Ultra-Realists

Category: Criminology

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: The Meso-Level

    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.

    References

    Armstrong, E. (2025) British Army Veterans’ Experiences of the Transition into Civilian Life: An Ultra-Realist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Begeny, C. T., Arshad, H., Cuming, T., Dhariwal, D. K., Fisher, R. A., Franklin, M. D., Jackson, P. C., McLachlan, G. M., Searle, R. H., and Newlands, C. (2023) ‘Sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape by colleagues in the surgical workforce, and how women and men are living different realities: Observational study using NHS population-derived weights.’ British Journal of Surgery. 110(11). Pp. 1518-26.  

    Billingham, L., and Irwin-Rogers, K. (2022) Against Youth Violence: A Social Harm Perspective. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Curtis, J.M. and Curtis, M.J. (1993) ‘Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults.’ Psychological Report. 73(2). Pp. 451–60.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, Masculinities and Violence: An Ethnographic Study. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Ellis, J., and Thiara, R. K. (2014) Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls: Education Work with Children and Young People. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 

    Fraser, N. (2020) Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. London: Verso Books.

    Gibbs, N., Salinas, M., and Turnock, L. (2022) ‘Post-industrial masculinities and gym culture: Graft, craft, and fraternity.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 73. Pp. 220-36.  

    Ging, D. (2019) ‘Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere.’ Men and Masculinities. 22(4). Pp. 638-57.  

    Ging, D. (2025) How fragile we are: Why Netflix drama Adolescence is essential viewing for everyone. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/adolescence-netflix-6654519-Mar2025/ [Accessed 23 April 2026].

    Haslop, C., Ringrose, J., Cambazoglu, I., and Milne, B. (2024) ‘Mainstreaming the manosphere’s misogyny through affective homosocial currencies: Exploring how teen boys navigate the Andrew Tate effect.’ Social Media and Society. 10.  

    Hendrikx, L. J., Williamson, V., and Murphy, D. (2023) ‘Adversity during military service: The impact of military sexual trauma, emotional bullying and physical assault on the mental health and well-being of women veterans.’ BMJ Military Health. 169. Pp. 419-24. 

    Hoebanx, P. (2025) ‘Red pill women: Heterosexual fantasies in misogynistic spaces.’ Men and Masculinities. 28(2). Pp. 177–96.   

    Ilan, J., 2026. The hustle society: Mainstream precarity, voracious entrepreneurialism, grift and exploitation in contemporary culture. The British Journal of Criminology, p.azag033.

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds). Crime, Harm, and Consumerism. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Maestripieri, L. (2023) ‘Women’s involuntary part-time employment and household economic security in Europe.’ Feminist Economics. 29(4). Pp. 223-51.  

    McIntyre, M. P. (2021) ‘Commodifying feminism: Economic choice and agency in the context of lifestyle influencers and gender consultants.’ Gender, Work, and Organization. 28(3). Pp. 1059-78.  

    O’Rourke, F., and Haslop, C. (2023) ‘”We’re respectful boys…we’re not misogynistic!”: Analysing defensive, contradictory and changing performances of masculinity within young men’s in-person and digitally mediated homosocial spaces.’ Journal of Gender Studies. 34(6). Pp. 848-65.

    Riley, L. (2025) ‘Fact 16: In the six months leading to March 2022, more than 1,500 police staff in England and Wales were accused of violence against women and girls.’ In Lamb, J. B., Hart, M., Treadwell, J., Lynes, A., and Kelly, C. (Eds.) 50 Facts Everyone Should Know About the Police. Bristol: Policy Press. 

    Sugiura, L. (2021) The Emergence and Development of the Manosphere. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Telford, L. (2025) ‘Left behind places, neoliberalism, and systemic violence in the UK.’ Frontiers in Sociology. 10.

    Vallerga, M. and Zurbriggen, E.L. (2022) ‘Hegemonic masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’: A thematic analysis of beliefs about men and women on The Red Pill and Incel.’ Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. 22(2). Pp. 602–25.

    Wescott, S., Roberts, S., and Zhao, X. (2023) ‘The problem of anti-feminist “manfluencer” Andrew Tate in Australian schools: Women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy.’ Gender and Education. 36(2). Pp. 167-82.  

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2017) ‘Criminology and consumerism.’ In Carlen, P., and França, L. A. (Eds). Alternative Criminologies. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. London: Policy Press.

    Yardley, E. (2017) Social Media Homicide Confessions: Stories of Killers and their Victims. London: Policy Press.  

    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2023) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: The Macro-Level

    Paul Alker, Liam Miles and Emma Armstrong

    As outlined in the first post of this series, the overarching aim of these theoretical interventions is to shed light on the key determinants of the rising levels of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in its myriad forms. It is our belief that a multi-level critical analysis of the issue is essential if we wish to fully comprehend the various causes of this violence on a symbolic and subjective level – violence that women and girls are experiencing with greater frequency and severity. In this post, as a precursor to further investigations of the meso and micro levels, we will focus on some of the main macro-level factors, which are the large-scale social systems and structures that contextualise the cultural forms involved in this violence.  

    As Lynes et al. (2021) illustrate, adopting an initial macro approach to understanding violence enables us to explore the issue of VAWG from a novel and often overlooked vantage point, affording us the opportunity to emphasise the broader social forces that create the conditions in which such violence takes place. From this position, a key debate in contemporary discussions of VAWG concerns the role of patriarchal power in late-capitalist societies. Some question whether patriarchy remains as dominant and influential as it once was or whether it has been displaced by other power structures (Lynes et al., 2021). Yet, Yardley (2020) argues that patriarchy does indeed still exist but it has undergone a mutation under neoliberalism to become what she terms ‘neoliberal patriarchy’.

    This iteration of patriarchal power operates through the celebrated neoliberal principles of hyper-individualism, instant gratification, hostile competitiveness, hedonism, narcissism, and success premised upon the failure of others. These zero-sum values are clear in the behaviour of many who perpetrate violence and harm against women and girls. Exhibiting a sense of what Hall (2012) calls special liberty, in which sovereign individuals follow the libertine drive to satisfy their own self-interest, regardless of the harm it may cause to others, for both expressive and instrumental purposes (Kotzé, 2024). This is a concept we will explore further in a forthcoming post on micro-level factors. 

    Alongside the neoliberal shift towards competitive individualism, identity-based divisions, such as race and gender, have increasingly replaced class as the fundamental structures of inequality (Žižek, 2002). In the absence of the traditional class struggle, this shift has fostered ‘culture wars’ in which men and women are positioned as adversaries, with identity politics weaponised to fuel antagonism rather than solidarity. Hall and Winlow (2014) refer to this as the construction of a ‘society of enemies’, in which both individuals and various identitarian groups are encouraged to view one another as pseudo-pacified competitors rather than allies. In the context of a society of enemies, the concept of neoliberal patriarchy enables us to appreciate the ways in which misogyny is effectively sewn into the fabric of late-stage capitalism (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Rather than being a deviation from contemporary social values, perpetrators of VAWG can be seen as extreme embodiments of the neoliberal ethos. In the forthcoming micro-level post, we argue this leads some men to believe that women are responsible for ‘stealing’ something that is rightly theirs, resulting in violence that manifests in both symbolic and subjective forms.  

    The intersection of politics, economics and violence in relation to VAWG is indeed a global phenomenon. A striking example of this is found in Mexico, where Rodriguez’s (2012) research explores the manner in which the anarchic confluence of global capitalism, alongside Mexico’s corrupt national politics, has displaced transient populations of people seeking work. Narco-warfare has enabled the emergence of The Femicide Machine: an apparatus that did not only create the conditions in which dozens of women and young girls could be murdered, but also developed the institutions that would guarantee impunity for those who perpetrated such crimes. Žižek (2016) frames this as a form of macho reaction to an emerging class of independent working women. Sayek Valencia (2019) further highlights the prevalence of this issue by presenting the staggering statistic that, at the time of writing, every four hours in Mexico a young girl or adult woman is killed.

    There are two common threads present across these authors’ assessments of the violence being perpetrated against women and girls. One, that it is extremely brutal in nature, and two, that it is inextricably linked to the social, cultural, political and economic context in which it takes place. Valencia (2018) argues elsewhere that this culture of extreme violence in Mexico would not exist were it not for the economic crisis the country suffered in the 1980s; the breakdown of the nation-state which led to an unholy alliance between politicians and the cartels, and the catastrophic shortcoming of NAFTA in the 1990s.  

    There are of course a number of contextual differences between the causes of violence against women and young girls being perpetrated in Mexico and the UK. Yet, we should not understate the role of the social and economic changes within the UK over the past four decades alongside some of the positive cultural changes that have occurred in the realm of women’s rights. What the examples of VAWG in Mexico illustrate is the importance of considering the macro context in which violence is taking place and the subsequent need for significant interventions at the macro socio-political and cultural levels.  

     Turning to the UK context, the Cost-of-Living Crisis (COLC) as a mediated and political term, can be utilised as a timely example of how risks in late-modern society permeate the fabric of everyday life and its social practices to produce and heighten the experience of ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991). These insecurities can be traced through the rise of food poverty (Francis-Devine et al., 2024), the housing crisis, in which many, particularly young people, struggle to access affordable housing (Atkinson and Jacobs, 2020) and insecurity in the labour markets, following a flexible and increasingly precarious turn (Lloyd, 2018). It can be argued that through neoliberal politics, the social emphasis on raising aspirations through centring the individual’s life journey, or what Beck (1992) denoted as reflexive modernisation, has been exposed as a lie, as in the contemporary moment, the opportunities to attain symbols of success are few and far between. Moreover, as Sanz (2017) suggests, the socialisation practices for men and women have seldom changed and largely retained the binary dichotomy of gender.  

    According to Ellis (2015), for many men living in post-industrial Britain, the norms around displaying masculinity remain. The male body has lost much of its value in the labour force. The attributes of physical strength and toughness have become redundant, replaced by a greater emphasis on cognitive abilities and communication skills, but a vestigial visceral habitus continues to be reproduced in some locales (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2005). This has created a situation in which many men are faced with the terrifying abyss of their own insignificance, in the absence of opportunities to gain any positive form of recognition from others (Ellis, 2015; Gibbs et al., 2022).

    As they struggle to accept this situation, articulate their growing frustrations and channel their libidinal energies in a positive or productive direction, a cacophony of negative emotions are allowed to develop – feelings of anger, shame, envy – the end result of which is often either implosion or explosion. Alcohol and substance misuse, depression and suicide characterise the former, whilst street-level and domestic violence against partners and children become the explosive chosen outlet for this pent-up energy and ill feeling (Dorling, 2010; Berardi, 2015; Power, 2022). Similarly, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2005) theorise how economic integration may contribute to VAWG, as it may prompt some men to reassert traditional patriarchal roles in response to perceived threats to their dominance. At this point of bringing forth the idea of visceral habitus, it is timely to return to Beck’s idea of ‘risk’, of which contemporary examples include the Covid-19 pandemic and the COLC, to make sense of how violence against women and girls is increasing. 

     It can be argued that there are two levels through which one can understand the COLC. The first, is at a surface level and arguably an objective standpoint. Indeed, the cost of living has increased. This can be observed in the ever-increasing cost of the weekly food shop, alongside rising fuel, energy and utility costs which can be attributed to geopolitical events including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has led to a disruption of global supply chains, thus increasing the costs for imports, and the production of essential goods. These accounts are clearly pin-pointed by the British Government as constituting the causes for the rising cost of living in Britain (See Francis-Devine et al., 2024). The second layer of understanding the COLC is as a systematic process, caused by the entrenchment of neoliberal politics, austerity, and wider anti-statist ideology. It is argued by Dorling (2010) that the system of neoliberal capitalism is designed to produce and reproduce inequalities, across communities and households, which manifests in the form of a ‘society of enemies’ (Hall and Winlow, 2014) and ‘neoliberal patriarchy’ (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Thus, we contend that rising levels of violence against women and girls can, at least in part and at the broadest level, be viewed as symptomatic of the present social and economic situation. 

     Whilst the surface level reasonings for the COLC are not to be dismissed, particularly as geopolitical insecurity and wider global restructuring has led to the rise of economic insecurity and heightened competition in the labour markets, it is further argued that the very nature of the system itself needs to be examined. This is to map the complexities of the COLC, but also to recognise that the system of neoliberal capitalism has engineered social and economic life, to sustain and manufacture inequalities and harm, to allow the system to sustain and reproduce itself.   

    Rising rates of VAWG, largely at the hands of men can be linked to COLC, plays a significant role as a layer of risk in a risk society. This is not to position the COLC as the sole contributor to this rise of violence, but to recognise that violence at the interpersonal levels is sustained and reproduced through objective, symbolic and systemic modes of violence (Žižek, 2008) that exist in everyday life. This poisonous mix of a rising cost of living and austerity politics has arguably led to a rise of men who feel increasingly marginalised and powerless. The enaction of what could be termed ‘residual power’ can be seen at the domestic and interpersonal levels and is arguably fuelled by the intensification of economic alienation, exemplified by the relentless struggle against the COLC. Here, the notion of ontological insecurity can be refined and understood more precisely as ‘objectless anxiety’, and foregrounded against the backdrop of the deaptative socialisation of young men and the cultural reproduction of the socially and economically redundant visceral habitus (Hall, 2012). 

     Whilst highlighting the importance of broader social and economic factors in contextualising and contributing to the rising tide of violence against women and girls. Of course, as we briefly mentioned above, some violent men are relatively successful, therefore it is also important that this macro socioeconomic context is considered alongside the meso- and micro-levels in which we find the differentiation to be discussed in forthcoming publications. We cannot truly understand the key determinants of this violence and develop meaningful strategies to address the issue by exploring each level in isolation. It is imperative that as social scientists, we seek to develop a robust understanding of VAWG in all its complexity so that we can understand the level of intervention required to meaningfully address the problem and reverse the tide of violence we are witnessing with growing frequency against women and girls. Only when we adopt such a robust approach to understanding the issue will we have the capacity to truly address it. 

    References

    Atkinson, R., and Jacobs, K. (2020) What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Housing? London: Sage Publications.  

    Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.  

    Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso.

    DeKeseredy, W. S., and Schwartz, M. D. (2005) ‘Masculinities and interpersonal violence.’ In Kimmel, M. S., Hearn, J., and Connell, R. W. (Eds.) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. California: Sage Publications.  

    Dorling, D. (2010) Injustice: Why social inequality still persists. Policy Press.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, masculinities and violence: An ethnographic study. Routledge.

    Francis-Devine, B., Malik, X., and Roberts, N. (2024) ‘Food poverty: Households, food banks and free school meals.’ House of Commons Library Research Briefing. [online]. Available at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9209/CBP-9209.pdf. (Accessed on: 19/03/2025).

    Gibbs, N., Salinas, M., and Turnock, L. (2022) ‘Post-industrial masculinities and gym culture: Graft, craft, and fraternity.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 73. Pp. 220-36.  

    Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. New York: Polity Press.

    Hall, S. (1997) ‘Visceral Cultures and Criminal Practices’, Theoretical Criminology, 1(4): 453-478.

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime & Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications.

    Hall, S., and Winlow, S. (2014) ‘The English riots of 2011: Misreading the signs on the road to the society of enemies.’ In Pritchard, D., and Pakes, F. (Eds). Riots, Unrest, and Protest on the Global Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 

    Hall, S., Winlow, S., and Ancrum, C. (2005) ‘Radgies, ganstas, and mugs: Imaginary criminal identities in the twilight of the pseudo-pacification process.’ Social Justice. 32. Pp. 100-12.  

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds). Crime, Harm, and Consumerism. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm.’ The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Lynes, A., Yardley, E. and Danos, L. (2021) Making sense of homicide: A student textbook. Waterside Press.

    Lloyd, A. (2018) Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Power, N. (2022) What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and its Discontents. Penguin. 

    Rodríguez, S.G. (2012) The Femicide Machine. MIT Press.

    Sanz, V. (2017) ‘No way out of the binary: A critical history of the scientific production of sex.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43. Pp. 1-27.  

    Valencia, S. (2018) Gore Capitalism. MIT Press.

    Valencia, S. (2019) Necropolitics, postmortem/transmortem politics, and transfeminisms in the sexual economies of death. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6(2), Pp.180-193.

    Yardley, E. (2020) ‘Technology-facilitated domestic abuse in political economy: A new theoretical framework.’ Violence Against Women. 27(10). Pp. 1479-98.  

    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2023) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.  

    Žižek, S. (2002) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. 

     Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. 

     Žižek, S. (2016) Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Penguin.

  • Datafication Laid Bare: Making sense of the Grok AI leaks

    What the Grok? Performance Promises, Cases of Controversy and Grok.

    On the 22nd of August 2025, news headlines began to circulate on social media sites regarding X (formerly Twitter) owner and tech-billionaire Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ‘Grok’. Initially launched in November 2023, Grok has seen rapid evolution with Grok-2 offering image-generation capability and Grok-3 advancing key features such as AI reasoning and reflection. Finally, Grok-4, launched in July 2025, claims to offer PhD level intelligence reasoning (Business Today, 2025). Of course, newer premium pricing tiers (around $300 a month for ‘SuperGrok Heavy’) have also emerged (ibid). However, recent headlines are about controversy and not the usual celebrations of AI ambition or performance. Rather, they demonstrate only the latest structural example of datafication, algorithmic governance, and harmful asymmetry.

    Interestingly, this is not the first instance where Grok has been at the forefront of controversy. In July 2025, Grok experienced backlash for generating anti-Semitic material, with reports suggesting the bot had praised Hitler whilst referring to itself as “MechaHitler”. This sparked condemnation from watchdogs and resulted in the developers promising improvements to hate speech moderation (Speakman, 2025). Prior to this, concerns were raised regarding the bot’s safeguards and prompts design as it was reported to have issued guidance on practical violence, offering advice to users on how to assault a public figure (Saeedy, 2025).

    Recent reports have revealed that over 370,000 chat transcripts between Grok and its users have been unintentionally published on the open web after being indexed by numerous search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo (Caswell, 2025; Dees, 2025). This was due to a technological oversight whereby neither no-index tags nor restriction of access commands were programmed, leaving unique shareable URLs unprotected – ultimately making them visible to search engine crawlers (Martin and White, 2025). All of this was reportedly done without any user knowledge, with many believing their chats were private (ibid). The exposed content seemingly varies in sensitivity and legality. Reports include relatively benign uses, such as summarising journal articles or drafting tweets, alongside the sharing of highly sensitive information, including names, passwords, private medical and/or psychological queries, and confidential uploaded documents such as spreadsheets and images. Further to this, much more dangerous or illicit content has been reported. Instructions for making fentanyl, methamphetamines and bombs were found. There is also evidence of users instructing the bot to write its own malware, assist in planning suicides and assassination plots of figures such as Elon Musk himself (Kundaliya, 2025; Dees, 2025).

    It may be easy to understand these events as another example of a privacy accident or data breach resulting in erosion of user trust, akin to those we have seen since the development of the internet and its subsequent technological advancements (Singh, 2025). So we may call for better safeguards in future use of the AI bot. However, such understandings and action fail to recognise that accountability and safety in AI, much like its technological predecessors, should not just be about technical fixes, but about confronting political-economic and cultural structures within late capitalism that normalise such exposure and harm. To aid this, the remainder of this blog draws from recent critical criminological discussions of AI and Harm (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming); Ultra-Realist perspectives and critique of the structural logics of late capitalism (Hall and Winlow 2025), Kelly et al’s. (2023) ‘graze culture’, as well as Atkinson and Rogers (2016) work on ‘zones of exception’ to outline how we can better make sense of the Grok leaks.

    Grok, Graze Culture, and Zones of Exception

    As Atkinson and Rogers (2016) explain, society has witnessed a cultural re-positioning of our once previously pseudo-pacified desires and “guilty” pleasures. We now engage with ‘enclosed screen spaces’ such as video games (or in this instance smartphones) to interact with sexual and violent desires under the assurance that they remain within these zones of cultural exception. As we move further into prosumer society (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2020), AI technology has developed to allow users to access such zones with ‘AI girlfriends’ or through the creation of ‘AI deepfakes’ (Goodwin, 2024). In this current context, however, Grok and other AI chatbots alike form a conversational zone of exception where one can engage with violent, criminal or deviant content, or share personal and sensitive information, in what is perceived as a private space. However, as users click the ‘share’ button, their intimate exchanges become globally accessible artifacts.

    Ultimately, Grok did not just experience a technological flaw, it positioned its users into a permanent digital zone of objection. A more public space where private desires and sensitive information is laid bare for all netizens to consume. Essentially, as we seek out further virtual spaces to fulfil such pseudo-pacified desires, spaces offered to us in the form of commodified technological innovation, we willingly offer data to a political and economic order orientated towards extraction, optimisation and profit (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming). Here, chats designed to feel safe become instruments of exposure and harm.

    AI bots such as Grok have further blurred the line between production and consumption, just as social media apps and similar technology have done (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2020). AI, by design, produces content from what it consumes. It is both a vehicle of and dependent upon prosumerism. However, in light of the Grok leaks, users were, whether knowingly or not, producing valuable cultural and emotional labour in the form of conversations and prompts. However, the flawed “share” button rebranded this labour into indexable content, unpaid and involuntary – commodifying intimacy, turning private exchanges into commodified data streams. Essentially, users became prosumers at their own exposure – creating and consuming simultaneously whilst corporations extracted surplus value. What may have been satire, experimentation or cathartic expression has now become a media spectacle.

    Kelly et al’s. (2023) ‘graze culture’ adds important depth here. They explain that society brushes up against the familiar (usually in the form of obvious subjective forms of violence epitomised by the serial killer) in order to disavow their sense of lack and experience of everyday structural violence, such as political inequality and global disasters. The implications here are twofold. First, it positions the leaked transcripts as fodder for our graze culture. Content for journalists, readers, doom scrollers and perhaps academic commentators to skim without context, disavowing their own realities. Secondly, it allows us to recognise that, whilst a technological fix may be offered, and we may raise alarms towards the safeguards in place in such technology, we will ultimately disavow the realities of the system that creates such harms in the first instance. In essence, the outcomes of such data optimisation (exposure and embarrassment, for example) become the very dark matter we brush up against to banish the reason it happened in the first place.

    AI’s Logic of Harm and Grok

    Raymen’s (2023) work on telos tells us that in order to fully understand harm we must explore the end goal or purpose of an entity. In this respect, AI, once marketed as a force for human advancement, has been redirected to optimise surveillance and profit and thus its telos is corrupted. This crucial point was raised at the recent Critical Criminology conference at Northumbria University, where myself alongside my colleagues Kyla Bavin and Adam Lynes presented our forthcoming work exploring the harms of AI (see: Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming). As we explained, the elite’s implementation of AI technologies in the gig economy (Lynes and Wragg, 2023) demonstrates this corrupted telos, as well as the special liberty they enjoy (Hall, 2012).

    The Grok case demonstrates similar luxuries as elites continue to profit from the infrastructure of surveillance and datafication whilst users absorb its costs. In Grok’s case, over 370,000 individuals have had their vulnerabilities laid bare whilst the corporation remains opaque and shielded from responsibility. Drawing upon Hart et al’s (2025 forthcoming) critical typology of AI, we can understand the harm generated by Grok’s leaks as follows:

    Datafication harms: Personal conversations have been transformed into searchable, exploitable data points.

    Algorithmic governance harms: Platform designs of Grok (for example the “share” button and lack of privacy warnings) governed user behaviour invisibly, coercing them into unwanted exposure.

    Operational harms: Users may experience reputational damage, psychosocial stress, and the chilling effect of knowing that their private queries might circulate without consent.

    Existential harms: Trust in AI as a safe mediator of thought and dialogue is momentarily destabilised, leaving users disempowered and alienated as they brush back up against the very system that harms them in the first place.

    Ultimately, the Grok case demonstrates how AI infrastructures govern not through overt coercion, but by creating conditions of pacification and exception. Users feel free to share intimate thoughts as the interface appeared safe. However, this freedom is illusory as the act of sharing transports them into a digital zone of objection where they can be surveilled, indexed, and judged. This is a form of algorithmic pacification where individuals are pacified into compliance, only to find that compliance itself generates new harms. Whilst we should not overlook the somewhat heinous prompts being inputted into Grok, seen critically, these leaks are not an isolated technical misstep but an exemplary case of how AI platforms embody the logic of late capitalism: the suspension of protections (zones of exception), the palatable fodder to brush up against in times of misery (graze culture), the corruption of emancipatory promises (telos), and the granting of unchecked freedoms to elites (special liberty). They highlight that criminology must move beyond narrow cybercrime framings to confront AI as a structure with extreme zemiogenic and criminogenic potential – a system whose very design can produce and reproduce harm, inequality, and disempowerment.

    References

    Atkinson, R., and Rodgers, T. (2016) Pleasure Zones and Murder Boxes: Online Pornography and Violent Video Games and Cultural Zones of Exception. British Journal of Criminology, 56(6), pp. 1291-1307.

    Business Today (2025) ‘The rise of Grok: Elon Musk’s foray into the AI chatbot landscape’, Business Today, 17 March. Available at: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/the-rise-of-grok-elon-musks-foray-into-the-ai-chatbot-landscape-468150-2025-03-17 [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Caswell, A. (2025) ‘Hundreds of thousands of Grok chatbot conversations are showing up in Google Search — here’s what happened’, Tom’s Guide, 20 August. Available at: https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chatbot-conversations-are-showing-up-in-google-search-heres-what-happened [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Dees, M. (2025) ‘Hundreds of thousands of Grok chats accidentally published’, Techzine, 22 August. Available at: https://www.techzine.eu/news/privacy-compliance/133998/hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chats-accidentally-published [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Goodwin, L. (2024) Romance scammer duped £17k from me with deepfakes. BBC News. 19th December. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr0g1em52go. [Accessed 25th August 2025].

    Hall, S. (2012). Theorising Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2025). Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hart, M., Bavin, K. and Lynes, A. (2025 – forthcoming) Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, and the Logic of Harm: Toward a Critical Criminology of AI. Critical Criminology.

    Kelly, C., Lynes, A. & Hart, M., 2023. ‘Graze Culture’ and serial murder: Brushing up against ‘familiar monsters’ in the wake of 9/11. In: S.E. Fanning & C. O’Callaghan, eds. Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 295–321. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Kundaliya, D. (2025) Elon Musk’s xAI exposed hundreds of thousands of Grok conversations to Google search. Computing. Available at: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/security/elon-musk-s-xai-exposed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-conversations-to-google-search [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Lynes, A. and Wragg, E. (2023). “Smile for the camera”: Online warehouse tours as a form of dark tourism within the era of late capitalism. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 24(4), 615-629.

    Martin, I. and White, E. (2025). Elon Musk’s xAI published hundreds of thousands of Grok chatbot conversations. Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/08/20/elon-musks-xai-published-hundreds-of-thousands-of-grok-chatbot-conversations/ [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Raymen, T. (2023). The Enigma of Social Harm The Problem of Liberalism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Ritzer, G. and Jurgenson, N. (2010) ‘Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), pp. 13–36.

    Saeedy, A. (2025) ‘Why xAI’s Grok Went Rogue’, The Wall Street Journal, 10th July. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-xais-grok-went-rogue-a81841b0 [Accessed: 26 August 2025].

    Singh, A. (2025) From Past to Present: The Evolution of Data Breach Causes (2005–2025). LatIA, 3(333). Available at: https://doi.org/10.62486/latia2025333 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Speakman, K. (2025) ‘Elon Musk’s X Chatbot Praises Hitler While Sharing Multiple Antisemitic Posts’, People, 9 July. Available at: https://people.com/elon-musk-x-chatbot-praises-hitler-antisemitic-posts-11769138 ]Accessed: 26 August 2025].

  • A Response to Pridemore and Rogers

    Please allow me to have a quick whine. If any other researchers involved in the UR project think I’m abusing my privileged position here, please submit a blog any time you think you have been misrepresented in any type of publication.

    Unfortunately, we do tend to encounter ‘straw targets’ in mainstream academic journals. Here, Pridemore and Rogers – link below- in an article to be published in the journal ‘Criminology’, take quotes from a 2009 article ‘A Tale of Two Capitalisms’, written by myself and Craig McLean, out of context. According to Pridemore and Rogers, we had claimed that ‘markets’ are some sort of causal context for high homicide rates. Here are the quotes. “In sum, according to Hall and McLean (2009), markets are “socially toxic” (p. 329), and a neo-liberal market orientation (at least as practiced by the United States and similar nations) is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism” (p. 334) that “invariably generate[s] the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates” (p. 333).”

    Utter nonsense. We actually wrote that neoliberalism – we were referring to the ‘greed is good’ culture of the 1980s in the context of deindustrialisation and job loss in the US and the UK – is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism”. We also suggested that minimally regulated forms of neoliberal capitalism “invariably generate the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates”. Not ‘markets’ in general. All modern societies have markets of one type or another – even North Korea. The main differences revolve around the extent to which they dominate and monopolise human activities.

    Furthermore, as the title of our 2009 article should suggest, it wasn’t a comparative analysis of multiple nations aross the globe. What we said is that compared to periods characterised by a minimally regulated market economy in the US, the more regulated social market economies of the US under FDR and historically ongoing in Europe had proven more effective at reducing homicide without resorting to mass surveillance and incarceration, especially after the economic crash of 1929. We also pointed out that during deindustrialisation after 1979 the regulatory social market legacy of Europe coped better than the US and maintained lower homicide rates, while during the rapid transition to neoliberalism in Russia after 1992 – “more shock than therapy” – homicide rates increased.

    Nowhere in our article did we claim that ‘markets’ – whatever that might mean – are a direct and invariable cause of high homicide rates. How does stuff like this get past reviewers?

    @ASCRM41https://assets.pubpub.org/ih43ssi9/Market%20Orientation%20and%20National%20Homicide%20Rates-71755197799367.pdf

  • Leagues of Gentlemen (and Women) on the illicit (violent) playing fields of neoliberal capitalism: An ultra-realist analysis of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen

    ‘Criminal markets are now sophisticated and competitive, riven by class divisions created on the back of the individual’s relative success and failures in markets. A successful new proto bourgeoisie drawn from all positions on the former social order dominates a defeated precariat’ (Hall & Winlow, 2015: 126)

    Take director Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, The Gentlemen (Netflix, 2024), which follows Eddie Horniman, a reluctant aristocrat who inherits his family estate only to discover it sits atop a vast underground cannabis empire. Here is a criminological reality in the 21st century where liberalism has been outgrown and which demonstrates symbolic inefficacy for those competing in the current neoliberal economy. By entering the reality of organised crime, corruption, and violence, a new Symbolic Order of entrepreneurialism and wealth creation materialises that would otherwise not be possible, or within reach for most, within the global neoliberal capitalist system. Thus, recycling the traditional economic business model of supply and demand for controlled substances, the actors in The Gentlemen have diverted their libidinal drives to fill the void of the Lacanian Real for a slice of the high life; where the high rollers of wealth accumulation previously sat and to which access was limited despite the capitalist fantasy and falsehood of ‘rags to riches’  that everyone can compete and succeed within the ‘fair and equal’ neoliberal system.

    What we can see in The Gentlemen is Hall’s (2007: 2012:2015) pseudo-pacification process in action. Let us revisit where this fundamental element of ultra realist theory derives. Hall posits that in medieval England the economy and the family unit were conjoined, where property was owned by the family unit and shared between them from generation to generation to support their existence (Polanyi, 2002; Sombart, 1915). The family units produced on a subsistence level for self-consumption rather than profit as their Aristotelian ‘telos’ or fulfilment. Labour was a family activity and not an economic commodity at this point, and the family units existed under moral guidance of the Church, which acted as the big Other, maintaining morality, stabilising prices, and keeping the peace. However, the co-existence of the market trader, who bought commodities only to sell them unchanged for profit, operated outside this subsistence model but was tolerated as they appeared to abide by the morality and ethics of the Church, which kept trade functional. The emphasis was very much in favour of the peasant labourer and the artisan at this stage rather than the profiteering of the market trader. The change in this system began in the 16th and 17th centuries, or earlier according to Dyer (2000). Dyer suggests that the nobility was more concerned with leisure pursuits such as hunting, prayer and entertainment than managing the land and estates that they owned; this was the realm of the peasantry and labourers, which opened the opportunity for the more entrepreneurial peasants and artisans in motivating aspiration and access to wealth creation whilst paying rents to the landowning nobility. Sound familiar?

    Let’s get psychoanalytic. Hall argues that at the core of subjectivity lies nothing but ‘a powerful and structuring absence that inspires deep anxiety; one which is assuaged by the active solicitation of a coherent symbolic order from which meaning can be established and the individual can orientate and navigate themselves within the world’  (Raymen, 2023: 141). As the Enlightenment overrode the Church’s morality, rooted in unconditional selflessness and sacrificial love, it ushered in a new era defined by the pursuit of profit, where the family unit was eroded and displaced by individualism and market competition. Subjective Lacanian ‘lack’  was reoriented to be fulfilled by economic gain and status seeking, and as a by-product, those less aspirational and entrepreneurial were left behind  – ‘Ha ha, losers.’

    In The Gentlemen, we observe the different socioeconomic units, whether they be family by birth or by entrepreneurial activity, all competing in the lucrative market of cannabis production and distribution using a division of labour and complete vertical integration (see Messina, 2022) to operate an illicit capitalist business model. Let us start at the top with the protagonist Eddie Horniman. Born the second son to the Duke of Halstead, a model of aristocracy in the colonial British Empire mould with a good education and a commission in the Army, Eddie unexpectedly finds himself heir to his father’s estate over his brother, who has been overlooked in the will. Inheriting a crumbling country estate which is costly to maintain, Eddie is announced as overseer of the family assets in an epoch of decolonisation where the past aristocracy has no real purpose or place in the current globalised neoliberal world. Still focused on leisure pursuits and entertainment, the Halstead family, especially Eddie’s Brother Freddy, cling to the defensive unit of family and land in a contemporary landscape of neoliberal market economics. With no notable income to maintain this wealthy status, a truth is revealed to aristocratic Eddie by the stylish, sardonic, sophisticated, and steely (Tudum by Netflix, 2025) commoner Susie Glass; the land he has inherited sits on top of a cannabis mass production site in return for rent; a last gasp deal his late father made to maintain the family income and status. Eddie’s brother, Freddy, still overindulgent in recreational excess, places the family under further strain by running up a drug debt amongst gambling and other failed risky ventures.

    Enter Gospel John, a Merseyside working class fish trader and zealot, to whom Freddy is indebted, known for his violence and a healthy dose of Christian fervour. Gospel John sends his brother Tommy to collect the debt from Freddy. He is shot by Freddy in the process. Now introduced to what the mass production of cannabis on his inherited property entails, Eddie is moved well beyond the safety and comfort of the aristocratic and privileged Symbolic Order he thought he had inherited into the reality of the highly lucrative, competitive, and violent sphere of serious and organised crime. Eddie’s former institutionalisation by the Army and government is now well past its sell by date and part of the vestige of power that once was (Netflix, 2025). The former Symbolic Order now being ‘deaptative’ (Johnston, 2008), Eddie has now become an actor in a new adaptive market economy with a higher scale of violence, yet operating within and on the same model as the neoliberal economic system, which Eddie finds addictive. At the same time, American Crystal Meth entrepreneur Stanley Johnstone is filling an absence, read as ‘lack’, of history and identity by re-inventing himself as a liberal English gentleman of wealth and property, eager to progress in the still rigid codified British class system, whilst the last remains of the Halstead aristocracy is desperately abandoning theirs to adapt and survive in this new reality. All this takes place and is maintained in a space of ‘orderly disorder’ (Horsely, Kotzé, and Hall, 2015) which is being run by convicted gang boss Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) from a privileged existence in prison, read as ‘holiday’, whilst his daughter Susie Glass runs the business on the ground for him.

    Hall’s (2012) interest in pseudo-pacification comes from the explanation of the decline of violence from the Middle Ages to the present day as market economies emerged and developed and where rates of violence and homicide are seen to have decreased. Economic trade cannot function in a totally altruistic or totally violent space. There must be a reduction of violence for economic exchange to function, not a total pacification but a balance between civility and controlled aggression; something which is evident throughout all the character interactions within ‘The Gentlemen.’ As Hall, in Raymen (2023:143) argues, ‘a perpetual cultivation of dynamic tension between the poles of pacification and stimulation which provides the ideal pseudo-pacified subjectivities for the flourishing of a market society.’ Hall suggests that as economies grew, subjectivity did not lose its aggression. Instead, aggression was preserved and put to an appropriate and scaled down use as a driving energy in nascent market economies.

     As we see in The Gentlemen, violence is a normalised (see Žižek, 2009) part of the organised crime economic modus operandi, an accompaniment to drug production and distribution used to ensure the security and continuous flow of products and maintain market share, just as it is in military form in the legitimate globalised neoliberal market economy. The drive to succeed in this open space of organised criminal enterprise, which can more easily be accessed by anybody, has increased the level of interpersonal violence necessary to compete and survive. Thus, the sliding scale of pacification has been moved further away from civility and upped the level of accepted violence on which Eddie’s new-found market economy operates. Yet, as we see in the various cohesive units within the show, elements of medieval pacification, morality and aesthetics – through the morality and values of the church in Gospel John, and the desire for the iconography and architecture of the nobility in Stanley Johnstone – are holding on.

    Yet for Eddie Halsted, the collapse of his aristocratic status sees him move into the arena of the organised criminal elite to be thrown into a violent economic reality. Interjected with various other criminal entrepreneurs, traders, labourers and artisans within the organised criminal fraternity, we see a wide spectrum of historical socioeconomic roles from the early centuries of capitalism now intersecting in a new global neoliberal illicit economy. Cannabis has been weaving its way into normality over the decades and is now quite commonplace everywhere, legalised or decriminalised in many parts of the world, yet still a controlled substance as defined under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the UK. One only has to walk through our post-industrial cities and towns to find the unmistakable scent of weed present.  So much so, that the production of cannabis in The Gentlemen is truthfully portrayed as a new and expanding industry where the means of production, packaging, and distribution are controlled in-house and underpinned by the artisan skills and labour of ‘weed horticulturalist’ Jimmy Chang as chief grower. Hmmm, sounds medieval but with guns to me.

    Effectively, in The Gentlemen (and women such as Susie Glass, Lady Sabrina, and the extremely dangerous and violent Mercy), all actors have become the ‘losers’ of the neoliberal capitalist system. They have therefore entrepreneurially adapted their own game, markets, and Symbolic Order. From the masculinity of the working-class actors to the entitlement of the privileged nobility, by exercising  ‘special liberty’ to lever themselves above the herd and achieve their instrumental and expressive aims (Kotzé, 2024), often violently but with ‘criminal fraternal civility’, all operate in pursuit of that which has been made absent in the restrictive  construct of the lawful neoliberal economy. By diverting their Freudian libidinal drives to fill the Lacanian void with the jouissance of illicit free market competition and its rewards, their aggressive drives have become accustomed to operating on a lesser pacified scale suited to the competition rules of the illicit market in which they operate – a free market that functions in parallel to the legitimised economy, but one which has higher returns and requires intensified competition and aggression to function optimally. Let us face it, the organised crime world does not operate with the same civility as the current economic system, but then the current economic system does not offer the same equally accessible opportunities, and when cannabis becomes legal, criminal entrepreneurs already have the means of production, the market connections and the infrastructure in place to continue their operations and maintain their competitive advantage.

    Reference List

    Dyer, C. (2000) Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London.

    Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. In Watson, K (Ed.) Assaulting the Past. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Ultra-realism’. In DeKeseredy, W., and Dragiewicz, M. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Horsley, M., Kotzé, J. and Hall, S. (2015) ‘The maintenance of orderly disorder: Law, markets and the pseudo-pacification process’. Journal on European History of Law. 6. Pp. 18-29.

    Johnston, A., (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm’. The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Messina, M. (2022) ‘Exploring vertical integration in the supply chain’. Forbes. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/exploring-vertical-integration-in-the-supply-chain/.

    Tudum by Netflix (2025) The Gentlemen cast is full of Nobility and Scoundrels. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-gentlemen-series-cast.

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  • Zemiogenesis and the Rudakubana case

    Steve Hall

    “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”
    Jacques Lacan

    Before, during and after his heinous crime, Axel Rudakubana clearly displayed symptoms associated with the psychopathy spectrum. The symptoms must have been noticed by parents and professionals, and they must have aroused some suspicions. Forty years ago, Rudakubana would have been at least eligible – if not guaranteed a placement – for time-limited confinement in a secure ‘assessment centre’ awaiting diagnosis and a recommended treatment programme. In the 1980s I worked with a dangerous youngster and his darkly obsessed family in such a centre. In this case, as in many others, all professionals agreed that earlier therapeutic and medical intervention would have produced better results.


    In 2019, after years of budget cuts, only 14 such centres – renamed Secure Children’s Homes – remained in the UK. Some of these homes are failing inspections, there’s a long waiting list, and children are referred only as a last resort after numerous failed interventions by the social services and the criminal justice system. Glancing briefly through the official literature, it’s quite noticeable that the cost of running such places features heavily in the analyses. Those who believe the myth that taxes and borrowing fund public spending will be quite easily convinced that the government simply can’t afford adequate services for young people with mental health issues, some of which, as we have just seen, can be deadly.


    As the children’s mental health crisis deepens, we are forced to live under the neoliberal cult of austerity, the objective of which is to run down public services ready for privatisation. It is aided and abetted by the postmodernist cult of moral relativism and the new left cult of minimal intervention and anti-psychiatry. This toxic combination of institutionalised parsimony, negligence and naivety demonises any form of moral, scientific or political authority – no matter how humane, advanced and rational – as an existential threat to the freedom of the individual. It also conveniently supplies the neoliberal politicians and financiers with yet another excuse for cost-cutting. Individual freedom is a great thing, no doubt. By the way, it’s also quite cheap to run, and neoliberals are convinced it can be cheaper still, at least where public money is involved.

    Each cult in the symbolically inefficent trio is now a veteran in the art of concocting excuses for itself and the other two tacit partners. The new three-headed master currently exerts its negative consequentialist power over all of us – I command that everyone shall be free from authority no matter what the real costs. Apart from the authority of the market, of course. The master is playing with children’s lives, both the tiny and often remediable minority suffering from the more dangerous forms of mental illness and their innocent victims. The current Anglo-American, late liberal way of life is, in the term used by ultra-realists, zemiogenic.

  • The Society of Enemies: 1. Identity Politics and Crime

    Steve Hall

    The extreme liberal activism associated with identity politics and sexual/gender politics continues to poison the well. Recently, myself and others made the claim on social media that the ‘moral panic’ cult, backed up by the dubious statistical ‘crime decline’ narrative, has hampered effective research and the struggle against today’s largely hidden traditional and novel crimes, particularly child sexual abuse. Originally placing itself in opposition to media sensationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘authoritarian populism’, the cult’s principle of minimal intervention has backfired badly, creating an atmosphere of inertia, ignorance and anxiety in which hidden crime proliferates and hostile, authoritarian reactions are more likely.

    The recent child abuse scandal in the UK elicited immediate responses from self-appointed identitarian activists – individuals and small cabals who imagine themselves to be intrepid leaders of their cultural constituencies. Rather than argue for the return of universal ethics, intelligent research and rational, effective politics and policies, they claim that hateful ‘white cis-het reactionaries’ – people like me and some other ultra-realist researchers, I suppose, along with gender-critical feminists – are all abusers at heart, care nothing about crime, harm or abused children, and simply want to take advantage of the current outcry to accuse gay, trans and ethnic minority communities of harbouring a disproportionate number of paedophiles. Paranoid whataboutery seems to have replaced rational research and debate.

    When Kimberlé Crenshaw, with what we must assume were good intentions, proposed an intersectional matrix of race, gender, sexuality and class, she hoped we could transcend hostile identity politics to create new solidarities, where each group might develop an empathetic understanding of the others’ modes of subjugation. But no. Activists, mimicking the zero-sum mindset of ethnonationalists, instead drew upon the intersectional matrix to emphasise what they feel – not ‘know’ – is the timeless existential hatred felt towards them by the groups on the other ends of the intersecting axes. In an emotivist culture, of course, what people ‘feel’ assumes the elevated position of absolute knowledge beyond question.

    The activists’ solution? They demand that we immediately subvert and abandon all traditional identities, institutions – including the family – and moral orders to become like them…. free-floating, undefined individuals, the pioneers of a beautiful, free, progressive future. Was that ever going to work, or was it the road to intersectional paranoia, the return of reaction and what Simon Winlow and and I once called ‘the society of enemies’ ? A society in which inherently antagonistic cultural groups imagine a world full of hostile others who don’t want them to exist, and immediately react with aggressive denunciations that can elicit and affirm precisely that assumption amongst the others they blame? This is the polar opposite of the ‘tolerance’ that liberals claimed to be one of their founding principles. Has post-structuralist identity politics bequeathed us with the most destructive, multipolar self-fulfilling prophecy we have ever known? Is this danger inherent in accelerated cultural progressivism in the midst of declining economies and institutional orders? An accidental ‘fatal strategy’? We need to know.