The day after the day after and it doesn’t get any easier. The blast, the momentary terrible silence and then the screams of the wounded. All of us are now screaming into that silence because we can imagine it only too well. And what we cannot imagine parts of the media will show us, even if we don’t want to see. Small bodies ripped apart. The smiles of young girls, now dead. The superfan messages. The beautiful young gay man. Excited selfies of pure youth. All the love flows towards these people, to their families, to the emergency services and to the city enduring this tragedy.

We shall overcome and we shall overcome by carrying on as normal, by our small acts of humanity. This is one reaction. Yet the presence of soldiers on our streets is not carrying on as normal.

For there is anger now and the message of love as resistance is not enough for many. From those who troll for a living, from Piers Morgan to Katie Hopkins, there emerges yet more hate figures and this hate spirals. Exactly the aim of terror. Morrissey, who has made the strange journey from icon to embarrassment, from Manchester to LA, once more reveals he is closer to Nigel Farage then Oscar Wilde. Immigration is at the root of this horror, he suggests, though he is the son of immigrants himself.

Does it matter what a fallen idol says? Not so much, but it certainly chimes with the view that good Muslims should drive out the bad Muslims. With Trump attempting to sword dance in Saudi Arabia while he sells the country arms, it’s quite hard to know who qualifies as “bad Muslims” sometimes, isn’t it?

What we do know for sure is that this attack reverses the recent trend for low-tech terrorism because a suicide belt is a more sophisticated way of killing than a stolen truck. However, the targeting of women and gay people is not new. We saw it in a plot foiled 15 years ago, which targeted the Ministry of Sound nightclub. The aim was to kill “slags”. And last year we saw the terrible shooting in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando.

When I first heard the awful news about Manchester, of course I thought it had been carried out by some disturbed man. Male violence is a given. This is not to say that all men are terrorists, but if we cannot identify the connection between these acts of violence and the construction of a kind of masculinity that so-called “radicalisation” offers uncertain young men then we cannot combat it. It seems that we can look at foreign policy in all its complexity as providing fertile territory for jihadi recruitment, from the shattering of Libya to what’s happening in Yemen. But it’s not enough. We can pore over sacred texts to be told that jihad is not legitimate, but that’s not right either. Indeed, this is to act as if all these murderers are inspired by religion and a complex understanding of global politics. We know this not to be true.

Often, however, the attackers are converts to Islam or have only recently become devout. They do things that good Muslims must not do, from smoking dope to visiting sex workers. Often their families have been broken in some way. There may be a history of petty crime. Domestic violence figures strongly in the background of some of the perpetrators.

These men are not all lone operators. In fact radicalisation is social whether online or face to face. It is perhaps their only real connection.

They share a hatred of women and gay people as less than human, as completely “other”. The desires that they provoke means they must be destroyed. Deep-seated misogyny is not exclusive to the idiots of Isis. Think of the American high-school shooters who often express these feelings.

Often when men kill women there have been signs and they have talked to other men about it. The police know this. We see this pattern over and over again: alienated young men withdrawing, unable to deal with their own inadequacies, drawn into gangs that provide meaning and purpose. Am I comparing Isis to a criminal gang? Absolutely. One that we know preaches extreme misogyny.

The plea to then answer this with love becomes hard to take. Resistance to this terror also has to take the form of resistance to misogyny of all kinds, to fight for the rights of women and gay people the world over. This can’t only be done by choosing love, it is part of a longer struggle where there never is a return to normality. Sure, in the short term, it would be better to have an election without the army on the streets.

But there is a parallel politics of living in which we fight for the very things these murderers cannot stand by being them: girls having fun while their dads wait for them. Young women taking full possession of themselves. Gay people high on life. Mothers watching their daughters go wild. Our ability to do this now is because others have fought for these “freedoms”. So now we continue, all while grieving and full of anger. And as we have in the past, we keep on dancing.