TV review of Adolescence (2025) and incels and the manosphere

I just watched the four-part TV series Adolescence that has created quite a media splash. The show tells the story of a 13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room. The parents did not worry too much about this, seeing it as somewhat normal behavior, until he is charged with the knifing death of a classmate Katie. They are incredulous that he could have done this but, as the show unfolds, they discover that his world of peers in school and online has taken him down some dark roads. The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs that their son was being influenced by others who were feeding them ideas that led to dangerous feelings of inadequacy and grievance.

The show makes a point of noting how adults are oblivious to what is going on in the world of adolescents and even when they know, misread the signals. This is shown in a scene where the detective’s son tells the father that he is blundering ineffectively because he does not understand the nuances of emojis, and that those emojis that he thought showed a liking by Katie for Jamie were actually sarcastic.

It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.

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The mind of an incel revealed

You may remember the case of a driver who used a van to plow into pedestrians on a busy street in Toronto on April 2018 and killed 10 and injured 16. A judge has lifted a publication ban on a four-hour interview that he gave after being arrested, where he says that he was inspired to start a revolution by online videos made by so-called ‘incels’, the term that involuntary celibates give themselves.

The attack traumatized Canada’s largest city, and cast a spotlight on the so-called “incel” online subculture of men united by sexual frustration and a hatred of women.
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In a nearly four-hour interview after his arrest, Minassian told police officers that he was virgin who had never had a girlfriend, admitted to using the van as a weapon and said he wanted to inspire more attacks.

Asked how he felt about the death of 10 people, he replied: “I feel like I accomplished my mission.”
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New film explores the life of an incel

I read this review of a new film Cuck that has as its central protagonist a white nationalist ‘incel’, the label that involuntarily celibate men who are resentful that women spurn them, give themselves. Incels have been blamed for some of the mass shootings that the US regularly incurs.

It’s a character study determined to provide insight into the types of racist, sexist lunatics who spread fear and hatred via the barrel of a gun and, at least as a portrait of what makes these individuals tick, it’s as timely as it is depressing—and horrifying.
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Before it heads down more contrived avenues that exacerbate its dearth of surprises, Cuck crafts an authentic vision of sexually aggrieved white nationalist psychosis. The crazy person in question is Ronnie (Zachary Ray Sherman), a California twentysomething who lives at home caring for his mom (Sally Kirkland, crowing like a prejudiced, pious loon) and, more frequently still, sitting in his dark bedroom, decorated with American flags and pamphlets for the military that won’t let him in because he failed his psych test. Habitually situated shirtless in front of his laptop, pizza and soda always within reach, Ronnie watches online video after online video of right-wing commentators—including his favorite star, Chance Dalmain (Travis Hammer)—ranting about the dangers of liberalism, immigration and diversity.
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Uh-oh, does this mean a rise in ‘incels’?

Christopher Ingraham tweets a link to an article that he wrote for the Washington Post has gone through the data compiled in the General Social Survey and says that the number of young men who have not had sex during the previous year has nearly tripled in the last decade and has now reached 28%.


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Another incel killing?

Since the shooter who caused the deaths of two people at a yoga studio killed himself, it is going to be a while before his motives can be gleaned from other sources. But initial signs point to this possibly being another rampage by a racist far-right misogynist, someone who shared the ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) mindset of rage against women because they will not have sex with them.
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Short film about an incel

I have written several times before about the so-called ‘incels’ (which stands for involuntarily celibate) who blame everyone else but themselves for the fact that women do not want to have sex with them even though they think that they deserve it. Their frustration has led some of them to go on murderous rampages.

Via Andrea James, I came across this tense short (about 14 minutes) film about an incel.

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A former incel speaks out

The strange and disturbing world of the ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) has come into the limelight following the violent acts by some of them. After the recent killings in Toronto by a self-proclaimed incel Alek Minassian who killed 10 people by mowing them down on the sidewalk with his vehicle, mostly targeting women pedestrians, Jack Peterson who had until then also identified as one, tried in interviews to defend the group, saying that they were not violent nor did they hate women but were adopting an ironic pose. The reaction from his fellow incels was not what he expected.
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The impossible dream of the ‘incels’

I only heard about the people who call themselves as incels (standing for ‘involuntarily celibate’) late last year when I wrote about them after their 40,000-strong Reddit group was banned from the site. What started out as a support group for men who could not find women who were willing to have sex with them turned into rampant misogyny, even on occasion leading to the advocacy of rape.
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‘Weird, sick, creepy, freaks’

At the 2016 Democratic convention, when it was clear that Republican nominee and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was going to wage a dirty campaign of lies and personal insults against Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama uttered the sentence that resonated with the crowd and that she is remembered for: “When they go low, we go high”. She was implying that Democrats would not get into a mud fight with SSACFT and the Republicans, but would take the high road and focus on the issues. It was a noble goal.

But that was then, this is now.

The early signs are that Kamala Harris is not going to hold back and is quite willing to take the fight to the Republican ticket. One of the things that the Harris campaign seems to be focusing on is that both SSACFT and Vance are both creepy and weird.
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