Fall of a Queen Bee

Our species’ taste for human sacrifice has entered the digital arena. Are we not entertained?

“Men who are truly generous are always ready to compassionate when the misfortune of their enemy surpasses the limits of their hatred.”
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo. 1844 -1846

This sentiment looms large as we observe the current trials of Blake Lively, allowing us the opportunity to watch the mechanics of human blood sport and female intrasexual competition in real-time.

While it’s true that we learn a lot about human nature from spontaneous real-world events, it’s also clear that such a study design as this would never pass a modern academic ethics board. Of course, neither would any episode of Punk’d or Noel Edmunds’ Late, Late Breakfast Show.

As we saw with the social media mobbing and suicide of Love Island UK presenter Caroline Flack in 2020, the mortal risks of online bullying and cancel culture are high. More tragic is the fact that Flack died just before Covid and lockdowns hit. Had she waited just two-weeks, the public humiliation of her trial would likely have been itself cancelled, and her personal scandal subsumed and forgotten under the news cycle of the global pandemic.

But ethics in the service of public amusement has a tenuous reach. Online mobs are the black ops of civilisation. Our species’ taste for human sacrifice has entered the digital arena. Are we not entertained?

Though Lively is accused of being a bully herself, so are more of us than are willing or honest to admit, and because of this foible of human nature, the pile-on is in danger of becoming a murderball.

A murderball is not a deadly soirée in Game of Thrones, it is a fatal female swarming manoeuvre in bees. When a wasp attacks a beehive, the hive smothers it at the centre of a suffocating ball. Similarly, when a hive decides to reject their queen, her daughters kill her in the same way.

We see a similar strategy in cancel culture and online mobbing—events that have become sporting fixtures on social media. While they are not as precisely scheduled as the footie, they are guaranteed and not constrained to a season. The games welcome all comers and the team with the most anons & ‘bots firing relentless salvos across time zones wins. Cancel culture is a fabian strategy: a war of attrition where direct conflict is avoided in favour of exhausting an opponent.

Elon Musk's purchase of X and his decision to remove the muzzle from free speech—allowing people to express biological truths without fear of deletion—plucked the sting from the tail of organized political mob attacks for a while. But the mobs and the inclinations are still there.

Species of matriarchal Hymenoptera: bees, wasps, and ants are often represented as epitomes of female cooperation. The early 20th-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman loosely modelled the eusocial matriarchal utopia she created in her book Herland on such dynamics. In the book, men suddenly and inexplicably disappear—happily only after building the infrastructure of a large, advanced civilisation.

Then just as abruptly, an elite caste of women develop the capacity to reproduce through thelytokous parthenogenesis, where female queens produce female embryos from an unfertilized egg.¹ These infertile offspring are born into fixed hierarchical castes, such as workers and soldiers. Female choice, one of the most powerful mechanisms of Darwinian evolution, is eradicated. Yet for many feminists, this is the model of a feminist utopia. It’s not a coincidence that all feminisms scorn the idea of female choice and “choice feminism” which emphasises a woman's right to self autonomy.

But as the murder ball attests, even in actual eusocial insect species, deadly female intrasexual competition still occurs. The fated all-female utopia is actually a dystopia. Today, via social media, we have the opportunity to study this on a large scale for the first time in human history.

“There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women:"
Madeleine Albright. Keynote speech at Celebrating Inspiration luncheon. 2006

In our evolutionary history—and remembering we are adapted to the past not the present—being ostracised from the group was likely a death sentence for women. It’s not pleasant for anyone, but this selection pressure has left women with an especially deep and adaptive terror of social ostracism. Blake Lively, like Amber Heard before her, today finds herself under the intense scrutiny—mostly by other women—for her hubris and ambition.

Timeline of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s It Ends With Us Drama

Lively started her mainstream career as an actress in the 2007 TV series Gossip Girl and then transitioning to movies. She married Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds in 2012 and they became a Hollywood power couple.

On January 2023: Lively joined It Ends With Us as the lead actress, playing Lily Bloom. Baldoni, was already entrenched as the project’s key figure having bought the rights to the book in 2019 via his company Wayfarer Studios, taking the role of exec. producer and male lead. He welcomes Lively to the cast. Later, Lively also asserts herself in a co-producer role, setting the stage for creative tensions with Baldoni during filming and postproduction.

The film’s promotional campaign began in August 2024 ahead of its August 9 release, and seemingly out of nowhere Lively began to face mounting bad press with critics accusing her of trivializing the movie’s domestic violence theme by focusing on aesthetics rather than its serious issues. Rumours of on-set conflict with Baldoni surfaced, alongside a 2016 interview showing her curtly dismissing and humiliating a female reporter, Kjersti Flaa, in a press junket.

At the film’s August 9 premiere Baldoni and his family are relegated to a lower-profile area, while Lively’s edit of the movie—allegedly unseen by Baldoni—screened in the main theatre. The clash over artistic control then became public. On December 4, The Hollywood Reporter names Lively on its Women in Entertainment Power 100 list, recognizing her as an “actress and producer.” She’s quoted saying, “Women are quite literally kicking ass in male genres,” with It Ends With Us cited as her first producer credit. December 20, Lively then files a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department against Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, against Baldoni detailing sexual harassment, misconduct, and a retaliatory smear campaign that fuelled the summer’s bad press.

In response, Baldoni filed a $400 million lawsuit in January 2025 against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and their publicists, alleging defamation and extortion. He is also suing The New York Times, claiming it colluded with Lively’s team to damage his reputation.

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Flaa has a YouTube channel currently focused on documenting Lively’s bad behaviour. I can’t blame Flaa for this reaction as she was the person at the receiving end of Lively’s snark. Having a personal gripe with someone who has personally hurt you is understandable. The pile-on less so. It’s also okay for people to receive criticism for bad behaviour, but I’m more interested in the vicarious schadenfreude that hundreds and thousands of others have bought tickets for.

Dumas’ sentiment at the top of this essay does not apply in contemporary murderballs or female intrasexual competition. Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, for example, have no obvious skin in the game but are jumping on the bandwagon with glee. Owen’s target isn’t Lively however, it’s her husband, Ryan Reynolds. As Owen’s said in the video linked above, “It’s going to be fab!” Entertainment value, not justice, is all.

I never watched the Depp/Heard car crash. I study bullying and female intrasexual competition because, as a female with Asperger’s Syndrome, I’ve experienced a lot of bullying by other females and grew up in a house the full of women (myself being the youngest) inundated with vertiginous selection pressures—paternal death, domestic violence, abuse, neglect—which contrary to the movie being discussed, didn’t have a happy ending. But I’m more on a par with Dumas’ sentiment. Just because I’ve suffered, doesn’t mean I take pleasure in seeing others suffer beyond the needs of justice being met. I’m a rare bird, I guess.

Many years ago, pre-Quillette, when the centre right was aligned in 2014, I wrote a popular critique of Anita Sarkeesian who was leading the first mainstream charge of institutional cancel culture and woke ideology against gamers (a battle which came to be known as #GamerGate): I also posted a defence of her against mob culture on social media to which the journalist Cathy Young responded, aghast, “Why are you defending her?!” The old rule of playing the ball and not the wo/man was being slowly erased, even then. Today, it’s completely gone.

The Lively/Baldoni case is ongoing, with trials scheduled for March 2026. Both sides have rejected mediation. The situation continues to draw significant attention, blending Hollywood drama with legal intrigue. Except these are not fictional characters, they are real people. As

Adam B. Coleman

has recently noted, people have a hard time distinguishing between the two these days. The institutional facilitation of Trump derangement syndrome by people who who claim to be humanists (Sam Harris), philosophers (Daniel Dennett), psychologists (Jon Haidt), and intellectuals (Steven Pinker) has helped let loose the dogs of the culture war. Now, is there anyone who can put them to heel? I see a direct parallel here to the rise of pro-Hamas antisemitism after October 7th and growing intolerance on the right.

As I have asserted many times before, cancel culture is manifest female intrasexual competition and as the evolutionary psychological research attests, unlike the humanity expressed in Dumas’ quote, it doesn’t cease until the target has been eliminated.

It’s not something I can take pleasure in.

Notes on this essay:

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For more on the failures of our intellectual class, see

1. Other forms of parthenogenesis are arrhenotoky, where unfertilized, haploid eggs develop into males and fertilized, diploid eggs develop into females and deuterotoky where, both males and females develop from unfertilized eggs. Females in Hymenoptera species are all related, in fact, sisters are more related to one another than mother and daughter due to a genetic system called haplodiploidy.