they spent their lives writing about being confined to, dismissed as extremists. A radical left-wing discourse must be able to contain not just divergence, disagreement and debate, but also transgression, outrage, and a space for the discussion of all political action, up to and including violence itself. By taking a reactionary approach to the representation of violence, we rob ourselves of our power to interrogate and understand it.

Kane’s final play, 4:48 Psychosis was an exploration of the descent into a psychotic episode — psychotics representing perhaps the most reviled, least glamorised, and worst understood ‘outsider’ position; that of the mad person, the outcast, the condemned. Kane’s work used violence to explore the porous border between self and other through which we experience our most extreme dislocations of identity, morality, and reality. Her life was accompanied by a series of bouts with severe and debilitating depression, and her work bore testament to the bewildering intensity of that lived experience. As the unnamed patient asks the doctor:

— Do you despise all unhappy people or is it me specifically?

— I don’t despise you. It’s not your fault. You’re ill.

— I don’t think so. I’m depressed. Depression is anger. It’s what you did, who was there, and who you’re blaming.

— And who are you blaming?

— Myself.38

The doctor is revolted by the patient’s symptoms, but distances himself from that disgust by deeming it ‘illness’ — a deviant condition, the ultimate nonconformity, the ultimate symbolisation of the Other. But the oppressive work is done by the subject, not the system — the doctor’s revulsion is redoubled within the self; contained within the depressive cycle and experienced as self-inflicted ‘reality.’ The patient blames themself for the symptoms they experience, which are a direct result of the patriarchal order represented by the doctor — hence the patient’s instinctive feeling that the doctor despises not just the patient, but “all unhappy people”, all those who cannot experience repression as ‘freedom.’ Whether one reads (or indeed casts) the doctor as male or female in 4:48 Psychosis is an artistic choice that represents the universality of suffering embodied in the split between self and Other.

Kane’s work again and again ties the experiences of depression and alienation to explicitly male violence, and to the violence inherent in the conformity enforced by capitalist patriarchy. For Kane, and later for Mark Fisher, affective mental health conditions and the oppression of capitalist realism are the same phenomenon. Like Fisher, Sarah Kane took her own life, perhaps robbing us of a positive ontology that could have been the mirror of her incisive, sceptical disruptions of culture, gender, trauma and control.

Like Solanas’ most incendiary passages, Kane’s work still calls for justice, for restitution, and for a ruthless drive to bring balance to a world out of joint. Neither of these women were reformists, and ultimately, even Solanas was no idealist. Both were realists, and sceptics. They asked difficult questions. And perhaps most unfortunately, those questions fell mostly on deaf ears. One can’t help but wonder what Solanas might have made of her life if, like Kaczynski, her alienation had led her from manifesto-writer to bomb-maker… and if it would have changed anything.

Again like Kaczynski, perhaps the most tragic note in Valerie Solanas’ legacy is that like so many writers, her position was read as an incoherent and extremist ideological one, undermined by her mental illness rather than informed by it. Subsequent academic rehabilitation of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto has done little to acknowledge its status as a critical provocation through which to read revolutionary praxis — which as she identified, was riddled with misogyny, and bullshit, reformist, weak-sauce politics, not to mention pussy-grabbing power plays enacted by ego-driven, male, messianic bad actors. The best feminist writing, like that of Valerie Solanas or Sarah Kane, is not ideological but revolutionary, because it is a framework for understanding that patriarchy is the axis of power in a capitalist society; and that the toxic, all-powerful male archetype embodies that horror, that affront to logic, whether he presides over a boardroom or a conversation at a bar.

Solanas also understood that allyship and activism require action, and sacrifice — and that these were undertaken performatively at the cost of their usefulness. Her complete scepticism about the commitment of men to eradicating inequality of the sexes is as pertinent today as it was when the S.C.U.M. Manifesto was written. The world is still full of self-described feminists, activists and allies whose actions cost them nothing, and achieve nothing. How many of them are truly committed to dismantling the effects of their patriarchal upbringings, their unconscious beliefs, their implicit biases, let alone their economic advantage? On the evidence, the numbers are vanishingly small.

As Polly Evans suggests:

Considering themselves to be an intelligent and progressive member of our society is crucial, as is their often identifying (theoretically, of course) as a feminist. In fact, they might well know more about feminist theory than you do… You can spot an intellectual misogynist by where they are not… don’t allow yourself to be absent. Be supportive, and show a quiet solidarity... think about the implications of everything you say.39

Male silence is not a failure to speak. Speech still costs nothing, especially in our mediated hyper-discourse, despite what the far right says. Our silence is a failure to be. It’s a failure of accountability. We can attack its positive form — Daddy, the destroyer; bosses and managers everywhere, corporate leaders and the men who abuse their positions of power to manipulate and exploit. These are the easy targets, and of course they need to be challenged and taken down. But male silence is also a failure to appear, and to embody. It is an absence, a void, at the heart of anti-capitalist ideology, which is and must be against patriarchy if it is to be in any way meaningful.

As men, we must be present, we must listen, and we must accept our own inner and outer destruction-as-transformation with grace, poise, and the eagerness of revolutionaries — driven by love, not hatred or despair, or some sense of buried revenge for lost entitlement. The destruction of ‘men,’ and of traditional and toxic masculine values — and it must be complete and total, they must be razed to the ground — should be a desirable outcome for anyone trapped in the paradigm of male identity, or oppressed in the paradigm of female identity. But that process of uncreation may well need to be gradual if it is not to become the kind of bloodbath Solanas described in 1967. Any incremental, Gramscian ‘war of position’ against patriarchy must have concrete, ambitious anti-capitalist goals, rather than a reformist agenda hobbled by never-ending internal purity struggles and self-policing. Nothing about this project suggests that it will be simple, possible, or even desirable to many.

To accept all of these arguments against patriarchy, but pragmatically accept that they are not realistically achievable within a lifetime, a generation, or even an aeon is not to capitulate to the dominant misogynist framework of Fisher’s capitalist realism however, nor to embrace apathy. To quote Audre Lorde again, from her essay “Learning from the 1960s”, we must: “... actively work for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming.”40 There is a necessity for a renewed engagement with — and reimagining of — the terms of critical discourse around gender, and male identity in particular. What is called for today is not dogma but solidarity — not conformity, but wild imagination.

Today’s activism is in many places divided, embittered and atomised along sex and gender lines. In feminist discourse, as in so many other places, Žižek’s injunction bears repeating: “Don’t act, think!” Young men must be, and seek to become, educated about the vicissitudes of patriarchy, because all too often that education is lacking.

As Celeste Davis writes:

Men are harmed by patriarchy and then often faulted entirely for this system they are stuck in, all without ever having been educated on the system that causes their suffering… Regardless of the reason for the lack of education, we often treat men as if they are fully informed about the forces that shape their lives — patriarchy and patriarchal masculinity — but they aren’t.41

Writers like Kane and Solanas were never afraid of the insurmountable barriers or the complexity of the questions their work addressed. They wrote because of this difficulty, they explored it fearlessly. As Kane says in the 1998 interview with Dan Rebellato: “I’ve only ever written to escape hell. And it has never worked.”42 Kane was happy with her work embodying violent contradiction, and ultimately, defeat. If you read the violence in their work as allegory, Valerie Solanas and Sarah Kane both argued that we must be driven by love, and by an embrace of the universality of our experience, which is suffering. We must unite along the axis where all are exploited, which is the inequality and injustice caused by capitalism, misogyny, and rising totalitarian control. Otherwise, none of us survive. Everything has a price in a free market… but nobody can afford silence; least of all someone who looks like me. This is about men — so we must speak. History demands it.

The study of human remains has traditionally focused on identifying male bodies; on telling the stories of great wars, revered warriors, the hardships endured by the labourer, the soldier or the farmer. Far less study has been carried out on the grave sites that contain the bodies of women, but the pattern of evidence is clear. In a vast proportion of ancient burials, female human remains contain stress fractures that are the telltale signs of domestic abuse and femicide — broken wrists, shattered bones, snapped necks. This includes the skeleton of Naia, found at a 12,000 year-old cave site in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula,43 once considered to be one of the oldest sets of human remains ever found. Male violence, coercion, dominance, and its concealment are older than our records, our languages, or our religions. Patriarchy is the snake coiled around the root of Capital; right at the source. We keep its secrets. We whisper its many names. Perhaps we can look to women like Valerie Solanas and Sarah Kane to show us how to speak the ugly truth.

Further reading

Anyone who wishes to know more about Valerie Solanas and her life and work would do well to read Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote S.C.U.M. (and Shot Andy Warhol) by Breanne Fahs. I just started it, and it’s already changing how I view her work since I wrote the essay above.

If you want more on Solanas and Kane, check out the links in the shownotes on my earlier version of this essay. And for more on Ted Kaczynski, read my recent essay for Revol Press, “Hypercapitalism and its Discontents”.

This month I read a few good articles around the topic of masculinity:

• Freddie deBoer on the “incel’s veto”

• For The Atlantic, Faith Hill looks at the struggles of young women, arguing their own crisis is under-appreciated.

• For The Guardian, Elle Smith writes about the rise of “looksmaxxer” Clavicular.

• In UnHerd, Valerie Stivers writes about the death of an “urban explorer”, and what it tells us about the crisis of meaning in (especially) young men's lives.

• This one's depressing — an unnamed VICE staffer writes about how much they enjoy having a virtual girlfriend.

• Django Ellenhorn’s incredible piece “Men Who Kill Themselves”, for Metropolitan Review, will break your heart then fix it.

• Finally, Katherine Dee writes about Andrew Tate, the “lonleliest bastard in the world”.

Writer, podcaster and expert on the Tarot, Brad Kelly is the host of deep-dive fiction podcast Method and Madness, and the author of weird fiction novels The Earthen Dark and House of Sleep. He was a featured guest on Strange Exiles in 2025, where he spoke about his use of the Tarot in fiction.

As a man, one is expected to bear down and deal with it. This is, perhaps, rightly so. And yet it is not without consequences. To endure is to ignore; to evade the pain is to look and think upon something other than it. Constricted by this habit, we so often do not examine what strange creatures we are beneath the surface or notice the hidden forces that nudge and drag us. I’ve become less curious about what men ought to be, in what ways we are lacking or potentiating, and much more inquisitive about what lies below.

When I have a question that cannot be answered with a simple internet search, I seek insight through the Tarot. To some, this is a fool’s errand. For me, there have been few better routes into my own subconscious and no quicker means to map what I am thinking but cannot yet articulate. The cards rarely answer us straight on but, then again, so few real questions can be dealt with in that way. It’s far better, in my experience, to be given impressions, outlines, a winding trail of trodden grass in the wilderness. And so I asked the tarot “what is up with men?” and what follows here is the wisdom I think the cards tried to impart.

King of Cups

One Father’s Day, my dad and I stood in his backyard — a lawn I’d mowed and mowed as a boy — and he confessed that he hadn’t been a very good father. Said it gazing out into the field behind his house the way I’d seen him a thousand times. All the drinking and the anger and he doesn’t know what Vietnam did to him exactly but somehow it was all tangled together. That stuff did kind of screw me up. My own anger — learned or inherited — is a latent frequency I have to watch for always. Something I feel rising in me even now as I write this because in fifteen minutes I have to stop and I swear to god there’s no time for the things I need to do and it makes me want to throw a table through the window.

Think of the masculine and feminine in the tarot as an allegorical framework, not some behavioral proscription, but the map of a deep dichotomy with the biological male and female as reference. One distinction is that the feminine is in the mode of ‘being’ and the masculine the mode of ‘doing.’ A tarot King is the exemplar of ‘doing’ in the context of his suit. Here in the realm of emotions, then, the King is a person who is generous with those they love. He or she makes amends and makes a joke, admits to faults, seeks to ease the pain in others, even at their own expense, but would not insult one’s intelligence with lies. Think of this King, and all the Kings, as a status to aspire toward, and his throne one that requires deliberate effort to attain and constant vigilance to keep. When you see a King in a spread, ask yourself: ‘how well am I holding myself in that seat?’

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Somewhere along the line, I developed a protective instinct over those thoughts and predilections that I believe are most synonymous with who I am. And so, for instance, I made comic books with friends when I was a little boy, but despite the decidedly PG content I never wanted parents or teachers to know about them. Even now I’m loathe to tell a stranger that I am a writer, what a pretentious thing to call oneself — without proof otherwise it’s like saying I’m a failure, I’m a kid who never grew up. And growing up, fusses were not well tolerated, so I put up the absolute minimum, hoping someone I love would see through my veneer and offer up a comfortable seat, bring me something to drink. The pain of rejection has made fools and cowards of us all — but the King uses it to perfect himself, knows that where rejection hurts the most is where his heart and soul comes closest to the surface.

Once you get down past the women who are married to outright assholes, the most common complaint of a wife about her husband is that he is not emotionally available, that his interior life is inaccessible. Fair enough, I suppose. But note that one long-observed distinction between men and women is that men, generally, are more interested in things and women in people; in the relationships between people. Perhaps if one wants to know how a man is feeling they should not expect words but should read the way he manipulates objects in the world, both physical and virtual.

Before I married, my dinner was steamed vegetables and a piece of meat prepared in the simplest way. I could have gone on eating that five or six times a week for the rest of my life. I just never liked to cook, couldn’t justify the time to myself. But now I prepare breakfast and dinner for my wife almost every day. I don’t know if she really knows it’s because I love her, that an egg made exactly the way she likes it is more than my fumbling words could say. And for me, there’s a moment there when I set the plate that I think I might have — if even for a second — found a way to sit in the King of Cups’ throne.

In that backyard on Father’s Day. The landscaping here was an unending project on which I was no more than semi-willing to collaborate. For a man who grew up on a farm, a lawn is more than some grass between the patio and the fence. The space is to be perfected and optimized and it might as well be your family’s face for all the judgment it must endure. I wonder if my mom knows he cares about the lawn so much because he loves her. I wonder if he knows that.

It took a lot for him to say a few unflinching words about raising me. And though I’m far from kingly I have my moments and so I knew that to contradict him would be a lie and that a falsehood now would re-tangle this knot he was trying to untie — never steal a person’s pain from them, though you may lovingly bandage the wound. So, honest as I could, I said some fumbling version of the truth: “It was hard at times, growing up. But I love you. And I’m grateful for all the sacrifices you made, all the work you did, to build up this life around us.”

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We cannot believe as we please; our beliefs are traces of our unchosen lives.1

— John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

At the heart of capitalism’s grip on the real is patriarchy, and at the heart of patriarchy is, very simply, the way we raise boys to become men in this world. The problem beneath capitalism is the structuring ideology of Social Darwinism, which is identical to what feminist theory calls patriarchy. We teach boys to fight, and win.

Shame is at the heart of it. As boys, men are shamed into a rigid caricature of masculinity and emotionlessness. As adults, men are shamed for the sin of being a man, and the sins of all men before them — shame compounded by shame. And yet it is this discourse of shame; of constant, preemptive apology for the male self, the feeling that we are ‘bad’, that conceals the true evil of our actions — even from ourselves.

If men try to fight the virulent strain of macho-man bullshit, even if they have managed to allow themselves to be vulnerable, caring, and open, they are shamed. Shamed for being less than men. Painted as homosexual or feminine, as if those were terrible things, so that even a man who has accepted his femininity or homosexuality still feels a deep-rooted and abiding sense of shame. This is why feminist literature is essential reading for men — perhaps only a thinker such as bell hooks could have understood:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.2

We are shamed, and shame each other — when we are out of work, for not providing for our families; shamed for holding it all in, shamed for letting it all explode, shamed for saying the wrong thing, shamed for not saying the right thing. We are shamed for our tendency towards violence, shamed when we choose a different path. In a 2020 Guardian piece exploring male identities, the playwright David Ajmi writes about his first memory of being shamed, when he asks for a feminine style at the hairdressers. A nonverbal look of disapproval from his mother and the hairdresser motivated a strong feeling in the young boy:

I cannot describe precisely what the shame felt like, because shame eludes precision; I cannot describe the precise violence done to me, only that it was unbearable. It was a feeling so threatening, so terrifying, I knew I had to bury it for my emotional survival. I knew not to cross the invisible line… Shame and masculinity have a reciprocal relationship — and they share the same vague contours. What makes shame powerful is that it lives so deeply in the unspoken. If emotions like anger or happiness are fairly easy to define, shame lives in a more complicated, hard-to-reach space. Shame has a vagueness that, instead of diluting its power, only intensifies it. Because it is so hard to name or pinpoint, shame magnifies in the mind. If one attempts to interrogate its workings, the shame compounds and redoubles. Men are shamed into hating anything feminine in themselves and the world, and if they dare to question that hatred, they are forced to relive the shame. This is the double bind of masculine identity.3

Jordan Peterson would have us believe that the policing of emotions and behaviour between men is a good thing; that shame has its place, and that a lack of shame makes one less of a man. He writes:

Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. Simple as that. We don’t need to feel sorry for you. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t want to do your work.4

The question is where Peterson expects men to “go away” to. He seems to argue that exile (or indeed death) is a desirable destination for men who don’t ‘measure up’ or who cannot be shamed. Furthermore, he unhelpfully suggests that displaying any traits he codes as ‘feminine’ are to be avoided at all costs. Peterson’s stuffy, repressive arguments are inherently sexist, but he and Ajmi agree about one thing: shame is the tactic we use to police the borders of sex and gender.

As the sociologist Michael Kimmel writes in his study of young American men’s culture, Guyland:

Other guys constantly watch how well we perform. Our peers are a kind of ‘gender police’ always waiting for us to screw up so they can give us a ticket for crossing the well-drawn boundaries of manhood. As young men, we become relentless cowboys, riding the fences, checking the boundary line between masculinity and femininity, making sure that nothing slips over. The possibilities of being unmasked are everywhere. Even the most insignificant misstep can pose a threat or activate the haunting terror that we will be found out.5

bell hooks comes to a similar conclusion: “Patriarchal boys, like their adult counterparts, know the rules: they know they must not express feelings, with the exception of anger; that they must not do anything considered feminine or womanly.”6 This is why an awareness of feminist discourse and critical theory is an essential tool for men, to help them understand themselves (and why Peterson considers both feminism and Marxism so uniquely dangerous to them). Without the contribution of feminist ideas, men perhaps cannot understand how the vicissitudes of patriarchy harm everyone, even as we transition away from the kinds of traditional, patriarchal hierarchies Peterson is so keen to celebrate and enforce.

And yet, in activist discourse across the spectrum, this central truth of feminism has often been forgotten, or at least sublimated; perhaps because this process of shaming and policing is actually a universal experience, one we all go through under capitalism. Shame is not as gendered as Peterson and others would have us believe. As the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone said: “Childhood is hell,” and while the hells men and women endure as they grow up are markedly different in the effects produced on behaviour, the way they affect our psychological makeup is broadly the same. Nevertheless, men’s sense of shame is marshalled and controlled in specific ways, as Maggie Dent writes:

Research shows that parents treat boys and girls differently from infancy, handling boys more roughly. Also physical punishment is applied more significantly to boys in many western countries. Little boys are spoken to more harshly and often told to toughen up when they’re hurt or distressed. Indeed, it is still common for boys to experience sarcasm, shouting, ridicule and overt shaming throughout their schooling. Buried emotions stay stored in our nervous system, and with the growth of the limbic brain in the early teens, small things can trigger big emotions to erupt often spontaneously. So many teen boys have told me they are “stupid”, feel a sense of inevitability that they will do bad things, and that they are bad. Such is the conditioning from childhood that creates belief systems and mindsets that affect adolescent boys deeply.7

Shame is about control, correction; coercion in the service of conformity. We buckle under the pressure to conform not just to gender roles, but to consumer roles. Our experiences of shame and desire, as men and women and as individuals, differ greatly. It is this struggle that should unite men and women rather than divide them — the struggle against conformity, consumerism, and the policing of both by manipulation of our shame and desires. This is true for all intersectional identities — no matter how divergent their lived experience.

Ajmi is right when he says:

...the features of masculinity are entwined with the features of American capitalism, which is premised on creating new needs — needs that can never be met, because they aren’t actual needs. Capitalism tells us something is wrong with us, something elusive and ultimately unfixable… capitalism is a vortex of shame.

This applies equally if not moreso to female identities, which are policed not just by shame but frequently by violence, rape and abuse. But these are crimes almost universally committed by men, and without some recognition of the way we malform male identities through shame, there can never be healing, or change. Rape culture will never be eradicated solely through the pressure of female activists — men must lead the effort if it is to succeed, and not just be an accounting of the dead and abused. Toxic masculinity is real, and on some level, masculinity is indisputably toxic. This is the reason the debate about how to replace or reform male identities cannot afford to mirror that toxicity by making men feel yet more shame.

And yet, much of today’s discourse seems to be about turning on men — all men — and saying ‘SHAME ON YOU.’ Undoubtedly, some men deserve it (perhaps the majority of us do). Writing about the collective fury of the #MeToo movement, Amia Srinivasan rightly points out that sometimes shaming could be considered necessary, as in the case of naming and outing rapists and abusers. Srinivasan writes: “… the discrete contributions of thousands of voices [are not] mere speech when they aggregate into a collective voice that has the power to expose, shame and humiliate.”8 But are the tactics of shaming and humiliation a necessary or useful corollary to efforts to expose abusers and rapists? Can men who rape and abuse women be shamed?

Unarguably, patriarchy and misogyny negatively impact the identities of all men, expressed in their conscious and unconscious actions and reactions. Some kind of ‘deprogramming’ is a desirable outcome for both sexes. But the sad fact is that all men are used to being shamed. And at the bottom of shame there is despair, or intractability. That is of no use to men who need to transform themselves and society. The art critic Ernst Van Alphen writes:

… shame is not a static affect, it is a dialectical process that evokes pride, dignity, and even shamelessness. What these dialectical opposites have in common is that both can result in anger. Shaming somebody or a specific group is often related to anger; people use shaming in order to punish people.9

Shame is how we punish others, and ourselves. I am forty-five years old as I write this, and have been to the funerals of far too many young men who took their own lives to escape shame, despair, or the addictions they tried to smother them with. I very nearly joined them on more than one occasion. The wrecks of good men, the wreckage they leave behind; punished rather than rewarded for their inability to perform the rigid caricature of ‘maleness’ for one reason or another. And then there are the dozens of domestic and sexual abusers, would-be rapists, narcissists and psychic vampires who’ve paraded through my life and yours, all casualties of a masculinity nobody with any sense would hesitate to describe as toxic. Also failed men, broken men — so broken they were dangerous. I saw many of them rewarded and elevated for these qualities. As Van Alphen correctly says, shaming men often has the opposite effect — a brazen leaning-in to shamelessness.

Feminist writers like Laurie Penny are not wrong when they locate, in the figures of the ‘powerful men’ who run society, a venal corruption as much to do with maleness as it is power. The great tragedy of so many of Penny’s eloquent essays is the faith they seem to radiate that men like this can ever be shamed, whether through the use of adequate adjectives to describe their corruption and evil, or through the disappearing medium of journalism itself — a process for which the radical subjectivity of her writing is an emblem. Powerful men cannot be shamed, because they have no shame — they cannot display an ounce of it. It was beaten out of them at private schools. The lack of shame cultivated among elite men is what gives power and licence to their corruption, greed, hypocrisy, and contempt for others. Society punishes and breaks them, to ensure they become punishers, and breakers.

The idea that men play life on “easy mode” is predicated on the assumption that all men experience, and crucially enjoy, these modes of privilege — that they cannot be experienced as anything except privilege, and further that any failure to acknowledge this indicates blindness and denial on the part of the person enjoying them. The author John Scalzi, in a much-shared 2012 essay, uses the metaphor of video games to describe how (especially white) male privilege works:

... the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.10

The ‘straight white male’ Scalzi conjures is not a character who experiences shame, or apprehends the meaning and weight of his privilege. He is ‘the subject who enjoys’ privilege, not the ‘subject who understands’; least of all the ‘subject who is ashamed’. Most of all, Scalzi’s extended video game metaphor re-inscribes the myth of meritocracy — players get points, which are converted to prizes, and experienced as advantage. This is a system with fixed values and outcomes — as such it bears little resemblance to the real world, and can tell us nothing useful about it.

Arguments like Scalzi’s flatten individual identities into broad categories with similar outcomes based on race, gender and sexual preference. He completely fails (or refuses) to see how such an inflexible, generalised argument can and will be weaponised against individuals who may have a much more complex relationship with their own masculinity. What Scalzi’s schema attempts to inculcate is the pre-emptive apprehension of shame in all men. This concept is almost indistinguishable from the Christian concept of original sin. It is a secular heresy to say all men experience life in the same way, and should be ashamed.

The shame men are made to feel about their feelings, hopes, responsibilities, and actions literally becomes the violence we see in our culture — in speech and in action. Yet we are so quick to disown that violence because we don’t want to admit our complicity. We distance ourselves, and pile on more shame. Looking at the violence the men around you are doing to themselves and to others with complete honesty is remarkably difficult. The abusers and rapists are our brothers, fathers, friends. If there is a response we can formulate to address their behaviour which does not involve shaming them, pushing them away, or labelling them as monsters, then society has yet to imagine it, as the feminist writer Lola Olufemi says:

Men are not inherently bad and women are not inherently good but the idea that one cannot escape their own biology traps us all in the oppressor / oppressed binary with no hope of abolishing it.11

The uncreation of masculinity, however that might occur, might be a large step towards evolving beyond capitalism. What is more male than the philosophical worship of capital, and the lust for priapic profit? But we cannot shame it into extinction. The illusions behind identity politics and intersectionality suggest that human difference can be categorised, and harmonised, with a full and frank accounting of blame. Is this illusion the trap? Or the vain hope of escaping it? The male / female binary is one clear division where the economic and cultural hegemony of the patriarchy can be disputed. The material reality of gender is irrelevant — this is where it must be disrupted, by breaking down cultural norms, not reinforcing them, or multiplying them to obscure or problematise the border territory. This is what Lindy West worries about in the media hype around the #MeToo movement:

I keep thinking about what #MeToo would look like if it wasn’t a roll call of people who’ve experienced sexual predation, but a roll call of those who’ve experienced sexual predation and actually seen their perpetrator brought to justice, whether professionally, legally or even personally. The number would be minuscule. Facebook’s algorithm would bury it.12

No matter how much we desire it, the idea of a world where victims of rape and abuse get proportional justice is as unimaginable to us, as inaccessible, as a world in which we could have some degree of sympathy for the confused and angry young men who commit mass shootings. The victim who finds justice is as rare as the offender whose motivations are understood. The media only entrenches these realities, painting incel shooters as evil monsters:

Incapable of discussing the epidemic of loneliness and alienation that gets lumped in with ‘incel culture’ ... it can only swing between hysterical condemnation — these young men are fighting a war against women — or soft-hearted (and -headed) pity: all these men need is a girlfriend and a better job.13

In fact, incels and other prisoners in the neckbeard deathcamp of twenty-first century masculinity have more in common with the committed ideologues of identity politics than they might like to admit. Both are pursuing their own exclusive, utopian vision of a better society. With increasing regularity, both exist within a discourse where violent ends are justified by important ideological means.

To some, this might echo the Trumpian sentiment that there are “good people on both sides.” The truth is harsher. We’re all terrible people. It’s just how we were raised.

As Evan Puschak writes in his analysis of the film Blade Runner:

All the freedom of modern society, all its secularism and egalitarianism and choice, conceals a darker side to the coin: the side on which human identity isn’t determined by society, but by the individual, making its formation, by definition, problematic.14

Further reading

I read a few great articles this month touching on themes related to this series:

• Poppy Sowerby on the increase in the number of ‘stay-at-home sons’, for UnHerd

• Katherine Dee on the origins of the manosphere in ‘pimp culture’

• Simon Pearson of Anti-Capitalist Musings on the commonalities and differences between the ideas of Ted Kaczynski and Nick Land

• Also, don’t miss Simon Pearson’s recent guest essay for Crisis Masculinity, ‘You Can’t Therapy Your Way Out of a Housing Crisis’ (paywalled)

• Poet and theorist Alex Mazey on the new album by Joji, and what his music tells us about the ‘sad boy’ aesthetic

• Alexander Hurst for The Guardian on the different visions of masculinity that clashed in the killing of anti-ICE protestor Alex Pretti

• Tim Jonze, also in The Guardian, on the complicated legacy of American Psycho

I mention Ernst Van Alphen in this piece — I wrote about his journal Shame and Masculinity last year for Glasgow Review of Books:

• Feminism Shows The Way: On Shame, Masculinity & Spoiling For A Fight

Podcaster, poet, punk-rap pioneer, promoter and all-round Glasgow music scene legend Mark McG is back on the show, discussing the twilight years and final shows from Glasgow underground heroes The Girobabies, his future plans for You Call That Radio, what creative burnout feels like, and his new lyric book-meets-memoir collection, If By Magic: The Words and Lore of The Girobabies.

This is a wide-ranging chat that touches on class politics, artistic ambition, reaching middle age, and how artists perceive their own legacies. Scroll to the bottom of this post or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube to watch the video version of this episode.

Recommendations from Mark McG

The song above, ‘Her Fancy Man’, is taken from the Girobabies most recent album Dreams Are Mental, which we discussed at length in Episode 36. It’s still available from the Girobabies’ Bandcamp on CD, vinyl and digital, along with some cool tee shirts. On the same site, you can pick up a copy of Mark’s book, If By Magic: The Words and Lore of The Girobabies.

Mark recently moved out of the city — we talk a little bit about the shift to rural, island life, and what he’s been up to since he moved away from Glasgow. From there, we get into talking about the albums and eras his new book draws upon — if you’re not yet familiar with the Giros, here are the key works to get you up to speed, in reverse order:

• Dreams Are Mental (2025)

• Who Took Utopia (2015)

• Bus Stop Apocalypse (2012)

• Social Not Working (2010)

Although lyrics from these aren’t included in the book, you should also catch up on Mark’s solo albums under the name Jackal Trades:

• At This Point (2021)

• Trip Hazard Advisor (2018)

• Need The Characters (2016)

We touch on each of these at least briefly, and if you add them all up, they amount to a comprehensive document of Mark’s fiercely intelligent, rabble-rousing, class-conscious lyricism. His work rate is incredibly impressive, especially if you take into consideration his weekly podcast output, and his efforts as a DIY promoter. It’s a huge and often hilarious collection of lyricism, and deserves wider acclaim and recognition (as we discuss on this episode).

We talk about the epic shows the Giros put on and played at the Barrowlands, a legendary Glasgow venue with roots as a dancehall going back to the 1930s, later becoming an iconic music venue headlined by (just to name a few) Simple Minds, The Clash, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure. It’s still one of the most sought-after venues in Scotland for any touring band, with incredible acoustics and a sprung dancefloor, and a world-famous, enthusiastic crowd. I’ve personally seen some of the best shows of my life there — from Placebo and PJ Harvey in the 1990s, to Run The Jewels and JPEGMAFIA in more recent years. Read this article from The Big Issue for an overview of the venue’s storied history.

For a band like The Girobabies who are self-managed, promoted and funded, putting on a big hometown show at the Barras is an incredible milestone — and they’ve done it more than once. Despite this, the mainstream press have largely turned their noses up at what one reviewer from Scottish paper the Evening Times described as their “baffling ned punk” — evidence of a persistent and malignant strain of classism in the privileged echelons of the Scottish media.

The Giros are perhaps seen as not “Scottish” in the right way for some critics, who prefer their local artists to stick to trad music or indie rock, and “too working class” for others, who prefer the miserablist posturing of Arab Strap to the more hip-hop oriented, scheme-informed power-rants of figures like Mark. All in all, the Giros are a band who have been sorely neglected by their national media — but they’ve never let that stop them, going on to tour the UK, Ireland and beyond, and playing some of the top stages at UK festivals. Mark mentions a couple of recent gig / book launch events which have passed since we recorded the interview, but you can still get tickets to see them one last time at Glasgow Art School on 28 March.

It’s then we start to talk about burnout, and grapple with the idea of what ‘success’ means in the context of a mostly DIY, self-funded career — something I talked about in my 2025 end-of-year post, reflecting on my own experiences as a self-funded musician and writer.

Like Mark, I have also reached the point of breakdown and burnout more than once — and like Mark, I have found scant opportunities to access support from funding bodies, gatekeepers, and Scotland’s firmly-entrenched media cliques. Creative Scotland’s funding model changed last year after an in-depth review, adding larger multi-year grants for grassroots organisations, but making it harder (in some ways) for smaller, independent producers and artists to fund their one-off projects.

Mark and I have both had some limited support from the BBC over the years, but neither of us has parlayed that into a foot on the establishment’s ladder, or into a sustainable financial model for our practice. We kick about a few ideas on how that feels, what it means, and what the consequences of rigid gatekeeping are for independent, experimental and working class artists.

For now at least, Mark is focusing on his writing, with If By Magic just released, and another book about his experiences as a touring artist and independent promoter in the works. He feels that this is where his head is at, and where his time is best spent — something I’ve also found since re-focusing the majority of my energy away from music, and towards publishing. Both of us look up to Darren McGarvey, aka Loki, who has pulled off an enormously successful pivot from under-appreciated Scottish hip-hop artist to acclaimed writer and critic, and is now one of the country’s best-known and biggest-selling authors (he was also my guest on Episode 31 of this show).

Mark talks a bit about the challenges of touring, and refers to “what happened in Dublin” — if you want to learn what did happen, you can now find out in this post on the Patreon for You Call That Radio (paywalled). It’s a funny story, but also the kind of thing that would make you think long and hard about the pressure you put yourself under as a touring artist. There’s more on that topic in this 2024 Guardian piece, which focuses on how the prohibitive costs and stresses of touring hit working class musicians the hardest.

Before the break, we go back to talking about how new and alternative music makes it to the mainstream in our post-John Peel era, and Mark mentions some controversial recent cuts to late-night programming on BBC Scotland. Replacing ‘discovery’ oriented shows by dedicated presenters with more playlist-driven and nostalgia-indulging shows was a decision many still feel will make the business of breaking through more difficult for Scottish bands who stray away from the cookie-cutter pop and “indie” rock that dominates the airwaves.

I agree with Mark when he says that (especially publicly-funded) radio should “niche down and get weirder”. Truly diverse musical eras like the 1980s and 90s had a healthy pop mainstream, but far more opportunities and pathways for less-established, more experimental bands to reach and influence the tastes of young listeners, and the bands that followed them. Without those routes into the industry, things have gotten pretty boring and generic in recent years.

Mark mentions a few bands who’ve managed to navigate these challenges to varing degrees of success. He tips his hat to avant-garde Dublin punk troubador Meryl Streek, politicised indie-rockers Declan Welsh and The Decadent West, electronic post-punk duo DOSS, and namechecks post-grunge troublemakers Cowboy Hunters as ones to watch (all four are artists Mark has given a stage to early in their careers). He also mentions The Amazing Snakeheads, a Scottish band who signed to Domino before sadly imploding. I throw in a menchie for The Mickey 9s and Post Coal Prom Queen, another two favourites of Mark’s who are growing their audience with each gig and release. We both acknowledge the great work that BBC Introducing in Scotland are doing to highlight and champion new bands in an inhospitable environment for music that falls outside the ‘poptimist’ bracket.

In the second half of the show, we talk about Mark’s new book If By Magic, and how it came together. He worked with Lucy from Salamander Street Publishing on the book, who put out a range of poetry, plays, nonfiction and art books. Mark gives a few details about his next book, which will be more of a memoir about his time as a promoter, and running with the Girobabies. If By Magic contains some lore about the making of the key Giros releases, but if you want to know the full story, keep an eye out for Mark’s prose debut next year.

Mark talks about some of the challenges he faced around how to write certain Scots words and phrases — there are few set rules around how Scots should be written. It exists as both a spoken dialect, and a written one, but the extent of regional variations on terms and their use means each author comes to this problem fresh, rather than being able to rely on a single source of truth.

The Scots Language Centre has more resources looking at these challenges, for those interested. Novelist Matthew Fitt, who wrote the excellent Scots-language science fiction novel But ‘N’ Ben A-Go-Go, has some interesting thoughts on the use of Scots in prose fiction and non-fiction — he says your most reliable guide to how to write Scots is to draw on your own experience of using the language day-to-day:

Avoid stereotypes when you write… Try to find your own original voice and express your vision of life through the rich, varied and always surprising language of Scots.

Mark’s approach was to check his spellings, word choices (and some of the explicitly political material) with several friends, including Doctor Normul, a singer-songwriter and activist who is a regular feature at his shows.

We finish by talking a little bit about You Call That Radio, which is Mark’s regular video podcast (and which we covered in more depth on the last episode with Mark). You can support YCTR (and Mark more generally) by clicking the button below and becoming a Patreon. His new series is called ‘Views from the Sea’ and features Mark holding forth on Scottish music industry drama, politics, the news and other topics.

Support Mark McG on Patreon

We also talk a little bit avoiding social media drama (or not, as the case may be). He also mentions the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ — which is looking less and less like a theory by the day. He mentions a Jackal Trades song that touches on the topic of online drama.

Finally, we talk about our concerns over the rise of Reform in the Scottish political scene. I agree with Mark that sometimes we need to stand up and be counted when it comes to politics — but that picking your battles is also vital. I hope Mark’s right about the forthcoming downfall of Farage and his ilk, in light of the ongoing chaos of the Trump administration. I also agree we need to talk more about austerity and class politics, rather than race, gender and other culture war points. If there’s a better artist than Mark talking about this stuff in Scotland, I can’t name them. If By Magic is out now.

Next time…

My next guest on Strange Exiles is still to be confirmed, but look out for some news very soon. In the meantime, check out the special bonus episodes in association with Revol Press, the first of which was an interview with Gareth Stuart Farmer, author of Writing Autism, coming soon from Revol Press in 2026-27. Before next month, I’ll be back with another of these bonus episodes, speaking to Rob Faure Walker about his book Radical Jung — available for pre-order now, out in Spring 2026.

Thanks for listening / watching! An extra special thank you to to my growing ranks of paid subscribers… having some income from this project is helping me to do things like fix my lighting solutions, pay guest contributors, and look at plans to expand into other areas and subjects it would be impossible to explore without support. I’m eternally grateful!

Here are a few things I published recently which you may have missed:

• ‘A Fascist Haunting’ for Revol Press, on the parallels between a classic Twilight Zone episode and Trump’s chaotic reign

• Crisis Masculinity 5: Dead Air, part of my ongoing series on male identity under late-stage capitalism

• ‘The Ergodic Ethic’ by Brance Nance, a guest post for paid subscribers as part of the Crisis Masculinity project

• ‘You Cannot Therapy Your Way Out of a Housing Crisis’ by Simon Pearson, the most recent guest post in the Crisis Masculinity series

See you next time — take care of each other.

— Bram, Glasgow, February 2025

James is thirty-two. He drives for Deliveroo, picks packages for Amazon Flex, and takes warehouse shifts when they come up. Seventy hours most weeks. He rents a room in Wolverhampton for six hundred and fifty pounds a month. The window won’t close properly. Black mould grows behind the wardrobe. The landlord ignores repair requests and hides behind a letting agent. James has a degree and the debt to prove it. He cannot save. He cannot plan. He cannot imagine starting a family.

His grandfather left school at fifteen in 1960, walked into an apprenticeship, joined the union, bought a terraced house on a single wage at twenty-five, raised two children, and retired with a final salary pension.

This is not a story about individual failure.

The contemporary crisis of masculinity has little to do with bruised pride or status anxiety. It is not a failure to adjust to women’s liberation. It begins from the material impossibility of social reproduction. Men cannot form stable relationships when stable relationships depend on secure income, affordable housing, and time not swallowed by work. Futures once taken for granted have been stripped away. Capital destroyed these conditions. What appears to be a crisis of manhood is the crisis of a system unable to reproduce itself, showing itself most clearly in masculine identity because men inherited roles that no longer exist in material form.

A man in his thirties now faces conditions his father would not recognise. Home ownership requires parental wealth. Secure employment has been replaced by gig platforms, fixed-term contracts, and permanent availability. Real wages fell twenty per cent between 1979 and 2024, while house prices climbed from three times median income to nine. Final Salary pensions disappeared. The system that once made adult life possible was dismantled.

Men cannot meet the expectations they inherited: forming a household, supporting dependents, owning property, planning a future, exercising competence in stable environments. The failure is structural.

Ideology insists the world still operates on effort, discipline, and personal responsibility. Material conditions prove otherwise. When expectation collides with impossibility, people internalise the crash. Economic defeat gets experienced as masculine inadequacy. Reactionary politics waits for the moment of impact. It offers scapegoats, not analysis. It offers nostalgia, not solutions. It transforms frustration into grievance and grievance into political identity.

This crisis did not begin with the financial crash or the rise of the gig economy. It is the culmination of a process that began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and has continued, uninterrupted, through successive governments. What I call the Long 1980s — the period of institutional destruction that Thatcher initiated and that continues today — never ended. It hardened into the economic and social landscape that now defines the early twenty-first century. To understand masculine despair, you must understand the destruction of social reproduction itself.

Thatcher’s War on the Future

From 1945 to the late 1970s, the British economy rested on a settlement now remembered with undue nostalgia. It offered stable employment for many men through full employment policies, strong unions, council housing, public services, and welfare support. It rested on the male family wage, which positioned men as providers and women as dependents. Its boundaries were clear. Women undertook unwaged labour within the home. Black and Asian workers were pushed into the lowest paid jobs, shut out of skilled work, barred from union membership, and subjected to racist immigration controls. Disabled people and those who did not fit the ideal of respectability had little access to its benefits. The white male breadwinner model sat at the centre of this world, and the state defended it through law, housing allocation, and the distribution of opportunity.

The settlement should not be romanticised. But its material supports mattered. A working-class man could leave school at sixteen, enter a trade, join a union, rent or buy a home at a reasonable cost, support a family on one income, and retire with security. The system was stratified and unjust, yet it provided a legible path into adulthood for those positioned to access it.

These institutions were not natural. They were the outcome of decades of working-class struggle, concessions forced from capital, and a global environment where the existence of the Soviet Union pushed Western states to offer material security to stabilise their own working classes.

Thatcher set out to destroy this settlement. Not to reform it. To end it.

The assault on trade unions removed the organised capacity of workers to defend wages and conditions. Privatisation transferred public assets into private hands and eliminated stable employment. Right to Buy drained council housing, converting a public good into private leverage while ensuring future generations faced unaffordable rents and mortgages. Finance deregulation flooded households with credit, hiding wage stagnation behind consumer debt.

Every policy pressed in the same direction: individualise risk, destroy collective power, commodify what had been social, and impose market logic across every aspect of life.

The generation that entered adulthood in the 1980s could still access remnants of the old system while benefiting from asset inflation and cheap credit. Their children confronted a different reality: depleted housing stock, stagnant wages, insecure work, punishing rents, and higher education that required heavy debt. By the 2000s, the settlement that had once underpinned adult life no longer existed. The crash of 2008 accelerated a decline already well under way.

New Labour did not reverse any of this. It deepened it. Blair and Brown financialised what Thatcher had privatised. Private Finance Initiatives shifted public services into the hands of contractors and locked them into decades of debt servicing. Housing was treated not as shelter but as an asset whose rising value stood in for wage growth. Brown’s regulatory regime encouraged the reckless lending that fuelled the crash. The third way offered a gentler tone and the same economic programme.

The numbers show the scale of transformation. In 1979, house prices averaged three and a half times median earnings. By 2024, the ratio stood at eight and a half nationally and thirteen in parts of London. Union density fell from over half the workforce to just above one fifth. Manufacturing collapsed from a quarter of the economy to under ten per cent. Home ownership among young adults halved.

These figures mark the destruction of the foundations that made stable life possible.

Thatcherism tore apart the conditions of social reproduction. People cannot afford homes. They cannot raise children without economic anxiety. They cannot care for elderly relatives when work devours their time. They cannot maintain relationships under the stress of permanent precarity. Planning becomes impossible when every aspect of life has been made contingent.

The Entrepreneurial Self and the Monetisation of Despair

The destruction of the postwar order did not only dismantle institutions. It dismantled the figure who stood at the centre of them. The male breadwinner was not simply a cultural ideal. His was a position grounded in material supports: a stable job, a predictable wage, a home that did not drain most of his income, and a set of public services that reduced the cost of living. He exercised authority in the household because the wage made him indispensable. His identity was shaped by competence, skill, and the solidarity of shared labour.

What emerged in his place was the entrepreneurial self, permanently responsible for optimising his own value in a competitive marketplace. Stability became a sign of complacency. Security became a trap. Masculine success was no longer grounded in anything material. It became an attitude.

This transformation required decades of ideological work. Unemployment was reframed as a shortcoming of character rather than a failure of economic policy. Precarious work was sold as freedom. Low wages were justified as an incentive to improve. Every structural crisis was reinterpreted as a personal deficiency.

Thatcher’s claim that there was “no such thing as society” was more than provocation. It was a programme. If society does not exist, then social problems cannot exist. Only individual problems remain, each requiring individual solutions.

Jordan Peterson gave this logic a therapeutic accent. Clean your room. Stand up straight. Sort yourself out. Take responsibility.

Placed in the context of modern Britain, these instructions become surreal. A man whose rent rises each year is told to tidy his room. The room is often a damp bedsit in a carved-up Victorian terrace, rented by an absentee landlord who avoids repairs. Black mould grows behind the wardrobe. The boiler breaks each winter. Personal discipline does not touch these conditions. They are products of landlordism, wage suppression, and the financialisation of housing.

Peterson’s moment has passed. Andrew Tate’s peak has also faded. Yet their message endures among young men raised inside precarity who reached for any language that made sense of their situation. The personalities move on. The structure remains. Both men taught their audiences to understand structural crises as personal inadequacies and to treat blocked futures as puzzles to be solved through discipline or swagger.

On Reddit’s menslib and AskMen, on Discord servers and TikTok comment sections, the vocabulary is consistent: grind mindset, self-improvement, sigma mentality, getting your life together. The language changes. The underlying logic does not. Structural failure is recast as personal inadequacy. Economic defeat becomes evidence of weak character.

The entrepreneurial ideal promises autonomy while delivering insecurity. It teaches men to treat themselves as small firms: always improving, always anxious, always ready for the next opportunity that never arrives. The world becomes a ledger. Intimacy becomes labour. Care becomes inefficiency. Time becomes something to be monetised. Under these conditions, the traditional masculine expectations of providing, planning, and leading cannot be met.

This produces despair that feels personal but is systemic. Men experience economic defeat as masculine failure because the ideological scripts they inherited have never been rewritten. Their fathers achieved adulthood through institutions that no longer exist. They are told to achieve the same results through self-help, discipline, or the performance of confidence. They are told to stand up straight in rooms they cannot afford.

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Gareth Stuart Farmer’s next book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident is forthcoming from Revol Press in 2026-27. Gareth is a writer, poet and academic whose work focuses on the lived experience of autism, with a mercurial approach that puts the reader into the neurodivergent experience in direct, unique and sometimes challenging ways.

My conversation with Gareth kicks off a new series of bonus episodes of Strange Exiles in association with Revol Press. For those who don’t know, Revol is an independent left-wing press dedicated to reviving countercultural dreaming, publishing new socialist theory and prose, and finding new voices on the contemporary left. You can find out more about Revol here. I was lucky enough to be published by them in 2024, and I now work with founder Mike Watson as a member of Revol’s editorial team.

Scroll to the bottom to view a video version, or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube.

Recommendations from Gareth Stuart Farmer

We discussed some of Gareth’s academic work, a lot of which has focused on the poetry and critical theory of Veronica Forest-Thomson (more on her below). We touched on his podcasts, which you can find on Substack under the title ‘Poetic Particulars’. We also talk about his poetry — check out his latest collection What’s That: Instead of Ego II: Acrostic Aftermaths and Other Poems, published by Broken Sleep.

We actually kicked off with a brief discussion of his passion for woodworking, based on his very good-looking bookshelves, which you can see in the background on the video of this episode (see below). Also in the background throughout the episode is Gareth’s cat Veronica (named for the poet!), who strides into shot more than once.

We begin by discussing the now-defunct term for autism, once very commonly applied especially to ‘high-functioning’ autistic people, Asperger Syndrome. As Gareth points out, the term has fallen out of favour, not least because of some ties between Hans Asperger and the eugenics movement under the Nazi regime in World War Two. Gareth’s book Kerf (2022, from 87 Press) was his first poetic work exploring autism, and his woodworking practice. Gareth reads from this collection in the video below.

We go on to discuss his work at the University of Bedfordshire, in English Literature (specifically poetry), and linguistics. We discuss the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who was the subject of Gareth’s PhD — he is also the executor for the estate of Forrest-Thomson’s work. Gareth examined her work, techniques and legacy in his book Poet on the Periphery. He also edited a major new edition of her seminal theory text on poetry, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, which was reviewed here for the London Review of Books, and discussed here in The Guardian.

Gareth mentions Raymond Williams’ work on ‘structure of feeling’ — you can read more about that here in a piece from the Raymond Williams Society. He also references some of his recent essays, including ‘Experiences of autism in higher education’ (published in the collection Social Justice in Practice Education), and another on poetry and the welfare state (published in Literature and Institutions of Welfare).

We go on to talk about Gareth’s forthcoming book for Revol, which is in the editing stages now. Gareth read from it in Twickenham at The Gathering Dark, showcasing its unique approach to language, which places the reader in the centre of an experience of neurodivergent thought processes through use of the second person. The subject is ‘You’ not ‘I’, allowing readers to identify with and see through the eyes of an autistic person when considering issues of language, communication, and identity.

Gareth mentions Louis Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’ — some notes here explain the term and its usage, which is to do with how ideology and identity are formed and influenced by the experiences we go through, and the ideas, thought systems or normative practices we encounter and absorb. This article from Not Even Past explores the history of interpellation in Althusser’s writing.

Gareth also mentions Julie Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ as a way to understand marginalisation and exile — you can read more about this in her book-length essay ‘Powers of Horror’. Later, we also introduce the concept of the ‘subaltern’ as a way to categorise people at the margins of society, first coined by Antonio Gramsci and later explored by Guyatri Spivak and others — there’s a good introduction to the term and its history available on the website for Global Social Theory.

For more in his approach to language, and the use of the second person in Writing Autism, check out the recent article below from the Revol Press blog, where Gareth talks about the books themes and intent, and how he approaches language in the text.

Revol Press

On Writing Autism: Communication, Culture & Constraint

Revol Press author Gareth Farmer on the particular challenges of writing about neurodivergence as an autistic writer, including excerpts from his forthcoming book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident (2026-2027 from Revol Press…

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10 months ago · 8 likes · Revol Press and Gareth Farmer

Gareth discusses how all of these theories interface with his work around neurodivergence in the workplace, and I bring up the book Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker. I read this last year, and it was a great introduction to the ways in which neurodivergent experiences and identities can be reimagined, reinterpreted and re-interpellated into our understanding of the world, and how people with autism and ADHD can flourish within it.

At this point we also start to talk about the links between capitalism and mental health in the work of Mark Fisher, which he explores in Capitalist Realism, Postcapitalist Desire and other books. This leads into an exploration of Revol’s aims as a publisher, particularly in engaging with these themes.

Gareth mentions my book The Darkest Timeline, and also Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism as interesting but distinct approaches to some of these themes. Gareth also mentions the late Sean Bonney as an example of a poet who engaged with these themes from an anarchist perspective. The Poetry Project has a nice profile of Bonney by Ted Rees, looking at his work and the topics he explored.

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We go on to talk about the so-called ‘crisis of over-diagnosis’ of mental health and neurodivergent conditions, which was talked about a lot in the British media — here’s The Guardian begging the question, some analysis of the Tory party’s Jeremy Hunt’s remarks on the subject, and some critique of Labour’s Wes Streeting for jumping on the bandwagon. Gareth is quite forthright in pushing back on the notion of an over-diagnosis crisis, but has some thoughts about how this overlaps with the more identitarian premise of making oneself unique or ‘special’ through identification with diagnoses, and the communities that grow up around people with specific conditions (particularly online).

We finished by talking more about ‘hidden disabilities’ and problems around representation, and how applying Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theories on intersectionality to think about neurodivergence can unintentionally lead to a competition between people with different conditions — leading to the commodification of those conditions to make “neurodivergent clickbait”. Gareth makes the excellent point that this false sense of “competition” between identities and communities is tied to the way capitalism forms identity — and that we should try not to think of rights and accommodations for disabled or neurodivergent people in this way.

He ends the conversation with some advice for the friends and family of neurodivergent people about respecting their unique lived experience, which is well worth hearing. Gareth’s book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident will be available for pre-order soon from revolpress.com.

Next on Revol X Strange Exiles: Rob Faure Walker

My next guest from Revol Press is Rob Faure Walker, an author, academic, and (more recently) ecotherapist specialising in ‘forest bathing’ — using nature to treat and manage mental and physical health conditions in a holistic way. His book Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism is available for pre-order, and will be released in Spring 2026.

Rob’s new book will explore how Carl Jung’s insights can guide us through the crises of digital era capitalism by integrating Jungian processes and archetypes with contemporary issues, offering a path towards collective healing and a reimagined relationship with radical politics, nature, and ourselves. Look out for my conversation with Rob in a few weeks time.