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Notes -
"Adolescence"
As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.
Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.
Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.
I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.
I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.
My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.
Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.
(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)
P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)
The political and educational establishment and those who share their views fail to adequeately diagnose the problem. This is primarily because they can't understand the experience of being young men and have zero interest in doing so. Indeed, every "men are doing badly" talking point is always discussed from perspective of its negative second order effects, mostly in relation to women. Starmer's gushing over this is indicative of naive confidence. He thinks the essence of the problem has finally been captured, and so do all the left of center opinion pieces on this show that were written shortly after its release. Frankly, it all feels a bit coreographed...
I have written about this before, once three years ago and once last year and I haven't seen anything to suggest that they've learned a single thing since then. There is nothing new to write about under the sun. I want to volunteer myself as a consultant to the government on the manosphere and how its influence might be curbed, purely because I cannot handle the unending nonsense coming from my computer screen and I would like it to stop.
I do think they want to fix the problem. It’s really hard to find a group of people who insist on doing the exact opposite of what everyone who works with young men is screaming for them to do and not eventually come to the conclusion that the problem is “they just can’t figure out what to do.”
What has worked for pretty much all of human history is a purpose, a sense of responsibility, and feelings of competence. There are ways to do this, it’s not even that hard. Get them out doing useful things, competing in sports or other activities. Give them male only spaces. They’ll be fine. And if you pay attention to what kinds of messages young men gravitate to, it’s messages exactly like that— calls to purpose, to doing hard things and building something worthwhile. They eat up Jordan Peterson, Jocko, and other similar figures.
With the correct direction so obvious, I find it weird to think that all of the phDs worried about young men have absolutely no idea how to make them healthier. I don’t see it, I see people who look at boys as failed girls and men as failed women and goes about trying to turn the young men into women. It’s doesn’t work, but I’m not convinced it was ever supposed to make men more mentally healthy. It seems more about making sure men are in a sense as domesticated as women are by nature— willing to sit down, shut up and do as he’s told.
But that is not Safe.
But that is not Equal.
But that will mean men will think themselves entitled to the fruits of that labor rather than paying women their fair share.
That is not Consent.
If you worship these things as Goddesses, and many do- you don't generally get elected without professing your belief in these things- you cannot fix this problem. Only by rejecting these Goddesses can you solve the problem.
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The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).
Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.
What happens when you age adjust? There are notably few boomers following him, after all.
Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.
Yes but are they overrepresented in the age group that likes Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate fans skew young and younger generations in Britain, as elsewhere, are more minority heavy.
When you adjust for this, are white youths more pro-Andrew Tate than minority youths?
No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.
The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.
The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.
When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.
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I haven't watched it, but is this your brain on partisanship? Incel violence isn't right coded, and manosphere also isn't beyond the fact that it rejects feminism. Numberically it may be true that underclasses commit the most stabbings, but people don't care about those. On the other hand there are high profile incel cases such as Elliot Rodger that people know about.
Also for this kind of thing, the perp/hero is also supposed to be sympathetic to the audience. If it's a gangbanger or jihadist who doesn't look like you, then the killer just becomes a flat boring character that nobody will care about. Anyways incel violence is categorically different from thug or secretarian violence.
If you really wanted a partisan story, adapting this more directly would do the job. Two seemingly ordinary white kids are actually sadistic, cold blood killers and they murder a trans just for fun. The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.
That's news to me. I believe it is right coded, in the minds of the kinds of people who dunk on incels.
In the minds of everyone who unironically uses the term, I think.
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It isn’t? Online on Twitter it seems to be. That’s the go to insult among the left for a right wing guy. Even Elon Musk got called incel by his estranged son. Jordan Peterson is supposed to be king of the incels if my TikTok comment section is to be believed
"Incel" is just a catch-all term for "dissident"; it makes far more sense in this context.
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That's the motte; "man bad" is the bailey. If you have the power to fight in the bailey, why retreat to the motte?
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I think that this is being used as the reason du jour to Have a Conversation about teenagers and social media. Back in my day it was personal information, sexting, and cybersecurity. We didn’t have the words ‘revenge porn’ and ‘doxxing’ but the designated cool grownups giving us talks about responsible internet use would have recognized the concepts quite easily.
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I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.
This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.
I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.
That's well and good if that's what you want to talk about, but the OP has 2 sentences which relate to the series being discussed by MP's. The rest is their own analysis of the plot, its supposed real life references, and some non sequiturs about knife bans and asian hate, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the show, they're all just getting lumped in as things that people that OP dislikes are promoting.
If the culture war angle relies on what the message of the show is and not just who is talking about it, then I would simply repeat my comment that I find it irritating that people will decide what the message of a show is based on a review from someone they dislike. It is simply lazy.
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The primary focus I see here is the propaganda angle, we don't need to watch the show to know little white boys aren't The Problem. Also this criticism would sting more if woke media wasn't always so fucking generic. If safety and inclusivity and ad-friendliness didn't dull creator's creativity even before they get around to making the story advance the same insipid globohomo agenda every fucking thing else is advancing.
Also that attitude privileges positive criticism over negative criticism. Nobody gives a shit if you gush about a show before watching it, in fact that is a significant part of most media's promotional strategies. And you can spin up all kinds of lies about a movie you haven't seen if it codes right wing. Therefore it is the duty of every good, right thinking person who doesn't want globohomo corpo-friendly slop jammed down their throats to loudly and repeatedly badmouth anything that even looks like it. This is the world progressives apparently wanted, it would be unkind not to give it to them.
You do need to watch the show to know if the show is saying little white boys are the problem. Anything else is laziness disguised as politics.
Is any show that depicts a young white male murderer implying that young white men are The Problem? I want an actual answer to that, because it seems like you're saying yes to that if you feel this comfortable shitting all over something you have the barest passing familiarity with. If no, then I don't understand your reasoning.
My attitude privileges nothing, it is simply the fact of the matter that people will spend hours and paragraphs shitting all over something they have no idea about. The reverse is usually not true. When it is, I also find that distasteful.
Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. I prefer analyzing things on their own merits. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.
Then you simply aren't paying attention. It is not the world I want to live in, it is the world I fought hard and impotently against, and I remain adamant in my belief that the only way out is consequences. One side of the debate - whether you accept it or not - spent the past 15 years shoring up their vise like grip on the zeitgeist to the point they now control not only coverage, but to a large extent distribution of all non-independent (in the classic sense, not the neoliberal sense) media. They block media they don't like politically from being seen or purchased. They flood the news with negative reviews before a right wing product even launches, because they gatekeep the authorised critic pool. When people complain they declare them nazis or incels or gamers. When people watch it and write their own reviews for metacritic or opencritic or Google, they call it review bombing. When people then stop watching they double down on blaming the audience. Or they blame 'fatigue', which is a mod on blaming the audience. Funny how dumb nerds like me talked about star wars and comics all day every day from 1985 to 2015 and then suddenly got fatigued huh?
And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage. That's why review bombing exists as a concept, why every now and then we get think pieces about how you can't trust user scores, and why we have the 'don't yuk someone's yum' meme. That wasn't the case before marketing executives realised they could game user impressions that hard. Positive reviews should be treated as dishonest by default these days, as they are part of the machine and thousands of people's livelihoods sometimes rely on the product scoring a high enough percent on review sites to count as success.
And so the answer to your question is no of course not. It's a Venn diagram of overlapping concerns, like adjacency too globohomo, where and by whom it was produced and the marketing campaign used to push it. And while white boys is one of the two main ones in this instance, the other necessary element is the chattering class thinking it's very important and we need to put it in schools. I doubt we'll see anything that important and iconoclastic (because that would be a necessary component, you don't need to show school kids shit they have jammed down their throats all the time) from a traditional media source ever again. Setting aside there being nothing new under the sun, there are too many competing and conflicting interests involved for nuanced arguments to take hold and far too many ways for people to pass the buck.
There is of course an experiment we can do here that will settle whether adolescence thinks little white boys are The Problem or not. You could watch it, and you will immediately be able to rub my face in how wrong I am. I would genuinely appreciate it if that was the case, because I have met Stephen Graham and he is really smart and friendly and just all round awesome, but I have kicked at that football way too many times to trust Lucy now.
I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. I am not a faceless representative of the political side that you so clearly despise. I am an individual who has provided my personal view on how media should be commented upon.
You are conflating a ton of things. There are some things people will call review bombing, will flood with negative reviews, etc. There are also people (like you) who will do all of the same negative behaviours and think they're justified for some reason? Sure, those things happen (I also think review bombing is a term that points to a distinct phenomenon, albeit with a negative connotation) and are sometimes bad. How much water do you think the 'I'm going to blame the general audience for my show being unpopular' argument really holds with the public? Is this a thing you think all "globohomo woke" people believe, or is it something you saw a few people say on twitter and now you're repeating in your deluge of spite?
"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage. And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?
Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.
This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.
Lmao ok, well given the way you talk to me I don't give a shit what you think. You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave. You demand empathy from me even as you insult and misrepresent me, you dismiss everything I say as not even worthy of consideration, and yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect, you are simply uninterested. But I am intellectually lazy for my lack of interest you say, based on three posts, the first of which was clearly playing on the irony of just desserts, and the second one you seem to be ignoring because it's too nuanced to sneer at. But I know I'm right, so I have nothing to prove. The only reason I engaged you is because I like talking about this.
It doesn't matter if you think I'm lazy, I know I am simply avoiding demoralisation and adding a straw to the camel's back that is mainstream media, and that's good enough for me. I am perfectly content to let others who feel compelled to discover the actually important and iconoclastic stuff - remember how I said that to you and asked you to watch the show and tell me it was good so I could go watch it? Word of mouth is my method of discovery, it's actually worked well for most of human history.
No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage.
Yeah, it works even from people who don't know what they are talking about and from random strangers the audience doesn't even know. That concept is a core part of advertising. And I don't just mean in the age of tik tok (although even more so now) it has been known for decades. And almost any kind of advertising can work for any product, but different types can work better than others. For gadget advertising you want a spokesperson to provide the product with authority. For appliance advertising you want an extra who looks like a classy but normal person to imply the user will gain prestige from owning the appliance. For car advertising you want sexy people to imply the car will make you sexier and get sexy people to hang out with you.
And media advertising comes in two prongs - you want famous people attached promoting it and you want regular people gushing about it. It used to be that you just wanted regular people talking about it, good or bad, the point was to ensure it is part of the national conversation. But after the 2011 writer's strike that changed and advertisers were given a lot more power during production as producers needed the additional funding provided by sponsorships and product placement. People were only really tolerating product placement in reality shows though, so they had to pivot, but they learned they could get similar gains through hype. That was when the astroturfing began in earnest. Now it's all about promoting positive engagement and chilling negative engagement. But since you won't believe me, ask an advertising executive. They'll dress it up in convoluted obfuscating language, but they are usually happy to talk about it.
If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.
"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.
"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.
Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.
Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.
So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.
"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.
I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.
I didn't speak down to you until you started doing so to me. That's what I do when people speak down to me. And you are still conflating refusing to stop talking about media I haven't watched with refusing to watch media I don't agree with politically. Ideally I would prefer the motte not acknowledge that kind of show at all, but since it was brought up, talking about it is the point of the forum. By your standards the only way to have a conversation is after giving the media the views they need, but hate watching pays just the same as watching in earnest.
That was what I meant about the irony in my first comment - you assumed I was seriously insisting we should all be loud dicks about anything we suspect we won't like, but I was exaggerating for comedic effect. I was actually the first person on the motte to vociferously argue for watching everything - even propaganda if you are in the right state of mind, although I have been reconsidering that lately. But you don't have to watch it in ways that profit the lazy and unscrupulous. Stereotypes only have significant value in impersonal interactions - for seeing the shape of the world, the pattern. When you are directly interacting with someone stereotypes can point you in the right direction, but individual elements of the pattern can and do behave erratically.
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For my part, given the topics involved and the kinds of people insisting it's Very Important, I'm pretty much willing to let my assumptions ride. I'm not turning off my pattern recognition ability because you think it's unfair.
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For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.
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I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)
And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.
And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?
(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)
In that case I commend you for practicing a forgotten art. I also read Babel last year (not knowing much about it going into it). I actually quite liked the historicity and worldbuilding of the book, it was pretty different from what I normally read in that sense and a good change of pace, but ran into a headache with the sections that were maybe to the most unsubtle degree I've come across in modern fiction so overtly didactic and earnest about the reader getting the point. Like, we get what you're trying to say, you don't have to try so hard. Still glad that I read it.
I agree that there's no way to please everyone, but there's also no reason to attempt to. Read what you want and comment however you like on it. If someone thinks you missed The Point or are wasting your time but you found it a valuable reading experience, they can get bent. If it wasn't, then you can reevaluate whether you want to continue those reading habits. It just irks me when people will dismiss something so completely out of hand because the wrong people like it. It's one manifestation of the brainrot you see everywhere these days where people don't want to bother taking the time to form their own critical opinion of something, so they'll regurgitate what some content creator said about X or Y or judge it on the most surface level of details.
Though on that note, I also agree with you that works which are striving to be summed up into one didactic surface level message invite bad takes. Still, I don't see how (from the summary that was given) this show would qualify necessarily. The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?. But without watching the show, we have no idea what the message of the show might be, what conclusions it might draw about how much race/social media/drug use/gender dynamics/parent responsibility or anything else play into the narrative.
And here we see the problem with the disparate cultures. My reading of the op, ideologically aligned as I am, is that it is fine to make tv shows about paths to radicalisation and youth crime, but ALL of the media that does this suggests the problem is little white boys and that doesn't reflect reality at all. That there is nothing brave or courageous about telling a story about the path to radicalisation and knife crime when you refuse to confront the ethnic reality of who actually falls onto that path and who actually commits most of the knife crime. And this is taking place in a media environment where being white and male is already setting you up for antagonist status, so it is no wonder the (ideologically aligned) media is lauding it and will do so regardless of its quality. That is not "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." it's "you are still crying wolf".
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The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)
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This statement alone should make everyone rather suspicious about the series.
On a different note I'd like to mention that Brianna Ghey's murder had nothing to do with either transphobia or misogyny, as the Wiki article makes it clear.
Also Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to do with him being gay. People tend to get mad if I say that. Don't drop that fact on reddit.
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I had a pretty surface level comment about this kind of narrative pushing in the last thread. The scope of my comment leaned more into journalists latching onto stories that fit their narrative, but your comment talks more about these streaming services pushing a narrative which I find to be just as important, maybe even more important. A lot of these newer shows produced by these platforms are really just delivery mechanisms for socially approved moral instruction, particularly when it comes to social issues. It's a pipeline of content designed (whether intentionally or not) to reaffirm progressive narratives, not challenge them.
I haven't seen the show, but I just read the CNN article about it. Like you said I think there is a recognition that there is a problem. They really try to explain its roots being mostly due to social media, which I agree is a major contributor, but they sort of leave out the passive, yet continued attempts at the feminization of the males in our society so that their violent tendencies can be increasingly shifted to the more indirect emotional and psychological kind. In this show, the female utilizes her ability to maximize psychological harm without being too direct, while the male causes direct harm. One is socially accepted and media-protected, the other is criminalized.
What is the message? Based on the article, it seems like the show creator is trying to strike some balance between the two types of aggression (direct-masculine and indirect-feminine) and how social media (which empowers feminine aggression) is a major problem. No disagreement there. He really does seem to want to help the younger generations, but seeing how we all have to tip toe around certain realities, it makes addressing the male "problem" a difficult one.
I do believe this except I find this delivery method to be unacceptable, and, based on Western countries' current voting trends, I'm not the only one. People are becoming quite tired of whitey being the face of certain negative trends, and that has been expressed many times (see Brexit and the elections of Donald Trump).
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I saw more than one meme claiming that Adolescence was Netflix's adaptation of the Southport stabbings, but assumed that couldn't possibly be the case given how recent it was. Good to know I was right.
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So, one thing I keep wondering about, is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?
Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification. Liberals seem to be low key against this? At least I've seen liberals like Krystal Ball act like Republicans are harming people's sexual health by "banning" pornography in her state of Virginia. It's not exactly a hill they'll die on, but they'll spend some breath on it from time to time. Like liberals seem to be pro pornography, or at least in some sort of weird hyperposition between being pro some abstract form of pornography that's good for sexual self discovery, and against some abstract for of pornography that degrades women.
I know... I know... just.... moving on.
So anyways, a lot of US left coded Narrative following shows seem to be very laissez-faire about pornography, especially with lots of "safe horny" scenes of diverse peoples and sexualities having sex on screen.
A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.
Is this actually a view that the UK public holds? Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?
Both.
Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.
The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.
It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.
The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.
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Just generally, non-US serious feminists have a dim/skeptical view of pornography because it’s not exactly politically correct.
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Which liberals?
If you mean progressives, they hate it. The claim it devalues women is trivially correct and everything progressives do is downstream of this.
Actual liberals are generally too busy watching porn to comment.
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British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.
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Im very curious about the people who rant and rave about the show. What psychologically is the source of their enjoyment? Obviously it does not conform to some previously unexpressed trauma of white boys murdering classmates. Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.
They believe it captures the lived experience of young men who enter the alt-right/manosphere/incel pipeline for whatever reason and thus provides the antitode to that way of thinking. It doesn't for a whole host of reasons, the primary one being that the main character is 13 years old and most fears young men have about their social status and manhood kick in from around 15-16 onward after maturity has hit.
The plot gives me 'progressives talking about sex instead of having it' vibes. I mean you also see that with progressives addressing lots of other things, it's not a super-specific problem. But progressives live in a world with functionally no one under about 20; not understanding what would be normal-if-bad behavior for a teenage boy and what would be extremely abnormal is expected behavior. The 'plot to get laid' aspect seems like something out of an eighties movie about actual highschoolers, not the real behavior of thirteen year old boys(who are much earlier in puberty than people who only deal with adults tend to believe).
To add a point of anecdata, when I was thirteen I wanted to touch some tits. Getting laid, let alone constructing a psychological profile of a potential "weak" girl to do so, was somewhere in the realm of strange vaguely gross things that didn't seem so appealing.
Yeah, when I was 13(maybe more like 13 1/2) I probably would have had sex if suddenly confronted with a willing woman, but going out of my way to get some seemed like weird alien behavior. There were girls I liked but picking one on the basis of ‘more likely to be willing to have sex’ wouldn’t have occurred to me.
"Men and boys, from a very young age, are influenced by hardcore online pornography and The Manosphere(tm) to [among other things] see women merely as sex objects" is a vital component in the origin story progressives tell themselves.
And indeed, most men have "been exposed to hardcore online pornography" (translation: they, or someone they know, typed "boobs" into the Internet) by this age. They're not going to tell you that, though; it's one of those things adults are weird about, and they know that.
No mechanism for how this actually happens is ever expanded on beyond mumble mumble sexual novelty, but whether or not it actually makes sense is generally irrelevant.
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These people are very concerned about Andrew Tate. That’s it. They’re concerned about sexism spreading among adolescent boys(and to be fair, I don’t like the spread of Andrew Tate sexism among adolescent boys either- even if it seems to be much less pronounced than the literati like to claim). That Andrew Tate fans are almost certainly less white than the general population is immaterial; specifying ‘white’ just makes their concern socially acceptable to themselves.
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My completely baseless speculation based only on reading the OP and skimming the Wikipedia page:
The series isn’t actually about violence, at least not thematically. The series is about sexualization, and the violence of the framing narrative serves as a grand metaphor. The series is cathartic because it validates the “ick” that women feel at unwanted sexual attention as being homoousian with physical violence.
IIRC when women are surveyed about what they mean by 'the ick' it's typically behavior in wanted or desired parters which falls short of an ideal.
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I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem. They probably have a blind spot preventing them from seeing it any other way. Other fans likely hate low-status (white) men and the show is like a minstrel show - legitimately entertaining as a sneer.
But, the writers could have more principled worries and know this is the only way to express it. By comparison, The Handmaid's Tale is actually inspired by Muslim theocracy, not Christian theocracy. The two stories are not completely comparable since THT I think is more of a cautionary "it could happen to us" and AFAICT this show is not meant to be a hypothetical -- it seems to be a show about current social issues.
In the vein of my previous comment, that maybe there is more similarity between me and the liblefts than I previously thought, I wonder if there is an aspect of racism of low expectations here. Maybe liblefts have essentially given up on shaping POC boys, and they view decent well behaved white boys as a last bastion that cannot fall to the distinctly vulgar and uncivilized Andrew Tateism. Maybe they view conservative whites as a part of a functioning political ecosystem, and see it collapsing with their slow disappearance.
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I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.
Thanks, an interesting read
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I like this. I'll probably steal it and use it the next time I get in a political argument.
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I don't think it's that deep. I think the normies, especially internationally, don't have the first idea about the state of the UK. Mentioning the crime discrepancies between demographics is the taboo in the west right now, so no, they're not freaked out about "POC violent youth", because they hardly have a concept of it. Fwiw, it might be a well directed show, possibly tugging at heartstrings of the parents in a "this could happen to you[r kid]" way. I wouldn't know.
Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.
That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.
Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.
Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.
Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.
The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.
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It’s pretty clear they aren’t all that concerned with BIPOC knife crime since their government just released sentencing guidelines that call for different “tiers” of sentences depending upon the race of the offender
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I don't know if you remember being a kid, and had somebody fuck with you (steal your toy, punch you, cheat off you during a test) and then to add insult to injury they also successfully lied and got you in trouble for it?
That's all this is. It's virtually inconceivable these people don't know who's really committing the rapes and knife crime in the UK. This is just the victory lap of their conquest, presaging how'll they'll write the history of the genocide of the Anglo-Saxon's.
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Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.
Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.
The real crime here is that this agitprop tripe is being celebrated as art and forcibly shown to highschoolers. But even that is as old as the trees.
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The Manosphere hasn't been a thing for quite sometime. It's like referring to Suffragettes rather than Feminists. Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness, individuals splintered into a decentralized ether of male self interest and self development.
Adolescence is just another focus for the usual groups to assign blame for anything and everything to white
boysmen. Red pill knowledge is framed as something that causes murder, hate and involuntary celibacy. If only boys behaved more like.. well, girls, then we wouldn't have this problem. Lets force boys in schools to watch this series so they can feel even more demonized. I'm sure that this won't have the complete opposite effect of that which the Karens would wish.I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.
I'd add that the Manosphere was clearly able to exist as long as it did due to a very peculiar cultural milieu where Blue Tribe feminists were ramping up the culture war, but the Trump phenomenon, the alt-right, the meme wars, Gamergate etc. did not yet exist.
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How would you describe Andrew Tate? What subculture is he a part of?
Andrew Tate was able to make a name for himself precisely because he obviously took detailed arguments that were posted on Manosphere sites that have been defunct for many years, repackaged them and dumbed them down, and presented as his own in short videos and whatnot. His followers believe him because they don't know any better, because again, those sites are no longer accessible. He's exploiting the death of the Manosphere.
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Some kind of fractured derivative of the Red Pill. Not that he would identify as that (which is kind of my point). Do you think Tate would go 'I'm part of the manosphere'?
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Arguably the primary targets are boys just becoming men. From an example published a few days ago:
(after similar anecdotes about 9 other prestige outlets)
The chief editor of the New Yorker is still a white American man, mind you. He replaced a woman in 1998 (back when that was still more unremarkable than Problematic) and he's probably still safe there today. If you try to take away an old man's job then you're certain to engender conflict with a powerful man. If you take young men's jobs before their careers really get started, the young men tend to just go away and find a different career. It might take a decade before people even start to notice.
I'd even just stop it here. Feminists like other critical theorists have done their own march through the educational institutions. I haven't really seen any pushback in Western public school systems and when I do it ends up as a cautionary tale..
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In addition to @DiscourseMagnus' reply, consider the following: What is an attack on men if not an attack on boys? For what else should boys aspire and expect to be?
Well now they have the option of becoming women.
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Always have been.
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