As someone who uses Twitter far too much, I get very jealous when I realise that there are people walking among us who have absolutely no idea who Laurence Fox is. Since appearing on BBC Question Time in 2020, the Harrow-educated former actor has rebranded himself as spokesperson for angry people who hate “elites”. Things he’s not keen on include “wokeism”, Meghan Markle, taking the knee and wearing a mask.
Fox’s outrage-stoking grift is familiar, boring and annoyingly successful. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever he tweets something particularly stupid, like calling masks “woke burqas”, the word “divorce” often appears as a trending topic alongside his name. Sometimes, the name of his former spouse (Billie Piper) starts trending too. The joke seems to be that Fox’s brief music career and now his foray into politics — which has included a doomed run for London mayor, launching a political party and constant posting — is a reaction to his 2016 divorce. (I reached out to Fox’s reps to ask why he thinks people say this about him, but I didn’t get a response).
There seems to be a lot of divorce going around. The pandemic has seen a surge in divorces in the UK, China, America and lots of other countries across the world. From Kim and Kanye, to Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth, Adele, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, celebrity divorces are everywhere too. In the last few years, various articles have argued that 2019, 2020 and now 2021 were defined by “big divorce energy”.
So what is “divorce energy”? It seems to be glaringly heterosexual, for starters. And it’s also gendered: even before marital collapse became everyone’s favourite Twitter meme, the stereotypes of divorced straight men and women were very different.
For women, “divorce energy” seems to revolve around liberation and freedom. Think: Princess Diana’s infamous “revenge dress” (which has its own Wikipedia page), or Kim Kardashian hosting SNL then frolicking around with comedian Pete Davidson a few weeks later. Adele’s rollout of 30 – complete with chic outfits and glamorous interviews with Vogue and Oprah Winfrey – seemed fitting for an album about “divorce, babe.” For women, “divorce energy” represents a belief that the best is yet to come. It says: “I’m going to be jusssssssst fine”.
Divorced guy energy, on the other hand, seems to be defined by a sense of tragicness and grievance. “Lozza Fox” is just the tip of the iceberg: writing for The Face, Imogen West-Knights describes male divorced energy as “‘Twitter centrists’ pictures of their pale, unsettling home-cooked dinners. Middle-aged men tagging the Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards in women’s posts on Christmas day, [...] Paul Hollywood in full leathers astride a motorcycle, the masterminds of failed projects on Grand Designs, the ‘What a sad little life, Jane’ guy.” The most obvious example in pop culture is surely Ross from Friends, whose three divorces became a constant punchline. And in politics, look no further than Michael Gove going clubbing alone and Matt Hancock wearing a turtleneck at Capital FM’s Jingle Bell Ball.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s very horny summer of love symbolises the gender split in divorce energy. Following his divorce from Jennifer Garner in 2015, Affleck’s public persona seemed to be stuck in a perpetual state of post-split bleakness: dishevelled paparazzi pics, much younger girlfriends and “I’m pulling myself together now” magazine profiles. But his PDA-packed reunion with his ex Jennifer Lopez (a three-time divorcee) made him fun-by-association with her. Suddenly, the tragic Affleck seemed a million miles away and the jokes and memes about him had a very different energy.
Affleck’s initial post-divorce slump sums up that male “divorce energy” feels like a continuation of the long-held stereotype of the “midlife crisis”. You know, the cliché of a man changing the way he looks, getting a tattoo, buying a car (or kayak) and maybe acquiring a younger partner too. Midlife crises aren’t always tragic in a ‘downward spiral’ sense. Sometimes they manifest as a glow-up, of sorts: Jeff Bezos’s divorced energy is defined by the Amazon CEO becoming a hencher, more pristine version of himself and wearing a gilet to show off newly-muscled arms. He even got into a space rocket competition with recently-separated billionaire Elon Musk (because new cars are for peasants, clearly).
In a deep-dive on Bezos’s divorced energy, writer Miles Klee reflected on his own divorce, which was very different. “When my wife and I separated, I was suddenly broke and sleeping on a floor mattress,” he wrote. “This, I thought, was the aesthetic of divorce. It didn’t have to be!”. Klee is, of course, not being fully serious here. But perhaps there is something to it: a sense that divorced guys might gravitate towards men who they think are thriving post-divorce, whether it’s a newly-hench Bezos launching rockets into space, or a one-man crusade against a “woke world gone mad” that they feel similarly scammed by.
Therapist Charisse Cooke has worked with many clients at different stages of divorce. She tells GQ that, generally, she sees two prevailing emotions in men: sadness and anger. Both of these can manifest in different ways and prompt “dramatic changes” in behaviour. She thinks these emotions combined with practical causes – more time alone, a fear of getting older, a newfound sense of insecurity, being less likely to ask for help and perhaps increased alcohol consumption too – are behind the stereotypes of how divorced men can behave.
Social media is a space where anger can be unleashed, or where sadness can quickly turn into anger. It’s also a place where a sense of community can be found if someone is feeling lonely. “In the aftermath of a divorce, men might expand their social media use and discover new platforms and apps. It can feel very intoxicating and exciting to suddenly have community people who want to chat to you,” Cooke says. “It's going to be very difficult to set boundaries around that, which is when bad behaviour can definitely ensue.” So downloading Twitter, for example, can be where the “sad, dishevelled” divorced guy can easily become the “angry, anti-political-correctness warrior” divorced guy. In the right circumstances, social media is where both stereotypes can be amplified and converge.
But why? Digital culture writer Hussein Kesvani, co-host of 10 Thousand Posts podcast, tells GQ that the most powerful divorced energy on Twitter emanates from the hardcore fans of guys like Fox or Musk, rather than the men themselves. “My theory is that divorced guys love being online because defining yourself by being divorced is a Main Character Energy [trait], but one that’s fully motivated by resentment,” he says. “These men are well past their sexual prime, so they can’t be playboys, but they also don’t want to say ‘I hate women’ outright either, so they basically invent a hero’s journey for themselves.”
The Twitter accounts that positively amplify angry men like Fox often embody a certain “she turned the weans against us” energy, like an online version of that era where Father’s 4 Justice kept climbing buildings dressed as superheroes. Kesvani thinks that’s because, in the “hero’s journey” these men are manifesting, divorce is an awakening. “It’s an example of a system that specifically aggrieves some men and it becomes their life mission to beat that system,” Kesvani says. “For Laurence Fox’s divorced guy fans, the message they’re getting is ‘the divorce is FURTHER proof that the system set by elites is rigged against YOU’”.
The idea that men are disadvantaged in the divorce process seems to be a key factor that radicalises divorced guys into being very loud and online. This belief is so widely held that it’s often considered a fact, and pop culture panders to it too. In the film Marriage Story, for example, Scarlett Johansson plays a woman who succeeds in using her divorce to relocate her family to Los Angeles, much to the anger of her now-ex husband (Adam Driver). But is this stereotype even true?
It’s been the case for a long time that women file for divorce more than men. (As of 2015, around 70% of divorces were initiated by women). But Neil Hobden, a divorce lawyer for 30 years who has been divorced himself, tells GQ that he hasn’t noticed a trend towards men being disadvantaged in the divorce process. If anything, at the beginning of his career, he noticed that the opposite was the case. “The Family Courts are careful not to discriminate against husbands and fathers in the divorce process,” he says. “I’m not saying there are no cases where the husband or wife gets a raw deal. But often where ‘discrimination’ is complained of, it is merely the Family Court recognising the reality in that family, in terms of earning power, child care arrangements and so forth.”
Regardless, Hobden has noticed that men can feel aggrieved by divorce because it often comes as a shock. “Many men, in my experience, simply do not pay attention to warning signs,” he says. “I regularly hear the complaint, in football terms, that ‘my wife showed me a straight red to end our marriage’. The reality, in many of these cases, is he was shown a number of ‘yellow cards’ which he failed to heed.”
It’s not a coincidence that the men some “divorced guys” are known for coalescing around – like Piers Morgan and Jordan Peterson – reject phrases like “toxic masculinity”, or the very idea that patriarchy exists at all. But if the divorce process is, as Hobden says, designed to be as equal as possible, then men still feeling hugely aggrieved by it suggests that they are used to moving through a world that benefits them. As the saying goes: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”.
This isn’t to say that our expectations of relationships aren’t shifting, though. “Right now, we are at the centre of our lives and our happiness is paramount,” Cooke says. “Duty to a family or spouse, or carrying on and ‘doing the right thing’ isn't enough anymore. We want to be satisfied.” So this might be why, for women, “divorced energy” feels positively associated with growth and valuing oneself more highly. But for men, the stereotype is more angry and erratic, because there’s a sense of failure that they aren’t meeting these new expectations.
What’s next for the divorced guy? Divorce becoming a meme on Twitter is part of a classic cycle. The more “divorced guys” are challenged and made fun of, the more the disparity between the so-called “divorce energy” of men and women grows. And this only intensifies the feeling among some men that they are being unfairly persecuted online and by “society”, which is then used to justify all kinds of weird behaviour – like processing their sadness by rebranding as an angry online guy who tweets pictures of overcooked steak to “own the vegans” or whatever. Just like the cycle of marriage and divorce, it’s an endless loop that allows everyone to cast themselves as a victim or victor at one point or another.
So don’t expect the “divorced guy” to stop being Twitter’s favourite joke any time soon. On the face of things, it might seem mean. But don’t worry, he secretly likes it that way.
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