The media-fueled controversy over ITV featuring former Chelsea Women’s manager Emma Hayes in a kitchen-like studio setup during Women’s World Cup coverage has been exploited by the upper-middle class to showcase their grievances publicly. This incident—quickly amplified into a “sexism row”—serves as a prime example of how identity politics are used to distract from the dire social issues affecting working-class communities. “The ‘sexism row’ is a conflict between wealthy media bosses and a well-paid pundit… a dispute in which the working class has no involvement.”
This sentence reveals the political deception entirely. Emma Hayes is not a victim of patriarchal oppression; she is a prominent and well-paid figure in women’s football. ITV, a corporate broadcaster worth billions, is involved. The dispute is an elite disagreement over how football commentary looks—an issue that has no impact on millions facing survival challenges due to failing public services, rising costs, and austerity.
Identity Politics and the Politics of Diversion
The episode follows a familiar pattern. In 2018, the BBC gender-pay dispute involved presenters earning £400,000–£500,000 annually, portraying themselves as victims of systemic discrimination. An article by Laura Tiernan showed that these privileged groups “are not remotely interested in the problems faced by most women in the workforce.”
Working-class women encounter real challenges like balancing work and family, limited maternity leave, low wages, poorly paid part-time jobs, inflexible shifts, and costly childcare. These problems are rooted not in “the patriarchy” but in capitalism itself. They are the consequences of decades of bipartisan austerity, privatization, and the erosion of social infrastructure.
The Hayes–ITV pseudo-controversy serves a similar political purpose. It sparks days of social-media outrage, opinion pieces, and performative outrage, giving the illusion that society is actively fighting for women’s liberation. However, the real issues faced by working-class women—such as collapsing hospitals, unaffordable childcare, stagnant wages, and the weakening of the NHS—are consistently ignored in public debate.
This is intentional. The goal of identity politics is to substitute class struggles with personal grievances, structural exploitation with symbolic gestures, and the battle against capitalism with efforts to increase diversity in corporate leadership.
The Reactionary Contempt Behind the “Kitchen” Outrage
A key aspect of the controversy is the argument that placing Hayes in a kitchen-themed set is inherently insulting. “The suggestion that a kitchen set is inherently ‘demeaning’ rests on a contemptuous attitude toward domestic labour.” This harshly criticizes the class dimension of modern feminism. For countless working-class women, domestic labour isn’t a form of oppression but an everyday, physically demanding task—done unpaid, unrecognized, and lacking social support. The wealthy elite involved in identity politics are not advocating for better recognition of domestic work or shared childcare. Instead, they aim to distance themselves from anything linked to ordinary women’s experiences.
Their anger isn’t about the exploitation of domestic work itself, but about its symbolic link to it. This reflects a politics of personal branding rather than a pursuit of social liberation.
A Conflict Among Elites, Irrelevant to the Working Class
The working class remains uninvolved in conflicts between millionaire pundits and billionaire broadcasters. The media’s intense focus on these trivial issues is a deliberate political move. It aims to keep the public distracted by symbolic debates while the ruling class speeds up its attack on living standards.
Readers’ conclusions should be clear-cut: “Achieving true equality for women requires not just more women in executive positions, but fundamentally overthrowing the capitalist system that sustains gender oppression.” This core view must steer the working class. As with all social inequalities, gender oppression originates from the capitalist mode of production. It cannot be solved through corporate diversity efforts, media outrage, or elevating a few privileged women to elite roles.
The Socialist Alternative
The sole progressive response to the social crisis affecting working-class women and men is the independent, international mobilization of the working class around a socialist program. This involves restoring public services dismantled by years of austerity, socialising childcare and domestic work, ensuring secure, well-paid employment for everyone, and expropriating the financial oligarchy that controls all aspects of social life.
The Hayes–ITV controversy serves as a distraction from critical issues, a fabricated spectacle designed to keep the population politically confused and socially fragmented. The working class should reject identity politics in all its forms and instead focus on the struggle for socialism—the only route to true equality and human liberation.
Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminism has been hailed in academic and pseudo-left circles as a daring critique of modern feminist politics. However, it is fundamentally a politically reactionary work, with its theoretical foundations and practical outcomes favouring the interests of the wealthy elite that control the gender-studies academic sphere and publications like Jacobin, n+1, and Salvage. Rather than promoting a socialist view of women’s oppression, Lewis’s book illustrates a further decline of identity politics amid escalating capitalist crises.
Enemy Feminism occupies a distinct space in modern academia, branding herself as a “communist feminist” linked to the broadly defined “social reproduction theory” and publications like Salvage and Jacobin-related outlets. Her goal is to delineate a boundary between what she views as a corrupted, reactionary feminism—such as TERFs and liberal “carceral” feminism—and an authentic, radical alternative.
There are valid targets to critique in her focus—liberal feminism that depends on police, prisons, and imperialist military forces to “liberate” women is genuinely a bourgeois dead end. However, Lewis’s approach itself has significant political issues that a Marxist cannot ignore. Identity Politics in Socialist Clothing: Although Lewis’s work hints at anti-capitalism, it still primarily organises around gender as an independent category of analysis and action.
Her earlier book, Full Surrogacy Now, demonstrates this by prioritising a queer-theoretical perspective that diminishes rather than clarifies class relations, focusing mainly on identity categories such as gender, queerness, and trans identity rather than on the working class as a historical class. This approach is not a praise for Marxism but a replacement of one form of identity politics with another. From a Marxist perspective, gender and sexual oppression are genuine consequences of a class society, rooted in the family as an economic unit created by private property. They cannot be eradicated through new identity-based coalitions; instead, they require a socialist restructuring of society’s material foundations.
Lewis’s framework, despite its seemingly radical language, remains focused on bourgeois social relations. The “Social Reproduction” framework: Lewis extensively cites “social reproduction theory” (SRT), associated with scholars like Tithi Bhattacharya. SRT correctly highlights that reproductive labour is vital to capitalist accumulation, offering important insights into how capitalism functions. However, when Lewis and others apply it, it often becomes a universal theory in which “reproduction” encompasses all social aspects, thereby obscuring the specific role of surplus-value extraction and the significance of the industrial working class.
A genuine feminist struggle requires adopting a Marxist perspective on women’s oppression, starting with history and political economy instead of gender theory. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains crucial: it argues that women’s oppression began with the rise of private property and the patriarchal family as key channels of transmission. Consequently, overcoming this oppression demands abolishing private property through a socialist revolution, rather than forming a new feminist alliance.
The most significant advances in women’s equality during the 20th century were driven not by feminist movements alone, but by working-class revolutions: the early Soviet Union eliminated legal discrimination against women, secured rights to divorce and abortion, and socialised domestic labour on an unprecedented scale. However, these gains were dismantled during Stalinism. Today, the goal is not to develop a better feminism, but to establish a revolutionary socialist party rooted in the working class, where fighting women’s oppression is fundamentally linked to challenging capitalism as a whole.
Identity Politics Masquerading as Marxism
Lewis’s main theoretical focus is on prioritising gender and sexual identity as key categories in political analysis. Her earlier book, Full Surrogacy Now, illustrates this perspective by framing the exploitation of reproductive labour within a queer-theoretical context that blurs class distinctions into a mix of affective and identitarian categories. As the document notes: “The analytical centre of gravity is always identity… not the working class as a historical subject.”
This is not just a minor flaw; it defines the pseudo-left’s core trait: replacing class with identity, materialism with subjectivism, and revolutionary politics with moral-therapeutic language. Lewis’s feminism, despite its radical terms, still lies within bourgeois ideological limits. Marxism, however, starts from the material conditions of society, where women’s oppression stems from private property and the patriarchal family—a mechanism for its perpetuation. As highlighted in the document: “They cannot be abolished by building new identitarian coalitions—they require the socialist transformation of society’s material foundations.” In contrast, Lewis’s approach leaves the capitalist foundations unchanged.
The Inflation of Social Reproduction Theory
Lewis relies heavily on “social reproduction theory” (SRT), a framework associated with Tithi Bhattacharya and others. Although SRT offers useful insights into how reproductive labour contributes to capitalist accumulation, Lewis and her group reduce it to a comprehensive schema that overlooks the unique processes involved in the extraction of surplus value. The document highlights this issue clearly: it “tends to expand infinitely into a theory of everything… dissolving the specificity of surplus value extraction.”
This conceptualisation of inflation is politically useful. By substituting the industrial proletariat with a broad category of “care workers,” SRT endorses the politics of NGOs, academic activism, and community organising—the favoured domains of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. It promotes a politics of fragmentation rather than unity; favours localism over internationalism; and emphasises moral exhortation instead of class struggle.
Abolitionism: Anarchist Gesture in Place of Revolutionary Strategy
Lewis’s support for “abolition”—including prisons, police, and even the family—illustrates the pseudo-left’s retreat from addressing state power. These slogans, which became prominent after 2020, are framed as radical alternatives to reformism, but in reality, they function as substitutes for a genuine revolutionary strategy. Abolition’politics sidesteps the question of state power entirely, substituting prefigurative gestures for a revolutionary strategy.”
The abolition of the capitalist state cannot be achieved through moral appeals, community initiatives, or expanded activist networks. Instead, it requires the organised working class to overthrow it. Lewis’s form of abolitionism is essentially anarchism, wrapped in Marxist rhetoric—a politics focused on negation without a clear plan for gaining power.
The Pseudo‑Left Milieu and Its Class Interests
Lewis’s prominence cannot be separated from the environment that elevates her. The document notes: “These are not socialist institutions. They are cultural platforms of the upper-middle class that redirect radical-sounding discontent into safe, identity-based activism.” This environment is antagonistic toward the working class. Its politics mirror the anxieties and hopes of a privileged group whose material interests depend on maintaining capitalism. Its “radical” stance is largely performative, with exaggerated rhetoric, and its activities are mostly limited to academia, nonprofits, and social media. Lewis is not an anomaly in this environment; she embodies its main characteristics.
The Marxist Perspective on Women’s Liberation
Marxism argues that fighting women’s oppression cannot be separated from opposing capitalism, countering the pseudo-left’s identity politics distortions. The document notes: “Women’s oppression arose with the emergence of private property… Its abolition… requires the abolition of private property itself.”
Women’s greatest progress in the 20th century largely stemmed from working-class revolutions rather than feminist movements. The early Soviet regime abolished legal discrimination, introduced rights for divorce and abortion, and socialised domestic labour, all on an unprecedented scale. However, these gains were later diminished by the Stalinist distortion of the revolution. Today, the aim isn’t to create a “better feminism,” whether radical or not. The primary focus is on forging a revolutionary socialist party rooted in the working class, with a Marxist program committed to overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism.
Conclusion
Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminism does not advance socialist theory; instead, it highlights the political decline of the pseudo-left. Its focus on identity politics, exaggerated emphasis on social reproduction, anarchist abolitionist ideas, and ties to the academic-NGO sphere all distract from the core importance of the working class in the quest for human liberation. Combating women’s oppression calls for a revival of revolutionary Marxist traditions, including those of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. It also necessitates establishing the International Committee of the Fourth International as the global socialist revolutionary party.
“We are hurtling towards a seismic shift in terms of really every aspect of our society is on the brink of being transformed by emerging technologies and, in particular, artificial intelligence.”
Laura Bates
“I’d also like to live in a world in which women can do whatever they want, without fear of what men might do to them. But we don’t live in that world. Our present reality demands that both men and women accept the existence of the sexual asymmetry, even if that means curtailing our freedoms.”
Mary Harrington
“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
“Fucking ain’t fair, act accordingly” (Female Dating Strategy blogpost, 2021)
The New Age of Sexism is a lucid, well-written and deeply researched book on how right-wing and fascist forces are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to attack minorities and women in general.
The subject matter contained in the book is, to say the least, disturbing. The degradation of male-female relations has reached a new apex with the use of this latest technology. AI, virtual reality, robotics, and the metaverse have delivered a “new age of misogyny” and, according to Bates “, We are standing on the edge of a precipice”.
As Barbara Ellen writes, “One recurrent theme is that women are no longer being ‘merely’ harassed, they are also being erased–replaced by increasingly realistic pornographic tech-proxies. Among them is a new generation of sex robots that can be purchased online and delivered to your door. Some models have mechanically articulated necks to simulate orgasm. Others give oral sex with back-and-forth head motions that Bates likens to a “pecking chicken”. Although vocal interaction can be enabled with sex dolls, many men don’t want it. It wrecks the fantasy – they prefer them mute.”[1]
The book is graphic in its accuracy, the rise of cyber-brothels, in which, believe it or not, robot sex workers take care of your every sexual need. Bates recounts in the book how a robot called Kokeshi: “A silicone shell being offered up as a warm, willing, breathing, talking, consenting sexual partner.” Bates comments that the robot’s labia have been torn off. “Perhaps bitten off. I feel sick.” Writes Bates. Even more disturbing is that she finds sex dolls made to look as young as five, with child vulvas, holding teddy bears.
Although Bates wonders why society accommodates this parallel universe, the answer is not far away. In one chapter, she examines the rise of the so-called Metaverse and its control by oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and his global Meta empire. Zuckerberg’s promotion of a “virtual-reality social world” is a big money maker, and so lightly policed as to be non-existent, providing a license to print money by the billions.
As Laura Bates writes in a Guardian article: “Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: ‘In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.” It’s the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women. Indeed, the deeply immersive nature of the metaverse will make the harassment and abuse that many of us endure daily in text-based form on social media feel 100 times more real, and will simultaneously make moderation 100 times more challenging. The result is a perfect storm. And I am speaking from experience, not idly speculating: I spent days in the metaverse researching my book, The New Age of Sexism. She continues, “I visited worlds where I saw what appeared to be young children frequently experiencing attention from adult men they did not know. In one virtual karaoke-style club, the singers on stage were young women in their early 20s. However, based on their voices, I would estimate that many of the girls behind the avatars were likely around nine or 10 years old. Conversely, the voices of the men commenting on them from the audience, shouting out to them and following them offstage were often unmistakably those of adults.”[2]
The role of Meta and other social media websites, which are easily accessible on the latest smartphones, in spreading and profiting from this online abuse and illegality is well-documented. Although not documented in the book is the role played by corporate advertising in helping perpetrate this abuse. But as Thomas Scripps writes “The real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.[3]
Meta is not the only one profiting from this sexual degradation and exploitation. Companies such as Elon Musk’s (X) and Sundar Pichai’s (Google) are in charge of the algorithms, datasets, systems and search engines that promote and deliver this disgusting filth.
If the growth of cyber brothels was not enough, Bates tackles an equally disturbing phenomenon, and that is the massive rise of deep fake pornography. Bates has been the target of this illegal behaviour. In the book, she describes a panic attack after being sent deepfake pornographic images of her. Bates’s experience is just the tip of a massive iceberg of this kind of abuse. A report by the Children’s Commissioner for England makes the following points.
“The growth of the online world is a technological revolution, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed in centuries. The internet has enhanced our lives immeasurably by opening up education, communication, and research in ways that those of us who are now well into our adulthood might never have imagined. For children growing up in 2025, who are among the first generations to have never known a solely analogue life, being online is second nature.
It is an incredible asset in our daily lives, but it has also fundamentally changed the nature of how we interact with one another, how we stay safe, and how we maintain our privacy. For most children, if not all, it has introduced a darker side. They are forever in their digital playgrounds.
Every day, children tell me about the violent, upsetting or degrading things that are shown to them online by algorithms designed to capture their attention. That’s why, as Children’s Commissioner, I have been relentlessly focused on driving for greater safety online. It has also been driven by what I observed in children’s changing behaviour during my years as a teacher and headteacher, as they learned to navigate life through a digital lens. But the subject of this report – sexually explicit ‘deepfakes’ – is not one I was familiar with until more recently, despite having worked with children every day of my professional life. Of all the worrying trends in online activity children have spoken to me about – from seeing hardcore porn on X to cosmetics and vapes being advertised to them through TikTok – the evolution of ‘nudifying’ apps to become tools that aid in the abuse and exploitation of children is perhaps the most mind-boggling. [4]
There is no doubt that Bates is a sincere activist and her books are an essential part of opposing this alarming abuse of women, but her work is only half the story. Bates, by her admission, is not comfortable debating, and her critics are caricatured or derided as “male” or, worse, “Right-wing”. My criticism of her is not from the right but from the left.
In my review of Lost Boys by James Bloodworth, I examined the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.
There is a flip side to Manosphere, and that is the rise of the Femosphere, which Bates has studiously avoided examining in any detail. This movement was spawned by the growth of the right-wing #MeToo movement.[5] The Femosphere, it must be said, is equally as reactionary as the Manosphere movement.
Bates has so far not commented much, if at all, on this right-wing movement, which has been written about in numerous academic papers and been fabled and glamorised in equal measure in books such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Stephanie Lacava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You.
In her excellent article [6], Rachel Healy examines the work of Dr Jilly Kay, specifically her use of the term “Femosphere” in a paper published in 2024. [7] Healy writes that “Kay has been researching a reactionary turn among young women, and how a backlash against mainstream feminism has created new spaces online. In the femosphere, instead of “incels” – male involuntary celibates – there are “femcels”, and instead of pickup artists there are female dating strategists and so-called “dark feminine” influencers who encourage women to find men to support them financially.”
It is not within the scope of this brief review to examine everything in Kay’s excellent research paper, which is freely accessible on the web. One of the more disturbing features of this so-called new feminist movement has been its adoption of the same fascist ideas as its male counterparts.
Kay quotes from an FDS podcast episode, which discussed a Reddit post entitled “40 Years a NEET: Reflections of a Stay-At-Home Son. One of the hosts said:
“I think men like this can’t be saved, I believe that the only that can be done about them is to allow them to perish on their own time […] we shouldn’t slaughter people for being like this but, like, they’re going just not to reproduce because again, they don’t have the drive to find a wife, they’re not gonna have kids, and I think it’s just better if their bloodline dies out, honestly, that’s probably just the best thing for society […] the only men who deserve to have families and kids are men who are gonna model ambition, drive and healthy relationship dynamics.”
The only difference between this group and their Manosphere counterparts is that the men have more ready access to guns than their female counterparts. It is undoubtedly only a matter of time before one of these trainee female fascists decides to launch a murderous rampage in the name of modern feminism.
To be blunt, this type of reactionary feminism would not look out of place in Nazi Germany. Their modern-day eugenicist ideas will be embraced by fascists worldwide. They make the same arguments that were put forward by the nazis. Only a cursory read of Mein Kampf would confirm that.
There is nothing progressive in this modern feminism, as Kate Randal points out. There is more talk of gender today than at any previous moment in history. The #MeToo campaign in the US has supposedly brought the conditions of women to the fore like never before. The Global media and Hollywood are animated by hardly anything else. But this is a fraud. The women receiving nearly all the coverage belong to the upper echelons of society, the richest five or ten per cent. Working-class women are largely absent from this discussion, except for a few token exceptions that highlight the rule. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.[8]”That is true today as it was in Luxembourg’s day.
London-based author and activist Laura Bates, 37, is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a website that collates first-hand accounts of sexism from women around the world, using those experiences to press for change. She’s also the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including Misogynation and Men Who Hate Women, as well as novels for teens that grapple with issues such as revenge porn and slut-shaming. Her new novel is Sisters of Sword and Shadow.
[1] Sexism with a silicone face-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/sexism-with-a-silicone-face
[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence- violence-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html
[4] “One day this could happen to me” Children, nudification tools, and
sexually explicit deepfakes April 2025-assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2025/04/Children-nudification-tools-and-sexually-explicit-deepfakes-April-2025.pdf
[5] See – She Said: The origin story of the #MeToo campaign, or a version of it- it-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/21/bcwe-n21.html
‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
“A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children … for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create … a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of enslavers and enslaved people, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against ‘foul language’ is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.”
― Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life & Other Writings on Culture & Science
“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
Lost Boys by James Bloodworth is a journalist’s examination of the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.
It is not surprising that Bloodworth did not want to research and write this book. He replied to his editor, saying, “Why would I want to do that?”. He writes, “Today I feel a bit like a funeral director in the aftermath of a mass casualty event. I would have preferred things to have turned out differently, but considering they haven’t, I intend to put my knowledge to some practical use. Having spent so much time researching the manosphere – including interviewing and interacting with hundreds of men and spending months at a time embedded on a course which purportedly taught men how to become ‘high status alpha males’ – I feel as if I have something worthwhile to contribute.”[1]
Indeed, why should anyone want to associate and talk to a bunch of Nazi like scumbags who give two thousand pounds to learn how to hunt down woman and on some occasions rape them and then brag about their behaviour of social media.
The origins of this so-called pickup movement can be traced back to Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller, The Game. His book turned the art of seduction into a woman hunt, which sees women as nothing more than prey and being treated as such. The men within this movement have no comprehension of history but their attitude towards women would not look out of place in the Nazi Party of German fascism.
To his credit, Bloodworth exposes these trainee fascists. He reveals the close links between the manosphere and the far Right, including fascists like Donald Trump. Trump’s fascist partners in the While House who dismiss their enemies as “beta”. His vice-president, JD Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. As Bloodworth points out, the rise of the Anti-feminist backlash coincided with the growth of fascist forces worldwide, and it reminded him of Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which enjoyed a resurgence during the first Trump presidency. As Sinclair wrote, ” Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’ However, his political understanding of how and why these members of the lumpen proletariat and deranged petty bourgeois are cannon fodder for a fascist movement is limited.
Bloodworth’s new book was inspired by his watching of the Netflix series Adolescence. He writes, “It is a striking film that is masterfully shot and powerfully acted. It has also generated a worthwhile public conversation. Much of this conversation has been constructive; however, some of it has been animated by a desire to change the subject – to talk about anything but misogyny and the radicalisation of young men on the internet. I found Adolescence surreal to watch at times.”[2]
As Thomas Scripps writes in his review of the Netflix series, “The reality, as we have been shown, is that the problems are well beyond an individual family’s ability to resolve. Perhaps the most common expression throughout the series is “I don’t know”, or some variant, from kids and adults alike; they are buffeted and bewildered by forces beyond their grasp.
The role of smartphones, the Internet, and social media, in particular, is well-contextualised in this broader social landscape. It would be foolish to deny the role they play in creating an unprecedented level of exposure to peer pressures and corporate advertising, declared and undeclared, and in streamlining the passage of individuals damaged by these influences into darker waters. But the real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.”[3]
So far, the opposition to the rise of the “Manosphere has not come from working-class women, but has taken the form of the middle-class movement centred around the #MeToo movement, which is already eight years old. As the Marxist writer David Walsh wrote, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other significant social and political issues of the day.”[4]
One of the more outspoken and articulate critiques of the “Manosphere has come from the pen of the writer Amia Srinivasan. Her book The Right To sex,[5] while containing so worthwhile observations, it essentially promotes the #MeToo movement’s right to unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process.
Srinivasan is the darling of all the radical groups, who fall over themselves in promoting her idea of social justice. Her brand of modern-day feminism is dominated mainly by selfish, upper-middle-class champions of “women’s rights”. Srinivasan writes, “It’s essential in any radical political tradition. It’s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More’s Utopia, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what’s possible, as well as what’s delightful about human life, has to be central to a radical politics.
As Kate Randall points out, “ The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle, not in the rarified atmosphere of the corporate boardroom and Hollywood. As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Notes
James Bloodworth is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in numerous British newspapers, as well as in many US publications. His book Hired: Undercover in Low Wage Britain was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2019 and was selected as The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year in 2018. He has produced and presented documentaries for Channel 4 television and has appeared on many podcasts. He has a new book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, scheduled for release on June 5, 2025, the result of a five-year investigation into the subculture.
[1] Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[2] ‘Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html
[4] One year of the #MeToo movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html
[5] The Right to Sex: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022 Hardcover – 19 Aug. 2021-Bloomsbury
A Trumpet of Sedition 