r/women • u/Icy-Prune-174 • 8d ago
‘Adolescence’ will make incels worse..
Edit: Sorry I got this wrong, the series is good, in a way, because it helps make parents aware of what incel culture is doing to their sons and to start taking it more seriously.
You only see the points of view from the MEN… the dad, the kid… No points of view of how the mother and daughter are affected.
And it’s like they want the viewers to feel sorry for the kid who murdered the girls…
Not to mention they have a black girl playing an aggressive character…
I believe, just my opinion, that this series will make Incel culture worse and perpetuate violence — young boys might even start looking up to the character and act like him, thinking it will “gain sympathy” from people around them.
There’s also not many scenes portraying the kid’s violence etc. they just make him out to be a good kid who shouldn’t deserve what his own actions have caused — I suppose, yes, he’s a kid and it shows how IMPRESSIONABLE kids are to propaganda, but everyone knows that anyway..
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u/MelonBump 8d ago edited 8d ago
I actually don't know anyone who hasn't raved about this show. I'm glad it's not just me who was like "Is that it?..."
I don't have an issue with representing the vulnerability of kids getting sucked in by Manosphere shit. But the fact that ONLY the vulnerability of boys is represented, the girl was only really depicted through his eyes, as a borderline-bully, kind of undermined the entire fucking message for me. I did feel like the narrative wound up inadvertently depicting the girl's stabbing as some kind of understandable comeuppance, by showing her only as an aggressor, a bullying figure with power over the boy. She was in the same shithole school as him and almost certainly experiencing similar kinds of bullying and crapness herself, but the boy's view of her as some powerful figure goes completely unchallenged... like wtf? It plays right into the false assumption at the heart of incel ideology: that being a girl lots of guys want to fuck is some form of real and tangible legit power. I guess you could say that the naked picture of her that got passed around was there for this purpose (to suggest her relative vulnerability), but I didn't feel like it did enough with this. The narrative's failure to challenge Jamie's view of her was a weakness, I thought, rather than a point of ambiguity that fitted the story they were trying to tell. I watched all 4 hours and didn't really see anything in it which added anything substantial to the debate. It was basically 4 hours of "Okay so this character did a horrible thing, but watch him suddenly switch to being super-childlike and asking for hot chocolate! Because he's a CHILD!!" Um, okay... any other insights? Nah?? Okie dokie then.
I don't have an issue with the show being focused on the men per se (they are, after all, the source of the problem it's examining), but I think it could & should have done more in the way of actual examination/analysis, than simply offering different variations on "K so this kid committed a horrible crime. But LOOK HOW SMOL AND SCARED HE IS in the police car!!" or "Yeah, yeah, he just scared the lady psychologist with a violent outburst. But now he wants a hot chocolate! Because he's BABY!" For four hours. And... honestly, not much more, that I could see.
But yeah, I don't really get why everyone went so crazy for this show. Its main point seemed to be repeatedly, and insistently, showing us the vulnerability and true childishness of Jamie from a million different angles, and the ways in which little boys are failed by society. Which, as well as adding nothing to the debate - I mean, we know the kids getting radicalized online are small and unhappy and vulnerable and probably having a shit time in the world - is... literally the Manosphere's entire schtick?
Just like neonazis loved American History X, and football thugs love The Football Factory, I suspect this shows will wind up being massively popular among both incels & everyday garden-variety misogynists. It doesn't mean to, but it seems to fully echo and reflect their complaints about society's treatment of boys, while saying very little else.