Obscene men: Manosphere Mussolinis and divorced dads

Thomas Necchi examines the trends of masculinity present with today’s far right, from influencers and streamers to political figures litigating their marriage in the public sphere.

To that type of authoritarian, patriarchal and misogynistic individual, the anti-militarist and unpatriotic shouts of women and children presaged something terrifying and unheard of: a future that did not include him.

– Antonio Scurati, M: Son of the Century

In every era, fascism has its recognisable archetypes, psychological profiles which it draws in at every level, from its foot soldiers to its officers. The grunts fall through the cracks as many do, so it has been easier for thinkers across the political spectrum to focus on the psychology of fascism’s leaders – biographies upon biographies of Mussolini, Hitler and various other figures in their regimes. There is a veritable industry of such books. But when developing an anti-fascist thought, it is not enough to speak of the men who made the big decisions as if they lived apart from their movements. To do so is to reproduce the great man theory of history. What we must look into is the character of the movement’s members and its supporters and why they relate to such leaders. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich said, ‘investigation of Hitler’s mass-psychological success must start from the fact that a Führer or the advocate of an idea can succeed only if his ideology or program is concordant with the average structure of the mass individual.’ Living in a society stratified by socio-economic relations, the individual is conditioned to think in ways according to the ruling ideology of the society he lives in. Any number of people within our societies might share the same interests, desires and anxieties. It is these which make fascist leaders appeal to them, who they look to in order to resolve their crises. This is what makes such leaders so effective and dangerous, for as the scholars Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman describe it, a fascist leader ‘does not confront his audience from the outside; he seems rather like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts.’ 

These innermost thoughts, as some scholars of fascism have highlighted, are most often fears and anxieties brought up to the surface by social upheaval and change. According to Robert O. Paxton, ‘looking for fears […] may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism.’ So what anxieties do they express? One of the most common tropes found in far-right rhetoric at the moment is the call to protect ‘women and children’ from various perceived or imagined threats, most often migrant men and transgender women. The phrase is so common the Guardian called it a ‘go-to trope’ in an article on the rhetoric. What seems innocuous, Amelia Gentleman writes, is in fact a cover with ‘a paternalistic subtext, hinting also at a need to protect the traditional gender roles and family values that have come under attack from a liberal elite.’ The time has come, fascists feel, to protect with a territorial anger the women and children of Britain, and in doing so renew and reinforce the social relations which have historically rendered those women and children as property of the father. Now we must ask: who are the tribunes of this cause?

From a quick glance, we can see that many of them can be counted amongst a category which psychoanalysts call ‘the obscene father’ – grotesque performances of masculinity to realise a primordial ideal of a man who enacts a sexual enclosure around women, keeping as many as possible for himself. Many such examples can be seen of this in what is often called ‘The Manosphere’, with influencers such as Andrew Tate providing a male audience with the supposed secret to realise their desires, linking material wealth with an unleashed libido. But this libertine attitude comes with its shadow – a patriarchal and authoritarian control of women’s own sexual behaviour. You only have to look at the examples provided in Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere, where one of these influencers practised an arrangement with their girlfriend which he called ‘one-way monogamy’ where the man could sleep with anyone they wanted and take on more wives whilst the woman was expected to be loyal. Whilst this might conjure up images of a favoured concubine in a harem, what it actually reveals is the logic of the family played out in the open to the point of absurdity.

Reich, writing on the mass psychology of fascism, pinpoints the family as the germ form of authoritarian social relations, because it was the most immediate form of maintaining those relations. He writes: ‘The family situation of the various strata of the middle classes is, to begin with, not separated from their economic position.’  The father was expected to be in complete control; his wife was expected to be completely loyal, and his children must be obedient and submissive. As Reich puts it:

The father’s economic position as well as his position in the state are reflected in his patriarchal relationship with the other members of the family. The authoritarian state has a representative in every family, the father; in this way he becomes the state’s most valuable tool.

The private property relation became entwined with inheritance within the family as a means to keep control within a class and a race – thus blood and soil was born. In its public face, this also required sexual monogamy to maintain an inheritance line, and thus certain ideological concepts adorned the petit-bourgeois family as a way of distinguishing it from the lower classes. Reich writes that ‘the sum total of these moralistic attitudes—the core of which is the attitude toward sexuality—expresses itself in ideas—ideas, not behavior—of honor and duty. […] They also constantly recur in the fascist ideology of dictatorship and race.’ But as Reich notes, this posture of sexual morality was often hypocritical. Much in the same way that nationalists claim hard borders whilst harboring the desire to expand, many men in traditional families have claimed it as a fortress whilst having affairs. Which is not to say they think it is completely false. As Reich notes:

[…] in spite of all hypocrisy, the depth of feeling connected with these concepts is genuine. The question is its source. The analysis of the lower middle class individual leaves no doubt about the connection between his sexual life and his ideology of “honor” and “duty.”

Hence the lack of self-awareness displayed by the manosphere Mussolinis as they espoused the virtues of an ‘uneven monogamy’ to Theroux, who in typical fashion simply handed them the rope with which to hang themselves. Nothing much has changed, it is just that the men in that documentary felt in control enough that they no longer needed the shroud of respectability. But this was proven wrong in the case of Myron Gaines, whose girlfriend Angelica Camacho left him shortly afterwards. The damage control attempted by Gaines, a clear panic at public embarrassment and psychological castration, gestures towards another figure of the far right who has become more common in recent years – the divorced dad.

These men, often older and not as outwardly hypermasculine as their manosphere compatriots, nevertheless proliferate the fascist movement in high profile positions. Whereas the manosphere attempts to deputise patriarchy by convincing young men to unleash their libidos through one half of a sexual lebensraum, the divorced men of the movement uphold the other half of it. They seem to always be mounting a last-ditch defence of the family as a controlling unit, attempting to drive the forces they see as ruining the family (and implicitly their own marital bliss) from public life. Whilst some may appear as bitter jokes to a lot of the public, the emotional force of their predicament has a lot of pull within the far-right. Within this category will also fall those men who did not marry their partners but have found themselves separated definitively all the same, many of whom can be heard saying ‘protect our women and children!’

Who are these estranged husbands and fathers? The most recent to appear in the news in Britain (at the Clacton by-election) is the washed up actor and Reclaim Party founder Laurence Fox, whose bitterness towards his ex Billie Piper is well known. Then you have Graham Linehan, whose public campaigns against trans people preceded a breakdown in his marriage and a seemingly complete alienation from most of his family. On the digital front, you have auditors like Charlie Veitch, whose divorce has been compounded by loss of custody of his children. Most famously of course, you have the current owner of X, Elon Musk, whose separation from musician Grimes was followed up by both keeping their son from her and by attempting a kind of ‘seed-spreading’, wherein various women were asked to carry his children or have sex with him. In their public dramas they play out roles which they seek to project onto national and international crises. These dramas resonate with the anxieties of reactionary men, who are no doubt feeling the same fear that their family units might disintegrate.

Just like the authoritarian control of family members can be found as the shadow of a supposedly libertarian sexual morality, the reaction against the disintegration of the family has its own shadow: one of coercion and domestic violence. The hand that attempts to hold the family together in its grasp, from an outside angle, is just a fist. And this can be seen in the conduct of the men we have mentioned. In a statement about his ex-wife, Laurence Fox self-reported (unprovoked) his own misconduct when he said: 

In the nearly a decade now that I have been separated from my ex-wife, she has taken me to court more than a dozen times, with allegations ranging from physical and emotional abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, attempted poisoning of our children and other such fantasies. She has abducted the kids for months on end and reported me to social services. Her desire has always been and remains to be to deny our kids a present father. 

And whilst Graham Linehan has claimed ‘they took everything from me. They took my family’, it is worth saying that his family left him, and that in all likelihood, he drove them away. Charlie Veitch has a conviction of assault on his ex-partner, who has also accused him of physical and emotional abuse of her and her children. Darker allegations of grooming and sexual assault have plagued him since his days as a conspiracy theorist (his own response at the time seems to suggest it was either another ex-partner or a close friend who made those accusations). Elon Musk has allegations of sexual harassment, and the distress expressed by Grimes at not being able to see her son was posted on Musk’s own website.

This behaviour is not relegated to those with public profiles, but is found at the grassroots as well. An article released in 2026 revealed that one in five arrested during the Southport riots had been reported for domestic abuse since then. Another article released after the Henry Nowak protests showed that the concentration of abusers in the rioters was even higher this time, with 22 of 37 detained having been accused or convicted of intimate partner violence. For all the talk of protecting women and children, it is clear that what they seek is not safety but securing control. To most people, hopefully, this appears a great and irreconcilable hypocrisy. But for the far-right themselves, it does not matter. Much like the infidelities of the petit-bourgeois of yesteryear did not rupture their sense of honour and duty, abuse convictions will not stop these men from pushing their politics. The abuse is the point. To return to Reich:

The father’s authoritarian position reflects his political role and discloses the relationship of family and authoritarian state. The same position which the boss holds in the production process, the father maintains in the family. He in turn reproduces submissiveness to authority in his children, especially his sons.

To divorce a fascist man is to disrupt not only their control but the reproduction of fascist ideology through their children. The soil is no longer passed from father to son, blood to blood, but split with the mother, a process that must feel like sanguine humor spilling from an arterial wound (at least, that is the level of drama these men seek to imbue the situation with). It challenges, in the most immediate and intimately charged way, social reproduction at its most authoritarian. Women and children must be brought back into the enclosure of the fist; protecting women and children and domestic violence go hand in hand. 

Through this violence, these men attempt to reinvigorate the patriarch, and rediscover a culture of masculinity by which they can assert control. Exactly what this culture of masculinity will look like can be gleaned from the below statement by Dan/DMO of the Thanet Patriots at a hotel protest recently. Speaking at this protest, he attempted to explain away his previous domestic abuse convictions with references to the supposed greater crimes of migrant men:

I’ve done bad shit in my past which I’m not proud of … We’ve all done stupid shit.

But then when these other people want to sit out there and be like, ‘Oh, you’re a domestic abuser’ – what? Do you think these people on the boats got a better criminal record than me?

[…]

Women, understand your men and be a bit more sympathetic about what they’re doing, because men go to war … this is a man’s fucking job!

The invocation of war is no accident. For the construction of threats, whether by migrant men or by transgender people and ‘ideology’, is precisely to create a front out of the family. As Alberto Toscano puts it in his writing on fascism’s sense of sexuality and gender, ‘today’s late fascisms, largely unmoored from ‘war as inner experience’ but ardently nostalgic for martial masculinities, fixate on gender nonconformity as both metaphor and metonymy, cause and symptom of a disorder at scales both personal and planetary.’ In the novel M: Son of the Century, a fascist laments that ‘Close combat no longer exists.’ It was precisely this ‘war as inner experience’ that made the paramilitaries such an attractive option. Nowadays, their inheritors have brought that close combat into the family, using the emergency of outside threats to assert their dominance. And if they have to use violence to keep the troops in line, all the better.

It would be wrong to speak of divorced men without speaking at least a little of the women who divorced them. Many of them are clearly reluctant to speak out, caught between a rock and hard place trying to negotiate messy interpersonal dynamics as well as the possible fear of retaliation both legal and physical. Some of them, whatever they feel, may understandably not want to relitigate a painful and harrowing separation in the public sphere. But the choice of a woman to leave, to walk out the door of the doll house and slam it behind them, can’t be overstated in the threat it presents to patriarchal order. For if fascism, as WEB Du Bois put it, is the ‘counter revolution of property’ then it goes hand in hand with a restoration of the property rights of the father, to re-assert control over his family. It entails an expansion of the definition of ‘property’; for a counter revolution of property, from the failure of the reconstruction to the fascist parties of the 20th century, has always been a counter revolution against those people it sees as such. 

To exit the family is no small feat, and the counter revolution against feminism across the globe bears testament to that. How can we start to resist it? To start, us men across the left should probably look to ourselves and ask if the relationships we conduct with women are truly in line with our politics. Do we walk the walk? Probably not, and now is the time to start changing that. For there is a real and present danger in looking to the domestic abuse convictions amongst the right and drawing the conclusion that so long as we are not violent like them, there is nothing we need to do. Not so. Leaving aside that many left-wing men have in fact been violent and coercive, even the most ‘content’ of families might ultimately prove unbearable if it does not facilitate the flourishing of women and children as human beings. We cannot afford to be divorced from reality here – we must reckon with the family as a site of violence. Perhaps such reckonings might lead us beyond the family, which is a socially and historically specific form. Maybe one day we can leave behind those contracts which, despite their romantic intentions, have proven only in the grand scheme to be fifty year reichs in the miniature.