Kicking the Dog

How a mediocre Netflix drama sparked a moral panic amongst the British chatterati.

Masks looking at a Tortoise by James Ensor (1894)

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When leafing through the newspapers, I mentally tally each story involving a man hauled before the courts, charged with what editors starchily refer to as “performing a sexual act.” Practitioners of this curious pastime appear to be everywhere. They hide in bushes. They burrow in parked cars. They even self-indulge in the vegetable aisles of Tesco.

In the council-estate English of my youth, these men were caught wanking in public. Today, officialdom shrouds their weird ways in hygienic buzzwords and bleachy evasions. At the end of each report, a solicitor doles out the latest trope: His client is seeking a diagnosis for ADHD or autism. This is a developing trend. A few years ago, the stock mitigation slithering from the lawyerly tongue was trauma or an adverse upbringing.

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As a young court reporter, I grew used to this class and its linguistic sluttery. The most testicular excuse I ever heard seared itself onto my brain.

Defending his client’s weekly appearance before the judge, a solicitor said:
“Your Honour, we have been here before. All I can say on behalf of my client is that he does not believe he is stealing, so to speak. He believes he is correcting the broken, late-capitalist system.” Reader, he fought to steal another day.

Doubtless that habitual offender still liberates iPads and iPhones from the capitalist oppressor, fencing the goods to justice-involved persons, many of whom are people experiencing opioid addiction.

This habit of euphemism does not merely excuse the guilty. It swings its sickle elsewhere.

Under our Labour government, the dictionary of euphemisms has swollen to rival War and Peace. Each day mints a fresh brick of Lego Language—words pressed together into sentence shapes that feel moral without actually meaning anything. Euphemism is not just annoying speech; it is a habit of mind. The mouth that traffics in euphemisms aligns with the mind that thinks in euphemisms too.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Labour’s declared War on Misogyny. According to our betters, Britain is a scorched plain over which misogynists roam, knuckles dragging, hypnotised by Andrew Tate and the Manosphere. These creatures, we are told, stalk the land, muttering statistics about male athletic advantage like a swarm of demented Daleks.

Our Labour government, its approval rating currently three percent lower than the percentage of Brits who believe there is a monster living in Loch Ness Lake, will train teachers to spot misogyny in boys and send ‘high-risk’ offenders to courses to ‘tackle the root causes of misogyny.’

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Misogyny, however, is not a vibes-based category. The word comes from the Ancient Greek misos (hatred) and gunē (woman): hatred of women. Until recently, it described a pathological condition involving fear, control, and violence directed at women. Such brutal men exist. They always have. But are they representative of the average British schoolboy doom-scrolling through social-media nonsense? Press X to doubt.

Yet this is where the campaign now lands: in classrooms of adolescent boys, taught to interrogate their latent depravity before it has manifested. It is not behaviour being punished, but probability.

In a culture strapped to the algorithm, only the most extreme definitions float to the surface. The brain, trained by screens, learns to seek the sensational, the novel, the ludicrous. And so, Labour shapes its moral imagination on content rather than evidence.

The Netflix drama Adolescence perfectly captures this drift. For the unacquainted, the series—an incel murder story drugged liberally with “that Andrew Tate shit”—was received as revealed truth. For The Guardian, it was “the best TV show ever.” It was not. Even a semi-literate eye would charge Adolescence as, well… adolescent.

Nevertheless, Adolescence assumed the status of revealed truth. On a BBC news panel, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was interrogated for admitting she had not yet seen it. Middle-class parents dutifully watched alongside their sons, scanning their offspring for signs of misogyny leaking from its gills. Fiction hardened into diagnosis.

Life now imitates social media. Labour’s plan to tackle misogyny appears lifted directly from the website formerly known as Twitter. Schools will teach boys that it is not acceptable to act like barbarians. One wonders who imagined otherwise.

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What these awareness seminars will not address—naturally—are the forms of misogyny that are neither hypothetical nor algorithmically inferred, but routine, organised, and existing beyond a Twitter feed or a Netflix menu.

They will not dwell on forced veiling, female genital mutilation, so-called honour violence, or acid attacks—practices documented in Britain and overwhelmingly concentrated within small but electorally critical communities governed by brutal patriarchal codes.

A rational observer might reasonably conclude that such practices meet any serious definition of misogyny: not ironic hatred, not incel posturing, but actual coercion, violence, and control exercised over women’s bodies and lives. You know, the very domination that Iranian women (and men) are currently risking their lives—quite literally—to uproot.

Yet these realities remain untouched and unmentioned, whilst classrooms revert into courtrooms enlisted to pre-emptively correct the imagined sins of adolescent boys. The reason is not moral complexity but political convenience. Euphemism thrives where naming the problem would threaten electoral arithmetic.

And so, the language grows ever softer around real brutality, even as it hardens against boys whose only crime is to physically resemble a fictitious incel murderer on Netflix.

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A more hysterical observer might call this Orwellian pre-crime: the punishment of potential thought. I will settle for something simpler. When a society loses confidence in its ability to name real wrongdoing, it compensates by inventing symbolic offenders. Uncle Siggy Freud called this ‘kicking the dog.’

And so, we slouch toward government by algorithm: a country in which actual crimes—criminal and cultural—go under-punished and unmentioned, whilst imaginary ones invite moral crusaders to kick those closest to their boot; those who cannot bite back.

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