Adolescence: What Does it Mean to Be an Incel? Netflix Series

The series Adolescence is disturbing, hard, and dark. It tells the story of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller, who is accused of brutally murdering a classmate, whom he injured 7 times with a kitchen knife. Jamie’s parents are devastated, the police don’t know what to think, and despite having evidence (such as a brutal video showing everything), they need to know what the reasons were that led a 13-year-old boy to do something so terrible and violent. To get answers, the authorities decide to go to Jamie’s school and ask questions of his classmates, and that’s where they discover that Jamie and Katie, the victim, were not friends, and that Katie wrote a comment on social media, where she said Jamie was a Incel. Adolescence is inspired in real cases of violence committed by teenagers, but also in things like toxic masculinity, misogyny, and Incel propaganda, and the way it can affect younger people.

Adolescence: What Does it Mean to Be an Incel?

In Adolescence, Jamie Miller killed Katie, and the authorities have all the evidence they need, but they want to know what led a child like him to commit a criminal act. In the second chapter, Adam, the son of the detective in charge of the case, is the one who reveals that Katie accused Jamie of being a Incel, and that maybe that could be a reason.

The term incel first appeared in the 1990s. According to CNN, it was created by a woman identified only as Alana to refer to “involuntary celibacy” (INvoluntary CELibacy) and the feelings of shame or social anxiety that contribute to that celibacy.

“The term “incel” became part of the language he used with his followers when talking about his shyness and social clumsiness. However, as the term spread, it began to acquire different meanings”, he says CNN.

The term refers to people who are frustrated by their lack of sexual experience, but it has also become radical and is believed to have led some people to commit violent crimes as a way of “taking revenge” on those they perceive as the cause of their frustrations.

“Incel ideology comes from an informal conglomerate of online anti-woman communities known as the “manosphere”. Over time, the manosphere has come to exhibit increasingly violent and hostile visions toward women and other groups. Users have migrated from older and more moderate categories of the manosphere, such as league artists and men’s rights activists, to the more extreme incel category. The latter implies an increase in the number of hate speech and debate on violence, and the incel speech presents similar levels of “discussion toxicity” to far-right platforms recognized as Gab. Incel ideology exhibits all the characteristics of an extremist ideology, such as internal groups and external groups and crisis/solution narratives; traits we see in almost all extremist ideologies, be it Salafist jihadism, white nationalism, etc, says the Center for Research and Evidende on Security Threats.

Technically, children cannot be Incel, as they are too young to understand everything to do with this ideology (and their celibacy is not involuntary, but normal for their age), but they can expanders to these ideas and discourses. , and this can affect your perception and your mental state.

CNN It also explains that, according to a 2022 study, published in the journal “Current Psychiatry Reports” and archived in the National Library of Medicine, it explains what the incel ideologies are:

An appearance-based hierarchy, where appearance is the most important thing for sexual relations and to define your place in society.

Belief in “hypergamy” female, which says that women are too sexually selective and use their privileges and sexuality to have a social promotion Aversion to feminism.