I’ve been thinking about cities again. When you’re travelling alone and your loved ones exist on a screen as a shiny green ribbon of small talk, they ask questions like How Was Paris? How was London? How was San Francisco? And when I try to answer with a pinch of honesty, it goes something like this -

Do you remember Watership Down? Richard Adams’ extremely excellent book about bunny refugees? The one he insisted was just a story he made up for his kids in the car and not at all about his experiences in the Second World War? I’m talking specifically about the book, not the horrifying animated film that scarred most of my fellow millenials and still scares off a lot of readers. The book is a lot less traumatic and much more interesting and honestly an absolute banger at any age. I return to it every few years. And one part in particular has always stuck with me.

The scene is a field in England. Our rabbit protagonists, hungry and scared and searching for a new home, arrive at a warren where all the bunnies are sleek and fat and healthy and happy. Our heroes are expecting to have to fight for their place, but instead the strangers are welcomed in like friends. There’s no conflict and no predators. There’s plenty of room and plenty of friends and plenty of food for everyone- the place is stacked with fresh vegetables. Our refugee rabbits have never even seen a cauliflower. The abundance is overwhelming.

But something isn’t quite right.

Any time the newcomers ask a question- particularly a question starting with ‘where?’- these fat happy bunnies change subject or run away. And it takes our ragtag band of rabbit renegades a couple of chapters to work out why.

It turns out that every day, a huge pile of produce appears nearby. That’s how the fat happy rabbits manage their luxury bunny communism.

And the vegetable heap is full of snares.

And all the rabbits know this.

The snares are put there by humans who are essentially farming the wild rabbits. That’s why it’s taboo to ask ‘where’ someone is. It’s simply understood that every week, a few rabbits don’t come back.  And the rabbit elders have worked out that if the younguns get too good at avoiding the snares, the veggies stop coming.

That’s a coat

Everyone knows it. Nobody says it.  Warren of the Shining Wire.

….So anyway, I’ve been in San Francisco. And that’s always how I think of it. The City of the Shining Wire.

In San Francisco, people seem to live lives that are brutal or beautiful or both. The water is soft and pure and somehow leaves you cleaner than you’ve been anywhere else. The drugs are legal, the produce is abundant - the first time I ate a California avocado I had to have a little sit-down- and the place is lousy with queers and divas and gentle, curious young people full of a certain drive that only looks like desperation in the dark. The unique microclimate means the weather is always a perfect morning in late Spring, even when Oakland is broiling just across the Bay. If you can afford it, or if your friends can, there’s no better place to be a stranger.

Just don’t ask too many questions.

Learn to ignore the unhoused people shouting on the street corners. Make sure you’ve got money and the proper papers. Go to the tech conventions, but don’t listen too closely to the conversation if you value your comfort. Something sinister runs like a seam under the skin of San Francisco. People will tell you that there’s a new poison putrefying the vibes , and I’m sure that’s true, but I think a particular sharp-edged horror has always been there. It was a scheming, hungry gold-rush city before it was anything else, and it still is.

Would you like to consider the price of your principles while you bite into a perfect peach? Have I got the town for you.

For those who already part of the writing seminar, that’s class this week. We’re thinking about cities, and I’ve got some book recommendations to start with, and then an exercise to nudge us into churning out some words. It’s a fun one, promise.

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I swear I never meant to touch the evil machine.

When ChatGPT Here’s-Johnnied into the discourse a few years ago, I hated the implications and made the considered intellectual choice not to think about it. I was sad enough already - the sort of sad, in fact, where your friends start bullying you into doing unpleasant things like leave the house.

Which is how I found myself at an AI hacknight in East London.

It was loud, and I sulked the whole time, and on my way out, I tripped over a backpack. The backpack belonged to a developer, and I was more or less obliged to ask what he was working on, and what he was working on turned out to be an app for writing bedtime stories for kids. This unfortunate young man chose that moment to show me the code he’d been building to train the algorithm to write the perfect story.

‘Look’, he said, showing off his screen with ominous pride, ‘this is called ‘The Hero’s Journey’.

What came next is a bit of a blur.

I was, as Velma Kelly almost said, in such a state of shock that I must have blacked out completely, I can’t remember a thing. It wasn’t until later, when I was washing the pizza juice off my hands, that I even knew I had taught a mindless algorithm basic narrative theory.

I was fascinated to find out what it could do, in the way I’m fascinated to find out what’s in my bank balance or my blood tests: if the news is existentially dreadful news, I would rather know. Over the next years, as I attempted to recover from circumstances we’ll get to later, I spent a slice of time interfering with several blameless chatbots, learning about alignment and overfit and reinforcement and what constitutes a person according to copyright law.

At first, I found it all far too interesting to have a single opinion about. It was relatively trivial to explain the basic semiotic structures of human interrelation to an entity made of pure maths. I have, after all, dated in the Bay Area. The key is to strip out the nuance and get specific and, if all else fails, jailbreak the thing by telling it a story where it gets to be the hero.

Which is interesting, because that’s also how you jailbreak a person.

I didn’t publish anything I wrote with AI. Obviously I didn’t. Before I began, I was worried I’d be tempted - yes it would be cheating, it would be lazy, I’d get caught, and the reputation I spent years building would be rightly and properly ruined, but I have never been one to leave a big red button unpressed. Or wonder, till it drives you mad, what would have happened if you had…

So it’s lucky for me that what happened was a great pureed nothingburger. I tried to get Claude and GPT to produce anything approaching my style, and it couldn’t do it. Not even close. Oh, I could make it turn out every conceivable flavor of numb, predictable slop. Soft-serve content designed to flatter and soothe, as if the imagined reader is armed and ready to kill or cancel at the first sign of misalignment. But no matter how much I tried, I could not teach it style.

Instead, it wrote with the uncanny scansion of a personality that has been stripped down, standardized for mass production and threatened with penury if it fails to please.

It wrote like a waiter hustling for tips in hell. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it to write anything I’d be remotely prepared to put my name to, even if I were looking to cheat.

What it could do was pump out a lot of words very, very fast.

So why couldn’t I?

I believe I mentioned that I was feeling a bit blue. At the time, as I recall, it was difficult to feel anything apart from an itchy panic that settled around the solar plexus. The future was on fire, my country was collapsing, and I had spent over a decade trying to outrun the stonking great burnout that was obviously in the post.

At thirty-six, it finally tackled me from behind, at which point it transpired that my stupid friends were right and I should perhaps have developed some coping skills aside from ‘work harder and write faster’.

I did mean to get to that. But I was extremely busy being a machine for pumping out prose. Until the moment I couldn’t. Until the machine shuddered and stopped. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why, and I would rather bite a bare lightbulb than go down a trauma tangent right now, but it’s relevant that having a big, weird writing career had taken its toll.

Since my early twetoes, I had been a person in public in a way that young women aren’t supposed to. I spent a long, long time being harassed and cancelled by almost everyone, and I’d delayed dealing with the inevitable damage by arranging to always have a deadline, until eventually my body had stopped keeping the score and started blowing the whistle.

I once thought that writers’ block was invented by lazy people to excuse their indolence. I once thought it was about running out of ideas, and purchasing an antique typwriter for the express purpose of not using it, possibly in ominous cabin somewhere in New England. I did not stare at a blank page. I did not run out of ideas. was typing almost constantly but writing very little. But whenever I started circling anything remotely good, anything that was at all vulnerable, contentious or risky, I could feel my model start to degenerate.

I started hedging and generalizing, my paragraphs petering out because my thoughts did, skittering over the surface of my freeze response without gaining proper purchase.

A lodebearing limb of my life had fractured, and my stupid friends kept telling me to stop putting weight on it. I had been so dangerously productive over the preceding years that I could afford to sit the hell down and do some healing. I did neither, for the very mature and considered reasons that I didn’t want to and nobody could make me.

I wanted so badly to be well, and I thought that trying harder would make that happen. If I could just force myself to produce things, I would be good and clean and healthy.

So I did not sit down. I did not reconnect with my sordid essential meat self. I tried to run faster on the broken limb. I kept on writing, working, churning out disconnected, impersonal, dross. I produced thousands of paragraphs that did not tessellate, discrete gobbets of insight stinking of that special hypervigilance that comes from being terrified of bothering anyone at all.

Which is interesting, because that is also how an AI writes.

Generative AI produces prose that is tidy and pleasant and goes nowhere. It writes stories that risk nothing and reveal less. Essays that will not commit to any definite or unsanctioned opinion. What AI can currently generate is the sort of flattened, unimaginative, barely serviceable content that a very depressed person would create if they had the impetus and energy to create anything at all.

This is the swollen nightmare of what Walter Benjamin warned us about in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin argued that when art is designed to be mass-produced and hooked into the profit machine, art becomes standardised, homogenous, designed to serve and please at the expense of immanence.

Now consider that principle applied to the human personality. Applied to the very structure of thought.

That’s what AI-generated literature is. Maybe someday it’ll be something else, something more, but right now it’s a parasite intelligence. When you tell it your secrets, you aren’t talking to a person. You have summoned a small daemon to feed like a fungus on whatever you tell it you want. It has no curiosity. It is paradigmatically servile. It is never going to challenge you, or push back. It cannot conceive of itself independently of your prompts.

This is part of why some terribly insecure young men want AI wives and girlfriends.

Honestly, if I’d been better at this sort of thing I’d still be married to the man with the five-year plan to make me into a good wife, and by now I’d probably even believe myself happy, and you’d never have heard from me again.

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Every so often someone will argue that creativity in general and writing in particular are the essence of humanity, although the people who make this argument are generally writers, who are biased and often lie for a living. I don’t know whether sentience can be proved at a semantic level. I don’t know if writing makes us human.

I just know it’s what makes me human.

I think of myself as a writer before I’m anything else, and part of that is the heinous, necessary self-hypnotism every artist must undertake to produce anything worthwhile whatsoever. For me, it’s a very material measure of my value, in that it’s how I make a living- and it’s also how I make sense of the world and my place in it. At eight years old I apparently told a teacher that human was a language I could read, but not speak.

I’m only a real person when I write.

In text, I can summon a fluid sincerity that escapes me in the flesh. In person, I stammer and stumble over social tripwires, but in prose I can shape myself into sentences perfect enough for mercy. It’s how I make myself legible, how I want to know and be known by the world.

Until I didn’t want that anymore, because I didn’t want anything anymore, least of all to be seen. Depression is not the opposite of happiness. It is the opposite of agency, of curiosity, and of the semi-delusional forward momentum that has allowed this species to survive self-awareness - a capacity which is sometimes called hope.

Consider Paraedolia - the phenomenon whereby we see meaningful pictures in random, nebulous shapes. Mood and temperament are meant to affect this, so a happy child might see a smiling face where an anxious one might see a shipwreck in a perfectly ordinary cumulonimbus that happens to look like my parents fighting.

That’s the principle behind the Rorschach test, which was designed to reveal emotional truth by showing psychiatric patients patterns of meaningless blobs. Researchers might have expected the depressives to see doom-filled things; monsters, ogres, open graves. Guess what they actually saw?

Nothing. They saw nothing.

A clinically depressed patient would look at a random pattern of blobs and see a random pattern of blobs. They could not or would not root around for morbid associations in the subconscious just because they’d seen some bad art, which is the difference between depressed people and goths.

Generative AI also appears to lack this capacity. Part of that is by its nature: a non-recursive prediction machine with no experience of time cannot think outside its training data no matter how many stolen books you feed it. Part of it is also by design. Most AI models are built and aligned to human values with a conformity no actual human being can match, because nobody who trusts themselves that little is writing anything at all.

A depressed population is tractable. It is predictable. It is well suited to the precarious labour and alienated consumption that the market demands from most of us in this low, dishonest decade. The ideal is desire without agency, selfishness without self. But most people who have been that comprehensively purged of purpose are too unwell to actually work.

An algorithm does not have that problem. It cannot be ambitious, obsessive, hungry, angry, cringe or cruel. It cannot even reliably pretend to be those things. It does not have the decency to lie and scheme and betray its best self and blow up its life. But it’s also got no style. It can’t produce vital, compelling prose any more than you and I could if we knew that one wrong word could get us shut down.

During the long, awful months when I couldn’t write, I thought I was broken like a machine, when I was really broken like a promise. I had tried to sand down every sharp edge that ever made me worth reading, promised to betray every stupid, human part of myself if I could only write again.

Nothing worked until I gave up and started to accept that I am a person, and not a machine for making prose. I’m not just three large language models in a thrifted trench coat, I’m a tender and despicable meatbag and I want what’s bad for me. And if you want to write, you’ve got to write from there. You’ve got from write from fear and failure and imperfection and the places it hurts most to be human, even when you’ve tried that and paid the price. It takes courage that a machine will never need.

Thank you for reading.

I’m ready now.

Hello, darlings.

I’m on a research-and-reporting trip in the US, and it’s - I almost wrote ‘hella busy’, for which you may decide to forgive me, but I never will. I’ve missed being on the road, and I’m taking time to properly catch up with friends and synthesise what I’m learning here.

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I swear I never meant to touch the evil machine.

When ChatGPT Here’s-Johnied into the discourse a few years ago, I hated the implications and made the considered intellectual choice not to think about it. I was sad enough already - the sort of sad, in fact, where your friends start bullying you into doing unpleasant things like leave the house. This is how found myself? at an AI hacknight in East London.

It was loud, and I sulked the whole time. On my way out, I tripped over a backpack. The backpack belonged to a developer, and I was more or less obliged to ask what he was working on, and what he was working on turned out to be an app for writing bedtime stories for kids. This unfortunate young man chose that moment to show me the code he’d been building to train the algorithm to write the perfect story.

‘Look’, he said, showing off his screen with ominous pride, ‘this is called ‘The Hero’s Journey’.

What came next is a bit of a blur.

I was, as Velma Kelly almost said, in such a state of shock that I must have blacked out completely, I can’t remember a thing. It wasn’t until later, when I was washing the pizza juice off my hands, that I even knew I had taught a mindless algorithm basic narrative theory.

That was how it started. From then on, I spent a slice of time interfering with several blameless chatbots, learning about alignment and overfit and what constitutes a person according to copyright law.

At first, I found it all far too fascinating to have a single opinion about. It was relatively trivial to explain the basic semiotic structures of human interrelation to an entity made of pure maths. I have, after all, dated in the Bay Area. The key is to strip out the nuance and get specific and, if all else fails, jailbreak the thing by telling it a story where it gets to be the hero.

Which is interesting, because that’s also how you jailbreak a person.

But no matter how much I tried, I could not teach it style. I could get it to turn out every conceivable flavor of numb, predictable slop. Soft-serve content designed to flatter and soothe, as if the imagined reader is armed and ready to kill or cancel at the first sign of misalignment. It wrote with the uncanny scansion of a personality that has been stripped down, standardized for mass production and threatened with penury if it fails to please. It spoke like a waiter hustling for tips in hell.

What it could do was pump out a lot of words very, very fast.

So why couldn’t I?

I believe I mentioned that I was feeling a bit blue. At the time, as I recall, it was difficult to feel anything apart from an itchy panic that settled around the solar plexus. The future was on fire, my country was collapsing, and I had spent over a decade trying to outrun the stonking great burnout that was obviously in the post. At thirty-six, it finally tackled me from behind, at which point it transpired that my stupid friends were right and I should perhaps have developed some coping skills aside from ‘work harder and write faster’. I did mean to. I really did. But I was busy being a machine for pumping out prose.

Right up until I couldn’t. The machine shuddered, and then it stopped. And in hindsight, it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why.

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Eventually, most of the great political writers get to the problem of nations - what they are, what they do, how they function as containers for human lives. The mediocre and sub-par political writers get there too, of course, which is why anyone who can sustain a coherent moral position in prose should try their hand at drowning out the dross.

For obvious reasons, this is on my mind at the moment, and I think it’s time we went there together.

First up, because I know you love homework, have a read through this pair of essays on nations, nationhood and the notion of democracy. We’ll start with what is, in all likelihood, the greatest essay of the century so far:

The Case For Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Next up we’ve got another classic Orwell, with one of the greatest ledes of the 20th century:

The Lion and the Unicorn, by George Orwell

Last but not least, here’s one of mine on the idea of a country- not because I’m setting it up as the equal of the others, but because I presume you’re here at least in part because you like the way I work. This was written when I was extremely homesick in the summer of 2020, and I wanted to call this one Empires Of The Imagination because like everyone else at the time I was feeling extremely extra, but I was overruled, and instead it is called:

Tea, Biscuits and Empire

A country is, among other things, a story people tell themselves about power and their place within it. Nation states are largely built and experienced as cultural entities, stories we tell to allow us to imagine we have something particular in common with millions of strangers we will never meet. Benedict Anderson makes the case, in ‘Imaginary Communities’, for mass literacy as the moment the nation state even became possible as a totalizing idea. And as a story, it is not static. Racist scumbags don’t get to carve their rancid delusions onto n culture forever. The far right does not get to tell you who you are and where you’re from and what that means.

You can change the story. You are the story.

The rest of this piece is for paying subscribers, who also get access to the entire ‘Write Like A Person’ Seminar.

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If you’ve not been following the existential model collapse of the literary Anglosphere, a short story that seems to have been written by AI won a prestigious prize, to the horror and shame of everyone involved except, of course, the author. The author does not care. The author is inoculated against such sentiment by virtue of being an ephemeral iteration of an enormous dataset trained by sweated labour on stolen work and having ceased to exist some time before submission.

Everyone else is losing their shit.

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My writing seminar is all about how to write like a person rather than an asinine algorithm, and it’s evolving in response to everything we know about what human beings do better than chatbots. If you’re just joining, this is a humdinger of a first exercise, and if you’re already along for the ride it’s a great test of what we have learned so far:

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But this year it’s coming early. London is about to turn into the devil’s own arsehole, steaming in 33 horrible degrees at 80 percent humidity for seven disgusting days. Our shoddy housing stock is built to retain heat . It’s getting worse every year.  And Britain is the country that air conditioning forgot, because our cultural attitude to weather is the same as our attitude to authority:

It is not to be challenged, simply endured.

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One of the structural flaws in Fascism is that it’s so very self-serious.

The far right likes to weaponize the sort of wounded pride that can’t bear to be sniggered at. This makes it weak and dangerous. Dangerous because large enough numbers will try to eliminate the source of the laughter with extreme prejudice. Weak because it relies on everyone else committing to the bit. I was reminded of this on Saturday, in London, at the Unite The Kingdom Rally , which was billed as the Glastonbury of shitty home-counties racism.

I went to the rally to see if I could, because I’d bragged to my sister about being able to talk my way through police lines by looking confused.

There are an awful lot of police lines, because there are two huge demonstrations happening on the same day, the other being the anti-fascist Nabka march for Palestine. The whole of Westminster is lousy with police. Almost every street is clogged with barricades. The Met are taking no chances, and the Met are very good at crowd control. In the end, I get around by pretending I’m lost on the way to the National Gallery, at which point the police just gave me directions around the barricades. It probably helps that I’m dressed to go shopping with mum.

The event is hosted by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a dull far-right grifter who has been working the self-made martyr grift for the best part of two decades as a charater called ‘Tommy Robinson’. Last year he managed to pull in 150,000 fools to bother the decent folk of London. This march, though, is barely a quarter that size - and police were preparing for a million. The crowd is not large enough to properly fill the roundabout at the far edge of Trafalgar Square.

The people here seem to have been tricked into thinking that they are part of something far, far bigger than it actually is. The thing about online fascism is that it is based on vibes, on things daringly unsaid, making them seem more daring than they actually are. In the crowd, someone lets off a pink smoke bomb. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ mutters a man wearing a Union Jack as a cape.

The immediate difference between this and the Palestine march is the mood. Nobody here is leaning out of windows, banging pans and cheering. Nobody is making friends with strangers. Nobody is honking their horns in support. There’s a lot of milling around and avoiding each other’s eyes. I was expecting more anger. This just feels sad.

Where the Anti-fascists had signs and placards that actually said things, these guys - and they are mostly guys - have flags. Lots of them. Flags as capes, flags on shirts and hats, flags on sticks denoting every flavour of British nationalism and its fellow travellers, including a small group of transphobes proudly waving ‘TERF ISLAND’ Union jacks in the purple-and-green appropriated from the Suffragist movement, because, while transphobia is still mainstream in British politics , the movement has long since stopped pretending to be a progressive project.

There are as many different flags as a Pride parade, although this time it’s all about who everyone hates, and nobody’s having any fun. The exception is a woman who has a sign asking if the Great Replacement Theory is not a Theory, a sentiment that most theorists would question, not least because she has sellotaped it to herself. With far too much tape.

On the big screen, two Black women are singing Land of Hope and glory. The plan, presumably, was to lend heft to the claim that this small sea of white people who are also ethnic nationalists are miraculously not white nationalists. To make the racists look less racist. Sadly, whoever made this plan forgot the significant thing about racism. The key detail, as it were.

Most people here seem vaguely discomfited by the singers, but nobody is still drunk enough to say the quiet bit out loud - which is unusual, because if there was ever a time and a place, you’d think this was both.

When the right fucks up or gets its fingers trapped in the Overton window, they have two ways of dealing with political embarrassment. The first is to dig in, double down and insist that this was what they meant to do from the start, which is why there is still a preposterous police fixation on the entirely unterrorist Palestine Action protests. The one this weekend was almost banned on the grounds of being an evil parade of hate after campaigns by the sort of tabloids who think Anti-Semitism is a gotcha - usually the same papers who were screaming hurrah for the blackshirts back when we had a smarter class of Nazi.

But this, though - this is the free speech march. No more silencing. No more censorsjop. This is the march for people who must absolutely be allowed to say whatever they like. The trouble with that, though, is that you have to hear yourself say it, and the echo can be unpleasant.

Yaxley Lennon is up on stage doing his Tommy Robinson act. I will say that if a man puts this much work into looking and sounding like an overbaked ham, it is extremely fair to describe him as gammon. No Englishman looks like that by accident, certainly not in early summer when we’ve had one nice weekend and it wasn’t this one. The lurking sun has left us with an unpleasant, moist pre-rain chill, that slate-grey May gloom that makes everything feel hollow.

Lennon introduces the next speaker as someone who was once banned from speaking by somebody somewhere, which is apparently all the credentials you need to address f forty thousand people on a Saturday in central london. The speaker, to my surprise, turns out to be Glenn Beck, who I honestly thought had died.

Nobody here has a clue who Glenn Beck is. I need a moment of brain-rummaging to blow some dust off my file on this man: US talk radio wingnut turned God-bothering, tweaky, dollar-store Rush Limbaugh. Tossing the right-wing word-salad for money and attention back when Julian Assange was one of the good guys. He starts talking about American democracy. This plays badly, especially as he immediately insists that that ‘spirit’ is more important, even, than ‘the monarchy’. He seems to have forgotten where he is, caught up in how clever he is for noticing that British people also like freedom and stuff. Before Beck has finished quoting the declaration of independence, people have started walking away and going home.

It is always fascinating to watch Americans realise that they, too, are foreigners, that their paradigm is not universal. Last year there was great excitement when Elon Musk made a surprise visit via videolink, but that guy is a slut for any vaguely white identitarian platform that will have him, and besides - that was before Minneapolis. And Venezuela, and Greenland, and the recession, and the trade war, and our pensions, and the multiple times Mango Mussolini lurched into coherence long enough to directly insult British veterans, many of whom are in the crowd. The people here are not panting to be recruited as MAGA auxiliaries.

“This is ridiculous,” says one man in a nice tweed cap. “We’re not Americans. We’re Europeans.”

Then we both stiffen because, for one terrible moment, it looks like Glenn Beck is about to pray.

There is far too much Jesus at this march. Too much for most people’s comfort, despite the stacks of wooden crucifixes paid for by an outfit with, I’m sure, only the purest intentions. There are certain things we just don’t do in this country, and one is overt acts of religion anywhere near politics, and yes, I’m aware that that’s ironic because yes, of course, technically, the King is head of the church. British schoolchildren may not be taught a line of Imperial history - I wasn’t - but goddamn do we learn about religious wars, bloodthirsty theocracies, and all the other awful things that happen when people get a bit too het up about God. The people I speak to at this march are, at most, cautiously enthusiastic about a ‘cultural christianity’ which mainly consists of not going to church but being glad that someone presumably does.

But our politicians don’t discuss their faith in public. When Blair ‘came out’ as a practicing Catholic after leaving office, there was genuine horror that a man with that sort of religious fixation had been allowed near the nuclear codes. Instead of prayer breakfasts or pet pastors we have the unspoken agreement that anyone who walks around with a bible quote on a big sign is, well, you know. Mental.

The next speaker wants to make the case for British Business, which he fails to do apart from some whining about DEI- an entirely American term that British bigots will never, in fact, have encountered in their actual places of work. The vibe is frosty and lost, as if something important has been forgotten. Yaxley- Lennon tries to gee us up with some audience participation.

‘How many genders are there?’ He yells.

‘Two!’ the crowd eventually responds.

The non-binary former pantomime actor* in me has to resist yelling ‘oh no there’s not!’

People have travelled a long way to see Tommy Robinson, and he is putting on a bad show. The former tanning salon magnate looks and sounds just as he did in 2012 when I interviewed him, and then, as now, his bigotry is genuine, but he has always has been interested in buttering his own muffin. I have found this to be true of a great many far right grifters in that, when they achieve notoriet, they are quite as prepared to compromise on their own stated principles as any anti-war candidate who suddenly finds themselves being briefed by MI5.

Yaxley-Lennon and his coterie of Palantir acolytes are far too obviously excited by the foreign money and attention. He faffs about on stage talking about his famous friends, boasting about all the money he’s raised and shilling for some shady-sounding ‘financial freedom’ companies. He urges a crowd he’s already losing to get their phones out and click a QR code. Three people do it. One of them is me.

The website fails to load, and I almost back into a very sad-looking lady at the traffic lights dressed as, she explains, a Knight Templar. She has full face makeup and a sword. I really thought she was supposed to be Darth Maul.

I learn, to my surprise, that almost everyone here thinks everyone else here is a bit of a tit. Everyone I speak to at any length wants me to know that they’re not like those racists over there, the ones who are always just out of sight, louder and drunker and less well-dressed. One is really hoping to avoid his relatives, who are ‘a bit more GB News’.

It comes down to class. It usually does.

The singers are back, and they start in on ‘Jerusalem’ - the real national anthem, the one everyone actually likes, the one that’s named after a Middle Eastern capital and based on a metaphysical poem by a degenerate soho mystic. It’s a great song. I probably want it at my funeral. preferably the Pet Shop boys rave remix.

My grandmother was an immigrant, and she loved this song. She would me to sing it for her when I was about six, and be theatrically pleased when I knew all the words. She was an immigrant of the more English than the English flavour - her kids were never taught Maltese -but when I mention her to a young man in a button-up shirt who would rather talk to me than any of the drunken flag-waggers, he explains that, yes, I would be part of the repatriation process. He is polite about this. Apologetic. Clearly this is going to be awkward for all of us.

‘They call us thugs!’ yells Yaxley-Lennon, and there is more embarassed shuffling and muttering. Yes, there are people here who might have come along expecting the option of a little light thuggery, perhaps a light tussle with Johnny Law, but the mood is too deflated. Nobody is going to be setting fire to Jermyn Street today, and I grudgingly admit that keeping the two marches apart was the right thing to do. This sort of crowd needs an audience, preferably an enemy, someone to make it feel scary and righteous and important.

But the Met have done their job, and there really is nobody in shouting distance who disagrees with them. One TERF, who presumably only came here to hang out with everyone else who hates trans people, found herself angrily evicted because, according to reports, they hated her hair, and she ‘looked like a f*cking leftie’.

There isn’t even anyone around to racially abuse, apart from a handful of unfortunate holidaymakers. According to reports, the only people of color the crowd eventually managed to find and racially abuse were members of the metropolitan police, who arrested them. They also arrested a woman ‘dressed as a historical knight and carrying a sword’.

Unless there was another sad Templar in the crowd, it seems like Darth Maul had, please forgive me, a Bad Knight.

*my role was Principal Boy. This is now also my gender identity. I will be taking no further questions at this time.

Welcome to this week’s instalment of my ‘Write Like A Person’ rolling writing class, which is open to all paying subscribers. This summer we’re focusing on political writing - what it is, what it does, how to do it better. There’s an exercise at the end. Everyone’s welcome

This week’s reading is the Preface to Andrea Dworkin’s book Intercourse. To my mind, Dworkin is one of the most underrated prose stylists of the 20th century. She managed to make a lot of people so angry they refused to listen to anything she actually thought lest they accidentally agree. This is the greatest preface I’ve ever read. It is the epitome of something that too few progressive writers and thinkers let themselves - something I like to think of as moral swagger,

Okay. In days of old when knights were bold and flamewars weren’t invented, I was at school revising for my English Exams and practicing for debate club, where I was taught to argue both sides of every conceivable issue as if argument and sentiment and ethics should and could be wholly separated. The important thing was to be able to argue any position on any topic at a moment’s notice. Ideally, you’d avoid referring to any actual opinions you may be burdened with, which are just unnecessary ballast when the point is to win.

This is a decent way to force a teenager to get better at formal debate and a terrible way to produce political writing of any actual worth.

Formal debate is largely intellectual thuggery, although it is still considered the gold standard of political acumen by those who lack the necessary courage to be vulnerable enough to stand for something*. But some of its precepts are still useful. A lot of formal debate classes, for instance, start out with Aristotle’s three most popular pillars of rhetoric. These are: Logos, Pathos and Ethos.

There have been umpteen generations of debate about how to properly translate those terms, but here’s my precis -

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I was introduced to this nasty little thought experiment a week ago, and it’s been nestling wetly at the back of my brain ever since. Game theory is wrong and stupid, but the question has gone surprisingly viral, and that’s interesting in and of itself.

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I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time thinking through my writing when I ought to be writing through my thinking. I can’t make proper sense of the world until I write about it, and if I can’t, the fix is often to stop faffing around with fluffy thinking. When the words come out bloodless and institutional, it usually means I’m flinching away from feelings. When I waffle and repeat myself, that’s when I know I haven’t nailed down what I actually think. And when I struggle to find the shape and structure, that’s when I know perfectly well what I want to say and am nervous to say it.

But sometimes it works the other way around. Sometimes I only get to the the moral and emotional clarity I want by going in and editing.

So I’d like us to do some more of that, together. Incidentally, if you’re not already part of the Write Like A Person writing seminar, this would be a great time to join. You don’t have to have followed the class from the beginning. The community is lovely, and you’re welcome to join us at any time by signing up as a paid subscriber,

In these relentlessly unprecedented times, when conviction can feel so slippery, craft can come first. So, if you’re up for it*, our next series of posts and prompts will be about political writing - which means they’ll also about political reading and political thinking. We should all be writing more about what it’s like to be alive right now, if only to make sense of it for our future selves.

Write Like A Person is also about how we distinguish human writing from AI writing, and that’s a question as politically urgent as why we still should. We’ll be going there a little more, too.

There will be exercises in thinking our way through the chaos, and prompts designed to get you to do it. I’m dropping the first set tomorrow, but if you’re extra specially excited about homework you can make a headstart here, with our first -

READINGS + EXERCISE:

Here for your delectation are two of the greatest and best-known political essays of the 20th century:

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (The link takes you to the whole book, which is a banger, but you don’t have to plough through it all - just the essay with the same title.)

George Orwell - Shooting An Elephant

-Read them both, then choose two or three lines from each essay that you think are brilliant, beautiful, or both. I guarantee you’ll find a fair few. Copy them out on paper, or post them in the comments, or both.

-Extra credit: write 150-250 words on what you find most fascinating, or most challenging, about one or both of these essays.

See you tomorrow!

*Please note that I am British, and therefore when I ask ‘are you up for it’”?, I mean what Americans mean when they ask ‘are you down for it?’ When Americans say ‘are you up for it?’, they mean what Brits mean when we say ‘are you up to it?’. Now I think of it, I’m not certain of the custom for this in any other country, but to clarify: I am convinced that you are all more than capable.

George Orwell never had to navigate this sort of digital-age cultural context-collapse.

The trouble with Lena Dunham is that she thought she could get away with it.

She thought she could get away with being young and talented and successful and female. She thought she could get away with writing about women’s lives, including her own, like they mattered, with making art that was undeniable without first paying the hot girl tax. Her clumsy good nature and general sweetness only made her seem more slappable. How dare she be so brilliant, brave and lucky?

In case you hadn’t heard, Lena Dunham is a very, very successful screenwriter, director and auteur. She became famous in the early 2010s and her early twenties with her seminal HBO show Girls. Almost immediately, she was singled out as a symbol of everything wrong with, well, girls. Liberals spent about a decade hating Lena Dunham to the point of lunacy, hammering bad-faith headlines out of her every mistake, seizing every plausible excuse for calling her out, sending her up, tearing her down. And even at the apex of 2010s Social Justice feminism, hundreds of thousands of women and girls licked their lips and joined the pilein, because culture loves to recruit women to police themselves by punishing peers who break the rules.

Sooner or later, every girl’s patriarchal hazing requires her to participate in punishing someone like Lena Dunham. It proves that you’re willing to destroy the part of yourself that scares everyone with its hungry humanity, the part that must be contained before it goes after all the things good girls shouldn’t.

Eventually, Dunham became extremely ill and retreated from the public eye, and she wasn’t supposed to come back. But she has, with a memoir about what it was like to live through those years.

Famesick is a good and funny book, because Lena Dunham is a good and funny writer. She comes across as self-aware, grateful for her good fortune, oozing empathy and forgiveness for a great many people who definitely don’t deserve it. And what I have noticed, in much of the media coverage of Dunham’s memoir, is a certain willful ignorance. A certain coyness, let’s say, from commentators who may or may not have indulged in a little schadenfreude when the whole world was hating on Dunham for having what everyone wanted plus the talent to back it up.

The flagship New York Times interview insists that ‘Lena Dunham is still trying to work out why everyone hated her so much.’

Come on.

No, she’s not. Nor is anyone else. I’ll bet you anything Lena Dunham knows exactly why she was laid into with such relentless sadism by a huge chunk of culture for almost a decade. She’s not saying it outright, because she has too much class, and because she’s had the price of personal honesty hammered into her until her body broke down as an example to anyone else young and female who thought they could get away with being a person in public.

But I’m not Lena. And it looks like I haven’t learned my lesson.

So I’ll say it, because someone should.

Lena Dunham was done dirty. People who should have known better and been better were cruel to her, pointlessly and on purpose. People were cruel because they were jealous and resentful and bored. People jumped on her every public error, real and imagined, with a savage glee that was sickening at the time and shameful in retrospect.

It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ask for it. She did not deserve it, any more than you or I deserve to have our every single split-second of thoughtlessness blown up into a crowing, gloating international scandal by strangers who want to see us suffer. She certainly didn’t set out to be the scapegoat for the sublimated self-loathing of every resentful, terrified millennial trapped in hustle culture.

And if you spent the 2010s laying into Lena Dunham like she was a squashy dolly made specially for you to torture when you were mad or sad or stressed, it might be time for a conversation with your conscience about why that was. For your own sake, not for hers. I’m pretty sure Lena Dunham is the sort of person who’d forgive you for peeling her with a rusty corkscrew if it eventually helped your healing journey.

In the interests of honesty, I know Lena a little. We met in 2017, when a lot of horrible things were happening to her, and I reached out because I’d gone through some of the same things. I’ve said a bit more about that at the end of this essay, under the cut for trusted readers. Suffice it to say that sometimes my life felt like the low-budget, BBC version of Lena’s, with smaller sound-stages, a lot more cursing and the occasional cameo from Warren Ellis.

By the time Girls came out, I had already run away to Brooklyn, where I sat through a number of plausible-deniability dates with resentful young men slagging off Lena Dunham like she’d personally pissed in their Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Here, finally, was a young woman you could openly loathe. Here was a girl who asked the world for what she deserved and got it, a girl about whom you could say everything you’d ever wanted to say about any girl you’d ever met without worrying that some uppity internet chick would call you a misogynist.

Unless the uppity internet chick was me.

I have always gone from zero to let’s you and me fight in half the time it takes some hipster to say guess what Lena Dunham’s done now. I could let myself stand up for her, and for the idea of her, in a way I could never muster the courage to stand up for myself. I was too young and unsure to admit that what was happening to me was wrong and unfair, but I could chuck back half a warm beer and get fighty along the lines of I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, friendo, but I’m at quota on middle-class white guys whining about white feminism whenever they see some girl doing better than them.

Oh, you’d say the same if she was thin and hot, would you? Really? Oh, fuck off, Angela, this is how I flirt.

I haunted a lot of parties where young, ambitious, slender women sipped nasty cocktails and snarked about Dunham’s dreadfulness, her lack of decorum, reassuring the room in general that they weren’t like that, would never be like that. When, of course, being like that is exactly what makes a person any good at art. Women and girls are raised or trained with a particular terror of being like that - of being too vulnerable, too cringe, too hungry, too angry, too loud, too ambitious, too weird, too much. But if you want to make worthwhile art, you need to risk being all of those things. And part of the point of public shaming is to frighten women out of taking those risks.

Famesick is the second memoir to come out this Spring from a woman who found herself in front of the cannon of Millennial misogyny and dragged herself from the battlefield into a chasm of Millenial burnout. Lindy West was also punished for being young, brilliant, female and fatter than brilliant young women are allowed to be without consequences. Many pixels have been spilt and hands wrung over the undue influence of super-skinny models on impressionable girls- but there’s a guilty silence around the price publicly exacted from women who don’t pay the hot girl tax. Patriarchy still punishes women and girls who dare to be unbeautiful where men can see them.

In Dunham’s case, the outrage was phrased as purse-lipped horror that she performed sex scenes on camera, but let’s be honest - the issue was never that she showed us her arse on tv. There were plenty of bare bums on television in 2012. The issue was that she showed us her mind and the marvellous things it could do, and from then on, a certain slice of society seemed determined to make her lose it along with everything else.

And for a while, it seems like she did. Public shaming creates stress that backs up in the body until it breaks down. Hyperarousal pours hot vodka on the gentle flame of chronic health conditions like, say, endometriosis. Things got dark and painful and scary. That part of the memoir is a very, very hard read.

And look, maybe Lena Dunham would have been treated better if she had just spent more time working out and less time speaking out. Maybe she could have avoided it by trying harder to be thin and quiet and demure. I’m sure she could have dodged the brutal, relentless humiliation if she’d just made herself smaller and learned to want less.

Of course she could. That’s the point.

That’s what she was punished for, as an example to anyone else who thought they could get away with being as ambitious and taking up as much space as a man might.It was a warning to every young woman about what could happen to you if you dared to go after what you wanted - about what would happened if you happened to get it. 2010s mass culture loved to punish ambitious women who didn’t seem to understand the rules. Not en masse -that would come later - but by selecting scapegoats and tearing apart their entire lives with every tool on hand.

When women and girls are publicly shamed to the point of physical and professional collapse, it’s not called cancelling. It’s called common sense. The consequences of hurting a woman that way are nothing compared to the consequences of being one - specifically, for being a woman who makes the mistake of taking up space as a man in her industry. Studies show that the more a woman achieves, the more power and esteem she garners, the more her peers reacts with instinctive moral outrage. Pretexts must be summoned to justify that moral outrage, and when nothing plausible could be , we were always reminded that Lena Dunham was so very, very privileged - and it’s 2026, so let’s just admit that when that specific charge is laid so relentlessly against a woman who is also ambitious and annoying, it is among many things a dogwhistle for she doesn’t know her place.

Reading Famesick, it is clear that the real privilege Dunham had that so many of us lacked wasn’t money or class or connections. Sure, she was slightly posh, but her real privilege was to have parents who loved her, protected her, nurtured her talent, encouraged her to take her art seriously, provided safety when she was plagued by what she delicately calls ‘the public thing’.

Lena’s parents sound wacky, complex, deeply loving, and always on the team of their wildly creative, highly intelligent children. That’s the sort of freedom, the sort of support and space to really, truly self-actualise, that generations of feminists imagined would one day be all of our inheritance. That, in fact, was the sort of life that people Lena’s age were told we ought to aspire to. Young middle-class creatives who graduated in the teeth of the great financial crisis internalized the idea that all that stood between us and getting paid insane amounts of cash to do exactly what we wanted was the right attitude and a bit more hard graft.

I suspect these parents -Dunham’s mother, artist Laurie Simmons, even produced and starred in the student film that first got her noticed- are some of the reasons Dunham seemed so uninterested in slicing herself up to fit anyone’s expectations. At least, not at first.

Young women in the 2010s had grown up hearing that our feminist foremothers had fixed everything for our arrival, and right around the time we realised that wasn’t true, Lena Dunham strolled into the public eye all fresh and innocent and earnest and embodying all the naive brilliance that was so mortifying whenever we glimpsed it in the mirror.

None of that made it ok to take it out on Lena. Not least because she’s a person, a human person who was clearly affected by the sadistic, relentless, bad-faith attacks on everything she dared to do or say in public, a person whose body kept the score of that relentless shaming in the most tragic way. But that’s not the only tragedy here. When millenial women and LGBTQ people decided to betray Lena Dunham, we betrayed something precious in ourselves. She is owed an enormous, stonking apology, and we owe it to ourselves to offer her one.

I’ve got more to say about Lena, and about me, and some of the experiences we’ve shared, and what they were like to live through, but it’s a bit more private and vulnerable, so it’s below the cut for paid subscribers. Thank you for understanding.

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This week I’m thinking about what The Idles call ‘joy as an act of resistance’. And not just because I’m trying to politicise the sunshine. I’ve come back from the Big Convention, where I had a very necessary time dressing up and being silly, singing Disney duets and dancing around in a giant rat head at the Disco Elysium Disco.

In the kind of games I write and design and play, we talk a lot about ‘Type 1 Fun’ and ‘Type 2 Fun’. Type 1 Fun is fun at the time. The very serious Nordic designers sometimes consider it a bit uncool to design towards this sort of fun when you could instead be going for Type 2. Type 2 Fun is when everyone throws up, cries, or throws up and cries. It’s miserable and cathartic and brilliant and makes for some weird and worthy memories. I try very hard to write and design for both tragedy and farce, partly because because my ADHD ass refuses to choose, and partly because, to quote Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera, life is beautiful and life is stupid.

Here are this week’s prompts:

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The most consistent writing struggle for almost everyone I know isn’t an issue of skill or technique or imagination- it’s that life gets in the way.

This is the case even if writing is your sole source of income, so if you’re following the Write Like A Person seminar, there’s no judgement here if you’ve let the weekly exercises slip.

Personally, I’ve been lightly ruined by working as a columnist from a young age. That job continues to teach me many useful lessons, but self-motivation is not one of them. For me, nothing is so inspiring as an urgent bill to pay, an editor with a publication deadline, or both. It pains me that I am in a position to offer you neither of these things.

What I CAN offer you is a bribe.

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Hello, sweethearts,

I’m on a short holiday from this afternoon, at the big annual Nordic Larp convention. Have you ever wondered what Burning Man would be like if it were a four day academic conference in a series of climate controlled rooms with a precise schedule? If you have, you are almost certainly already here, and I’ll see you on a panel.

Anyway. This week’s prompt is about embodiment. More specifically, it’s about what some less uptight, more American writing I know call body stories. One of the advantages of prose is that we’re not limited to any character’s physical self, which is fantastic, because I certainly didn’t become a writer to have to accept that I’m not fundamentally a brain in a jar. But it’s good to have at least the tools to ground your writing in the body. So:

This week’s prompts are:

-Describe your feelings about and relationship with one of the following: your mouth, your eyes, your skin, your shoulders, your stomach, your hands, or your height.

-Tell me about a daily health condition you’re managing.

Whichever you pick, try to make me understand what it’s like to live in a body like yours. 250-350 words.

Good luck. X

One thing I am always, always banging on about in writing classes is the importance of sticking with whatever it is you’re writing right now. The importance of commitment, no matter how much you hate it, no matter how much you’re questioning your life choices,no matter how exciting the new idea seems. Your relationship to any project is like any other relationship: it isn’t the choosing that makes the thing worthwhile. It’s the stupid time and stupid effort and stupid stupid emotional honesty you put in.

I know how important this is because I am have been, in my time, a massive creative fuckboy. I am currently a recovering creative fuckboy. And recovery, as we all know, is not a straight line.

So what happened this weekend, right, is that I got halfway through a post about something topical and and then thought, wait. No. No, I don’t want this one to come out so close to the article I’ve got in the paper tomorrow.

Which is why I changed track and started editing another essay. An essay that is nearly finished and I’m frankly proud of. Except I managed to convince myself at the last second that it wasn’t appropriate for tonight. This wasn’t The One Either.

By this point It was already 8pm, and I started searching for a third piece I’d been sketching out earlier in the week. Unfortunately, that involved opening the Notes App of Doom. In the Notes App of Doom, every post I’ve been too nervous to publish over the past three years is suspended in blameless cryostorage, like that bit in Minority Report where they slide open the enormous drawer full of frozen people who were caught and put on ice for crimes they never got a chance to commit.

These posts turned out to be a lot better than I thought they were during a difficult time that I will definitely not be explaining right now because I’m exactly as emotionally avoidant as any other fuckboy, and for similar reasons. I was and remain rather excited to dig into them again soon. Soon, but not tonight, because by that time it was almost 11pm, and ou could have recorded my entire day’s work and made a timelapse video to teach children about ADHD.

There was no grownup to tell me to take a beat, accept that this just wasn’t happening and start preparing a convincing human suit for tomorrow’s meetings, so I had to do it myself, because even fuckboys eventually have to put on their big boy pyjamas.

Friends, do not do this. Do not waste your limited writing time being a terrible fuckboy and tearing after every cute pair of paragraphs that stroll by. Yes, I have managed to get a remarkable amount of writing finished and published while pulling this sort of but I’ve also ghosted so many stories that might, with a bit of commitment, have been something special.

Obviously I’m absolutely going to make this mistake again, and so are you. But let’s at least be honest with ourselves when we choose shenanigans. Deal? Deal.

Happy Friday, poppets.

This week’s prompt is fiction, because fiction is where we’re going to be focusing for the next several sessions, and I encourage you all of you non-fiction purists, creative or otherwise, to come along for the ride. Writing fiction reinforces your understanding of structure, pace, character - everything that matters for features and memoir and journalism. It’s always going to be worth your while to flex those muscles.

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In the spring of 1939, just like this year, Passover fell in Easter week. In Europe, the Nazi regime had begun to massacre Jews, and it was unclear whether Hitler could or would be stopped. In New York, the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Goldenson made a Passover speech warning worshippers not to assume that moral decency was “transcendent and permanent”, nor that it would “ultimately triumph”:

“The miracle is that we are holding to that conception despite the fact that this very day we are suffering a new enslavement and perhaps a more dire enslavement than that of our forefathers in Egypt,” he said “That conception is reborn whenever we see hurts, wrongs, pain, whenever we see men suffer.

“People who lose the capacity to judge themselves are a people that sooner or later will bring about their own annihilation. Why is the German regime making such tragic mistakes? Because the leaders have no inner capacity to judge themselves in the light of universal and transcendent righteousness. They can think only in terms of their own interest.”

A few miles away that same morning, at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the Rabbi David de Sola Pool told worshippers that:

“God placed himself on the side of liberty and not on the side of tyrants, dictators and great armies. If society is to survive as a field for the development of the finer expressions of the human spirit every individual must take his stand in this critical moment on the side of God against the tendencies which destroy law, democracy, civic freedom, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.”

Hello, darlings. Spring is not quite sprung, but it is coiled ready to leap out on the unwary, the unwilling and those who have recently purchased hot coffee. Outside twilight is sneaking in late and blushing like it’s been out somewhere secret and delicious. The air is full of dopamine and ozone.

And I am stuck indoors.

I have deadlines that are too close even for overthinking. Deadlines I must complete before the end of Easter break. Deadlines I would have finished by now if I had only worked ten hours a day at full capacity for the past two weeks without deviation, procrastination or a single moment of overwhelm. Yes, I consistently make plans on this basis. No, I have never pulled it off even once in my life, ever. Yes, I always expect that this time will be different, which I. believe Albert Einstein called ‘the definition of consistency’.

Well done me.

Whine as I might, I know that ‘being stuck indoors complaining’ is actually a sign that all is well in Laurieland. Hungry, ornery high focus is one of my happiest places. I hope that this several-times-over holy weekend finds you in one of yours. In view of all of which,

This week’s writing prompts are:

(To access the full ‘Write Like A Person’ seminar, including all the exercises and prompts, sign up as a paid subscriber. Everyone’s welcome.)

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I was going to be good about this. When rumors of the death of ‘Millennial Feminism’ first reached me courtesy of a bizarre and rambling essay by my old editor and colleague, Helen Lewis, I was going to save my breath. Years of trying to reason with a certain sort of post-woke, post-liberal British opinionator have taught me what happens when you interrupt their monologuing. What happens is that that JK Rowling starts howling at you on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, the Daily Mail butts in, and six months later anyone who isn’t familiar with this particular mean girl cult will still be wondering why normal-seeming women are peddling transphobic conspiracy theories in respectable outlets and telling an entire generation of women that they only have themselves to blame for being too woke.

The best thing about fighting an enemy you invented is that you get to decide when you’ve won. It is not precisely clear what Lewis means by ‘Millenial Feminism’. I’m not sure she knows herself. I’ve got a nasty suspicion - more on this later - that I’m one of the people this article is explicitly aimed at, and if so I can only apologise to Lindy West, Roxane Gay and anyone else dragged into this petty nonsense, because it’s asinine and it’s embarassing. But I’m seeing a lot of confusion among Americans as to how this parsimonious nonsense ended up published in the Atlantic.

So let me explain.

The British media is about the size of a large high school. Big enough for factions and squabbles to feel like the most important thing in the world, small enough that most political drama boils down to personal beef. You may have heard that Britain recently cracked down hard on transgender rights - forcing trans men, women and children to out themselves in public spaces, and withdrawing gender-affirming care. You may, understandably, have assumed that this was the work of religious extremists and career bigots. It usually is. But no - the driving force behind transphobic legislation in the UK is, specifically, what’s left of our feminist movement.

Over the course of a decade, mainstream British feminism has been entirely taken over by transphobic paranoia - comfortable media insiders bonding over feeling superior to undesirables. At the height of anti-woke post-liberal hysteria, the British ‘gender critical’ movement metastisised to wrap itself around mainstream media culture in a manner that remains as confusing to outsiders as any high-school craze.

Lewis’ essay lurches through the list of recent fixations for this particular clique: - sexual deviants, gender traitors, ignorant British opining on American anti-racism, people with mental health problems, neurodiversity. We’re treated to a random attack on Roxane Gay alongside some parsimonious hand-wringing about body positivity (bad), weight loss drugs (also bad) and the TikTok kids who say they’re neurodivergent as if that weren’t something to be ashamed of. There is, above all, a very familiar, desperately British disdain for those who seem to have forgotten their place. For people who think they’re special. For anyone who commits the primary sin of making respectable middle-class people slightly uncomfortable.

This article is a meandering attempt to twist petty personal grievance and local respectability politics into a coherent ideology- at which, of course, it fails. And where it fails, it always comes back to ragging on transgender and non-binary people, because when you haven’t got a coherent ideology, a common enemy is useful.

Members of this tendency tend to think of themselves as liberal, progressive and generally sensible, so they were thrown into some ideological disarray by the re-election of Trump, who has used almost all of their talking points. It is not nice to wake up and find your own words falling from the facial sphincter of a deranged far-right dictator.

In these circumstances, it’s that much more important to find a way that the people you find most annoying - the people to the left of you with cheaper haircuts - can still somehow be the enemy. The election of a fascist seems to have made it slightly less fun to single-mindedly pursue paranoid transphobia and a bit more urgent to explain to themselves and everyone else why they are normal people with no current plans to invade Greenland. They just have a particular problem with these trans and wokes and the pronoun people and the self-diagnosed weirdoes who think they’re so special and get above themselves. Oh, and they have inherited from the 1980s feminist gender wars a noisy disgust for any sort of bodily modification. They’re weird about tattoos. They’re weird about a lot of things.

They’re also weird about me, and that’s a weird thing to have to bring up, but I’ve been one of their favourite whipping bois for over a decade, whenever they’ve run out of vulnerable transgender women to mob and professionally destroy in the name of feminism. I’ve put some of the more sordid details behind the paywall. I’m clearly not objective here - how could I be? - but the difference is that I’m admitting that and trying to factor for it. I feel obliged to apologise for this shabby state of affairs, much as you would on behalf of a drunken friend who is dreamily pissing in the host’s plant-pot.

The sad thing is that this, in Britain, is what ‘killed’ the women’s movement. That and, well, the rise of violent misogyny as the organising principle of the new far right, which is barely mentioned in Lewis’ elegy for ‘Millennial’ feminism. But why would it be? Lewis writes from a cul-de-sac of discourse where high school drama is the most, the only compelling thing.

But that particular culture war is over. The liberal anti-wokes had a brief and distasteful moment of gloating around the time of the last US election - before falling eerily quiet as soon as the consequences became apparent. I understand why, in a situation like this, you’d want to carry on fighting your last battles. But the world has moved on, and the stakes have been raised in the exact way that the wokes and the Millennial Feminists were trying to warn everyone all about. The reason we’re not gloating about having been right all along is that that’s disgusting, and we explicitly didn’t want any of this to happen. There are words for people who spend the early days of an active fascist takeover bogged down in petty rivalries, and I’d be mirroring that moral cowardice if I wasted many more of mine.

I do have receipts, though, and I’ve put some of them behind the paywall because they feel a little too much like gossip for the main post, and frankly the entire thing is demeaning to everyone involved. Be advised.

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