Author: Paul Alker

Paul Alker, Mark Bushell, Emma Armstrong, Max Hart, and Craig Kelly

At the micro-level, VAWG is often framed as a result of individual actions – abuse jperpetrated by an abusive partner, a violent stranger, or an online harasser. While it is true that acts of violence are carried out by individuals, this perspective alone risks obscuring the broader conditions that shape violent behaviours. In this penultimate post of the series, we explore how individual biographies and the psyche function in light of the points laid out in previous posts, exploring how the three levels of the macro, meso and micro intersect.  

Research conducted by Ultra-Realist scholars has previously sought to make sense of male violence (see Ellis, 2015; Winlow, 2001), although it has not focused specifically on VAWG. Here, Ellis, Winlow, Hall and others, argue that individual biographies alongside macro, structural conditions can be used to understand subjective violence – physical violence inflicted by one individual upon another (Žižek, 2009), perpetrated by a small minority of men, a line of thinking we will follow in this post. The individuals they encountered sought to navigate and cope with past trauma by adopting a strategy in which they ‘retaliate first’, launching a pre-emptive strike against those who act as a symbolic substitute for past aggressors – violent fathers, bullies or opponents in street fights – in an attempt to prevent the return of the original feeling of humiliation (Winlow and Hall, 2009). Although these empirical explorations are particularly useful for understanding male violence perpetrated against other men, we would still encourage the reader to engage with these texts directly. Here though, we expand upon some of the ideas directly relating to VAWG and offer some original insights from other areas of ultra-realism’s theoretical arsenal and theoretical psychoanalysis.   

In this the blog series so far, it has been determined that events at the structural cultural and organisational level may create the conditions that give rise to VAWG. To qualify this, it is perhaps instructive here to consider the role of absence (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022). The present post-crash, post-pandemic world of sustained austerity under successive Labour and Conservative governments has served to exacerbate the already existing systemic violence of neoliberalism, leading to further labour market instability, which alongside the absence of welfare and other support mechanisms has resulted in increased precarity and economic insecurity (Hall and Winlow, 2015; Telford, 2025). Additionally, the withdrawal of funding from important public services in the realm of education and mental health support have served to exacerbate the issue further. 

The absence of opportunities for ‘success’ and the failure to attain what the neoliberal consumer capitalist system promises the individual if they play the game, often leads to feelings of shame and a lack of opportunity to attain positive recognition from peers and others in society. This can significantly impact the individual’s sense of what Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2022) refer to as ‘mattering’. For the duo, mattering allows the individual to feel both significant and recognised by others, alongside providing the feeling that they have agency and power to shape their lives and impact the world around them in a positive manner. They highlight the deleterious effects of lacking a sense of mattering, demonstrating how its absence can contribute to violence directed both inwardly towards the self and outwardly towards others. Kotzé and Lloyd (2022) therefore highlight the importance of considering what is absent and how this can have a probabilistic causal tendency, leading to resentment, hate and outbursts of subjective violence – physical violence inflicted by one individual upon another (Žižek, 2009). As Žižek (2009) points out, it is important to consider how all three forms of violence are interrelated. Although systemic violence is largely invisible, we must still take it, alongside symbolic violence, into account when trying to understand what might appear to be irrational irruptions of subjective violence.  

As Bratich and Banet-Weiser (2019) go on to discuss, the increasing precariousness of neoliberalism following the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic across many parts of the world has led to a renewed sense of instability and insecurity in relation to employment, welfare support or rising costs of living for many individuals, not only men (see also Gerbaudo, 2018). Yet, as we highlighted in the previous post, some men respond to these experiences of pressure, anxiety and hopelessness by following the rhetoric of manosphere figures such as Andrew Tate, who channel feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction towards women and feminism as the purported source of their predicament. It is the psychic process that helps facilitate this process that will be the focus of this post.

In the Rise of the Right, Winlow et al. (2017) explore the manner in which racism has mutated following the course of neoliberalism. They argue that much of the racism we witness today isn’t an expression of the kind of supremacist thinking that emerged in the shadow of the Western Empire. Rather, the racism we associate with the contemporary right-wing reactionary forces is rooted in a perceived inferiority and the idea that the racial Other has taken something from the white population and continues to pose a threat. Could it be argued that something similar has taken place in the realm of misogyny? Rather than being attributed to the persistence of patriarchy, contemporary misogyny and VAWG could be a consequence of thinking that women and girls are somehow responsible for taking something from men and boys. Or perhaps have access to something that they don’t and therefore they are responsible for the theft of their enjoyment. To explore this, we first need to explain Lacan’s notion of lack and desire.  

Desire occurs as a result of our inherent feeling of lack or incompleteness. It is an unavoidable fact of the human condition, and as a result it is impossible to cure – we are unable to achieve a feeling of wholeness. Yet, it is this underlying feeling of ‘objectless anxiety’ (see Hall, 2012) and the desire to overcome it, that animates us to act, compelling us to seek satisfaction in a futile attempt to overcome our sense of lack (McGowan, 2015). Therefore, we are constantly in search of what is known as the ‘lost object’ or what Lacan refers to as the object petit a; the thing that will make us feel whole again and lead to satisfaction – the problem is, this satisfaction can never be met (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022).  

Todd McGowan (2016) argues that capitalism’s harnessing of subjective desire ties the individual to the economic system and propels them into an endless process of searching for satisfaction. Within our existing Symbolic Order, of which consumer culture is a significant part, we believe we can satisfy that lack through our latest purchases or experiences in commodified leisure spaces. Capitalism has its subjects in a constant state of desire by maintaining ‘the promise’ – the belief that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity (McGowan, 2016). This is a promise which, as has already been noted, can never be kept there – there is no object that will fill the void and make us feel completely satisfied.  

Paradoxically, the problem is that as subjects of desire, we don’t want to realise our desire and obtain the lost object. We desire instead to keep thwarting our desire, which in turn keeps us desiring (McGowan, 2015). As McGowan (2016) notes elsewhere, consumer capitalism has been incredibly successful at incorporating this natural disposition – the elementary paradox of human desire – into its functioning. For McGowan, what we find most satisfying is our dissatisfaction. It is the failure to derive satisfaction from what we think we desire that we find most satisfying. Prior to its acquisition, the commodity or the consumer experience holds a sublime status that appears to us as the object of our desire. What often makes an object most desirable is its availability to us – the more out of reach it appears, the more we want it! However, upon the moment of its acquisition, the object begins to lose its appeal. We then continue on in the hope of one day finding the object that can finally satisfy our desire once and for all. In a somewhat perverse manner, we perpetually repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction which drives us to consume only to be dissatisfied once again. And what is more, we know this is the case, yet we disavow such knowledge and cynically continue to act as if we are none the wiser (Žižek, 2009). It is this repeated and renewed dissatisfaction that we ultimately find most satisfying. 

The fundamental problem with desire, as Lacan (2007) saw it, is that what we desire is always the desire of the Other. He meant this in every conceivable sense. We have desire for the Other, we wish to be desired by the Other and perhaps most importantly we desire what the Other desires. As such, our desire for what the Other desires renders both envy and resentment constitutive components of human desire (Žižek, 2009). For both Derek Hook (2021) and Stephanie Swales (2022), the subject deals with the impossibility of achieving full enjoyment by imagining that the Other – in this case women – serve not only as a barrier to, but also as a thief of, men’s enjoyment, and that women have a capacity to attain a level of enjoyment that remains elusive to men. This causes the male subject to draw the conclusion that it is the female Other who is ultimately responsible for the theft of their enjoyment. Here, the misogynist, whilst avowing their own lack, disavows the lack of the Other, while falsely assuming that women possess the ability to attain complete satisfaction. 

By imagining women as the barrier to their enjoyment, misogynists convince themselves that their dissatisfaction can be solved by controlling or punishing women rather than confronting the impossibility of ever achieving full satisfaction.  It perpetuates the misogynistic fantasy that returning women to their subordinate position would restore men’s rightful access to full enjoyment (Hook, 2021). As Žižek (2016) argues, such a social constellation in which the Other is perceived to be infinitely enjoying inevitably generates jealousy. In response, the subject imagines a utopian realm of enjoyment to which the Other has privileged access and from which they themselves are excluded. As McGowan (2003) points out, the sense of immense frustration felt by those who believe they have been robbed of their enjoyment can result in outbursts of anger and violence against those perceived to be guilty of such a crime. 

Envy, particularly when deeply ingrained within a societal structure that reinforces competition, often culminates not in the pursuit of one’s own enjoyment but in the destruction of the enjoyment of the Other. When individuals perceive their own fulfilment as unattainable while the other seemingly thrives, resentment festers, leading to acts of symbolic and physical violence aimed at depriving the Other of their perceived advantage. Žižek (2009) described this as the logic of ressentiment, whereby individual subjects, unable to achieve their own satisfaction, instead seek to sabotage the satisfaction of those they believe achieve unbridled enjoyment. In the context of VAWG, this manifests in attempts to police, control, and diminish women’s autonomy – whether through restrictive policies, online harassment, or physical violence.  

However, paradoxically, the misogynistic fantasy derives a form of enjoyment from the very dissatisfaction it claims to oppose. As McGowan (2016) argues, subjects often find satisfaction not in overcoming obstacles, but in endlessly reproducing them. The fantasy of stolen enjoyment provides an explanation for feelings of frustration and lack, allowing subjects to continually blame an external Other for their unhappiness. In doing so, resentment itself becomes a source of enjoyment. The misogynist therefore remains attached to the belief that women are responsible for their dissatisfaction because abandoning the fantasy would require confronting a far more unsettling reality: that no amount of control, recognition or success could ever eliminate the constitutive lack at the heart of human subjectivity. The fantasy persists because it transforms dissatisfaction into a meaningful grievance, and in doing so provides its own perverse form of satisfaction or jouissance: a kind of pleasure derived from the pain of suffering (Leader, 2021).

The contemporary figure of the incel illustrates this dynamic particularly well. While the incel consciously presents himself as seeking intimacy, recognition, romantic fulfilment and ultimately sex, he still remains deeply invested in the fantasy that women – commonly referred to as Stacey’s or Foids – are responsible for denying him all of these things (Nagle, 2017; Johanssen, 2021). This grievance provides a source of meaning, identity and enjoyment, whilst also allowing dissatisfaction to be continually renewed. In this sense, the incel becomes attached not only to the prospect of fulfilment, but also to the very obstacles, namely women or so-called alpha males or Chads, that appear to prevent it. The fantasy of exclusion sustains resentment whilst shielding the subject from confronting the more unsettling possibility that no relationship or sexual encounter could ever provide the complete satisfaction he imagines.

Framed this way, contemporary misogyny can be understood not as an outdated remnant of patriarchy, but an active, adaptive response to the crises of neoliberal capitalism and their cultural fallout. When economic instability erodes traditional masculine identities, consumer culture intensifies desires it cannot satisfy and digital spaces provide narratives that externalise feelings of lack and failure, VAWG can emerge as a means of alleviating perceived humiliation and impotence.  

As we have seen with the narcissism that animates special liberty (Hall and Winlow, 2015), neoliberal ideology has redirected the watercourse of our powerful libidinal energy away from prosocial channels of collective action into pools of asocial toxicity. In helping us to understand what these shifts mean for VAWG at the micro level, we can turn to a further psychoanalytic concept – cathexis.  

Taken from the German verb besetzen and corresponding noun Besetzung, cathexis refers to a desire ‘to occupy’ or take up ‘occupation’. Freud used cathexis to describe a process of investment, where libidinal energy is channelled into a particular person, object or idea (Bettelheim, 1983). Cathexis can operate in benign ways through the emotional attachment to something like a family heirloom or a photograph from which one derives comfort. However, in an elevated state of hyper-cathexis, a surfeit of psychic energy compels the subject to occupy their object of fixation in the same way that an army might lay siege to a city. When this obsessive libidinal investment is directed towards a significant other, its implications for aggressive control over that person become clear.  

Hyper-cathexis forms part of a host of narcissistic subjectivities that continues to fester under neoliberal cultural conditions but their elusiveness spells significant problems for addressing the issue of VAWG. Such subjectivities simply aren’t always on show, they can seem difficult to predetermine, or they are relativised and explained away under the liberal ‘assumption of harmlessness’ that dominates ethical life across the west (see Raymen, 2023). Like rage, they can sit latent or partially repressed, re-emerging later, individually, or in concert with one another across time and space. This concept is also deeply entangled with the cultural injunction to enjoy, a term developed in Lacanian psychoanalysis and popularised in the work of Žižek (1999) to describe the neoliberal compulsion to pursue pleasure as an imperative, rather than a choice.  

 Within the context of the issues outlined in previous posts, at the Macro and Meso levels, this injunction is filtered through a deeply gendered and transactional lens, where women exist as objects of ornamental consumerism. In this worldview, a woman’s value is derived from her status as a possession – something to be acquired, displayed, and crucially, controlled. Any challenge to this dynamic is not merely seen as defiance but as a violation of libidinal drives. Here, the cultural mandate to consume and enjoy collides with hyper-cathexis, producing a distorted justification for violence. In this logic, objectification itself becomes a form of consumption, and VAWG is reframed as an assertion of male entitlement or a perverse form of pleasure.  

 A further concept worth delineating here is Freud’s (1926) idea of the symptom. This refers to the unconscious formation that emerges as a compromise between repressed desires and the constraints of social reality. Symptoms, in a sense, are expressions of unresolved psychic conflicts, often appearing as repetitive compulsive behaviours that provide temporary relief but never resolve the underlying tension. Put simply, when drives are repressed and cannot find a direct mode of expression, they return as symptoms. Lacan later reworked this idea into the ‘Sinthome’, a term developed in his later seminars (Lacan, 1975-6), which moves beyond the symptom as something to be deciphered and instead suggests that certain formations – especially those related to identity – become structural to the subject. The Sinthome is not simply a sign of repression, but a fundamental mode of being, a unique knotting of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary that holds a subject together.  

Here, the Sinthome actually directs us towards something much more enduring than Symptoms that provide us with temporary outlets for unresolved psychic tensions. Instead of operating as episodic expressions of conflict, it becomes integrated and woven into the subject’s very mode of being. This distinction is key for understanding VAWG as we may anticipate that misogynistic attitudes and behaviours will disperse, even for a short period of time, once immediate frustrations are resolved if functioning merely as Symptoms. However, Sinthomatically they are part of the psychic structure through which the subject organises their relationship to others, identity, and enjoyment.

Thus, the macro-level conditions, as a result of neoliberal precarity, alongside the meso-level circulation of misogynistic narratives should not be viewed as mechanically producing violence. Instead, they function as symbolic resources whereby subjects construct Sinthomatic attachments. Here, online influencers, reactionary communities and consumer culture alike offer ready-made explanations for feelings of humiliation, failure and lack. Repeatedly identifying with these narratives can generate incorporation of misogyny into the subject’s psychic economy as a stabilising framework that organises desire and enjoyment.

Ultimately, in the context of VAWG, the concepts outlined throughout this post help us understand how misogyny operates not just as an ideology but as a consequence of deeply embedded, micro psychic structures and how these interact with the macro level socio-symbolic order and meso level communities. Figures like Tate offer a symptomatic response to a broader crisis of masculine identity under neoliberalism, a system which has failed in its promises to deliver satisfaction. Women, framed as both barriers to male enjoyment and possessors of an elusive satisfaction, become targets of envy and aggression. The hyper-cathexis of women as objects of consumption is not just a cultural byproduct but a Sinthomatic structure – a stabilising psychic formation that knots together experiences of economic insecurity, narcissistic injury, frustrated desire and fantasies of stolen enjoyment. One that ultimately, provides a false sense of stability and coherence for disaffected men and boys. Here, the compulsion to degrade, dominate or inflict serious physical and psychological harm upon women is not simply about power, but maintaining a fragile psychic equilibrium, where violence, in all its forms, serve as ritualised acts temporarily alleviating a deeper underlying crisis.

References

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Paul Alker, Craig Kelly, Max Hart, Cade Darby, and Emma Armstrong

Throughout this blog series we aim to show how violence against women and girls (VAWG) must be understood through multiple layers. While macro level structures shape the broader social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that enable VAWG, as we argued in the last post, the focus of this post is to consider the meso level – the institutions and social environments where these dynamics play out more tangibly. Schools, workplaces, communities, and digital spaces all serve as key sites where gendered violence can be reinforced, resisted, or normalised (Ellis and Thiara, 2014). Despite formal progress in gender equality, many of these spaces continue to reproduce patterns of inequality and misogyny, as will be discussed within this post.

One of the most significant achievements from feminism has been the increased integration of women into the workplace. However, this progress has arguably brought about unintended consequences. While women have entered the labour market in large numbers, they remain disproportionately concentrated in part-time, casual employment which does not provide the economic security required for true emancipation from patriarchal control (Maestripieri, 2023). At the same time, the workplace itself continues to be a major site of VAWG, via harassment and discrimination (Begeny et al., 2023). On paper, formal progress does not equate to lived experiences of sex equality, despite promises of anti-misogyny and ‘inclusion’ as an initiative at an organisational level. This disjuncture is particularly acute in male-dominated institutions such as the military and the police, where hierarchical structures and institutional cultures of silence often normalise and conceal misogynistic behaviours, including sexual and domestic violence (Hendrikx et al., 2023; Riley, 2025). In these settings, the superficial attempts at equality fail to address the causes of this violence.

While the workplace has been a key battleground for gender equality, neoliberal feminism has often reduced progress to these corporate diversity initiatives and symbolic gestures (Fraser, 2020). Beyond work, and in response to the demands of the neoliberal market, activism – particularly feminist activism – has become a highly commodified practice, (Mcintyre, 2021). Liberal feminism’s cultural turn and adoption of postmodernist perspectives has fallen into the same trap as much contemporary anti-racism. Despite good intentions, they often neglect the structural conditions that give rise to modern forms of racism and misogyny. This is even truer in an era of hyper visibility, in which narcissistic performances of self on platforms such as social media distract from the structural drivers of inequality (Yardley, 2017). By centring representation and performative activism, these movements engage in what Kotzé (2020) terms ‘micro-resistance’ – small-scale, surface-level acts of defiance that create the illusion of progress while leaving the underlying system fundamentally unchallenged. The potential of collectivism and the awareness of common oppressors has been clouded by individualistic identity politics, promising autonomy and uniqueness through consumerism (Winlow and Hall, 2017) and increasingly platformed as short soundbites competing for attention on social media which necessitates a degree of narcissism at its core. Against this backdrop, misogyny thrives (Yardley and Richards, 2023).

The symbolic violence of the present post-political context has left many feeling that they lack any real political representation. Whilst the culture war rages on, and both sides of the political spectrum remain true to neoliberal orthodoxy and fail to address issues on an economic level, a sense of apathy within the voting population prevails, which has led to a loss of faith in politics and overall disengagement from the mainstream political sphere (Winlow and Hall, 2022). In the absence of meaningful solutions, this has of course resulted in some gravitating towards political figures on the fringes who appeal to their grievances and feelings of dissatisfaction. Therefore, online spaces occupied by manosphere figures provide not only ideological narratives but also affective rewards – recognition, belonging and a sense of purpose – which compensate for the feelings of lack and dislocation generated by contemporary social life.

In March 2025, Netflix released the series Adolescence, a provocative drama exploring the radicalisation of young men online, whichsparked widespread discussion about how the digital space acts as a vehicle for normalising misogyny and gendered violence, particularly around incel communities (O’Rourke and Haslop, 2023). Ging (2019) discusses the ‘manosphere’, characterised by an adherence to Red Pill ‘philosophy’, which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. Within this context, genuine political thought is absent in exchange for a perpetual pursuit of profit – whether in the form of monetary or social capital – and a pseudo-populism. Andrew Tate is a prime example of this dynamic, serving as a leading beacon of the manosphere for disaffected young men across the globe, a position further cemented by the extensive hatred directed towards him (Haslop et al., 2024). He has garnered a cult like following based upon the objectification, subjugation and degradation of women that is thinly veiled through incoherent aspects of a personal marketed identity. His persona is a myriad of incoherent alignments that aims to capture as wide a following of disaffected young men as possible. He oscillates between disparate and often contradictory identities: claims of religious devotion while engaging in the sex industry; glorifying elite physical conditioning while indulging in the overt use of harmful substances that align with signifiers of wealth, such as Cuban cigars; and launching vague political aspirations (the BRUV party) that are underpinned by notions of anti-immigration, despite ongoing legal proceedings in a country where he is a foreign national.

This month, Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere premiered on Netflix, offering a close-up view of some of the key figures operating in the online manosphere. What emerges is a world built on hustle culture, where participants promote courses, mentorship schemes, and pathways to wealth that often resemble pyramid-scheme style models, promising success to many while structurally delivering it to very few (Ilan, 2026). Alongside this sits a striking contradiction: while espousing overtly misogynistic views in their content, several figures are shown to be markedly deferential in their personal relationships with women. Our overall impression is less one of anger and more one of sadness. The documentary confirms the hostility embedded within these spaces, but also the fragility and insecurity that underpin them. Perhaps most telling is the repeated invocation of the ‘matrix’, a metaphor used to suggest that mainstream society deceives and supresses men, positioning the manosphere as a form of awakening or resistance. Yet, what is offered in its place is a system that mirrors the very dynamics it claims to oppose: a competitive, exclusionary model of success in which only a small minority can realistically thrive. This very much echoes Kotzé’s (2020) concept of micro-resistance. These observations point to a deeper question: how do these spaces attract individuals and sustain their engagement over time?

At its fundamental level, the manosphere serves as an isolating social vessel that separates individuals from familial ties to ensure ideological change can take place. This process reflects dynamics observed in other institutional contexts where shifts in the symbolic order are produced through forms of social detachment, including cult formulation (Curtis and Curtis, 1993) and military recruitment strategies (Armstrong, 2025). While the manosphere operates primary online, making physical isolation less central, forms of social and relational isolation remain key to its functioning. Entry into these spaces if often framed through promises of success, wealth, and sexual access (Sugiura, 2021), particularly targeting working-class men who exist within a sense of hopelessness and feel ‘left behind’ from the economically successful populace (Telford, 2025). The promise of wealth can be seen as the driving force that convinces many men to join the movement, but this promise is an illusionary truth behind a much larger symbolic order which these men later assimilate.

This process of ideological change becomes apparent when looking upon the use of the ‘matrix’ to describe the world, shielding the populace from wealth and power, with those involved in the manosphere as the protagonists for change and enlightenment (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022). This language surrounding existing social ties can isolate the individual, as they are told that the general population are ‘sheep’ and therefore not worth engaging with if one seeks success. The application of isolation within this group works to detach individuals from familial and social ties, drawing them into a community that appears to offer what they feel has been missing from their lives. This makes toxic elements of the red pill, such as the discussions of female inferiority (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022) and normalisation of sexual dominance (Hoebanx, 2025), easier to assimilate, as this is the content individuals are exposed to daily. In this way, individuals are offered little in the way of counterarguments, leaving them effectively enclosed within a narrow ideological environment.  

Ilan (2026) argues that contemporary Western societies increasingly resemble what he terms a “hustle society”, in which the core tenets of neoliberalism, relentless entrepreneurialism, speculative risk-taking and exploitative opportunity-seeking, are normalised cultural expectations. Within such a context, individuals like Andrew Tate are not aberrations but archetypal figures who serve as exaggerated expressions of dominant cultural values. The hustler identity, combining wealth accumulation, conspicuous consumption and the exploitation of others, maps closely onto the hyper-competitive and individualised subjectivities produced by neoliberal capitalism. Seen in this light, the misogynistic ideology circulating within the manosphere does not simply represent a fringe deviance but an intensified articulation of the same competitive, transactional and extractive logics that increasingly shape mainstream economic and social life. Thus, the manosphere provides misogynistic ideology, but also offers participation in the aspirational logics of the hustle society.

Therefore, such dynamics do not emerge in a vacuum but are shaped by broader structural conditions. The absence of a genuine political alternative beyond the dominant neoliberal order continues to marginalise ever-growing swathes of the population and has left a vacuum that figures like Tate and others featured in Theroux’s documentary exploit. This has accelerated the rise in disaffected young males, as young as aged ten, who subscribe to his misogynistic overtures and are actively groomed into these online spaces through patterns of consumption, both material and ideological.

For some working-class men particularly, the erosion of traditional pathways to masculine identity – such as stable employment and the breadwinner role – leaves them seeking alternative ways to assert their masculinity (Ellis, 2015). Many turn to physical pursuits such as the gym (Gibbs et al., 2022) or the military (Armstrong, 2025), as sites where strength, discipline, and control can be visibly demonstrated. However, before these routes become viable options, young boys are exploited in the digital space, where figures like Tate capitalise on their insecurity, frustration, and lack of direction. Here, we see how overtly the Meso level interacts with both the Macro and Micro levels. Even if we wilfully ignore the ongoing accusations of violence against women perpetrated by Tate himself; evidence of his influence within the context of the parameters set out by the Macro have a clear impact on the Micro. Research in the Australian school system offers a stark demonstration of the normalisation of VAWG in young men due to the influence of Tate and the wider manosphere (Wescott et al., 2023).

As we have already stated, individuals like Tate are most certainly a contributing factor to rising hate and violence toward women and girls, a fact that would be dangerous to ignore. However, it is perhaps problematic also to ignore the fact that Tate, and indeed Donald Trump and other manosphere and far-right figures, are the extreme embodiment of everything the prevailing political economy stands for, rather than being the antithesis of contemporary neoliberal values. Although positioned as non-conformist, they are in fact hyper-conformist (Kotźe, 2020). It is our contention that a purely moral critique of the action of Tate, which account for an overwhelming amount of the overall discourse, not only fails to acknowledge the role of neoliberal ideology in the formation of such harmful subjectivities but also creates the very conditions in which young men are indeed vulnerable to the influence of such rhetoric. Beyond providing endless moral critique of individuals like Tate, who should of course be held accountable for their crimes, focus must also be directed towards critiquing the system that gave rise to him – figures like Tate do not emerge in a vacuum and neither do the young men who follow him. Therefore, it is our contention that focusing solely on individual consumers or online influencers risks obscuring the institutional and structural conditions that make such figures influential in the first place.

Beyond focusing on the influence of Tate and many facets of the so-called incel ideology, Adolescence shines a light on the contemporary experience of teenagers, both male and female, in the senior school environment and highlights the various challenges they both face on a day-to-day basis, inside and outside this environment. In somewhat stark terms, episode two depicts the modern school as a space in which students effectively run the show, lacking any level of discipline, whilst the teachers in many cases overzealously attempt to ‘police the horde’. Despite the fact that a fellow student has been brutally murdered, very few seem to care. To some, this depiction may verge on the hyperbolic, yet for us, it certainly touches upon aspects of our own secondary school experience and that outlined in academic research.

As Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2022) highlight, children and young people’s time spent in school is one of the most significant elements of their childhood and adolescent years. They note that, at its best, it can help children to make sense of the world they inhabit and determine their place within it, whilst simultaneously providing the foundations for them to live happy and healthy lives. Importantly they acknowledge that, of all the institutions that children and young people come into contact with, school is arguably the most consequential, given that it is the only institution in society that every child under the age of 16 is legally obliged to attend and thus holds enormous practical, emotional and relational significance in young people’s lives. They note how schools have the potential to play a vital role in enabling children and young people to flourish by being places which support young people’s sense of mattering, furnishing them with deeply meaningful forms of recognition and respect, whilst helping them to see the difference that their existence makes to the world. Yet, they argue that a number of structural features of the education system are in fact generating harm and ultimately compromising many children and young people’s ability to flourish. As Ging (2025) notes, the school environment depicted within Adolescence constitutes a significant part of the puzzle as to why 13-year-old Jamie went on to kill his classmate Katie. The school setting depicted is far removed from the ideal Billingham and Irwin-Rogers outline above and certainly serves as a startling example of some of the features of the secondary education system currently harming the young people caught up within it. Yet, this is the reality of schooling following a decade and a half of austerity in which ill-equipped teacher battle with students who do not respect them.

Alongside the structural dynamics already outlined, secondary schools can function as key sites in which experiences of humiliation are produced and internalised. As young people begin to navigate attraction and intimacy, these interactions unfold under conditions of intense visibility from friends and peers. Rejection is rarely private and is often witnessed, shared, and in some cases amplified through social media platforms, transforming routine adolescent experiences into a humiliating spectacle of acute public embarrassment. This is not to suggest that rejection leads directly to violence, but rather that, under certain conditions, repeated experiences of exclusion and perceived inadequacy can sediment into deeper feelings of shame, resentment and anger. Where these affects are not processed or supported, they may be redirected inwards in the form of a variety of self-destructive behaviours or outward in the form of violence manifest in both symbolic and subjective forms. In this sense, violence is not condoned, but understood as symptomatic of something more deeply embedded.

Ultimately, schools operate as a microcosm of the wider social world, as ideological state apparatuses that aid in the reproduction of its very logic within the subject. It also functions as a space in which the same attributes that confer status outside the school gates, such as appearance, confidence, popularity and forms of social and cultural capital, structure hierarchies within it. In a neoliberal consumer culture, self-worth becomes increasingly tied to notions of desirability and what might be understood as ‘sexual market value’. For those excluded from these hierarchies, rejection can take on a more profound significance, experienced less as a singular event and more as a confirmation of one’s perceived lack of value. In this sense, the school environment not only reflects broader inequalities but reproduces them, creating conditions in which humiliation can become a formative experience, shaped by, and in turn reinforcing, the wider socio-symbolic order. As a result, young men increasingly seek meaning and belonging in digital spaces, opening them up to the influence of figure like Andrew Tate and other manosphere content creators.

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