The incel question, or: when in doubt, always blame the white kid
Sadly, poetry is not a very popular subject — it would be a different world if it was — so let’s now talk about other stuff.
I started watching this British series from Netflix, called “Adolescence”, which has received rave reviews.
I didn’t like it.
It’s about a teenage kid who supposedly kills a female classmate because she calls him “incel” (involuntary celibate), or something like that. I’m not sure, because I didn’t watch it until the end, just half of it, but it was already clear where it was going.
On aesthetic grounds, while the kid is good, I didn’t like the actors who portrayed the cops, and I also didn’t like some of the directorial choices. Technically it is very well done, and the idea of doing each episode in real time or a continuous shot is interesting, although it may test the viewers’ patience in some scenes.
But the main reason I didn’t like it has to do with the content.
First of all, as we can expect from Netflix, the cast is very multicultural. Okay, in this case, as it is a series set in present-day England, I suppose it’s adequate, as this is what London looks like now. And Paris, Rome, Berlin, etc.
I suppose what annoys me is that we are not supposed to question this new reality at all, just accept it. There is no discussion about the difference in behaviour between different groups, or whether turning the whole world into a global Babel is a good idea or not.
People talk constantly about diversity, but where is the diversity?
I am old enough to remember an Europe when we had different countries, each with different people, different foods, different architecture, different art. Now, every big capital looks almost the same. You have the same shops, the same global brands, the same restaurant chains, the same soulless modern art and architecture, and the same type of mixed population with people from all over the world.
So, there is less diversity instead of more.
Besides, while I do agree than in more general, abstract terms, we are all human, I also think that there are differences between groups. Furthermore, people tend to gravitate towards other people who are also similar to them anyway. So even now in these multicultural cities you have a Chinese neighbourhood, a Korean neighbourhood, a Pakistani neighbourhood, an African neighbourhood and so on.
So you still have borders and walls between different ethnicities, only that now they are smaller and inside the same country or even inside the same city.
And it’s going from bad to worse. Recently Italy has made much more strict the rules to obtain citizenship through Italian descent, in favour of migrants who have zero Italian ancestry but who already live in Italy. So expect even less ethnic Italians and more Bengalis, Africans and Arabs. And that from a prime minister who said she was going to fight against migration…
But in the series, this whole issue is presented as something that is irrelevant and doesn’t matter, and you have a multicultural characters but culture somehow is not important, because supposedly everyone acts the same way, regardless of their origins. Only that the killer is white, of course.
Second, the burdensome and appallingly dehumanizing police procedure is shown as mostly correct, and the cops and various workers are portrayed as basically good people who are doing the right thing in a difficult case, when it’s actually a monstrous system, run by psychopaths. This is related to my criticism of bureaucracy in the previous text, so I won’t go deeply into that again.
Third, and most important, the series adopts a feminist point of view. Basically, it is saying that violent foreign rapists are not a problem, the big problem are white incel kids.
I think the “incel” stuff is mostly an imaginary, invented problem, or, if it is, it is mostly for the “incels” themselves. Almost by definition, 99% of “incels” are not violent or aggressive towards women.
Violence is related to sexuality. Aggressive men who rape or beat or abuse women are rarely “incels”. Besides, the majority of sexual abusers in England and most European countries are non-whites from an immigrant background. For many reasons, but mainly because many of them do not integrate, or because they came from a very different culture where modern feminism is not the norm.
There has been a big increase in knife crime in England in the last years, to be sure, but it’s not by white kids — and I doubt that they are “incels”.
Some white incels might even hate women, who knows, but their reaction is mostly to refuse social contact and stay locked indoors playing video-games.
But white incels attacking or murdering women? Well, it may happen in the case of very extreme and deranged individuals, I think in the U.S. there have been one case or two of shootings caused by sexual frustration — that is, if they are not fake events — but in general they are very rare.
Yes, it’s true that 80% of women are mostly interested in what they believe to be the top 20% of men. I don’t think this is up for discussion, and I think even most women admit that. Men are more accepting of their limits and their level of attraction. Women aren’t.
Besides all that… Well, if you’re past a certain age, that’s a different issue, and of course it becomes harder to find a partner the older you get. But the conventional wisdom is that if you’re young, not extremely ugly, and not completely autistic, it’s not totally impossible to find a girlfriend. Probably it’s not going to be the cutest girl in your class that you’re secretly in love with, unless you’re the captain of the football team, but, you know, if you reduce your expectations you might get a nerdy girlfriend that has more in common with you anyway.
That said… That may have been true decades ago. It is true that things have changed a lot for the worse since I was in school, so, I can understand why a lot of young men feel very frustrated these days. Online dating, social media, the normalization of pornography and the digitalization of culture in general have been extremely negative for the relations between the sexes and caused a lot of unnecessary pain, in particular for young men, but for women too.
Everybody is feeling much lonelier.
Young men in particular have been demonized for years as “toxic” and part of “rape culture”, now they are being demonized as “incels”. I guess boys can’t win.
Moving forward, I think the solution will have to involve returning to a more traditional society that values family, marriage and monogamy instead of the current values of “having sex with whoever you want”.
Maybe even going back to have schools segregated by sex, some schools for men, some for women, as it used to be not that long ago, could be a possibility. This way there would be less sexual drama and everybody could concentrate in, well, studying.
And perhaps even returning to arranged or semi-arranged marriages will have to be considered, at least in certain societies, such as Japan or Korea, where this is more traditional.
In Europe, this has not been part of the culture for a long time, but in any case the “anything goes” of modern relations and the radicalism of modern feminism will have to be dialled back at least a bit.
Whatever we are doing right now, it’s not working.
I mean, people are not having children, or if they are it’s well below the replacement rate; and, with or without children, the majority of couples end up divorcing in just a few years, that is, if they are even married in the first place. In some countries such as Sweden or Norway almost half of households are of people living alone.
There is obviously a huge social problem going on.
But it is a problem with deep causes that most people are unwilling to discuss, so, you know, it is easier to just blame white incels as the root of all evil.
