Alex Kazemi’s Y2K period novel reminds us that the manosphere is nothing new

Masculinity is hot right now. And not hot in the desirable sense, but in the public outcry – let‘s write one million thinkpieces about the impacts of pornography, video games, and TikTok on the psyche of young boys – sense.

With the rise of the ​“manosphere” and the ballooned profiles of its influencers, such as Jordan Peterson and self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, it can seem as if Gen Z and Gen Alpha boys are facing uniquely modern pressures that are leading them towards anti-feminist, anti-women ideals. Netflix’s UK smash hit Adolescence, which follows the aftermath of a schoolboy who murdered a girl after being deemed an incel, has likely been 2025’s biggest television moment, so much so that Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed the series being shown in schools to ​“help students better understand the impact of misogyny [and the] dangers of online radicalisation”.

And there is some truth to that. But Canadian author Alex Kazemi’s novel New Millenium Boyz, which was published in the UK for the first time last month, makes for an important revision in the collective memory. Set in 1999 in affluent, suburban America, it follows a group of teenage boys – Brad Sela, Lu and Shane – who set forth down a tragic spiral of cruelty and one-upmanship, in a disquieting reminder that toxicity in teenage boyhood is by no means a new phenomenon.

Their language is casually horrendous – enough to make seasoned queerphobes and xenophobes in the present wince – while their attitudes towards women are arguably worse. Set within the Columbine, MTV monoculture, fin-de-siècle context, though, even though it is shocking, there are relatable reminders of the culture of the time, which has been pushed deep into amygdalae as Y2K era culture undergoes a nostalgia-tinged renaissance. With Kazemi having dedicated his waking hours trawling old messageboards, libraries and internet archives, it’s historical fiction at its most guttural and unnerving. We caught up with him to find out more.

You were born in 1994, right? So you would have been six years old at the turn of the millennium. What made you want to explore the lives of boys a decade older than yourself?

First off, I was very fascinated by the [current] culture’s fixation on the Y2K era. It’s like the most referenced and ruminated time space, and it’s very glamourised. Like in the Charli xcx and Troye Sivan song ​‘1999’, [the lyrics are]: ​“I just wanna go back.” And then I was seeing the rise of Andrew Tate and this discussion around masculinity, and I was like: ​“Okay, let’s maybe look at the root source of what it was like when I was a child, how the world was, and how did that affect boys born in ​’94, ​’95.” I saw that I grew up in a hyper-accelerated version of this corrosive, poisonous kind of white masculinity, which is now romanticised and fetishised.

I was trying it as an exploration project, but it started when I was 18 during the Tumblr era, when I had a viral manuscript. It was a 10-year adventure, and when the pandemic happened, I was forced to go through all my notes and fragments. With the Red Scare blowing up and the apathy that we were seeing in the political discourse of people in the arts and fashion world, it was a perfect storm for the book to finally be released.

Have you heard of Adolescence? It was a massive thing here in the UK, so much so that the prime minister said that he supported it being shown in schools.

Yes, and I felt very vindicated when I saw it. It was exactly the torch I wanted to see to start these discourses and conversations. The 2000s were full of media dissecting the lives of teenage girls – 13, Mean Girls, etc. – but we never looked at how cruel and bitchy young men are.

The boys in your book egg each other on a lot, and do things they might not otherwise.

Because they are also children, right? Teenage boys are children and they’re learning how to manage their emotions and feelings, and I, from my own experience of being a teenage boy, remember watching my friends crumble and break down. I don’t know if there was abuse in the household, or just whether at points being 16, 17 was just so emotionally apocalyptic, but I remember being like: ​“Well, why is this not in movies we watch? Why do we not have a mirror of how we actually are?” So I felt like when I was writing the book I wanted, to make sure that we showed the moments of walking home from school, hearts to hearts – it’s kind of like reality TV but also stylised and satirical.

• Read next: Jordan Stephens: ​“I don’t like using the term ​‘Toxic Masculinity’ anymore”

Why do you think it has been underrepresented in popular culture and media? Do you think it’s because it’s so dark?

Yeah, and I think it’s also not what really sells to teenage boys. We’re sold a very heterosexual, chauvinistic hypermasculinity – it’s all kind of one note. And also when I was a teenager the discourse was shifting, there was this idea that things were getting better. It’s funny, when Gen Z read the book they are like: ​“Was it really this casually homophobic and racist?” And I’m like: ​“Go back and watch comedy from that era.” This was not even shocking, it was just par for the course and the language of the ecosystem. And that’s why I think of it as historical fiction, because I want people to be educated about it. It’s a warning of where we’re headed – younger kids on YouTube Shorts and 4Chan and Reddit, they want to be contrarian because they are young and rebellious, right? So if they see this fetishisation of old school masculinity, it’s only going to be more of a chaotic mess.

I think the bits that really made me feel uncomfortable were when I could remember things that happened around me. The casual homophobia and racism of course, but also things like questionable consent in sex scenes. Were you deliberately trying to make people feel on edge?

Of course, yeah. I think it was connected to films like Spring Breakers, 13, Bully and Kids. I’m paying homage to that sort of genre and the way that those filmmakers made me feel in their work. A lot of people tell me that after the book they want to take a shower, or drink hot chocolate and feel cozy. It disturbed me too, because being in this world for so long, I didn’t realise how unhappy I was working on it, because I was engaging with such dark content as an artistic project. I was exploring these themes and going through the Columbine [1999 High School shooting] documents and connecting to that energy. It’s not traumatic in itself, but it’s not a joyful thing to wake up to every morning.

• Read next: On a night out with the cast of Skins, Ewen Spencer captured millennial hedonism in all its unabated, messy glory

Did you see that there was a school shooting in Austria recently, with plans found to detonate a pipe bomb? It’s eerily similar to Columbine.

That’s the thing, you know? The media in the Y2K, monoculture era really gave the Columbine kids everything they wanted, with the media coverage, the scandals, everything. I think that was a big part of New Millennium Boyz for me, because I studied other Columbine-inspired media and noticed that they left out how the boys were constantly self-obsessing and self-mythologising over fame and power. In the tapes, they’re like: ​“Who’s going to make the movie? Steven Spielberg or Tarantino?” And you never see that. They’re always seen as disaffected, disenfranchised and bullied, but you never see the more Machiavellian, almost-influencer mindset. I’m not connecting serial killers to Addison Rae or something, but that narcissism that is so synonymous with our era is related to them as well.

As information becomes so much faster, and stories in the news cycle last about one second on social media instead of being on TV for a whole week, why do you think school shootings have continued to become more frequent?

I think it’s the romanticisation and glamourisation that young, depressed teenagers have. When you have alienation and rage and you’re mentally ill, these people are magnetised to things like this and they fetishise it and obsess over it. The new generation have even more archetypes than those before, like Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza and James Holmes. It’s really scary to think about that, and also the numbness – our generation came into this post-everything world where there is this numbness, so boys are trying to chase emotion and how to feel outside of seeing Scream and watching Drew Barrymore’s guts hanging out.

It’s interesting that you talk about alienation, because when I think back to my teenage years, I remember the voice inside of my head and how it was much louder than the voices outside. Yet your book is almost entirely written in conversations – what was the thinking?

I made Brad’s internal monologue quite small because I wanted people to feel like they were watching a film. So it was mentioning a setting, and having the boys talk and hang out. Then Brad’s internal monologue starts to come out through how he talks to a video camera, or in more intense scenes when they kill the rat and that type of stuff. There was actually a lot of drama with my publisher because they weren’t sure if they wanted to publish something with this kind of prose. The literary community is all about voice, right? But I just wanted to trust that instinct, It was almost like making fast cuts in reality TV, sort of like early MTV.

On the MTV theme, I don’t suppose you remember how about eight or nine years ago, a load of internet commentators announced that subcultures were dead? There was this idea that the internet was feeding everyone the same content and music and we were moving to this kind of mass internet culture. But I thought it was interesting that the boys had those same tensions with being fed MTV monoculture, but still rejected certain parts of it.

Yeah, it’s directly correlated to my own thoughts of how I was going to paint Gen X, millennial-cusp characters, in that so much of their identity is built on subcultures. But like Lu is obsessed with Marilyn Manson, but doesn’t see how Marilyn Mason is a part of the consumerist mass pop culture, but thinks it’s anti-culture because that’s what he’s being sold. And that directly correlated to my feelings about Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy when I thought I was a really cool emo kid, and that I was different to the kids who shopped at Hollister or were reps at Abercrombie & Fitch.

When things were a bit more fragmented, everyone kind of had their space, but what’s so strange about this era and moment in culture is editors and magazines used to put their finger on the pulse of culture, but there’s not really a pulse to put a finger on anymore, because there are so many different fragments of everything. Like you could walk down the street and be like: ​“Hey, do you know what Brat Summer is?” And someone would be like: ​“What the fuck are you talking about?” But in 1999, if you’re like: ​“Do you know who KoЯn is? Do you know who Britney Spears is?” Absolutely, because it’s being sent on one centralised feed. Now we’re all in these little algorithmic craters and digital ecosystems that are like prisons, but the boys’ ecosystems were centralised MTV corporate culture. And if they did know underground things, they probably had to figure it out for themselves and seek it out.

• Read next: ​‘Did it ever go away?’ – Emos at 2000trees on the subculture’s revival

How much do you think the romanticisation of the Y2K era is to do with teenagers wanting to be teenagers again? There’s a theory that teenagers in recent decades, grow up faster and have to be adults earlier.

Lauren Greenfield talked about this in the late ​’90s in her photobook Fast Forward, and I think that this has only sped up. It’s so tragic, like they learn to make pornography of their bodies as children from [things like] Snapchat. But my boys in my book are growing up fast because of the MTV culture – for people our age maybe we would turn on the TV and see The Simple Life or the MTV VMAs, and we internalise sexual imagery on music videos and TV. But that seems so harmless compared to what children are seeing these days.

And I think people consider that time period – 1999, 2000 up until ​’06, ​’07 – as the time of the last real teenagers. They could have a real teenage life that wasn’t so online. And I think it’s interesting because we could all mass delete social accounts, get non-smartphones and have this mass rebellion, but no one wants to go through the efforts of living a life of digital minimalism because we have normalised brain rot and normalised social media addiction.

New Millennium Boyz by Alex Kazemi is published by Permuted Press.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s dig­i­tal edi­tor. Fol­low him on Bluesky.

Buy your copy of Huck 81 here.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Insta­gram and sign up to our newslet­ter for more from the cut­ting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.