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Notes -
"Adolescence" isn't like that.
After watching it, I can give my thoughts, and it really isn't.
First let's look at what "incel" means in the world of the show (which may not reflect reality). "Incel" is portrayed as a zoomer concept that all the kids know about and the boring old adults don't get it. The kids know about it because all kids know about it, and boring old adults don't because it's a kid thing and it's just not part of their generation. It's also shown to be a generic insult, kind of like how calling someone a fag may have been used 10 years ago. Calling someone an incel doesn't make them an incel, just like calling someone a fag doesn't make him a homosexual. And in fact the protagonist explicitly rejects the label. His friends are also not suggested to be incels, though they are pushed together as common victims of bullying. One is bullied for being poor and the other is bullied for being dumb.
In the show there is no idea that there's a looming incel threat that is coming for your kids and schools. The attack is portrayed as being motivated by bullying and a personal grudge against the victim, not by ideology or misogyny. Of course being called ugly and an incel was a big part of this bullying, but no more than any other kind of relentless torment that kids put each other through.
Now let's analyze the episodes individually.
Episode 1 mostly lacks social commentary, but if anything, is anti-police by showcasing quality police brutality and abuse. The show starts off with the detectives nonchalantly executing a hardcore no-knock raid with dozens of heavily armed officers in order to pick up a kid. Even though the kid is an accused murderer, they have no reason to believe he will resist or that the family will impede the investigation. Then there's the interrogation, where the police don't have enough evidence, so they gaslight in order to fish for a confession. Fortunately the kid has a lawyer and is able to avoid most of the traps. It's true that being anti-police is somewhat blue-coded but I don't otherwise see anything too major happening in this episode.
Episode 2 is more of a commentary on school and society. The administration is shown as uncaring and incompetent. Bullying runs rampant. The detective's son is even bullied every day nobody things anything of it. The drama and storytelling is nice, because we see in the beginning that the victim's best friend is hiding something, and we find out gradually that it's because the victim was doing the bullying too. Of course murder isn't justified in this situation, but it establishes the main character as a sort of antihero that we can almost relate to. Which is the perfect time because when the detective breaks the friend he says that's the last thing he needs to close the case and throw our antihero in prison.
Episode 3 is a battle of wits between the two characters. The killer wrongly assumes that the psychologist is in cahoots with the police and fishing for a confession, but rightly understands that she is not on his side. The psychologist alternates between trying to build a rapport and asserting her authority, while the killer remains on the defensive. At the end we find out that the killer gained a liking for his nemesis, in sort of a messed up Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It is shown that the killer's mind is melted by being exposed to too much oversexualized content on Instagram. This sounds correct as whenever I make the mistake of opening FB, I get reels by creators who also do OF.
Episode 4 is hard to analyze, but it's hard to argue that there's any sort of partisan propaganda wrapped up in it.
Overall, the show is overhyped but also interesting enough, and really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle. 50% of murders are committed by a certain kind of person, yet true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected, not because of a woke bias in reporting.
Yeah, I've been looking for an opportunity to jump into this, with my perspective on the show from here in the States, where it's been popular but not explosively dominating the pop-culture discourse like it seems to be across the pond. I didn't watch the whole show, but my fiancée did and I caught significant chunks of it. I thought it was a very well-made psychological thriller/crime drama. The actors were very good -- the child actor playing the son in particular, but the supporting cast were quite good too, the father in particular stands out in my memory as having some solid scenes. I'm a bit of a sucker for the one-shot long-take gimmick but I thought it was done really well and with purpose, it ratchets up the tension and makes things feel more real (perhaps a factor in why everyone seems to be taking it so damn seriously). It's not made explicit whether he actually committed the murder until, iirc, the third episode and you can really feel the confusion of the characters as they believe or don't believe the story, his parents being in denial until the end, etc. The show overall kind of feels like a plot you might see in an episode of Law and Order: SVU but given a higher production value and done in a sort of elevated indie-artsy style. It's genuinely very well done.
So, I definitely understand why the show was a hit. What I do not understand is why it has become this absurd social flashpoint. Yes, the show includes some cringey dialogue about the young killer being radicalized by "the manosphere", but the point of the show (or at least, this is how it seemed to my American eyes) is the drama, the social commentary is just there to make things topical -- like when CSI would do an episode about killers organizing in chat rooms in the 2000s -- and is very much secondary to just being an interesting piece of fiction in and of itself. I did not get the sense that it was pushing any kind of significant message at all, really. There's an element of "this could be your kid next" but only in the way that you're supposed to think "ooohh, Michael Myers could come to YOUR town!" when you watch Halloween.
What I'm getting at is this. The interesting question, in my mind, is not "why does the show exist in the form it does" or "why is it popular"; it is a somewhat-soapy crime drama involving children and families and a salacious murder, and has some elements tying in to topical hot-button issues. In short, it's top-tier mom-bait -- think again of the venerable Law and Order: SVU -- that's been elevated to wider success on the back of good execution (direction, cinematography, and acting). This kind of stuff has been successful for decades, and Adolescence is an unusually well-crafted example of the type, but nothing more -- so the interesting question, to me, is "why did the British government and mass media latch onto this so insanely hard?" They're talking about it like it's some kind of exposé and not, you know, a completely fictional TV show. Because -- to reiterate -- the show by itself does not come off as a preachy after-school special type of thing, or even especially woke. It's the same sort of salacious, loosely-based-on-the-headlines drama that people have been making for decades. When I first saw that people in the UK government wanted to show it in schools I sincerely thought it was a joke -- but now it seems like they're really going to do it. Is it just a sort of dark bread and circuses thing, "let's gin up some furor about this fictional story so we can avoid dealing with our many real problems"? If so, it looks like it's working, as both woke and anti-woke commentators are taking the whole thing incredibly seriously. Pardon my French, but, what the fuck is going on in England?
I haven't watched the show or plan to, but your description of the phenomenon surrounding it reminds me a bit of the Netflix show Jessica Jones from about a decade back. Not nearly as big a deal in terms of being talked about for ideological messaging as Adolescence, but I ran into more than a few mentions by people about it as some great demonstration of "rape culture." When I watched the show, it was a decent superhero dramedy that was so extremely far removed from anything approaching social reality that the notion that it was some meaningful social commentary to anyone who's not actively trying to twist it that way seemed utterly absurd.
Which, I think, points to why the people talking about these shows this way are doing so: they're actively trying to twist it that way. The mainstream ideology that these people follow posits that fictional works always and inevitably have political and ideological meaning, which is why the followers so often decrt media that has the wrong messaging and also try to create media that has the right messaging. This show Adolescence seems to have enough features that allow them to see the correct patterns that properly flatter them and their messaging, and it's apparently well made to boot, so they latch on to it.
The funniest possible thing to happen now would be the writer(s) of the show being proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be unremorseful sexual predators.
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Ooh, looks like Netflix has released "Cuties: Boy Edition". I guess they understand their audience pretty well, and this time they even got free advertising from at least one world leader, so clearly they're doing something right.
We mostly see our dashing police walking intensely towards things while talking about whatever. They don't talk about the plot because there is no plot; they're just cameramen so the audience can see the porn. In the most intense episode, their existence is only implied.
With that in mind, let's look critically at the antagonist. He's cute, but not cute enough that the audience would start feeling anything positive towards him or anything uncomfortable like that (contrast, say, Will in S1/S2 of Stranger Things, purpose-built to be that way). He's made up to look a bit younger in the third episode, though that can be excused by what happens to him in the first, and the audience needs to understand that he's barely legal/fair game. If he acted or looked any younger that would be a harder sell, though this does happen a bit later on.
So let's get into it. We start off pretty strong in the first episode- men with guns sexually humiliate him (or rather, he humiliates himself) in child-coded ways, first by pissing himself and then what happens at the station. Him being forced to strip naked in front of his father (y'know, in case he's hiding a bruise under his cock), and his reaction thereto, is pure fanservice, especially since it's revealed about 15 minutes later that his doing so is completely superfluous to the case; they cut to the video tape and treat it as an open and shut case, which it is.
The second episode is more of the plot happening before our brave cameramen- we see a Stunning and Brave Black Woman #Resisting (£Resisting?) the police [so your vanilla oppression scene], they talk about how the place smells like masturbation (guess they were out of teen spirit that day), and they track down the guy with the Unloicensed Knoife (apparently the antagonist had to borrow one, but I think that was mostly padding). Most of the plot-relevant details are not explained; we're just supposed to know who Andrew Tate is and what incels are. Also, haha, Boomer tech illiteracy- good thing our Ace Detective didn't send the horny heart to his wife, that sure would have been awkward.
The third episode is where the real action happens. The antagonist is made up to be a bit younger in this scene and acts significantly more childish, too (we were told he actually had half a brain, but I guess that was just to set him up as a credible threat; I would have expected a freakout over needles in the first episode far before any of what happens in that room). We see that, ultimately, all the woman has to do to take [sexual] advantage of him such that he commits to her is to bring him some candy sprinkles, wear a lower cut top, and park those tits nice and close (despite her likely being "too old", responds our antagonist to some blurry photos). Maybe he'll pick up a chair once or twice, but he will ultimately commit.
I spent the last 24 hours watching true crime documentaries on 2x before I watched this and couldn't help but notice that nobody in actual interrogations (even when they're interrogating particularly young criminals, and the young criminals themselves) does this. They don't tend to be that sexually charged either. This is 100% "womanly wiles" territory, and takes place in the guise of a therapy-but-not-really session.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Actually, the same is true for said nemesis; my read is that she felt a little guilty about having enjoyed that exchange, which is (I believe) why she has to calm herself down at the end, but maybe I'm reading too hard into it.
The fourth episode is just "everything bad in this show happened because of Men and Their Tempers, daughters are better than sons, the computer makes them evil". Slow-pitch by comparison.
No climax (beyond "I'm changing my plea"), no point (beyond "incel bad"), and no meaning (the means, motive, and opportunity to the driving event are not dealt with in any detail and the victim is a Mary Sue); sounds like a pretty typical yaoi to me.
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I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.
The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.
For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.
You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:
Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.
The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.
There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.
Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.
Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.
Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)
Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.
The truth is that incels are not hated because they are very murderous. Their crimes are much more serious than that:
Women will put up with hot men who are not feminists, but if your sexual market value is small and you are also on the bottom of to woke oppressedness totem pole, then you are expected to be an Ally to your betters. See the Scott Aaronson saga for illustration.
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As I will get around to expanding on in another comment, this show is purely pornographic.
I get that this is rhetorical but the answer is "yes, obviously, their rules fairly".
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There's a quip about literacy, usually misattributed to Twain, that goes something like "The person who does not read has no advantage over the person who cannot read."
IMHO the same applies more strongly to numeracy. I would dare to hope that Starmer et. al., at least passed Algebra, and perhaps Calculus ... but what even was the point, if, when they have concerns that can be informed by mere arithmetic, they don't even consider using that? I'd like to offer kudos to you for offering a better analysis than I've seen so far from politicians or journalists, but I wish that were a greater compliment than it is.
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Schools are falling over backwards to fight right-wing "toxic masculinity" and "incel culture" while referring to this show. It portrays this as a general problem of white boys. Yet, the real cases it's based on are extremely disproportionally minorities. It's a moral panic designed to misdirect from real problems (misaligned minority cultures) to imagined problems (white young boys being frustrated with progressive values).
There IS a UK demographic in which knife crime is a huge problem. There IS a UK demographic in which systemic mistreatment of white teenage girls is a huge problem.
Neither of these demographics are the demographic to which the aggressor in Adolescence belongs, and I refuse to accept the claim that this was accidental.
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This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.
It's culture war angle is really two-fold. Firstly, the idea that middle class native British boys from nice families end up stabbing their classmates, whereas in reality it's invariably second generation African boys (I mean, the show has a scene with a white boy mugging a black boy for his lunch money, come on!).
So too with Andrew Tate:
The second is that this could be caused by something called 'the manosphere':
Ed West concludes that the real reason for this kind of moral panic isn't that middle class British boys will become misogynists and murder their classmates. It's that those same boys are rejecting progressive politics.
Goddamn, blacks have that problem in Britain, too?
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Possibly, but also no one gives a shit about the beliefs of minority males. You have to frame it as a white problem.
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I don't disagree with the rest of your point and I haven't lived in England but if it's anything like Ireland I wouldn't underestimate the rough parts of the white working class, black kids being robbed by white kids (and not just travellers) was something I saw at school.
Is the murderer in Adolescence supposed to be working class? I haven't watched it but the kid looks clearly middle-class coded, he doesn't have a working class affect or style of dress at all.
Regardless, it's somewhat silly to say "look, poor whites can be scum too" when that's never really been denied by anyone and when current violence increases and specific types of crime are almost exclusively linked to Peckham, Brixton and Birmingham and other areas with a specific demographic profile. Acid attacks are not being committed by white working class boys, nor is it white working class culture that promotes music and culture glorifying stabbing your rivals to death and posting it on social media to gloat about.
We also already have ample media about white working class criminality and violence - This is England, Peaky Blinders, all of Guy Ritchie's filmography, etc. so it's not like there's some kind of awareness being raised.
The family is supposed to be sort of upper working class: the kid's father is a plumber, who runs his own business, but also when his plumbing van gets graffitied it's a point that he can't afford the chunk of cash to get it properly repainted.
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His dad is a plumber. I don't see anyone saying that plumbers aren't working class. The family also speaks in a thick regional accent, rather than posh and proper city English.
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Indeed, acid attacks have increased 70% over the year prior, and are disproportionately committed by Africans. The UK has had 500,000 knife offenses since 2014, and yet not a single violent crime has been found to be committed for incel motives over the past decade. (We even have a case of murder, thePlymouth shooting, where the perpetrator was knee deep in anti-incel online communities, and the triggering event was when the girl he was talking to online in America posted about him being a creep leading to the mods to delete his account (quite funny))
Could you expand on this? I was under the impression that the Plymouth shooter was an incel, even though none of his victims were women who'd rejected him.
He was engaged in Reddit communities dedicated to disproving and dunking on incels: IncelsInAction and IncelTears, 39 posts altogether. In the community IncelExit, specifically dedicated to ensuring people do not become incels and instead find “healthy ways to cope”, he had 148 posts. He was a contributor to the Virgin subreddit, but that community actually has nothing to do with incels (obviously not every guy concerned about his virginity is an incel, otherwise literally every boy before his first experience is an incel).
He wrote,
One could even argue that had he a community of people to commiserate with, that the chance of the attack would decrease; the whole reason for social support is to be heard sympathetically and to relate to someone else. Instead he was participating in subreddits that are absolutely merciless to boys to who exhibit anything approximating inceldom, which winds up including what a teenage boy naturally feels when he doesn’t have a girlfriend. (How many tens of millions once felt the pangs of “tfw no gf”?).
https://voxpol.eu/jake-davison-an-incel-case/
As an aside, I find the case especially sad because he posted in AfricansGoneWild. Look at his beard! His love for guns! My guy could have walked into a mosque and left with a Somali and a shahada.
I'd encourage everyone to check out that voxpol site. English-toothed Experts on Hate Speech from the Hillary Rodham Clinton school of Swansea University. Keffiyeh wearing college girls from American liberal arts schools writing about censoring White Male Supremacist Terrorist Speech.
We've had three conversations lately about laundering leftism into public policy as fake expertise, and these guys are the best example I've seen yet. Brilliant find man.
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Fascinating, I had no idea about any of this. All I'd heard about it was that it was an incel-inspired mass shooting.
Does that mean that there hasn't been even a single incel-inspired act of violence in the UK this century? No one in the UK has ever been called upon to Dodge the Rodge? This is a moral panic that Labour and the Guardian have ginned up out of literally nothing?
On a related note (in case you didn't know), the Pulse Nightclub shooter was not motivated by targeting homosexuals - that was by accident. This kinda misattribution is common.
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I don't know the answers your questions specifically, but it wouldn't surprise me if the answer to this one is Yes. Are you aware of how many actual children were confirmed to be ritually abused by satanists in the 1980s?
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It seems so, and I asked Grok about the last decade and he agreed. Although there have apparently been some referred “channel cases” related to incel stuff, but I’m not familiar with how that works and if convictions are public and I’m too lazy to look. That appears to be a terrorism prevention program, but the UK of course jails people just for material.
It must also be noted, just as a fun thought experiment, that if there are 100 murders a decade related to unrequited love, and if incels occupy 1% of the population, then we should expect 1 murder a decade which involves an incel, and involves unrequited love, and yet which was not actually caused by the ideology. Because men sometimes do kill unrequited crushes, all over the world, and have for all of history — without any accompanying ideological motive.
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"reign in" got past The Spectator's proofreaders? I'd say they cut out the humans too soon, but I'm pretty sure even current AIs would spot that one.
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I'll take an L on my various "they ran out of mana" takes, clearly if they can make a goofy propaganda flic, and get so much buzz going around it, they still got something left in the tank.
Why anyone here would want to give even more energy to it is beyond me, though.
I actually think the very fact that they're brute-forcing the show into Parliamentary discussions and mandatory school screenings shows how little juice they've got left and how frightfully they are clinging on to whatever avenues of power they still have a monopoly on. The worlds of legacy entertainment and education are some of the strongest bastions of the liberal project, so they're tripling down on that power because they can feel it vanishing elsewhere.
If one has an anti-liberal stake in the culture war, one can actually only welcome this move - mandatory school screenings of anti-white male propaganda will only further alienate and enrage British boys, further teaching them that liberal project sees them as potential murderers who are guilty until proven innocent. If I were a double agent nestled within Starmer's cabinet, but secretly working for the Reform Party, this is exactly the kind of "let's pour oil onto the fire" move that I would suggest in order to guarantee that any British man under 30 feels permanently alienated from the Labour party.
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When government is talking big game about showing a propaganda piece to children, there's no real way to counter it without giving it more oxygen.
It's natural to see people move to subversion. The battle to keep this particular piece of Netflix slop hidden away is already lost.
"Subversion" feels too much like cope to me. Ok, if you could spam the feeds with AI generated clips that take the piss out of the intended message and it's authors, it might work, but deep diving into the film to try to extract a "subverted" message is accepting it's frame from the getgo. You're better off rolling your eyes and moving on.
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One thing that seems preposterous to me throughout this entire thing is how a 13 year old boy is being treated like an adult. Everybody involved, even the psychologist just acts as if this kid is and ought to be a man who has control over his emotions, a sex life and full control over his actions.
It's bizarre.
This is one of the things that- spending a lot of time in a natural-fertility environment- is just jarring about ‘liberals talking about sex instead of having it’. The median thirteen year old boy is a child who acts like a more mature 10 year old. He probably has started to figure out that looking at girls is kinda nice, he won’t admit it though. The exceptions who behave like teenagers are 1) disproportionately minorities and 2) look like teenagers, which this kid does not.
I’ve never watched the movie, but ‘15 year old boy asks out girl because he heard she was easy, gets angry when she rejects him and it spirals into -bad thing-‘ is the kind of not-inherently-implausible that having a thirteen year old in the same seat would not be.
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One of the unspoken pillars of feminist thought is that members of the female sex are perpetual children and members of the male sex are perpetual adults, with corresponding levels of responsibility and agency. Of course, this is systematically denied by feminists (aside from rare gems like Paglia), but is self-evident in the practical outcomes of their ideology.
The treatment we received as 10-year old boys in school after having roughhoused around a bit or done harmless pranks was always extremely stern and guilt-laden - compared to female college students have hysterical breakdowns and being coddled in manners virtually indistinguishable from how you treat crying toddlers.
I would note that feminist treatment of women as perpetual children and men as perpetual adults is highly selective and inconsistent. They'll selectively absolve the woman of all responsibility and place all fault on the man when these poor darlings are "pumped and dumped" and taken advantage of and supposedly manipulated into sex acts that get retroactively interpreted as predatory once the outcomes of the sex don't result in what they want. They will put out pieces of special pleading explaining how women's special circumstances justifies them being treated more lightly when dealing with them in multiple contexts, sexual, professional, criminal and so on. The same people who pull such shenanigans will generally not acknowledge that women's lack of agency and unique delicateness should ever affect how they get treated when they are in the running for leadership roles or positions which require one to take on a huge amount of responsibility. There is no consistency here, it's all "Who, whom".
The even more irritating thing is that much of these same beliefs are also sincerely held by social conservatives (including many users in this space), who tend to typecast women as "potential victims" and men as "potential problems"; they view women through a lens of what others can do for them and men through a lens of what they can do for others. They are exceptionally paternalistic towards women, have a tendency to place all responsibility and blame upon men, and will virtually only recognise "innate sex differences" in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women. The acknowledgement that men and women are not the same only ever gets used in one direction, and this hypocrisy seems to be common in mainstream political thought on gender.
On the contrary: James Damore got fired from Google essentially for arguing that, because of innate sex differences in career aspirations, Google's efforts to provide special and preferential treatment for women were misguided and a misallocation of resources. It's my impression that most people in this space agree with him - certainly I don't think that qualified men who want to work in STEM should be passed over in favour of less qualified women just for the sake of gender equality. Likewise, I don't think fitness requirements for firefighters, soldiers etc. should be relaxed just because the candidate is female.
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Do you have any recent examples of this? As one of the resident social conservatives, my belief is that this "perpetual childhood" should include a curtailing of rights and privileges in proportion to its reduction of responsibility/culpability, and the fact that it does not is an enormous problem. I thought this was a fairly common view among the social cons here. The double standard you're referring to strikes me as more of a boomercon thing, and I don't know if we have any of those here anymore.
I think most of the perpetual childhood stuff is social permissions. A woman is generally permitted to be the second income, worry about such nonsense as “work life balance” (which generally means working 40 hours a week or less, rarely taking work home, and getting lots of PTO), whether or not the job is fulfilling (in other words is it fun and do things that are good for virtue signaling), and so on. Men, unless they’re extremely privileged don’t get to think that way because their career has to feed, house and clothe the family. Sure, the wife’s income might supplement, but she almost always makes a lot less than he does. A man is expected to protect himself, his family, and if there’s a war, his country. In both cases, his actual wants take a very strong step back to the practical aspects of the job market. Men are forced to look to high paid jobs whether or not they want to do that sort of work. They are forced to work longer than they actually want to because they need to take care of a family, and they need to suck up to the boss by working late, they need to manage themselves to take advantage of trainings and promotions or job hopping opportunities even if they’re not interested in that work for itself because they have a family.
Even in social situations, there’s a constant need to make sure to not show weakness, or to be emotional, both of which make them look weak. The number of men who made an early on in dating mistake of admitting to being sad about something and thus lost someone they loved is astounding. Women are allowed feelings, in fact women are basically allowed tantrums over stupid things that they don’t have any right to be upset about. There are viral videos of women pissed off because their man can’t load the dishwasher. Left out — she’s generally a stay at home mom in a nice middle class neighborhood and he’s working 60+ hours a week so she can complain that he doesn’t do enough chores on top of all of that.
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I don't know if it's all that dominant on the right but one does come across quite a few "man up and do whatever your wife says like a REAL ALPHA would" takes from conservative media figures - they are right about men needing to accept that they are the foundation of responsibility and economic provision within family and society at large, but fail to understand that without corresponding power and rights, this just becomes a form of indentured servitude in which you're supposed to grin and bear any humiliation.
I agree that those people are real, but IME it's the older generations posting the "Buckle up, buttercup!" and "my hands look like this so hers can look like this" memes. The only millennials I see posting in that vein (on X) seem to be trolls.
I was going to post something like this myself -- it's age effects. Both because culture was just different when older generations came up, and also because Gen X and above, even some millennials, have no clue how bad things have gotten in culture for the younger generations.
Younger social conservatives are generally very chill and warm people, even if they're dogmatically rigid. I think it's selection effects because social conservatism requires a certain approach of dutifulness and compassion, and highly disagreeable right-wing men under ~30 gravitate towards libertine libertarianism and are people I expect would be Democrats in the 60s-2000s.
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I mean to me it’s a little like a social version of socialism where the responsibility is given to the men while the benefits are given to women. Women want the option to get a girl-boss job, or serve in the military. They don’t want the responsibility that comes with it. Women even the most hard core feminists don’t sign up for the draft, and seem likely to oppose women being entered into selective service. They want the high powered jobs, but don’t want the responsibility of being a breadwinner, or even working the long hours necessary to earn such a position. For the feminist, it appears that adulthood is optional — they can take or leave whatever parts (generally the taking responsibility parts) they want while taking the benefits of being socially treated as adults. Weak when demands come but strong when the social credit or other benefits are available. It’s not inconsistent.
I think that equal ought to mean equal in both rights and responsibilities. If I’m perfectly capable of doing the girlboss thing, then I ought to be able to take responsibility to provide equal income to the family budget. If I’m capable of choosing sex, then I don’t get to cry rape when the guy doesn’t call me the next morning or bring me flowers. If I’m capable of fighting in the military, I need to sign up for the draft.
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The foundational lines of thought behind 19th century patriarchal paternalism and modern feminism are closely linked since they are both inherently bourgeois philosophies that emerged among the upper segments of wealthy, educated society as a reaction to social upheaval from the lower classes - patriarchs wanted to preserve their class standing by limiting bourgeois female interaction with the plebs, while early feminists saw early signs of social mobility and were so outraged at the thought that a man of a lower social status could have the right to vote that they concluded "we need a bourgeois chauvinism but for the girls". Look at some of the earliest suffrage posters and pamphlets - they all engage in a degree of extreme classism that we would consider almost anarcho-capitalist today.
The outcomes only differ in the sense that both have an opposing foregone conclusion - patriarchy highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, men should be in charge", while feminism highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, women should be in charge". The step-by-step thought processes are remarkably similar.
I would say they're not mirror images; namely, that 19th century patriarchal paternalism was far more consistent and reciprocal than things are today. Sure, men were the heads of the household with some legal power like owning the property that came into the marriage and being able to enter into contracts, but that came with a corresponding responsibility - husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives and any children born out of the marriage, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife (and kids) was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The courts would not accept this.
The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all of her debts before marriage. Husbands continued to be responsible for all family debts contracted after marriage as well. A wife could also buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency), and had the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. In the 18th/19th centuries, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why.
Now? The male end of the responsibility is still being socially upheld under a veneer of female helplessness and victimisation, and at the same time, women are equally as capable as men and all of that
agitpropdistinctly non-agentic framing that emphasises their need for special protections shouldn't impact your evaluations of their suitability for leadership positions that require one to exercise agency. You don't want to be a misogynist, do you?Yes I agree, I was oversimplifying for sure.
It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities - you can't vote unless you serve in the Athenian army, you can't pursue a career as a Roman magistrate without financing public infrastructure, you can't hold a title of nobility unless you also physically fight on the battlefield when the king summons you to, etc.
Liberalism's lean into universalist perspectives on societies and the nature of civic cohesion completely shattered this extremely meaningful relationship of the individual to the collective - the very last gasp of this traditional understanding of civics might have been JFK's "ask what you can do for your country". Today, one can demand all rights with zero corresponding responsibilities - like the left-wing/communist alliance here in Vienna demanding full voting rights for any adult who lives here - no matter if they are citizens, net contributors to the welfare state, or if they can even speak German. They of course don't remotely understanding how this would be the deathknell of any kind of civic mindset and would rapidly push society into the same tribal ingroupings based on family, clan, ethnicity and faith that have dominated virtually all societies on Earth outside of highly structured civilisations.
The industrial revolution destroyed the specific socioeconomic/sociobiological niche for men and offered no replacement.
It did not do the same for women.
The more automation replaces one gender more than the other, the worse it gets for that gender- if you want to see how that ends, look at how we treat teenaged men, who have been completely replaced in the workforce to the point society considers disenfranchisement a moral imperative.
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There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that most of the West is democratic and therefore there’s a sort of pandering that develops where people prefer leaders who tell them what they want to believe, and what people generally want is liberty from obligations both social and economic, liberty to do whatever they want to regardless of consequences, and someone else to be forced to pick up the tab.
But of course none of that works. A society in which no one has any obligations even to simply not be a drain on society is one that will not last. A society in which every social vice is tolerated is one that will quickly decline due to disease, drugs and associated crimes to pay for those drugs. And thus no one will want to go into the increasingly lawless parts of civilization, or if they do, they go prepared to defend themselves and trust no one until they can retreat into areas where social bonds prevent the social and economic rot they see in the city.
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It's normal hyper-agency in action. This is not a child, its a male adolescent and thus has full agency and responsibility. How else could the filmmakers make their point?
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...that's because 13 year old boys are adults, and human beings understand that more or less instinctually. Yes, usually we'll give some or other reason to pretend otherwise, but how we say we treat them vs. how we actually treat them is always different (and usually completely self-serving, in the older party's case) so we know that's a lie.
We expect 13 year old boys to take on adult responsibilities for social order yet grant them none of the rights that come along with that, which is how we justify absolutely bizarre things like "boys who are statutory raped are still liable for child support". Executing that age group for capital crimes is the historical norm- and let's not get started on the Volkssturm or Hamas' choice of soldiers.
It's mostly the women who encourage that, by the way- just another asset to be used up in warfare. Human doings at their finest.
Things were better for 13 year old men 150 years ago as the balance of right and responsibility was a bit more even; it's only within the last hundred years where they lost their rights. Of course, the same is true for men in general, it's just naturally far more pronounced in a population that can't fight back as effectively.
You may notice that the former were the pathetic last-ditch force of a faction that was effectively defeated and was trying not to realize that, and the other is likely heading towards a similar position (if it is not already there). Child soldiers are the disgusting last resort of a faction that has no meaningful right to use violence.
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No, 13 year old boys are not adults, even biologically. Their voices are just starting to crack.
Yes, 13 year old girls are biological adults. Boys are not. Male puberty occurs later.
There are very good arguments for ‘16 year olds are basically adults, let’s stop pretending they aren’t’. But not (male)13 year olds.
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You can interpret anything as non-woke if you want. I could interpret the Sequel trilogy of Star Wars as an aristocratic anti-woke vitalist saga if I wanted. The First Order displays massive superiority in engineering and warfare, the decadent new Republic clearly has no clue what they're doing. Democracy simply doesn't work and needs ridiculous feats of luck to prevail over disciplined, efficient authoritarianism. There's a treacherous black guy who displays zero positive qualities and even gets his attempt at a heroic sacrifice cucked away from him. All politics is decided by great men/women of esteemed bloodlines...
But that's not the message from the writers, that's not what they were aiming for and that's not what most people are getting from the story. Adolescence is a Netflix original, not a Little Dark Age edit.
A story framed around a young teen middle-class/non-gang white boy being a murderer is innately woke since this basically never happens. There are vast numbers of shocking and unexpected things they could do in the entire field of fiction, that they choose this particular theme is question-begging.
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently. I watched a true crime about a 14 year old white american boy who murdered his parents in cold blood. If it was a jogger who did it nobody would care because it's just a Tuesday.
I'm looking for a woke angle and just don't see it.
Clearly given its popularity there actually aren't. In terms of shock value I think this actually tops forcing a bunch of poor desperate people to compete in death games for money.
It's true that murder stories of 'stupid black thugs kill eachother (or try to do so only to end up shooting random bystanders) over drugs' aren't that exciting. But the British media system is eagerly saying that Adolescence is relevant, they say it has some important truth to tell us about reality. They're putting it on in schools for free apparently.
It's not being treated like a shocking fictional story like a zombie apocalypse film when zombies were new and fresh, it tells people a story they want to hear like the tedious Capitalism Bad parts of Star Wars VIII. Loads of people latched onto the incel terminology as depicting their hated group, young right-wing white men. But in reality, the incel community is quite diverse racially and politically. If you go to incels wiki, they go on and on about browncels, ricecels, the 'just be white' theory. It's not John Smith and Adam Sterling watching Andrew Tate, it's Muhammed and Daneesh. Tate even described at one point how he put up one of his camgirls in a MAGA hat only for her to do poorly, many of the lonely hopeless men he was financially abusing were left-wing. Tate didn't pretend to convert to Islam to get more of the middle-class white boy market, he was clearly trying to skew to his strongest supporters.
If you want real shock value for a Western audience, you could try portraying environmentalism and eco-spiritualist anti-development sentiment as alien plots to subvert technological development (an innately good thing) and weaken us for an invasion.
That's what the Three Body Problem did, naturally they eased this out in the Netflix adaptation, along with race-swapping half the cast to be brown, white or women.
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The entire premise of the show and it's deranged state-led promotion by the UK government is specifically and explicitly axed around the depicted story being part of a "wider epidemic", at no moment whatsoever is the public treatment of it related to how "infrequent" such events are. There is no shock factor at play aside from the simulated shock of "behind every sweet white boy is a deranged sexist murderer" - which is of course demonstrably false.
Exactly. It would be as if we had an 80ies movie about how bunch of regular and nice kids committed heinous murder inspired by violent action movies while trying to reenact D&D spell in real life. And the whole thing would be promoted by school system as a guide for teachers and parents.
I am not sure if there was anything like that during satanic panic, but it would not surprise me. Wokeness has attracted the usual moral busybodies of yesteryear, I would not be the first one to go with "woke is secular puritanism" angle.
In 80s and 90s movies, gangs of criminal thugs would often reflexively be portrayed as diverse, so you’d have one white guy, one black guy, often one Asian guy, etc. It was kind of funny because of its dissonant sense of optimism. I have a dream where roving bands of murderous junkie rapists do not judge by the color of one’s skin but by the content of one’s (bad) character.
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Mazes and Monsters, starring Tom Hanks?
That one was even based on a Jack Chick tract comic, if I'm not mistaken.
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The demand for violence from the hated demographic far exceeds its supply.
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Clearly? Hollywood us releasing bomb after bomb in order to promote a specific message. We're not living in a world where the mist popular things get promoted, so we don't actually know this idea's relative popularity.
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The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
Because it reinforces more or less every destructive cultural lie told over the past 100 years. The audience for this is parents (typically mothers) who are very concerned about what media their children consume, yet are too stupid or otherwise high on Morality to figure out that this is what they need to be defending their sons from.
It occurs to me that the anti-Adolescence is a media that:
This series is not designed to be informative about any issue, though, it really seems designed to introduce terror and humiliation when specific cues are presented. These cues are the white child protagonist and a few buzzwords, but the show doesn’t even focus on the buzzwords, so it’s really only the white child. Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation, the directorial choices only make sense when you imagine an evil director who wants to inspire bad feelings about specific cues. Because it lines up too accurately.
For instance —
the hiding of the boy’s face in the car, so that you don’t relate to him on his isolated journey back
the emotionless bureaucratic faces of the police that strike down any sympathy to the boy; the bureaucratic language intentionally designed to train the viewer to treat the boy in a dehumanized way
the white woman chosen for the minimum possible amount of emotional expression on her face, even worse than that Star Wars actress of yore
the third episode which begins in a way that you could plausibly feel sympathy, and then reconsolidates that into terror and fear at him and some disgust
the questioning designed to humiliate him, in other words, to demean his status in the eyes of the viewer
showing a random encounter of a white student bullying a black student (the nephew of the cop or something), and then having a white woman cry over an African girl, for no other reason to instill a sense of a racial villain
the use of childhood photos to make the viewer think it’s real
the music (described as “tense and oppressive” in the subtitles)
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you like your friend Joe. I can get you to dislike him a bit more, maybe a lot more, by presenting a series of cues about Joe and then right afterward elaborating upon the ways in which Joe is unlikable. I can show you Joe’s face, and then I can play ominous music and talk about murder — this alone would move the needle if done repeatedly. I can go further, and have a sequence of clips of Joe mentioning why he is likable, and then right after each sequence I can show you someone in a higher status position showing no empathy to him and then talking about him like he is dehumanized. I can show you clips of him dehumanized, for instance him pissing himself, needing his father to put on pants for him, being stripped in front of him, being asked whether he’s gay — intuitively you know, bullies will create rumors like this because bullies are looking for the best way to reduce your status — and if I do this in the right sequence and with right power, everyone will like Joe less, scientifically, it will be measurable. You don’t realize how strong the effect is: there are studies which show it can be used to reduce cravings in alcoholics by reconsolidating the cues of alcohol to cues of disgust. It’s strong.
Someone involved in this movie was specifically interested in psychologically manipulating the viewer, to decrease positive valence associated with white male children and even white males generally, and increase it for minorities and women. Cue by cue, this is really what the movie is about, and the actual incel etc stuff takes up only a small fraction of the screen time, and wasn’t the intended cue manipulation by the director.
To make it worse, the black actor who we are supposed to consider a dignified British person is actually not, and I don’t mean in a physiognomy-enjoyer way, I mean in real life he was jailed for a gun offense and fined for assault, and his own demographic in the UK is disproportionately responsible for stabbings. But consider also that physiognomy reactions are strong: imagine Steve Schirripa playing a math genius, or imagine an aboriginal Australian woman teaching a Chinese guy how to do math — this is the British version of this, someone from a criminal people in a position above a boy who looks like he should be singing Anglican evensongs at King’s College Cambridge. Literally inverting the entire social order of the UK, the best that the UK can produce being put into a humiliation ritual by the worst that the UK still has to deal with.
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It's a show aimed at adults and not children. I'd expect a 14 year old child wouldn't understand and just snooze through the show.
Possibly. If the aim is to normalize police brutality, indifference to your society collapsing, and anarcho-tyranny, then it kind of works.
Unfortunately that's just a reflection of reality in 2025 UK.
The detective was looking for a motive for the killer when he had no evidence they weren't on good terms. The motive was a personal grudge, not incel ideology.
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Like what? What is "Adolescence" and what is it supposed to (not) be like?
It's a short, four episode UK TV series about a teenager who murders a classmate. It's being interpreted as a penetrating look at the radicalisation of young boys by social media.
I will say, making it a classmate and not a teacher or politician getting murdered was a clever move. Either of the latter two would risk a Torment Nexus/"this, but unironically" response.
(Disclaimer: I happen to agree with the opinion I'm imputing to the writers - that students murdering teachers and politicians en-masse would, in fact, be bad.)
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