Why the angry misogynistic 'incel' in my Fringe play is a sympathetic character – Caitlin McEwan

Two Little Pigs centres on Mark, who is left confused, angry and desperate for something to control after his girlfriend abruptly dumps him. He buys a pet pig, which comes with an incubator that allows him to harvest the animal’s cells for meat (a gym-obsessed vegetarian, he’s always looking for guilt-free ways to hit his protein target).

He’s expecting a docile, subservient hog; what arrives is a brash, opinionated nightmare. Fluent in English after eavesdropping on the feminist farmhands who raised her, she has an insatiable curiosity about the human world. It’s an odd-couple comedy about one man and his pig trying to communicate across the human-animal divide, and finding that, ultimately, some things don’t translate.

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My problem with the ‘manosphere’

I’m expecting some people who watch the play to say it’s about the manosphere. While I understand that interpretation – and as a reclusive, fitness-fanatic misogynist, Mark’s not exactly beating any accusations – the term makes me bristle. Popularised by figures like Andrew and Tristan Tate, the manosphere is a collection of forums, podcasts and influencers promoting ultra-masculine, anti-feminist beliefs.

But the term has become so ubiquitous, deployed on all corners of the internet to mean anything from ‘dangerous extremist’ to ‘not very nice bloke’, that it feels meaningless. It’s an illusion, existing entirely in the trick mirror of our phones.

Andrew Tate utilises the metaphor of the ‘red pill’ from The Matrix to describe men who have seen the light: the reason they have no money or power is because women are repressing them, but if they turn the tables, they can have whatever they want. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but ultimately, it’s another trick.

The initial idea for Two Little Pigs came from an article about lab-grown meat, which argued that having a pet which was also a food source had the potential to “change the moral imagination” and “reorient human-animal relationships”. I started thinking about what kind of character would want or need an animal with that duality, and came up with Mark. Finally came the idea of the Pig as a feminist-animal hybrid, who could get through to her owner in a way that the women in his life couldn’t.

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A victim, not a monster

It was important for me that Mark wasn’t a monster. The audience has to root for him for the play to work, and I also don’t think it’s helpful to view men like him as avatars for figures like the Tate brothers.

If anything, he is, excuse the pun, a mark; seemingly innocuous fitness and self-improvement content is his gateway to more extreme beliefs. Women know all about the dangers of self-improvement: popular culture has been trying to give us all body dysmorphia for decades, and I’m inundated with targeted ads for plastic surgery on social media.

My friends and I have fallen for it: our group chats are full of discussions about retinols and skin boosters in our endless pursuit to look younger. I’m not saying botox is more dangerous than misogyny, but I do think we’re all fallible and could afford to have more empathy for men like Mark.

Writing the play, I couldn’t excuse his behaviour, but I could relate to his predicament. He isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool extremist but rather a lonely, angry man who is disappointed with his lot, and dogged by the feeling that everyone is out to get him. I could empathise: there’s a lot to be angry about right now, and we’ve all dabbled with a victim complex from time to time.

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Myths about masculinity

The play is about masculinity, but also the dangers of the kind of binary thinking Andrew Tate’s rhetoric relies on: men are superior, women are inferior. Mark tries to wrap his head around the duality of the Pig as pet and food, but his belief system requires him to keep things simple and separated.

Through his conversations with the Pig, he begins to untangle the myths he’s held close about his masculinity. Because of her removal from, and curiosity about, humanity, she is able to engage with him rather than dismiss him as a red-pilled incel – and she does it with an absurd humour that is hopefully an alternative to the recent brilliant but sobering on-screen depictions of similar stories.

Theatre is a place where imagination meets debate: if you can suspend your disbelief enough to pretend a woman in a costume is a literal pig, you might also be able to empathise with, or at least understand, the kind of man Mark is, the one you’d typically avoid in the pub or on a dating app.

The play is unlikely to change your mind in 60 minutes, but it will hopefully encourage you to flip the issue around and examine it from a different angle. I suppose it’s a bit of a trick, but hopefully the kind that makes you clap at the end.

Caitlin McEwan is the writer of and actor in the play Two Little Pigs, which will be performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next month