Ariana Grande is tiny, isn’t she? There’s six inches of heels at one end, and perhaps two feet of hair at the other, but in between there’s hardly anything at all. Obviously the heels come off, and the hair might too, and without them she can probably walk down any street in near anonymity. On stage though, at the One Love Manchester concert on Sunday night, she became an avatar.
No, I’m not gushing. It’s just a fact. Will he have been watching, do you think, the next terrorist? The one we don’t know about yet. The next man — and it will be a man — to ram a car into people, or plunge a knife into people, or explode himself amid people, or do whatever sordid act of nihilism comes around next. Very possibly, because these guys are hypocrites, and need to know what to hate. For them, Grande was already an avatar, of everything they cannot allow to stand. Yet there she was, standing anyway. All five foot whatever of her. Even after all.
“Khalid Masood, the Westminster attacker, was a gym fanatic
Concerts like that in Manchester are not pitched at potential terrorists. I get that. Still, perhaps we quietly kid ourselves about the effect they might have. Perhaps we think the next terrorist will be watching, and have an epiphany. “Sheesh!” we might imagine he’ll think. “This looks great! So I’m going to stop watching videos of my fellow murderers in Syria, mansplaining Islam while holding up a finger. And instead I shall watch Katy Perry, perhaps singing Roar, and then I shall buy myself some golden hotpants and go clubbing. For I see now that the other side of this cultural divide, with its feminised fun, and glitter, and dancing, and faintly sexualised hugs from Miley Cyrus is simply a far happier place to be.”
The thing is, they probably know that already. Indeed, their terror about this, which is surely growing, and relentless, and perhaps even keeps them up at night, may well be the demon which turns them into monsters in the first place. Yes, most western terrorists have something in common, which is that they are Muslim. No, this is probably not irrelevant. Yet they have something else in common, too, which is that they are almost all men. Mainly, they are young men. And that probably isn’t irrelevant, either.
Mass shooters also tend to be young men. In America, where randomised crowd slaughter is a growth industry, you’ll find a Y chromosome behind the trigger 98 per cent of the time. And that’s not all they have in common. Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who killed six (and himself) at the University of California in 2014, recorded a video beforehand about his sexual frustration. Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26, who killed nine (and himself) at a community college in Oregon a year later, left a diary in which he wrote, “I am going to die friendless, girlfriendless and a virgin”. Invariably, these are men who are struggling to be men.
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“Like the gun killers of America, they are struggling to be men
Are western terrorists really religious warriors? Or are they better understood, also, as men struggling to be men? You will find a strong streak of aspirational masculinity in many. Khalid Masood, the Westminster attacker, was a reported gym fanatic, with a failed marriage behind him. According to this newspaper yesterday, one of the London Bridge attackers “worked a few hours a week at a segregated Islamic fitness centre which holds sessions in martial arts and ultimate fighting” as well as prayers. It would be petty to suggest that this necessarily entails a seething sexual frustration but, come on, we’re all thinking it. Consider, meanwhile, the marketing pitch of Islamic State itself, telling western youths with few prospects that they can be warriors by day and enjoy a harem of sex slaves by night. Scared of women? Come over here, and they can be scared of you instead.
Beneath the glass ceiling, the western world is feminising, and fast. British women today are considerably more likely to go to university than men. British Muslims are not exempt from this trend, with younger Muslim women more likely than their male peers to have degrees, and girls outperforming boys at school. This is happening against a backdrop of female mass culture confidence. We might scoff at the idea of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman being a feminist icon, what with her being a former Miss Israel in a copper camisole and not much else, but she does spend her time punching men and winning. Even female pop stars, such as Grande or Cyrus or Taylor Swift, seem to sell themselves more as a girl’s dream best friend than a boy’s dream girlfriend.
If you’re my age, and a father of daughters to boot, all of this is very welcome. Were I 20 years younger, though, I suspect I might find it all a bit threatening. Clearly, the male fear of inferiority is at the root of quite a lot of the ugly things some young men suddenly and shockingly do, from trolling online, to revenge porn, to campus rape culture, to the extremist politics of the alt-right.
Jihadism, clearly, is a big step further. Islamism, equally clearly, provides an excuse for taking it. Still, I wonder if we make a fundamental mistake when we inevitably liken these small, pathetic men who kill on British streets — and over whom Grande towers even without her heels — to their brutal, brutalised counterparts in the Middle East. Perhaps instead, we should bracket them with the next murderous white teenager who strolls into a US high school with an assault rifle. Or, to put it another way, if we solve the problem of rootless, aimless, self-loathing western men, then just maybe the problem of radicalised western Islamism might begin to dwindle, too.