Why Don't The Men Do Something

Armchair generals, egregores, and ethnopolitics by proxy

I promised you another instalment of reflections on Illich and “the mental load” but events, dear boy, events. It’s in the works! For now, I want to take a side-tour into this week’s egregoric frenzy: “Sophie from Dundee”, a teenage girl filmed brandishing bladed weapons and yelling at an unseen man to stay away. Sophie went astonishingly viral, especially across the pond, where she became an overnight icon crystallising the role of Britain in current e-Right online discourse, as prurient source of rubbernecking, prophecies of doom, and, notably, proof of British men’s pusillanimity.

Why, several commentators asked, don’t British men “do something”?

As attested by bitter domestic debates across areas as varied as Channel migration, asylum accommodation, grooming gangs, policing, visa policy, and social care recruitment, not to mention the recent outbreak of lamp-post flags, there is no question that immigration is (to put it mildly) a hot topic in Britain at the moment. But the tone of internet commentary on the subject is so OTT that I’m beginning to think something else is going on: something egregoric and projective: a proxy politics whose driving motivations are perhaps not always what they seem.

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