It’s haunting isn’t it?
Adolescence on Netflix has quickly become a cultural phenomena.
Like Squid Games but for incel culture.
It is drama so gaspingly brilliant, painfully intimate and hauntingly powerful that you should stop reading this blog and go watch it now if you haven’t.
I don’t care if you don’t have Netflix, get it.
It’s that good.
The acting is incredible from every member of the cast.
The distance between the actor and the camera in the long shots creates an intimacy on screen that generates a constant sense of tension. These incredibly private and personal moments within the Police processing system of a 13 year old boy charged with the murder of an older teenage girl are windows into human drama that rarely are given this level of realism and emotion.
It tackles head on the cultural reality of wounded masculinity in the year 2025 after a decade of MeToo.
Adolescence demands things from us as viewers that force uncomfortable questions.
The issue of the older girl bulling the younger boy online by mocking him as an Incel and the online misogyny that wounded masculinity has been spawned into.
The working class loving Dad who thought he’d broken the cycle of abuse by refraining from hitting his Son the way he was beaten.
The underfunded social services that can’t even begin to fix the broken boys.
They all come together in a 4 part drama that is deeply moving.
I think the shadow of the #MeToo movement caused a terrible backlash and it’s a backlash Adolescence is the harvest of.
I don’t think we have a toxic masculinity problem, we have a wounded masculinity problem that creates toxic behaviour.
Toxic masculinity reduces all aspect of masculinity as evil.
Wounded masculinity acknowledges the damage without tainting all masculinity as the problem.
Andrew Tate is a toxic misogynist prick because he is a toxic misogynist prick, he isn’t a toxic misogynist prick because he is male.
Many young men are lost and alienated, pushing them further away by framing all men as the problem drives them into the arms of those who would manipulate their identity crisis.
The worst thing about identity politics is when men start seeing them selves as the victims.
What do Trump-voting men want from women? Probably not what you think
The US presidential election seemed to mark a backlash to changing gender roles. But most Trump-voting men say they don’t want to return to the past.
President Donald Trump’s reelection seemed to mark a cultural turning point on gender – a backlash to #MeToo and other progress for women’s rights, and a return to a time when men could be men.
His campaign told men that they had lost their status in American society and that the Trump administration would restore it. Vice President JD Vance reiterated the point at a gathering of conservatives last month: “Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”
It’s a message many Trump-voting men want to hear: Republican men are more likely than others to agree that Americans have negative views of manly men. Nearly half say that’s true, compared with a quarter of people overall, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted during the campaign, findings that have been reflected in other polls.
But survey data, academic research and interviews with Trump-voting men suggest that most don’t want to return to a more traditional masculinity either, one that requires men to be aggressive, dominant or stoic. Instead, they want Americans to have a different take on masculinity – one that is positive instead of negative, and broad instead of narrow.
Overall, respondents were more likely than not to say American society places too much emphasis on traditionally masculine traits like physical strength and risk-taking. A majority thought there wasn’t enough emphasis on being caring or open about emotions.
And a majority – including a majority of Republicans – said certain behaviours by men were unacceptable, like talking about women in a sexual way, drinking too much or throwing a punch.
That is not always the message from the president – who has been found liable for sexual abuse, said he’d “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”, and was instrumental in ending abortion rights nationwide – or from members of his administration or right-wing influencers.
The president “is delivering results to improve the lives of women across the country”, said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, including by hiring female senior staff and through executive orders to expand in-vitro fertilisation access and ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Trump-voting men don’t necessarily share macho or sexist beliefs, the survey and interviews show. Instead, many think progressives have gone too far.
…apparently the intersectionist woke dogma that painted all heteronormative cis males as toxic masculinity was a tad alienating.
The truth is wounded masculinity is doing more damage and labelling them as toxic is deeply counter productive.
Boys growing up without dads are in crisis, report says
- By the age of 14, almost half of first-born children do not live with both natural parents, compared to 21% for those born in 1970
- Boys are now more likely to own a smartphone than to live with their dad
- Boys are struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime
- As the likelihood of a masculine presence in the home diminishes, young men are seeking new modes of masculinity, like the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate
- Lawrence Dallaglio, the former England rugby union captain, backed the report, stating: “We have been so careless in our downgrading of the traditional masculine virtues that we are in danger of leaving a whole generation behind.”
It costs less money long term to fix hurt boys than angry men but the woke weren’t interested in that, in 2016 when they suddenly gained cultural power via social media, middle class woke identitarians plus Fourth Wave Feminists plus non-binary activists were too busy labelling all masculinity as toxic to even consider the knock on effect of all that hashtag activism and woke cancel culture.
To them, ALL men and boys were so toxic that they must be constrained and muzzled and leashed and denigrated.
Patriarchy was defined as all men and everything male, it was all toxic and Me Too allowed a social media Lynch mob that generated immense cultural backlash.
Due process was heteronormative white cis male privilege, the new evidential threshold was anything women said on twitter and into that new world parents raising sons feared their boys would be accused of rape more than they feared their daughters of being raped which is insane because women are in far greater danger of that being true.
We told a generation of young women that every man would try to rape them and told a generation of young men they were rapists.
This all comes together in Adolescence.
The last 40minutes of the final episode has you sobbing.
I honestly have no idea how we fix all of this.
Adolescence demands we try.
This is drama at its most powerful
5 Broken Stars
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Be yourself and DGAF about what anyone else thinks. Don’t be an arsehole or get yourself arrested. The end.
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