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The audio bonus The Spitting Scene from The Never King by Nikki St Crowe is a striking case study in how misogyny functions not just as hatred of women, but as a structural system that reduces women to instruments in male relationships with each other.
What we’re witnessing here is compulsory heterosexuality in action — the social mandate that men must pursue women not out of genuine desire, but because heterosexuality serves as proof of masculinity itself.
In patriarchal structures, a man’s worth is often measured by his ability to “obtain” a woman.
Marriage and heterosexual conquest become markers of social acceptability, economic stability, and adult status. The woman isn’t desired as a person; she’s desired as a trophy that signals to other men: “I have achieved manhood”.
This creates a peculiar dynamic where men compete intensely for women while simultaneously viewing them with contempt or indifference. The competition is real — but it’s not actually for the woman. It’s for status among men, for the approval of the homosocial group.
How do women function as proof of manhood?
In patriarchal societies, manhood isn’t simply granted at a certain age — it must be actively demonstrated and continuously performed through specific accomplishments. Having a woman (whether as girlfriend, sexual conquest, or especially as wife) serves as tangible evidence of several interrelated masculine achievements:
1) Sexual prowess and virility
The ability to attract and “obtain” a woman proves heterosexual function and desire, distancing the man from any suggestion of homosexuality or asexuality, both of which are culturally coded as failures of masculinity. The more conventionally attractive the woman, the more “points” accrued in the masculine status game.
2) Economic viability
Historically and still today, supporting a wife (and family) signals that a man has achieved financial stability and provider status. The bachelor is often viewed with suspicion — why hasn’t he married? Can he not afford it? A wife demonstrates he’s economically competent enough to sustain a household.
3) Social maturity and responsibility
Marriage especially marks the transition from boyhood to full adult manhood. The unmarried man, regardless of age, remains somehow incomplete, unserious, not fully integrated into adult society (though never as estranged from society at large as the single woman). He hasn’t “settled down,” hasn’t taken on “real” responsibilities.
Dominance and control
Having a woman — particularly in relationships where the man is positioned as head of household — demonstrates the man’s ability to lead, control, and make decisions. The woman becomes evidence of his capacity for dominance, which patriarchal culture conflates with leadership and strength.
Heterosexual legitimacy
Perhaps most crucially, the woman serves as a shield against suspicion. In a culture where male-male intimacy is policed and condemned, where close friendships between men are viewed through a lens of paranoid homophobia, having a girlfriend or wife provides cover. It says: “My emotional investment is in the right place; in women, where it belongs”.
The woman, then, becomes a form of social currency exchanged between men. When Vane pursues the woman in Pan’s orbit, he’s not really pursuing her — he’s demonstrating to Pan (and to himself, and to any observers) that he’s a real man, worthy of Pan’s respect and attention. The woman is the coin, but Pan is the treasury where Vane seeks to deposit his proof of masculine worth (more on this in a bit).
Homosocial desire and its discontents.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the term “homosocial desire” to describe the ways men’s relationships with each other — their bonds, rivalries, and emotional investments — often route through women as intermediaries.
In cultures where male-male desire is taboo, where any hint of attraction between men is coded as weakness or femininity, men must find socially acceptable channels for their emotional and psychological focus on other men.
In The Spitting Scene, Vane’s fixation on Pan is palpable, yet it cannot be directly expressed.
The woman becomes what literary theorists call a “conduit” — a channel through which Vane’s devotion to Pan can flow without triggering social sanctions. By pursuing the woman Pan wants, by seeking Pan’s judgement about the woman, by watching Pan’s physical actions, Vane can remain in Pan’s orbit, can admire his body, can experience arousal in his presence — all while maintaining the fiction of heterosexual masculinity.
What’s particularly telling is the woman’s complete irrelevance in this triangle.
When there’s conflict around her, Vane doesn’t engage with her directly and solve the problem right then and there (because he could physically overpower her and exact his will on her relatively easily) — he goes to Pan, because Pan’s response is what actually matters.
During the “punishment” Vane doesn’t register her reactions, her pain, her pleasure, her humanity. His gaze is fixed entirely on Pan’s body, Pan’s actions, Pan’s dominance. She could be anyone, anything, because she’s merely the medium through which Vane experiences his desire for Pan.
This is misogyny’s particular cruelty: not just hatred, but erasure. The woman exists in the scene, yet she doesn’t exist as a subject with her own interiority. She’s a prop, a tool, a placeholder for male homosocial exchange.
There’s something tragic in Vane’s predicament too — he denies himself what he truly wants (emotional, physical, sexual, and psychological surrender to Pan) because the social costs are too high.
Toxic masculinity doesn’t just harm women; it also traps men in rigid performances of heterosexuality, cutting them off from authentic connection and desire. The woman pays the price of being used, but Vane pays the price of self-denial and alienation from his own wants.
This brings us to the question of representation and critique.
What does it mean when such scenes are written? Is the author critiquing this dynamic or celebrating it? Are we meant to find this arousing, or disturbing, or both?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was intended as a condemnation of grooming and predation, yet it’s been widely misread as a tragic love story, with Humbert Humbert’s manipulations taken at face value.
When critique and titillation occupy the same space, when misogyny is depicted in ways that could be read as erotic (and even romanticised), we risk perpetuating the very systems we claim to examine.
So maybe the most uncomfortable question then becomes: is this scene an example of “misogyny as titillation”? Can we eroticise power dynamics rooted in women’s objectification without reinforcing them?
Even with authorial intent to critique, once released into the world, a text becomes subject to reader interpretation. Some will read it as a searing indictment of toxic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality.
Others may simply find it hot, may identify with Vane’s worship of Pan, may not even register the woman’s erasure because her erasure is so normalised in our cultural imagination.
I don’t think the answer lies not in avoiding such depictions entirely, but in how we frame them — both in the text itself and in conversations where we can name what we’re seeing, can make the invisible structures visible, can refuse to let misogyny pass unremarked.
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