Editing Lost Boys has taken up most of my time lately so I haven’t been writing here as much as I would like. I’m aware that I have been saying that for a while now; however the manuscript is going back to the copy editor at the end of this week so that’ll be it as far as any major changes to the book are concerned. I’m a bit of a perfectionist about this kind of thing. But then you sort of have to be: once the book goes to the printers that’s it, everything will be out there at least until the next print run (if you are lucky enough to have another print run). The book will be out on 5 June.
Over the weekend I had an op-ed about the manosphere (the subject of my book) in the iPaper. It’s an overview of my own flirtation with the pickup artist community back in 2005 and how that shaped the course of my investigation.
The Game piqued the interest of libidinous men across the world – myself included – despite the manipulative techniques contained within its pages. Pickup gurus posed as oracles of forbidden knowledge. They homed in on our insecurities and said that we too could go from “loser to Lothario”.
Had I had a healthier view of women at that age I probably would have recoiled from the pickup community. Instead, I chose to ignore the darker side of what they were teaching, like viewing women almost as an alien subspecies.
It could act as a conveyor belt to more extreme ideas too: there was a cavalier approach to women’s free will. Men were told to “disregard” what women said and to “push through” what was characterised as “token resistance”. Sex was a game and women were interchangeable commodities to be exploited. Even Strauss would later admit that the techniques propagated in The Game were “objectifying and horrifying”.
And so, 13 years after my own flirtation with it, I plunged back into the manosphere. I noticed that things had taken a darker turn since I’d been away. Pickup lines had been replaced by angry diatribes about how women were shallow and manipulative. Men railed against the decline of traditional gender roles and claimed that feminism had “gone too far”.
Where I had fallen into the manosphere because I’d wanted to meet women, the new generation of influencers seemed to want to get back at them in some cosmic way.
What’s more, the jaundiced tone of the content seemed to be resonating with a growing number of men. The Canadian professor Jordan Peterson was gaining a huge following with his folksy self-help dictums and gruff advice to “toughen up”. Peterson rubbished the gender pay gap, railed against “radical feminists” who he said had an “unconscious wish for brutal male domination”; and counterposed masculine “order” with feminine “chaos”. There was, he said, “not a shred of evidence” that Western society was patriarchal.
It’s pretty wild that I started researching Lost Boys back in 2018. I intended to have it finished a lot sooner but a lot has happened since then. Covid threw all of my plans (as well as everybody else’s) up in the air. I spent a year living in the countryside looking after my grandma and for 18 months I couldn’t travel to the US. Then just as I was getting back into the groove she died, aged 91, which was devastating for me: I spent a good portion of my childhood and teenage years living with her. I wrote about grief for the Times Magazine last weekend. The title of the piece is a bit much (you don’t ‘get over’ grief' so much as assimilate it) but that’s the only part I didn’t write.
As a child I spent weekends and school holidays with Grandma. Her home, in the sleepy village of Berrow in Somerset, was like an ocean of tranquillity for me, a place to get away from the arguments that seemed always to be ringing out in the home of my mum and stepfather. My real father had already moved on before I was born; a few years later my mum — Grandma’s daughter — had started a new family and had three further children. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would feel like the odd one out, but either way, my stepfather and his parents were determined to make sure of it.
At Grandma’s, by contrast, I was the centre of the universe. To pass through the front door on a Friday after school was like coming up for air. Unlike the hospital, which smelled of antiseptic mixed with bodily fluids and excretions, her terraced cottage had a mingled scent of lavender and tea leaves. I’d fling my rucksack in the corner (where my homework would lie undisturbed until Sunday evening) before settling down contentedly with the Beano. Every cupboard disgorged a seemingly endless supply of chocolate biscuits.
My heart felt like a lump of granite as I left the hospital for the very last time. The anxiety of the previous week was replaced by a haunting stillness. Or was I just numb? The days that followed felt strangely profound as my senses adjusted to a world whose very texture seemed to have radically altered. “I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound,” wrote CS Lewis in A Grief Observed, his 1961 meditation on loss.
Hope Not Hate has a report on the Tufton Street race and IQ obsessives working at the heart of Westminster. The amalgam of swaggering superiority and middlebrow bigotry is particularly striking.
[Andrew] Sabisky was hired by Dominic Cummings, then the prime minister’s chief advisor, who in January 2020 requested that “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” join his Downing Street operation. “What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity,” Cummings wrote on his blog. He found Sabisky, bringing him onboard as a contractor. The two remain close, speaking often about politics, in particular Cummings’s tentative plan to launch “the Start-up Party”.
Sabisky did not last long. In February 2020, his writings on Cummings’s own blog, plus comments on far-right and race science websites like the Unz Review and HBD Chick were uncovered by the press. “There are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin,” he had said. Sabisky, it emerged, had also addressed the 2015 London Conference on Intelligence, a gathering of eugenicists and far-right activists.
When he left his government job, part of Sabisky’s defence was that the media was acting hysterically “about my old stuff online”. However, in meetings with our undercover reporter, Sabisky confirmed that he still believes in advancing far-right policies. He described his vision of bringing about “voluntary repatriation”, whereby immigrants, both illegal and legal, would leave for their countries of origin. In April 2024, he explained in the Jugged Hare pub in Pimlico that the way to do this would be by “massively restricting immigrant access to benefits and housing”.
It’s clear the national populist right is on the march in Britain, helped by their fellow travellers in Westminster and the media. The UnHerd and Heritage Foundation writer Mary Harrington is someone who could accurately be described as a crypto-fascist were she to make any effort at keeping it a secret. She has previously described the pseudonymous online writer Bronze Age Pervert (who believes in ‘fascism or something worse’) as a ‘genius’. In a gushing interview with Peter Thiel for UnHerd in 2022, she also proclaimed herself ‘on the side of Caesar’, musing that the prospect of techno-monarchs with ‘untravelled power’ was ‘far from the worst option currently on the table’. As you can see, she has a strong penchant for pseudo-intellectual babble. It was therefore enjoyable to see her pulled up on her windy circumlocutions about January 6.