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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.
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.
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.
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 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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