The Black Unicorn Press

It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”

Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant  “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.”  But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find it, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra. I still had stupid ideas about sex and how men had it, until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.

Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”

Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm. 

I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others.  It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having  sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence.  Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations. 

Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.     

Post 32 of 100:  what do boys believe about masturbation?

It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIAA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”

Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant  “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.”  But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra, because this was before the internet was made for porn and this was the material to which I had access. I still had a lot of stupid ideas about sex and how men had it (remind me to talk about “Unrequited Love” in a future post), until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.

Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”

Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm. 

I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others.  It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having  sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence.  Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations. 

Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.     

In post 25 of 100, I began looking at the question of why advocates of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) believe that women currently control every aspect of society, and that is there is no room for boys to be boys and grow up to become “real” men. In that post, I looked pretty specifically at the situation of whether women really do control the educational system, as claimed by Carl Benjamin. However, that only feels like one narrow piece of the puzzle. There seems to be a second, more common argument within the Manosphere about how women control society by controlling access to sex, something that so strongly motivates men, that they/we have no ability to resist women’s will in our pursuit of sex. 

There are a bunch of problems with this claim that I want to talk about either here, or in a future post, depending on how long this goes.

In no order:

1. Sexual violence and harassment statistics would strongly indicate that there is a very hard limit on how much control women collectively have when it comes to controlling access to their bodies. I think PM folks like Men’s Rights Movement types will tend to argue these statistics and claim that false accusations are much more common than the 2-10% they actually are, and other conspiratorial lines of absolute bullshit, but I don’t really want to address that stuff unless someone I care about earnestly asks me to, because it feels like a waste of my time otherwise. No matter what other questions you might have about a person, or their lifestyle or opinions of them, if they tell you they have been sexually assaulted, believe them and help provide them the support they need deal with that horrific and traumatizing experience as much as you are able to, even if that is just telling them you believe them and asking if they have a network of people helping them, or if they need help finding it. You may not physically, emotionally or socially be in a position to be a core part of that network yourself, but you should always be in a position to help point them in the direction of some resources for survivors of sexual violence. 

2. The core premise of the PM claim that women control access to (heterosexual) sex is that all men are implicitly consenting and desiring sex at all times, and thus women have an unlimited buffet of options when it comes to choosing sexual partners, leading to belief in the “80/20 rule” mentioned in the show Adolescence, which is an incel corruption of the “Pareto principle” taken to mean here that 80% of women are attracted to the “top” (whatever that means) 20% of men, meaning that the vast majority of men never get looked at by the vast majority of women.  Having grown up socialized as a man in the very misogynistic 90s, I know that ideas like this, and claims like “nice guys get the shaft, mean guys give the shaft” were commonly shared, even in very left leaning circles, including anarchist spaces and the punk rock scene. This idea that very many men are competing for a very small percentage of desirable women has been common in much of mainstream society (and media) and not just the alt-right or the manosphere. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that comes across as complete bullshit to my lived experience…but the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies based upon entirely subjective opinions about things like attractiveness—there really is no way to disprove this to someone who really believes it.

Like, personally, I know that every person I have ever slept with, hell, ever even made out with, has been HOT AS FUCK (even you, Dru Parish, although you are terrible at making out with boys), and there is no way that I can be in the top 20% of any Incel or PM man’s vision of what are the most attractive men. I probably have to put off deep diving into disproving the 80/20 theorem in a future post, because I can already see that this is something that is going to take a lot of connecting support to make sense of, but even the initial claim that all men are always consenting to have sex is dangerously false. It is one of these stereotypes that I think young boys get told (men want sex, women don’t) that leads to false expectations and can disconnect young men/boys from thinking for themselves about their bodies and desires. Saying “most people have at least one sexual fantasy that they would like to be able to be fulfilled in the right context” feels a lot more true, but is also something that applies as much to people socialized as women as to men. I also think the importance of having sex with another person is such an over-romanticized and heavily enforced expectation for both men and women that it becomes very difficult for people generally to come to terms with themselves as sexual beings and what that means for them. I know that for me, growing up, no one ever talked to me about how masturbation was actually the first act of becoming a sexual being and the place where far too many of my ideas about what it was going to mean to be a sexually active man were beginning to form. I fully intend to write a future blog post about learning about yourself and your body through masturbation, so I will save most of that for the future, but I will say that, even though my first sexual partner was an amazing human being and HOT AS FUCK, I was actually not mature enough to actually be ready to have sex the first time we did it, and that I probably didn’t say anything about that because I thought that, as a man, I must have really wanted to have sex more than I wanted to be able to talk comfortably about things like birth control, and desire, and consent. In the end, I feel very lucky that everything worked out very well for me and that I have no regrets or less than fantastic and amazing memories of any other sexual experience between us, but I am mature enough now to recognize that I wasn’t ready when it first happened. It certainly was not my natural horniness as young man that overrode my brain or self-control, it was expectations in my brain that over-rode my own body’s discomfort and unreadiness.

3. Saying “I believe that women have social, economic and political power over men because I believe that men want to have sex with women so badly that they lose any ability to think or act rationally or be in control of themselves” isn’t saying anything about society, it is saying something incredibly pathetic about yourself as a human being and a man. It is a statement that pretty much invalidates any argument that such a person could possibly try to make about how society is better when men are in charge of things, because it begins with the idea that men are irrational, emotional creatures controlled primarily by their own sex drives, and if they cannot be in control of their own access to women’s bodies to satiate that sex drive, then they can be easily manipulated and controlled. Seriously, making this argument about who is control over society based upon who controls men’s sexual access to women’s bodies is an absolutely pathetic position that completely undermines the entire argument of patriarchy. This ends up being true of most arguments in favor of patriarchy, but the transparent fallacy created by this argument in particular is worth pointing out, mocking, and ridiculing. 

Overall, the logic of Incels, Red Pill-ers, Men’s Rights Morons and other Patriarchal Misogynists tends to be flimsy and asinine, but incredibly dangerous because it doesn’t actually require any logic, facts, or complex understanding of the world. It only requires that a person really internalize gender and sexual insecurities, as well as feelings of rejection, into a state of mind that is desperate to find an external scape goat, instead of having to reevaluate personal romantic and sexual expectations and where those expectations come from. This is why folks really buying into PM ideologies become so dangerous, a fact proven over and over again in mass shootings and acts of anti-social violence, and why the people promoting and exploiting PM ideology have to be confronted specifically for relying on this tactic. Attacking Patriarchy and Patriarchal Misogyny is not attacking men. If someone sees an attack on the ideas of Patriarchal Misogyny and feels like those attacks are about taking power away from men, than that person is mistaking the inherently exploitative and corrupt “power over others” as the authentic and true power that is generated as power with and power from within. They are painting masculinity into a corner where it defines itself not as being in control of itself (in fact, PM ideology tends to claim men cannot control themselves), but as being in control of others, especially women, children, and men who are socially inferior. That is a much greater threat to people who want to identify as men than any offense PM ideologues can fantastically imagine. 

Or rather, what kind of commodity is masculinity? This question came to me as I saw a headline for a paywalled CNN article that I couldn’t read, about how the character Patrick Bateman, of American Psycho, engaged in an morning self-care routine that was intended to be a parody of “hyper-heterosexual” masculinity by the author Bret Easton Ellis, but has since become something that would be considered rather common amongst many hyper masculinized male media personalities, especially online influencers. As a regular person with no interest in paying for online news media from a glorified cable news channel, I will not be paying to unlock this article, so I am not going to pretend to have a well-informed opinion about the author of that article’s argument or its validity. I think from the headline itself, and the clip of the movie scene I assume the article is addressing, that it is probably saying something like “hey look! Men now use a whole array of beautification products that would have been seen as something feminine, or homosexual 25 years ago.”

I don’t really care that much about the argument whether men using beauty products is a masculine behavior or not. Personally, as a pretty extreme anti-capitalist, I have incredibly strong reservations about the commodification of body image and it’s role on the human psyche, regardless of gender, but I also recognize that people like to feel good, and the stranglehold capitalism has on making people feel good isn’t getting up-ended or challenged by focusing on one particular industry that engages in that, especially by attacking one that is maybe breaking out of the intense gender enforcement that it has long embodied. What is more interesting to me, and what the headline of this article inspires me to want to talk about, is how the physical portrayal of hyper-masculinity has largely become a commodity that is only really accessible to the wealthy.

There is an incredibly irony in the ways men like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and even Donald Trump have spent fortunes physically changing themselves into representations of what they believe to be attractive, masculine men, while US mainstream culture has become obsessed with attacking trans women for wanting to do exactly the same thing (spending much smaller fortunes to better physically embody the gender traits that they feel best represents them), especially as these kind of men have probably been pushing Cis women into doing the exact same thing for even longer. People have pretty effectively pointed this out on the internet in ways that is more compelling and entertaining than I am going to be able to do, but the deeper analysis that keeps getting left out of the memes and conversations I have seen about this irony is whether there is, fundamentally, something different about contemporary patriarchal figures feeling so beholden to commercialized beauty/gender affirming products, procedures, and expensive lifestyle choices, for themselves, than what has typically been expected of patriarchs of the past. The reason why that question feels interesting to me is because it implies the potential for a higher level of insecurity in their belief in Patriarchy as a system of power and control. If the patriarchs of today are feeling like it is necessary to sink millions of dollars into fictionalizing their bodies into fantastical representations of masculinity in order to be accepted as patriarchs, it seems pretty clear that they know they are not actually embodying these masculine ideals, or at least, that creating the facade of masculinity is as important a part of maintain their power and social position as just having wealth in the first place. 

Now, patriarchs, powerful men within a society that expects powerful men to assert domination and leadership,  have been spending money on facets of their own masculinity for a very long time, and many of those have included aggrandizing their own physical and sexual prowess (in post 28 of 100, I talk about this with cars). But it feels different to me for these patriarchal men to identify their own physical bodies as essentially objects of commodification that must be presented and maintained in very specific ways if they want to retain their patriarchal authority. Maybe it is just wishful thinking on my part, but it feels like any self-awareness of this at all would be a clear indicator that they they fully-well recognize that there is no actual biological, religious, or inherent condition of male supremacy, but that the authority of patriarchy is something that can, and always has been paid for or stolen. Men can only appear stronger, more intelligent, more rational, more capable than women in a world where the tests of strength, intelligence, rationality and capacity themselves are either deliberately manipulated in advance to conform to the traits that men being tested already have, or if the men that patriarchy wants to put forward for these tests can be manipulated, trained and engineered to do better at them…or both scenarios at once. 

In other words, I find it really interesting that there appears to be a shift in patriarchal misogynistic portrayals of masculinity that are making it where men that want to assume high positions of authority within this power structure can’t just wave their own wealth around as a symbol of their power and expect to be taken seriously as manly men who deserve to be in power. They can’t just spend a ridiculous amount of that wealth on the people around them to demonstrate that they deserve to have that power, they have to spend a ridiculous amount of that wealth now on the creation and presentation of their own physical form, not just to justify their position of authority to themselves, but to actually keep that power over a world that buys into their patriarchal misogynistic bullshit.  

Both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were very largely seen as clowns or at least mega nerds less than 20 years ago, people who might accomplish some absurd levels of economic success, but hardly be people worthy of adoration, emulation, or being entrusted to further socially or politically engineer society. Both of them responded by going way overboard on spending money to physically change themselves into portrayals of men that people seem far more willing to trust with authority. I think one of the things Donald Trump might actually have been ahead of the game on is in identifying this at a pretty young age, so as to avoid nearly as much notice or discussion of his focus on his physical image and how much he has paid to maintain it, even if his physical image is something that comes under public scrutiny.

Does this mean that authority figures within Patriarchal Misogynistic power structures are more vulnerable to attack along lines of their physical image? Does attacking them for their physical failures at representing masculinity even actually attack the underlying structures of their authority? Or does it just pave the way for future patriarchs, who can play the hyper masculinity game better, for longer, to come along and replace the kind of incompetent buffoons we have running things now? I think these are all valuable questions to investigate and consider because I think we have seen, over and over again, that patriarchy, and the misogyny that underpins it, is very good at changing and disguising itself as its structures become more and less tolerated by society as a whole.  

There is a very common social stereotype that men love cars and that a man’s car represents him in the social world. This men’s health article overflows with examples of men identifying deeply with their cars and even references academic studies about how driving cars make men feel more connected to their masculinity and that men derive measurable increases in self-esteem from gaining access to an automobile. The article goes so far as to state that “Men romanticize things that embody power, fearlessness, speed. But what accounts for the tremendous intimacy between men and cars? Men don’t simply own cars — they have relationships with them.” This is to say that, to the author of this article, and many men who would agree with him, a man’s car is a mechanical representation of his own freedom, power, and social status. As such, cars occupy a place in men’s hearts that is much deeper than just existing as material objects. The article goes on to suggest some reasons why that is problematic, especially focusing on environmental impacts, and then goes on to suggest that the issue won’t really be a problem, because men will adapt to identify with electric cars instead of gasoline fueled ones. 

What is completely missing in this analysis, and missing from the vast majority of conversations I see happening about the automobile generally, and especially in the context of the relationship men have with their vehicles, is that this whole metaphorical connections between automobiles freedom and power are all predicated on massive governmental infrastructure enabling cars to have any value to human beings at all, and I think there actually is a very important and valuable lesson in looking at how that relates to masculinity.

Ok, I don’t intend to write a massive essay here about how expensive car culture is to maintain, in the US or globally. There is actually a whole lot of folks out there writing and making online media content about: how suburbs can’t afford to maintain their own road networks through property taxes and how older suburbs are going broke throughout the US, leading people to move into new ones that fund initial infrastructure spending with grants or worse, loans, and will experience the same problems down the the road (pun intended) when their infrastructure starts needing repair; how cities prioritizing parking and car accessibility into commercial districts over pedestrian access decimate those commercial districts; and how high speed road networks lead to increased fatalities from accidents. There is perhaps no more obvious of a symbol for government dependency for a private industry than the automobile, which has required subsidization of every aspect of its development and evolution to accomplish its place as being the way people move in the United States, and around the world. Without roads, fueling stations, government regulation and enforcement (on everything about cars, from their manufacture to usage to disposal), signage, parking, and complicated international supply chains subsidized by many world governments, automobiles would probably have never become more than novel oddities, like hot air balloons.

So how does this relate to masculinity? Are all men as useless as an automobile in an environment not built up around their every need? Maybe. But even if you don’t take it that far, I think would be pretty easy to see that the there is a disturbing parallel in the way people talk about the necessity of both automobiles, and many unhealthy masculine behaviors that are all dependent upon a massive amount of infrastructure (physical for cars, social for masculinity) to even exist.  It might feel like I am trying to slam on both automobiles and masculinity by making this point of social dependency, but I actually think that seeing negativity in pointing out that dependency is actually representative of the real problem. 

The more invisible the actual cost and labor associated with maintaining massive infrastructure projects, the less value people place on that labor, and the more likely that people take for granted that it will always be there. Movies like Mad Max, and other post-apocalyptic media that feature very unrealistic portrayals of how automobiles will still be useful in a future where no one is building roads or regulating the trade of oil for its refining into gasoline are essentially telling a fantastical narrative that might as well include dragons and wizards. The same can really be said of the patriarchal misogynistic construction of masculinity that is deifying people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Even the UFC tough guy macho guys like Joe Rogan (who I don’t think is intentionally trying to put himself forward as role model of masculinity) and Andrew Tate (who very much is trying to put himself forward as role models of masculinity) are dependent upon massive networks of other people giving them power and authority to sustain any of their accomplishments. Survival is not about individual super men/Tarzans who can do everything for themselves, that is just not how humanity has ever worked. Hunter-gatherer societies are almost always more egalitarian than agricultural or post-agricultural societies in how they distribute labor, including along lines of gender. Hyper violent masculinity has never been about being more capable of protecting one’s self, or keeping one’s self alive, it has always been about seizing control and power from others, usually by trying to be just violent enough to get other people to stop resisting their authority. The freedom and power that PM versions of masculinity seeks is never some uniquely independent vision of the self, it is a self squarely situated at the top of a hierarchy that other people just accept because they don’t have the will to resist it. This is pretty much exactly where the automobile industry sits in the world of transportation today. It is not that cars are just innately and universally the best way of moving people and goods from point A to point B, it is the case that the automobile industry has made it incredibly difficult to develop other methods, because it has monopolized the money, energy and time of public infrastructure projects to make it seem like doing anything else is just going to be impossible…while simultaneously existing in state that is unsustainable for individual communities and for the world as whole. 

So that is why I think there is a real, subversive power behind the metaphor of “automobile as a symbol of (PM) masculinity.” It is really an ironic mockery of reality based upon ignoring the cost of maintaining either. I don’t think I did the best job here of explaining the cost of (PM) masculinity, and the infrastructure required to maintain it. That is really too big of a topic for any one post, and something I will probably have to break up in future posts, but it is also something that I have touched on in many of my past posts already. (PM) masculinity is exhausting, and self-destructive, and something that wears out quickly when actually required to be put into use. The people that idolize (PM) do so in the same way as people who personify and adore an expensive car. It is something they want everyone to respect and ogle, and maybe occasionally take out and put to the test, but they really don’t want everyone to come up and touch it, and the more they have to use it in their actual daily lives, the more quickly it erodes into a valueless hunk of junk.

I read this article about politics in Canada, largely because it is about the right wing political shift of young men in other countries, beyond the US, but also because I am curious about whether the new, very centrist head of the Canadian Liberal Party is going to manage to keep Canada from going full on conservative in their next election…and that does seem possible…for now. But, as much as Justin Trudeau always struck me as a bit of clown, he definitely took control of the Liberal party by appealing to a strongly left-leaning progressivism that was very popular with Canada’s youth. His cabinet was the first in Canadian history to include as many women as men, and was very much a shining beacon of Diversity when he was elected. In many ways, it feels to me, as a US citizen, that the “woke” ideology that Trump has had so much success attacking in this country was much more prevalent in the Canadian Liberal Party than it has ever been in the US Democratic Party.

So I find it really interesting that this article reports that 17 percent of folks ages 18 to 35 say that a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man. That might not seem like a lot, but only 13 percent of those between 35 and 49 felt the same way, and only 6% of those 50 to 74 feel the same way. 40% of people under 35 in Canada say that women’s rights have gone far enough. This seems to mirror data I have seen saying that the youth are veering right in Europe, Israel, and the US as well, often largely around issues related to race and gender.

This article claims that much of this shift stems from the growth of right-wing social media platforms, and I think that is probably true, at least for a big part of the story. The authors of that article are convincing in their claim that Right-leaning online shows have almost 5 times the followers and subscribers as left-leaning shows, and that a lot of media that is being labeled as nonpolitical, and focused on topics like comedy, entertainment and sports, were overwhelmingly showing a right-leaning political bent. The article also goes on to claim that people really trust the information they learn on podcasts, with 87 percent of people saying that expect news they hear discussed on a podcast to be true. So it is pretty easy to see that if many of the most prominent podcasters and other online media makers are describing “American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power,” that that is is information that is going to gain a lot of traction. If scroll down that article, you can see a chart of the followers that various online media personalities have, and it is overwhelming how many of the most followed content makers lean heavily to the right, or at least into a camp that is patriarchal and misogynistic. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Theo Von all have more followers than Trever Noah, who has twice the number of followers of any other left leaning online shows. 

Looking at those numbers, it is hard to argue against the role that social media has been playing in shifting young folks political views, especially around topics like family values and gender roles. So while academics like me were starting to feel like our colleges and universities were really starting to get anti-misogynistic, gender egalitarian ideas out to our students, it turns out that students were growing to place less and less faith in anything educational institutions had to say about social issues and had other media sources that were answering their questions in ways they wanted to hear. That all makes sense to me.

At the same time, I think that overall global skepticism for the future is a factor that is getting too often ignored in these conversations. Between Climate catastrophe, war, and economies that youth are told are the best that have ever been, but exclude them from getting jobs that will ever let them own houses, or really any property at all, it is not hard to see that people are desperate for ideologies that offer them a more hopeful future. For now, the right has really managed to monopolize that by scapegoating groups like immigrants for the destruction of economic opportunities and turning Trans rights into the ultimate boogieman of gender ideology that is destroying young men’s social and romantic futures. The left has massively failed to offer any of the large scale social and political solutions that it has in the past, in response to economic and social uncertainty, and instead seems pretty content in just placing its faith in global capitalism to just keep making so much wealth for the richest people in the world that enough excess keeps trickling off the top to keep people in line, then act shocked and outraged when the richest people keep trying to figure out ways to trickle less and less down stream. 

I am very skeptical that more left-leaning online media is going to make a dent in youth political leanings. Right-leaning online media works because it sells insecurity to young people with just enough disposable economic capital available to them to make those young people a marketable audience that will justify advertising and support from larger social media platforms. Their right-wing content will remain free because they are so attractive to advertisers, and they have no issue letting any and all companies use them to sell products. Short of some kind of nationalized social media platform that never allows any kind of advertising incentivization, but remains dedicated enough to free speech and accessibility to let its users post content without concern for censorship or algorithmic manipulation, I just don’t see a left-wing social media presence overtaking the right. It is a win-win situation for the billionaires that run the existing social media platforms to keep running them the way they are running them, and a minefield for governments to try to regulate without looking like fascist censors. I applaud left-leaning content makers who are trying to do the best they can, but the infrastructure of their platforms is leaning heavily against them, even if there were not ideological considerations like worrying about presenting factual information fairly in appropriate contexts, instead of focusing on generating clicks and drawing in advertisers above all other considerations. 

Maybe I am wrong, and would love to be called out for it, but it feels like the last 10-15 years of the left entrenching in colleges and universities, only to place responsibility for enacting change on the backs of their students individually, while focusing all other efforts towards electing elitist politicians who were never fully on board with seeing radical changes to the system…hasn’t worked out very well. The left has to get back into the conversations happening in work places and people’s family homes, and in the coffee shops and bars and streets of the country if it wants its ideas to compete with online media platforms. I don’t think an obscure blog on the fringe of nowhere is the best way to do that, but I will keep trying to solidify my ideas here so that I can share them with others better in the future.

This post was much lighter on the Patriarchal Misogyny talk than I intended it to be. It skated it, and I think the world has to deal with why the internet is such an economically rich environment for patriarchal misogynists to exploit, as well as how to challenge that. But I think that might have to be a topic I address more in a future post.    

I started out today wanting to write a blog post about this news article about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and  how the Trump administration’s dragging of their feet and insistence that his return is out of their hands is both an example of their own use of weaponized incompetence as a political tactic, and another connection between Trumpism and Patriarchal Misogyny, because I assumed it was common knowledge and commonly agreed to that weaponized incompetence was well understood to be a tactic employed by men to shift arduous and difficult labor onto the women in their lives. As I searched for articles to share to provide further reading on this connection, I realized that the vast majority of these conversations have been happening on social media and people’s personal blogs, and that without any academic credentials to use a research library, the free resources available to me to talk about this connection are very thin. 

So in the process of wanting to write that article about how Trumpism combines Elon Musk’s mantra of “move fast and break stuff” with a form of weaponized incompetence focused on avoiding accountability for prioritizing the appearance of accomplishing goals over responsibility for the consequences of acting so recklessly, it seems like I am going to have to write first about weaponized incompetence and misogyny. Firstly, this is very much not my original idea. It blew up on social media about 2 years ago, and you can still find components of reddit threads and social media posts people have made about this topic if you search for it, but any academic takes on it have yet to seep down from sources constrained to academic libraries to the general public. 

I think part of this is because weaponized incompetence is not just a tool men use to make women do work for them, but is actually a deep-seeded tool of social identity construction that includes race, sexuality, gender and class, and might be so deeply imbedded for some people that calling it “weaponized” just feels confusing and misleading. What labor is worth doing, who should do it, and how they should be compensated for it, are questions of critical social analysis that are essential to feminism, socialism, anti-racist activism, anarchism, queer theory, environmentalism…really just most strains of leftism or radical thought. It is almost a given that any form of conservatism is going to make moves to essentialize certain labor divisions as natural or ordained by god, and that this is kind of a question at the heart of all culture war issues. So maybe one reason discussions about “weaponized incompetence,” and the inability of certain groups to complete certain kinds of labor for themselves hasn’t really become topics of common discussion is because that feels like a conversation that can only happen after one side acknowledges that, in a fair system, that labor would be done by everyone. In other words, maybe the idea of “weaponized incompetence” in areas like domestic labor could only become something people could talk about as possible once it became commonly accepted that it is possible for domestic situations to exist where the labor of cleaning, cooking and maintaining the household could be equally shared and not just dumped on one person because of their expected subservient role in the relationship. It is only possible to label something as failure based upon incompetence when someone even bothers to try in the first place…to demonstrate…that, to accomplish…the task…they…just…cannot. 

When the offending party just reacts with hostility to being asked to do the work in the first place, and insists that it is other people’s natural responsibility to do the task, then we can’t really call that weaponized incompetence, just something like misogyny, when it is based on the expectations of men to have free access to the labor of women, or racism or classism, or some other form of discriminatory identity expectation. But this is exactly why I think it is important to call out Trumpism specifically for employing the tool of weaponized incompetence, especially within the same kind of patterns that we it used by patriarchal misogynists that are trying to hide the extent of their misogynistic ideologies.

“Well sure Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported accidentally, but now he is out of the US so there is nothing the US can do about it!” 

***what happened to Abrego Garcia was not deportation. Deportation is the act of expelling a foreigner from a country on grounds of illegal immigration status or for having committed a crime. Abrego Garcia was disappeared from the United States into an incredibly hostile environment from which he had received official guarantee that he would not be subjected to. I really wish US media would stop using the word deportation to describe governmental criminal acts***

This is the same kind of “whoopsies!” logic that has followed most of the actions of D.O.D.G.E, the mishandling of classified documents (all the way back from Trumps first administration through to the Signal app scandal), his handling of tariffs and the world reaction to them, and has become a hallmark of Trumpism past and present. What makes it obviously shallow and transparently weaponized incompetence is how frequently Trump himself will contradict the official statements of his advisors and representatives on social media, making it abundantly clear that he responds first with incompetence to see what the reaction will be, and then steps forward to insist the act was intentional and to take credit for it, after he has tested the water and thinks there is something to gain from his base by appearing to be deliberate in his cruelty instead of just absent-mindedly incompetent. He does it over and over again and it is clearly a weapon in his playbook that he uses personally within his own life, and has mastered using as a political tool. He is paving the way for patriarchal misogynists across the globe to confidently act first, on minimal information, and push accountability off onto others as often as possible when incompetence is the necessary defense against culpability. 

I don’t know if this behavior is new to the fascist authoritarianism of today, but it is an essential part of the “chaos offensive” that has allowed Trump to expertly dodge any consequence for his law breaking, cruelty, and disaster diplomacy. Long term, he is paving the way for future Jeffery Epsteins, Weinsteins, P-Diddys, to delay and prevent being called to task for their crimes, and the authoritarian right around the world is watching and taking notes. 

I tend to say that I was raised by a single mom. My father wasn’t entirely out of the picture especially not in my youth, and my mother remarried and I had a stepdad from the age of eight into my twenties, but I have issues with both that I have written about extensively in my autobiographical anthology I Fucked Up. I don’t have harsh feelings for either my father or my stepfather, even though they have both caused me traumatic pain at various times in my life, but I tend to look at both of them as examples of masculinity that really made me question the value of masculinity as an identity, and the things that “men are supposed to do.” 

One aspect of this that I have thought about for a long time, and have struggled to write down effectively in words before is why I get so upset and uncomfortable with the very common meme that “fathers make sacrifices for their families.” I don’t know if I am going to be able to do better with this blog post than I have with my attempts at story telling and poem writing in the past, but I am going to try, because I think some aspects of this have come up in watching Adolescence, but also, I see the “Father must do anything for the family” to be an absolute root lie of patriarchal misogyny and Trumpism both. Like my aversion to the value of Loyalty, I will acknowledge up front that “A father will do anything  his family” is probably one of the first things people think of when they say “family values” and that there are centuries of media, from around the world that reinforce this idea as one of noble character and high moral value. As a whole, I think my complaint is really more directed at the reality that this value almost never actually means the “I would take a bullet for my child” extreme that a lot of people think of when making a statement about a father sacrificing for their family, but instead that fathers actually very rarely even act in the actual interest of their families, and instead can get wrapped up in a whole lot of bullshit trying to convince themselves and their families that fathers are the ones who best know and speak for the interests of their families. 

This is the situation that I feel like drives so many men who have relationships fall apart into the arms of patriarchal misogyny. I think a very central pillar of socialization as a man is the belief that, as a man, your highest purpose in life is the creation of some kind of family that will come to define your identity, but which also represents your identity into the world. I think this is why so many men are attached to having their partners and children adopt their last name, and where that tradition came from. I think it also underwrites a lot of the laws (both from religious law and secular) that have established property rights into the hands of a father, not only of properties like possessions, land, and titles, but also wives and children. I am arguing that the idea that a man is supposed to see his family as the ultimate representation of himself and his legacy is pretty much the root concept of patriarchy, and it has a deep stranglehold on the construction of a masculine identity.

It is not a difficult value to romanticize, especially if you ever end up a parent, or have dreams or aspirations to become one. In its noblest aspirations it can be a model for many people on how to unselfishly love beyond the boundaries of yourself, or at least it gets spun that way over and over again. But I just don’t believe that learning to see yourself represented in your family, in your partner and your children, is really experiencing a love bigger than yourself, it is just projecting your sense of self beyond the confines of your own body and mind. I especially don’t believe that there is any altruistic selflessness in the projection of valuing family that I see in the most public proponents of patriarchal misogyny, like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, etc.

Even I the nobler projections and fantasies of this story “the father sacrificing some aspect of themselves for their children or family,” these stories of sacrifice almost never include the family collectively coming together to discuss what is best for everyone individually and for that to be what drives the father into action. It is almost always a father acting unilaterally to do what he alone really understands what needs to be done, because it will end up being the best for everyone. This is the fiction and the fantasy that I have personally seen drive many a man into a horrific spiral of feeling exploited and undervalued by their families, their children and especially their romantic partners. Because sharing the labor of figuring out what the family needs is seen as an act of  burdening the family with the often messy and ugly realities not just of survival, but of prosperity. And this is where I really think the idea of “a father must do anything for their family” really gets harmful and dangerous for society, for the family, and every single person in it. Especially because the needs of most families in the United States almost never come down the moments where anyone must do some thing terrible for the family’s safety or survival. Instead, the absolute atrocities that the United States continues to engage in, and that men wanting to be model father who will do anything to support their family continue to condone and support, are almost always about misplaced expectations of sharing wealth and prosperity. When the dirty deeds of “doing anything to support the family” are no longer really justifiable, that is exactly when not revealing them to the family isn’t really about protecting the family from the horrors of the world, but about protecting the acting father/man from potential value judgment from their families. This is the situation that the United States keeps putting itself into, at home and around the world, and is a big part of why I think patriarchal misogyny is such an attractive ideology to people on the right who think they are pushing family values. 

Nothing is actually lost when people value and wish to protect their communities, not just their immediate families. There may be extreme times of hardship where everyone in a community cannot be supported, fed, protected and cared for, where really difficult and ugly choices may have to be made, and where people might decide “my family, not yours.” But those times are so much more rare than the fear mongering rhetoric that the right pushes relentlessly would have us all believe. It only becomes possible when there are a sizeable base of people fully buy into the idea that any attack on their own right to have everything they want is a violent attack upon their own person. And when each man can count their entire family, and prosperity of their entire family into that same self-serving dominion, that is when you have the zealous foot soldiers that will condition themselves to see everyone else as an enemy out to destroy their very sense of identity.

Family values in the hands of patriarchal misogynist are identity politics. They are used to create a sense of self, with specific, coded radicalized and gendered ideologies that justify violence and dehumanization of anyone that isn’t willing to step in line and give themselves, their bodies and their labor, to the cause of supporting the next biggest patriarch up the chain.  

In Post 23 of 100, I talked about the pain of sitting through a Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) video to make sure I was responding directly to his criticisms of the TV show Adolescence, and not my own imaginings of his argument, or how he might have been represented by someone else.  One idea that he mentioned that I have been wrestling with since watching that video is trying to answer the question that titles this post. How can anyone, especially a grown man living in Suburban England, really believe that there is some kind of matriarchal authority that is currently controlling western society/culture?

After only a small amount of internet research, I realized that this question is at the heart of the entire Manosphere/Men’s Rights Movement (MRM)/Incel identity and is going to take some time to research and write about, over the course of several posts, so I will step back from trying to look at that question in its entirety for this post, and instead look at the one thing Carl Benjamin said in that video that has some truth behind it…but only really one small aspect of it.

The vast majority of school teachers in the US and in the UK are women. Benjamin is UK-based and looking at those figures, but I am in the US, so I will point to this Pew Research Center report, and acknowledge that 77% of K-12 public school teachers in the US are women, and that the ratio of women to men in the profession skews even more heavily the younger the student grade level. Carl Benjamin uses this statistical reality to make the claim that this is the root of young boys growing resentful of the authority of women, because they are having their social behaviors monitored and evaluated by feminized standards that don’t understand what it means to be a boy. 

I think there are a lot of people who probably find this argument to be moderately compelling when based on this evidence. I know for me, as college professor and as a male outreach facilitator for a domestic and sexual violence shelter, I absolutely have had an easier time getting male students to listen to me and respect my ideas than many of my colleagues who are women. Male teachers who were adequately trained to address misogynistic violence (like what happens in the show Adolescence, at the extreme end) and the rhetoric that leads to it probably would have an easier time engaging with the boys and young men most likely to need guidance away from misogynistic ideas and behaviors. There is violence prevention research that backs up the claim that young men, especially young men already headed down the road of embracing misogynistic and abusive ideas about gender relationships, will be more likely to listen to men than women. Troubled boys will tend to listen to and respect the opinions of male authority figures over women. However, as Carl Benjamin makes clear in almost all the rest of his video, if young men struggling with patriarchal, misogynistic ideology are turned over to the kinds of men he advocates should be disciplining these boys, then their misogynistic and patriarchal ideas are not only going to be reinforced, they are going to become almost unshakable, especially in an environment like a public school, where most of the student’s future teachers are going to be women that the boy has been doubly socialized to disrespect as an authority figure. Patriarchal and misogynistic male teachers are capable of having a massively oversized reach and effect on the boys and future young men they are teaching, making the “just get more men into teaching/mentoring roles and positions of authority to be a potentially dangerous approach to reducing gender-based/misogynistic violence. For example, just imagine putting Carl Benjamin into a high school classroom…and then stop imagining that right away, because you don’t deserve to have that occupy space in your brain.

But all of that is getting a little off topic to this post. I think one place where the manosphere has been successful in recruiting young men into patriarchal misogynistic (PM) movements has been in framing educational institutions as centers of feminist/matriarchal dominance, and then attributing any fault in a student’s educational experience as being a product of that matriarchal authority. The school is underfunded and lacks resources that would benefit the student or engage with their interests or learning styles…blame female leadership. The school is beholden to meeting specific state/federal standards that require teachers teach specific and required material in such a breakneck pace that nuance and context are impossible, so overgeneralized, “correct” answers to the tests become all teachers can afford to teach…blame female leadership. The school’s physical infrastructure, built decades ago and underfunded at every opportunity, feel structured like a prison, sniffle creative thinking, and limit especially physical forms of emotional expression…blame female leadership.

Another aspect of this situation that patriarchal misogynists manage to avoid addressing when they talk about how terrible it is for boys and young men to be surrounded by female teachers is why this unbalanced ratio became normalized in the first place. While there are many factors that have played a role in women becoming an oversized sample in the field of education, it has never been the case that more women were encouraged into the field of education after that field has experienced increased growth or economic support by society. Women generally are paid less than men in every field, and this remains true for teachers. Hiring women as teachers has been an intentional strategy in past decades for bringing down the cost of schools and reduced educational budgets tend to push men out of jobs faster than women when they see a limit to future pay increases or professional growth. Society devalues education, and, surprise surprise, the field of education becomes more and more feminized. This makes it even easier for PM advocates to point at schools as locations failing to meet the needs of boys and young men for either educational or emotional development. 

I think I will need to write a future blog post about more personal experience I have had with women gaining access to positions of authority within organizations and institutions, and how frequently that leads to immediate and harsh critiques of these places as “no longer supporting the value and potential they once had,” as I have seen that in political movements, worksites, and school clubs and organizations many times. Men, even politically conscious ones,  grow uncomfortable lending their political, social and economic power to places where they feel limited or controlled in what they can say or how they act. 

My last thought that I want to tag onto this blog post, about why some boys and young men see school as a place dominated by matriarchal authority, and limited by that authority from developing into the people they want to be, is that they are not just navigating this space on their own, they are being influenced by familial and social role models in their lives. Fathers/uncles/gaurdians who struggle to listen to, respect or value the work of women in their lives are going to act just like Carl Benjamin when they see their male children learning to listen to, respect and value the work of their female teachers, and every teacher knows that the energy parents and guardians put into their children’s development is going to be massively more persuasive than that put forth by the teachers. For patriarchal and misogynistic parents and guardians, a “feminized” educational system becomes an exceptionally easy breeding ground for instilling hatred for women in positions of authority, especially when schools and adolescence are already naturally going to be sites of rebellion and a growth of independence.    

So, no, I don’t think it is really fair to even pretend like having more women teachers than male ones means that schools are sites of matriarchal or feminist authority. But I think it is very easy to feel that way if you are man with a predisposition to misogynistic thinking and are in a location where misogynistic thinking might actually be called out as such instead of laughed off or implicitly agreed with. There are already ample studies that indicate than men tend to think women speak more often then they actually do, it really isn’t all that surprising that many men seem to react the exact same way to seeing a women exert any authority at all in a setting that the man does not expect them to.  

In the second episode of Adolescence, a kind of tricky thing happens that is really easy to miss. The episode is about the police coming to the school attended by both the perpetrator and victim of the stabbing to ask questions of some of the students and try to gather information about building a case against the boy, Jamie. The police are looking for the murder weapon, and think it might have been passed on to a friend. The episode is mostly about the perspective of the officers and the difficulty of getting kids to talk to them at all about what happened or why, even though all of the kids already seem to know more than the police officers do, largely because they have been communicating about it in emoji code on social media. Eventually the male detective’’s son, who is also a student at the school, gets a private moment to let his father in on the code, mostly because the son is getting embarrassed by how incompetent his father is looking in front of the whole school. I might do a later post about the necessity of having coded “kids only” language/means of communicating and how I think adults today might be blowing that aspect of social media out of perspective, but I think the more interesting thing to talk about in that episode, is the clear collusion that occurred and continues to occur with Jamie’s friends. 

Because the show never does any voice over narration, and everything is presented from the perspective of the characters in front of the camera at that moment, there is a lot that goes unsaid in the show, or only gets hinted at or briefly mentioned. One of these is understanding the extent to which Jamie planned to murder this girl and that he did not do it alone. To make sure I am not making assumptions about things that other people don’t see, I will lay out, chronologically, what I saw presented as what happened leading to Jamie murdering his classmate Katie.

– Katie shares revealing pictures of herself and a friend with a boy in her school.

– The boy shares these pictures with enough other people that they go viral within the class.

– Jamie either becomes interested in Katie as a result of seeing the pictures, or already was interested in her, and decides to try to win her over romantically by appearing to be sympathetic and understanding of how unfair it is that the pictures were publicly shared. 

– Katie sees through this trick and identifies Jamie as a creep, leading her to mock him, by calling him an incel.

– Jamie is very hurt by this, talks to his friends, and plots some kind of revenge. Some aspects of both Katie’s rejection and Jamie’s reaction is posted on social media and observed by most of their classmates.

– Exactly how much his friends know at this point is not really revealed, except that one of his friends, the one Jamie identifies as stupid, gives him a knife to use for his revenge plot. Maybe the friend thought he was just going to scare the girl, maybe he knew more, it is left very vague in the show.

– Jamie stalks the girl down and murders her very quickly, with almost no conversation before hand, as shown in the CCTV recording in the first episode. He stabs her multiple times and then flees, clearly not realizing that the parking lot had a camera on it. 

– Some how Jamie gets home, in new clothes that are not covered in blood and without the murder weapon. The audience is not told how this happens although the police suspect that he went to a friend’s house and received help getting rid of evidence. 

– The next morning Jamie is arrested.

I think one of the reasons why Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has expressed interest in this show being watched in schools and discussed by youth and educators is because there are many points where other people could have intervened to stop this fictional murder from happening, and this kind of proactive thinking is at the heart of well-researched violence prevention programs. Like getting people to talk about the crime itself and the emotions around it is one important part of helping people be prepared not to participate in such actions, but talking about the situation from a broader social perspective also helps people see that this kind of violence isn’t just about the emotional state of the perpetrator, or showing young women what to look out for or how to protect themselves, but that an entire community enabled this violence to happen and could have done a lot more to prevent it.

This is why I think the second episode is about much more than just the police trying to find more evidence to convict Jaime of the crime, even though, from their perspective (which is the one the camera stays on for most of the episode), that is what their trip to the school is about. 

Interestingly, and probably true in most real incidents of gender/sex-based violence amongst youth, the adults in this story were all pretty clueless and not in much of a position to identify the risk factors before it happened. Not the parents of either child (we think, we never see Katie or Katie’s parents to know how much of the situation she was bringing home) nor the teachers were going to be aware enough to figure this out. Even if Jaime’s parents had been more observant of Jamie’s social media presence, he was communicating in code that would have completely stumped them if they had seen the posts. Obviously they feel incredibly guilty when they realize that their boy had been the one to do it, and many of the other adults in the community around them are probably placing blame on them, because parents are supposed to be accountable for the actions of their children and take responsibility for teaching them not to be terrible people in the first place, but that kind of rhetoric is almost always just applied after something terrible has happened as a way to find someone to blame. Occasionally there are very specific, tale-tell signs that grown ups should be educating themselves to look out for and be prepared to get involved when we see them, but, I feel, an uncomfortable truth for many adults in the room is that part of raising kids, or being a part of their education and growth is preparing them to be active members of the various communities to which they will one day belong.

***when I say gender/sex-based violence, I am talking about sexual violence, domestic violence, and all violence that originates from one person feeling like another person has an obligation to treat them a specific way because of their genders, sexes, or sexualities. So it also includes misogynistic violence, homophobia, and violence against transpeople. It is maybe a little awkward of a thing to write out/say, but it is more specific than just saying violence as a whole.*** 

Definitely in the case presented on the show adolescence, it is the youth community around Jamie and Katie that were most powerfully situated to do something to change the outcome, but also were clearly not being prepared by their families or the social institutions around them to do so. Jamie’s friends were active participants in enabling the violence that occurred, and clearly knew it afterwards, as they react by pulling a fire alarm when the police do arrive at the school to learn more, and don’t provide any useful information until cornered and essentially tortured to reveal it (there is no Television better than the righteous police office crossing the boundaries of legality to get information that might not even be necessary for their case, but that we know the interrogated person has). The rest of the school was overly comfortable sitting in the “innocent bystander” role, eating their pop corn and gossip about the entire situation as it unfolded, through Katie’s murder. 

Bystander intervention training was pretty much my area of focus in violence prevention work, and is still the direct action and preparation for action that I think can have the most positive effect on ending and minimizing the threat of gender/sex-based violence. There are a lot of reasons why kids don’t feel comfortable stepping into an active bystander role, and why a lot of adults feel uncomfortable letting them, but I think that is a deep enough topic for its own future post. So all I will say is that a more active bystander intervention model could have had the potential to empower one or more of the youth witnessing this situation into taking positive action that could have stopped it from escalating. I will also go over personal experiences with that kind of thing from my youth in a future post as well. I will say that I agree with Starmer that the show Adolescence could be used as a conversation starter that could lead youth to the development of bystander intervention strategies as well as a stronger understanding of what kinds of behaviors can escalate to unthinkable violence when no one does anything to stop it. Maybe in England, there is a better institutional structure to facilitate that happening, but it feels like in the US, any attempt to get that conversation started at institutional levels is going to be met with extreme patriarchal, misogynistic responses masquerading as protectionism for children. “How DARE you think MY CHILD needs to be exposed to such horrific ideas, or be prepared to respond to them! If anyone is going to teach my kids about sexual and domestic violence (or even worse, gender-violence)! If they are going to learn about it, it is going to be from sneaking off to consume media behind my back, or worse, experience it first hand and have no idea how to talk about it or to whom!”