Editor’s Note: Mentions of rape, violence and murder. Includes mentions of fictional revenge porn, violence towards and murder of a minor, and quoted use of slurs.
I recently watched Adolescence on Netflix. The “commentary” throughout this series is about how pervasive patriarchy is, including how it finds its way into the lives of children and teens. Jamie, a 13-year-old boy, is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, after being provided a knife by his best friend.
Within the first five minutes of the show, we meet Detective Inspector Bascombe who, while sitting in his police car with his partner, is listening to a voicemail from his son who is requesting to stay home from school. DI Bascombe jokes that his son is asking him, not his wife, because he’s “the soft touch.” The pushover parent. The “nice” one. This opening scene immediately establishes a conversation about manhood wherein, although we culturally understand men, especially Black men, as “masculine” (i.e. strong and in-charge), we’re teased with the idea that there exists an option for variation. For an alternative. A “good” one. A good man.
As the series continues, we meet a million more iterations of patriarchy. The “boy bully” relentlessly teasing his classmates; the male teacher conveniently aloof and absent; and the security guard in Jamie’s prison, flirting with the psychologist.
As the series continues, we meet a million more iterations of patriarchy.
But, as we know, patriarchy doesn’t just impact the lives of boys and men. Patriarchy, as perpetuated by women, shows up within the school system when an administrator is asked about the manosphere (aka “the Andrew Tate shite”) as the potential catalyst for the crime and she (passively) responds, “oh, I’ve heard the boys talking about him” as if they were talking about something as casual as the lunch menu, not as deadly as an incel-fueled execution.
One of the more frustrating, yet familiar, versions of patriarchy perpetuated by women and girls that we witness in Adolescence is how unwaveringly loyal Jamie’s mother and sister are to him. Even during the critical moment when Jamie discloses he’s going to plead guilty, freely acknowledging that he murdered Katie, his mother simply responds, “has the food got any better, love?” and his sister, “are you still in the gym all the time?” We’ve likely all been acquainted with this kind of patriarchy: the deniers, the minimizers, the deflectors, the ignorers—all a vital facet of the maintenance of patriarchy.
If I could choose one scene that highlights the terror of patriarchy in all its cruelty, and subtlety, it would be the interview between Jamie and his psychologist. What starts out as a seemingly friendly, almost flirtatious, conversation, eventually turns into the unflinching truth, felt as a sustained sense of abject fear. The commentary in this moment is: look at what’s happening to our boys. And further, that the violence of patriarchy does not wait until boys are men.
While chivalry is the belief, disguised as “niceness,” that women are inferior, the manosphere unearths your commonplace male chauvinism to reveal an unapologetically radicalized belief that men are both victims of and superior to women.
The violence of patriarchy does not wait until boys are men.
Incels are antagonistic towards the idea of women’s sexual agency. They see women as objects, not people. Incels, in every sense, are anti-feminist. They hold rigid, archaic beliefs about gender that favor binary gender and traditional gender roles. They see sex workers as an easy target; low-hanging fruit to degrade and discredit.
But wait…
What I actually just described is the politic of radical feminists (radfems), like Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists (SWERFs) and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs). The truth is: the belief system of the manosphere is not that different from the framework that radfems, like SWERFs, use to justify their treatment of sexuality, women, and sex workers.
In Adolescence, we are reminded that porn is a tool by which the manosphere can enact harm or hopes to prove that women are corrupt. We see an example of this when Jamie discusses a classmate leaking the nude photo of Katie as a type of revenge porn and when Jamie uses this violation as a chance to ask Katie out. “Everyone was calling her a slag, so I thought if she was that weak, she might like me. It’s clever, don’t you think?”
This reflects how the manosphere understands sexuality and sexual agency and what it means to use it against a girl/woman. But radfems believe the same thing: that such a level of agency is a problem; and often that women’s sexual agency is reduced only to being provoked by men, rather than autonomously engaged.
The belief system of the manosphere is not that different from the framework that radfems, like SWERFs, use to justify their treatment of sexuality, women, and sex workers.
Manosphere and radfem politics are two sides of the same coin—all leading to violence against women and by extension, sex workers. While alt-right, manosphere rhetoric is objectively bad, radfem rhetoric is more acceptable and even seductive to those who are otherwise well-intentioned or politically left because they, incorrectly, see their values as the protection of women and girls. Radical feminism operates parallel to the manosphere, enticing two different communities towards the same end: nuclear families, traditional gender roles, and women who know that their place is never sexual-subjectivity.
Radical feminist ideology scares me more than incel propaganda because it is positioned as good for me. It claims to offer respite, but actually hopes to see me dead. The “abolition” of sex work from a radfem perspective is a death of a thousand cuts. Gradual legislative erasure that ends with destitution and decay. Punishment of the john = starvation of the whore.
Both sets of politics are steeped, accidentally, peripherally or explicitly, in Evangelical Christian values. And sex shame is the weapon that hopes to maintain women’s obedience and male power. Whether its misogynistic ideology rooted in religious and traditional gender roles or commitment to binary sex, the followers of both sects use sex shame to fuel their objectives.
Incel culture engages with sex shame in that it convinces boys and men that they are not worthy of, by proxy of being incapable of, receiving women’s sexual attention and that they are “ugly” or undesirable, pushing them toward extreme isolation and self-hatred. And radical feminism’s relationship to sex shame is refusing to see sex workers as women with agency; instead, only as victims.
Radical feminism operates parallel to the manosphere, enticing two different communities towards the same end...
Sex shame, in either iteration, alongside other systems of oppression create a unique kind of violence; like the kind of violence we see in Adolescence and beyond. It attacks expansive sexual orientations; it refuses to see trans women as women; it devalues pleasure by any means necessary; and it makes consent a dubious concept that can only be acquired in rigid contexts.
While incels see porn as an emasculation of men both in terms of being perceived as a tool to “weaken” men (i.e. as a distraction from becoming “more of a man” or enacting domination over irl women) and to economically disempower them (i.e. the “exploitation” of men who are subscribers to women’s porn sites, leading to the financial empowerment of women sex workers), radfems see porn, and sex work broadly, as rape, a gateway to sex trafficking, and a debilitating “addiction” for men.
Again, both push people towards believing their sexualities, sexual agency and sexual desires are wrong. And when non-cishet men conceptualize their sexual agency as wrong, they become more vulnerable to rape and abuse, kept quiet by lack of sexual health education and shame. But when cishet men conceptualize their implicit sexual desires as wrong? Sometimes they join websites like NoFap and Reboot (which promote abstinence from porn and masturbation), under the guise of community and self-help, which ultimately serve as putrid echo chambers leading to real world violence. Like the man who killed five people in England in 2021 (NoFap member); or the man who attempted to murder a US Supreme Court Justice in 2022 (NoFap member); or the man who killed five people in a bank in Kentucky in 2023 (NoFap member); or other instances not directly linked to anti-porn, self-help forums but sustain the lie of “sex addiction,” like the man who killed eight people in Atlanta in 2021. In fact, this particular man told the police he was a “sex addict” and that he intentionally targeted massage parlors because he was “seeking to eliminate the temptation” that he believed those types of businesses represented.
But these most extreme cases shouldn’t prevent you from noticing the million other examples of incel culture—or radical feminism. From the dark-humored proliferation of incel words like “looksmaxxing” in the mainstream, to the offhand comments about gender equality being a lie, to the TikToks of girls frustrated by their boyfriends following sex workers. to the “feminist scholars” making reels discussing the “nuances of consent” with heavy implication that sex work is rape, to the outright dehumanization of sex workers by a “lauded” radical feminist saying things like, “in prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. And no woman gets whole again later, after” —both communities hate women, and women who use sex as a revenue.
For more on patriarchy and radfems, see Porn Didn't Hurt You, Patriarchy Did and The Difficulties of Talking to Women About Sex Work.
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