As I mentioned in my post 21 of 100, I had many reasons for knowing that I wanted to watch the show Adolescence, but one of them is that I have been seeing “hot takes” pop up about how the show is garbage because the inciting incident for the show involved a black boy murdering a girl over a stuffed animal (absolutely untrue that the show was written in response to this incident), and by doing so, the real purpose of this show, and the support that has been shown to it by the British liberal/labor establishment, is to demonize white masculinity and scapegoat white boys for the rise in “what is being”so-called” misogynist violence. In responding to one of these “hot takes” written by my old ex-professor (the one I wrote about in post 18 of 100), pointing out the factual inaccuracy of claiming that the show’s creators intentionally race swapped the murderer in their story, I was pointed to a Sargon of Akkad video (Sargon Akkad is Carl Benjamin’s Youtube persona) , titled “The Perpetual Inmates of a Social Prison” as why it doesn’t actually matter what the show creators thought they were doing. Their real purpose (and why the show has been so promoted), whether they know it or not, is reinforcing this pervasive narrative that white men are the root of all evil, perpetuated by a feminism that is currently dominating the current world order. These guys really and fully do believe that women hold all the social and institutional power in society and I am going to write a lot more about that in the future, but for this post I want to talk about how badly Carl Benjamin misses the boat when analyzing episode three of Adolescence.
***I am sorely tempted to mock Carl Benjamin by calling him his YouTube name, Sargon of Akkad, just to avoid having to keep using my own name over and over again when talking about a guy who was one of the central instigators of the Gamergate harassment campaign, but I will avoid that temptation because it is a good exercise in humility to not take pride in my own name.***
I really cannot negatively review this video badly enough, nor discourage you from watching it unless you are a glutton for idiotic, misplaced, misogynistic anger, but as an academic, I don’t like writing about people’s perspectives without having taken the time to read/listen to those perspectives myself. I have read Mein Kampf, I have read The Protocols of Zion. I try to understand bad ideas at their sources, not how they are portrayed to me. So I decided to watch this 2 hour monstrosity of video in its full (even though you can get everything you need out of it to understand where Benjamin goes so wrong in the first 20 minutes) just to make sure I didn’t miss any hidden gems that would really help me understand why all my ideas about misogyny are wrong, social-programing instilled by the secret feminist order that is out to feminize all boys and men to ensure that we can never take back the political power that us white men have somehow, supposedly, lost. The kicker for me about this video, is that from within the first 5 minutes of watching it, that it is abundantly clear that the reason why the manosphere and the right are so mad that the show cast a white boy to play the role of the murderer, is because they cannot help but immediately empathize with, and see themselves in the role of this character. For Carl Benjamin, certainly, and probably many more men with patriarchal misogynistic beliefs, the character of Jamie, the boy murderer, represents white masculinity, and every time he is being interrogated or evaluated by official representatives of the state, they are experiencing (or they would probably claim re-experiencing) all of the trauma of having become heavily repressed/oppressed second-class citizens in a civilization that was founded to empower and protect them.
Seriously, in his video, Carl Benjamin, flies off into a rage, cussing, his face flush, because, in his mind, every white boy in England knows exactly what it feels like to be sat down in a chair and interrogated for hours by a “menopausal, HR Harridan” ( Benjamin’s words, even though none of the women in the show that ever interact with the Jamie character in this way are of Menopausal age) that is trying to tell “us” (the white boys) that our naturally spirited, “boys will be boys” behavior is mortally evil and the cause of all of societies problems. Remember, that this scene is actually of a court appointed psychologist trying to determine whether Jamie is of mature and sound enough mind to realize that what he did was murder someone. Anytime Carl Benjamin does remember to talk about how Jamie might be different than a typical white boy, he does the same kind of mitigating, apologist behavior that you see in a conspiratorial misogynistic character in the fourth episode of the show that tries to convince Jamie’s father to call the arrest of his son a government plot to oppress the white man…even down to referring to Jamie as an “alleged murderer,” as if he was an actual person in a real trial case, and not a fictional character in a TV show that really makes no effort at disguising his guilt.
While I think it speaks highly of the shows ability to humanize Jamie as a character, it is also just jarring and wild to me to see a guy who has absolutely no sympathy or empathy for the real life Hassan Sentamu, basically just immediately see himself in the shoes of Jamie, and repeated talk about how boys like Jamie are just “boys being boys” who need real men in their lives to help steer them…as if murdering a girl who might have been a bit of an internet bully falls into this “spirited boy behavior.” Doubly jarring and wild to me is that Carl Benjamin’s big argument about why the matriarchal power structure he believes currently controls England is so bad, is because it shows no grace or mercy for this kind of “spirited boy behavior”…again remembering that in this fictional case, the behavior is blatant misogynist murder, who then attempts to cast the “you can’t actually believe I would actually do something like this” charm offensive to hide his guilt. Carl Benjamin insists that this experience, of being the white boy oppressed by a system that views whiteness and masculinity as markers of social evil, is so well represented by the way this psychologist woman “interrogates” Jamie, by calling into question everything about himself that he identifies as himself, that it captures everything wrong with contemporary British society. Again, never actually recognizing that what the Jamie character really did was conspire with others to acquire a knife, stalk, and then murder someone for rejecting his attempt to manipulate her into liking him by being nice to her when he sensed she might be weak. The psychologist in the scene’s goal is not to make Jamie feel bad for being a boy attracted to a girl who rejected him, her goal is to get him talking about what happened enough to figure out whether he was aware enough of his actions and their consequences to face trial for them.
Carl Benjamin is unquestionably one pillar of manosphere rhetoric and thought. He presents himself as different from a character like Andrew Tate, even though he talks about Tate a lot in this video, because he is civilized, married, a father, (who also, you know, generates lies and misinformation to get others to harass and dox women), but he makes it very clear that he believes that women’s jobs are to be merciful and kind to men, even ones who are violent misogynists, and that women who refuse to take that path and dare to think themselves capable of talking to boys or men about why their violent behaviors are unacceptable are “HR Harridans” who should just ceed all of that power over to a man who will just know how to handle this kind of behavior on account of being a man and having gone through adolescence as a boy. Never mind that that experience of going through adolescence as a boy has likely been full of traumatic violence and abuse (something that Benjamin himself points out without realizing he is doing so, repeatedly in the video), or that many of the men in the show itself that try to act in that role for Jamie, end up creating trauma for him by infantilizing him or failing to process their own trauma without projecting it on to him (something you learn about especially with the father in the fourth episode, but also in the first two episodes with the arresting police officer).
In my mind, that call for “get the professionally trained women out of the room and just let these incompetent men handle the emotional growth of boys into men” is a pretty compelling metaphor for what the manosphere is setting out to do, and why I think men who realize that it is crap need to step up and risk having a bunch of misogynistic hate mongers call us names like “gelded beta cucks,” in public without crumpling behind the traumas that these kind of guys have been using against us since we were children to convince us that it is wrong to see women as human beings worth of friendship and respect, even if they are not fucking us or acting as our mothers. They are all-to-happy to debate and harass women who will call out the idiocy of blaming all the political and social issues of our day on the feminization of men, because they fundamentally don’t believe that any real men will actually listen to or respect women, and so they see themselves as having already won any debate against such women before it has began. You can really see this playing out in the way that they talk about the show Adolescence, and the way they look at female authority figures in the show as standing in for their imagined “matriarchal, anti-white, misandry” power structure that is preventing the white man from enjoying the spoils of western civilization by having empathy for the conquered, colonized, and exploited. While I think there might be some merit to a critique of the authoritarian structure of schools, criminal justice systems, and family structures, the patriarchal misogynists are only interested in critiquing the people at the top of those hierarchies if they are feminists, and think the solution is to just put more white men back into those positions of authority, especially white men who understand and are sympathetic to “boys being boys” and, you know, murdering girls who don’t show them the mercy and compassion that white men deserve.