In late July, New York magazine’s Cut published Ezra Marcus’s “Revenge of the Simps,” the story of Nikita Tyukalo, a twenty-one-year-old Andrew Tate acolyte who built a webcam sex-trafficking operation out of luxury rentals in the Seattle suburbs. Astonishingly, Tyukalo was taken down by a community of self-described “simps,” obsessive online fans of the young women he exploited who noticed something was amiss while watching hour after hour of their streams.

Tyukalo modeled his enterprise directly on Tate’s “Pimping Hoes Degree” course, which teaches men how to groom women into online sex work and confiscate their earnings. The men who worshipped his models from the other side of the screen, meanwhile, formed an amateur investigative unit called the White Knights, compiled evidence of abuse, and fed it to police until a SWAT team came through Tyukalo’s door in June.

Jacobin editor Meagan Day spoke with Evelina Johansson Wilén, a regular Jacobin contributor and socialist feminist scholar from Sweden, about the article and the real-life events it depicts. In addition to writing on dating, romance, fertility, family, childcare, and women’s labor, Wilén has conducted research on incel communities and the sugar-dating industry. Day, meanwhile, has contributed articles about the Donald Trump–era gender wars, the manosphere, and offshoots like looksmaxxing.