Voy Polloi: Mankind and Morality in These Darkening Days

Dr William Pierce was a stale pale male who lived in West Virginia. Monika Kim is a vibrant Korean-American who lives in Los Angeles. What do they have in common? Very little, of course. Nevertheless, I thought of Pierce when I was reading Kim’s second novel. It was the title of the novel that caught my eye: Molka. And the eyes eyeing the title — they caught my eye too. Here’s what I’m talking about, the front cover of Molka:

The eye-catching cover of Monika Kim’s Molka (2026)

What does Molka mean? I had no idea, so I picked up the book and found out on the back cover: “molka (n): the Korean term for spy cameras secretly and illegally installed, often to capture voyeuristic images and videos.” Yes, I’d read about those scandals in Korea. And here was a novel based on them. A horror novel set in Seoul. Well, that sounded interesting, so I got a copy of the book and began reading. But while I was reading, I was reminded of Dr William Pierce, the neo-Nazi mystic who headed the hate-group National Alliance until his death in 2002. More specifically, I was reminded of something Pierce once said about cruelty. He said that a man’s true character is revealed in the way he treats those weaker than himself.

High tech and low deeds

That’s “weaker” in the full sense: unable to defend oneself or call on defenders. Pierce was talking about cruelty to animals, but his point has much wider relevance and resonance. How do we behave when we think there would be no consequences for bad behavior? That’s a true test of character. The molka scandals in Korea have answered the question on behalf of large numbers of sometimes very ordinary men. Their true character is bad, because advanced technology has allowed them to invade women’s privacy without fear of retribution. Some of those men were wrong not to fear, because they’ve been caught and jailed. Not enough men and not for long enough — that’s what Molka says. But being caught doesn’t alter the psychology of the voyeurs: they thought they wouldn’t get caught, so they chose to behave badly. That’s certainly the reasoning of a male character called Junyoung in Kim’s novel (inter alia, Junyoung means “Handsome Excellent One” in Korean). He installs spy-cameras in the women’s toilets at the company he works for, so that he has on-demand private porn at the desk where he supposedly devotes all of his time to computer security.

Men have really behaved like that in Korea. And in lots of other countries. I wrote about one example from Britain in my article “A Clown Called Chleo,” where I described how I had been puzzled in 2025 by a headline that read: “Woman jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi.” Woman? I thought. But women don’t do that sort of thing to men. My instinct was right: it wasn’t a woman, it was a male pervert called John Leslie Graham who claimed to be a “transwoman” called Chleo Sunter. OK, maybe there are real women who have installed spy-cameras and gotten depraved thrills by watching unaware men use the toilet. But there can’t be many.

This kind of voyeurism is what feminists call a “gendered crime.” It’s overwhelmingly carried out by men and overwhelmingly directed at women.[1] Hoi polloi, “the many,” is a Greek term for the great mass of ordinary men and women.[2] But “Voy Polloi,” the great mass of voyeurs created by modern tech and the internet, are overwhelmingly men, not women. That “gendered criminality” is the basis of Monika Kim’s novel Molka, which describes how an ordinary Korean woman called Dahye (“Many Graces” or “Much Intelligence”) strikes back at the patriarchy after being the victim of video’d voyeurism, first by the toilet-camera installer at her place of work, then by her rich and manipulative boyfriend Hyookjun (“Radiant Handsome One”).

“Castrate cruel males”

Molka was described as “wildly original” by the New York Times, but that isn’t a good description. Contra the myths of Clown-World about White racism and White male sexism, Monika Kim enjoys non-White privilege and female privilege, so she’s been praised beyond her merits and has been successful beyond her due. “Wildly original”? Nope. I’m not an expert in or an aficionado of female-revenge fiction and films, but I can describe Molka as like a cross between a book from 1991 and a film from 2000. Molka has the “all men are bastards” and “castrate cruel males” of Helen Zahavi’s novel Dirty Weekend from 1991 and the “vengeful ghost of unjustly killed woman” of Robert Zemeckis’s film What Lies Beneath from 2000. And although I finished Molka easily enough, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

I kept asking myself what I increasingly ask myself nowadays: How much of this was written by AI? Then again, maybe AI would have done a better job. The prose was bland and uninspired, conjuring little before the mind’s eye and conveying no strong sense of place or character. And there was a big wodge of woke in the mix. Although Molka is set entirely in Korea, the first cruel male defeated by the Korean heroine Dahye is a White American called Bobby. He tries to force fellatio on her in a Seoul nightclub and doesn’t reckon on the sudden appearance of a vengeful female ghost, that of Dahye’s dead sister Eunhye (“Kind Blessing”). A cruel Korean male had made Eunhye pregnant and she’d committed suicide by jumping in the Han river that runs through Seoul.

Not monsters, just men

Her watery death means that the imminent appearance of her ghost is announced by dripping taps and leaking ceilings. Has that been used in a horror-film before? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been used in lots of films and is even a cliché. It’s certainly something designed for the camera and microphone: a close-up of a suddenly and mysteriously dripping bathroom tap as a ghost prepares to manifest to presently oblivious living characters. Or a sudden drip-drip-drip in the darkness of a bedroom where an oblivious living character slumbers. Like so much fiction since the rise of cinema and TV, Molka was written with a cinematic or televisual sensibility. It’s about screens and was shaped by screens. But if the novel isn’t a good read, it is an interesting one. Modern technology has given the human race much more opportunity and flexibility to do bad things. And lots of humans have seized that extra opportunity.

More precisely, lots of men have done so. And not just as individuals. Modern technology allows bad men to find each other and collaborate in ways that were once impossible. And when I say “bad men” I don’t mean monsters like Jeffrey Epstein. No, I mean perfectly ordinary men whose true character was revealed by what they thought was the opportunity to do bad things without consequences. Molka reminded me indirectly of William Pierce. It also reminded me directly of Gisèle Pelicot. She’s the French woman whose husband Dominique drugged her and pimped her out to male strangers for nearly a decade of nocturnal rape and voyeurism. In Molka, Dahye is drugged and pimped out by her bastard-of-a-boyfriend, which is another reason for her to chop off his penis at the end of the book.

“An international network of rapists”

But condign castration is feminist fantasy. The real victim of cruel drug-rape, Gisèle Pelicot, didn’t want to behave like that. Instead, she behaved with dignity and courage after being stripped of dignity by the man she thought she could trust. That was part of what made her story so uncomfortable for me as a male. I didn’t like to think that perfectly ordinary men could behave like that. Even less did I like to think that perfectly ordinary White men could behave like that. I was both disturbed and fascinated by what had been done to Gisèle Pelicot. So I followed the court-case, trying to understand what had gone on and wondering whether I should write about it for the Occidental Observer. But there was no apparent racial or religious angle, no way to contrast the bad behavior of White men with the worse behavior of non-White men or Muslim. The same is true of similar cases now receiving attention across the world: see articles like “‘Truly international’ network of drug-facilitated rape uncovered by UK crime agency,” which describes how “offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships.”

That’s an article at the Guardian, because it’s the left that are most heavily covering and condemning these crimes. After all, they support the leftist world-view, don’t they? Men are evil, women are innocent. Well, I think these cases expose the contradiction in the left’s world-view, the double-think I’ve summed up in the phrase “Preach Equality, Practise Hierarchy.” The crimes themselves are masculine in a way that can’t be denied by any honest observer, but the leftist response to them is moralized in a way that can’t be justified by a core leftist principle. How so? Well, think of how a core leftist principle explodes the left’s moralism about the White “enslavement” of Blacks. If human beings are indeed all “The Same Under the Skin,” there’s no way to justify a hierarchy where one group, such as women or Blacks, is morally superior to another group, such as men or Whites. If egalitarianism is true, good behavior and bad behavior are contingent on circumstances outside any individual’s control. As I said in “Destroy the Goy,” the leftist principle of human equality entails omnia ex alea — that “all things come from the dice,” from the unchosen and undesigned contingencies of geography, environment and history, which are effectively random from the ethical point of view.

Disgust or temptation?

By leftist principles, we can’t pass judgment or erect a moral hierarchy because Whites enslaved Blacks and because men are preying on and perving over women. It would be like saying that someone who rolls 10 with three dice is morally superior to someone who rolls 5 with one dice. If history had been different, Blacks would have enslaved Whites (Blacks have no problem enslaving other Blacks in Africa) and it would be women preying on and perving over men. As it is, even in our present time-line leftist principles entail that vice or virtue can’t belong wholly to one side or another. If we’re all the same under the skin, our propensity to bad behavior is the same, whether or not we express it to the same extent. As groups, Blacks can behave badly towards Whites and women can behave badly towards men. And will indeed be doing so, if we look. But leftists don’t look. And don’t report on the findings of those who do look: “Studies finding anti-female bias are shouted from the rooftops [while] those finding no bias or bias against men are reported in a whisper or simply ignored.”[3] That’s something I didn’t expect to see in the New Statesman, that other citadel of British leftism where the disgusting crimes committed against Gisèle Pelicot have been extensively covered.

And I do find those crimes disgusting. But what if she had been younger, more attractive, and her husband had been offering her not to a group of men but just to me? Even as it is, I have to think “There but for the grace of God go I” about Dominique Pelicot. If I imagine a younger and more attractive Gisèle Pelicot, disgust starts to dwindle and temptation starts to rise. In my defence, I can say that I consciously chose not to look at the “topless” photos of Kate Windsor, the Princess of Wales, during the furore about paparazzi intrusion in 2012. I thought: “She wouldn’t want me to look, so I won’t.” But it was easy to think like that, because I’ve never found Kate Williams attractive and never wanted to see her naked. Would I have resisted the temptation to perve if I did find her attractive?

“First endure, then pity, then embrace”

I hope so, but I don’t know so. I would certainly have resisted if I’d known I’d have to face consequences for perving. But consequence-free perving is what modern tech and the internet have offered in abundance for decades. Or so millions of men have thought. Most of them have been right, because most tech-aided voyeurs and most consumers of illegal porn aren’t in prison. They couldn’t be: there wouldn’t be room. The bad character of millions of men has been revealed by modern porn in a way that was once impossible. That’s because modern porn is much easier to find and much more stimulating to view than the older kind. I’m glad that I grew up before the internet and gladder that I had little exposure to porn as a teenager. I wasn’t glad at the time, mind you. I wanted to see naked women. If I’d grown up in the internet age, I would have seen women not just naked but doing nasty things that I would’ve regretted seeing. But maybe I wouldn’t have regretted seeing them for long. Using porn is like taking drugs: you don’t know what you’re doing to yourself until after you’ve done it. As the poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) so wisely, and unsettlingly, wrote:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. (Essay on Man, 1733)

Like the depraved baby-rapist Jamie Varley, the depraved wife-pimper Dominique Pelicot was probably conditioned to depravity gradually by using porn. It’s improbable that either man started with the worst first. The worst porn would probably have repelled them at the beginning. In the end, they were embracing the worst and acting on it. That’s why Dominique Pelicot is world-infamous and Jamie Varley should be world-infamous. It’s easy to explain why he isn’t: he committed a worse crime than Dominique Pelicot, but his crime wasn’t suitable for leftist propaganda. Leftists are very happy to talk about straight men drugging, raping and pimping their wives or girlfriends. Leftists are not happy to talk about homosexual men raping babies to death.

So they don’t talk about it and they ignore the probability that baby-rape is more common, maybe much more common, among gay men than among straight men. If it is, I don’t think that makes straight men morally superior to gay men. Instead, it makes them differently depraved. And I don’t think women are morally superior to men because it’s men who are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual violence and women who are overwhelmingly the victims of it. Monika Kim and her novel Molka do assume moral superiority for women, but can’t justify it by their own leftist principles.

The wingless and the stingless

As a man, I don’t like to see men behave so badly with spy-cameras or collaborate so disgustingly in sex-crimes. But stats are stats. And these stats don’t lie. For obvious biological reasons, men are much more likely to become perverted and to practise perversions. But men don’t choose their biology any more than moths do. In some species of moth, the males are winged and the females are wingless. Is that pernicious patriarchy at work, literally denying females the freedom to fly?

Pernicious patriarchal aptery? The winged male and (almost) wingless female of the Winter Moth, Operophtera_brumata (Wikipedia)

No, it’s not patriarchy. The female moths are wingless for the same reason as male bees are stingless. The biggest hate criminal of all has been at work. It’s that giant racist, sexist and homophobe called Mother Nature. And she’s still at work in the tech-nourished and tech-aided human depravities of the twenty-first century. Biology doesn’t allow us to excuse men’s crimes and perversions, but it does allow us to understand them better and to see through the left’s attempts to exploit them not for the benefit of women but for the benefit of leftism. The Christian doctrine of original sin is also an antidote to leftism. The doctrine states that we all inhabit a Fallen World and all inherit the moral fallibility of Adam and Eve. We all sin, because we’re all the children of sinful Adam and Eve.

I think that’s a metaphorical truth, not a literal one, but it’s a metaphor that’s soon going to become inescapable. Israel’s war on Iran is not going to end well. If it crashes the world’s economy and leads to mass starvation, depravity will become everyday reality. If we escape the worst, we’re still going to see seismoclasms and surges in sin. My advice to myself and others remains the same: Seek Sophia, not stimulation. Sophia is the divine personification of wisdom; “stimulation” is the mind-numbing and morality-sapping in all its forms, from drugs to porn to television. William Pierce sought Sophia, not stimulation. He would be a good man to follow in these darkening days.

[1]  It is possible that homosexual voyeurs are using spy-cameras much more than we’re aware of, but there seems much less incentive for homosexuals to behave like that. Sex is much more easily available to homosexual men than to heterosexual men, including in toilets. Plus, invading men’s privacy is, for men, less of a transgressive thrill than invading women’s privacy.

[2]  “Hoi polloi” was one of my earliest introductions to how much literacy has frozen English pronunciation. I first encountered it spoken as “hoy floy” by someone who wasn’t very educated and had presumably never encountered it in print. That kind of phonetic change is natural enough for a foreign term (p- in English is aspirated and can easily be misheard as f-). It would have altered English a lot more without literacy.

[3]  That claim is made in the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams’ A Billion Years of Sex Differences, a book about biological sex reviewed by a “gender-critical” feminist. The review is entitled “Ignoring sex differences harms us all.”