Surviving Adolescence
My thoughts about the new Netflix show
The new Netflix show Adolescence has seemingly caused a global moral panic along the lines of:
brings up good points about how the above concerns are overblown in his analysis:A perfectly fine young boy from a perfectly fine family can lead a normal life. But then, he might find dangerous and toxic content online which will corrupt him to the point of murdering someone. And there’s not a single thing parents or anyone else can do to prevent this.
But what the Adolescence debate is missing is that everyone seems to overlook a simple fact:
Jamie from Adolescence was not a perfectly fine young boy.
He was low status - he was bullied and socially rejected.
Anyone with a basic understanding of the manosphere knows that it’s not a coincidence that the most toxic content such as blackpill incelism or hardcore red pill stuff in the style of Andrew Tate gets the most traction among low status boys and men.
And incel terrorism is a thing - there is a Wikipedia page with description of the phenomenon and list of attacks. Of course, it’s debatable whether the quantity and frequency of these attacks should be a social concern. But they do happen occasionally, and I believe that there are far more cases where an incel killed just one person.
Also, in recent 25 years we’ve seen many Islamic terrorist attacks, where young men shot people in public, blew themselves up or even flew planes into buildings. These men were not successful men with loving families - most of them were probably also low status incels, convinced by the radical Islamist ideology that their terrorist act and sacrifice will provide them a harem of 72 virgins in Paradise.
So yes, it is somewhat possible for young boys and men to be corrupted by dangerous, radical ideology online which will turn them to monsters capable of doing horrible things. But the risk is considerably only if they’re low status - normie kids correctly identify this content as online idiocy and shrug it off, unscathed.
More importantly though, low status and social rejection can lead to many other problems often faced by teenagers - anxiety, depression and suicide, and other more common and benign issues like early and/or excessive involvement in things like sex, drugs, alcohol and crime.
Yet, the social commentary regarding Adolescence conveniently skips the issue of status.
There are two reasons for this. One is that talking about status simply codes as low status.
More importantly though, the fact that some kids are low status (and therefore face various difficulties) is not a social issue. That’s because status is an undeniable, universal and indelible fact of social life.
The only people who considered low status a social issue were Marxist communists, who wanted to build a classless society. But all attempts at communism failed at this task and resulted in replacing the former status hierarchy with a new one, with the Supreme Leader and his Communist Party on top, the normie conformists in the middle and the low status dissidents on the bottom - facing persecution, exile, prison, torture, death or the Gulag.
The communists not only didn’t fix low status “issue” - they made it a lot worse.
Social status is a zero-sum game. There will always be some people suffering from low status and its consequences.
But here’s the thing about the Adolescence moral panic: Yes, maybe there is nothing the parents can do to prevent their kids from accessing dangerous and toxic ideology online. But they can make them immune to it by doing whatever it takes to prevent their kids from being low status.
And by doing so, they can also make them immune to other low status problems like depression, suicide, sex, drugs, alcohol and crime.
It seems that preventing their kids from being low status should be one of the top priorities of every parent.
If a parent does something that effectively moves their kid up the status ladder, it means that some other kid will now be lower status. That’s a bummer. Status is a zero-sum game. It’s not pretty, it’s not egalitarian.
But still, each parent should prioritize the safety and well-being of their own children. And especially in case of school age kids, status is a big part of that.
Unfortunately, and perhaps expectedly, it seems like most parents are clueless about status. I ended up writing a separate post about this problem:
Parents are clueless about status
In my previous post, I wrote about the things parents can do to prevent their kids from surviving the kinds of teenage tragedies shown in the new Netflix show Adolescence:
Keeping your girl safe
Protecting your son from being low status, which would make them prone to becoming a dangerous, violent extremist is one way of helping your children survive adolescence.
But the Adolescence story is not only a tragedy of a boy turned into a violent extremist. It’s also a tragedy of his victim.
And this tragedy could have not happened if the girl, Katie, and her parents cared more about safety.
Girls should not walk the streets alone at night
I’ve read many other takes on Adolescence and not one of them mentioned this simple fact. No one also mentioned how this part of the story is unrealistic, which means that maybe this thing is normal now.
If so, that this seems to be some kind of lost generational knowledge that was obvious for anyone living one or more generations ago.
Back in the day, when teenagers wanted to leave the house in the evening and go socialize, the parents either just didn’t let them (if they were younger teens), or told them “You have to be home by X PM”, and then yelled at them and punished them if they came home late. I guess that at least in some social circles this is not a thing anymore.
Yes, at least some Western countries have become safer over the years (some others have not though). But this doesn’t change the fact that violent men still exist, and for such man - be it a ransom kidnapper, a human trafficker, a Pakistani child rapist, a regular native rapist, a serial killer, a mugger, an aggressive drunk/drug addict or an incel schoolboy who suffered from rejection and bullying and was radicalized by dangerous content found online - the most available and vulnerable target is always the girl walking the streets alone at night.
I am not saying that teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to socialize, or that they should always be chaperoned by parents or other adults. But there are many options other than girls walking the streets alone at night, and each and every one of them is safer:
Being picked up and driven home by a parent
Parents living in remote suburbs sometimes complain about “being a taxi driver” for their kids. In Europe, some choose to live in cramped apartments in dense walkable cities and “not being a taxi driver” is noted as one of the advantages of doing so.
Uber
Moving around in a mixed group
Having boys from the mixed group walk each girl home
Two or more girls walking together
This is still much safer than a girl walking alone - a single attacker usually can’t engage with multiple targets at once, and the girl who is not currently attacked can attack him, run away and call for help and recognize him later if a suspect is caught by the police.
Girls should not violently assault boys
Another strange thing the victim, Katie, did, was that she assaulted Jamie. As she confronted him while being on the street alone at night, she pushed him so hard he fell on the ground. This enraged him and he did what he did.
From the perspective of Jamie’s incel mind this was the final straw: “First, she rejected me. Then, she bullied me online (read: humiliated in public). And now, she violently assaulted me”.
Obviously, my point here is not victim-blaming (or parents-of-victim-blaming). It would be idiotic to state that she “started the fight” and he “acted in self-defense”. You don’t bring a gun to a knife fight, and you most certainly don’t bring a knife to a… fist fight with a girl?
There is another memorable scene in Adolescence where Jade, Katie’s friend, violently assaults Ryan, Jamie’s friend, in the middle of the school courtyard.
Assaulting a boy in the broad daylight with the entire school watching is still stupid, but still, several orders of magnitude less stupid than assaulting a boy when walking the streets alone at night.
And notably, Ryan was Jamie’s friend who was also socially excluded, bullied, and radicalized by the violent incel ideology online. Had Jamie not killed Katie the day before, Ryan could have possibly done the same exact thing: take his knife (he gave it to Jamie - the whole knife thing might have been his idea to begin with) and follow Jade walking the streets alone at night and try to intimidate her with the knife, then things could possibly escalate the same exact way1.
I think both issues - girls walking the streets alone at night and girls physically assaulting boys have something to do with feminism.
Feminists promote the idea of a self-sufficient woman who “doesn’t need no man” and can fend for herself just fine. The other part of feminism is highlighting how men are horrible, dangerous and hurt women. You would think that this would improve women’s safety, but paradoxically it had the opposite effect.
Due to feminism, male-towards-female violence has become both highly socially stigmatized and fiercely persecuted. If there is any exchange of violence between a man and a woman, the man is always at fault.
If a woman violently assaults a man, there is actually very little he can do. If he hits back - he’s a “woman beater” (i.e. Jamie). If he doesn’t - he “got beat up by a girl” (i.e. Ryan). In either case, he’s humiliated.
This is a problem raised by Men’s Rights Activists. Yes, women are smaller and weaker than men both on average and typically in relationships, but some women are actually quite big and strong (i.e. the fat ones), and even those who aren’t can still hurt men using sharp or heavy objects.
Boys and men are just strictly not allowed to attact girls and women. Which is obviously a good thing.
But it seems that this gives at least some girls and women a false sense of safety. They think that if boys and men are strictly not allowed to attack them, they won’t. And this means that they can do dangerous things like walking the streets alone at night or violently assaulting boys or men.
The thing is, there are men who just don’t care if they’re not allowed to attack women. There are cold-blooded criminals who, reasonably or not, think that they can get away with their violent act. And there are emotionally unstable boys and men, who, when enraged, will just attack without minding the consequences.
In the old times, women were protected by fathers, brothers, husbands and sons throughout their entire lives. They were less free, sure, but they were also a lot safer.
And for most women, I believe, safety is paramount.
Obviously, If Jamie hadn’t killed Katie, Jade probably wouldn’t have a reason to assault Ryan. But you get the point.
You've fallen for the narrative. Irl this story doesn't exist and not with this class or culture. The cases are so rare where a middle class native english boy attacks someone is practically non existent.
This is a hysteria. Low status sensitive boys like these are much more a danger to themselves than anyone else. To be pitied not feared, the stats bear that out too. One at my old school hanged themselves.
What is unspoken is actually the radicalization of young girls. They are told that the system is stacked against them. That their husbands will leave them and thus better not try. Given climate anxiety, that the climate is overheating and that it's all over. And now that there are many gangs of violent incel terrorists out to get them.
There are dangerous people of course and precautions are wise. The case in adolescence is an attempt to distract at the importation of more violent cultures. look at the actual crime data rather than fictional stories.
This bit doesn't make sense. Norms like 'aa a man, you never hit a woman' were much stronger pre feminism, and if anything male to female violence was even more stigmatized, at least outside domestic relationships. Blank slate feminism got us women in combat remember.
> Due to feminism, male-towards-female violence has become both highly socially stigmatized and fiercely persecuted. If there is any exchange of violence between a man and a woman, the man is always at fault.