I’ve been reading about the new Netflix series called “Adolescence“, about an incel teenage boy who murders a teenage girl.
The culture of men-on-women violence has been growing since the late 1980s, and, throughout that period, has gone from being culturally deviant to entirely normalised.
I despise every last one of these whining, self-pitying, entitled arseholes.
I have no time whatsoever for their so-called issues.
Afaik, their central credo is that an inability to get a date justifies murder(!).
Why in the name of sanity is this shit being indulged? Why are these deluded losers’ warped viewpoints being given credence in serious works of art, such as this Netflix series?
It’d be more appropriate to do a piss-take movie about them. The Andrew Tates of this world need to be laughed at, to extinction.
When I was growing up, blokes were way more resilient, and that included taking romantic failures in your stride.
Check out this wonderful clip from The Inbetweeners – Simon has talked himself into thinking a girl might like him, and decides to ask her out. He gets nowhere of course, and, tellingly, his mates just think his failure is comical.
Nobody advises him to go home, sit moping in his room and cook up a stew of childish self-pity stew about how evil women are etc. You had a go, it didn’t work this time, your mates think it’s hilarious, you pick yourself up, and life goes on.
Had Simon endured something really bad, such as illness or a family bereavement, or even being dumped by a long-term girlfriend, the lads are capable of being surprisingly supportive, in a slightly-awkward way.
But for this failure to pull, nah, they just (rightly) think it’s fucking hilarious.
And I think it’s very important that the wider culture of light-hearted resilience, as exemplified by Simon’s good mates laughing at his failure to pull, is very important, and sends Simon a very healthy message about resilience.
It lets Simon know that his little romantic failure in this instance is not the end of the world, that it’s quite normal in fact; and that trivialisation of failure has the paradoxical effect of ensuring that Simon is much more likely to try again in future:
Nowadays, Simon’s mates certainly wouldn’t laugh. The self-obsessed little shits would see Simon as a martyr for the incel “cause”, and in 6 months, he’d be researching cable-ties and semi-automatics.
In similar vein, I remember a bloke a year above me in college. Someone who was a friend of a friend had just won the national beauty competition. She was very glamourous. The bloke from the year above me mentioned that he was going to ask her out, that very week!
“You?”, I echoed, surprised and dubious. “Why not”, he continued. “Sure, I may get shot down in flames, but so what. Nothing ventured, etc.” And I greatly admired his attitude, and learned from it. He was so cheerfully relaxed about being, as he put it, “shot down in flames”. He had no sense of entitlement, and certainly no certainty that the newly-crowned beauty queen would agree to a date. And if he fell on his face, he’d just pick himself up, and continue on his merry way. Resilience. And that resilience creates respect, and a genuine safe space for women.
This is why cultural androgyny does not work. You can’t, on the one hand, tell uneducated blokes that women and men are to be treated exactly the same, and then expect them not to react badly if a woman rejects them.
Chivalry, on the other hand, creates a general culture of men treating women with gentleness. It derives from a benevolent form of mild sexism, one where a man naturally sees himself as a protector of women. Nowadays verboten of course, but it’s badly missed in society. See my old blog about how I and my primary school peers were unable to mark girls when playing a game of football – different times:
Disjecta 