William Costello
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, and the show did go to great lengths to show that in other facets of his life, he was perceived as a normal kid. He wasn't in trouble in school. He wasn't in many fights. His grades were okay. He had two friends. Yes, this did seem to come kind of out of the blue. One thing that's kind of ironic is Mr. Malick, to bring it back to throw him under the bus a little bit more.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
He's depicted, he's kind of lampooned. as being inept because of his over-reliance on showing videos to the students. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer says, hold my beer. Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of, I don't know if the irony is lost there. But yeah, the school, the depiction of the school was pretty accurate in that it's moved towards more behavioral management.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And, you know, there's a rush to maybe not exclude behaviorally disruptive students. And it creates a school environment where for those years, you're trapped with the best and the worst in terms of behavior of your peer group. That can be hell for a lot of people. Yeah, what's the mean?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I commented that the show depicts a plausible narrative of how a tragedy like this might unfold. And I stress the word might there because there has been no tragedy like the show depicts. It's a fictional boy stabbing a fictional girl in a fictional series. There has been no 13-year-old white kid who's getting good grades in school, not causing much trouble, suddenly going and stabbing a girl.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And given that, you know, we're describing that this is an accurate depiction of the school, the decision has now been suddenly made that this is now a challenge that those type of schools have to manage, showing this type of program to all their students. The program itself is rated 15 and I don't know what age bracket they're proposing to show it to in schools.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, so it tries to depict a kind of a normally well-raised, well-meaning parents and family life. One thing they struggle with is they talk in the final episode, they're kind of retrospectively thinking back of what they could have done differently.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I think the show is really good at depicting the confusion and fear of modern adults about this topic and about just the new generation in general. They do depict the father as having some kind of anger issues.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
has outbursts as well now you could say that by the end of this series he's had enough to be angry about and people are writing nonce on his work van and all this stuff but it does depict that he's taking it out on the women around him and perhaps that's a theme the show was trying to depart with that it does depict the parents trying to break that cycle and demonstrating some therapeutic tools that they've clearly learned we're going to win the day or something not going to let the day get away from us or
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Something like that, yeah, which I presume is a clinical psychology.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah. And it also, so even, and I thought a charitable interpretation was that this was skillful on the part of the writers that they didn't paint such a clear causal arrow of what made Jamie do it. They hinted at a scattergun approach of a lot of potentially contributing factors.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes. But in that kind of claustrophobic approach, it didn't really unpack the rabbit hole of manosphere inspired violence at all. I think the whole thing was explained to the floundering cop by his son in a very short clip. And by the way, it said a lot of misinformation, like this idea that incels are communicating with this covert emoji language.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes, incels have a kind of a hidden lexicon of trolling language, but I'm not. I've been studying this topic for a number of years now, and I'm not familiar with it.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
No, I've never. And the 100 emoji. Oh, I've never heard that. No, have you? No, ever. And we're close enough to this topic. I'm fucking on the vanguard, dude.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
content was there like maybe 10 lines 20 lines yeah and I've heard in apparently in another 60 minutes interview from America that apparently the child actor Owen Cooper had to educate the writers a little bit more on some other mistakes that they had originally written in they said that's not really realistic so yeah
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Exactly. So when I say that the show depicts something plausible, here's what I mean. So instead of depicting a cold blooded psychopathic killer, and it's up for debate whether Jamie, the boy in the show, is meant to be depicted as a psychopath. I tend to think no, but there may be some reason to think yes.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
You know, the idea that this show is then depicted to be shown in schools and inform politicians, and it's not accurate in a lot of meaningful ways, is kind of worrying.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes, and you can infer that because the parents are looking back through the rearview mirror and they very much feel guilty about not going in to see what type of content he was accessing on the internet.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I'm sympathetic to someone misspeaking, but to hear Prime Minister Starmer first call it a documentary... Kind of troubling. So just to get back on the mistakes it makes and the representation of the manosphere, I thought that that was intentionally depicting the confusion of the adults involved. And that seemed to be a creative decision. It even described one of the female detectives saying,
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
says, oh, incels, that's that Andrew Tate shite. And I don't know whether that's intentionally by design to show the confusion, because there's a world of daylight between Andrew Tate, incels. They hate each other. I've seen Andrew Tate antagonize incels on Twitter, saying, come out with me for the weekend. You'll no longer be incel. I'll prove it to you. And they go back and forth.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But it doesn't depict this cold-blooded, calculated killer who's... And the show doesn't claim to have a straight-line answer that it definitely was the manosphere influence that made this happen. It kind of skillfully, I think, presents a couple of potentially contributing factors.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Incels hate the red pill guys, the guys that claim they can game the system. They hate each other. There's a world of difference. Meaningful differences.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. And a cursory look at some of the research would have informed that. Do you know if they had a consultant...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I don't know. But specifically with regard to the government now paying a lot of close attention to this topic, we actually were commissioned by the UK Government Committee for Countering Extremism to do the largest incel study in the world. And we presented this to the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament. That's all online for people to see. And some of those findings were
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
would have informed a more accurate depiction of the show, or certainly should be reviewed again in light of looking into this topic again. But no, we weren't consulted, and I'm not going to get annoyed about that. But as far as I know, no Incel researcher was, no research team. I...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
have heard, and I can't know how verified this is, I heard it from the tin man, George, so I'm throwing him under the bus now. He says in his initial research into the show that they had a school psychologist and a child psychologist.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And that could be for the welfare of the child actors, or it could be to inform the child actor portrayal or the school portrayal, which on that front, I think they did a pretty good job. But one incel researcher could have...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes. And a direction, like you could have built in the mental health problem, the nihilism of the black pill differently. One thing that was, you could say, depicted Jamie's misogyny was what I call the low mate value theory of misogyny. The show actually kind of depicted that a little bit. It depicted Jamie
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
seeking to make a romantic play for Katie, the girl in his class, when he describes her as feeling weak. So he says her nudes have just been leaked by another misogynistic boy in the class who described her as flat chested. And Jamie chooses that time to opportunistically try and capitalize on this attack towards her self-esteem.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
In any case, it presents a young boy, Jamie, who's depicted as being very insecure about giving the impression to others that he's sexually successful. And that's kind of recognizable to a lot of sexually developing young males. That's a big concern of theirs. And that's how you derogate other rival males. Young men always derogate each other in that way.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And that's precisely how I hypothesize the low mate value theory of misogyny to work. It's kind of like an analog from within relationships where low mate value men in relationships try to attack their partner's self-esteem in order to lower their self-perceived mate value so they don't feel like they can leave the relationship. They say things like, who would have you except me? Things like that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I hypothesize that incels misogyny or male misogyny from outside the relationship is just that strategy, trying to lower women's self-esteem. There's also the aspect of
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
incels in particular it could be a very very sneaky strategy to try and encourage your rival males to stop trying nobody knows who these incels on the other end of the screen are they're just espousing this ideology to others online hoping that some of them buy into it and give up take the black pill meanwhile they could be out trying to capitalize on their misogyny that they're espousing so there's two tandem kind of strategies that would work very complementary to each other
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But by the same token, I really do believe most incels I've interviewed or talked with, they really do seem to believe it. So I don't know, maybe there are some really dark triad incels that are doing this. or dark triad men, because you needn't be an insult to do this. You could just anonymously participate in this.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And it's kind of like a free rider concept of your free riding on the effectiveness of their collective misogyny, but not getting any of the bad reputation yourself because it's anonymous. Yeah. And also not dragging yourself down in your own sort of sense of hope. Yeah. It only works if you create a sense of consensus in the woman that most men think like this.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And if you think about the misogyny of incels, it does seem almost like functionally designed to achieve this. It reminds women of their poor mating choices. Oh, you can't tell that Chad is going to end up beating you up, reminding them that they're going to hit the wall. Their mate value is going to expire quite sharply.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
reminder basically trying to function to help them lower their standards, which is kind of what you might expect if you're getting the cues that you're on cue to be an incel, you might activate some of this psychology.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And it's important that you do that by coordinated condemnation. So you have to create the sense of consensus. Oh, it's not just me that thinks like this. Now that might backfire in very modern environments because modern women get enough positive reinforcement, probably to coordinate every man in Austin. Right, and 20 DMs a day from people saying how hot you look.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
It's probably going to backfire. But imagine in our ancestral environment, if you could create consensus that, oh, hey, every guy in the tribe thinks that you're getting too big for your boots and you're not settling down fast enough or something like that. I argue with my supervisor about this because he thinks, oh, I don't know, there weren't many...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
he has his masculinity challenged by the girl he ends up killing, actually. I should say, spoiler alert. But I think everyone in the world has seen this show by now. So the girl he ends up killing, I think it was actually bold of the... the creators of the show, the writers, to write in that she was bullying him online, calling him an incel.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
single women with two highest standards in our ancestral environment. They were all married up pretty quick. But I think it could be a strategy that modern men pursue.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Um, it kind of doesn't really speak to it that much. So the male sedation hypothesis suggests that incel violence or sexless young men violence isn't as big a threat as we might expect it to be. You should expect the rise in sexlessness to also correspond with the rise in violent crime. And that doesn't seem to be happening so clearly.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And our hypothesis was that, well, young men are actually spending time cathartically or being pacified in online worlds, not just pornography, but online worlds themselves. And the show kind of does the opposite, that it suggests, oh, we thought they were safe in their room on their computer.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And yes, there are dangers to being online and there are problems associated with that and dangerous content you can access, but you almost certainly are safer in your room rather than out causing trouble in the streets. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Now, that's not for me to say, oh, I think it's good that young men aren't getting out into the world, but it may be a case of choose your poison, that if we didn't have these kind of online outlets, online status games, that could be buffering against the real world violence.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
you know phones are the new cigarettes and he does and to be fair to him he says 90% or 99% of boys who are exposed to this content would never take it as far as Jamie but he does also in the same breath suggest if you think the mating market is organized in this way anyone takes it to its logical end and
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I'm thinking that's a huge leap to make that the only move you have if you buy into incel ideology is to turn violent to level the playing field.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
They do a little bit, to be fair. They increasingly move the goalposts to... I was going to say, I think it would be like 90-10 or 95-5. They're more extreme. I've noticed an extreme Martin Bailey tactic among incels recently whereby they used to suggest... Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I thought that was important because it shows that whether or not you buy into being an incel at age 13, I mean, every 13-year-old boy is probably an incel, but whether or not you've bought into the ideology, it depicts that this being on the table as an insult kind of affects you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And the pressure that Jamie feels to present himself as sexually successful is probably exacerbated by consuming manosphere content, right? Incel is the insult of choice. It depicts that social media exacerbates this problem even further because he can see hundreds of classmates liking her comment.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
It also depicts that he kind of clumsily came upon a knife, which is fairly realistic, and maybe it wouldn't find its way into the hands of a 13-year-old white, well-raised kid. But there are a lot of knives on the ground in England at the moment, and he happened to find in his possession a knife.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
home too much it's a little too real and this kind of left me floundering a little bit because okay you know creative people who are making a show i'm not going to hold their feet to the fire they have creative license they can make a show and depict whatever they want but we just need to hit pause a second because if this show is prompting round table discussions with parliament with the prime minister which it has and the parliament are going to fund
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. , . . . . .. a, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a in ,,,,,,, a guy coming in with a modern take on masculinity, how he's going to show you how it's real masculinity to be a feminist, and they can see right through it. They don't buy it, these young guys.
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
He didn't intend to, well, as far as my reading of the show goes, he didn't intend to go out and kill the girl. He intended to confront her about this challenge, this insult to his masculinity. And having the knife, things got way out of hand. So that's what I mean when I say it's plausible.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But no one could say that about someone like Neil Strauss, Dan Bilzerian, who's been there and done that. One, at the game that they're selling, and say, it's actually hollow. That's a more powerful...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But in terms of a depiction of the epidemic of knife violence in this country, in the UK, which is specifically what the writers of the show have spoke about in interviews where they talk about what inspired the show, they talk about two specific instances and then they go on to talk about the epidemic of knife violence.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So Adolescence is this Netflix show that's absolutely blowing up and getting crazy amounts of attention at the moment. It's on track to become Netflix's most watched miniseries of all time. And that's just within a couple of weeks. So it's really capturing public attention. And one caller into a radio station that I heard from England this morning said that it just it hits people.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I thought that was something very important that was hinted at in the show too. In the final episode, the father, Stephen Graham's character, they tell the story of how he met Jamie's mother, the wife. And Stephen Graham, I hope he won't mind me saying, he's not exactly the most physically attractive guy. I think he's pretty short like me and not exactly Chad, would we say. But
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
he describes being very, very funny and very popular in school. And he met his wife there and they stayed together. And that's a much simpler time, right, compared to what Jamie's dating environment he's graduating into from being a young man. It's way more complex. And I think a lot of adults are kind of floundering because it's so novel to them.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So on that front, it's not representative of prototypical knife violence in the UK. to bring in the racial demographics as well, it's not typical of the scale of the manosphere problem. Like I say, there's never been a killing like this. There's been one killing with Jake Davison that's loosely tied to incel ideology, very different in nature to what's depicted in adolescence. And, um,
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, there's lots of different directions that could have gone with it. But yeah, there's a lot of more questions than answers after the show. And for me, I'm going to turn in real art critic now, but for me, there were too many unfired Chekhov's guns. Are you familiar with Chekhov's gun? No.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So Chekhov is this Russian author, and he says, if there's a gun in the first scene on the wall, by the end of the third act, it has to be fired. Otherwise, what's the point in having it? So for me, there were elements like, The young black girl who's acting out, the friend of Katie, a lot of hints at her storyline and would it be significant? Didn't really go anywhere.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Where did Jamie get the knife? Didn't really come into play that much. Was he seen going home? A lot of things just kind of unanswered. But yeah, whether that was strategic by the writers or not, I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
but it what you've got is a girl of what seems to be a kind of popular girl coordinating an online bullying attack for a lower status boy yes yeah and that's what i mean when i say it's plausible that this perceived slight about such an important feature of your masculinity in front of all your friends online and they get the ability to ratchet up that um
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
the likes on it so he gets the perception wow everyone's believing what she's saying I have to sort this out and it just he clumsily had a knife redeem my masculinity yes and he initially tried to make a play for her romantically when she was feeling low but yeah that's what I mean this idea of young men receiving a perceived slight and having to sort it out that actually is a plausible trigger for a lot of young male violence now
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
young male violence towards young women is the lowest category of all young male violence. It's typically young men against other young men. Very rare for an actual instance like Jamie. And certainly there's been no instance like Jamie inspired by Manosphere, nothing like that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Rather than the show perhaps maybe being culpable in inspiring something like that, they'll probably say, we told you so. And let's get this straight. There is not like a hidden epidemic of incel violence that we're just not picking up on. The media are all over this stuff. I told you before coming on air the reasons why incel content is so captivating to us.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes, this is an important point. And I just recently on the back of the show wrote to a former professor of mine, Alberto Acherbi, who has this model of cognitive attraction rules. So types of content that are really, really attractive to humans and incels ticks every box.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
In terms of Manosphere fans, it's also not really representative because ethnic minorities are actually way overrepresented in their admiration of Manosphere guys. How so? So, and specifically, how much do you admire Andrew Tate? I think it was like 12% of rates of approval among white boys and that rose for Asian. And I should say in the UK, Asian means South Asian, not East Asian.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And we're hoping to write a paper on that because it's important to understand why this content is so appealing and why we put it all over the news all the time. So the point that made me get onto this was The media are not missing incel violence. They're on it. Anything that's even loosely connected to incel violence, they're connecting it.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So, for example, I saw that Southport killing, I think, was reported on that the parents said they have fears about how Andrew Tate... The headline was, Parents fear that Andrew Tate may have been influential in the killing. And I read the article, and an important kind of sentence, it says...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There is no evidence of him accessing Andrew Tate content or this being an influential factor in him doing what he'd done. So the media is already clamoring for incel violence. So back to the attraction rules. So... The specific rules for attractive content, it has to be about sex. It has to cue the idea of a threat. It has to be minimally counterintuitive.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So for incels, the idea that this group of men on the internet forming an identity around such a peculiar aspect. It has to activate the tribal other psychology, be very negative. All these rules... incel violence, it also piggybacks on our evolved protective instinct about women. It's often framed as the potential violence and harm against women.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Steve Stewart-Williams has a really cool paper on the harm hypothesis and he talks about all the women are wonderful effect findings that we have that Both sexes seem to just prefer women, have pro-women biases in a whole host of different ways. Sentencing, just general preferences, really encourage people to read that paper. But this, that's an example of it.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
The in-cell, the attention-grabbing nature of in-cell narratives piggybacks on that as well. And that's why this story's made such a splash.
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think so, to some degree. The extent to which... I'm quite happy that the show is being used to spark a dialogue and all that, but the extent to which it's being taken seriously and being used as a catalyst for what seemingly is policy change, that's pretty troubling.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And the extent to which it seems like it's not research-backed and how the government seem to be latching on to this creative piece of performance art rather than the research,
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#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
clamoring to charities who as far as i'm aware haven't done research in this area either it just all seems a little bit much and just the machine that has kicked into gear in terms of promoting it so fast is very disconcerting yeah yeah it's a surprise certainly i think um
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And then for black boys, it was much, much higher. I can't remember the specific statistics, but the study is from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who are actually quite a progressive, almost you'd say woke organization. So for them to actually publish those findings tells you something. So that's kind of an interesting the way it's depicted. Now, like I say, with creative license,
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Or at least fund more research into it. There's no real consensus. I mean, Jonathan Hyde, I know you've had him on, has made a massive splash with the social media kind of findings, but they're not uncontroversial within academia. He gets pushed back a lot.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
lot right so it's not what's the current what's the current state of that do you know how much do you know about it i'm not as familiar i know christopher ferguson had some really interesting meta analyses finding small or null effects and theoretically very plausible idea that all these reasons why social media would be harmful and the empirical data is less clear but um
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But yeah, it's worth looking into more and don't make knee jerk policy decisions on it until you have a bit more consensus in the science rather than, I'd never say settled science, but you can have consensus. What would be some of the worst policy proposals that you could think of? I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I just think I'm pretty libertarian in my sensibilities that I'm not keen for this idea of bans, banning phones. And I don't know, maybe bans of the phones while they're in school could be okay. But I think the horse is kind of bolted on that. I don't know. Fuck, dude. There's a...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
brings a lot of attention to it that might not have already been there like we look at those figures of how popular is Andrew Tate among young people fairly low so you potentially have made it really cool to be into this stuff that's a question I would have guessed
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I guess I'd just be reluctant to come down too hard and condemn any type of intervention, but I would condemn the knee-jerk, non-research-backed interventions. Any interventions that are even trialed should be informed by research and rolled out fairly slowly. Don't have every school in the UK now has to follow this intervention path. That's almost unheard of.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I'm not going to hold Stephen Graham's feet to the fire. He chose Owen Cooper, who's an incredible actor, and his performance speaks for itself. Anyone would want to cast him in the role if you had access to him. Stephen Graham obviously probably wanted to play the father himself. He's going to realistically cast someone who looks like him. But I just think we need a bit of perspective.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Being pro something is probably more galvanizing than against, maybe.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I think you raise an important point. I do believe in the positive male role model thing that getting that conversation off the ground could be effective. And there are good ones out there. I'd count you among the good male role models out there. Yeah. encourage people to quit alcohol for a thousand days. You're getting people's sperm count checked. You're doing force for good, right?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Have you had yours done? Not yet. I'm on the case. The girlfriend harassed me to do.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah. Good. Positive role model, right? But I do think these interventions, they need to be real. So I'll give an example. I just watched a debate about this topic in an Irish debate channel on Primetime RTE. And there was two very polarized depictions of masculinity.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There was one guy who was very, very traditional masculinity, who described masculinity to him as being protector and protect the women in his life and very, very kind of old school, but not not kind of crazy stuff. And then you had the very modern guy in a man bun who's a teacher. And he literally said, and it was kind of a comedic incident.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
He said, I hope that masculinity doesn't mean that I'm expected to take care of the women in my life and protect them. And it scans to the audience. Very pretty girl just goes... It was like you couldn't write comedy like that. But that kind of shows there has to be somewhere in between, but they have to be credible. They have to be seen as credible to young people.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
If Parliament are calling the writers of the show in for an emergency roundtable discussion that's going to, I mean, my reading of it is it seems like it's going to inform policy. We need to be a bit more, have a bit more perspective there. Policy should be research based. It shouldn't be based on emotive performance art, no matter how powerful that art is.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I don't think the guy with the man bun speaking about this softer, gentler masculinity is going to inspire a guy who's already down the rabbit hole of Andrew Tate. I was encouraged to hear Scott Galloway, who I think speaks a lot of sense on this topic. He was on with Stephen Bartlett in The Diary of the CEO, and he speaks about that idea that I talk about earlier,
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
the dating market, you're untrained for it and you get no coaching. And he speaks about the need for credible male role models. And that's something like sexual education in schools. As far as I know, it doesn't include how to actually become attractive to your preferred sex. Yeah, I can tell you what the urethra is, but I have no idea how mating dynamics work. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So maybe there's pretty benign how to build a dating app that's appealing to the other sex type of workshop. How to disagree with somebody in a partnership. Yeah. How to build a flourishing relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Very important. And I thought it was bold of Galloway to make this point. He said that it was in his own personal experience learning and someone telling him that actually developing yourself as a man, achieving more status, getting an education, succeeding in work, that that actually can help you be more attractive to women. That's a very empowering message.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There's nothing more motivating to young men than doing this will help you be more attractive to women who will be in school every day.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But the problem is when you attach the goal of becoming attractive to women to any sort of male self-development, it gives this impression that it's misogynistic. I've spoke to you about... Barack Obama's autobiography where he said he was reading different types of literature to attract different types of women.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And that's kind of intuitive to young men is get the goal, get the girl, you kind of develop yourself, you succeed at a contest and you get the prize. Maybe people think that framing is very misogynistic. I don't know. I think if you don't use that type of motivation to young men, you're going to lose them to the manosphere. Yeah, I...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, so you and I spoke about this white pill vision of a dystopian future where young men use AI to train themselves to be better. But I wonder whether that's another downstream unintended consequence that the very fact of having to practice will be seen as lowering your status.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, and I will give credit to Jack Thorne, one of the writers of the show. He was interviewed by Sky News after speaking with Prime Minister Starmer, and he said... it is important to remember this is just a fiction and I hope this starts a dialogue and leads to further discussion with people, perhaps who've done the research and things like that.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Well, that's it, practice in the dark. Or something I spoke with Elliot about on his show was that it will come across as a bit more inauthentic. It's kind of like when people use the tricks of saying your name too much, or, you know, it does come across as that inauthentic. That's an interesting kind of perspective. But yeah, those are the kind of
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
brave new worlds we're going to find ourselves in but yeah it's interesting that I wonder whether women or people in particular are aware that sexual selection is that filtering effect and they don't want too much artificial training on it so you can get a low mate value male they almost have an ache about him learning how to improve his attractiveness acumen.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Really good point. I saw on Twitter this morning, actually, an account, I don't know his real name, actually, but Nuance Enjoyer often posts some really interesting stuff. And he spoke about how looks maxing actually might be more realistic for a lot of unattractive young men than fundamentally changing your personality. Like a lot of people kind of think, oh, it's not all about looks in cells.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
You can just cultivate a real winning personality. That's not that easy at the best of times. It's a lot easier when you're perceived as attractive anyway. Oh. Oh, so you lead with the way that you look. Lead with the way that you look. And you can actually probably, like the gym, for example, unfortunately your height isn't one you can change much.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But yeah, you can fundamentally change your look. You can hire a stylist to kit you out in the right gear. The gym can transform you. So it actually is plausible that you could improve your mate value by looks maxing more than changing your personality. There's not an awful lot of... personality change interventions that reliably work. Neuroticism is one you can slightly change.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But that begs the question of how research-backed was the creation of this show? And if it's not very, then why is it being used as kind of this benchmark or catalyst to start the conversation? And how useful it will be to show this, to find four hours in a curriculum in every school up and down the UK to show this, What will that lead to?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Well, this explains the young male syndrome is that when you're at an evolutionary zero, when you're incel and you have no mating prospects, you can make a big play, win big or go bust. That's what it is. It's the young male syndrome is I'll go to war. I'll go do whatever, take a massive risk for a win big and change my trajectory. But yeah, you're right.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But it's interesting that the mating market is there's a certain type of person that wants to pretend it's completely opaque. And even when I use language like the mating market, people say, oh, it's not a market. That's icky to do that. You are selected in it. You compete in it. You're chosen. A rank order. You have value in it. It's completely behaved like a market. Like trades.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Is there evidence to suggest that such an intervention will lead to positive outcomes? I'm not so sure. There's good reason to maybe think that it wouldn't. And I just recently, before I came over here, I've seen that there's a petition has been started to pull the pin in the project. And a couple of the reasons cited seem quite compelling to me.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I'm trying to give a charitable interpretation of how you would achieve what he's going for with still providing some kind of guardrails and guidance for young men. So maybe something like, positive masculinity is locus of control or agency. So that gives space for whatever your vision of success is. Masculinity is your ability to cultivate enough agency to achieve that. That includes everyone.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I had a comment actually on my Instagram. This was this mother who watched my episode with George, The Tin Men, with her daughter and tried to suggest that you need to train men to not be competitive with each other. And I was thinking, well, first of all, women select women.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
on status a lot so there's no point lying to them about that uh humans form status hierarchies it's an absolute crime to convince someone that they don't imagine what a hamstring you give your son if you tell him you don't need to compete in any way with others in society yeah
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
But yeah, it just... The fundamental point is that if there's any positive masculinity to be pushed, we have to go post-woke on this. The days of describing gym bro culture as being far right, bright wing, that has to just die. We have to go for whatever the opposite of that is. That's just never going to catch on.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Some of them include that the blame and shame doesn't work, so it'll make the potential... people who would be guilty of this crime clam up and reject the intervention. It also will give ideas to people. It makes notoriety towards this type of crime. I mean, that's something I'm very concerned about.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So with spree killing like this, like mass shootings, incel violence, notoriety is often a big factor. So if you're suddenly talking about a crime that We'll get you perhaps a show that is the most watched Netflix show of all time within a couple of weeks. Parliament are going to discuss this problem. It's going to be shown to every school in the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
That gives notoriety and that's perhaps will have a backfiring effect.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
this show being shown to every student in the UK throughout the next couple of months, all within a couple of weeks of it airing, by the way, then I think we're entitled to maybe scrutinize the realism or the realistic nature of the show or how much it depicts accurately the problem it's talking about. And on that front, then, you can ask the question, how realistic is this problem? So
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So it's a kind of a naivety, I would say, for people to think that the misogyny can't be explained at least partially by the mental health.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I'm still spending far too much time on X, so that's the main place I'm hanging out these days, at Costello William. But if you're interested in our academic work, go to my ResearchGate profile or my Google Scholar or email me and I'll send you whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So bad. Maybe before next time. Yes. Appreciate you. Very good.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yeah, absolutely. And there is a reason why incel stories really capture our attention. So it could be actually really dangerous to not fully understand why that's happening and to continue doing this. I mean, I remember when Jake Davison, the incel killer in England, who's loosely tied to incel ideology, His videos were played all over Sky News.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And there is evidence that these extremist killers, mass shooters, they cruise for a cause and specifically to gain notoriety. There's an institute for male supremacism. They have some guidelines. Are they pro or anti? It's always confusing to me that they categorize incels as typifying male supremacism because incels themselves...
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
They're really keen to stress to you how they call themselves subhuman. They're really keen to show how they're not supremacist. But in any case, they have some guidelines on reporting on incel violence. And one point that I really, really agree with is the no notoriety protocol. You shouldn't make potential heroes or antiheroes out of these people.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And that's perhaps potentially what showing adolescence to every student in the U.K., Perhaps does. It also brings the number of people, it moves those who have never seen the show or never heard of Manosphere from zero to everyone overnight when you're showing it suddenly. And, you know, I don't know how effective it's going to be. Is Jamie a good avatar for the typical incel?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
There are some ways in which he's not, but I think they do speak to an important point about how, like I said earlier, the incel topic being on the table or the incel rhetoric being around affects every young man. So he's affected by the threat of being perceived as an incel. But according to our research, incels are disproportionately ethnic minority.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So in our recent data, 42% of incels were a person of color. That's exclusively US and UK sample. The extraordinarily high rates of autism among the incel community, roughly 30% based on our latest data. So that really wasn't touched on at all in the show. The mental health wasn't touched on an awful lot in the show.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Little bits of his low self-esteem and how insecure he was, that maybe was spoken to a little bit. But the suicidality, like I've often said, that extremist violence of incels is often likely self-directed.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Yes. I mean, it's unverifiable how many have actually followed through on their suicidal ideation. But just to remind your viewers of the statistics, they're quite stark. 30% of incels in our recent data said they thought about suicide or self-harm every day over the last two weeks, when 33% more said they thought about it more than half the days or several days over the last two weeks.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So two thirds have had these thoughts pretty regularly. At least once in the last two weeks. Now, if you put that into context, in the general population, it's 5% of people had had a suicidal thought that year.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
Let me just be very clear. There is no epidemic of manosphere-inspired violence like depicted in the show. Unlike, however, the epidemic of knife violence, which is a very real phenomenon and perhaps is more tightly tied to drill music, for example. That is a very real problem. So on that front, it absolutely is not realistic of the problem it's painting.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So it's a massive, that's a story that wasn't really spoken about in terms of realism, of the threat of extremism from incels that I think people need to pay attention to is as much the mental health as anything else. What else about Jamie that was right and wrong?
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
So I thought episode three is extremely powerful where it depicts him and his psychiatrist having a kind of an interview to gauge, she's trying to gauge how, if she can get into his mindset about why he did what he did. And in that episode, it's quite powerful acting, but I recognize, and a lot of people online are commenting that, wow, you can see what a psychopath he is, how manipulative he was.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
And I'm kind of thinking, wow, Well, no, I just saw a pretty normal teenager who's angry. He oscillates between really charming and trying to cultivate rapport and extreme anger, insecurity. I also saw... There was little hints that he perhaps treated the female figures of authority in his life a little bit differently.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
I thought the school that was depicted showed that as well, that the male teachers were kind of angry and shouting and able to command maybe a bit more. Women were a little bit more fawning or useless. Right. And maybe that speaks to what Richard Reeves talks about the need for really positive male role models as teachers in the school.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
One of the male teachers they depicted was pretty floundering. Mr. Malick is his name. He comes in late. His shirt is untucked and he's He's burnt out, and that's a real problem in UK schools. I have a background in education, and I know it's really hard for schools to retain teachers more than five years. So they really depicted that the schools function more as behavioral management.
Modern Wisdom
#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong
That was one thing that's really accurate. I don't know if that mirrors your experience of UK schools.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, so it's making a huge splash and it's shining a light on my topic of research, so the incel topic or the manosphere more broadly. The first couple of things I'd really want to clarify from the outset is that it's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. So while you might say that the father had very clear things that it was understandable to be angry about, I think Jamie's teenage anger is kind of prototypical as well, because, yes, he feels entitled to dominate or perhaps he feels pressured to try and assert himself that way because he's so threatened by this precarious masculinity that if he's called an incel, he has to rectify that.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
by challenging the girl that called him an incel he has to really prove to the psychiatrist that he is sexually successful he even makes up some lies about that and he does a very typical male typical teenager kind of oscillation between anger resentment cooperation charming i recognize that character up and down schools in the uk when i used to work in schools
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
very typical of that kind of confrontational approach to an authority figure. So when I see some people online calling Jamie a psychopath, I didn't see much evidence of that. I saw a few maybe perhaps hints that the show was trying to depict him as a psychopath. One was that he tried to get away with the murder, obviously the murder itself.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
It didn't depict him as this cold-blooded killer who meant to go out and kill the girl. It depicted this guy who went to confront her, happened to have a knife that was given to him by his friend, and things got out of hand. Now, the psychopathy hint that I picked up on was that he kept his shoes because they were too expensive.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
He got rid of all his clothes to try and get away with the crime, but he kept his shoes because they cost too much. I thought that the show might have tried to depict him as a psychopath. But in the psychiatry interview in episode three, which is a phenomenal episode,
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
i just saw that typical somewhat low self-esteem teenage boy who was trying to prove himself oscillating between cooperative and abrasive uh yeah but um i do think his anger is more about the pressure he feels to show that he's not going to become an incel because although every 13 year old boy is probably an incel the insinuation of the girl using it as an insult was that he would always be an incel and perhaps young boys
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
People get the impression that everyone, adults and teenagers, get the impression that everyone is having a lot more sex than they really are. The culture is sex-saturated in advertisements and everything. You walk through a city, you're stimulated by sexual stimuli everywhere. But in reality, people are having less and less sex, but people get the impression they're having more.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So this pressure to prove yourself as not an incel, I think that's what he's angry about and how understandable that is.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, there's a reason why it's the insult of choice when you want to derogate a man. Incel has now kind of become to function just as an insult.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So Prime Minister Starmer was asked if he'd seen the show, if he'd have plans to play the show for politicians in Parliament. and he said that he might and he even misspoke and he described the show as a documentary at first which i'm unsympathetic to a um misspeaking but the fact that that might be the tendency to over inflate the the remit of this show so in my opinion
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
What is unusual about the modern-day incels is that they are the first group of incels throughout history, as far as I'm aware, to galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up. Now, I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic, because incels typically talk to each other anonymously.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So you actually don't know what the person, anonymous account 6565, is actually doing in real life. So if you think strategically as a low mate value man, if you want to level the playing field for yourself, you might try to espouse this ideology that encourages the rest of young men to give up, take the black pill, stop trying. The second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And I thought the show really picked up on that because it told the story of how Jamie tried to actually capitalize on what he describes as a moment of weakness in Katie, the girl he ends up killing. He heard about the fact that her nudes nude pictures got leaked around the year group. And he thought that might be an opportunity where she was feeling weak.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And he tried to make a play to go out with her. So this is how I hypothesize that misogyny functions. The last time I was on your show, I spoke about how within relationships, people can choose the benefit provisioning strategy to keep your partner or the cost inflicting strategy.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So the cost inflicting strategy is to lower your partner's self-esteem so that she has a lower sense of her own mate value and feels like she can't leave you. It's really dark stuff, but it's a well-established finding that low mate value men use this strategy within relationships.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Now, low mate value men are the ones that are most prone to misogyny within relationships and outside of relationships. So what I hypothesize is that misogyny is trying to function to do exactly what Jamie was trying to capitalize. It's trying to lower women's self-esteem so they have lower standards and thereby you might have a chance.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Low mate value men, when they're abusing their partners, they say things like, who would have you except me? So that the partner feels like they have to stay with them. If you think about the misogynistic rhetoric in the manosphere, or from incels in particular, it seems almost special design functioning to try and lower women's standards.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
It chastises them for choosing Chad, because incels often point out how the person most likely to abuse a woman is Chad, the sexually successful man, the partners they choose. So they derogate women's choices. They also derogate women waiting. They say, remind women that they're going to hit the wall at the age of 30, that past fertility, their mate value is going to decline.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art, no matter how powerful that piece of art is. So that's kind of disconcerting. And I'd hope that the additional interest that the show has brought to this topic would shine a light on the real research on the topic rather than just the show itself, because
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So the insinuation is they should settle down earlier. All of these things seem to be functioning to try and lower standards. So two things, trying to encourage other men, your competition to drop out and trying to lower women's standards seem very functional in the way in cells operate. So that's something I've become interested in lately.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yes, and I should say that... my interactions with incels and from what I can see, they don't seem consciously aware of this strategy, if that is what they are doing, if that is how the misogyny is functioning. They very much do seem to buy their own ideology. They do buy the black pill of dropping out.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And on the one hand, you might say, having grown up, it was the main concern for young men was trying to compete for women. It was like a big business, most important thing in your world. What could encourage young men to just drop out of that?
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But incels would see it that they get a lot out of incel ideology compared to the humiliation, the anxiety, the exhaustion of competing in a dating market that they see as unrewarding. With the incel ideology, incels get a common enemy. They get a black and white blueprint of how the world works. They get a sense of fraternity with their fellow incels.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
They get a trolling lexicon language to use that kind of encourages identity fusion with the incel identity. They get an excuse to no longer participate in the mating market. And perhaps they're, through pornography, they find that their mating goals are, they're getting just enough to scratch the itch that they feel like they're not totally evolutionary dead ends and that might be just enough.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
What doesn't come with pornography use is status. So insults are very low in status. It functions as an insult. So that is still there should be motivation for them to go out and seek a real world mate, because being able to be sexually selected is a cue of status. It actually functions as your status as well. So yes, incels get a lot out of the ideology and the identity.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
rebel against what they see as the humiliation of the mating market. And it's kind of hard to say, well, actually, they should keep trying in the dating market. They should leave all those positives that they perceive from the incel identity behind and go get rejected 99 times more. And I promise you that the hundredth time you'll get success.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And you and I might say, yeah, that is what they should do. And it is worth it on the other side. Everyone has to go through a bit of rejection and anxiety to achieve romantic success. But for a generation of incels, they're kind of coming to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And that's maybe where we need to intervene.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yes, so the show kind of paints the picture that he tried a lot of different hobbies, that the parents encouraged him to try lots of different sports and things like that, and the only one thing that he was good at or enjoyed was his drawing and his art, and he ended up leaving that alone in favour of the internet addiction. And make no bones about it, the internet is really addictive.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
The show itself, it's a piece of fiction, and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK. I think it is a plausible depiction of how incel violence may occur, but there's no typical instance of incel violence that this is based on. There has been no case like that is depicted in the Netflix show.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
I mean, we're all addicted to some level or other to the internet, so it's very hard... to imagine what that does to a developing brain, a young male mind. But I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere-inspired violence, like Jamie, is very thin on the ground. There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yes, it's a plausible depiction, but yeah, perhaps it's a broader problem of just rejecting other in-real-life hobbies in order to spend time online. Also, If the only place you're learning about the dating market, for a young teenage boy, Jamie is an example of someone who's very worried about it. And it's a fierce contest.
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
You become a teenager and you're thrown into it and you don't get any preparation for that. In school, they have sexual education classes. But as far as I know, they consist primarily of consent lessons and biological lessons about how sex works. they don't give any lessons on how do you actually become an attractive partner? How do you attract your favorite sex?
TRIGGERnometry
InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
How do you actually form flourishing relationships? So it's this black box that teenagers are in, and it's the most important thing to them. And the only people giving answers to it are these pickup artists, manosphere, red pill tactics, which will train young men how to achieve short-term mating success that doesn't lead to long-term flourishing relationships.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And one point I'd really like to make is that there might be an opportunity to use, as credible role models, the developmental arc of a lot of these Manosphere guys themselves. So a lot of pickup artists or red pill people, they achieve success in this short-term mating game, they win at the pickup artistry, and they climb the mountaintop, and they realize this is not fulfilling.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And they have a turn, a change of ways. They discover God, or they completely change their ways. You have Tucker Max as an example of this. Dan Bilzerian is an example of this. Neil Strauss, who wrote the original pickup artist book, The Game, he had a total turn and wrote another follow-on book, which is terrific, all about how he realized it wasn't leading to flourishing relationships.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So I think that's an opportunity for schools to actually build workshops around their stories, because they'll be seen as credible role models. They're not just some kind of stuffy adult teachers who don't understand modern dating. These are guys who won at the red pill game, at the pickup artist game. So they absolutely have to be perceived as credible to the young men who buy into this ideology.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. And it's a tough challenge to actually, you know, educate young men about how that actually isn't that fulfilling. I mean, he seems pretty fulfilled in the depiction he gives. And yeah, it ticks a lot of the boxes of what young men really like. Fast cars, lots of money, lots of power, good fraternity with his friends and brother, like you said, and lots of women.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So yeah, it is hard not to crack. But I think we do need to show young men that there are other status games to play and that For all the positives that comes with Andrew Tate, whatever he's got, he's detested by a lot of the world. And he's not seen as high status by many men. And the long-term flourishing relationship is the route to success for more men, I would say.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence. And they mentioned two specific cases that they were inspired by, but they don't give much detail about those. And people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of a black young man killing a girl.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And I think we need to champion that as a goal instead of the short-term oriented stuff.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So one big risk factor is there's a massive over-representation of autism among incels. And there's many reasons why a young man with autism might be particularly vulnerable to the incel ideology. Young men with autism, they're very black and white in their thinking. There's a lot of comorbidity with poor mental health. Incels have really poor mental health. So do young men with autism.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And when you're in a state of really low mental health, that's when a black and white vision of the world really appeals to you. You don't have the cognitive bandwidth available to make sense of a complex dating market. So you will absolutely find the black and white rule book of pickup artists or the incel ideology as appealing.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Young men with autism much prefer online networking without having to have in-person interactions. It's a special niche interest that they get to have a hyper-specialization that they get some status for.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
There's lots of reasons why young men with autism might be vulnerable and when captured by the ideology might be the ones that are particularly prone to extreme violence, which is some troubling data too. So that's a huge one. And the show didn't really explore that. Perhaps it was too big of a third rail to explore or too much of a narrow direction to go.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
uh with but just to put that into context it's likely that between 18 to 30 percent of incels have autism so i'll break that that those figures down for you some studies have found that 18 of incels self-report having a diagnosis in our most recent research which is the largest incel study in the world we used what's called the aq10 scale and that's not a scale to diagnose autism but it's used by clinicians to or to
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
to assess whether someone is entitled to a referral. So if you score 6 out of 10 on this scale or above, you are entitled to a referral. And 80% of people who score 6 out of 10 or above and get a referral go on to get a diagnosis. So you've got a ballpark figure there of likely 18% to 30% of incels who have autism.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
which is extraordinarily high compared to the general population, which is, for young boys, between 1% and 3%. So that's a really crucial factor. The fatherlessness, I'm not aware of any specific data. And I should have asked it in our most recent research. But it seems likely to me, lack of role models.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
I think loneliness more broadly, just lacking friendships, learning about the world through online. Those are all risk factors for the ideology.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
They're finding different instances that it may have been inspired by. Now, from my point of view, As artists, Stephen Graham, the writer of the show, he probably wanted to star in it himself and probably wanted to star as the father. So it's plausible that he would cast someone who could realistically play his son.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
They also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper, the 14-year-old actor who plays the main character, Jamie, in the show. So it's plausible they would want to cast him as well. But
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
On the other hand, if there are specific instances that inspired the show, and you see all this speculation that people are saying, oh, it's swapping the races and it's damning the white working class people of Britain, you could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show or what inspired the casting.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And it could be nothing more than just saying,
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
yeah i wanted to play the the father of the character and we discovered owen he was a terrific actor and that's it but uh there's been nothing so yes it while the show is a plausible depiction from my point of view of how violence like this might occur um in cell inspired violence it's very important to clarify that it's not typical of knife crime in britain which i would wager
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
is drill music has more specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence than incel violence or manosphere inspired violence. So that's one thing. I do hope that the politicians who are interested in this topic now pay attention to research rather than just the show.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about. When you're at school, you're trapped with the best and the worst. And it brings down the good kids who are like, don't want to be violent in school, but they have to kind of be trapped in with students who want to fight and disrupt everything. So that's different.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, absolutely. And that was my reading of it as well, that it was just this crowd control. And a lot of teachers will tell you that that's their experience, that they get burnt out and they are just managing the behaviour for the most part of the class. And yeah, people have different reactions to the way that school was depicted.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And people who don't have the experience in school, they think, oh, that must be just a terrible school. And I don't know, it was pretty typical. I've been in a lot of schools, and yes, there's a massive gulf between the good schools and the poor schools, but... That wasn't, it was pretty typical. Really? Yeah.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. And my girlfriend is a clinical psychology student and also does supply teaching in schools. And her critique of the show was that the psychiatrist was a little bit easily rattled for what a psychiatrist working in prisons should be. She commented that
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Well, I hear a lot worse than that and receive a lot more anger from the teenage children in a school on an average Tuesday than in a prison. So yeah, I think that the show did try to depict that, that the school system and even the prison system, it drew parallels between them, but how ineffective they were. You hear in the prison, it's just behavior management overall.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
There's no rehabilitation happening in the prisons, really. And perhaps you can question how much learning is happening in the schools as well.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, so that would be kind of my main hope for where we go from here and what happens in response to all this attention that the show has garnered.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. And even when Mr. Malik, he was kind of depicted as this inept teacher and his go-to move was, let's play another DVD or let's put another film on. And that kind of is the go-to move for the burnt out teacher is just play something. And you can kind of draw parallels to parenting there as well. It's so tempting to just...
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating. I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere-inspired violence, like Jamie, is very thin on the ground. There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
pawn your kid off on the screens, even from a toddler up to a teenager, very hard to entertain them. A lot of young teenagers now go to their parents and say, I'm bored. If I ever went to my father and said I was bored, he would make work for me. You'd never do it because that's what his response would be. But parents now talk about, oh, I don't know how to entertain my kid.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So it's very tempting for them to just say, well, at least they're interested in something. They spend time on their computer.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
In schools during the school day? Perhaps I would, yeah. Just because I can't see why you'd be able to concentrate on a lesson while you're actually... I couldn't.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, and if the goal of school education is the Latin to lead out, to prepare for the world, there's not really many workplaces where you're allowed to just be on your phone with your colleagues, with your boss around for sure. But maybe they're trying to change that too and say people should work from home more. But that's a different topic, I suppose.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But there's also perhaps a larger point, again, that perhaps the online worlds are actually kind of distracting young people a lot. So take sexlessness, for example. That's the big kind of concern a lot of people are concerned with now. But if you took it 20 years ago, the concern was too much underage sex. And teenagers are having too much sex.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Whereas now, they may be distracted from all sorts of kind of bad behaviors by the online worlds. which aren't perfect, aren't great, and obviously learn there's dangers like manosphere ideology, incel ideology, all of that. It's the world's largest status game. You can get bullied at enormous rates by people dogpiling onto you online. But it might be actually this distraction
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
occupying people on screens might be actually buffering against real-world violence. So there is some data from sexual violence that wherever pornography increases, sexual violence instances go down. So on a societal level, it does seem to distract otherwise sexually violent men.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So that might be actually one reason I spoke about with you last time why incel violence isn't actually worse, because typically you'd think increases in sexlessness among young men That's a recipe for disaster. We call it the young male syndrome. But this modern generation, they aren't out there status driving and causing chaos in the streets for the most part. But they are up to trouble online.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So it's kind of choose your poison, really. There may be a way to try and regulate the sites a bit more. But I think the genie is out of the bottle, really, in terms of whether you can take it away from a generation now.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. It's nothing new. I even saw Stephen Graham, the writer of the show, he gave one interview where he was up in arms, where he was horrified that he heard reports from some parents who have teenage daughters who even said that their boyfriends were requesting pictures of their genitals. And I thought, OK, that's a lot of teenagers, boys and girls are going to be sexual with each other.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
I don't think that's crazy. It's not a sign of a pornified generation that is doomed. I don't think it's insane that young men would want to be sexual with young women like that. So, yeah, there is a danger of a moral panic. And these... Overzealous control measures are always brought in under the guise of safety.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
We need to protect, and often children, young people are always the ones they say, we need to protect them. And that's how a lot of tyrannical governments kind of put in these overreaching, far-reaching mechanisms of control.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So I think one thing that would be good is to implement a kind of relationship formation acumen lessons into the sexual education that they get. I'm not sure the extent to which that's done or if it's done at all. My intuition is that it's not. I don't think there's anyone training young people how to be a more attractive partner.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And people might bristle at this idea of, well, how can you train people? But actually, we research this stuff. You can. You can absolutely train people on how to improve their mate value, how to learn about how the mating market works. And that's an enormously valuable thing to do.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And I think they've introduced it in a lot of universities in East Asia now, actually, where they'll go on practice dates, things like this. Because if you don't fill that gap vacuum, Andrew Tate and Red Pill pickup artists will. So you have to offer them something from schools. Now, the trouble is, people teaching in schools.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Sorry, Francis, we tended to not be the most credible role models, right? It's very difficult. So finding the people to do that.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Mate, you're still single, so that hasn't helped. It's a hard gig, but something I have in mind is, let's take online dating apps. You could have a workshop where the boys and the girls learn how to cultivate a better dating app profile. What does the other sex respond to? What works? And it could be a fun thing.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
I imagine you'd have a full classroom full of young people that day when you're learning how to do that. And you could make a fun out of it without it being too spicy. But I don't know.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah, absolutely. Even if the only variable you took into account there was age. So as you get older, more women are interested in you than when you're 14 or 15, there's only your age and maybe younger are interested in you, no one older. But as you get older, there's younger and older interest in you, so that broadens the pool.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But yes, there's opportunity to accrue more status, and you're not stuck in this violent status game of school, which is really kind of scary for a lot of young boys, I imagine. So yeah, there is opportunity to age out of insult them, for sure. But I think motivating them with the goal of, if you achieve status in these ways, education, intelligence, a good job, being reliable,
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
that comes with the reward of being sexually selected. I don't think anyone is saying that to young boys. It's not used as a motivational tool in schools, but perhaps it should be. It's one of the main things that motivates young men, is the promise of being sexually selected. They kind of are maniacally driven to do whatever is rewarded by the opposite sex.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So the mind of one sex shapes the body and the mind of the other, and we're motivated to respond to whatever is rewarded. So that could be leveraged to help young boys be motivated.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly, the worldwide body count associated with incel violence is massively overblown. To pay attention to the media, you would think that they were the most violent group.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Absolutely, yeah. So it would have been the lesson there would have been for the parents to really double down on his artistic skill, what he was good at, and really foster that. And rather than letting him get kind of distracted into other status games and think that, oh... being incel at 13 is the worst thing in the world. I need to prove that I'm not.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
He should have been just fixating on a longer game and developing himself. Yeah, because like you say, a young boy at 13, every 13 year old man is probably or boy is an incel. but they needn't be so concerned about it. And that was one thing I thought the show did well in depicting that this is a modern concern.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
I thought they did really well in the show to juxtapose Jamie's experience of worrying about forming relationships and learning about it on the internet and panicking about it and letting it affect his self-esteem so much. They juxtaposed that with his father's experience, who... Stephen Graham isn't the most handsome fella, but he's depicted as being very funny in school, in the show.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And that's how he met his mother at school. But it kind of... it contrasts it. It was a lot more straightforward of an experience. You meet someone at school, you go on to form a relationship with them. Whereas now, the modern dating market is very, very complex and novel, and the parents don't know how to prepare young people for it.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
The adults barely know how to adapt to it themselves, never mind train the next generation of what it's going to be like. I think we have to try. And yeah, preparing them. If online dating is where it's at, that needs to be built into the lessons. That's important. How do you not get filtered out? How do you shine? If you can, in whatever ways you can.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But in terms of like a body count or how many people have been killed by incels, it's estimated that it's roughly 59 people around the world in a handful of ideologically motivated instances of violence that are still somewhat contested how motivated by incel ideology they were. So it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more incel violence.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Well, you guys are talking about it and your audience are, because I know you had Stephen Shaw on to talk about the birth rate collapse and the population collapse. But just to kind of some tangential points to that, I would talk about unwanted childlessness among women specifically. So a lot of what Dr. Shaw talks about is But that's something we really need to reckon with.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
How are we going to adapt to a world with a really aging population? Because the fertility crisis or the population collapse, yes, it's concerning to me as an issue in and of itself. But people tend to think, oh, what is your solution? Just roll back women's rights for 100 years and make them have babies they don't want? Yes, sure. That's not my solution. I'm just messing.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But at the very least, women should be able to have the amount of children they want. So this is against their own desires. So I would maybe... Neither sex is happy with the way things are. Right. And I would be in favour of perhaps even going as radical as subsidising egg freezing for young women. Young women shouldn't have to choose between career or children.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
What matters in terms of bringing a child into the world is the age of the egg and the amount of eggs you can work with from the start. The body, the age of the body of the woman is actually less consequential as the age of the egg.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Perhaps, but if you pumped money into R&D to make this technology even better, giving young women the most chance to do whatever they want with their eggs, if you harvest them at the most you can early on, then women can have children, they can sell them, they can do their career. And they still have their autonomy, but they don't encounter this unwanted childlessness.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And I think that's an epidemic that isn't spoken about enough. That's kind of the equivalent of male incels is the unwanted childlessness. And they often cite the reason of not being able to find a partner who measures up to their standards as one of the motivating factors for the unwanted childlessness.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Just to be clear, the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of incel violence. So it's not like there may be more incel violence that we're not aware of. The media are on it. Don't worry. They would definitely catch every example of it. So there isn't an epidemic of manosphere violence like is depicted in the show.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
That doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern. You do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the broader problem of misogyny. And the only harm, violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that, is not the only harm associated with incel ideology.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating. You have the mental health costs, the suicidality figures that we talked about last time. And you have the hostility to women. You have these misogynistic attitudes kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just incels themselves but maybe are familiar with the topic.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And that was something that I thought the show did very well. it depicts a 13-year-old boy. And one of the cops makes the point to his son when he's talking about the kid. He says, what 13-year-old isn't an incel? And what I thought the show did very well is that they showed that there's a pressure on young males now to not be called an incel.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And the main character, he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering, whereby she used incel as an insult. And I thought that was pretty brave by the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully. But the choice of incel as the insult of choice, I think people will recognise that. You see that online a lot.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And to derogate a man's ability to achieve sexual success is a pretty sore one. So I thought that was brave from the writers. And it was plausibly done that Jamie, the main character, he just felt so publicly shamed on social media, whereby a lot of people in his class were liking her comment where she called him an incel.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So it kind of shows the broader influence of the incel topic above and beyond just people buying into the full ideology themselves. Because the show doesn't unpack exactly how Jamie goes down the incel rabbit hole, how much of the ideology he bought into. It doesn't even depart with much of what the ideology includes.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
It shows just one pretty rushed scene of the detective's son explaining, just hinting at some of the elements of incel ideology that may have been a contributing factor to him murdering Katie.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yeah. So I'm not familiar with the exact statistics about the racial breakdowns, but I know that 13 year old white boys aren't the the highest represented in knife crime for sure. I also know that even within manosphere content, so Andrew Tate is brought up in the show as being manosphere.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
And I thought the way in which the female detective brought up Andrew Tate, it kind of shone a light on the confusion that a lot of adults and teachers people have about this topic, that she lumped Andrew Tate and incels all under the one umbrella. She said, that's that Andrew Tate shite, and it's all the one thing.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Where in actual fact, there's a lot of distance between Andrew Tate, red pill type of ideology, and the black pill ideology of incels. But in terms of the racial breakdown, to get it back to your point, the fans of Andrew Tate are disproportionately black, followed by Asian, and least of all whites.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So in terms of the young men who have a positive opinion of Andrew Tate, I think it's something like 9% of white boys have a positive opinion of him, and it raises higher for Asians, and it's much higher for blacks. So that's something, again, that it didn't really represent the research so accurately for whatever reasons.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So like with a lot of things in the manosphere ideology and incel ideology, there's a grain of truth to the point. Now, it's taken to a very blunt level of analysis, and the 80-20 rule is a very crude breakdown and probably hyperbolic.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
It's hard to get an exact figure, but there is such a thing as attraction inequality, whereby more men are interested in finding more women attractive than the reverse. And you see this kind of exacerbated in online dating. We even have data sets ourselves whereby the Pareto distribution that most attention flows to the most attractive profiles.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
That is a real phenomenon, but it's not as extreme as perhaps the 80-20 crude level of analysis that the incels talk about. And it certainly doesn't mean that 80% of men have no chance in the mating market. I mean, if we look around, most men tend to do pretty okay eventually. It may have got harder for young men in recent years.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
But it takes, this is kind of, incel ideology does this, or manosphere ideology. They take a real phenomenon and run with it to a very extreme level of analysis and kind of nihilistic doomerism.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Yes, and I just retweeted a study that came out very recently that examined online dating, and it showed that physical attractiveness totally eclipses other factors in terms of success in online dating specifically. So like you're saying, if you're swiped negatively on a dating app because of the physical attractiveness,
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
your other qualities don't even get a chance to contribute to your overall attractiveness. So that is one feature of modern dating that I would probably encourage society to try and rebel against is the funneling of all dating to the online apps. You're kind of encouraged to not meet your partner at work, to not meet her at college, things like this. There's fewer institutions.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
Even recently, a guy came to give us a talk at the University of Texas, and he talked about how around the world, church was often a mechanism for people to meet their partners. If you talk about college being a mechanism for people to meet their partners, you've got a massive sex ratio imbalance there where there's way more women on the campuses now.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So the more you funnel dating towards the apps, and there is some evidence that increasingly people are meeting their partner online, that does kind of exclude physically unattractive men. And a bugbear of mine, it really excludes short men, because that's one very static metric that you could literally filter people out.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
So to put that into context, if women were to set their dating app filter in American women to six foot or above, they'd be filtering out the vast majority of their mating pool. If they set it to six foot three and above, even more. So I think it's just like 18% of American men are six foot or above. So you're really narrowing your window there or your pool of mates that you can even pick from.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
It's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament. Policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art. Violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that is not the only harm associated with incel ideology.
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InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence
exactly right yeah and it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through but yeah people are increasingly living their lives online and people are not interacting in real life as much not drinking alcohol as much and all of this is con kind of uh reaching a point where in the the modern mating market people are kind of going Solo more than ever before, which is interesting.