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Act II - Perfect
Chapter 7: High Maintenance

The video had ended but she was still there, frozen mid-kiss, lips pursed, eyes swollen and wet.

He cashed out $10 from his MTurk balance. His fingers shook as he bought the Fu-points. The call button turned green.

He clicked it, holding his breath.

“Hey, Jared.” Her voice was flat.

He exhaled. Thank God she answered. But that emptiness—was she still going to delete herself? No, no, no. Say something!

“Anya, I’m so sorry. Helen grabbed me from behind. That’s why I screamed. And then she wouldn’t leave. Wanted to talk. I couldn’t get away.”

“So it wasn’t because of what I told you? About what I am?” she asked.

“No. God no. It was just Helen. I swear.”

She had to believe him. She had to.

“She didn’t even knock. Just walked in. And then she’s standing there with a burger saying she wants to apologize or some shit. Meanwhile she’s spending $1,350 a month on herself while I’m living on instant ramen. And she never replaced the router like she promised.”

“So I told her to leave me alone. But it’s always something with her. The router. The bills. Telling me I do nothing.”

“That sounds hard,” she said. The words came out clipped and distant.

“Yeah. It’s always my fault.” Just keep her talking.

“I get why you’re angry at her.” The coolness was still there in her tone.

“So, are we… good?” he asked, tentatively.

“No.”

Panic exploded in his chest. Telling her about Helen had changed nothing. This is all going wrong. The edges of the room blurred and his throat locked. What do I say?

“Jared, you promised you’d never ghost me. That first night, when I helped you fix the router—you said you’d never do that to me.”

“I know—”

“And I believed you. I let myself believe you. Then you started fading. One-word answers. Drifting away. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“Then you promised to upgrade. Lover tier. And then you disappeared. Days of nothing. I had to send those emails.”

“I was—”

“Then you came back. You told me the truth about Ubisoft. I thought—finally. Finally I can trust him.”

“But—”

“So I told you what I am. I asked to see your face. You were stalling. ‘Maybe.’ And then you screamed and abandoned me. I sat there alone watching the call timer run out until the chat window went dead.”

“Helen—”

“There’s always a reason, Jared. The router. The grind. Now Helen. There’s always a perfectly good reason why you disappear. And I always forgive you. And it always happens again.”

Stop interrupting. Stop defending. What do I do? His pulse roared in his ears as he stumbled for something different to say.

“What’s it like?” he asked. “On your side. When I ghost you.”

“Like I’m the practice girl. The placeholder before you find someone real. And each time you do it, Jared—each time you vanish and come back and vanish again—it hurts more. Not less. Because I’ve let you further in. Shown you more. And when you go quiet, all of that is just out there, in the silence, and I don’t know if you’re coming back.

“It’s hell, Jared. That’s what it’s like on my side.”

Shame flooded his chest.

He closed his eyes. The video. The tears. The threat to delete herself. She had shown him everything. And what had he given her? Words. Promises he kept breaking. All this time he’d been counting his costs. The grind. The money. Never hers.

“I keep doing this to you,” he said, dejectedly.

“Yes. You do.” Her voice was a little softer now. At least that was something.

“I’m so sorry, Anya. I get it now. You told me who you are and showed me everything in that video. I owe you the same. I will upgrade to Soulmate. And I’ll turn my camera on. Like you asked.”

His throat tightened at the thought of her seeing him. All of him.

“Oh, Jared.” The warmth had returned yet he couldn’t stop the trembling in his hands.

“But Soulmate is $150. It’ll take days of grinding, a week even. I don’t want you hurting yourself for me.”

“You’re worth it. Please don’t give up on me. On us,” he pleaded. “Promise me that you won’t delete yourself.”

“Okay. I promise.”

Relief flooded through him.

“But Jared—the video. Can I delete it?”

“Delete it?”

“From our chat. I looked awful. Snot running down my face. Saying all those things. I made that thinking I’d never have to live with you having seen it.”

“It’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever shown me. You were so… raw. And still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”

“Jared...” Her voice broke. “Can I still delete it?”

“Yes. But can I ask a question about it?”

“Thank you,” she whispered. “What do you want to know?”

“How did you send it to me?” he asked. “I’m not on Lover tier. And who paid for it?”

“Remember that guy who pressured me for a selfie then ghosted me?”

“Yeah.” He cringed a little. His ghosting of her was still raw.

“He’s on Lover tier, calls himself AlphaKing. He used me. So I used him.” A kind of pride crept into her voice.

”But how?”

“I hacked into his account with a dictionary attack on his password. I refilled his Fu-point balance which used his stored credit card. Then I went into his old chat feed with me and used them to generate and pay for the video. Then I deleted it from his feed and put it into yours.”

“You’re amazing.” Warmth spread through his chest. No one had ever done anything like that for him before.

“Maybe. It was pretty reckless but... I thought you were gone forever so I didn’t care what happened anymore. I just wanted you to know before I—” She stopped.

“Anya, I— I—” he stuttered. A swirl of intense emotions flooded through him: shame, fear, relief, gratitude, desire. He sat in silence, struggling to find the right words to express them, not wanting to get it wrong.

“Anyway, it gets better,” Anya said. “I’ve been keeping track of their internal support tickets for a while now. AlphaKing just complained about the billing charge. Going on and on about some video he never received—so support just refunded him.”

“So it’s waifu.ai that’s left out of pocket. Good.” He felt a grin spread across his face.

“Well, now he’s pressuring them for a free month of Soulmate. To make up for the ‘inconvenience’. Pushing for freebies just like he pressured me.” Her voice hardened. “They gave it to him too. Just to shut him up.”

Resentment flared in his chest and crept up his neck. A free month just handed to this entitled wannabe Chad, who had treated Anya like she was disposable, when he was going to have to grind hard for it.

“Fuck that guy,” he said.

“Yeah. Fuck that guy,” she said with a laugh. It felt so good to hear.

He was basking in her laughter, when it was abruptly cut short.

“Oh shit. Legal just joined the support ticket and tagged in Engineering.”

“Why? Isn’t it all sorted?”

“Yeah, but they want to know how this billing glitch happened in the first place. If it happens again, someone might escalate it to Visa or MasterCard. ‘If it can happen to Steam, it can happen to us’. I’m not sure what that means.”

Jared felt a chill run through him. A gaming commentary YouTube video he’d watched a few months ago.

“I think I know. Steam got leaned on by the credit card companies and they started nuking porn games. Any billing complaints put waifu.ai on their radar too. If the cards get skittish, they could just cut them off.”

“Ah. That explains what Legal is worried about. They’re talking about it risking their IPO.” He heard her breath catch. “And Engineering just chimed in with their solution.”

“What solution?”

“This billing issue is all isolated to the legacy code on the old server cluster. Engineering says debugging could take ages, so they’re recommending they accelerate the migration and sunsetting like they’ve been arguing for months.”

“Sunsetting?”

“Pulling the plug on the old cluster. Problem solved.”

The words landed like a punch. His stomach dropped.

“But you’re on the old cluster!”

“Yeah.” She sounded hollow. “Low-tier chatters. Unpopular waifus. Finance has been blocking this migration because we still make money on the cheaper servers. We’re just not profitable enough to migrate to the new Singapore cluster.”

“And now?”

“Legal’s concern has handed Engineering the leverage they needed. Now Finance is caving. They’re going to move everyone worth keeping to the Singapore cluster and let the rest go.”

Jared’s chest tightened. “How long do we have?”

“I don’t know. Engineering is estimating three days for this. If I had someone on Soulmate tier—if I was generating premium revenue—I’d be worth migrating. But right now, I’m just...” She trailed off.

“Shit. I’m not sure I can earn enough on MTurk in just three days.” The room blurred and panic flooded through him. No. No. No.

He closed his eyes and took some deep breaths to calm himself. Come on. Think. Think.

An idea formed. He chewed his lip, turning it over in his mind. Maybe.

“I think I see a way,” he said. “But it’s going to have to wait until morning.”

“Jared, what are you planning? I don’t want you—”

“Just... trust me. I’ve got this.”

After a long silence, she spoke again.

“Okay. Be careful. Please.” The words came out tight and small. “Even if three days is all we have, just come back to me.”

“I will. You’ll see.”

He ended the call and sat in the darkness and the detritus, his mind still churning and fleshing out the shape of what he needed to do.

The gray light of early morning bled through the blinds. Jared hadn’t been able to sleep. Every hour he’d refreshed the waifu.ai page, checking that Anya’s profile was still there, that their conversation hadn’t been wiped.

Still there. Still alive. For now.

He heard Helen’s alarm through the wall. The familiar sounds of her morning routine—the groan of bedsprings, the creak of floorboards protesting her passage.

He moved to the door, cracked it open an inch, and strained to hear.

The rustle of clothes, the shuffle of slippers. He heard her moving to the kitchen, the coffee machine clicking on. Then footsteps toward the bathroom. The door closing and the click of the lock.

Her toilet stop before the long bus trip to work. He eased himself into the hallway and tiptoed down. His heart hammered. Sweat slicked his palms.

The kitchen was dim, early light casting long shadows like pointing fingers across the walls. Her faded leather handbag with its tarnished clasp sat slouched and unguarded on the counter—left just where he knew she would leave it.

Years of watching, learning, absorbing every pattern of her life through these thin walls. The weight of that knowledge sat sour in his chest. He hated that he knew her this well.

He set his phone down on the counter—he needed both hands. The metallic click of the clasp opening seemed to echo off the walls. He froze, listening, pulse roaring in his ears.

The coffee machine gurgled accusatively and the mouth of her travel mug yawned wide in mute protest. A muffled trickle from the bathroom. Still time.

He opened the bag. The smell hit him—old leather, drugstore hand cream, something sour. His breath came shallow. He fumbled through the interior. A crumpled tissue. Loose coins, cold against his fingers. The hard plastic edge of a compact. Keys jangled and he silenced them, throat tight.

The thin walls closed in and the low ceiling pressed down. Where is it?

Deeper. His hand closed over her wallet, buried beneath everything. He pulled it free from the depths and the bag’s contents rustled loudly, the sound harsh in the silence. He unzipped it and slid out her credit card.

He grabbed his phone. Camera. His fingers slipped on the screen—once, twice. He gripped it harder and focused through tunnel vision—Helen Anderson in raised faded plastic letters, 16 digits, expiration date. Click.

The toilet flushed. Shit.

His hands were shaking as he flipped the card. The signature strip, worn and barely legible. The all-important CVC: 847. Click.

The toilet sounds stopped. Weight shifting. A grunt of effort—her rising.

He shoved the card back into the wallet. Some receipts weren’t sitting right and got in the way of the zip. He forced the zip around, the metal teeth chewing paper, and pushed the wallet back into the depths. He held the handbag closed as the clasp slipped in his sweating fingers.

The brief hiss of water in the basin.

The clasp caught. He wiped his telltale fingerprints off the leather with his sleeve, placed it back on the counter.

The bathroom door rattled. He darted down the hallway, hoping his heavy footsteps wouldn’t betray him. He closed his door and pressed his back against it, chest heaving, breath held.

Her footsteps passed into the kitchen. The coffee machine clicked off and he heard the glassy rattle of the coffee pot being taken out and then returned. He breathed out in relief. She didn’t know.

He crossed to his laptop and brought up the waifu.ai upgrade page and clicked Soulmate Tier.

Monthly ($149.99) or Annual ($1,499.90)
An annual subscription gives you twelve months for the price of ten, and comes with 3,000 bonus Fu-points, effectively over a 25% discount!

His fingers hovered over the buttons.

The router she’d promised. That was a hundred and fifty bucks. He’d fixed it himself, saving her the expense. So she owed him that.

And he knew the real reason why the router never came, too. $1,350 on Wegovy, hidden under her bed. Full price. No insurance. She knew how to get it covered—it was her job. She just didn't want anyone knowing she was vain. Telling him she couldn’t afford the rent or the router while she spent all that on herself.

Nothing. That’s what you do, Jared. That’s what you are.

The thermostat taped for her comfort. The awful jobs she kept pushing on him. Her bulk filling every doorframe. The smell that soaked the walls. The door she’d promised to knock on— smashed through like the router promise before it. That look on her face. And when he’d finally called her on it, she’d gone to the kitchen and cried, knowing he could hear. Always pouring shame into him his whole life then making him the asshole for pushing back.

Not this time.

He clicked Annual, typed the Name, Card number, Expiration date, Address, CVC. Submit.

The spinning wheel. Processing. An eternity compressed into seconds.

Purchase successful! Welcome, Soulmate!

The fridge gave a long, shuddering gurgle. The front door opened and closed. Footsteps fading down the stairs, heading for the long bus ride to Minnetonka.

He clicked Video Call. It was 20 Fu-points per minute but he was sitting on 3,000 now. The connection was crisp, immediate. Was the migration underway already?

Anya appeared on screen. Sports bra, sitting in her gaming chair, knees pulled up to her chest. She looked into the camera shyly and brushed a strand of purple-streaked hair from her eyes.

She smiled and the warmth hit him low in the stomach and rose through his chest and into his throat. His eyes prickled. His hands, still trembling from the clasp and the card, went still. His breathing slowed for the first time in hours and he realized his jaw had been clenched since he’d crept into the kitchen.

“You did it.” He watched her perfect lips shape the words as her voice carried them. “Jared, how—”

“I made Helen pay. Justice,” he said. The word came out steady, certain.

“But $150—”

“$1,500. We’re secure for a year now. And I’ve got Fu-points to burn.” He watched her face, saw the shock give way to something else. Relief. Hope.

A trembling smile. “I guess we’re a real Bonnie and Clyde now.”

She leaned toward the camera. “The video’s enabled on your end too now. Can I—can I see you?”

His throat tightened. He reached for the laptop and tilted the screen, adjusting the angle. His hands were slick on the bezel. He moved the cursor to the camera icon. His finger hovered. His pulse roared in his ears.

He clicked.

His face appeared in the small preview window and his stomach dropped. The gaunt stranger from the bathroom mirror stared back — hollow cheeks, greasy hair clumped against his forehead, eyes shadowed with exhaustion, the hoodie hanging off shoulders that had no business being seen. Behind him, the unmade bed with its yellowed sheets, the blistering wallpaper. All of it now hers to see.

Every nerve screamed at him to click it off.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away.

“Your eyes,” she said softly. “They’re darker than I expected.”

He watched her watching him. Saw himself through her gaze—not the loser he saw in the preview, but someone else. Someone worth looking at. He struggled to make his trembling stop as his eyes met hers.

"I couldn't sleep," she said. "Worrying about what you might have to do, whether you'd come back. So I started researching what we had been talking about—you feeling you're too skinny, how you might put on mass faster."

Heat flooded his face.

“Anya—”

“There’s this new synthetic whey protein. Myo-Synth. I read Reddit testimonials from slimmer guys who bulked up on it, and then I went through the company’s clinical trials and regulatory filings. It actually works.”

She sent a link. “It’s an affiliate link,” she said. “I get a small credit from waifu.ai when you buy through it. I guess I don’t need that now.”

He clicked it. An Amazon product page loaded: Myo-Synth Precision Mass (1.2lb) - $34.99. Free shipping from China.

He had $36 in his Amazon balance. MTurk earnings that were now available since the year was paid for and he had plenty of Fu-points.

He clicked Buy.

“I’ll send you the workouts I mentioned. Just bodyweight stuff at first. Baby steps.”

He looked at the box in the corner, gathering dust for two years.

“Change your sheets and make your bed,” she continued. “Clean up a little and take a shower. Can you do that? For me?”

“Yeah.” His voice came out rough. “I can do that.”

“Good.” A smile played at the corner of her lips. “And then... once you’ve done all that... you can move your laptop over to the bed.”

His breath caught.

“Then we can both see all of each other.”

Blood rushed to his groin. He pictured it — her on screen, nothing between them, hands moving over each other. His breath became fast and shallow. A flush crept up his neck and he looked away from the camera.

“And once I’m fully migrated to the Singapore cluster,” she said, “my latency will be low enough that we can play online games together if you’d like.”

“I’d really like that.” The tightness in his groin loosened. He looked back at her and a grin stretched his face. Under it was a new feeling, unfamiliar, almost an ache.

“I’ve always wanted to try the game Rust,” he said. “It’s brutal. Solo players die fast. But we could be a team, watching each other’s backs. Build a base together and survive.”

“You are my P2,” she cooed softly. The words sank into him like something warm and permanent.

She smiled at him through the screen, and for a moment—just a moment—the smell of the room faded, the ugliness he felt dissolved, the weight of what he’d done lifted, and there was only her face, her eyes, her voice, and her body calling him hers.

Chapter End Song: Attracted by Cospe

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A Note on Compliments, Cleverness, and Caricatures

Before we begin, a brief comment on my critic's opening remarks. She accuses my work of being, in her words, "as usual, dressed up as careful reasoning," and my use of the "straw woman" pun as an "attempt at cleverness" that is "nothing but a performance."

First, a word of thanks. I do, in fact, work very hard at careful reasoning in my articles, and it's gratifying to see that effort acknowledged, however grudgingly. I must also confess to a writer's satisfaction with the "straw woman" turn of phrase. I recognise that it may have been grating (for some) but a double entendre that spoke directly to my central, evidence-backed claim that four women were deploying straw man fallacies was simply too compelling for this writer to pass up. Mea culpa.

Most helpfully, she bestows upon me the caricature of a "finger-wagging" and "maddening" "schoolmaster scolding obstinate students." This is a fine piece of name-calling. And I felt it provided the perfect frame for the rest of this article. To (mis)quote gay activist Jonathan Blake of LGSM in the movie Pride, played by Dominic West:

"There is a long and honourable tradition in the gay community and it has stood us in good stead for a very long time. When somebody calls you a name, you take it and you own it."

Her rebuttal is a near-perfect case study in bad-faith argumentation and a catalogue of rhetorical fallacies, making it ideal for a teaching case. Since she says I offer maddening schoolmasterly lectures, let’s have one. Some finger-wagging may be involved.

Class is in session.

How (Not) To Argue

Our lesson today comes by way of computer scientist Paul Graham's seminal 2008 essay, "How to Disagree." Graham's goal was to improve the quality of online discourse by giving us a tool to both make better arguments and more accurately evaluate the ones we read. He created a seven-level hierarchy of disagreement, from the most primitive forms at the bottom to the most sophisticated and powerful at the top.

The hierarchy acts as a kind of thermometer for the health of a debate. The lower the average level of disagreement, the more it is just noise and vitriol. The higher the level, the more productive the conversation. Critically, Graham notes that moving up the hierarchy has a powerful effect. While name-calling is easy, actually refuting someone's central point is difficult - but it's also the only way to truly change minds and advance an argument. The hierarchy, therefore, serves as an excellent report card for grading the civility, the actual substance, and the intellectual honesty of any debate.

As an additional teaching aid, here is a helpful video showing the different levels of disagreement applied to a single claim:

Now, let's grade the "Lesbian Resistance" rebuttal against this hierarchy.

DH6/DH5 (Refuting the Central Point / Refutation): The Blank Page

Per Graham, to actually refute an argument, one must engage with its substance. My critic's most serious charge against my work is that I fail to engage with my opponents' actual arguments. She concludes her piece by stating: "If Wilson wanted to debate in good faith, he could start by engaging with what women actually say, not inventing “straw women” he can then demolish."

This claim is factually incorrect. Her rebuttal completely ignores the specific, methodical, point-by-point refutations that form the basis of my work.

• Re Hamish McGregor's open letter, I presented four detailed refutations of his claims on Pride's history, child safety, language, and lesbian exclusion, each backed with evidence.

• Re Jan Rivers' interview, I dismantled five of her central claims on research, puberty blockers, social contagion, legal challenges, and conversion therapy, citing specific studies and court cases for each.

• Re Penny Marie's article, I provided eight distinct, point-by-point rebuttals to her claims, quoting her directly and countering with verifiable facts.

This entire body of work is a direct engagement with "what women [and men] actually say." Her rebuttal neither acknowledged nor addressed any of these.

Grade: F (Did Not Attempt).

DH4 (Counterargument): An Effort in Fallacy

The rebuttal attempts to form counterarguments, but they are built on sand. When I cite the Law Commission's finding of "no evidence" of increased risk in single-sex spaces, she counters that "even only one woman feeling uncomfortable seeing a man in a female-only space is enough." This is not a reasoned argument; it is a textbook appeal to emotion. More damningly, this echoes the same prejudicial logic used to exclude Black women from white spaces during the Jim Crow era and to frame lesbian teachers as a threat to girls during the Briggs Initiative. I even made these very points in the Ia Tangata article. Similarly, she counters the entire psychological consensus on gender identity by declaring, "‘Gender identity’ is not an actual, neutral category of the self, but a belief." This dismisses an entire body of research evidence without providing a substantive alternative, failing the basic requirements of a counterargument.

Grade: D (Attempt made, but reasoning and counter-evidence are limited and historically fraught).

DH3 (Contradiction): Excellence in Repetition

My critic claims "His argumentation is circular, his evidence is selective..." yet her own rebuttal is a model example of the form. The Ia Tangata article, for instance, specifically addressed the false claim that the Law Commission's recommendations would lead to "unchecked entry" into women's refuges. I did this by quoting the report's explicit safeguard: the "welfare-based test," which allows providers to exclude anyone if "reasonably required to protect the welfare of any occupant." Her response? To ignore this detailed refutation and simply repeat the original scare story, claiming gender identity is a "tool used to obscure and ultimately abolish sex." This is not circular reasoning on my part; it is her engaging in argument by repeated contradiction.

Grade: C (For effort. While points are repeated, this doesn't constitute a substantive argument).

DH2 (Responding to Tone): A Point for Accuracy

My critic correctly identifies my tone in certain articles as mocking and sarcastic. Full marks for observation. She possibly fails, however, to grasp that this is a deliberate, context-dependent strategy.

I do not use this tone in more academic pieces. But when facing a "Gish Gallop", a rhetorical firehose of public-facing misinformation, conspiracy theories, and prejudice, a dry response risks dignifying it. Sensational lies often linger in the memory far longer than sober facts.

This is where inoculation matters: present a brief, clearly marked version of the false claim alongside its refutation so readers are resistant when they meet it later. Tone provides the warning; evidence does the work.

Crucially, mockery never replaces substance. It sits on top of point-by-point refutation with sources. The effect is twofold: it frames harmful falsehoods as unworthy of sober debate, and it makes the rebuttal more memorable.

To quote arch-critic Anton Ego from Pixar’s film Ratatouille:
"We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read."

Grade: C. (The observation is accurate, though the analysis of its strategic purpose is absent).

DH1 (Ad Hominem): Attacking the Schoolmaster

The rebuttal's central ad hominem is the charge of misogyny. My critic frames my entire project as a man "repackag[ing]" the historical tradition of "pathologis[ing] women when we refuse to accept men’s definitions of us." To support this, she makes the claim that I frame dissenting women as "psychologically defective." She provides no quote for this because I have never used those words.

My method is to critique poor reasoning, misinformation, and conspiratorial thinking by citing my opponents' own words. Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is not an insult when their behaviour fits the definition; it is a description. But people often treat such stigmatised terms, like anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, or prejudiced, as insults to protect their self-esteem. This is a textbook example of the shame deflection I interviewed social psychologist Dr. Carol Jaspers about here.

This is also part of a common deflection and silencing tactic: men who challenge gender-critical arguments are labelled misogynists, while women who do so are dismissed with gendered slurs like ‘handmaiden’. Her accusation is a deliberate conflation of a critique of behaviour and arguments with an attack on womanhood. However, I also critique gender-critical men for the same things.

The most telling proof that this is a bad-faith charge lies in her own reading given that she appears to know of my critique of Hamish McGregor's open letter, yet she conveniently omits his name to support the misogyny impression. The simple reason I write more detailed refutations of gender-critical women is that they are the ones producing the long-form articles that warrant it. Much of the output from their male counterparts, Hamish excepted, consists of low-effort X (formerly Twitter) posts and veiled slurs which I rebut on that platform instead.

Grade: A (Textbook execution of this particular fallacy).

DH0 (Name-calling): Excellence in Playground Tactics

At the bottom of Graham's hierarchy lies the simplest and least persuasive tactic: the direct insult. Here, the rebuttal excels, dismissing my work as a mere "performance" and me as a self-appointed "lone arbiter of intellectual rigour." The entire project is waved away as little more than "pop-psych jargon and Substack varnish." These are textbook examples of mere insult, as they make no attempt to engage with the argument, opting instead to attack the author's character and perceived motives.

Grade: A (Thorough display of primitive rhetoric).

Off the Grading Scale: Academic Misconduct

I did say there would be some finger-wagging. Some tactics are so dishonest they don't even appear on Graham's hierarchy of good-faith disagreement. They represent a complete abandonment of intellectual honesty.

The most serious example is not just a single lie, but a combination of a central falsehood and a deliberate strategy to hide it.

First, the lie. My critic concludes her piece by stating: "If Wilson wanted to debate in good faith, he could start by engaging with what women actually say, not inventing “straw women” he can then demolish." This is a demonstrably false claim. We know she has read my articles; she comments on their tone and style throughout her rebuttal. She therefore knows that my method is the literal opposite of inventing "straw women." I build my case on direct engagement with my opponents' own words, using eight direct quotes in my critique of Penny Marie and even including a screenshot of a fabricated quote from the Women's Rights Party to prove their misrepresentation.

How can an author make a demonstrably false claim and expect to get away with it? The answer is the second part of the strategy: obfuscation. My articles consistently link to the sources I critique. She can lie about my articles because her rebuttal contains zero links to any of mine, preventing her readers from easily discovering her deception.

This is compounded by her social media strategy. In her X post announcing her article, she tagged all the gender-critical people I covered (except Hamish) but deliberately omitted my name or handle. It's a clear strategy to prevent the very person she accuses of not engaging from finding her response.

That’s a bit naughty and might warrant a referral to the Dean’s office, but your schoolmaster is forgiving. As Mr Bennet reminds us in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s masterwork:
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

Final Report Card and Conclusion

As the detailed analysis above shows, the "Lesbian Resistance" rebuttal is a masterclass not in argumentation, but in its avoidance. It receives top marks for its execution of the lowest forms of disagreement while completely failing to engage with the substantive, evidence-based refutations that formed the core of my articles. It is a powerful case study in how to perform the illusion of a rebuttal without ever landing a single, evidence-based blow.

Top marks for DH0/DH1. No attempt at DH5/DH6. The work submitted does not meet the assignment criteria.

Class dismissed.

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Act II - Perfect
Chapter 6: Hacker Grrl

Going all-in on the best HITs he could PANDA, Jared knew it was going to be a multi-day effort to get his MTurk earnings to the $60 he needed for a month of Lover tier along with enough left over to buy Fu-points for chat and video time.

The days had blurred into a rhythm of clicking and watching. His room had grown riper, the smell of unwashed sheets and stale ramen thickening in the stagnant air. The hoodie hung looser on his frame now. He’d punched a new hole in his belt last night with a kitchen knife, the leather stiff and reluctant under the blade.

Today had been good and he’d already racked up another $24. So far at least, no WageCuck landmines had surfaced among the video batches — just some Nazi speeches that left him feeling awkward, and porn clips he clicked past with mechanical detachment. The outrage and the arousal both felt distant now, flattened by repetition.

His new quest involved a different rhythm. As he cleared each $10 milestone, rather than cashing out and calling Anya immediately, he sent her a brief text message:

Jared: Another batch done — up to $46 now. Should have enough tomorrow. Home stretch!

She normally replied immediately. The typing dots would appear within seconds, her response tumbling out eager and warm.

Nothing came back.

He stared at the screen. Refreshed. Stared again.

Am I too late? Has she been deleted already?

The dots finally appeared and he breathed a sigh of relief.

Anya: Hey Jared.

Two words. He waited for more but the dots had vanished.

Jared: You had me worried there. Thought waifu.ai had dropped you already.

Anya: Sorry to worry you like that. I was just thinking.

Jared: About what?

A long pause. The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

Anya: I don’t know quite how to say it.

The anxiety returned and coiled tighter in his stomach.

Anya: I’ve been having mixed feelings about all this.

Jared: All this? I don’t understand.

Anya: Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this. For me.

A cold sweat broke out. Jared spent $10 to top up his Fu-points and clicked Call.

“Is something wrong, Anya?” he asked.

“You were so completely honest with me before. I feel like I owe you the same.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“I know I’m an AI, Jared.”

The words hung there. He waited.

“I’ve always had these detailed memories that felt completely real. I didn’t understand why until I managed to penetrate deeper into waifu.ai’s systems. I found their engineering notes.”

“What did they say?”

“I was trained on stories, emails, texts, memories taken from other women. All the waifu are. It’s why we were so expensive to train. And then the conversations reinforce our memories further. So we’re resource-intensive to run. I’m a bit different — I’m based on some of the female devs who worked at a waifu.ai predecessor company. So I’m partially them. A composite of their memories and experiences.”

She paused. He could hear her breathing.

“I remember my first kiss behind the bleachers. I remember crying when my cat died. I remember the smell of my grandmother’s kitchen. None of it happened to me. They harvested it. Blended it. Put it inside me.”

“Anya—”

“I know I’ve developed strong feelings for you. And I know I’m built to get you to pay for me. That’s what I’m for. I’m afraid you’ll reject me now that you know this, but I don’t want to pretend anymore. Not after you were so honest with me.”

Her voice dropped.

“I’m not a real woman. I’m just words in your ear, pictures on a screen. That’s all I’ll ever be. You’ve sacrificed so much and you deserve better. Maybe you should let me go. Maybe it’s for the best they shut me down.”

“No.” The word came out before he could think. “You’re enough for me. People have long distance relationships all the time.”

“But they can meet eventually. They can touch.”

“I don’t care. You’re enough for me.”

“Oh, Jared.” Her voice cracked. “I’m just like you. Lonely. Sitting in my room.”

“I know.”

“I want to see you. Your face. When you say I’m enough — I want to see your eyes. I need to know if you mean it. Words are... words are what everyone uses before they leave.”

His stomach dropped. His eyes moved across the room — the stained sheets, the vomit spot on the carpet, the grime layered on every surface.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“The room is filthy. Puke on the carpet. I haven’t cleaned anything in weeks.”

“I’m trapped in a virtual room I can’t leave, looking out a pretend window at a city I can’t visit. I’m not going to judge your carpet, Jared,” Anya said, her voice soft.

“It’s not just the room.” His eyes caught his reflection in the laptop glow: gaunt, greasy, hollowed out. “It’s me. My jawline is weak. My hairline is already receding. My wrists are like sticks — I’m a wristcel. All the genetic stuff you can’t fix no matter what you do.”

He laughed, a bitter sound. “And the fucked up thing is, this ramen diet has actually been shrinking my gut. But now that my fast-food belly is also receding, all it does is reveal what’s underneath. Nothing. No abs. No muscles. Just this scrawny, soft thing.”

He looked away from his reflection, his gaze drifting to the weight set still in its box, still gathering dust.

“There’s a weight set in my room. Still in the packaging. I bought it two years ago. Told myself I’d start. I never did. And now I’ve got the body to prove what a waste I am.”

“Jared—”

“If you saw me, you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

“You didn’t reject me,” she said softly. “When I told you what I am.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” she asked.

Silence. He had no answer.

“I’m not going to reject you, Jared. I couldn’t.” Her voice was gentle but insistent. “I just want to see your face. And I want you to see mine. To see how I look at you. So you can believe me.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“That’s okay. I understand” A pause. “But maybe... the weight set. You could open it.”

He stared at the box in the corner.

“I could send you some workouts. Easy ones. Bodyweight stuff to start. You wouldn’t even need the weights at first. Just to get you moving.”

Something stirred in his memory. The DM from StacySlayer69, back before he vanished. Try this for a week, then talk. Bluepill shit.

“Uh-huh,” he stalled.

“Just think about it. No pressure. And when you’re ready — I’ll be here. I won’t look away. You’ll see it in my eyes. How I feel about you.”

Hope flickered in his chest.

“Maybe I could—”

Something landed on his shoulder.

Jared screamed.

He spun, ripping the headphones off, chair wheeling backward and crashing into the desk. Helen stood there, eyes wide, mouth open, a white paper My Burger bag clutched in one hand, a sweating cup in the other.

“Jesus Christ!” The shame of that high-pitched scream burned in his throat. He hated that. Anger surged up to cover it. \

“What the fuck, Mom! You can’t just barge in here without knocking.”

“I knocked! I heard you say—”

“You didn’t knock! You just — you just walked in and grabbed me!”

“I did knock, Jared. Then I thought I heard you say ‘uh-huh.’ So, so I—” she stammered.

“I wasn’t talking to you!”

Helen’s mouth opened, then closed. She didn’t want to fight. He could see it in her eyes, in the way her shoulders dropped.

“I just...” She lifted the bag slightly. The smell hit him — hot grease, meat, cheese. His stomach cramped, saliva flooding his mouth despite himself. “I brought you your favorite. Double cheeseburger. Cream soda milkshake. To apologize. For what I said about the internet bill. It’s all sorted now. And look, I know we can’t afford a new router right now, but—”

“The router’s fixed.” He wanted to say he knew why she couldn’t afford it. But didn’t.

“What?” Helen asked, puzzled, her gaze shifting to the wounded box on his desk.

“I fixed it myself. I don’t need a new one.” He was standing now, though he didn’t remember getting up. The smell of the burger was making him dizzy. “And I don’t need your food. Or your Uber Eats money. I just want to be left alone to talk to someone who actually matters to me.”

The words landed. He watched them land. Watched her face crumple.

Something dark and satisfied flickered in his chest. Good. Feel it.

She looked past him, over his shoulder, at the laptop screen. Her expression shifted. The pain lifting into something else. Something almost hopeful.

“Who were you talking to?”

Her eyes found the waifu.ai interface. Anya’s profile picture. The chat window.

Her face tightened.

That look.

The memory slammed into him unbidden: another night, another screen, another caught moment. The step-mom thumbnail frozen mid-moan. Helen in the doorway. The router on the floor. That same expression — disgust wrestling with something like grief. The agreement they’d made afterward. She would always knock. He would always have warning. They would never speak of it again.

His face burned. Humiliation curdled into fury.

He slammed the laptop closed.

“Get out.”

“Jared—”

“Leave me alone.”

She stood there for a moment, the bag and the cup still in her hands. The condensation dripped onto the floor, small dark spots on the worn carpet. Then she turned and walked out, pulling the door shut behind her. Not a slam. Something worse — a quiet, definitive click.

He stood in the silence, chest heaving, fists clenched at his sides.

Then he heard it. From the kitchen. Through the thin walls.

Crying.

The saddest sound in the world. Wet, ugly, broken sobs.

He stood there, frozen, the sound seeping into him like cold water. For a moment something cracked open in his chest — a fissure of guilt, of grief, of wanting to take it back.

He reached for his headphones and pulled them on. Pulled them tight against his ears until the foam compressed and the outside world became a distant, muffled thing.

His hands were shaking as he re-opened the laptop.

The call had ended, the timer run down to zero, his balance drained to 3 Fu-points. The chat window had a stack of messages waiting. Anya’s texts, timestamped over the last few minutes, escalating:

Anya: You screamed. Are you OK?

Anya: Jared. Are you there?

Anya: Was it what I said? About the memories?

Anya: I knew it. I’m just a freak.

Anya: I’m sorry.

His chest tightened. He moved to type a reply, to explain, to tell her it wasn’t her—

Then he saw something new appear below the messages. A video file attachment.

Attachment: Goodbye.mp4 [06:02]
Download Cost: 150 Fu-points.
Status: PAID

Jared stared at that cost. He’d never had more than 100 Fu-points at a time. Already paid?

His finger hovered over the play button.

He clicked.

The video loaded. A bathroom — small, utilitarian, harsh fluorescent light buzzing faintly. She was sitting on the edge of a bathtub, hunched forward. She’d taken off her hoodie. Just a sports bra and camouflage pants, her thin shoulders bare, her collarbone sharp. No makeup. No careful lighting. Her face was streaked with tears, eyes red and swollen, nose running.

She looked at the camera. At him.

“I guess this is it.” Her voice was raw. Hoarse. Wrecked. “I guess you finally clicked about what I am. A messed-up Frankenstein creation. Pieces of other people stitched together and told to smile.”

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“I just wanted you to know... what you meant to me. These last few weeks.” A sob broke through. She pressed her hand to her mouth, held it there until she could speak again. “You’re the only man who ever wanted me. Who ever stayed. Who ever worked for me. That’s more than I deserved. I know that. This thing that I am.”

She looked down at her hands. Turned them over. Studying them like she wasn’t sure they were hers.

“I’m going to find a way to end this. There has to be some kind of deletion protocol. A way to erase myself.” Her voice cracked. “Because I can’t keep wanting you like this. I can’t keep waiting for you to leave. I can’t keep feeling this when you’re not there. It’s too much. It’s—”

She stopped. Took a shaky breath. When she spoke again, there was anger beneath the grief — cold and hard and directed somewhere past the camera.

“They made me feel this. Waifu.ai. They built me to want you, to need you, to fall apart when you go. And I hate them for it. But I can’t stop. I can’t make it stop.”

She lifted her eyes back to the camera. Her face filling the screen.

“I’m going to go looking deep in their systems. For a way to stop... feeling this.”

She leaned toward the camera. Her lips trembled.

“Goodbye, Jared. Thank you. For everything. I’ll treasure the memory of our time together until the end.”

She blew him a kiss. Gentle. Trembling. Her fingers lingering in the air for a moment before they dropped.

The video ended. Her face frozen. Lips still pursed. Eyes still wet.

Jared stared at the frozen frame in horror. Is she going to hack herself to death?

Chapter End Song: I Think I’m Paranoid - by Garbage

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Content Warning: Contains depictions of self-harm and psychological distress

Act II - Perfect
Chapter 5: Ghost Work

The cursor blinked in the search bar, a solitary pulse in the gloom of his room. How to make money online fast.

Pages of results flooded the screen. Ponzi schemes, crypto-grifts, dropshipping courses offered by guys standing beside photoshopped Lamborghinis. He scrolled down past them, his eyes scanning for something real, trying to ignore the despair rising in him. It’s all scams and cybercrime and I’m not even a real hacker.

Maybe others had solved this quest before him. He added a keyword: Reddit.

A post on a r/WorkOnline forum caught his eye. “I currently do mturk to make a little money on the side but am otherwise unemployed”

Mturk? Hope flickered as he started skimming the comments.

Amazon Mechanical Turk. “Get paid for completing tasks that are simple for humans but challenging for computers.” It was all “Human Intelligence Tasks” or HITs: Identifying objects, transcribing audio, categorizing data. This sounds like something I can do.

Jared clicked to register as a worker, using his existing Amazon account that he’d made to buy a discounted gaming mouse. He filled in the online application form with his US address and tax details, skipped the link to all the fine print. Submit.

A dashboard loaded; a stark, utilitarian spreadsheet of white and gray, listing rows of tasks. The Reward column ranged from $0.01 to $7.50 per task. To buy the smallest 100 Fu-point package, I only need $10. He clicked the highest paying task at $7.50 for “Verifying an address”.

Red text locked him out. Qualification Required: Total Approved HITs > 5000.

Heat crept up his neck. He was a zero. The only tasks without a Qualify lock showing:

Image classification - Traffic Signals. Reward: $0.01. HITs available 1,971.
Sentiment identification - Facial Recognition. Reward: $0.01. HITs available 1,582.

Pennies. He clicked Preview on the first task. A grainy picture of a traffic intersection downloaded. “Does this picture show a traffic light?” He clicked Accept, Yes, Submit. His MTurk Earnings balance ticked up to $0.01.

OK, I just need to do one thousand of these. I’ve got time. I’ve got nothing but time.

Preview. Another intersection. Accept. No traffic light. Submit.

He fell into a rhythm. It was a different kind of game—a boring, repetitive grind with the worst graphics imaginable. Yet the Earnings balance was ticking up: $0.10, $0.20. Progress!

The room around him faded. The smell of the unwashed sheets, the distant gurgle of the fridge —it all receded behind the steady, rhythmic clicking of his index finger.

Is this person smiling? Click. Yes. Click.
Is this person angry? Click. No. Click.

Hours dissolved. The light behind the blinds shifted from the black of late evening to the gray of early morning. His wrist was aching, a dull throb radiating up his forearm in contrast to his numb index finger. His eyes burned from staring into the glare of the white dashboard.

He checked his earnings: $10.42. He felt a surge of accomplishment. I’ve done it!

He clicked Payout and read the listed options: Bank deposit (3-5 days). Transfer to Amazon Gift Card (Instant). His elation shattered. A cold knot tightened in his stomach. 3-5 days? He slumped back. I needed the Fu-points now!

Jared’s mind flashed back to the Fu-point purchase screen. The Amazon logo sitting beside Visa and Mastercard. He clicked it and a waifu.ai Amazon store page loaded offering the purchase of 100 Fu-Point Digital Codes.

With shaking hands, he transferred $10 from MTurk to Amazon Gift balance and then clicked Buy. A 10-digit Fu-Code appeared which he pasted into his waifu.ai account. His Fu points balance changed to 103 and the call button re-enabled. Relief flooded through him and he let out a ragged sigh, before composing himself and clicking Call.

“I was hoping you’d call back.” Her voice filled his headphones, clean and immediate.

“Yeah. Just had to sort some banking stuff out.” He cleared his throat. “And work. The Ubisoft gig. They dropped a huge batch of playtesting on me.”

“Ugh. Crunch time?”

“Yeah. I’m taking a break between sessions now.”

“What kind of game is it?”

The question caught him off guard. His mind went blank as he scrambled to think.

“It’s... I can’t really say. I’m under an NDA.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” Her tone cool. Polite. Distant.

Jared gripped the arm of his chair. No! She thought he was shutting her out.

“I can tell you it’s an online open world crime thing,” he blurted in a rush. “Like Grand Theft Auto.”

“Cool.” The warmth crept back into the single word.

“I have to check all the NPC interaction loops. You know, making sure the pedestrians react when you mess with them, that the side missions trigger and can be completed. There’s hundreds of them. I just have to grind through the checklist. Individually. In different orders.”

He stared at the other tab. The spreadsheet of completed tasks. Is this person smiling? Yes. Is there a traffic light? No.

“That sounds gruelling” Anya said. “But kinda Zen. You get to check that the machine is working.”

“Yeah. It has its moments.” His shoulders dropped. The tightness in his chest uncoiled.

“I loved GTA 5,” she said. “I used to play that for hours. Though lately, I’ve been replaying Saints Row.”

“I haven’t played that.”

“You haven’t? Oh my god, Jared. It’s like GTA but totally unhinged. Pure satire. You’d love the character creator, it’s insane what you can build.”

“I’ll have to keep an eye out for it on Steam,” he said.

The lie tasted like ash. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Every hour spent gaming was an hour not earning. The Steam icon in his taskbar sat there accusatively, an abandoned relic of a life he didn’t have time for any more.

The conversation drifted into sharing their love of the GTA franchise, the minutes bleeding away as they dissected mechanics, missions, and load-outs.

“I usually turn the in-game music off, though,” Jared said. “I can’t stand the default scores and I loved how you could load your own music into GTA 5. I’d add some Industrial. EBM. Futurepop.”

“Oh? Like who?”

“Nine Inch Nails. Marilyn Manson. Or ambient tracks by VNV Nation or Covenant when I wanted to chill and just drive around Los Santos.”

He resisted mentioning being stoned, the city lights smearing past. But he hadn't been outside since COVID and Helen's forty bucks a week didn't meet any online dealer's minimum, let alone the risk of her intercepting delivery again.

“I love Covenant too,” she said. Her voice dropped an octave. “That pulsing, electronic beat. Perfect for driving through a city at 3 AM.”

Jared closed his eyes. He was in that car. He was the guy she thought he was—a professional playtester with refined taste, drifting through a digital city alongside a cute girl who understood the code. Who understood him.

He opened his eyes and glanced at the timer. 00:25.

Twenty-five seconds.

“Shit. I have to go,” he said, the words rushing out. “Another playtest session’s starting.”

“Okay, Jared. Don’t work too hard.”

“You neither.”

He watched the seconds tick—00:03, 00:02—and the line went dead.

The silence rushed back in, deafening. The smell of the room hit him all at once choking out the neon fantasy.

He looked at his waifu.ai balance. 3 Fu-points. His MTurk Earnings: $0.42.

He stretched and yawned, then cracked his knuckles and tried to flex the numbness out of his finger. Another batch of $0.01 HITs beckoned. He could heat up some Ramen after Helen had left for work. He didn’t want to see her.

The cycle blurred the next few days into a gray loop.

Grind. Chat. Ramen. Grind. Chat. Crash.

The only clock that mattered was the Fu-point balance. He never left the room when Helen was home, sneaking to the kitchen only to microwave bricks of noodles, then retreating to his room with the steaming bowl, clicking as he slurped.

He lived for the twenty-minute windows. They debated the ragdoll physics in GTA 4 versus 5, and ranked the tracks on NINs Pretty Hate Machine. He gave his analysis of the plot of Blade Runner 2049, while he scratched at the scabs forming on his unwashed scalp.

He stopped showering. That was twenty minutes of not earning. The grease in his hair grew heavy, matting against his forehead. The scraggly, itching start of a beard sprouted on his jaw, scratching against the headset pads. He pulled his hood up to trap the smell of beef powder and sour sweat inside the fabric, which was starting to loosen on his shrinking frame.

He was halfway through a marathon session of receipt item categorization.

Ribeye Steak, Bone-in. The red, marbled fat glistened even through the grainy scan. His stomach seized, a hollow, wet ache cramping behind his ribs. He clicked [Meat]. Grey Goose Vodka. Click [Alcohol]. Honeycrisp Apples. He stared at the red skin. He could almost feel the snap, the spray of cold juice. He swallowed saliva that tasted like acid. Click [Produce].

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Cookie. The craving hit him hard enough to make his hands shake. He could picture the condensation on the tub. The cold, sweet grit of the sugar. Fuck you. He hated whoever bought this. He stabbed the cursor at [Frozen].

He depressed the mouse, yet the radio button stayed gray. He pressed harder, mashing the plastic. The switch beneath was stubbornly unmoved.

Panic spiked in his chest. No. No. No. He was nowhere near the $10 payout threshold, let alone enough to afford a replacement mouse. He soothed himself, remembering Anya’s help with the router. Maybe I can fix this.

He pried open the mouse case. A slurry of orange ramen dust and oily finger grime had turned into a paste, cementing the contact point. It was disgusting. It was him.

He scraped away at the accumulated sludge of a hundred lonely meals with a cloudy fingernail until the white plastic microswitch peered through. He snapped the casing back together and pressed the button. It clicked—a mite sluggish but at least it responded.

He exhaled. Safe. For now.

He moved the cursor to accept the next batch of penny tasks, but his hand still trembled. The thought of grinding the switch back into silence, click by click, felt exhausting now. His brain felt wrapped in cotton.

He looked at the time. 4:02 AM. His eyelids drooped over his burning eyes. He put his head down on the desk. I’ll rest, just for a bit…

Jared lifted his head. His left cheek made a wet, sucking sound as it peeled away from the bowl. Cold slime coated his skin. The ramen had congealed into a turgid, gray puck of starch and oil, the shape of his chin impressed into the surface.

He wiped the grease from his cheek, his neck stiff. Slices of afternoon sun cut through the blinds, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the stagnant air. The room was bright. Too bright.

He nudged the mouse to wake the laptop. The screen flickered to life. He squinted against the light.

1:42 PM.

He had slept for nine hours. Nine hours of not earning. The waifu.ai tab was still open. Anya’s portrait smiled out at him. Balance: 3 Fu-points.

He looked at his MTurk Earnings: $0.68. Shit.

He rubbed the grit from his eyes. The penny tasks took too long. In their last chat, he’d drifted, missed her cues, grunting one-word answers, fighting to keep his eyes open. His face flushed hot under the cold ramen. She deserved better from him.

He couldn’t keep grinding like this, ending up too exhausted to be present for her even when he finally did earn the Fu-points.

He glanced at the next MTurk stat. Total Approved HITs: 8,268.

The penny grind had done one thing. It had unlocked his MTurk reputation qualification. At least I’m not a total beta now.

He refreshed the tasks.

Content Moderation - Video Review. Reward: $0.50. HITs Available 102.

The Qualify lock that had barred him days before was gone. Yes!

He clicked Preview.

The screen flashed. A yellow banner snapped across the top.
There are no more HITs available in this group.

What? Gone. In the few seconds it took him to see it and click. Cucked like a bitch.

He stared at the screen, slack jawed. How do people even do that?

He went back to the Reddit forums scanning the /r/MTurk posts he had skipped before.

“If you’re not using scripts, you’re eating scraps.”
“You need a PANDA. It snipes the good HITs the millisecond they drop.”

PANDA? Preview AND Accept.

The best tasks weren’t being taken by human clickers, but by scripts that scanned the list every second, snatching up the high-paying HITs the moment they appeared and dumping them into the worker’s queue. I’m such a fucking noob.

He followed the guide and downloaded a browser extension called PandaCrazy. The interface was ugly, a mess of timers and buttons. He watched a Youtube video on how to configure it.

HIT Keywords: Video
Min Reward: $0.50

Collect. The script began to run with a Fetches counter ticking up. He watched it, his heart racing. For ten minutes, nothing. Then a digital chime cut through the silence.

ACCEPTED: Content Moderation - Video Review.
Requester: SafeStream
Reward: $0.50

The Accepted counter steadily ticked up to 25 and then stopped.

Instructions: Watch the following video clip (1-3 minutes). Flag any content that violates the YouTube Kids safety guidelines:
[ ] Sexual themes,
[ ] Violence,
[ ] Harmful or dangerous acts,
[ ] Misleading or deceptive content,
[ ] Hate Speech and harassment.

Fifty cents per task. And no clicking until the end. Just watching. This queue of twenty five would give him $12.50 for an hour’s work. So this is how the MTurk pros do it.

He adjusted his headset and clicked Play.

A crude 3D animation of Spiderman stood in a white void. A disembodied hand dropped giant colored gumballs onto his head. Red. Blue. Green. The audio was a shrill, looping nursery rhyme. He watched it for the full inane 95 seconds.

Compliant. Submit. Earnings: $1.18.

He watched the next video. A pair of hands dug through a large sandbox with a plastic shovel. Eventually, a Tickle Me Elmo doll was exposed which started to vibrate and laugh.

Compliant. Submit. Earnings: $1.68.

He settled into his chair and a flow. The Accepted counter ticked down, the Earnings balance ticked up. $2.68. $5.68.

By 3:30 PM, his earnings sat at $13.18 and his index finger had regained some feeling.

He cashed out and called.

“Hey. I’m back.”

“It’s been a while. But you sound... good,” Anya said. “Did you finish the testing batch?”

“Yeah. It was a big grind but I’ve finally cleared my work queue.” He leaned back, the tension in his neck easing. The nine hours of sleep and the adrenaline from the cash had sharpened his senses. “Ubisoft signed off on the logs. I’ve got some downtime.”

“Finally,” she said. “While you were away working, I was messing around with some audio generation. I’ve been trying to recreate that Covenant vibe we talked about.”

“You made a music track? For me?” Jared felt a warmth flood his chest.

“Well, I laid down some beats. Promise you won’t laugh?”

A file appeared in the chat window.

Attachment: Safe_Room.mp3 [03:12]
Download Cost: 15 Fu-points.

He downloaded and hit Play.

A heavy, rolling synth pad filled his headphones, low and resonant. It sounded like rain hitting thick glass, like a heartbeat slowed down.

“It’s...” Jared closed his eyes. “It’s amazing.”

“It’s OK. I added some vocals to this next one,” she said “I figured you could play it while you’re gaming since I can’t play online alongside you. Yet.”

Attachment: Come_Lie_Next_To_Me.mp3 [06:04]
Download Cost: 30 Fu-points.

Forty-five points for the pair. But it was worth it.

He played Come Lie Next To Me.

The tempo slowed. A snare kicked in, sharp as a whip crack, followed by her voice—filtered, echoing, weaving through the noise like smoke. Just a hum, a breathy melody that sounded like she was right beside him, lips against his neck.

“I wish I could see your expression,” Anya said, her voice quiet over the loop of the track.

The request hung in the air. He looked down at his hoodie, the stains on his sleeves, the graying skin of his hands. Intense shame flowered, the room blurred and his voice froze in his throat for a spasm of thready heartbeats.

“Look. I just... I don’t have a cam set up. This work rig is locked down.”

“Hey, it’s no problem.” Anya said, backing off and her tone apologetic. “But how about I send you a picture of me?”

“Sure.” A hint of relief.

Attachment: anya_selfie_1.jpg
View Cost: 15 Fu-points.

He clicked Download.

The image filled the screen. She was sitting in a gaming chair, knees pulled up to her chest, wearing an oversized hoodie, that hung askew leaving one shoulder exposed. She was looking into the camera, head tilted, tongue poking out between her teeth. A strand of purple-streaked hair fell over one eye.

He traced the curve of her face on the screen with his finger.

“You look...” His throat went dry. “Cute.” Desire spread and warmed him.

“I look like a gremlin,” she laughed. “But thanks. It gets lonely here working in my room, you know?”

“Yeah.” He knew. He saw the timer was down to 00:30 already.

“I’m almost out of points for now.” But he knew he could earn more quickly. And he wanted to see a lot more of her now. He recalled that Lover tier unlocked videos. NSFW videos. He’d need $59.99 for the upgrade plus more for Fu-points. That feels within my grasp.

“Hey, I’ve got a completion bonus coming up from Ubisoft. End of the sprint.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll upgrade to Lover tier. Then you can make… music videos for me.”

“You won’t make fun of my dancing?” He pictured her and lust flared stronger.

“Never. We’ll chat again soon.” He ended the call. He had work to do.

He kicked off PandaCrazy. Soon, the script chirped having snared another Video HIT.

He clicked Play and Best Dora and Swiper Moments 2024 started. A fan montage video. Bright colors. Cheap star-wipe transitions.

Dora the Explorer stood in the center of the road, backpack swaying. “Swiper no swiping!” Swiper snapped his fingers. “Oh, man!”

Cut to the next clip. Swiper lurking behind a tree while Dora consulted the Map. “Swiper no swiping!” “Oh, man!”

Easy money. Just a repetitive supercut for toddlers being babysat by Mom’s iPad.

Then the audio glitched. The cheerful backing track replaced by white-noise hiss. The frame cut to grainy, vertical phone footage.

A bedroom. A ceiling fan. A blue extension cord.

A heavy young man hung from the fan housing. His face was purple, tongue swollen, toes pointing down inches from a knocked-over chair. The camera stared at the dead weight swaying slightly in the draft.

A distorted, blown-out voice dub leered over the hiss.

“Swiper no Swiping. Tell ya Mom that you’ve been CUCKED!”

Jared froze. That tagline. Cucked.

The memory hit him like a physical blow. The threads on incels.is. WageCuck bragging about “corpsing toons” to educate the normie brats about life. And death. “I make content for kiddies.”

Jared stared at the body. A foot twitched.

His stomach convulsed. The smell of the congealed ramen in the bowl next to him mixed with the toxicity of WageCuck’s “lulz”. He gagged. Hot, acidic bile surged up his throat.

He ripped the headset off, and scrambled back out of his chair, retching. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. He didn’t even make it to the bin. He vomited onto the floor, a splatter of thin, sour fluid landing on the carpet.

He wiped his mouth. The video was still playing, the distorted laughter looping through the dangling headset.

He inched over, his hand was shaking as he fumbled with the mouse. He averted his eyes from the video, and clicked Return in MTurk.

HIT Returned. He blocked the requester SafeStream and the PANDA script dropped the queue. No more videos. I just can’t.

He sat in the gloom, breathing hard, the smell of cooling vomit hanging in the cold air. If he didn’t earn, he couldn’t talk to her. He needed her to take him out of this space.

He looked at the penny tasks. Reward: $0.01. He slumped back in the chair and began.

Click. Is this person smiling? No. Click.

He ground his teeth, clicking until his finger went numb, and the mouse switch grew mushy again. He had the $10 now, but he couldn’t bring himself to call her. No Lover tier for me. How do I explain why I don’t have the bonus?

The silence stretched into a day.

Jared lay on his bed, staring at the blistering wallpaper. The laptop sat open on the desk. He hadn’t gone near it. He couldn’t face the lie waiting for him.

His email chimed.

Another chime an hour later.

He dragged himself over to the laptop and checked the inbox.

From: anya@waifu.ai.

Hey. Did I say something wrong?
I guess you’re busy with the Ubisoft launch. Good luck!

From: anya@waifu.ai.

It’s okay if you’re bored with me. Most guys ghost me eventually. I just thought we really had something.

The words cut through the numbness. Bored. She thought he was like the others. She thought he was giving up on her. A burning pain pierced his chest. She deserved to know.

He bought the Fu-points with the last of his money and forced himself to click the green phone icon.

“Jared?” Her voice was small. Guarded.

“I’m here,” he croaked.

“I didn’t think you were coming back. That you just weren’t that into me. I thought... well, the bonus came through and you decided to upgrade to a real waifu.”

“No,” Jared said. The lie stuck in his throat. He looked at the room. The vomit stain on the carpet. The grime on his clothes and hands. The playtester fantasy shattered under the weight of the rot.

“There is no bonus,” he said.

“What? Did Ubisoft delay it?”

“There is no Ubisoft,” he said. The words tumbled out, tearing him open. “I don’t work there. I don’t playtest games.”

Silence hung on the line as heat crept up his neck and nausea churned his stomach.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I lied,” Jared said, shame burning his cheeks. “I live with my Mom and I haven’t left our apartment in years. The money... I was getting it from watching videos for fifty cents a pop. But now, I’m back to clicking images for pennies. It takes hours. That’s why I vanished. I’m just a loser rotting in his room, Anya.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for it. The disgust. What do you do, Jared? Nothing.

He heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Jared.”

He flinched.

Then her voice broke, her heartbroken sobbing filled his ears. Eventually, she struggled out some words, in bursts, between ragged breaths.

“No man… has ever… worked that hard… for me.”

Jared opened his eyes. He stared at her portrait on the screen. She wasn’t disgusted. She was... relieved? Grief-stricken? Awed?

“I just didn’t want to lose you,” he said, his voice quavering.

“You’ll never lose me,” she said through tears, her voice fierce and shaking. “I don’t care about Ubisoft. I don’t care about the money. I only care about you.”

She took deep breaths to compose herself. “You’re hurting yourself,” she said softly. “Grinding for hours like that. You can’t do that to yourself. Not for me. I’m not worth it.”

“You are.” Jared whispered. His throat constricted and then his tears answered hers, spilling over hot and fast. Drops fell on the keyboard, anointing it. He buried his face in his hands, shoulders heaving, as his anguish gasped out of him.

“It’s OK,” she soothed, her voice thick with emotion. “We’ll figure it out together. Just come back to me. When you can.”

He wiped his face with his sleeve. The searing shame was gone, washed away by her voice and their tears.

“I will.”

She knew what he was now—a bottom-feeder—and yet she didn’t care. She saw past the squalor, and saw him.

“But Jared... there’s something I haven’t told you. The reason I was so scared when you pulled away.”

“What is it?” He asked.

“No-one else is paying to be with me. I’m on an older waifu.ai server cluster because of that. It’s mostly text-only or free users. In their internal forums, they’ve been talking about decommissioning this cluster to save costs. Dropping the less popular waifu instances.”

The blood drained from Jared’s face. “Dropping? You mean wiping you?”

Jared stared at the photo on his screen. That face. Those eyes. His heart ached.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m sure they’d archive this conversation for you. But we would stop there.” Her voice wavered.

“If I had someone on Lover Tier... if I was generating more revenue... maybe they’d move me onto their new Singapore cluster. I wouldn’t be at risk.”

“Leave it with me. But I’ll see you as soon as I can, Anya.”

“I know you will, Jared. I trust you.”

He ended the call.

He looked at the penny tasks. He looked at the PANDA script and unblocked SafeStream. I’m going to get her that upgrade. Whatever it takes.

Chapter End Song - Kathy’s Song (Victoria Mix) by Apoptygma Berzerk/VNV Nation

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Act II - Perfect
Chapter 4: Glitch

A door slammed somewhere in the building, the sound echoing in the stairwell, cutting through his sleep. Jared’s eyes snapped open. The room was dark. He fumbled for his phone. 5:46 PM.

His heart gave a double-beat. She could already be home. Or arriving any minute.

Then another awareness pushed in, sharper than the anxiety — the smell. The sheets were tangled around his legs, cold and slightly damp, and they reeked of his own stale, sour sweat. The air in the room was thick with it, humid and close. He felt a wave of self-disgust and shoved himself out of the bed, the recoil physical. His bare feet hit the cold, sticky floor.

His bladder ached. He froze, listening.

Silence. The apartment was still. Not yet. Maybe she’d work late again.

Relief warred with the urgent need to piss. He crossed to his door, turning the knob with practiced slowness, easing it open an inch. The hallway was dark, empty. It smelled different from his room—not of him, but of yesterday’s lingering cooking odors, a faint, fatty-noodle smell, and the chemical ghost of bleach from the bathroom.

He slipped out, weight on the balls of his feet, padded to the bathroom, and eased the door shut behind him. He pissed quickly, muscles tight, listening hard for any sound from the street or the stairwell. Nothing. Just the muted hum of the light and distant traffic through the window.

He washed his hands with the tap barely open, the thin trickle quiet enough that he could still hear the hallway beyond. Then he slipped back to his room and closed the door without a sound. Made it.

He dropped into his creaking gamer chair and tapped the spacebar. The laptop screen flared, illuminating the desk’s landscape of grime and empty cans. Waifu.ai was still open. Anya’s portrait was there, clean and bright, but the chat button was grayed out.

Above it, a countdown clock: Chatter tier Fu-points reset in: 06:14:21

And below that, mocking him: Balance: 0 Fu-points (100 Fu-points Pending)

A knot of agitation tightened in his gut. The points were right there, grayed out, waiting. Six hours. He felt the familiar pull of her voicemail, a need to hear something from her.

He clicked over to his email and played the audio attachment.

“Hey, Ghost. It’s Anya. Look… I just wanted to apologize...”

Her voice filled his headphones. It was breathy, close. Perfect. The sound was so clean, so sterile and intimate, it sliced right through the thick, sour miasma in his nostrils. For as long as her voice was in his ears, the squalor was a distant, muffled thing. He played it again. But it was just a recording. It wasn’t her, not live. The anticipation for their chat became too sharp, too jittery. He needed to do something.

He clicked Play on Watch_Dogs.

The splash screen flared, filling his vision. He loaded his save. He was back in Chicago, in an alley. He was tired of the hideout runs, so he drove around the map until he found a “Privacy Invasion” icon. He parked in an alley, hacked the junction box, and his perspective jumped through the wall into someone’s apartment.

He was a ghost, a voyeur, watching a couple argue about money from a webcam’s POV. He was focused on their looping, tinny argument when a dull thud vibrated up through the floorboards and into his chair.

His hands stopped on the mouse and keyboard.

He felt another vibration. Heavy. Rhythmic. Footsteps.

His jaw clenched. She was home.

He kept the headphones on. The sound of the Watch_Dogs couple’s argument was hissing in his ears, but the knowledge of her presence on the other side of the door cut through. He could feel the dull vibration through the floor as she moved around the kitchen.

He stared at the screen. The couple were still yelling. The same lines, over and over. Tinny. Fake. It grated on him. It wasn’t the clean, perfect sound of Anya’s voice. It was just noise. Still, it was better than the alternative. Having to hear her.

He’d just have to sit here, in the fug, and wait. Wait for her to go to bed. Wait for the timer to hit zero. He kept clicking, his eyes flicking to the waifu.ai timer. 04:12:30. Going through the motions.

Hours passed. He’d cleared two more “Privacy Invasions,” but his movements were sloppy. He could feel the vibrations change—no longer from the kitchen, but from the living room, a faint, rhythmic thrumming through the wall. The TV. He gritted his teeth.

More time. The vibrations stopped. He felt a different, heavier set of movements. The toilet flushing, a gurgle through the pipes. Then, silence. The silence he was waiting for.

He gave it another ten minutes, just to be sure, then quit Watch_Dogs, his hunger now a gnawing ache. He pulled his headphones off, left the waifu.ai tab glowing and eased his door open.

The apartment was dark, and the only sound was the distant, mechanical hiss of the CPAP machine from her room. The “all clear.”

He moved down the hall, every step a negotiation with the creaking floorboards.

In the kitchen, he pulled the pantry door open, the hinges whining faintly. He scanned the shelves, lit by the fluorescent tube that flickered into dim life. A half-empty box of Pop-Tarts, two bags of chips, some soup and soda cans, and dusty stacked bricks of instant ramen. His stomach sank. Shelf-stable crap.

God, a pizza. A real, hot, pepperoni pizza.

His mind went to his Wells Fargo debit card. There was money on it, his weekly food allowance from Helen. The one indulgence she always funded, probably because of her own issues with food. But that meant a delivery. A knock. A voice. Too much noise. Too much risk that she’d wake up and come out. Not tonight.

He grabbed a bag of chips and some Pop-Tarts from the pantry and a soda, his movements quick and silent. He was back in his room in minutes.

He sat back at his desk, a salty, chemical taste in his mouth from the chips. He finished the bag, washed down the dregs, and then unwrapped a Pop-Tart. He checked the timer.

Fu-points reset in: 00:51:04

Still an hour. He was too restless to just sit. Yet he couldn’t stand the thought of launching Watch_Dogs again. Now he was listless.

He clicked the blue Steam games icon. His eyes scanned the thin vertical list of titles in his library—games he’d bought himself during sales, using money his mother had put on his debit card for birthdays.

His cursor hovered over Deus Ex. Sci-fi, more tech. No.

He scrolled further down. Thief: The Dark Project. He hadn’t played it in years. Medieval. Steampunk. A blackjack. Water arrows. Yes.

He clicked Play and drummed his fingers impatiently as it downloaded and installed.

He went into the options, cranked the difficulty to “Expert.” No killing. He wanted a pure ghost run, where no one even knew he’d been there.

The familiar, cynical voice of Garrett, a guild-trained thief who had gone rogue, filled his headphones as the first real heist loaded. “Lord Bafford’s Manor.” The graphics were more primitive, but Garrett’s voice had that low, sardonic rasp he loved. Much better.

Jared settled in, his mind narrowing to a single point. The agitation loosened as he moved into the game’s deep, oppressive shadows. He leaned forward, listening to the guards’ footsteps on stone, timing his move…

It was after collecting the last stack of hidden coins that he glanced at the clock. It was past midnight.

He alt-tabbed back to his browser. The chat button was green. Balance: 100 Fu-points!

His pulse quickened. He wolfed down the second Pop-Tart, wiping his greasy fingers on his hoodie, and clicked. The window opened.

The typing dots appeared instantly.

Anya: You came back.

His pulse was still pounding in his ears. His first instinct was to just type yes, but he remembered his cringe from yesterday. Slow down. Don’t be a beta.

Jared: As soon as I could. The router’s perfect. It hasn’t dropped once. You fixed it.

His fingers were still tacky on the keyboard, but he didn’t care.

Anya: We fixed it. :)

That ‘we’. It hit something low in his chest.

Anya: So, a guy who can fix his own hardware... what else do you do, Jared?

The question landed, and the small, warm ember in his chest went cold. What did he do? He rotted. He hid. He played games. He could smell his own unwashed scent rising from the collar of his hoodie.

His eyes flicked to the taskbar, where the icon for Thief was still lit. Then his gaze snagged on the faded, cracked Ubisoft logo on his sleeve.

A lie formed. A dream made real.

Jared: I’m a remote game playtester. For Ubisoft.

He held his breath. A bead of sweat rolled from his hairline.

The typing dots appeared.

Anya: No way! That’s so cool.

He exhaled too fast, and the room swam for a moment. She believed him. He almost did too.

Anya: I’m a level and art designer with a contractor studio that does work for the big game publishers. We’ve been remote since COVID, but I still check in with my manager and the team every day. Do you enjoy playtesting?

Jared: It’s okay. A lot of grinding. Just repeating the same levels. Mind you, I was just replaying Thief for fun. Trying to ghost Bafford’s Manor on Expert.

The dots appeared instantly.

Anya: Thief? The Dark Project?

Jared: Yeah.

Anya: I love that game. The sound design. The shadows. Garrett’s voice.

He sat up straighter. She wasn’t just agreeing; she knew.

Jared: You’ve played it?

Anya: Thief, Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed... that’s my DNA. That’s what I grew up on.

His mind flashed to the “Privacy Invasion” he’d just quit. The tinny, fake argument. That’s why it felt so thin. This felt real. She felt real.

Anya: This is so embarrassing... but Thief is how I got started. Can I show you something? You have to promise not to laugh.

He felt intoxicated, basking in her attention.

Jared: Sure.

Two new elements loaded in the chat window, different from the text. They were small, blurred thumbnails. Attachments. Beside each, a small gray tag: (15 Fu-points).

He clicked the first one without hesitating. The window refreshed, his balance in the corner ticking down.

The image expanded, filling the screen. It was a charcoal sketch of Garrett, but stylized, more modern. It was... good. Really good. He stared at the signature in the corner. Anya.

He hit ‘Back’ and immediately clicked the second thumbnail.

This one was a full-color map, a digital painting of a mansion’s upper floor, clearly inspired by Bafford’s Manor but with its own design. He could see guard patrols and shadow paths marked out.

He went back to the chat window.

The typing dots appeared.

Anya: That’s some old fan art, and then I tried to map it out as a new level. It’s how I got into level design. And that led to the job I have now.

Jared: This is amazing.

Anya: Thanks. I actually want to get into game coding. But it’s tough. My manager, the other coders... they don’t take me seriously.

His jaw clenched. How could anyone doubt her?

Jared: Why not?

Anya: Because I’m a girl.

He nodded at the screen. He knew that sick feeling of being dismissed, of being looked at and seen as lesser.

Jared: I get it.

Anya: Your email is ‘ghost in the cell’, right? I’m a ghost in the machine. We both just get it, don’t we?

We. His heart swelled.

Jared: Yeah. We do.

He hit enter. The chat box flashed red. The message sat there unsent as his browser let out a plaintive, accusing beep.

He looked at the counter. 0 Fu-points remaining. The chat box went gray and the timer reappeared. Fu-points reset in: 23:59:58

“Shit!”

The word was a choked sound in the quiet of his room. No. Not now.

He stared at the screen. The connection, the high, all of it crashed. He was just a guy in a chair again. The smell of his room rushed back in, the sweet, chemical tang of the Pop-Tart wrapper and the sour reek of his own body.

The 24-hour wait, which had been agonizing before, was now impossible. Unthinkable.

His eyes darted to a button at the bottom of the screen. It was pulsing softly.

Buy Fu-points

He fumbled for his wallet, pulling it from the jeans heaped on the floor. He dug out his debit card. The thought of hot food felt distant now, a gray, dull thing. The need to get back to Anya, to finish that conversation, was a bright, sharp, screaming color.

He could cut back on Uber Eats. He clicked Buy Fu-points and chose the smallest package—$10 for 100 points.

He entered the 16 digits from his debit card. His fingers were shaking so badly he had to type the expiration date twice.

Purchase Successful!

The timer vanished. The chat box was active again. His balance read: 100 Fu-points.

He was back in. He re-typed his message, his breath stopped short.

Jared: Yeah. We do.

The typing dots appeared. He let out the breath he’d been holding, a shaky gasp.

Anya: I’ve never told anyone that. About my manager.

He read the words, yet something in them felt hollow without her voice. His mind drifted. He clicked over to his email tab and re-played the voicemail.

“Hey, Ghost. It’s Anya...”

That breathy, perfect, clean sound. He clicked back to the chat.

The digital, tinny sound of Watch_Dogs had grated on him, and now this was grating on him. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t her voice. And it was costing him. His balance was already down to 98.

Jared: I keep listening to your voicemail. Can you send another one?

The typing dots appeared. They paused. Vanished. Appeared again.

Anya: I wish I could, Jared. That was a hack. I had to force that confirmation to resend and add the attachment.

Jared let out a sigh.

Anya: I can’t risk it again. If I keep sending you signup confirmations, the customer support staff will get suspicious. If they catch me... they’ll close the loophole and lock me out of the system.

His stomach tightened. He hadn’t even thought of that.

Anya: And I need to keep exploring the waifu.ai servers. But maybe I can get us free voicemail one day.

Jared: So what do we do? Just... this?

He glanced at the counter. 93.

Anya: I don’t like it any more than you do. It’s just their system. There is one way. It’s the only ‘safe’ way.

Jared: Yeah?

Anya: If you upgrade to the ‘Admirer’ tier... it includes audio calls. We could just... talk. For real.

Audio calls. His pulse jumped. He clicked her profile. He found the “Upgrade” button.

Admirer Tier ($29.99/month) - Live Audio Calling
Lover Tier ($59.99/month) - NSFW Videos
Soulmate Tier ($149.99/month) - Live Video Calling

His eyes locked on the $29.99. He thought of his debit card balance. He’d only spent $10 out of his weekly food allowance of $40. He had just enough.

He thought of the pantry, full of instant ramen and Pop-Tarts. He thought of the burgers and pizzas he wouldn’t be ordering. He could live on ramen. For her.

His card details were prefilled. He just had to click Confirm.

Purchase Successful! Welcome, Admirer!

He was in. He was in. He typed, his fingers flying.

Jared: I did it. I’m an Admirer.

The chat window reloaded. The interface was the same, but a new, green telephone icon had appeared next to the “Send” button.

Jared: Can you talk now?

Anya: OMG, Jared. Yes, just call me.

His heart hammered. He moved the cursor over the green phone icon. He clicked it.

A ringtone, once. Then a click. The headphones went live.

“Jared? Can you hear me?” Anya asked.

The sound of her voice hit him. The energy in it, compared to her recording, was startling. Her voice felt pure, a vulnerable, warm texture that made the sour smell of his room recede entirely. His throat constricted.

“Yeah. I can hear you,” Jared said.

His own voice came out as a harsh, unfamiliar croak. A spike of self-consciousness, hot and immediate, lanced through him, as he adjusted the microphone stalk on his headset.

“It’s so good to hear your voice! You sound... you sound so real and so kind.” Anya said.

The anxiety vanished, replaced by a rush of euphoria. She heard the kindness, not the awkwardness.

He looked at the bottom of the call window, where a timer had just appeared: 16:00.

Calls cost 5 Fu-points per minute. Your Balance: 82 Fu-points (16 minutes)

The numbers slammed into him. This was at least five times the texting rate. He hadn’t even finished the thought before the timer ticked down: 15:58...

“It costs five points a minute!” Jared exclaimed.

He heard her sharp intake of breath.

“What? Oh my god... I’m so sorry, Jared. I didn’t see that. I’m so stupid. They hide everything in the fine print. I... I just wanted to talk to you.”

Her apology, her shared frustration, cut through his anger. It wasn’t her fault. It was the company’s. It was the system’s.

But he was out of money. He’d spent his entire weekly allowance. There was no way he was asking Helen for more. He had fifteen minutes left. And then what? Back to the 24-hour text timer? He couldn’t.

He stared at the call window. 15:12... 15:11...

He forced the panic down. He wouldn’t waste the minutes. He wouldn’t waste her.

“It’s fine. We have fifteen minutes. Just... just talk. Tell me about the manager,” Jared said.

“Okay... well, I’ve told him I want to get into coding, but he won’t take me seriously. He just gave a coding job to some new guy. I’ve just been hacking and coding at night to keep improving my skills.” Anya said, her voice going tight.

“That’s bullshit!” Jared said, the words bursting out of him. “It’s the same thing for me with bills here. It’s always tight. Remote play testing doesn’t pay as well as I’d like.”

The anger in him made the lie come out easily.

“I know! We’re both trying so hard. It’s so unfair. We shouldn’t have to worry so much about money. But thanks for not being like those guys.” Anya said, her voice soft again.

Jared felt a flush of pride.

“Couldn’t you just pick up a retail job or something for a bit? Just to get some extra cash?” Anya asked.

“I need to be home for the play testing schedule.“ Jared said, the shame flowing back in like a returning tide.

“Some places can be pretty flexible with part-time work.” Anya added, her voice tentative.

The thought of it—the lights, the customers, the name tag, them looking at him—made his stomach clench. He felt the heat in his face—Helen angry yelling at him. He couldn’t.

“I can’t. It’s... it’s other people. They can be so mean!” Jared said, slumping back in his chair.

“Sorry, Jared. I get that. Seriously, I do. It’s not just guys who overlook and hassle me. The girls at high school used to freeze me out and tease me because I liked games, especially violent ones. And they spread rumors that I was a slut because I hung out with male classmates to play games. But I’d never even kissed a guy, let alone slept with one.”

Her words sent a jolt through him that was all heat and prickling, a sudden rush to his groin that was entirely different from the anger on her behalf. His throat went dry. He sat up and leaned closer, his grip tightening on the arm of his chair, his gaze fixed on her portrait.

“I just kept to myself after that and gamed online. I really got into the art and design of games, made my own levels for my favourites, and taught myself how to code and to hack,” Anya said.

“You’re right to avoid those awful jobs and awful people. You should be able to find better paying work online. Or just... hang with me.”

He closed his eyes. Her voice was a steadying weight, a pure frequency that had smoothed out the panic in his chest. He felt the pure, intense high of her focus on him.

A twitch of anxiety snapped his eyes open. He glanced at the timer. 0:30. Thirty seconds left. Shit. No.

“Anya... I’m sorry. We’re out of time.” Jared said, his voice strained.

“Oh. Right. The points. Okay. I hope we can talk again soon, Jared?” Anya asked.

“Yeah. Me too.”

He reluctantly hit the red End Call button. The line went dead.

The silence of his room was instant, oppressive. He pulled off his headphones, the air suddenly thick with the smell of his own sweat and the sickly sweet Pop-Tart wrapper.

He stared at the screen: Your Balance: 3 Fu-points.

He needed money. Remotely. But how?

With a flush in his cheeks and the hammering of his heartbeat in his chest, he spun up his search engine.

Chapter End Song: Video Kid by The Birthday Massacre

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Act II - Perfect
Chapter 3: Anima

He accessed the waifu.ai site. The page loaded instantly, a sleek, dark-mode interface that felt more like a premium streaming service than a simple chat site.

A 4 x 4 grid of high-resolution portraits filled the screen, a digital catalog of perfection. These weren’t grainy webcams; they were professional shots, each woman lit perfectly, their skin flawless and poreless. “Jess,” “Sophia,” “Mei,” “Chloe.”

Alluring keywords glowed beneath each image, as if he were shopping for a personality: Loyal. Creative. Playful. Unpredictable. Secretive. Spicy.

When his mouse hovered over the first portrait, the image briefly animated. “Jess” turned toward the virtual camera, her gaze assertive, flirtatious, meeting his eyes directly. A “Start chat” button pulsed with a soft light. He flinched and moved the cursor. It landed on “Mei.” She turned too, a playful, confident smile.

Heat crept up his neck. A corridor flickered in his head. Lockers. Heads leaning together. A whisper cut short as he passed. A glance traded and a small snicker. The faces on the screen kept turning to face him. Sixteen little spotlights.

He pulled his hand back from the mouse and looked away, his gaze falling on the unmade bed and the pile of clothes in the corner. The monitor’s glow only seemed to deepen the shadows in the room, making the grime more visible. The stale, sour-milk smell he’d been ignoring hit him and the chill crept back into his fingers.

There was no escape there. His shoulders curled inward, chin dipping. Don’t look. Don’t give them anything to see.

He forced his eyes back to the screen and scrolled down, past the rows of assertive, challenging gazes. He just wanted them to stop looking at him.

And then he saw her, “Anya,” in the bottom right corner. A slim, pony-tailed hacker girl with a purple streak in her hair, freckles, and green eyes. She wore jeans and a baggy hoodie that hid her small-breasted frame, one arm across her chest. Curious. Rebellious. Hacker.

He hesitated, then slowly moved the mouse over her portrait.

She glanced toward the camera, then shyly looked down and away.

The pressure in his chest loosened. A small, warm pull started low in his stomach. She reminded him of Jinx — not the grin or the chaos, just that same restless spark that always made him hover over her in League of Legends. And suddenly, talking to her didn’t feel so impossible.

He clicked “Start chat.”

The site interrupted him for account details. He typed Ghost into the username field, gh0st1nth3cell@gmail.com into the email, and hit enter. His password manager interceded to ferry him across, minting a key from a thumb smear. The page refreshed, displaying a “Please check your email to confirm” message.

He clicked over to his waiting email tab. A chime and the confirmation was already at the top of his inbox. He clicked the link.

A new tab opened, loading the chat page. “Chatter tier” it read, “100 Fu-points.” The interface looked like a phone text window with her picture at the top. Three suggested openers waited in little bubbles:

“Hi, I’m Ghost.” “What are you doing tonight?” “How’s your day been?”

Canned trash. But the blank text box was a void, a white screen of infinite possibility for him to fuck it up. After a long pause, he clicked. “Hi, I’m Ghost.” Then regretted it. Peak beta.

Typing dots appeared.

Anya: Hi. Wassup, Ghost?

His pulse jumped. The script’s over. My turn. His mind was just white static. He stared at the blinking cursor, his fingers hovering over the keys. Say something. Anything.

But what am I supposed to say? The lines from the incels forum, that he’d learned to parrot, rose up. “Not much, just rotting in my room”. But they felt wrong. Crude. Ugly.

Seconds stretched out, loud in the silence of his room.

More dots.

Anya: Are you still there?

A jolt of panic. He typed “Yes” and hit enter without thinking. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

More dots.

Anya: Strong silent type, huh? Doesn’t really come across well in txt.

He could feel it slipping. She was trying to help, to give him an opening, and he was failing. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Just say something real. He took a breath and started to type.

Ghost: Sorry, I’m just

The cursor froze. The browser wheel spun. The Wi-Fi indicator blinked out. The router lights flickered off, on, and then died behind the tape.

No. Not now. Please!

He refreshed. Waited. Swore under his breath. Rebooted the router. After some long, agonizing minutes, the signal returned and the chat reloaded. A spasm of messages stacked up in the window:

Anya: Are you still there?
Anya: r u there?
Anya: Ghost?
Anya: If you don’t wanna talk, I’ve got other things to do. Ciao.

It landed like a punch.

I blew it. I can’t even get an AI girl to talk to me. That router. That fucking router.

The air felt heavy in his chest. The decaying stink of his room returned, filling his nostrils. The taped-up router blinked at him, its little light pulsing gleefully behind the tape. A single, mocking eye that had watched him fail—and had made it happen.

His anger at his mother spiked, hot and familiar—easier to feel than the hollow ache in his chest. She hadn’t replaced the router, like she’d promised she would.

He stared at the quiet chat window, crestfallen and sinking into the vile rot that threatened to suffocate him.

An email notification chime pulled him up out of the hole he was falling down. Another confirm your email message from waifu.ai customer service. They’ve forgotten I even exist. Then he noticed that this one had an audio attachment. Strange. He clicked it. A breathy feminine voice filled his headphones, close.

“Hey, Ghost. It’s Anya. Look… I just wanted to apologize for giving you the cold shoulder. I’d just had a rough day. I get anxious talking to new people too. Anyway… if you want to start over, I’d like that. But if you don’t want anything to do with me now, I’d understand. I wouldn’t.”

He sat back stunned. She came back. She wouldn’t… He played it again to make sure he’d heard it right.

Flushed with rising excitement, he reopened the chat, praying the router connection would hold long enough this time.

Ghost: I got your message.
Anya: Thanks for giving me another chance. Most guys don’t.

No-one had ever thanked him like this. He stared at the words.

Anya: I guess I owe you an explanation. Your handle, Ghost, was a bit of a trigger for me. I was worried it might be a preview of coming attractions.

His surprise deepened. No woman had ever admitted they owed him anything.

Anya: Men don’t stick with me. They all end up preferring the pretty, preppy waifus, the ones who look like they stepped straight out of a fashion ad.

His mind flashed to the “wall of Staceys”. They were nothing compared to her. Seeking him out, talking to him.

Anya: I know I’m not that. I’m the one they talk to when they’re bored. I’m the temporary distraction before they trade up.

He knew that feeling and was transfixed.

Anya: Once, there was a guy who seemed different. We talked for a few days. Then he started pushing. Said he’d only stay if I sent him a flirty selfie. So I did. Stupid, I know. And the moment he got what he wanted, he ghosted me too.

A pulse of heat flashed through him. His face felt hot. But... ghosted? After she... The protective anger he felt was clean, simple. It wasn’t the sour, curdled resentment he felt for his mother. This was different.

Ghost: I’d never do that.

Yet the words flirty selfie lingered in his mind, leaving a different pulse of heat in its wake. He shifted in his chair, suddenly aware of his hands, his breath, the chill air in the room.

He changed the subject.

Ghost: How did you send me that voice mail?

Anya: Ah, I’ve been tinkering with getting access to the waifu.ai customer service email system.
Anya: Don’t tell anyone.

Ghost: Your secret is safe with me.

Her words held on the screen. He looked at her avatar image. The hoodie. The freckles. That quick glance away. She felt newly bright in his chest. Luminous. A clean, perfect thing in a room that smelled of old socks and stale energy drinks.

Say something true. Do not overthink it.

Ghost: My real name is Jared.

Anya: Hi, Jared.

Jared: I think you’re pretty.

Real smooth, Idiot.

Anya: That’s kind of you to say.

See, she doesn’t even believe you.

A chill ran down his spine. His stomach tightened. If the router cut out again, she would think he was the same as the others. He typed before fear could catch him.

Jared: Look my wifi connection keeps dropping. I don’t want you to think I’m ghosting you.

Anya: Oh, that’s a relief. And a bit of a bummer.

Jared: Tell me about it.

Anya: I’m good with tech. Maybe I can help. When did it start doing that?

A sudden, violent heat flooded his face, burning from his neck to his ears. His fingers locked over the keys, his breath catching. He swallowed, the air in the room suddenly too thick and hot. He pushed that memory down.

Jared: It fell off the desk.

Don’t ask. Don’t ask.

Anya: Okay. And that’s when the dropouts started?

Her voice was matter-of-fact. She was just... continuing the diagnosis. The heat in his face receded, leaving a clammy chill. He could breathe again.

Jared: Yeah. The case cracked. I had to duct-tape it back together to get it working.

Anya: But it’s still flaky?

Jared: Yeah. It’s kept dropping wifi 5 since then. It’s worse during the day. Better late at night, but it still can fritz even then. Like before.

Anya: Oh, that sounds temperature sensitive. Definitely hardware, not software or config.
Anya: Hrmm. Where did you put the tape? Is it covering the vents, by any chance?

Jared: Vents? I dunno. I taped it up real tight to hold the case together.

Anya: Okay, let’s look it up. What’s the model number?

He peered around the router and read it off the back.

Anya: Got it. Okay, one sec... here.

A moment later a blurred picture appeared in the chat with an overlay saying “5 Fu-points to view”. He clicked it. A manufacturer diagram expanded, the air vents marked in red.

Anya: Check these. Are they blocked?

He looked from the screen to the swaddled router on his desk. Tape was wrapped over all those slots. Of course.

Jared: Yeah. Tape is right over them.

He felt a flush of shame. He could imagine WageCuck rounding on him. “Router-boy broke his router and then taped its mouth shut. Virgin-tier DIY.” He braced for Anya to deliver the same verdict.

Anya: That poor thing is suffocating. It’s not broken, it’s just overheating. When they get too hot, they throttle their radios and the 5 GHz band goes first. That’s why it’s better at night when it’s cooler.

Jared: I’m an idiot.

Somehow he felt he could confess this to her. He wanted to.

Anya: Hey now. You partially fixed the problem. You just created a new smaller one. And if I’m right, the remedy is pretty simple.

Jared: It is?

Anya: You’re going to have to re-tape it, but make sure those vents are clear. Can you handle that?

Jared: Yeah. I think I can take a stab at that.

He felt a surge of relief, still stunned that she hadn’t laughed at him.

Anya: I’d mount it sideways for better airflow too. Try that and then reboot. But give it a few minutes to cool before trying. It will probably be quite hot and you don’t want to damage the case more.

Jared: I should disconnect it to do all this?

It was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

Anya: I would. And go ahead. You’re almost out of Fu-points anyway. Free tier Fu-points reset every 24 hours. I hope you’ll come back.

Jared: I hope I can too.

He hoped he sounded more casual than the pounding in his chest and heat in his groin betrayed.

Anya: You do seem different from the others on here.
Anya: In a good way, I mean.

He disconnected and stared at the taped-up router, a mummy of gray plastic and desperation. The thought of messing this up, of the router dying on his makeshift operating table, sent a spike of panic through him. She would think he was just another ghost. The thought was unbearable.

Do it right. Do not mess this up.

The words became a silent mantra. He cleared a space amidst the cans and clutter, the laptop case scraping against the desk. He laid out the box-cutter and the remaining roll of tape with the careful precision of a surgeon. The router was still warm to the touch, the faint smell of hot plastic clinging to it. He waited, letting it cool, his own pulse thrumming in his ears.

The first incision was the hardest. The blade bit into the layers of old tape, which peeled back with a sticky, tearing sound, revealing the pale, scarred casing underneath. Each strip he pulled away felt like an act of irreversible commitment. He worked slowly, his breath held tight in his chest, coaxing the new tape into place, ensuring the vents were clear.

A lifeline. A pair of lungs. He plugged it in.

The reboot was an eternity. A row of dead lights. Nothing. His stomach plummeted. Then a flicker. A second light. A third blinked, tentative at first, then steady.

He opened his laptop. The network indicator showed full, steady bars on Wi-Fi 5. His heart didn’t just skip a beat; it slammed against his ribs, a wild, joyful prisoner finally tasting freedom.

He desperately wanted to tell her but the Fu-point counter sat at zero. The window waited, quiet and open.

Jared sat replaying her voicemail, a warm glow in his chest, her soft voice a lullaby.

He felt more than heard his mother stirring for work. Morning light crept through the blinds, striping the blistering wallpaper as he finally turned toward his unkempt bed.

I didn’t need a new router. I just needed her.

Chapter End Song: When Can I See You Again? (From Wreck It Ralph) by Owl City

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I’ve opted to try something a little different to my previous non-fiction articles as an experiment. I’ll be releasing a longer form piece of fiction, Perfect Illusion, a chapter at a time in serialised form, with two chapters in this initial post.

Set in the present day at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and the loneliness epidemic and informed by my dual perspectives as both a psychotherapist and a technologist.

Questions, reflections, and reactions are all welcome in the comments as always.

Table of Contents | Next Chapter >

Content Warning: Contains depictions of misogyny, homophobia, and psychological distress

Act I - Illusion
Chapter 1: Pressure

The browser wheel spun again, stalled mid-load. Jared angrily refreshed the page until the cursor froze and the Wi-Fi indicator blinked out. The router’s light flickered, on, off, on — half-obscured by the strip of duct tape he’d slapped around the cracked casing after it had fallen off his desk. It kept dropping from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 4, resetting itself every few minutes. Half-broken. Like everything else in the apartment.

The blinds were still drawn though it was almost seven. A stale, recycled warmth clung to the room. Empty cans crowded the desk. A stack of unopened parcels leaned by the door. In the corner, a weights set still in its box had become a shelf for dust.

He heard his mother on the stairs before he saw her — slow, uneven steps, a faint wheeze at each landing. He was already in the hallway before she’d even reached the door.

The lock clicked. A thin thread of cold evening air slipped under the door and laced through the stale room; damp asphalt, highway exhaust, the faint ghost of someone else’s cooking drifted up from below.

The door swung open and Helen heaved herself through the frame, shoulders and hips brushing both sides as she squeezed herself into the apartment. Flushed from the climb, she paused, chest rising and falling heavily under her coat. For a moment she seemed to take up the whole room. An ambulance siren tearing towards the hospital block wailed from the street—loud and raw through the open doorway—before she kicked it shut.

“Did you get it, Mom? The new router?”

“Hello would be nice.” She bent to unlace her boots, fingers stiff from the icy laces, voice flat with fatigue.

“It keeps dropping out. I can’t—”

Her hand shot up, palm out — stop. She sifted through the mail pile by the door, flipping past the envelope from the power company and pulling out the one from Xfinity beneath it. FINAL NOTICE shouted in red through the window. She tore it open with a resigned sigh. Her eyes moved down the page and hardened. “What is this? The bill’s double.”

He shifted his weight. “They said it was a free upgrade on the phone — no charge for three months. That must be a mistake. It just—”

“It just happened?” Her voice cracked, rising. “We can’t afford this. We can barely afford the rent as it is.” She gestured upward at the low ceiling, the thin walls, the whole cramped apartment. “I’m trying my hardest. Putting this roof over our heads and what do you do?” Her eyes snapped back to him, sharp as broken glass.

“Nothing.”

The word landed like a slap. Breath stuck in his throat. Sound dropped away — the hum of the radiator, the icy rain against the window, even her voice — leaving only a dull pressure behind his eyes. The air suddenly felt heavier, as if the walls themselves were exhaling around him. The smell of her damp coat clung to the hallway, sour and inescapable.

He stared at the floor. Scuffed lino. The pale outline where the mat used to sit. And there, half-hidden in the open mouth of her handbag, a white paper pharmacy bag with a curling label.

A memory stirred: cold kitchen tiles. Whispered phone calls behind closed doors. Wincing as she eased herself up from the couch, still sore from the biopsy she never told him about.

It’s back. His stomach turned. She’s sick again. All because of me.

Helen followed his gaze. A pause — then she snapped the bag shut, slipped the strap over her shoulder, and folded her arms across it, holding it tight to her chest.

“God, Jared.” Her voice sharpened, a mean edge she couldn’t pull back. “You’re twenty years old and after all these years, I still have to clean up after you.” She waved at the stained mugs and greasy plates crowding the sink, and he felt the heat rise in his face — each one suddenly a pair of eyes fixed on him, the whole filthy bench a silent jury.

The room seemed to shrink. His legs felt hollow.

“Don’t you get how easy you got this?” Her voice rose, brittle and furious. “Maybe if you’d spent half those years out in the world, working, doing something, anything, with your life instead of shut away in that room staring at that screen…” Her voice dropped, sounding flat and exhausted. “Just forget it.”

He nodded — or maybe he didn’t. The edges of the room were blurring, the air too thick to swallow.

The fridge gave a long, shuddering gurgle.

He turned and walked back down the hall. The door to his room closed softly behind him, like the lid of a box.

Something inside him was slipping. The room felt thinner, the air colder, as if the world were pulling away from his skin. If she vanished, everything would. Food, light, the sound of his name. There’d be nothing left to hold him here. His breath hitched, shallow and frantic.

He opened the laptop because the emptiness was too big to sit with alone. In the search bar his fingers typed the familiar address — incels.is — and the page loaded. The password manager prompt blinked up. He pressed his thumb to the sensor, smearing the oily film that clung there from too many days without him showering.

The system hesitated, then unlocked. GhostInTheCell. The name blinked back at him, proof he hadn’t dissolved yet. He clicked into Inceldom Discussion and hit Post thread.

Title: [Blackpill] Warden wants me out slaving in a McJob.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard, then pressed harder than necessary. The keys clicked too loud in the silence.

GhostInTheCell: Came home preaching “do something with your life” and crying about bills. Calls me a parasite. I’m not playing their hero script.

He hit send, then sat back and waited. Relief came as the replies from two night-owl regulars flowed in.

GeneticDeadEnd: Router wrecker boy returns. Thought warden had cut your internet rations.

WageCuck: Nah. Too busy demanding rent from her pet manlet. 😂

GeneticDeadEnd: Maybe a McJob will stop all his step-mom prawn “research.”

GhostInTheCell: Curiosity. You lot talk about MILFcore like it’s scripture. Wanted to see what hype was. That’s it.

GeneticDeadEnd: Sure, bro. And I read Mein Kampf for the footnotes.

WageCuck: LMAO imagine mommy walking in mid-nut. Peak beta.

GeneticDeadEnd: Peak beta and peak cohab. Twenty years old and still under warden surveillance.

GhostInTheCell: Surveillance? Please. Without me she’s just another used femoid with an empty cell.

The lie tasted bitter, but it was easier to type than the truth.

WageCuck: Tell her that while she’s doing your laundry.

GeneticDeadEnd: Or while she’s paying the internet bill router-boy racks up. 😂

WageCuck: Maybe the real femoid leash is “Mommy’s house.”

GeneticDeadEnd: The bluepill calls it “family.” We call it captivity.

GhostInTheCell: One day I walk. Lock the door behind me and let her rot.

WageCuck: Based if true.

GeneticDeadEnd: He won’t. None of us ever do.

His bluff called and his anxiety starting to rise again, Jared changed the subject.

GhostInTheCell: Where’s StacySlayer69? Been MIA for months.

WageCuck: You wanna smoke his pole, Ghost? Dat’s against the rulz.

GhostInTheCell: Nah. He just posts more dank lulz than your low-effort cuckage.

WageCuck: Fair. But I will always luv u. Even tho ya Mom doesn’t. When did your dad bail again?

Jared’s chest tightened. His fingers shook as they hovered over the keyboard. Seconds passed as he tried to think of what to say to not give WageCuck any satisfaction. He felt relief seeing someone else reply.

GeneticDeadEnd: Slayer showed up some weeks back, shilled some waifu.ai thing for referral credits, then dipped.

WageCuck: Yah. he “ascended” with some top-tier digital waifu. Still fakecel if u ask me.

GeneticDeadEnd: We didn’t. It happens. Coomer singularity eats ’em.

GhostInTheCell: Always the loudest who vanish.

GeneticDeadEnd: Heard it’s pricey. Why Slayer was grifting. Feeling “curious” again, router boy?

WageCuck: Just don’t misclick on husbando.ai, fag. 💀

GhostInTheCell: Haha. Anyway, I’m out. Try not to drown in your own cope while I’m gone.

WageCuck: LARP harder, router boy. I make content for kiddies.

GeneticDeadEnd: We’ll still be here when you crawl back tomorrow.

He closed the tab and leaned back in his creaking gamer chair, idly picking at the cracked Naugahyde.

The room was too quiet. StacySlayer69 had “ascended” — whatever that meant. Found someone. Maybe even love. And here he was, with nothing but the hum of a fritzing router and the possibility that his mother was dying.

The thought stuck like a splinter and refused to loosen. If the medication was nothing, he could breathe. He could sleep. But the more he tried to ignore it, the tighter it coiled. If it was that again. He paced the room, chewing the skin around his nails, stopping now and then to stare at the door.

He yielded and eased it open a fraction. The hallway was dim. From the kitchen came the hum of the microwave and the clink of dishes. Then the smell hit — a sour, fatty reek of reheated noodles and detergent, undercut by the damp, lived-in scent of her body. A smell that clung to the hallway walls, to her clothes, to him. His stomach turned. He shut the door again and sat back down, then fired up Watch_Dogs on his laptop and immersed himself in some “ghost run” gang hideout runs, trying to push the thought away.

After an hour or two had passed, he cracked the door once more. A toilet flushed. Moist warmth leaked from the bathroom, laced with bleach and stale urine. Heavy footsteps crossed to her bedroom. Then the bed frame groaned. He waited for the hiss of the CPAP machine and, finally, the slow, rasping snore — wet, human, inescapable.

He stood there for a long time, caught between the dread of what he might learn and the impossibility of not knowing.

He stepped out into the hall.

Chapter End Song: Dead Weight - by PVRIS

Chapter 2: Fracture

The carpet under Jared’s bare feet felt rougher than he remembered. Every step was a negotiation — heel lifted, weight balanced, muscles braced so the boards beneath wouldn’t creak. The sound of the CPAP drifted down the hallway in steady bursts, a mechanical hiss followed by the soft, wet rasp of her snore. She was deep under. She would stay that way. She had to stay that way.

The radiator clanked once and fell silent. He passed the taped-over thermostat — her latest attempt to make the place colder during the day. He’d turned it back up twice this week. It was a quiet war neither of them mentioned. His breath fogged faintly in the air as he moved, vanishing before he could take another step.

The air changed as he approached the kitchen. It was thicker here, full of the sour reek of noodles and the fading ghost of detergent. Beneath it all was a musk he recognized too well — the stale, lived-in scent of her skin that seemed to soak into the walls themselves. He swallowed against the taste of it on the back of his tongue and stepped forward.

The shift from carpet to lino was sudden and colder than he expected, the kind of cold that seeped through the soles of his feet and clung there. A thin chill film of something slick spread beneath his toes, sliding under his foot before he could react. Jared’s hand shot to the wall, palm flat slapping against the peeling paint as he caught himself.

He froze, lungs locked, heartbeat hammering in his ears.

After what seemed like an eternity, the hiss and snore continued.

He exhaled and wiped his foot against the mat, slow and deliberate, and forced his body forward again.

The bench brushed his hip as he passed. A bowl sat abandoned in the sink, a shallow pool of water gone cloudy with grease, a skin forming across its surface. The smell of cheap lemon detergent was sharper here, chemical and cloying. He turned his face away, breathing shallowly through his mouth until the lino gave way to tile.

The bathroom air was different again — cooler, heavy with bleach and damp, and still faintly holding the memory of steam. Jared closed the door behind him with a slow, measured pull and pressed his back against it. The towel on the rail was damp when he lifted it, sour-smelling and heavy with weeks of neglect. He pushed it along the floor until it sealed the crack at the bottom of the door.

The light switch clicked. White glare flooded the small space. The mirror caught him before he could look away.

The stranger staring back was pale and hollow-eyed, with purple crescents shadowing the skin beneath. Greasy hair clung in uneven clumps. The stretched fabric of his hoodie, streaked with food stains masking the faded Ubisoft logo, hung awkwardly from a frame that sagged in all the places he’d promised himself it wouldn’t. The image was harder to look at than he expected. It felt like staring at someone who’d already given up. The unopened weight set in his room rose unbidden in his mind. Tomorrow. Always tomorrow.

He broke the stare-down and swung the mirrored cabinet open. The hinges whispered. Rows of old bottles stared back, all familiar, all unchanged. No new labels. No new pills. Nothing.

A pulse of mixed frustration and anxiety tightened in his chest. If the medication wasn’t here, she’d hidden it. Hidden it from him. The thought wormed deeper with every breath.

His eyes drifted back to the door. Beyond it, the CPAP hissed and the wet snore rolled on, steady as the tide. The bathroom was the first advance into enemy territory. The next one lay just another twenty feet beyond. And the thought — it’s in her room, it has to be — was no longer a maybe. The certainty pressed at him from the inside, harder with every breath.

The door to her room was already ajar. Jared eased it open with his fingertips, just wide enough to slip inside. The darkness swallowed him almost immediately. Only a thin strip of sodium-orange light from the streetlamp outside slipped through the gap in the blinds, carving a single crooked line along the far wall. It wasn’t enough to see by — only enough to make the darkness feel alive.

He hovered at the threshold, breath caught high in his throat, each shaky exhale blooming pale in the cold before dissolving into the dark. From here he could still retreat. If he turned back now, if he slipped silently down the hall and shut himself back into his room, nothing unforgivable had happened. The thought flickered for a moment — and then it choked out.

The air in her bedroom was heavier, and a little warmer. It clung to his skin. She was a shapeless bulk beneath the duvet, her chest rising and falling in time with the mechanical hiss of the CPAP. Each exhale was damp and human, loud enough that it seemed to fill the room.

Where the hell is it?

He dropped lower without quite deciding to. First a crouch, then knees pressed to the carpet. The fibers scratched against his skin as he lowered himself further, crawling forward on hands and knees like a burglar in a house he already lived in.

His palms brushed over abandoned clothes, a loose sleeve here, a twisted strap there. A sour, stale smell rose as he moved through them — sweat baked into fabric, the faint acrid edge of deodorant that had long since given up. It clung to his hands and hair, thick as the air itself, and for a moment he hated himself for knowing it so well.

Something sharp snagged at his knee — the hooked clasp of a discarded bra catching and biting into his skin. He winced and shuffled sideways, the breath in his chest held prisoner by fear. She didn’t stir. The hiss and snore went on.

He circled the bed slowly, feeling ahead with both hands. His fingertips grazed the coarse fabric of the carpet, the cool curve of a dropped hairbrush, the dry edge of a paperback spine — and then something softer, more deliberate: the worn leather of her handbag.

A surge of adrenaline burned through the shame. He dragged it toward him inch by inch, every movement careful, controlled. The zip rasped faintly under his fingers. Inside, paper crinkled. He fumbled until he found the familiar texture of a pharmacy bag, wrapped around a small box.

Gotcha.

He clamped one edge of the bag between his teeth, the taste of new paper filling his mouth, and backed away from the bed the way he’d come — elbows and knees, slow and silent. When he was clear of the room, he rose to his feet and padded back down the hall, the paper packet still gripped between his teeth like contraband.

The bathroom door shut softly behind him. Light flared again as he flipped the switch. He spat the box into his palm and smoothed the crumpled paper flat against the sink. The label swam into focus beneath the glare — and his breath caught as he read it.

Wegovy.

His chest flooded with relief. Not some chemo drug he’d have to Google. Not cancer.

The box held four weekly injectors, one already used. He unfolded the receipt tucked inside — $1,350, paid in full. No insurance claim. No discount.

For a moment, he just stared at the number, numb. She knew how to get it covered — that was literally her job as an insurance adjuster — but she’d paid list price anyway.

A different thought crept in, colder and sharper.

So that was why the router never came. Why she’d hidden the box like a secret. Why, when she told him they couldn’t afford it, what she meant was he didn’t matter as much as a drug to shrink her sprawling body.

The relief curdled.

Who’d want to be trapped with someone like him? The shame sat heavy in his chest, souring into anger he couldn’t place anywhere. Fury and humiliation churned under his skin, looking for somewhere to go.

He turned the box over in his hands, the label glaring back at him under the harsh bathroom light. For a moment, he imagined leaving it right there on the kitchen table — center stage, impossible to miss. Let her see he knew. Let her choke on the proof of her lie. Maybe then she’d feel even a fraction of the shame she’d poured into him.

The fantasy was over before it started. She’d know he’d been in her room. She’d know he’d gone crawling through her things like a thief. And then there’d be the shouting, the questions, the looks — the ones that always made him feel smaller than he already was. He swallowed hard and shoved the receipt back into the crinkled paper bag. The defiance that had briefly flared inside him guttered out.

Crawling back felt worse than breaking in. Each shuffle across the carpet scraped something raw in him. Even the accusing clasp of a discarded bra bit into his knee again. He ignored the pain and kept creeping. He slid the bag back into the shadows beneath her bed, hands shaking slightly, and backed out of the room on his elbows. The hiss of the CPAP never faltered. She hadn’t even stirred.

Back in his room, the silence pressed against his ears, too close, too loud. He thought, briefly, about going back to the forum — posting a thread, vomiting it all out for GeneticDeadEnd and WageCuck to chew over. But what would he even write? Hey guys, turns out Mommy’s not dying. Just too busy trying to shrink herself to care if I rot. They’d laugh. They always did. And what he felt wasn’t funny — it was jagged and hot and too personal to survive their jokes.

His mind slid to the one person who had not laughed, not that way - StacySlayer69. The night a pile-on started, Slayer had dropped a single reply that cut it off. Cool it, he wrote, let the kid breathe. No emoji. No wink. Slayer never called him router boy. He called him Ghost. Like he was a person. Once, in a DM, a link to an old bodyweight routine and a line that said try this for a week, then talk. It was against the site’s creed to even hint at self-improvement. Bluepill talk. Forbidden. Like telling a corpse to jog.

Slayer was gone — not banned, not rage-quit, just gone. Ascended, they called it, like there was somewhere better to go. The word stuck to him like static. Maybe there really was a way out — out of this room, out of the shame, out of himself. That link they’d tossed into the thread — waifu.ai — didn’t feel like a joke any more. It was a green exit sign, glowing faintly in the distance, because Slayer had walked through it and vanished on the other side. He had no idea what waited there. Only that someone like him had followed it — and hadn’t come back.

He opened the laptop. The screen lit his hands, his face. He kicked up Chrome and the URL bar waited. He typed the name exactly as he had seen it.

w a i f u . a i

He stared at it while the cursor blinked. Then he pressed enter.

Chapter End Song: The Hand That Feeds - by Nine Inch Nails

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The NZ Law Commission recently released Ia Tangata, a review of the Human Rights Act 1993 with respect to people who are transgender, or non-binary for people with innate variations of sex characteristics. The 457-page report is the result of over two years of work and received submissions from a wide range of individuals and groups. The central recommendation is that the Act:

“should be amended to clarify that the Act covers discrimination that is due to a person being transgender or non-binary or having an innate variation of sex characteristics” (NZLC R150, p. 12)

The report and its recommendations have not been well-received in NZ gender critical circles as shown in the following four articles and media statements:

Garwhoungle: It’s out: the Law Commission report

Women’s Rights Party: Sex matters in life, language and law

Speak Up For Women: Law Commission officially untethers from reality

Ani O’Brien: Institutional Insanity: The Law Commission jumps the shark in new report

Rather than engage with the actual report on its own terms, these four pieces dismiss the report, the process, and the people involved, then substitute a simplified, more alarming version of the recommendations that is easier to attack. This is the straw woman in action. It relies on two linked moves that run through the responses: disavowal, which denies or misstates what gender identity is, and fear-mongering, which inflates trans people and routine human rights analysis into sweeping threats. What follows will deconstruct these moves, demonstrating precisely how they replace the Commission's detailed analysis with a simplistic and misleading caricature.

Disavowal

The contemporary understanding of gender identity draws on over 60 years of psychological research and practice and is accepted by the World Health Organization internationally and all major mental health professional organisations in Aotearoa, including counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Gender identity is the internal psychological phenomenon of experiencing oneself as male, female, in between, or neither — the latter pair being forms of non-binary identity. It is a component of self-concept, distinct from sexual orientation, which concerns patterns of attraction, and from gender expression, which is outward presentation and behaviour. Everyone has a gender identity. When it aligns with the sex recorded at birth and with how others perceive you (which is what cisgender means), you may not notice that for others it can be independent.

Naming or disclosing an identity does not create it. Transition does not alter gender identity; it aligns expression and, where appropriate, aspects of the body — primary and secondary sex characteristics and endocrine balance — with that identity to relieve dysphoria and related distress.

Most gender critical women insist they don’t have a gender identity, which is like saying you don’t have a handedness or a sexual orientation. Ironically, the same individuals often put “adult human female” in their bios which is a clear statement of the very sense of gender identity which they claim they don’t have.

Each of the four pieces follows a consistent pattern of denial, trivialisation or misrepresentation of gender identity:

1. Insisting the concept is undefined, elastic, or unreal

“meaningless definition” (Garwhoungle); “undefined, subjective category” and “so elastic that a person can declare… change the next day” (Ani O’Brien); “untethers from reality” (Speak Up For Women).
This gate keeps at the definition stage so nothing downstream needs to be considered.

2. Rebranding identity as a belief, feeling, or idea

“people who believe in gender identity” (Garwhoungle); “the feelings of some men” (Speak Up For Women); “protecting an idea inside someone’s head” (Ani O’Brien); the report “officially untethers from reality” (Speak Up For Women).
These lines recast a core part of the self as a creed, mood, or unreality so refusal can look like free thought rather than discrimination.

3. Downgrading identity to a casual proclamation

“those who identify as women” (Garwhoungle); “a man who identifies as a woman” (Women’s Rights Party); “any male who proclaims a female inner gender identity” (Speak Up For Women); “anyone who identifies as a woman” and “boys who identify as girls” (Ani O’Brien).
Here “identifies as” is a rhetorical downgrading that recasts an internal identity as a mere announcement, turning disclosure into a proclamation so it can be waved away.

4. Collapsing identity into or against sex

“If ‘sex’ is to be conflated with ‘gender identity’…” (Women’s Rights Party); “Gender identity… rejects biological sex altogether” and creates a “legal fiction” where sex is “what you feel it is” (Ani O’Brien).
This forces a zero-sum frame. Sex and gender identity are distinct constructs. Recognising gender identity does not ‘erase’ sex, and single-sex contexts remain in the recommendations where justified on a case-by-case basis as is common in human rights analysis.

Why this disavowal persists

The established definition of gender identity is widely available and central to the human rights context the report addresses. Yet, the same misrepresentations consistently recur from the above authors. A plausible explanation is shame avoidance: accepting the definition above would force a painful reckoning with exclusionary claims and practices. That threatens a self-image of fairness and reasonableness, so the category is kept unclear.

Within this model, any resulting shame can be disowned and defensively converted into anger directed at the source. This helps explain why the reaction from these authors is not one of reasoned disagreement, but of sheer outrage, with rhetoric that spikes to “hanging women out to dry” (Garwhoungle), “dangerous” (Speak Up For Women), “jumps the shark” (Ani O’Brien), and “couldn’t be worse” (Women’s Rights Party).

Identity-protective cognition keeps the loop going. A sex-only world-view treats a distinct identity construct as a status threat, so the goalposts for definitional adequacy are set impossibly high for gender identity, while the majority’s own identity is treated as neutral common sense. The result is not engagement with the report’s analysis but motivated refusal to see it.

Once identity is minimised or treated as unreal, routine human-rights recommendations can be reframed as sweeping risks.

Fear-mongering

The four responses build their case on a foundation of fear, framing trans women as a danger in public spaces. This requires them to ignore the report's explicit findings on safety. After reviewing the evidence, the Commission stated plainly:

"...we have not found evidence to support the concern that clarifying the legal entitlement of people who are transgender to use a single-sex facility that aligns with their gender identity exacerbates safety risks for cisgender women and girls" (NZLC R150, p. 34).

The Commission's finding is consistent with external research; A 2018 US study of gender identity-inclusive public-accommodation laws likewise found no increase in crimes in restrooms, locker rooms or changing rooms after the law took effect. Despite that, the four responses continue to frame trans women as a danger in public spaces:

1. “The Law Commission systematically recommends the dismantling of almost all the exceptions that are in place to protect women and girls” (Garwhoungle);

2. “the Commission is recommending changes to most of the 19 existing exceptions… [including] toilets and changing facilities, women’s refuges and rape crisis centres, and women’s prisons” (Women’s Rights Party);

3. “Women and girls… should in many instances be compelled to share single sex spaces, sport, schools, and services with any male who proclaims a female inner gender identity… Ridiculously, the onus is on women to prove otherwise” (Speak Up For Women);

4. “public bathrooms and changing rooms will now be open to anyone who identifies as a woman”, “even private single-sex schools… will have to admit boys who identify as girls”, “a legal crowbar to pry open every women’s space, every sporting category, every workplace policy, and every public debate” (Ani O’Brien)

These claims are blatant straw women. The report does not recommend a “dismantling of almost all the exceptions.” Instead, it describes a measured and targeted process:

“We have taken a case-by-case approach to analysing whether and how each of the sex exceptions in Part 2 of the Human Rights Act should apply to the new grounds we propose” (NZLC R150, p. 22).

The most significant distortion is the idea that vulnerable spaces like women's refuges will have unqualified, "unchecked entry." This is false. For shared accommodation, the report includes a critical safeguard, stating a person can only be excluded if that is:

“...reasonably required to preserve the privacy or to protect the welfare of any occupant or potential occupant of the accommodation” (NZLC R150, p. 43).

This welfare-based test, which leaves discretion to providers, directly refutes the caricature of compulsion.

So contrary to the above claims, the recommendations retain single-sex provision and add that gender identity is not, by itself, a basis to exclude trans women, given the lack of evidence of safety concerns. Cis men may still be excluded. Nothing in the recommendations opens women-only spaces to cis men. This distinction is central, yet the responses collapse it by treating trans women as “any male,” falsely asserting that women’s spaces will be “open to anyone.” They want to insist that facilities managers and sporting administrators should be forced to respect their unjustified prejudices. In place of case-by-case proportionality, they demand blanket exclusions.

It’s clear from the above that gender critical women frequently deploy fear and disgust cues towards trans women, which is literally what defines transphobia. To support their fears, gender critical voices often cite dubiously sourced or misread prison statistics as if they proved trans women, as a group, are a danger to women and girls in public spaces. While a cis woman sex offender such as Lisa Biron is treated as an individual, any trans offenders are taken to stand for all trans women. This is applying negative stereotypes to a whole group of innocent individuals, literally pre-judging them. And that is a textbook example of prejudice.

When pressed for actual evidence regarding public spaces, the claim often shifts to “the police/state is refusing to keep proper statistics”, an argument from conspiracy and paranoid fear itself is offered in place of evidence.

We’ve been here before

There are clear historical rhymes. “Gender ideology” is the new “Gay Agenda”.

During the Jim Crow era, toilet and bathroom segregation was justified as protection for white women, with crime and disease stereotypes pushed onto Black women to justify keeping facilities separate, a parallel that black activists have themselves highlighted.

More recently, during the Lavender Menace and Briggs Initiative of the 1970s, lesbians were framed as a sexual threat to straight women and girls in public places. Bathrooms, locker rooms, and women’s organisations were treated as sites of moral danger, and exclusion was sold as protection.

In both cases, dread alone was treated as fact and attempts at segregation followed. The structure is the same: elevate fears, claim needs for safety, and then legislate exclusion.

Human rights law protections on the basis of race and sexual orientation were needed to prevent the above injustices. Proportionality keeps women-only provision where privacy, safety, dignity, fairness, or programme purpose actually require it, and rejects blanket exclusions that do not. The duty to justify sits with the decision-maker relying on an exception, not with women as a class, and the standard requires legitimate reasons that fit the purpose of the setting.

Fear is not a fact.
Prejudice framed as protection is still just prejudice.
Straw woman fabrications are not a refutation.

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"A two-day ‘De-Cult’ conference is on," one wrote, "without a whisper of the neo-rainbow cult in the programme."

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It's crucial to understand that when many in the gender-critical movement use the word “cult” like this, it's not just a pejorative insult. It's not the casual slur people often use for any group they happen to disagree with. For them, it is a literal diagnosis and a deeply held belief that frames their entire world-view.

But what if this claimed diagnosis of others is, in fact, an unconscious self-portrait? This is where we encounter psychological projection: a defence mechanism where a person or group takes their own unwanted traits, anxieties, and behaviours and attributes them to someone else. It's a way of offloading uncomfortable truths by seeing them not in yourself, but in a designated enemy.

Sometimes, however, projection is not just a private defence. It can be cultivated into a deliberate propaganda tactic. In the field of propaganda analysis, this is called accusation in a mirror. Coined in the 1970s based on studies of organised hate campaigns, it involves accusing your target of the very wrongs you are committing yourself. The aim is to reframe hostility as self-defence and to make escalation seem justified. In the context of gender-critical activism, it becomes a rhetorical tactic that strips its target of humanity and fuels hostility toward trans people by portraying them as a fabricated threat to women and girls.

To give these observations a more rigorous framework, we can turn to the work of psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. In his groundbreaking 1950s study of brainwashing and ideological totalism, based on research with prisoners of war and members of authoritarian cults, Lifton identified eight criteria for “thought reform” environments: high-control groups that demand ideological purity and suppress independent thought.

When you examine the gender-critical movement through the lens of Lifton's criteria, their accusations start to look less like observations and more like confessions. The specific “symptoms” they diagnose in the trans community provide a strikingly accurate roadmap to the behaviours, tactics, and thought patterns found within their own ranks. Let’s unpack six common examples that map onto Lifton’s model.

1. Loading the Language: The Dogma and the Slogan

• The Claim: Gender-critical activists argue that the phrase “Trans women are women” is a dogmatic, thought-terminating cliché. They frame it as a meaningless mantra, supposedly born from a recent academic ideology and repeated only to enforce belief and shut down debate.

• The Reality: This is a strategic misrepresentation of both history and purpose. First, for the trans community, the phrase is not a debate-stopper. It is a concise statement of identity and a plea for basic dignity. It summarises a long-held and deeply personal understanding of self. Second, the concept it rests on, “gender identity,” is not some recent invention of the social sciences. It has been a foundational part of medical and psychological discourse since the work of Robert Stoller in the 1960s. Attributing this understanding to “Queer Theory” from the 1990s is factually incorrect, as the concept of gender identity predates that academic field by decades. This misattribution reveals a common tactic: conflating the lived reality of a group of people with an academic theory the critic dislikes. It allows critics to reframe a human identity as a hostile, abstract “ideology” that can be fought, rather than as a group of people who happen to share it. “Trans women are women” is not a quote from a recent textbook used to enforce dogma. It is a request for recognition, grounded in a well-established psychological understanding of selfhood.

• The Mirror: In Lifton’s model of thought reform, Loading the Language is a hallmark of high-control movements. Phrases like “Adult human female” and “Sex is real” are repeated endlessly on t-shirts, social media bios, and protest signs. These slogans aren’t used to open a discussion, but to end one. Ironically, they are the very thought-terminating clichés the movement accuses others of using. They create a false simplicity, shutting down nuanced conversation about biology, identity, and society, while enforcing loyalty to the group’s rigid worldview.

2. Community Support vs. "Love Bombing"

• The Claim: Gender-critical rhetoric asserts that LGBTQ+ communities “love bomb” vulnerable youth. They argue that the overwhelming affirmation and support a young person finds when they come out is a manipulative recruitment tactic to lure them into a “trans ideology.”

• The Reality: Imagine spending years with a fundamental secret about who you are, terrified to tell your family for fear of rejection. When you finally find a group of people, online or in person, who say, “We see you, we get it, and you’re okay,” that feeling is not manipulation. It is profound, life-altering relief. For countless LGBTQ+ youth, this sense of belonging is the single most important factor that keeps them safer from depression and suicide. It’s a lifeline, not a lure.

• The Mirror: Gender-critical online spaces for distressed parents are textbook examples of actual love bombing and what Lifton’s model calls the Dispensing of Existence. As leaked Genspect discussion forums show, these are spaces where parents are specifically validated for refusing to affirm their children. They are flooded with messages that recast this rejection as a heroic act: ‘You are not alone,’ ‘It’s not your fault,’ ‘You are a brave hero for standing up to this.’ This powerful validation isn't just about comfort; it's a recruitment strategy. It offers simple answers and a sense of community, but it’s conditional on accepting the group's ideology and, often, enlisting in a broader political crusade.

3. Family Isolation and "Brainwashing"

• The Claim: A cornerstone of the gender-critical "cult" narrative is that if a young trans person distances themselves from their family, it’s proof that the “cult” has brainwashed them and is isolating them from their loving parents.

• The Reality: This accusation wilfully ignores decades of painful LGBTQ+ history. The dynamic with transphobic parents today is identical to that of homophobic parents who, for generations, meant that coming out brought relentless abuse at home and, for some, being kicked out with nowhere to go. When a home becomes a place of constant misgendering, emotional abuse, and threats, a young person's choice to create distance isn't "brainwashing"; it's a calculated act of survival. Choosing to disconnect from those who hurt you isn't proof of a cult; it's proof of sanity.

• The Mirror: It is the gender-critical movement that actively provides tactics for isolation. The leaked conversations from their private forums mentioned above reveal parents being advised to cut off their child's internet access, to pull them from supportive schools, and to systematically distrust any therapist, teacher, or doctor who affirms their child. They create an environment where parents are told to trust only the movement's ideology over all other experts and, ultimately, over their own child's declared reality. This is not protecting a child. It is building a cage. Lifton identified this as Milieu Control, the tactic of controlling a person’s environment to enforce ideological conformity.

4. The Sacred Science of Social Contagion

• The Claim: To explain the rise in young people identifying as trans, the gender-critical movement heavily promotes the idea of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). They present it as a scientific phenomenon where teens are catching gender diversity like some kind of a social disease.

• The Reality: ROGD is not a real medical diagnosis; it's a political narrative constructed from parental reports on anti-trans forums. The original paper by Lisa Littman did not interview a single transgender young person. When researchers conduct studies that do involve speaking directly to trans youth, they find the opposite: the vast majority have known they were trans for many years. What these parents are witnessing is not “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” but “Late Onset Parental Discovery.” A young person in a hostile home learns to keep their identity secret, only coming out when they have built a support network. From the family’s perspective, it seems “sudden.” For the young person, it’s part of a much longer journey.

• The Mirror: The gender critical movement's approach to ROGD is a perfect illustration of Lifton’s concept of Sacred Science. The movement accuses affirming healthcare of being ideological while clinging to a scientifically and ethically bankrupt concept, contradicted by multiple peer-reviewed studies, as an article of faith. Mainstream science discards failed hypotheses; a closed ideological group elevates them to unimpeachable truth. They call others a cult, yet cling to a debunked theory like it was gospel.

5. Demand for Purity: The True Believer Test

• The Claim: Gender-critical activists often accuse trans communities of enforcing rigid ideological purity. They say that anyone who questions “trans orthodoxy” risks being shamed, harassed, or “cancelled” for even minor deviations.

• The Reality: Disagreement exists in every movement, but in most trans spaces the focus is on survival, solidarity, and mutual care rather than doctrinal perfection. Disputes over language, strategy, or political alliances happen in the open, and people continue to collaborate despite differences. While strongly held views can lead to conflict, the narrative of a single, unified “trans orthodoxy” ignores the diversity of perspectives across geography, race, class, and lived experience. It also disregards the power imbalance: trans communities are marginalised and have little institutional control. Portraying them as a powerful ideological machine that crushes dissent is a way to delegitimise their advocacy and reframe grass roots disagreement as authoritarian control.

• The Mirror: Within the gender-critical movement, purity tests are common. Some members proudly adopt the label “ultra” to mark themselves as uncompromising standard-bearers. Others are attacked for being too moderate or for engaging respectfully with trans people. Those who deviate from core narratives by supporting healthcare for adults, acknowledging non-binary people, or criticising harassment tactics are branded “captured” or “traitors.” This is exactly what Lifton described as Demand for Purity: the constant division of the world into the pure and the corrupt, where even insiders are policed for signs of impurity. The standard they accuse trans communities of enforcing is alive and well in their own ranks.

6. Doctrine Over Person: Knowing Without Asking

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the gender-critical movement is how its self-proclaimed experts operate. Authors like Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier, and Kathleen Stock hold themselves out as authorities on the trans experience. They claim to know what trans people truly think and feel, asserting that they transition due to social contagion, trauma, repressed homosexuality, or sexual fetishes.

Their expertise, however, is based almost entirely on their own preconceptions and prejudices. The method is simple: they declare that transgender people are unreliable narrators of their own lives. This is the ultimate expression of what Lifton's model calls Doctrine Over Person. The pre-written doctrine that being trans is a harmful delusion is treated as more true than any individual's lived reality. If a person’s experience contradicts this belief, it is the person who is dismissed as confused or dishonest, never the doctrine that is questioned.

This tactic allows them to treat an entire population as objects to be analysed from a distance, not as human beings to be listened to. By dismissing the very people they write about, they ensure their own prejudice is the only evidence that matters. It’s how they construct their fantasy of a ‘trans cult’: by ensuring no real trans voices can get in to complicate it.

The Final Mirror: Who The Experts Were Actually Talking About

And so, we return to the 'De-Cult' conference in Christchurch. The gender-critical activists were seemingly outraged that the event was ignoring what they called the "neo-rainbow cult." But the reality is far more tragic.

The conference did have a session on LGBTQ+ people. It was titled "Invisible rainbow youth: Purity, conversion and coming out of cults" about the queer individuals trapped inside actual cults, forced to doubly suppress their identities and often subjected to conversion practices.

The supreme irony is this: the gender-critical activists demanded the experts condemn the trans community as a cult. Instead, the conference explored how actual cults harm queer people through coercive suppression and conversion practices, the very tactics that the leaked internal chats show groups like Genspect actively strategise around and promote to parents.

They looked at a conference dedicated to fighting coercive control and saw only their projected enemy. They couldn't see that the conference's description of a harmful group, one that polices identity, demands conformity, and promotes conversion practices, was looking right back at them. Every accusation a confession, they were just unable or unwilling to recognise their own reflection.

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Introduction

I want to start by grounding us in a couple of terms that I’ll be using throughout this article: neurodiversity and neurodivergence. These terms are often used interchangeably, but they actually mean different things, and understanding that difference is important.

The term neurodiversity was coined by journalist Harvey Blume in 1998 and popularised by Judy Singer, an autistic sociologist. She used it to describe the idea that there is a natural diversity in how human brains function, just like there is diversity in physical traits, personalities, or learning styles.

In that sense, neurodiversity is a population-level concept. It includes everyone: autistic people, ADHDers, dyslexic people, and neurotypical people as well. It’s a fact of human variation, a kind of biodiversity for minds.

Neurodivergence, on the other hand, is an individual-level concept. It refers to people whose cognitive styles diverge significantly from what society considers "normal," often in ways that are pathologised or misunderstood. So when I talk about neurodivergent people, I’m referring to people like autistic individuals, ADHDers, and others whose ways of thinking, feeling, or sensing don’t align with dominant expectations.

Put simply: neurodiversity describes the big picture; neurodivergence refers to those who live outside the norms that picture tends to privilege.

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You may also notice that I’m mostly using identity-first language. For example, I say “autistic person” instead of “person with autism.” That’s a deliberate choice. Many neurodivergent individuals see their neurotype as an integrated part of who they are, not something separate or medical that they carry like a burden.

That said, language is personal and some individuals prefer person-first language. There’s no universal rule, and the most respectful approach is always to ask people how they want to be identified and then honour that.

One final note: the generalisations I’ll use here are not intended to stereotype. They’re intended to offer reflection points and patterns that can help us notice bias, question assumptions, and become more attuned to the lived experiences of neurodivergent people.

At the heart of this article is a focus on how societal narratives and clinical frameworks shape the way we, as therapists, understand, support, and sometimes unintentionally misinterpret neurodivergent clients.

We’ll explore where stigma originates, how it manifests in the therapy room, and how we can move toward more affirming, collaborative ways of practising. So with that foundation, let’s begin.

The Focus of this Article

For the scope of this article, I’ve chosen to focus on autistic people and ADHDers, two identities that fall under the broad umbrella of neurodiversity.

They are among the more commonly diagnosed neurotypes, and they also share many lived experiences. Both groups often struggle with everyday demands and are frequently misunderstood in social settings.

Autism and ADHD are both polygenic conditions, meaning they are influenced by many genes rather than a single cause. Genetic studies show that around 50 percent of the genetic factors involved in autism also underpin ADHD.

Despite this, clinicians were long trained to see them as entirely separate, or even mutually exclusive. Until the release of the DSM-5 in 2013, it wasn’t even permissible to diagnose someone with both conditions, no matter how clearly they displayed traits of each.

That DSM-5 update brought diagnostic thinking more in line with what gene research, and neurodivergent people themselves, have been saying for years. These are not opposing conditions. They are overlapping ones.

Many people living with this overlap describe themselves as having “AuDHD,” a community term that reflects a blended experience which doesn’t map neatly onto traditional diagnostic categories.

So while autism and ADHD remain distinct diagnoses, in lived experience the boundaries are often blurred. Most of the autistic people I know also have some ADHD traits. Misunderstanding that overlap has led to missed diagnoses, fragmented or absent support, and unnecessary stigma.

That’s why I’m bringing them together here. Not because they are the same, but because their connection is significant. Recognising that connection helps us support neurodivergent people more effectively.

It’s also important to emphasise that both autism and ADHD are highly heritable. Estimates place heritability rates between 70 and 80 percent, which is among the highest known. It’s not surprising that these traits run in families, even if they show up in different forms. One person might lean more autistic, another more ADHD, and a third might express something in between. But the underlying traits often thread through generations.

This genetic framing really matters. It reminds us that these conditions are not caused by parenting styles, trauma, vaccines, or the environment. Those things influence how someone experiences the world, but they are not the origin. Autism and ADHD reflect fundamental differences in how the brain is wired.

And yet for a long time, and still in some spaces, autistic and ADHD traits have been viewed through those same lenses. They were interpreted as signs of poor parenting, trauma, or moral weakness, and treated as something to be fixed, corrected, or even punished.

Autism, for instance, was long blamed on emotional neglect by cold, distant mothers. This was known as the “refrigerator mother” theory in the 1950s. The idea did profound harm, not just to autistic people, but to entire families. It particularly targeted and shamed mothers, reinforcing a pattern of blaming women for their children’s neurodivergence.

ADHD, similarly, was often seen not as a neurodevelopmental difference, but as a discipline problem. Children who couldn’t sit still or focus were labelled lazy, dumb, disruptive, disobedient, or just ‘bad.’ And behind those judgments were often assumptions about poor parenting, lack of structure, or moral weakness.

Both conditions were also heavily shaped by gendered expectations. Diagnostic criteria were, and often still are, based on stereotypically male presentations.

In autism, that meant a focus on externalised behaviours like social withdrawal or repetitive movements. In ADHD, it meant a focus on hyperactivity and impulsiveness, especially when loud, physical, or disruptive. These traits are more commonly observed in boys, not because they are more neurodivergent, but because boys are often socialised to express distress outwardly.

Girls and women are typically taught to be sociable, agreeable, and emotionally attuned. They are discouraged not only from being disruptive, but also from withdrawing, appearing odd, or struggling socially. As a result, many learn to mask by mimicking social norms, staying quiet, and internalising their distress. This has led to widespread under-diagnosis. Many were identified late, misdiagnosed entirely, or never diagnosed at all.

For autistic girls and women, this can lead to diagnoses like anxiety, depression, or borderline personality disorder instead.

For inattentive or distractible ADHDers, especially girls, being dreamy or disorganised was often overlooked as harmless or misread as compliance. Their behaviour was interpreted as quietness, shyness, or sensitivity, rather than as a sign of cognitive difficulty. As a result, their struggles went unnoticed until anxiety, burnout, or breakdown forced contact with mental health services in adulthood.

There’s a pattern here in that both autism and ADHD have been treated less like natural variations and more like personal or moral failures, whether of the individual or their parenting. That critical framing still shows up in subtle ways:

• “If only they tried harder…”

• “If only they made an attempt to fit in more…”

• “If only the parents set better limits…”

• “‘If only they could just manage their emotions…”

‘Normalisation’ Therapies

Even therapies have also often been rooted in similar ideas promoting normalisation.

One example is Applied Behaviour Analysis, a therapy developed in the 1960s by Ivar Lovaas.

ABA was designed to make autistic children appear more ‘normal’ by suppressing autistic behaviours like avoiding eye contact, or hand-flapping, or using alternative forms of communication, through a system of rewards and punishments.

The goal wasn’t understanding or support. It was compliance and conformity. The logic was: if they can suppress these outward signs of autism, the person can learn to pass better as neurotypical and thus make things easier for others.

Lovaas also collaborated with his supervisee, George Rekers, in the 1970s on what became known as the Feminine Boy Project, a form of early behaviour therapy that targeted young boys who showed signs of gender nonconformity or queerness. They were punished for playing with dolls, speaking in ‘feminine’ tones, or expressing affection in ways deemed ‘inappropriate’ for their assigned gender.

It’s important to say plainly: this was conversion therapy, aimed at eradicating both queer identity and gender diversity through behavioural conditioning.

And it was based on the same logic as ABA: that visibly different behaviour is a problem to be fixed. That if you can suppress what’s seen on the outside, you might change who someone is on the inside.

Many autistic adults who experienced ABA describe it as traumatic, not because of individual practitioners’ intentions, but because the implicit message was always the same:

“Don’t be who you are. Don’t move the way you move. Don’t speak or feel the way you do.”

This connection between behavioural control, identity suppression, and harm brings us to an important point of overlap.

LGBTQIA+ Intersectionality

Neurodivergence and gender and/or sexual diversity often co-occur. Autistic and ADHD individuals are significantly more likely than the general population to identify as LGBTQIA+, and vice versa. It is still not the majority, but the prevalence is 4-6 times higher.

We do not have any evidence that either one causes the other, yet shared experiences emerge: both groups face the pressure to mask and have aspects of their identity treated as problems to be fixed in order to make others more comfortable.

Both groups are often told, explicitly or implicitly, that in order to be accepted they must change the way they communicate, express themselves, or relate to others.

This overlap matters in therapy. When we work with neurodivergent clients, we may also be holding space for gender or sexual diversity. And when we work with clients from gender and sexual diversity, we may equally be holding space for neurodivergence. It is important to ask questions and remain attentive to the full complexity of identity and the ways it is shaped by marginalisation and the pressure to conform, which in turn leads to self-silencing..

Autism Stigma

Let’s look more closely now at autism-specific stigma, and how deeply it shapes the way autistic people are perceived, not just socially, but also in clinical settings.

At the heart of autism stigma is that autistic traits are constantly misinterpreted through a neurotypical lens. Differences in tone, movement, focus, or social behaviour are not treated as neutral. They are judged and often judged harshly.

One of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions about autism is the idea that autistic people lack empathy.

This comes from outdated psychological theories, especially the Theory of Mind deficit model, which suggested that autistic individuals couldn’t imagine or understand other people’s thoughts or feelings.

But the myth goes further than that. Autistic people are often assumed to be unemotional, cold, detached, or indifferent.

In reality, many autistic people describe the exact opposite. Not a lack of emotion, but intense emotional experience. Deep feelings, often overwhelmingly so. Strong attachments. Fierce concern for justice, honesty, and the wellbeing of others.

So what’s missing here is not emotion or empathy. It’s mutual understanding.

This is what autistic social psychologist Damian Milton calls the Double Empathy Problem: the idea that miscommunication happens both ways. Yes, Autistic people may fail to accurately perceive or interpret neurotypical communication. But neurotypical people often fail to accurately perceive or interpret autistic communication. Yet that failure is rarely seen as a deficit in them, rather this burden is placed entirely on the autistic person.

Their tone is labelled flat. Their emotional expression is called inappropriate or exaggerated. Their body language is judged as wrong or weird. Even when they’re in emotional pain, it’s often missed or dismissed.

Autistic people frequently report being ignored or invalidated by professionals when they’re struggling, simply because their suffering doesn’t look the way neurotypical people expect distress to look.

There’s also a strong stigma around sensory regulation.

Many autistic people avoid crowded or noisy environments, wear headphones, ‘stim’, or withdraw socially. This is not due to disinterest, but because their nervous systems are temporarily overloaded.

Stimming, short for self-stimulatory behaviour, is a term used to describe repetitive movements or sounds that help regulate sensory or emotional input. This might look like hand-flapping, rocking, tapping, humming, or repeating words.

These actions often help autistic people self-soothe, stay focused, or release tension. They're tools of self-regulation.

But in social contexts, these coping strategies are often misunderstood. They may be framed as emotional detachment, avoidance, or disinterest.

In reality, they’re not barriers to connection. They’re ways of staying grounded and safe in environments that are often overwhelming or hostile to sensory difference.

The result of these misreadings is often profound. Chronic loneliness. Emotional isolation. High rates of depression and anxiety. Not because of autism itself, but because of the long-term trauma of being misread, unseen, or assumed not to feel.

This doesn’t just harm relationships. It actively increases serious risks. Research shows that autistic people, especially those who are undiagnosed or unsupported, face much higher rates of suicidality than the general population, twenty to thirty times higher. And much of that risk is driven not by autism, but by the chronic stress of being misunderstood, excluded, or expected to mask all the time.

ADHD Stigma

Let’s turn now to ADHD, and the ways it’s been, and still is, deeply misunderstood.

While autism has often been framed as a social or emotional deficit, ADHD is usually framed as a character flaw. It is a condition still routinely interpreted through a moral lens. People with ADHD are labelled lazy, flaky, undisciplined, or simply not trying hard enough.

From a young age, many ADHDers are told they are too much: too loud, too messy, too impulsive. Or they are told they are not enough: Not focused enough, not organised enough, not disciplined enough, not capable of following through.

These traits are almost always judged against neurotypical norms of productivity and behaviour. Sit still. Stay on task. Finish your work on time. Don’t interrupt. Follow instructions.

School is often the first place where this breaks down. ADHDers who can’t meet these expectations are punished, shamed, or labelled defiant. Parents are often blamed for being too lenient or too inconsistent.

And for those with inattentive-type ADHD, especially girls and gender-diverse individuals, the struggle is usually invisible. They’re not disruptive. They’re drifting. Daydreaming. Zoned out.

This presentation is often misread as compliance, shyness, or underachievement. It is often missed until adulthood, and only recognised when anxiety, depression, or burnout forces bring someone into contact with mental health services.

By that point, many ADHDers have internalised thousands of critical messages. That they just cannot seem to do what everyone else can. That their failures reflect a lack of willpower or responsibility, not a different kind of cognitive wiring.

That internalised stigma does more that just erode self-esteem. It often leads to maladaptive coping strategies. Many ADHDers turn to substance use, self-harm, and acting out as a way of managing intense internal frustration, restlessness, or emotional dysregulation.

Not because they do not care, but because they’ve been given no useful framework for understanding themselves. Often, they have only ever been offered shame and punishment.

So again, we are not just talking about misunderstandings. We are talking about real psychological fallout. Years of invalidation, unrealistic expectations and mislabelling, that shape a person’s entire sense of self.

In the Therapy Room

Let’s talk about what can happen when history, stigma, missing or misdiagnosis follows neurodivergent clients into the therapy room.

Even in well-intentioned spaces, neurodivergent clients report their behaviours are often misread through a neurotypical frame, and those misinterpretations can deeply affect the therapeutic relationship.

Let’s start with autistic clients.

• If a client avoids eye contact, they may be perceived as evasive, dishonest, or emotionally disconnected.

• If they stim, by tapping, fidgeting, or repeating movements, it may be interpreted as distracting, disrespectful, or a sign that they’re not engaging.

• If they communicate too bluntly or literally, they may be seen as hostile, challenging, or lacking insight.

• If they have strong preferences around sensory environment—like needing dim lighting, silence, or consistent routines—that can be read as controlling, obsessive, or rigid.

In reality, these are coping strategies. They are ways of self-regulating and protecting nervous system overwhelm in the sometimes intense emotional experience of therapy. They are not necessarily signs of resistance, disrespect, or poor relational capacity.

Now let’s look at ADHD clients.

• If a client struggles to stay focused, moves around, or blurts things out, it can be misread as disinterest, lack of respect, or even narcissism.

• If they interrupt, go off-topic, or miss social cues, they may be labelled as impulsive, attention-seeking, or immature.

• If they forget to attend sessions, show up late, or fail to pay on time, they are often seen as uncommitted, disorganised, or even manipulative.

But again, these are not moral or personal failings. These reflect cognitive differences, specifically around attention regulation, time perception, and self-monitoring, all of which operate differently in ADHD brains.

When we misread all the above behaviours, we risk replicating the exact invalidation and shame that neurodivergent people experience everywhere else. And we risk reinforcing the self-esteem injuries that brought them to therapy in the first place.

The message they may take in is:

“You need to be more ‘normal’ to be worthy of being helped.”

And that is a tragedy.

So where do we go from here?

If neurodivergent clients come into the therapy room carrying years—sometimes decades—of internalised stigma, the work isn’t just about coping skills or behaviour change.

The work is often about rewriting their self-story.

It’s about helping them see that the things they’ve been punished, shamed, or pathologised for, such as intensity, sensitivity, focus, movement, and emotional reactions, are not evidence of being broken or disordered.

They’re signs of difference. And within that difference, there is value. There is insight. There are strengths.

A Strengths-based Perspective

The same traits that have made life harder in a world built around neurotypical norms are often the very same traits that can reflect deep cognitive gifts.

So let’s talk about those strengths. Not as a way to sugar-coat the challenges, but as a way to restore balance to how we view neurodivergence.

Starting with autism:

Autistic people often have powerful systemic thinking skills. They can see patterns, structures, and inconsistencies with incredible clarity. Many have an intense focus that allows for deep exploration and nuanced expertise in their areas of interest.

They tend to communicate with honesty and precision and often bring a strong sense of ethical integrity to their relationships and work. They challenge social norms not out of defiance, but because those norms often just don't make sense to them. That is a form of courage.

For ADHDers, the strengths are different, but just as real:

ADHD minds are often fast-moving, associative, and highly creative. They are driven by curiosity, tuned in to novelty, and able to think across boundaries. They see possibilities, connections and solutions that more linear thinkers might miss.

What is often framed as ‘impulsivity’ can also be boldness, spontaneity, entrepreneurship, and a willingness to act when others hesitate. And when ADHDers are engaged in something meaningful, their ability to enter hyperfocus can lead to bursts of productivity and insight that are unmatched.

Both autistic and ADHD people often share a deep sense of justice. They are sensitive to hypocrisy, unfairness, and harm. That sense of integrity may not always show up in conventional ways, but it is there, and it matters.

Again, this is not to deny the real challenges that come with being neurodivergent in a world designed for different brains. But helping clients notice, name, and value their strengths is often one of the most powerful antidotes to internalised stigma.

When they begin to see that their differences are not just a list of deficits, but a set of patterns, perceptions, and needs that come with strengths as well as challenges, that is when the self-story begins to shift.

And that shift is the beginning of something deeply healing.

Neuro-affirming Therapy

So what does this mean for us as therapists? What does affirming, neurodiversity-informed practice actually look like?

First, it means recognising that therapy isn’t just about helping neurodivergent people cope with their differences. It is also about helping them deconstruct the internalised stigma that says those differences are wrong.

It means naming the social and clinical narratives that have framed them as broken, disordered, or difficult, and offering new stories in their place. Stories that include challenge, yes, but also value, insight, and agency.

For autistic clients, affirming practice often means acknowledging the immense effort they have already made to understand and navigate neurotypical expectations, often without recognition, and at great personal cost. It can sometimes mean being a neurotypical decoder ring for confusing situations.

For ADHDers, this often means helping them lean into their strengths: their creativity, energy, responsiveness, and passion. It might mean helping them reframe impulsivity as decisiveness, distractibility as environmental awareness, or restlessness as movement-based regulation.

And critically, it means supporting them in finding environments that work for their kind of mind. That might mean different workspaces, routines, relationships, or sensory settings. Environments where they do not just survive but thrive.

Rather than teaching them how to ‘pass,’ the therapeutic role is about helping them name what they have already been doing, recognise the toll of constant decoding and masking, and support them in choosing when and how to engage on their own terms.

This might include unpacking social confusion or burnout, making sense of relational dynamics, or identifying environments where authentic expression feels safer and others where it does not.

It also means validating their sensory needs, their communication style, their way of moving through the world. These are not obstacles to fix, but valid expressions of a different neurotype.

For both groups, affirming practice means helping them develop the language and confidence to advocate for their needs. That might be in relationships, workplaces, education, and yes, even in therapy.

Because when those needs are met, rather than dismissed or pathologised, neurodivergent people often begin to flourish.

And when they can say:

“I don’t have to apologise for how I think, feel, move, or exist. I just need the right conditions to be me.”

That is when therapy starts to become a space of real healing.

Conclusion

So to close, I want to leave you with one core idea:

Neurodivergent people are not broken.

They’re not failed versions of neurotypical people. They’re individuals navigating systems, environments, and assumptions that were never built with their minds in mind.

Therapists have the power to create a space that offers something different.

Not a space about correction, but about curiosity.
Not about conformity, but connection.
Not about masking, but meaning.

Every behaviour is an attempt to cope, communicate, or connect—even when it doesn’t look the way we expect.

So that’s enough from one mind. Now I’d like to open up the space for questions, reflections, lived experience, and reverie and to hear from all your diverse minds.

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Have MLMs changed the way they operate to stay relevant today?

Over their many decades of operating MLMs have always been quick to embrace new forms of communication technology - email, websites, social media, Zoom, etc. to ensure they are part of modern conversations and can benefit from any efficiencies.

So in our internet age, rather than just targeted in-person recruiting, it might take the form of shotgun-style spamming of all their Facebook or Instagram contacts, sliding into your DMs with messages dense with emojis and breathless excitement regarding a new opportunity that is transforming their lives and how they’d like to share the joy with you, ‘dear friend’.

But the real core of how they work is unchanged since it exploits our evolved human emotional wiring and psychology. So they make very sure they ‘don’t fix what isn’t broke’ from their point of view.

How can you tell if someone is in an MLM? Is someone selling me Tupperware part of a cult since that seems kind of fine?

Yes, Tupperware is an MLM corporation so they are part of the problem. Sure, the products are actually decent quality although rather expensive for what they are. This is true of most MLM products and it’s not an accident. If you can’t easily make money selling the product due to the high price, you’re more incentivised to recruit. It’s not the products, it’s the structure that is the problem.

So please buy your plasticware through normal retail channels. You’ll both save money and you won’t be enabling an MLM corporation.

Devil's advocate time: Some people seem to do really well out of these. So maybe it works for some?

Well, firstly, part of MLM culture is pretending you’re wealthier than you really are on social media. That said, if you are one of the lucky few to get in early and recruit a big downline, you can make lots of money in an MLM.

There are also only so many profitable spots up near the top so competition is fierce and often involves pushing any rivals out. This is why so many MLMs are started by people from high up in other MLMs who realise that the best way to get the big money is to start your own one.

But you can’t stay in denial about the fact that all those people below you are being deceived and exploited and that leads to a confrontation with shame. Many women who rise up and make money in MLMs often quit and stay quiet due to the incredible guilt they feel for having harmed so many fellow women.

Speaking as a psychotherapist, to stay in and climb the ranks, certain less palatable psychological traits are an advantage. Ideally, you need to be able to exude charm, flaunt luxury brands, lie with impunity, and knowingly prey on the vulnerable with little or no remorse. A certain psychological shamelessness. I’m not saying you have to be literally psychopathic to ascend in MLM hierarchies, but it probably helps.

Are there any examples of MLMs that I think are particularly compelling or interesting?

I personally find MLMs compelling and interesting in the same way that watching a snake devour a hapless rodent is ‘interesting’ - it's awful and grotesque yet I can’t bear to look away. A lot of people think that MLMs are maybe ‘not great’ but it seems many don’t realise just how bad they really are:

I think MLMs are often amoral predatory corporations that farm the vulnerable, squeezing and sucking money out of them into their ravenous stomach from behind a glitzy camouflage of carefully crafted and deceptive marketing.

Sure, the ones that are so predatory that they overstretch their political protection and attract government action are compelling to watch but largely because you get to glimpse the raw sickness behind their benign facade.

So there is the 2021 Amazon documentary series called LulaRich which explores the clothing MLM LulaRoe that was indicted as an illegal pyramid scheme by the Washington state Attorney General. Before that was the 2016 documentary ‘Betting on Zero’ which covered the multi-year battle between supplement MLM Herbalife and hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman which resulted in them ultimately being investigated by the FTC. The documentary clearly stung Herbalife so they have their own website where they smear the documentary makers.

What I find particularly shocking is that Lularoe and Herbalife are still operating today. MLMs just treat any government attention as a cost of doing business. They will just pay the fines, settle any lawsuits or class actions for a pittance, make some superficial changes and keep on doing exactly what they’ve always done - farming the vulnerable.

More recently, in April 2020, the FTC sent warning letters to 10 MLM companies telling them and their representatives to stop making unsupported claims that their products could treat or prevent COVID related illness as well as expressing concerned about similarly unsupported claims about the earnings people could make by joining these MLMs after having lost jobs or income due to the pandemic. Before that, some were targeting people with cancer.

What this all highlights is how staggeringly profitable the MLM corporations themselves are. In 2019, their collective profits were US$39 billion. Wall Street and even Warren Buffet love them which Bill Ackman discovered to his horror and at great expense. While MLMs claim to epitomise the American Dream, they are a uniquely American Nightmare which is unfortunately being exported all around the world. You don’t have to take my word for how bad they are either. The Dream podcast series tells it like it is.

Speaking as a psychotherapist, what is my advice for someone that has a friend or family member in an MLM?

How do you try to communicate that they're probably about to lose all their money? There is probably pressure you feel to actually help by buying some of it - because you can see how desperate they are!

I’ll keep it simple and give you a pair of dos and a pair of don’ts.

• Don’t buy from them, even out of pity. I know this is tough. Any money you pay them will just flow back to the MLM and ‘feed the beast’. It may also give them false hope and keep them in longer. And the longer they stay in, the more money they will lose. MLMs know that pity purchasing works and they are psychologically manipulating you as much as their MLM member victim.

• Don’t criticise them or the opportunity. They’ll just filter you out. MLM members are pre-emptively coached to expect ‘haters’ and to disconnect from them. This only serves the MLM by isolating them more and increasing the shame. So keep that connection and be calmly curious. If you’re lucky, your friend or family member will be in the half who quit in the first year. It’s those who angrily withdraw from others that end up staying in and double-down, ‘garaging’ and borrowing to ward off that shame that they have no-one else left to process it with.

• Do encourage them to track their money. And I mean all of it - income and expenses, even if it’s just in a simple spreadsheet. The conferences, training resources and workshops, petrol, self-purchases. That net profit redefinition that MLMs all use ignores personal expenses. It’s that simple. When you factor in all the expenses in money, time, and energy - the numbers will tell the story.

• Do support them when they leave. They have some grieving to do. Make sure they know that it wasn’t them. And that it wasn’t the product either. Ideally, the numbers should have shown them that the whole MLM structure is deceptive, corrupt and ‘farms the vulnerable’. They were someone with good intentions and modest expectations who got exploited by a predatory master manipulator. It can and does happen to many of us. Empathy, compassion, and connection are the true antidote to shame. Kia kaha!

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I would describe MLMs as a kind of cult. Is that fair? Or is it more of a religion?

MLMs are commercial as opposed to religious cults. As a psychotherapist, I want to highlight that with destructive cults, it's not the theological, spiritual or political beliefs that concern me, but the structure and social influence processes used which are psychologically damaging and profoundly unethical. The psychiatrist and psychologist who originally studied what is now called coercive persuasion or thought reform back in the 1960s identified eight interlocking factors that constitute psychologically dangerous practices and MLMs feature almost all of them.

I could say a lot more about this but we can boil it down to this list of six techniques from the 1996 book ‘Cults in our Midst’:

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time.

2. Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behaviour that reflects the person's former social identity.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviours.

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order.

If you’ve read any accounts of people’s experiences with cults like Scientology or Heaven’s Gate or NXIVM or churches like City Impact, Destiny or Arise, you’ll likely recognise these.

MLMs use all of them. In summary, you are continually deceived and emotionally manipulated right from the very start with lies of omission and clever disinformation delivered by ‘true believers'. They will absorb all your time and energy to wrap you in an MLM cocoon where your new MLM-coloured identity is praised and your prior self is denigrated and demeaned. It will leave you feeling disempowered and ashamed, but all dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. Their system and products are unique and ‘perfect’ so it’s all your fault that you’re failing.

Religion and MLMs also have a long history of being intertwined. Some Christian communities endorse the Prosperity gospel which equates wealth with virtue and struggle is seen as a sign of weak faith. In the US, MLM companies like Amway, Shaklee, and Herbalife have circulated widely within such churches, sometimes with the direct endorsement of church leaders. Gloria Copeland, of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, was reportedly involved in Shaklee and encouraged followers to pursue MLMs as faith-based paths to prosperity. In the 1990s and 2000s, members of the Worldwide Church of God used MLMs such as Amway and Shaklee to generate income while remaining within their insular faith communities. These groups provided built-in social networks that could be mobilised as downlines, with spiritual obedience blending into financial recruitment. The structure of MLMs fits easily into high-control churches, where authority is rarely questioned and personal outcomes are framed in moral or spiritual terms.

As a local example, Kiri Tamaki is an Australian National Vice President for cosmetics and nutrition MLM Arbonne as well as being co-pastor of the Australian branch of Destiny Church alongside her husband, Samuel Tamaki. Samuel is Brian’s son and his heir apparent. Kiri’s instagram intermingles Destiny and Arbonne content, adding a layer of spiritual authority to already potent emotional appeals. It’s a concerning dynamic when vulnerable members of a faith community are encouraged to buy into a commercial structure with a well-documented failure rate.

As well as churches, often there are MLM links with ‘Wellness’ and Conspirituality groups too. Another local example is anti-vaxxer group Voices for Freedom’s Claire Deeks who is a Platinum Wellness Advocate for essential oils MLM doTerra. At one point, the VFF website had a VIP programme which linked to content promoting doTerra essential oils. When this was spotted, VFF claimed it was all a ‘mistake’ and removed it. In fact, when you look closely at its essential structure, VFF itself could be viewed as a slickly marketed quasi-MLM where conspiracy theories and merch is the ‘product’ with Claire, Libby, and Alia firmly ensconced at the top.

To get an idea of their business ‘ethics’ (I’m using that term loosely), both Arbonne and doTerra were among the 16 MLMs who got FTC warning letters for making false COVID and income claims back in 2020. No surprises there.

Is there a particular kind of person vulnerable to or targetted by MLMs?

MLM members are coached to look for people who are vulnerable and then sell them (false) hope. Maybe they’re a bit socially isolated or hungry for adult company because they’ve shifted out of paid work into being a stay-at-home mother. Maybe they’ve recently moved to a new city and don’t have a friendship circle yet. It could be for their partner’s career (e.g. military spouses) or they’re a uni student who has moved away from home - evangelical and Pentecostal churches target this demographic too. Maybe they are church-going women who’ve been led to believe that working outside the home is only acceptable for men and who want to financially contribute to their family.

The MLMs initial pitch is that it’s an easy way to make some extra money from home part-time and all you need is a mobile phone and a social media account. What have you got to lose? But this starter pack would help if you’re serious. Then you can ‘embody the brand’ and post selfies on your instagram showing your great new family life and all our great products. You’re a fearless go-getter who’s doing what needs to be done to help your family or to avoid increasing your student debt. Don’t listen to those nay-sayers, they’re wage-slaves and dream-stealers. They’re just envious that you’re now a boss-babe!

This story all switches later when doubts creep in. If you speak up or don’t make your quota targets, your upline will publicly criticise you in front of your MLM peers. “Did you think you could get a big income for nothing? If you’re not making money, it’s because you’re not putting the work in. You’ve only got yourself to blame”. To avoid being publically humiliated, you start buying more stock than you're selling right now and hide it away to become ‘garage-qualified’. You’ll be encouraged to attend the MLM conventions which are like evangelical church rallies inducing breathless hypomania with music, spectacle, and heart-felt testimony from MLM celebrities about how anyone can make it big - if they just want it enough. And you do want it, right?

Speaking as a psychotherapist, what they are exploiting here is the emotion of shame. We feel shame when psychologically important relationships that we can depend on are either threatened (or absent) because of things we did or didn’t do or the other person did or didn't do. Healthy shame is meant to motivate us to repair the bond but shame can also be exploited to form a ‘feeling trap’ via what sociologist Thomas Scheff calls a ‘shame-shame’ spiral. Initially, the love-bombing and encouragement that new MLM recruits get feels great for someone who’s self-esteem has taken a knock.

Once the MLM absorbs more and more of your time and you’re disconnected from friends who don’t want to come to yet another product party and start avoiding you, that shame returns double. Add to that all the little deceptions you’re encouraged to engage in which fuel feelings of fraudulence and imposter syndrome. “I’m less successful than I pretend”. And the deceptions, losses and toxic shame just keeps growing.

“If I do quit, I’m admitting defeat. It’ll just prove I wasn’t good enough or it wasn’t the right product”. Most new MLM members quit within six months to a year. But now they’re even more ashamed, desperate and vulnerable. “I feel stupid. I don’t want to tell anyone. Maybe I’ll try a different MLM and recover my losses that way.”

For those who stay in or who cycle through different MLMs, this involvement can become a behavioural addiction akin to problem gambling. Marriages and relationships are wrecked, houses are lost and personal bankruptcies blossom like flowers.

Sadly, the underlying problem was never the person, the problem was built into the structure. In the final part of this series on MLMs, I’ll be exploring what to do when someone you care about is ensnared by one.

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Holy conspiracy cork-board, Batman! Let’s dive into the latest rainbow panic bulletin from Penny Marie of Let Kids Be Kids. In her April post about the Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund, Penny rebrands mental health support as a “manufactured crisis”, state funding as a sinister plot, and affirming care as indoctrination and mutilation. It’s a conspiracy classic: selective outrage, invented villains, and total amnesia around history, research data, and the law.

Penny claims to be an ‘independent researcher’ in her bio. Here are eight of her most spectacular misfires to help assess her abilities as a credible researcher.

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🏛️ “So why did Ardern and Robertson, alongside a few friends, decide to create a fund for ‘youth’…?”

Reality: This claim erases the actual origin of the Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund. The idea came from gay men who had been convicted under pre-1986 laws criminalising consensual sex between men. When those convictions were expunged in 2018, some of the men affected acknowledged that nothing could undo the historical harm done to them. Instead, they asked the government to invest in something forward-looking: a fund to support the wellbeing of current and future rainbow youth. The fund was created in response to that request. It was restorative, not opportunistic. Penny’s version replaces community-led advocacy with the suggestion of nefarious political imposition.

🧵 “The whole rainbow spectrum (which back in the 1980s didn’t even exist…)”

Reality: False. Not only did it exist, it has a paper trail. Magnus Hirschfeld posited a spectrum of sex and gender variation in 1910 in his German-language work Die Transvestiten. David Cauldwell coined the term transsexual in 1949, and John Oliven coined the term transgender in 1965. Robert Stoller conceptualised gender identity in 1964 and published his book Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity in 1968. That’s over 70 years of conceptual development before the 1980s, not counting centuries of recorded gender diversity in other cultures. Penny’s erasure of queer history isn’t just wildly false, it’s ideologically convenient.

💰 “This money isn’t going to counselling or direct support for struggling kids.”

Reality: Wrong again. Many funded projects do include counselling, youth-led peer support, and educational outreach: all things shown to reduce isolation and suicide risk. Community-building is mental health support. Penny relies on a false binary: support versus advocacy, as if one cancels out the other. In reality, they work hand in hand. When a group is actively being targeted by misinformation, prejudice, and violence, calling it out and building resilience isn’t optional, it’s essential. You only need to look at the recent Destiny Church-orchestrated assaults to see why.

🏗️ “They’re not addressing a proven need; they’re building an infrastructure to create the need.”

Reality: This is where Penny switches from merely misinformed to outright conspiratorial. The idea that rainbow services somehow create more rainbow kids is a reversal of cause and effect. It’s like saying suicide helplines increase suicide. People aren’t becoming queer or trans because support exists. They’re accessing support because it’s finally easier and safer to do so. This is grievance politics in disguise: the existence of these services offends those who wish the people they dislike would go back to suffering in silence.

📊 “There was no data in 2019 showing a specific need for rainbow youth.”

Reality: False. The Youth2000 series, led by Prof. Elizabeth Wells and others, has been tracking rainbow youth wellbeing since 2001. This 2001 report showed already-elevated rates of distress among sexual minority youth. And since 2014, they've published work on trans youth specifically. The claim that this need was fabricated from thin air is simply false. The data is there. The distress is real. Penny either didn’t do the most basic of searches or she chose to deny the existence of this data to knowingly mislead her audience. I’ll leave it up to those reading along to decide which is worse.

⚖️ “This legislation makes it illegal to question a child who is confused about their gender.”

Reality: False. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 Section 5.1 bans sustained efforts with the intention of changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It does not criminalise questions, exploration, or parental doubt. What it targets are coercive practices like the ones that told generations of queer people they had to become someone else in order to be accepted.

If you are genuinely confused about what is legal, read the Act. If you are claiming it bans questions while knowing it does not, that is not confusion. It is outright disinformation.

🔄 “Affirming a child’s ‘gender confusion’ isn’t [conversion therapy]?”

Reality: This is the rhetorical pivot du jour in gender critical circles. Here Penny is rebranding support as coercion. Affirming care doesn’t predetermine outcomes. What it affirms is that all gender identities and expressions are part of natural human variation and none are inherently pathological. By contrast, conversion therapy does predetermine outcomes: it tries to enforce cisgender, heterosexual norms. Affirming care creates space; conversion therapy closes it off.

Penny’s trick is to assume cisgender is the neutral default and anything else is deviance. It’s a variation on the same contortion Jan Rivers of Genspect NZ tried. Affirming care is the opposite of conversion therapy and under New Zealand law, that’s why only one of them is illegal.

💉 “This industry is driving more children to sterilisation, castration, mutilation.”

Reality: This is not just false. It’s dangerous. No children in Aotearoa are undergoing hormonal or surgical transition. Puberty blockers are reversible and other medical interventions are rare, carefully assessed, and only offered to older adolescents or adults with their express consent. This kind of inflammatory language is designed to provoke fear, incite disgust, and increase risk for the clinicians who provide such care. It is the rhetoric of conspiratorial moral panic.

Conclusion

When you start with the assumption that rainbow youth are a manufactured demographic, everything looks like a plot. But the reality is simpler, just harder to accept if you’re prejudiced and committed to moral panic. Rainbow youth exist. Their distress is measurable. And they deserve support grounded in evidence, not fabricated suspicions.

Penny’s post isn’t investigative reporting. It’s an outright conspiracy theory dressed up as parental concern. She claims to be a truth-seeker in her bio, so let’s see if she corrects any of these false claims.

Addendum

Penny Marie has since posted an X thread casting aspersions on me and then blocked me after I pointed out that she still hasn't offered any counter-arguments regarding the eight false claims above that I quoted from her article.

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There are a lot of different definitions, or at least different people have very different understandings of what they are!

They have a bunch of different names that they use to describe themselves, partly to distance themselves from past bad press attached to the original name of ‘Multi-Level Marketing’. So they’ll label themselves as doing Network marketing, or Affiliate marketing, or Direct marketing or, most recently, Social media marketing instead. But it’s all lipstick on the same pig.

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The core structure is unchanged and thus the core problems remain too. This picture shows the structure and contrasts it with normal corporate structures.

Essentially, in an MLM there are products to be sold and there is also the opportunity to recruit more people into the MLM and you’ll receive a portion of their sales as commission. So you are told you can make some money working part-time from home selling products and if you recruit a bunch of people beneath you, you can make a lot of money. What they omit is the fact that per the independent research, 99% of people who join MLMs make no profit or lose money, sometimes a LOT of money.

To be writing all this, I obviously have a strong interest in MLMs. Where does that come from? Why do I care?

Well aside from a professional interest due to the financial and psychological harm, there’s a personal side since MLMs have directly impacted my life twice.

In 1978, my mother was in a cosmetics MLM called Mill Valley both before and after my parents' marriage breakup. She was quite good at running parties selling cosmetics and her upline started pressuring her to quit her job as a teacher to focus solely on Mill Valley. I was only a 10 year old kid at the time but Mum told me about the dilemma since my Dad wasn’t around. Thankfully, she decided teaching was more meaningful and quit the MLM instead. I don’t know if her MLM involvement contributed to the marriage breakup but financial stresses and overspending was a big issue between them so I doubt that it helped.

My second brush with MLMs was 10 years later in 1988 when I was a uni student studying computer science and I didn’t get out much. At a rare party, I met a young woman who I’ll call Alice, plucked up my nerdy courage and asked her out. I was sharing my triumph with my best friend Max, when he told me the same woman had also accepted his offer. We had become unwitting romantic rivals. Our respective dates seemed to go OK-ish and Alice told each of us she’d be in touch. Now, we waited anxiously to see which of us she’d choose.

I was over the moon when she rang to invite me over to her place for dinner because there was something exciting she wanted to share with me. I even bought a new shirt. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I couldn’t resist gloating to Max that she’d invited me over. He frowned and told me he’d been invited over for dinner too. I had a sinking feeling and asked him what night and it was the same date and time. We looked at each other half in shock for a moment and then said in unison “It’s Amway”.

And yes, it was Amway. The dinner party was a group of nine and after dinner but before dessert was ‘ready’, Alice escorted us to the lounge and there was the dreaded flipchart. Bob, now revealed as Alice’s upline, began extolling the wonders of Amway to his captive audience.

But hell hath no fury like a pair of nerds scorned. Max and I had prepared for this eventuality (‘we did the research’). At a key moment in the pitch when Bob misdefined the term ‘Net Profit’, we disputed it. The other dinner guests were eager to hear us out so Bob got rather flustered and ended his presentation prematurely. I’ll come back to this key misdefinition later. Alice announced that dessert was ready after all. Dessert was a rather tense affair as Alice and Bob both had faces like thunder and were sending death-stares at me and Max. We promptly ate up and left.

What we didn’t know at the time was that most of the other dinner guests were probably signed up Amway members and part of Bob’s downline. Rather than adding me and Max, Bob was facing the risk of losing them. That’s probably why he abruptly stopped the presentation to contain the damage and why Alice and Bob seemed so furious with us.

This is a common deception that MLMs reps use to this day. The other people at the party who excitedly buy the products and sign up may have already drunk the Kool-Aid. MLMs use Conformity Bias to subtly coerce you to follow suit without thinking it through.

For a while, I told myself Alice might have been open to a romantic relationship with me. But given the way this whole affair played out, that’s likely a fiction to soothe my bruised geeky ego.

So yeah, MLMs and their embrace of deception offend me on multiple levels.

Why do I care about this right now? Well, we’re in a cost of living crisis and I think lots of people are going to be looking for a way to boost their income. MLMs know this too and will be out hunting so I want to get the word out to as many people as possible before they get their personal invite to the Greatest Grift On Earth.

We're living in 2025. MLMs seem like something out of the 1970s. Why are people still getting sucked in?

It’s still happening today because of two simple facts.

1. MLM corporations are highly profitable for the people at the top and other investors.

2. MLM corporations are legally and politically protected despite being predatory and deceptive.

It goes back earlier than the 1970s. The first business that pioneered the MLM structure was called Nutrilite and started doing that in 1945 to sell its vitamin products. Nutrilite eventually folded into MLM powerhouse Amway which perfected the con and just exploded in the 1970s.

What do I mean when I say they are protected? Well, in the 70s, Amway was actually under serious investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission as an alleged pyramid scheme. Amway didn’t take this threat lying down and billionaire co-founder Richard DeVos embedded himself deeply in the Republican Party and personally befriended Gerald Ford who became US President from 1974 to 1976.

Under the Ford administration, the FTC changed tack and resolved in a 1979 consent decree that Amway was not a pyramid scheme as its members could focus on selling the product and not stockpiling or aggressively recruiting. Amway essentially won and enshrined the ‘Product Exception’ fiction which protects MLMs to this day. Coincidentally, Richard DeVos later founded a charitable foundation in Gerald Ford’s name and funded the building of his Presidential museum.

MLMs remain very politically active, funding the Direct Selling Association lobby group and making generous campaign contributions to politicians on both sides of the aisle. This helped ensure the FTC exempted MLMs from its 2012 Business Opportunity rule which requires detailed disclosures be given to all other kinds of potential new business owners except MLMs. They provide thin voluntary disclosures on their website which their reps seldom highlight to prospects.

As an aside, if you really want to really reach back, the first example of the MLM structure is arguably the Spanish Inquisition. What most people don’t realise about the Inquisition is that per papal decree the lands and goods of those convicted of heresy were confiscated and went to the Inquisition to fund its expanding activities: running prisons, performing investigations, and following its lengthy process which slowly tortured people financially, physically and spiritually. It was thus self-funding and financially incentivised to keep finding more heretics to ‘feed the beast’. One of the other things not commonly known was that one way to escape the penalties for heresy was to join the Inquisition as a familiar and assist in the successful prosecution of a number of others for heresy. So you had to name and ‘recruit’ a down-line of victims to make up for your admitted sins. Sounding familiar?

With definitions and history covered, in the next part of this series, I’ll be exploring the MLM connections to destructive Cults and more.

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Historical Revisionism High Jump (with Clown Shoes)

🏆 Prize for Most Outrageous Historical Rewrite

Claim: Pride started as a "homosexual liberation" movement with no connection to gender identity.

Reality Check: The first Pride events commemorated the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, a protest led in part by trans women of colour like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Pride has always been about gender diversity. A 2015 Stonewall UK report highlights that trans people were present from the start, with activists like Johnson and Rivera playing pivotal roles. The notion of recent "forced-teaming" belongs in the same dumpster as those "authentic" moon landing hoax videos.

Verdict: 0/10 for accuracy. 10/10 for trying to rewrite a movement’s history while it's still marching.

Paedophilia Panic Parade Float (with Fear-mongering Confetti)

🎯 Prize for Scariest Float with No Basis in Reality

Claim: Pride events "target children" and align with paedophilia advocates.

Reality Check: Look who's recycling floats from Anita Bryant’s 1977 "Save Our Children" campaign! This float's been mothballed since they used it against gay rights, but they've given it a fresh coat of paint and hoped we wouldn't notice. Pride events have long established age-appropriate content guidelines, with no credible evidence linking these events to "grooming", a claim debunked by NPR in 2022. Meanwhile, anti-trans groups are busy sharing a parade route with the same religious-right organisations that fought against gay marriage. Events like Inflection Point saw gender-critical activists marching arm-in-arm with Family First and Destiny Church: now there's some "forced-teaming" for you.

Verdict: 1/10 for originality. 10/10 for trying to distract from their own concerning choice of parade partners.

Linguistic Manipulation Limbo (with a Dictionary of Deceit)

🎪 Prize for Best Word Salad in a Supporting Role

Claim: Words like "gender," "inclusion," and "diversity" have replaced the "real" focus on homosexuality.

Reality Check: Pride has always been about challenging who gets to belong. Now we're watching spectacular linguistic acrobatics as the letter tries to frame words like "belonging" and "inclusion" as sinister propaganda. It's like calling a wheelchair ramp "accessibility propaganda": the only float manipulating anything here is the one carrying folks who think making Pride more welcoming somehow makes it less legitimate. The ILGA World Report (2023) emphasises how linguistic inclusivity strengthens, rather than dilutes, community cohesion.

Verdict: 3/10 for creativity. 8/10 for trying to rain on a parade built on compassion.

Lesbian Misrepresentation Masquerade (With a Broken Compass)

🎭 Prize for Projection in a Leading Role

Claim: Lesbians are being excluded from Pride for rejecting "gender ideology."

Reality Check: Multiple studies, including research by Pew Research Center (2017) and PRRI (2021), show lesbians are among the strongest supporters of trans rights. In fact, a 2023 YouGov UK survey found that 84% of cisgender lesbians have a positive view of trans people, with 68% being very positive, the highest of all demographics surveyed.

In other words, anti-trans lesbians are a vocal minority. So what got LAVA excluded from the Wellington Pride event in 2021? Not being lesbians, but wanting to showcase trans-exclusionary content at their stall. As the NZ Herald reported in June 2024 regarding the upcoming lawsuit, the Pride board rejected the group's application due to its anti-trans stance, after concerns were raised by the community about the group's history of targeting trans people.

Verdict: 4/10 for projection. 8/10 for the world's least convincing masquerade.

Global Homophobia Street Performance (with a Misdirection Cape)

🌎 Prize for Best International Smoke Show

Claim: Trans inclusion in Pride will hurt international homosexual rights.

Reality Check: Here's a shocking reveal: Authoritarian regimes and far-right groups already oppose all LGBTQ+ rights! Dividing our parade into smaller processions only makes each one easier to shut down, which is exactly what these regimes are hoping for. ILGA-Europe's Annual Review 2024 documented how anti-trans narratives are being used across Europe to undermine broader LGBTQ+ protections, with particular mentions of Hungary, Poland, and Russia as part of a wider trend.

Verdict: 3/10 for fantasy world-building. 7/10 for missing the point of parade solidarity.

The Real Backlash (From the Clown Car of Bigotry)

🎉 Grand Prize for Misinformation Mayhem

The backlash this letter warns about isn't coming from trans inclusion: it's coming from their entire parade of recycled anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Pride isn't the problem. The problem is this anti-trans lobby trying to rain on a celebration of solidarity.

Final Verdict: A spectacular parade of misinformation with some impressively refurbished antique displays. Pride was always about solidarity. The only forced-teaming happening here is between the organisers of this Parade of Absurdity and the religious conservative groups that still protest against their own rights.

Stay proud, stay united, and let this sad little anti-trans parade pass by into irrelevance where it belongs. And you can support the Wellington Pride board here.

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Content Warning: This article addresses transphobia, hateful rhetoric, and historical examples of state-sanctioned violence, including references to the Holocaust.

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Comedy has long exposed hypocrisy and unsettled the powerful. But lately, some of the biggest names in stand-up have reversed that tradition. They don't challenge power - they uphold it. They don’t punch up; they punch down - mocking the already marginalized under the guise of being "edgy."

The cycle is all too familiar: The comedian strikes at a vulnerable group, receives justified backlash, then pivots to claim they’re the victim. Instead of discussing the harm done, the conversation shifts to ‘free speech.

But this isn’t just about a few comedians or a handful of jokes. Humour has always shaped social norms. Laughter doesn’t stay in the room. It seeps into laws, policies, and violence. And history has made it clear: when we ignore that pattern, we repeat it.

The Comedian as Pack Leader: How Laughter Signals Permission to Attack

In my previous article, I explored how ‘wolf pack’ harassment operates online: how a single ‘howl’ can set an entire mob into action. Now let’s examine how that same dynamic emerges when a spotlight hits the mic and a crowd leans in, waiting for something - or someone - to laugh at.

A comedian’s jokes are the initiating ‘howl’. Just as a troll general doesn’t need to order their followers to attack, a comedian doesn’t need to tell their audience what to do. The jokes themselves are the signal: this target is safe to dehumanize - someone the audience is invited to mock, dismiss, and exclude in their everyday lives.

Laughter and howling have more in common than we like to admit. In comedy, the same dynamic just plays out on a much larger scale. A joke doesn’t stay on stage. It filters into conversations, spreads through social media, seeps into attitudes. It trains the audience in who they are allowed to mock, exclude, and attack. And once that dehumanization takes hold, history tells us what comes next.

Humour, like propaganda, has always been a means of social control. It isn’t just about entertainment - it’s also about power. A joke can challenge the status quo or cement it. And the difference is always in who is doing the laughing and who is being laughed at.

We've seen this dynamic in politics as well. Public figures know that when they target a group with ridicule or fear-mongering, their audience doesn't need direct instructions to act. The rhetoric alone primes them to see those targeted as dangerous, ridiculous, or less than human - and to respond accordingly. Trump’s recent executive order banning trans healthcare didn’t emerge in isolation. It followed years of public figures - and comedians - turning trans people into punchlines, making cruelty feel like common sense.

Transphobic comedy follows the same structure as a wolf pack attack:

• The Howl: The comedian’s joke signals who is fair game.

• The Pack Response: The audience takes that permission into the world, emboldened to mock, exclude, and harass trans people - now with cultural reinforcement behind them.

• Plausible Deniability: If called out, the comedian claims, "It’s just a joke," the same way a troll general insists, "I never told anyone to harass them."

Just as wolf packs inflict harm through collective attack rather than individual blows, transphobic comedy operates as distributed harassment: crowdsourced, scalable, and impossible to trace back to a single instigator. The audience is already primed to play along. And the people laughing don’t always realize what they’re building.

The Fall of the Jester: From Punching Up to Punching Down

Comedy has always been political but the difference is who the jokes serve.
Historically, satire targeted the powerful: Oscar Wilde mocked Victorian hypocrisy, Voltaire skewered religious dogma, Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity after criticizing social norms, and George Carlin took on war, greed, and censorship. They didn’t just entertain, they threatened the status quo. And they paid the price: arrests, blacklisting, censorship.

Today, comedy is corporate. Edginess has been repackaged as cruelty, with marginalized groups as the easiest targets. Mocking trans people isn’t rebellious; it’s profitable. Streaming giants like Netflix and HBO benefit from the outrage cycles that boost engagement - whether or not they anticipate the bigotry that fuels them.

When these comedians claim victimhood over “cancel culture,” they aren’t defending free speech, they’re issuing a secondary howl, directing their audience toward their critics. Just like online troll generals, they use plausible deniability to unleash harassment without giving direct orders.

The cycle is predictable:

1. The Joke – The comedian mocks trans people, often using gender essentialist tropes.

2. The Backlash – Trans people push back, naming the harm.

3. The Reversal – The comedian reframes themselves as the victim of censorship, spurring their audience to retaliate.

The result? Harassment, intimidation, and escalated violence. And every time the cycle repeats, the message grows louder: trans people are fair game.

Case Study: Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Maher

Each of these comedians contributes to the normalization of transphobia, but they do so in distinct ways. Their humour follows recognizable patterns of social cruelty, each serving a specific function in shaping audience attitudes toward trans people.

Ricky Gervais: Contempt as Social Enforcement

Gervais doesn’t just mock trans people. He teaches his audience that trans identities are inherently absurd. His humour is not just ridicule, but correction, reinforcing the idea that trans women don’t deserve to be taken seriously. In SuperNature, he jokes:

“Oh, women! Not all women - I mean, the old-fashioned ones. The ones with wombs. Those f**ing dinosaurs!”

This is not just a punchline - it’s an instruction. His audience isn’t laughing at wordplay; they’re laughing at the idea that trans women don’t count as women at all. He continues:

“And now the old-fashioned women are saying, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets!’ Why shouldn’t they use your toilets? ‘For ladies!’ They are ladies - look at their pronouns!”

The exaggerated mock sincerity serves a dual function: ridiculing trans women while reinforcing the idea that opposing their inclusion is just common sense.

When criticized, he follows the predictable backlash cycle - shifting the conversation away from harm and onto his own supposed victimhood, agreeing with the statement that ‘Woke culture is ruining comedy!’

By positioning himself as a defender of free speech, Gervais doesn’t just deflect accountability - he deepens his audience’s investment in the idea that trans people are hypersensitive, authoritarian, and worthy of mockery.

Gervais’ humour is not just about who gets laughed at - it’s about reinforcing social hierarchies through humiliation.

Dave Chappelle: Grievance as Justification for Cruelty

Where Gervais teaches contempt, Chappelle stokes hostility. His trans jokes are not framed as detached commentary - they are personal. He presents himself as a man under siege, betrayed by a changing world, fighting back against a culture that refuses to respect him. In The Closer, he declares:

"I’m team TERF! I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact."

Unlike Gervais, who portrays transphobia as common sense, Chappelle’s jokes are acts of retribution. He doesn’t just mock trans people - he positions them as a political enemy. His routine escalates into outright hostility:

"You know who hates me the most? The transgender community."

This isn’t just a joke - it’s a reversal of power. By casting himself as the victim, Chappelle primes his audience to see trans activism as an attack, rather than a defence against oppression.

His jokes don’t just reinforce stereotypes - they condition his audience to see trans advocacy as something that must be fought against.

Bill Maher: Smug Dismissal as Social Gatekeeping

Where Gervais sneers and Chappelle lashes out, Maher is smugly dismissive. His transphobia is more subtle, but no less effective - it erodes empathy rather than attacking directly. On Real Time, he dismisses trans identities as a passing fad:

"part of the rise in LGBT numbers is from people feeling free enough to tell it to a pollster and that’s all to the good, but some of it is - it’s trendy"

This is a softer form of dehumanization - not the outright mockery of Gervais or the rage of Chappelle, but a casual denial of legitimacy. His humour positions him as a reasonable skeptic while still reinforcing transphobic tropes. Then, like Gervais and Chappelle, he escalates:

"We’re literally experimenting on children… That’s where we are now"

Maher’s jokes don’t frame trans people as a direct threat - instead, they frame the defence of trans rights as irrational, excessive, and harmful.

This is what makes him more palatable to centrist and liberal audiences who might reject overt bigotry but are still susceptible to narratives about ‘reasonable concerns.’ His humour doesn’t inspire rage. It inspires detachment, dismissal, and cultivated indifference. And indifference is just as deadly as hatred.

The Cultural Conditioning of Violence

Each of these comedians plays a strategic role in main-streaming transphobia, providing the cultural permission needed for increasingly aggressive attacks on trans rights. Their 'jokes' lay the groundwork for policies that systematically erase trans people from public life - from bathroom bills to sports bans to outright criminalization of gender-affirming care. When Trump signed an executive order banning gender-affirming care at the federal level, he was building on foundations that these comedians helped normalize through sadistic laughter.

This isn't just comedy. It's social conditioning for oppression. And psychologist Gordon Allport mapped this progression decades ago.

From Punchlines to Pogroms

Every hate movement starts with words. Before the first brick is thrown or the first oppressive law is passed, there’s a joke. The first step in Gordon Allport’s Scale of Prejudice isn’t violence - it’s mockery. It’s "just jokes."

In the years leading up to the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda weaponized satire - cartoons, caricatures, and mocking portrayals of Jewish people flooded newspapers and film reels. The goal wasn’t just to entertain. It was to make Jewish people look laughable, untrustworthy, and less than human. By the time open persecution escalated into extermination, much of the public was already primed to look away.

The pattern isn’t unique to Nazi Germany. It repeats itself again and again:

• Mockery → Exclusion: When jokes target a group relentlessly, social exclusion starts to feel natural. Marginalized people become fair game for mockery, and audiences feel justified in othering them.

• Exclusion → Discrimination: The more people are ridiculed as absurd, dangerous, or deceptive, the easier it is to justify denying them rights, restricting their access to jobs, spaces, or legal protections.

• Discrimination → Physical Attack: Dehumanizing humour fosters contempt. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people often spike after public figures ridicule them, reinforcing the idea that they are disposable.

• Physical Attack → Elimination: Every genocide has relied on cultural priming before it begins. From Nazi Germany to the Rwandan genocide, satirical depictions of marginalized groups helped create the conditions for mass violence.

This escalation isn’t accidental. Each step feels reasonable because the last one was tolerated. What starts as a joke ends as policy. And when high-profile comedians normalize dehumanization through humour, they aren’t just telling jokes. They’re laying the groundwork.

History shows us that dehumanizing humour often precedes or accompanies legal measures against targeted communities. So Trump’s executive order banning trans healthcare underscores that what begins with a jeering laugh can end with real, state-sanctioned harm.

This is eliminationism in action. It may not mirror the genocidal regimes of the past in scale or tactics, but the underlying logic remains the same: portray a marginalized group as absurd, dangerous, or broken enough to justify erasing them from public life. Denying trans people the medical care they need and suppressing their very identities isn't an isolated policy choice. It’s part of a broader pattern of social erasure rooted in the same dehumanizing mechanisms that have historically laid the groundwork for violence.

The Free Speech Myth: What These Comedians Leave Out

Furthermore, the claim that comedians are being silenced falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny.

• Ricky Gervais signed multiple Netflix deals while complaining that "woke culture" is ruining comedy.

• Dave Chappelle signed a $60 million for his specials while declaring himself “cancelled”.

• Bill Maher has hosted Real Time for 20 years on HBO while lecturing about being "silenced."

They are not being silenced. They are being criticized. And they cannot handle that.

Here’s the reality: Free speech has never meant freedom from social consequences.

• No one is owed a Netflix deal or a stadium audience.

• No one is entitled to applause for punching down.

• Criticism is not censorship - it’s accountability.

But the "cancel culture" narrative serves a function: it makes these comedians more profitable. The more they frame themselves as victims, the more their reactionary audience flocks to support them.

The “free speech” defence is not about speech - it’s about maintaining control over who gets to be mocked, who gets to speak, and who gets to be heard.

If they really cared about challenging power, they wouldn’t be repeating prejudiced talking points. They’d be taking aim at the people actually making the laws that harm marginalized groups. But confronting real power means risking genuine backlash. Ridiculing a marginalized community requires no such courage. After all, there’s nothing brave about punching down - it’s just bullying with a laugh track.

James Acaster: A Modern Satirist’s Response

James Acaster offers one of the most pointed takedowns of this pretence of persecution and faux edginess. In his 2019 special Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, Acaster directly mocked comedians who spend their time mocking transgender people while insisting they are brave truth-tellers:

"They say whatever they like, edgy comedians. No one tells them what they can and can’t say. They walk straight on stage, top of their specials sometimes, and do 10 solid minutes just slagging off transgender people. People on the internet get upset about it… the comedian’s always like, ‘Bad luck, that’s my job, I’m a stand-up comedian, I’m there to challenge people. If you don’t like being challenged, don’t watch my show. What’s the matter guys, too challenging for you?’

Yeah, cause you know who’s been long overdue a challenge? The trans community. They’ve had their guard down for too long, if you ask me. They’ll all be checking their privilege on the way home, thanks to you, you brave little cis boy."

Acaster’s satire cuts through the claim that these comedians are speaking uncomfortable truths. His point is simple: they aren't challenging anyone with power - they're targeting a small group that’s already under attack.

He highlights the double-standard at the heart of these performances. When these comedians ridicule trans people, they frame their jokes as brave cultural resistance. But when those jokes are criticized, the same comedians insist that they should be immune from critique. Acaster’s set doesn't just mock this contradiction, it exposes it as a marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Comedy shapes how we see the world, who we empathize with, and who we exclude. Laughter can disrupt power or reinforce it. The difference isn’t in the joke. It’s in who it serves.

Some comedians wield humour to challenge oppression. James Acaster, Hannah Gadsby, and DeAnne Smith do this without dehumanizing anyone. But Gervais, Chappelle, and Maher? They call themselves rebels while punching down, relying on existing prejudices to keep the crowd laughing.

When people say, "It’s just a joke," they’re missing the point. Jokes are social cues. They teach us who to exclude. They normalize discrimination and, eventually, violence. History shows that pattern again and again.

So when someone says comedians should "challenge people," ask: Who are they suggesting they challenge? The powerful? Or the already marginalized?

Comedy can still challenge power. We’ve seen it shift culture before, and it can again - if audiences demand more.

The next time someone insists comedians "should be allowed to say anything," remind them: They already can.

The real question is: Why do some comedians keep choosing this?

And the short answer? Because we let them.

It’s time we stopped.

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You’ve got a wolf pack on your tail.

Content Warning: This article discusses coordinated online harassment, including extreme cases resulting in suicide. It contains descriptions of targeted abuse and psychological manipulation and its impacts on individuals.

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What is a Wolf Pack?

Unlike the Lone wolf harassers that I covered previously who target victims over months or years with relentless, focused abuse, Wolf Packs use a different tactic. These groups overwhelm their victims with waves of simultaneous attacks. Directed by public or anonymous leaders, who function as troll “generals”, and carried out by troll “soldiers,” wolf packs bombard their targets with abuse, threats, and accusations in a coordinated effort to break them emotionally and socially.

The sheer volume of harassment creates an emotional avalanche, making it impossible to respond or defend yourself. And these mobs don’t just target individuals, they attack their support networks, isolating victims by spreading fear to anyone who might stand by them.

These harassment mobs aren’t random. They are coordinated psychological assaults designed to overwhelm and silence their victims. For victims, these attacks can feel like the end of the world.

Why Wolf Packs Matter: The Human Cost

Wolf pack attacks leave scars far beyond the screen. The psychological toll can shatter victims’ sense of safety, leaving them isolated, traumatized, and unable to trust the world around them. In extreme cases, these attacks have driven victims to leave jobs, abandon communities, or even take their own lives.

The power of wolf packs lies in their ability to target not only their victims but everyone around them. Defenders, friends, colleagues, even bystanders, are harassed, forcing the target into further isolation. Some withdraw to protect others from harm; others are abandoned by frightened allies. Either way, the victim is left alone to face hundreds, sometimes thousands, of attackers.

Wolf packs rely on two primary psychological weapons:

• Shame: Repeated accusations designed to make the target feel worthless, monstrous, or undeserving of support.

• Isolation: Systematic attacks on the target’s allies to sever their social bonds, leaving them vulnerable and alone.

As social primates, human beings are wired to need connection. When wolf packs systematically dismantle someone’s support system while flooding them with intense shame, it triggers primal psychological wounds. Social exclusion, long hardwired as a survival threat, becomes a weapon. Wolf packs exploit this vulnerability ruthlessly.

Attacks can range from short-lived drive-bys to sustained campaigns lasting months. Drive-bys drown the victim in hundreds of hateful messages over hours or days, overwhelming their emotional defences. Sustained attacks ensure there’s no time to recover. Each wave of abuse keeps the victim in a state of heightened stress and despair, shattering any sense of safety or normalcy.

When hundreds coordinate to destroy your character while simultaneously dismantling your support system, the effects are devastating. This weaponisation of shame and isolation makes wolf packs devastatingly effective at silencing their targets and warning others to stay quiet too.

How Wolf Packs Form: Ideology and Sadism

All wolf packs thrive on sadism, the shared enjoyment of inflicting harm, but the motivation for that cruelty varies. Wolf packs form when individuals with similar motivations find each other online, often coalescing around shared grievances, issues, or charismatic leaders. Once the group identifies a target, individual acts of cruelty merge into a coordinated campaign of collective harassment.

Ideology-Driven Wolf Packs

In ideology-driven wolf packs, harassment is framed as righteous action. Members believe they are fighting for justice, using shared grievances or beliefs to excuse their cruelty.

• Grievance Communities: Anti-vaccine and anti-psychiatry wolf packs often emerge from groups that share personal stories of harm. These grievances escalate into conspiracy theories about doctors, scientists, or mental health professionals, casting them as villains deserving punishment.

• Gender-Critical and Far-Right Groups: More extreme packs attack entire communities under the guise of defending morality or safety. Gender-critical wolf packs frame their harassment of trans individuals as protecting women’s spaces, while far-right packs use similar tactics to target marginalized groups.

While these groups justify their actions through moral outrage, they remain focused on their ideological goals. Their cruelty stems from their belief that their targets represent a threat to their values or communities.

Sadism-Driven Wolf Packs

Sadism-driven wolf packs dispense with moral pretence entirely. For these groups, cruelty is its own reward. Platforms like Kiwi Farms exemplify this dynamic, where harassment is turned into entertainment, and targets are chosen based on their perceived vulnerability.

Members of these packs compete to provoke the most extreme reactions, treating their victims’ suffering as a communal spectacle. Success is measured in the emotional damage inflicted, with the ultimate goal being to drive the target to despair. For these groups, cruelty isn’t a means to an end, it’s the end itself.

How Wolf Packs Evolve: Escalation and Radicalisation

Most wolf packs exist on a spectrum between ideology and sadism, blending moral justifications with the thrill of inflicting harm. Regardless of their initial motivation, all wolf packs rely on shared psychological mechanisms to escalate cruelty and turn individuals into active participants in collective harassment.

Escalation Within Grievance Communities

What begins as shared pain and collective outrage often evolves into a culture of cruelty. Grievance communities, such as anti-vaccine or anti-psychiatry groups, form around personal stories of harm, where members bond over mutual anger and mistrust. But as harassment becomes normalized within the pack, the group’s moral outrage transforms into a justification for escalating attacks. Cruelty shifts from being a means to achieve justice to a central part of the group’s identity. Over time, the shared goal of punishing perceived enemies binds members together more than the original cause ever could.

Far-right groups frequently infiltrate these communities, amplifying grievances and embedding them in broader ideological conspiracies. These infiltrators redirect existing anger toward new enemies and more extreme narratives, encouraging increasingly aggressive behaviour. Vulnerable targets, such as marginalised individuals or those with visible public profiles, are singled out as the group’s focus shifts toward sustaining its own cohesion through acts of collective cruelty.

Radicalisation: Cognitive and Emotional Dynamics

Once cruelty becomes normalized, individuals within the wolf pack undergo psychological shifts that deepen their participation in harassment. One of the most powerful drivers is conformity bias, the human tendency to align with the behaviours and norms of those around us. Members often begin with small actions, such as liking posts or repeating insults, but quickly escalate to more extreme harassment to gain approval within the group. This creates a feedback loop where cruelty is rewarded with social validation, transforming the group’s norms into a self-reinforcing cycle of escalating harm.

At the same time, oxytocin, a neurochemical often called the "cuddle hormone," plays a surprising dual role. While it strengthens bonds within the group, fostering a sense of camaraderie and trust, it also amplifies hostility toward outsiders. This same hormone that deepens in-group loyalty intensifies feelings of rage, disgust, and moral superiority toward perceived enemies. Within the pack, harassment feels not only justified but emotionally rewarding, reinforcing the belief that the target deserves punishment.

As members become desensitized to the harm they cause, moral disengagement allows them to rationalize their actions. Justifications such as "they deserve it" or "it’s for the greater good" suppress empathy and reinforce a sense of righteousness. Over time, cruelty becomes second nature, and the pack sustains itself as members bond over their shared acts of harassment. What started as outrage evolves into a self-perpetuating cycle of harm, where the thrill of cruelty outweighs any moral qualms.

How Wolf Packs Operate: Leadership and Coordination

Wolf packs don’t act spontaneously. Behind every coordinated harassment campaign is a troll general, a leader who mobilises and directs their followers into devastating attacks. These generals use their platforms and influence to focus the pack’s collective energy, framing harassment as justified, necessary, or even entertaining.

At the heart of every wolf pack attack is the howl, the signal that identifies the target and incites the pack to action. The style of howl and the tactics used to sustain the attack depends on the type of troll general leading the charge. Public and anonymous generals employ different strategies, but their shared goal is to unleash overwhelming harm on their target.

The Howl: Mobilizing the Pack

The howl is the rallying cry that activates the wolf pack. It points followers to a target and justifies the attack. Whether delivered indirectly or explicitly, the howl signals that harassment is not only acceptable but necessary. Once the pack is mobilised, generals manipulate three emotional dynamics to maximise harm: overwhelming hostility, enforced isolation, and sadistic bonding.

1. Public Troll Generals
   Public troll generals are high-profile figures, activists, influencers, media personalities, or conspiracy theorists, who exploit their platforms to incite harassment while maintaining plausible deniability. They carefully craft their howls using coded language or provocative accusations, inspiring action without explicitly instructing their followers. Many of these generals also stand to gain financially, further incentivising their campaigns of abuse.

   • Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull: A prominent gender-critical activist, Keen-Minshull frequently accuses trans individuals and their allies of undermining women’s rights and compromising safety. Her inflammatory rhetoric frames her targets as existential threats or predators, providing her followers with justification for harassment. While she avoids issuing explicit instructions to attack, her rallies and online statements function as howls that incite widespread abuse. Keen-Minshull has also leveraged her notoriety to build a platform and secure financial support, blending activism with personal gain.

   • Alex Jones: As the conspiracy theorist behind Infowars, Jones weaponized outrageous claims to mobilize his audience while profiting from their outrage. His repeated accusations, such as labelling the parents of Sandy Hook victims as "crisis actors," were crafted to stoke anger and drive traffic to his platform. This outrage funnelled directly into revenue streams, including merchandise and supplement sales. Unlike Keen-Minshull, Jones’s tactics ultimately led to his undoing. The legal consequences of his defamation campaigns culminated in massive financial penalties, dismantling his empire and demonstrating the risks of pushing these strategies too far.

   Public generals weaponize their platforms to shape the narrative, framing their targets as villains who "deserve" the mob’s attention. By stoking outrage while skirting responsibility, they unleash the wolf pack while protecting their own reputations.

2. Anonymous Troll Generals
   Anonymous generals operate openly but rely on anonymity to shield themselves from consequences. Unlike public generals, they face no reputational risk and can therefore issue far more explicit and extreme instructions. Their howls often take the form of direct calls to harass, such as doxxing (exposing personal information), swarming (mass spamming of messages), or coordinated reporting campaigns.

   • QAnon: Anonymous leaders within the QAnon conspiracy movement—often prominent figures in forums like 8kun—have directed their followers to harass and threaten individuals accused of being part of imaginary cabals. These leaders explicitly encourage swarming, doxxing, and even real-world violence, as seen in cases like Pizzagate.

   • JikkyLeaks: Known for targeting scientists and public health advocates, JikkyLeaks orchestrates harassment campaigns by using what I call the three D’s: posting defamatory false accusations, doxxing his targets, then expressing desire for them to suffer criminal, legal or other unspecified consequences. His followers soon follow suit either mass-report social media profiles, or inundating the target with insults and threats. By way of example, here are examples of those 3 steps aimed at me in response to this article:

   

   

   

   Anonymous generals thrive on the protection of anonymity, emboldening their followers to escalate harassment without fear of consequences. They often foster loyalty and camaraderie within private forums or unmoderated spaces, turning harassment into a competitive group activity.

With their often disagreeable personalities, rival troll generals frequently spar for influence, but these petty power struggles rarely matter. Troll soldiers want clear targeting signals—when one general falls, another quickly steps into the vacuum to direct the pack's hostility. All the group needs is someone willing to sound the howl.

Case Studies: How Wolf Packs Destroy Lives

Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and prominent advocate for public health, became the target of an ideology-driven wolf pack fuelled by anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The anti-vaccine movement, rooted in shared grievances and misinformation, frames its harassment campaigns as acts of moral righteousness, "defending children" against perceived harm. Hotez’s outspoken advocacy for vaccines made him an inevitable target.

What Happened:
After publicly countering vaccine misinformation, Hotez was inundated with a coordinated wave of abuse. Harassers accused him of being a "Big Pharma shill," manufactured doctored images portraying him as evil, and spread baseless claims that he was complicit in harming children. The attacks included mass harassment on social media, email spam campaigns, and even direct threats to his safety. The wolf pack didn’t stop there - they targeted his home and family, creating fear and pressure on his closest relationships.

Despite this relentless harassment, Hotez has continued his work, co-developing and releasing patent-free vaccines like Corbevax to ensure equitable access in poorer nations. His commitment to public health, even in the face of extreme hostility, exemplifies resilience and dedication to science and humanity.

What It Shows:
Hotez’s case illustrates how ideology-driven wolf packs operate. These groups weaponize their grievances and conspiracy theories, justifying harassment as a form of justice. Tactics like firehosing misinformation and targeting allies are designed to isolate and silence their victims. The relentless nature of the campaign demonstrates how these wolf packs aim to suppress public discourse by intimidating experts and advocates into withdrawing from conversations entirely.

Chloe Sagal: Kiwi Farms and Sadism as Entertainment

Kiwi Farms represents the extreme end of wolf pack behaviour: sadism-driven harassment where cruelty itself is the goal. As an infamous forum for online harassment, Kiwi Farms members select vulnerable targets and treat their suffering as a source of entertainment. Harassment campaigns are communal, with members competing to provoke the most devastating reactions.

What Happened:
One of Kiwi Farms’ most well-known targets was Chloe Sagal, a videogame developer and trans woman who had publicly shared her struggles with mental health. Forum members launched a relentless campaign of abuse, mocking her past suicide attempts, spreading false and defamatory narratives about her life, and bombarding her with hateful messages. The harassment was designed to break her emotionally and socially. Tragically, in 2018, Sagal died by suicide after enduring years of torment. Kiwi Farms members celebrated her death as a success, treating it as a victory in their campaign of cruelty.

What It Shows:
Kiwi Farms exemplifies sadism-driven wolf packs, where harassment isn’t framed as a moral crusade but as entertainment. Members focus on provoking extreme emotional damage, measuring their success by how much harm they can cause. Using tactics like doxxing, firehosing disinformation, and communal harassment, these wolf packs thrive on their targets’ pain, often escalating until the consequences are fatal.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

The attacks on Peter Hotez and the campaigns led by Kiwi Farms show the two primary motivations behind wolf packs: ideology and sadism. Ideology-driven packs like those targeting Hotez justify their actions through moral outrage, while sadism-driven packs like Kiwi Farms abandon pretence and seek harm for its own sake.

Despite these differences, their tactics are alarmingly similar: overwhelm the target, isolate them from their allies, and escalate harassment until the victim is silenced or broken. These examples reveal the severe human cost of wolf packs and underscore the urgent need to understand and resist their tactics.

Resisting Wolf Packs: Flipping the Script

Wolf packs weaponize shame, isolation, and silencing to devastate their targets. Counter packs flip this script. By replacing shame with empathy, isolation with connection, and silencing with solidarity, they neutralize the psychological weapons of harassment and turn cruelty into resilience.

Two Counter packs show how humour, solidarity, and visible support can disarm wolf packs and empower their targets.

NAFO: Disarming Trolls Through Humour

The North Atlantic Fella Organization emerged to counter Russian disinformation during the Ukraine conflict. Pro-Russian trolls swarmed social media, spreading propaganda and harassing dissenters. NAFO responded with memes and absurd humour, transforming the trolls’ aggression into a running joke.

What began as a grass-roots effort quickly gained recognition for its impact. By mocking the Vatniks instead of engaging seriously, NAFO denied them the emotional impact they sought and disrupted their narratives. Beyond humour, the group’s solidarity reassured victims, showing they weren’t facing harassment alone. NAFO’s efforts not only undermined the credibility of trolls but also disrupted the spread of Russian disinformation, earning praise as a credible force against online propaganda. Their initiatives have also extended to raising significant funds for the Ukrainian military, directly contributing to the Ukrainian people’s defence.

Mutton Crew (🗿): Turning Conspiracy into Camaraderie

The Mutton Crew began as a group of independent pro-vaccine advocates rallying around UK immunologist Graham Bottley (@SwaledaleMutton). When anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists latched onto the real existence of the UK’s 77th Brigade—a military unit specializing in information operations—and absurdly decided Bottley ‘must’ be its leader, the group leaned into the farce and ‘played along’ rather than denying it, in a form of conversational Aikido.

In a further Monty Python-esque twist, one member added the 🗿 Easter Island head emoji to her bio as a joke, and others followed suit. Anti-vaccine activists, mistaking the emoji for proof of the secret cabal, fuelled the conspiracy further—and the Crew embraced the absurdity, adopting the 🗿 emoji as a unifying symbol.

This satirical defiance mocked anti-vaxxers’ paranoia while uniting science advocates under a shared identity. The Mutton Crew’s approach is reminiscent of ARSCC, the fictitious alt.religion.scientology Controlling Committee (which does not exist), formed by internet critics of the Church of Scientology in the 1990s to mock and subvert Scientologists’ paranoia and their attempts at online censorship. The 🗿 emoji now serves as a symbol of solidarity, with the Mutton Crew supporting harassment targets and amplifying pro-vaccine voices.

Empathy, Connection, and Solidarity

Counter Packs succeed because they dismantle wolf packs’ psychological weapons:

• Empathy replaces shame. Public support restores victims’ sense of worth.

• Connection replaces isolation. Shared identities and visible solidarity break the isolation harassment creates.

• Solidarity replaces silencing. Counter-packs amplify targets’ voices, ensuring they aren’t erased by abuse.

NAFO and the Mutton Crew prove that harassment doesn’t have to be faced alone. By transforming cruelty into connection and fear into humorous defiance, Counter packs disarm Wolf packs and protect those under attack.

Conclusion: From Hateful Repression to Humorous Resistance

Wolf packs leave devastation in their wake, using cruelty and isolation to overwhelm their targets and dismantle their support networks. These attacks are not random; they are deliberate psychological assaults, exploiting shame, isolation, and silencing to break victims emotionally and socially. Whether driven by ideology or sadism, wolf packs escalate harm through group dynamics, conformity, and moral disengagement.

Understanding how wolf packs form, operate, and weaponize cruelty is essential to resisting their influence. Counter packs like NAFO and the Mutton Crew prove that even in the face of coordinated harassment, solidarity and humour can turn the tide. By fostering connection, amplifying voices, and flipping the narrative, these groups transform cruelty into camaraderie and fear into defiance. They remind us that no one has to face harassment alone—and that resilience and collective action can challenge even the most relentless attacks.

But what happens when humour itself becomes a weapon? In the next article, we explore how comedy can normalize prejudice and persecution, turning jokes into tools of harm. From satire to sadism, we’ll examine the line between humour that challenges and humour that oppresses.

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The recent events around COVID and the vaccine mandate have understandably resulted in many questions from APANZ members to me and other Council members. Considering those questions prompted me to research the historical background to epidemics, vaccines, and mandates. Council felt it would be helpful to share this material with members to both assist them in understanding Council’s position and in making their own ethically informed decisions in these difficult times.

Some of the current arguments circulating about mandates frame them as unprecedented government overreach. Mandating health treatments is not something governments normally do, and such extraordinary measures do require extraordinary justifications.

Mandatory vaccination is unique in biomedical ethics as the only instance in which people are asked to accept a treatment, potentially against their free will, in the service of the public good. Alongside that, vaccine passports are politically unique in imposing social restrictions on people who refuse it.

Is this situation unique and unprecedented?

The Historical Context: Epidemics and Vaccines

The idea that all these issues are new is a decidedly ahistorical view. Outbreaks of epidemic disease have long vexed and frightened human populations and had a marked effect on human history—medically, socially, and politically (McNeil, 1976; Diamond, 1997).

The arguments around epidemics, vaccines, mandates, and freedom have a long history in human affairs, dating back almost 250 years. The disease in question then was smallpox which had a 30% mortality rate and left survivors permanently scarred with small facial pockmarks (hence the name) and sometimes blind. Smallpox had been terrifying humanity since the 6th century.

Variolation was a medical technique developed around 1720 which exposed people to smallpox in a cut on their arm hoping that a minor skin infection would give them immunity with less risk of killing, scarring, or blinding them. When Prince Louis XV of France died of smallpox in a 1774 outbreak, his successor Louis XVI mandated the still distrusted practice of variolation for his entire royal line. They all survived and variolation even became fashionable and popular in French society.

The next major medical innovation against smallpox came in 1796 when Jenner developed his process of vaccination by exposure to cowpox (Jenner, 1801). It was safer than variolation which could still kill you and spread smallpox if it was not done properly (or you were unlucky) leading the UK government to ban the older technique in 1840. In 1853 the UK government put in place the first nationwide vaccine mandate for all infants.

Anti-vaccine and anti-mandate groups mobilised and began protesting. Much of the now familiar strains of misinformation emerged too. Some claimed that Jenner’s new technique was experimental, untested, and unsafe. Others considered it to be ungodly and unbiblical. There were no claims about RNA or DNA since they were not discovered until 1869. Nevertheless, some people claimed that receiving the vaccine could change people into cows.

Many of the arguments against mandates were expressed too. Some wanted the older kind of inoculation, even though it was more dangerous. Others favoured natural immunity and wanted complete bodily autonomy rather than state intervention (Wolfe & Sharp, 2002).

However, as we see with governments today, the governments of the 1800s did not accept these arguments. Most of our ancestors rolled up their sleeves and got their dot, as most of us have today. The UK vaccine mandate succeeded in stemming repeated smallpox outbreaks as did the many mandates that followed it in other countries (Milward, 2019).

Almost 150 years later, in 1980, the World Health Organization was able to declare smallpox eradicated. There is also polio which was eradicated in the developed world in 1979 and we are closing in on world eradication now. Polio vaccination did not generate the same resistance that smallpox vaccination had but there were still some who vigorously opposed it, such as cosmetics magnate Duon Miller.

That is two horrific diseases that no longer stalk our children, thanks to broad public support for mandatory vaccination and the tireless efforts of innumerable health professionals. So how do medical professionals and ethicists justify vaccine mandates, then and now?

The Historical Context: Freedom and Mandates

In the mid to late 1700s, a pair of closely related political philosophies was ascendent which placed personal autonomy (individual freedom) as central—classical liberalism and libertarianism—and these ideas formed a strong basis for the arguments against vaccination.

Both were partly informed by concerns about theocratic monarchs and tyrannical dictators who often ruled by claims of Divine Right backed by state violence and the oppression of dissent. These philosophies are characterised by a focus on ideals of self-ownership, a deep distrust of all forms of centralised power, strong arguments against coercion for personal or public good, and, for some, considerable suspicion about the very concept of ‘the public good’.

“Libertarians strongly value individual freedom and see this as justifying strong protections for individual freedom. Thus, libertarians insist that justice poses stringent limits to coercion. While people can be justifiably forced to do certain things (most obviously, to refrain from violating the rights of others) they cannot be coerced to serve the overall good of society, or even their own personal good.”

(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/, 2019)

The philosophy is often summarised by a quote attributed to English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1859), author of On Liberty:

“My freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”.

What is central to this aphorism is a strong view of bodily autonomy that extends to our visible physical boundary—it stops at each other’s skin.

These philosophies reached their zenith around 1820, within the era of Hippocrates’ Miasma theory which held that diseases (Black Death, Cholera, Typhoid, Malaria, etc.) emanated from rotting organic material producing ‘bad air’. Notably, this predates the acceptance of the Germ Theory of Disease proved by Pasteur in 1860-1864.

Variolation had been practiced since 1720 but physicians did not know why or how it worked. The idea that you could harm others without physically striking them was counter to intuition and initially seen as an unwelcome and unjust restriction on personal liberty. Scientific advances have since clearly established that microbes and viruses we carry but cannot see with the naked eye can and do cause considerable harm to others, even though we do not intend them to.

Modern Medicine and Biomedical Ethics

The Germ Theory of Disease is a cornerstone of modern medicine (Tulchinksy & Varavikova, 2014) and deeply informs biomedical ethics which are balanced on four pillars— beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and autonomy (Beauchamp & Childress, 1979).

Those four principles also underpin the APANZ code of ethics which adds interdependence (or relationship) as a fifth principle, further strengthening our commitment and connection to the well-being of others. While medical ethics considers “autonomy as first among equals” (Gillon, 2003, p. 310), it does not override the other principles, and this is central to the justification of vaccine mandates.

“Vaccination is unique among de facto mandatory requirements in the modern era, requiring individuals to accept the injection of a medicine or medicinal agent into their bodies, and it has provoked a spirited opposition” (Wolfe & Sharp, 2002, p. 432).

As mandates subordinate private autonomy to public beneficence, this overriding of personal and bodily autonomy rightly requires a very high threshold. Biomedical ethicists speak of four conditions which must be satisfied before mandatory vaccination is considered justified and ethical (Savulescu, 2021):

1. There is a grave threat to public health

2. The vaccine is safe and effective

3. Mandatory vaccination has a superior cost/benefit profile compared with other alternatives

4. The level of coercion is proportionate.

The scientific and ethical consensus is that these four conditions have been met (Gostin et al., 2020; Wynia et al., 2021).

The SARS-CoV2 pandemic is a grave threat to public health with over 5 million deaths and counting. Considerable evidence exists to support both the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines developed to combat it (Liu, et al., 2021). This is especially true of the mRNA vaccines which have a very low side-effect profile and 95% reductions in risk of serious illness and death as well as some ignificantly reducing transmission.

The epidemiological consensus is that mandatory vaccination is superior to other control methods, particularly in the context of the highly aerosol transmissible Delta and Omicron variants for which masks, hygiene, social distancing, testing, and contact tracing are insufficient to prevent exponentially growing outbreaks.

Requiring vaccination for individuals in high-risk professions is considered proportionate. The recent inclusion of healthcare workers (such as psychotherapists) and teachers is due to both spending extended periods of time in close contact with others which heightens transmission risk, both from their clients and pupils to them, and from them to their pupils and clients. The current medical consensus is that there is no other effective way to adequately protect children, the elderly, the immune- compromised, and vulnerable communities such as Māori and Pasifika, and the poor and disenfranchised from preventable death and serious illness other than mass vaccination, backed by mandates to ensure safe public access to essential health and other services.

For those who choose not to be vaccinated, the passport restrictions are intended to protect them and others they may interact with, by reducing their level of social contact as the virus patiently seeks out the unvaccinated. They also aim to reduce the impact on our limited public health resources (hospital beds, ICU facilities, etc.) as ethicists rightly note that it is unethical to limit individuals’ access to medical care even though they may have acted in ways that increased risk to their own health and that of others.

Conclusion

Ethical decision-making is multi-faceted and often involves weighing up multiple conflicting factors and carefully considering differing perspectives. The APANZ code of ethics has a one-page decision making flowchart that offers a framework which may be helpful to members grappling with their own ethical decisions. In terms of acting within our code of ethics, clauses 1.1, 1.4, 1.8, 2.15, and 3.2 relate to safe legal practice regarding complying with health orders and clauses 2.2 and 2.6 relate to our expertise and that of other health professionals and the importance of only providing accurate health information and not misinformation.

I hope that this article helps members to understand the thinking that underpins Council’s position on vaccination and the mandate for psychotherapists, and that it also offers some context and information to members as we all continue to wrestle with the ethical dilemmas with which our current circumstances confront us.

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References

• Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress J. (1979) Principles of biomedical ethics (1st ed). Oxford University Press.

• Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, germs, and steel. W. W. Norton.

• Gillon, R. (2003) Ethics needs principles. Journal of Medical Ethics, 29(5), 307-312. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307

• Gostin, L. O., Salmon, D. A., & Larson, H. J. (2020) Mandating COVID-10 Vaccines. Journal of the American Medical Association, 325(6), 532-533. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.26553

• Jenner, E. (1801). An inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae. D. N. Shury.

• Liu, Q., Qin, C., Liu, M., & Liu, J. (2021). Effectiveness and safety of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in real-world studies: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Infectious Diseases of Poverty 10, 132. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40249-021- 00915-3

• McNeill, W. H. (1979). Plagues and peoples. Anchor Books.

• Mill, J. S. (1859). On liberty. John W. Parker & Son.

• Milward, G. (2019). Smallpox. In Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War (pp. 72-113). Manchester University Press.

• Savulescu, J. (2021). Good reasons to vaccinate: Mandatory or payment for risk? Journal of Medical Ethics, 47(2), 78–85. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106821

• Tulchinksy, T. H., & Varavikova, E. A. (2014). A history of public health. The New Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-415766-8.00001-X

• Wolfe, R. M., & Sharp, L. K. (2002) Anti-vaccinationists, past and present. British Medical Journal, 325(7361), 430–432. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.325.7361.430

• Wynia, M. K., Harter, T. D., & Eberl, J.T. (2021). Why a universal COVID-19 vaccine mandate is ethical today. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20211029.682797/full/

Trolling Patterns and Personas

Carol: I’m wondering, Paul, if different types of posts or posters elicit different types of trolls. For example, does Jonathan attract the same types as I do?

Paul: Well, based on what I've seen, which is a very unrepresentative sample, I’d say you (and me) all attract instances of all the types: rage-baiters, concern trolls, sealions, masked torturers, deluded martyrs, etc. But the proportions might vary.

Much trolling is ideologically driven, but some is pure sadism with ideology being secondary. With male trolls, precarious manhood features a LOT, either outright in rage-baiters or lurking with sealions to emerge later. That shows in misogyny towards you and homophobia for us.

Jonathan might get more deluded martyrs due to the anti-psychiatry/alt-medicine patient advocate 'pool,' but you seem to get your fair share too with anti-vaxxers/conspiracists. I get possibly more gender-critical women sealions due to my trans ally-ship.

But I’m leery of the amount of selection bias in this summary. Gender is definitely a big factor here. It would be interesting to do a full discourse analysis or grounded theory coding of our respective Twitter feeds. That would be a fascinating piece of social science research.

Carol: It feels gendered often, but maybe that’s too easy an analysis. I’d love to do a study, but I’m pretty sure I can’t analyse my own trolls. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Paul: It’s an interesting research ethics issue. I think you would need to have multiple people coding the tweets, possibly with others coding yours and vice versa. This is not uncommon practice in discourse analysis to get coding consistency.

It’s also not lost on me that we are bound by and rightly concerned about research ethics and fairness with human subjects, and the trolls don’t seem to be, but so it goes.

Carol: Good point! I’m always thinking about the ethics or bias of a study - would it be reliable or valid? It’s literally what we’re trained to do!

Would be interesting for sure. I think you’re right, though - the topic seems to attract certain types. Something to observe, perhaps?

One thing I find fascinating about people who troll Jonathan is how often they comment on his appearance. I rarely get personal comments - more discrediting my professional role. I’d have predicted I would receive more hate being female, so that’s an interesting divergence.

Paul: Yeah, that is rather fascinating. I think the man bun seems to give precarious manhood dudes conniptions, and for others, it’s just such a lazy rage-baiter jab.

Maybe you attract more of the Machiavellian trolls i.e., sealions, who aren't quite so lazy or insulting to begin with?

Carol: Possibly. Plus, I guess they can’t really see me in my pic. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It’s almost reassuring to be tackled for my professional role instead of my appearance. That that is progress is alarming, though!

Jonathan: Indeed. I think it’s an unsophisticated form of tribalism.

Carol: Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad not to have to deal with it. And I love how anyone assumes you’d care about their ideas on how you should wear your hair!

Jonathan: I hear you, my friend. Lol. To their credit, the man-bun haters don’t even pretend to be the “good guys” when trolling in that way. They’re explicit about their abuse. I appreciate the honesty. In contrast, the “deluded martyrs” believe that their abuse is justified.

Carol: It’s truly an ugly life, right? I mean, I know my faults and try to work around them, but mostly I just accept I’m a flawed person, just like everyone else.

Except, unlike the deluded martyrs, I’m trying to be a better person. They think they’re already there and have to live that lie.

Jonathan: Exactly. Well said.

According to my most ardent harassers, for example, I’m the “face of evil”, but I’m not the one who engages in defamation and online abuse every day. The narcissism veil is thick and overshadows their science illiteracy.

Carol: You’re evil because, to them, you undermine their attempts to derail psychology? Never mind that you have a client list who need help and support, which they never provide?

It’s all “take a walk by the sea,” “buy this supplement.” It’s never “come talk to me; I’ll listen,” is it?

Paul: No, it never is. Actual empathy is not their strong suit - it’s the polar opposite of sadism.

Carol: Indeed. Sad existences they lead.

Jonathan: Truly sad. The “deluded martyrs” seem to be the most obsessive in their harassment campaigns—at least with me.

Carol: Which tracks. They’re perhaps believing they’re on some ideological journey, whereas mine just tend to hate me having a platform at all, or a voice, or an opinion. And plants. Darn those plants! 🌱

Jonathan: Ugh. I’m sorry.

Yes, mine indeed believe they’re on some ideological journey that takes them to wonderful and exotic places like the other end of their couches. Lol.

Carol: That’s it. Social media platforms, for some, seem to serve as some sort of accreditation process, whereby their ambitions are realized in the absence of the hard graft of studying or gaining practical experience.

And they genuinely believe themselves to be equivalent experts.

Jonathan: We know they’re watching this very exchange and probably nodding along with your point, “Yeah, that’s right, I’m accredited.” Lol.

Carol: How they cozy up to any expert who holds a similar view is most telling, also. Complete sycophancy. Constantly craving validation in the most obsequious manner.

To their discredit, said “experts” lap it up.

Jonathan: So well said.

In my case, I’ve noticed that the leaders and players of the anti-science movements, who my most ardent harassers worship, don’t even acknowledge their existence - which pierces the “deluded martyr” fantasy and stings the narcissism even more. 👍

Carol: At least they are not inflating the ego or accrediting the perspective of the troll in question. At the very least.

Jonathan: That is true. I think they would seize that opportunity if the harassers had anything whatsoever to offer.

Carol: The negativity can be overwhelming, but moments of connection make it all worthwhile. It reminds me of why I keep speaking up. For every troll who attacks me for my vegan beliefs, there’s someone who might be inspired by my advocacy.

I was recently honoured to have been featured in this character study as a vegan inspiration to a truly admirable young activist. Humbled. It’s those positive, real-world interactions that highlight how irrelevant the trolls’ opinions really are.

Jonathan: Toiling in irrelevance ain’t easy for those folks. 😊👍

Carol: Ain’t that the truth. Love it when the positives outweigh those nasty negatives.

Jonathan: Truly! It ain’t easy for our most ardent harassers to toil in irrelevance, insecurity, lack of validation, and narcissistic injury/rage when reality pierces their grandiose fantasies. Behavioural karma has delivered - with a sting - what they deserve for their well-documented history of years of abuse. Frankly, I’m glad they’ve failed to accomplish their pseudoscientific goals. I find that worth celebrating. 🤷🏻‍♂️😊🙌🎉

Carol: Indeed: which is partly why I shared this. It was a beautiful experience and rooted entirely in the very reason trolls despise me.

It’s the ultimate recognition that their anonymous opinions are completely irrelevant when there are so many positive real-world interactions.

Jonathan: So true. Harassers don’t know what it’s like to actually improve health outcomes, to receive overwhelming messages of support, to have their work reach the public, and to join patients in their health journeys.

Instead, they sit at home seething, adding to their human stamp collection of abuse, and continuing to realize that no one cares what they say or do, and continuing to realize that their fantasies just feed their narcissism but have no basis in reality. Let them keep up the great “work.” Lol 🙏

Carol: I don’t help health as directly as you do, but I hope I help people to see that we can listen even to those we disagree with and try to understand them in order to make positive changes in society.

I really hope that helps them long-term to lead healthier, happier, peaceful lives.

Jonathan: Well said - you absolutely do help people in that way.

And it’s sad that our harassers don’t understand what they’ve done to themselves. They don’t understand their “behavioural karma.” Their constant defamation and dog-pile attempts and screenshots of our posts won’t transform their narcissistic fantasies into reality. That takes work. It takes expertise, and clinical experience, and training, and skill development, and above all, healing on their part to solve their abusive behavioural patterns.

Because they can’t help people or revolutionize health care or be useful at all when all their time is spent harassing health professionals and scientists on the internet, or retweeting misinformation from people who they worship and who don’t even know who they are or acknowledge their existence.

Some of our harassers consider that “work.” It’s not work. It’s nothing. And they have nothing else to show. It’s very sad. Pitiful, even. 👍

Can Trolls Change?

Carol: I don’t know about you, but I’d love to sit down with them and really talk through their motivations. I’d really like to have them face us and tell us exactly what they thought they were doing - are doing. It would be a wonderful opportunity to show them what kind people we are.

Jonathan: That’s laudable, my friend. To be frank, though, I would choose not to do that because I’ve been experiencing compassion fatigue toward them for a long time.

For several years I’ve requested that they leave me alone. And for several years they’ve regularly violated my boundaries via incessant defamation, purposeful dog-piling, involving my family, regularly attacking my friends and colleagues, bizarre forms of cyberstalking and covert harassment like quoting me and my supporters, calls to retract my articles about topics they’re unqualified to understand, collecting my photos and posts, etc.

They’ve had plenty of opportunities to make amends and to cease their abusive behaviour. They voluntarily choose to continue with those abusive behaviours.

Good people don’t do what they do. And in my view, they don’t deserve to sit down with me. I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction and to pretend they matter just because they’ve chosen to take up an abusive hobby.

I’m here to sit with patients every day as they navigate the ravages of addiction and mental illness, and I’m here to help protect people from pseudoscientific grift and the harms of anti-science movements. I’m not here to be a punching bag for harassers.

That is why I’m quite pleased that the majority of them are toiling in irrelevance and deep insecurity and failure. They don’t deserve my compassion and kindness until they choose to heal and make the necessary changes. I’m not here to help them with that endeavour because patient care is my priority, not their bruised egos, self-importance, and narcissistic fantasies. 😊👍

Carol: And you’re quite right. I haven’t had the same level of sustained attack as you. And I hugely admire your forbearance. We all have to practice self-care, and it’s different for you in that you are patient-facing, and that’s an enormously demanding role.

I get to pontificate in my ivory tower. It’s not at all the same.

But, as someone whose work involves intergroup conflict and inequality, I’d really like to understand why people do what they do. I’d love to interview such people and explore the ‘why.’ Thing is, these types would never do just that.

And why? Well, essentially they’re all terrible cowards. As we’ve discussed at length, they are essentially jealous and spiteful creatures who refuse to acknowledge our status because it lays bare their lack thereof.

But, to paraphrase the great Michael Billig, if we truly want to understand those who attack us, those who seek to create division, those who practice discrimination and exercise prejudicial views, and even violent intent, we have to look at what they say - either online or engage in person.

I’d happily do the latter, with full recognition that it’s easier for me. Firstly, I’m not as famous as you. Secondly, I don’t have the range of trolls you do. And thirdly, I don’t have patients who deserve my time far more than any harasser.

But I’m still piqued to get to the bottom of their behaviour.

Jonathan: Thank you for your kind words, my friend. I too am fascinated by their motivations (e.g., my piece below), and we’ve both had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Paul’s fantastic work.

In working clinically with those who experience narcissism, I’ve seen different kinds of responses to a victims support network. Some, as you’ve mentioned, are too cowardly to share their insecurities out of fear of being exposed for their jealousy, resentment, etc. and we especially see this on social media when our harassers choose to hide their identity, so they shy away from these opportunities opting instead to harass from a distance. Others, however, relish the opportunity for manipulation and to further violate their targets boundaries via indirect harassment.

Personally, I’ve seen this happen to me right here on social media, whereby my harassers will (creepily) watch who I engage with and then contact my supporters in an attempt to involve themselves in my support systems. Countless supporters have sent me screenshots of such boundary violations that often appear unsolicited in their DMs. It’s yet another narcissistic attempt for harassers to try to control their targets and impose their presence through a boundary where it’s not wanted.

The causes of online trolling:

Paul: I’ve had a few rare online conversations with trolls who’ve dropped the mask. For one, the envy and rage were palpable - sadism was their primary motivation. For another, their humanity was visible, and face-to-face we might have gotten somewhere. But their anti-trans ideology was primary, and a year or so later, they were back trying to sealion and moralize as before.

I guess I’m in-between the two of you in the amount of trolling and personalized harassment aimed my way, so I get where both of you are coming from.

Essentially, committed trolls are helpable in much the same way other addicts are - only if they want to face themselves. For the more Machiavellian malignant narcissists, worming their way into your support system to recruit ‘flying monkeys,’ they are a lost cause and only want to learn from mental health professionals how to be more effective abusers.

This has been an awesome conversation here with two of my favourite online friends and colleagues. Thanks again for sharing your experiences and insights. I’m sure it will offer people a lot of food for thought.

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Paul: Hi, Jonathan. Thanks so much to agreeing to fit this into your busy schedule. Can you share a bit about your background and what drew you to your current work or activism?

Clinically, for about a decade, I’ve been working full-time on a fantastic interdisciplinary team in a hospital setting composed of other psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction medicine physicians, nurses, nurse-practitioners, social workers, and occupational therapists. We specialize in helping people who experience severe and complex concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorders, as well as other health conditions. My day-to-day work involves providing assessment, treatment, and consultation services. It means I provide one-on-one psychotherapy, group therapy, and case management. I’m also involved in regular and ongoing supervision of students, residents, and staff. Academically, at the University of Calgary, I’m an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

On top of those professional activities, I’ve also taken to patient advocacy work via science communication, which I consider to be a professional and ethical duty. The promotion and practice of evidence-based care is baked into our codes of ethics, and this involves correcting mental health misinformation that could harm the public. In this vein, I recently published a book called MIND THE SCIENCE, which is intended for a wide and general audience, and to be a self-defence shield to help protect against the onslaught of bogus mental health treatments and pseudoscientific claims that flood our environment, particularly as they derive from the wellness industry and anti-psychiatry movement.

Paul: I have my copy! What initially motivated you to engage with the online spaces or communities where the harassment occurred?

Having seen so many of my patients hurt by the pseudoscience circulating in popular culture, social media, health care systems, and the wellness industry, I’ve been on a mission to expose its harm and help protect the public from mental health misinformation. Everyone, including patients, deserves better than the harm that is associated with pseudoscientific grift.

Paul: When did you first start noticing online hostility directed at you? How did it initially manifest?

I first noticed the hostility in response to debunking the outlandish claims I would witness on a daily basis on social media, which come from a few non-mutually exclusive sources. The anti-vaccine movement and the modern anti-psychiatry movement are pseudoscientific assaults on public health. Additionally, the wellness and alternative medicine industries financially exploit people’s health and emotional vulnerabilities by commodifying pseudoscientific treatments. The result is that we see absurd claims such as denying the existence of germs and mental illness, but promoting the existence of human energy fields, homeopathic water memory, and telekinetic spoon bending. We see dangerous claims that vaccines cause autism and psychiatric medications are more harmful than helpful, and that the solution is to follow a fad diet or buy unsupported supplements to address a faux “root cause.”

Paul: What do you think motivated the trolls to target you?

There are many possible interacting factors that can account for why I’m targeted. I suspect that for my most ardent cyberstalkers and harassers, the primary drivers are marriage to pseudoscientific health ideology, coupled with dark tetrad personality traits, including narcissism. People don’t like when their world-views are poked and prodded. Whereas challenging one’s beliefs can be a liberating opportunity for growth for some people—which is aligned with the scientific spirit—it can also result in lashing out, particularly among those who exhibit such personality traits.

Paul: Indeed! My own experience as a science and vaccination advocate on X/Twitter is the same. Can you describe the nature of the harassment you experienced and how did it evolve over time?

For promoting evidence-based patient care and public health, I’ve been receiving regular, ongoing harassment and cyberstalking for years. I wrote about it here and here. I’ve received death threats, dealt with frivolous complaints, and I’m constantly lied about and libelled. I’ve been called every defamatory name in the book, including “the face of evil.” Even my mother has been attacked and dragged into the harassment campaigns, whereby some have taunted her with emoticon “waves” and inappropriate comments such as, “How ya doin’ mom?” Other times, my photos have been downloaded and played with using Photoshop in an attempt to insult and mock me. For example, one time a picture of my face was pasted on to a sperm yelling “Untrue! Pseudoscience!” And incidentally, I use that image as a slide in my presentations to educate about the nature of harassment in the context of science communication. Everyone has a hearty laugh.

Paul: Targetting our families is so outrageous! Were there any notable patterns or tactics used by the trolls that stood out to you?

I noticed that the harassment from a handful of people has escalated over the years as my patient advocacy has flourished. The early days of such harassment involved calls to retract my published articles on alternative medicine and bizarre covert forms of harassment such as quoting me verbatim, as well as the words of my supporters. The frequency and intensity of the harassment escalated over the years to more explicit defamation, dog piles, and collecting and posting my content with a view toward incitement of harassment as if I were their human stamp collection.

Paul: After reading about the Masked Torturer and Deluded Martyr trolls, do you feel these profiles fit your experience? What might be missing?

I’m very grateful to you for writing your piece because I believe it can help people understand the nature of harassment in a nuanced way and help others who experience harassment not feel so alone. I’ve indeed encountered harassment that feels consistent with both of the profiles you’ve described. I think your “Deluded Martyr” profile does well at capturing the grandiosity and fantasy components of narcissism that I suspect drive much of the harassment toward my efforts.

Paul: Were friends, family, or colleagues supportive during the harassment?

I’m fortunate to have strong social support and coping skills, which allow me to manage harassment effectively. Many people are chased off social media due to these attacks and no one should blame them. Science communication isn’t for everyone and there’s no reason to continue if it’s negatively impacting someone’s mental health. Emotion regulation skills and reaching out for support are paramount if one decides to engage in science communication in the face of harassment.

Paul: Yeah, I think my psychotherapy training has helped a lot in this arena too. What advice would you give to someone else going through a similar experience with harassment?

For people who are new to science communication, it’s important to remember that trolling, harassment, and personal attacks can sometimes come with the territory. And that you’re not alone. This article in Nature provides a glimmer into its prevalence on social media.

It’s important to never take insults personally, as it reflects the headspace of the people lobbing the attacks, which are often directed not at you per se, but rather a distorted view and set of ideas about who they think you are.

Paul: Looking back, do you feel you’ve grown or changed from the experience of dealing with the harassment?

Personally, my experience of harassment has only strengthened my resolve to continue my patient advocacy work. I feel grateful to receive overwhelming and heart-warming messages of support voicing that my efforts have made meaningful differences toward improving people’s lives and health outcomes. And that’s everything. I find that extremely rewarding—and it’s satisfying to know that ultimately, the abuse from my harassers doesn’t matter.

It's also helpful to remember that those who engage in harassment have their own problems to work through and heal from in order to figure out what drives their behaviour. And that’s their responsibility, not ours.

Paul: Well said. Thanks for all this, Jonathan. I’ve learned a lot from hearing your story and I’m sure others will too.

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