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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33458 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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"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.

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!).

The social problems Starmer wishes to confront do exist, just not in a way that makes audiences feel comfortable. In the week that Adolescence was being watched by millions, a school in Elm Park on the London/Essex border held a party which was overrun by knife-wielding teenagers. That was close to where a real teenage girl was murdered by two real teenage boys in 2019. You’ll notice that none of the perpetrators resemble the star of Adolescence, because teenage knife crime in Britain is predominately a problem with young black men. This is testified by the fact that, according to Graham, who both wrote as well as acted, the show was inspired by the fatal stabbing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu, as well as other real-life cases. These are unpalatable realities, and audiences for drama don’t like them.

So too with Andrew Tate:

Even the baleful influence of Andrew Tate and ‘toxic misogyny’ is, again, disproportionately a problem among minorities, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out, and ‘there are several issues that may make young black men more likely to be drawn to Tate’s rantings’, the obvious one being fatherlessness: ‘Young black males are a group disproportionately impacted… This means young black men are the least likely group of young men to have a positive male role model living with them at home – a world away from Jamie’s nuclear family, as depicted in Adolescence, in which the boy is “radicalised” by online influencers.’

The second is that this could be caused by something called 'the manosphere':

Instead they’ve found new moral evils to focus on in the form of the manosphere or online hate, and the agents of the state even sympathetically view Jamie as subject to forces outside of his control. Misogyny is part of the pyramid of harm, that strangely gormless worldview in which tiny infringements of social codes are linked to far more serious problems (edgy banter at work > > > something something > > > the Holocaust). The boy’s father doesn’t have female friends and sometimes loses his temper; his son murdered a girl. Can’t you see the link there, between behaviour typical of perhaps 50-90 per cent of men and one characteristic of 0.001 per cent?

One reason that society now feels so uncomfortable with young men is because social norms have moved to a more feminine centre, focussed on empathy and harm-prevention, one major cause of the Great Awokening. It is a way of seeing the world, and of organising human relationships, which many males indeed find difficult to negotiate, but contrary to the fears about men suffering from smartphone use, the data shows that social media is disproportionately harming girls, ‘and is more likely to cause depression than radicalisation.’

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.

(I mean, the show has a scene with a white boy mugging a black boy for his lunch money, come on!).

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.

I wouldn't underestimate the rough parts of the white working class

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.

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))

We even have a case of murder, thePlymouth shooting, where the perpetrator was knee deep in anti-incel online communities

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,

”I’m not clarifying [sic, classifying] myself as an incel but people like similar to me they have had nothing but themselves and they socially had it tough. Like how can you have drive and will power?”

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.

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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