I did watch Adolescence. Honestly, i don’t care very much whether it was “fair to incels” any more than i care whether a work of fiction is fair to murderers or pedophiles. I do think that if you want to reduce sexual abuse of children you ought to understand what motivates pedophiles. (And i feel bad for people who find children sexually alluring, that must truly suck.) But i feel no moral obligation to be " fair" when portraying them.
Since Adolescence hopes to do something about kids becoming incels, it is a better work to the extent it gets the motivations right. This is a case where i understand the work, but maybe don’t understand the world enough to comment usefully. It certainly looked plausible to me.
I think comments from an incel, or someone who understands incels, could be a valuable addition to a discussion about the work. And i think it could be valuable even if the commenter only read detailed reviews. But to the extent they wanted to complain about being “unfairly” portrayed, i lose interest.
Yes, that’s the issue. If it was simply an episode of a crime show, then it really wouldn’t matter whether the portrayal was accurate or not. But since it was created at least partly for the purpose of drawing attention to an issue, and to trigger social change, it does matter whether it gets the motivations right. (I don’t know if Chappelle’s jokes were also intended to make a political point? I wasn’t really following that controversy.)
Because I was curious about this, and thought it might be a useful addition to that thread, I did search out a couple of reviews of Adolescence from actual incels. What surprised me most was that one review in particular appeared to be a thoughtful and reasonably fair analysis; not at all what I had expected from a member of such a forum. (And IIRC, his conclusion was that it was well produced and well acted, and that many aspects of the programme were indeed accurate, but some were quite far off base.
However, I didn’t post it because of the widespread belief in guilt by association, and because I thought the contribution would not be welcome. It’s just easier not to bother.
Key difference between the Chapelle situation and the Adolescence and Poor Things ones: I’ve not heard anyone claim that Chapelle’s jokes weren’t making fun of trans-folk, just that it was fine to do so because funny. That argument is fair game. For the latter two? The people participating who saw it did not think it was attacking men or even incels or did not feel it was misogynistic or for the male gaze. The people who had not seen it were arguing it was. And then on that as a given fact what the problems with it interacting with society were.
The main thing I heard about Chappelle’s jokes was that they were “punching down”, ie joking about trans people in the same way he does any other group. I don’t believe “punching down”, should be taboo in general. But I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to, which is why I don’t have a strong opinion.
As for Adolescence, you can argue whether it’s critical of men (not directly, based on what I know). But it’s undeniably critical of Incels, since it depicts them as adopting a belief system that leads to murder, and as a malign online influence on (other) adolescent boys. (It’s the common trope that “the internet is corrupting our children”.)
Chapelle - again there is no one disputing that it was “punching” at the group. The debate is about “punching down” …
Adolescence - Your comment was
And that simply was not what the show did or was about. At all.
In terms of of “incels”? Yes a part of it was broadly how much of our kids lives are impacted by influences that parents are clueless about. About how we parents connect and fail to connect with our children. About how some is luck of the draw. Falling into specific Andrew Tate misogynistic material was part of it yes. If we define incels as that specific philosophy then it does acknowledge the misogynistic aspects of it. But the violence that resulted was, in the show, not so simplistically a direct result of it
How individual public figures react to a show or an issue is a separate subject.
I ended up later seeing some of his jokes on Facebook reels. The ones I saw all had a similar structure: he’d say some transphobic shit, then back off and offer a thoughtful, nuanced, compassionate take on trans issues, then close with this little sneaky “aren’t I naughty?” coda that was some transphobic shit. As near as I can tell, a lot of his defenders were like, “You have to watch the special, because he’s a lot more nuanced than you think!” ignoring his framing device.
In some ways, the nuance made it worse: he knew what he was saying was shitty, and just didn’t much care.
What do you mean? If it was punching, then it was punching down, surely?
This is a larger issue, which is really outside the scope of this thread.
Re adolescence, if you want to read a review from a Genuine Incel™ who did watch the show, I can paste a suitably broken link. Obviously this is a biased source, but he’s also in a far better position to judge how accurate it was than any of us.
Politicians overreact to single crimes, or presumed patterns of crimes, pretty regularly. Overreacting to a fictional crime is a new low. The UK has become notably anti-freedom over the last few years.
Punching is not necessarily punching down. It can be in the eye of the beholder. Someone mocks white men … you might perceive that as punching down in today’s world and others might disagree.
The issue for this thread is if those sorts of hearsay comments, from someone who has not seen the work, even cited to someone who says they saw the work, are worthwhile contributions to a discussion about the work. Answer: they are not. Even if they agree with your take on pet issues you have.
Meh. Sometimes fiction brings attention to real problems. Some real reforms have occurred after fictional works highlighted real problems. The claim by those wanting action is regarding the real stabbings by youths in the UK. Whether or not that is a big enough issue to act on, or whether or not the show framed the issue fairly, I don’t know. But politicians taking advantage of a public interest brought up by something in the media zeitgeist to push their desired agendas is not a new thing.
It’s because this author wrote a romance I really liked about an android and a human, and so I’ve been trying to give her other books a chance to impress me as much as that one did. Hasn’t happened yet. Also, I went back to reread the android one and it wasn’t quite as good as I remembered. As much as I love the “genre” it’s almost like I love the aesthetic, the structure, the ideal of a romance novel way more than the execution. There are only a handful where I would say, “This is it. This is how it should be done.” But I do like to read weird things like spider romance sometimes, just to see if it gives me a new perspective.
i disagree, and think such comments can be worthwhile, if appropriately informed. But also, anyone who claims that Adolescence is propaganda against men is uninformed. And if someone claims it is propaganda against their, er, style of masculinity, then i have extremely little respect for the person saying that. Because he’s revealed something pretty unpleasant about himself.
No, I think it is wrong and bad to punch someone regularly while telling them they must never punch back. Literally or metaphorically.
I agree with @puzzlegal that they can be, depending on circumstances. And this is not my ‘pet issue’, any more than transphobia is a ‘pet issue’ of the people complaining about Dave Chappelle’s jokes. Actually, I see it as a matter of (social?) justice. (Before anyone starts, please recall that not all wrongs are equally wrong.)
All very well for you to say, when you don’t have to live with the consequences.
TBH, I can’t really remember what people were saying about it back in March, and since Twitter is so ephemeral, I couldn’t find anything in my searching, either. I don’t recall seeing anyone saying it was propaganda against their ‘style of masculinity’, though.
I dug out the quote from the review of Adolescence by an Incel on how accurate it is. I don’t think there’s anything offensive here:
It wasn’t anti-incel propaganda. That part is nonsense. I guess I don’t have to have the read the rest to know the author is full of shit and trying to push some martyrdom idiocy then I guess lol
It wasn’t anti-incel propaganda, but it assumed that the audience would find incels unsympathetic. I can see a self-identified incel feeling that it came across as anti-incel propaganda. And i would agree that it was anti-incel.
This. Although not just objectionable content, but various other characteristics that don’t require direct reading to make judgements on. “Full of misspellings”, “ends on a cliffhanger and the author’s dead so it won’t be continued”, “factually incorrect”, etc.
And then there’s issues of personal taste like “it’s a mystery and I don’t like mysteries”; sure it might be the exception, but that kind of opinion is certainly a reasonable take. And you can’t read everything, so at some point you need to form opinions like that so you can decide what to actually read.
Well, but if people are talking about the hot new mystery, “i don’t like mysteries” is not a useful comment to add to the discussion, unless it’s an answer to a direct question like, “why won’t you read this book”.
But a discussion of why a book might be objectionable to people other than the ones discussing it, or might be appreciated by people who wouldn’t obviously be drawn to it, are both things you might be able to usefully add to a discussion without necessarily having read the book yourself.
