Although Charlie Brooker is commonly considered a ‘TV critic’, in reality he is a keenly observant analyst of the interplay of social forces. Here he is in magisterial form, in today’s Guardian:

Is there a single worse force in the universe than swaggering, cocksure, stupid young men? Because I’m struggling to think of one.

You see them everywhere: lurching around in messy haircuts and idiot trousers, thinking about cars, or babes, or babes in cars, laughing too loudly and blaring things like “classic!” or “quality!” or “genius!” or “mental!” and every one of them, without exception, is a cee to the yoo to the enn to the tee of towering, awful proportions.

And the thing is, the real ones aren’t even real, so to speak. The archetypal swaggering, cocksure young man is an insulting media construct, designed to star in beer commercials. Some 90% of their real-life equivalents are merely emulating these idealised buffoons in the tragic belief that this is what the world requires of them […] The remaining 10% are authentic wankers who’d do that anyway, of course - but there are probably some decent people lost among the ill-advised majority: trapped inside their shallow, posturing cocoons, yearning to break out but too scared to try. We should pity them. And when that fails, attack them with hammers.