Scuole secondarie in Inghilterra per affrontare la cultura “Incel” e insegnare modelli di ruolo positivi | Relazioni ed educazione sessuale
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/15/secondary-schools-england-to-tackle-incel-culture-relationships-sex-education
di DarkSkiesGreyWaters
30 commenti
“The updated guidance comes hard on the heels of the Netflix drama Adolescence, which triggered a national outcry from parents, educators and policymakers with its portrayal of a 13-year-old boy who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate.”
That drama was fictional. It annoys me that they’re talking about a “national outcry” based on a work of complete fiction, as if this was a documentary.
It’s not as if there aren’t actual problems around the actual interactions between gangs of men and young girls that need to be properly tackled…
I’d have a few questions about what’s on the curriculum, where the “incel” culture references are being taken from, how this is being adapted to teach young boys how to behave in the world, who the ‘positive role models’ for boys are – and why, and what the exact “myths” about women in the “manosphere (whatever the hell that is)” are.
All of this, of course, is never expanded upon.
And also why this is being acted upon as a result of a television series….
By that logic we should have a curriculum on how to slide down a hill in a bathtub because I’m pretty sure Compo did that once in Last of the Summer Wine…
Bring back partnered dance, instead of telling boys theyre the problem and a threat and put them off approaching a girl forever.
This will come at the expense of another educational topic. A topic that might actually teach the children something useful. For example – the basics of running a small business and the associated administration (tax returns and the like). Given that a lot of children aspire to be Youtubers and influencers, you would think that business admin education would be useful.
Instead, we are going to teach kids about incels and porn, all because Netflix funded and released a fictitious limited series which the PM watched.
We are no longer a serious country.
So we’ll be having a recruitment drive trying to get men into teaching?
I should write a shocking miniseries about how the world will explode if I’m not given 10 billion pounds and hope the PM watches it.
One way to introduce kids to positive role models is to make after school clubs accessible to all. Dance, swimming, arts, football, basketball etc. many of these clubs are too expensive for families to send their kids to. These are the places where kids learn how to behave in public and meet the positive role models they can aspire to.
Really? Because I’m pretty sure they also teach being trans or homosexual is normal and good.
Sigh, you can’t TEACH positive role models, you have to BE positive role models.
You also need to tackle the root cause of incel culture, not just try and treat the surface level symptom.
Schools gonna teach young boys to stop noticing the systemic oppression of young boys and men. Maybe if they just stop noticing, they’d stop being so angry.
More than happy to use made up bullshit to further nag and shit on young native men. Also notice how they’re happy to ignore a documentary uncovering Pakistani rape gangs. If they behaved in an equal way, schools would have to teach young Pakistani Muslims western values towards women, that Islam is just another religion, shagging your cousin isn’t a good thing and should be avoided and not reporting your mate to the police when he offers a chance to get in after him on a girl he’s groomed makes you a monster.
As a woman with a son, I don’t think this problem has occurred in a vacuum and I don’t have much faith in the education system to approach things in a helpful way without demonising young boys. My son is only 7 but he already comes home from school saying that the girls are being treated differently than the boys by the staff and that he wishes he was a girl because they get treated better. He has also never had a male teacher. There is a massive problem with young boys underperforming in the education system and it’s been getting worse every year. When will it be taken seriously?
Needs more positive male role models in media, but they need to be realistic rather than perfect. So male characters who are overall positive, but who have traits that are acknowledged in-media as being problematic which can be changed.
I’ve been on a 9-1-1 obsession recently, and I’m aware that that’s _not_ what most teenagers would be interested in. But the primarily male cast is mostly positive, and their more toxic traits are actually addressed in the show as being negative. Even in the spin-off set in Texas, one character’s anger management issues (he’s quick to use his fists) are presented as being an Actual Problem instead of just how men are expected to behave. Therapy is an actual thing that characters in both shows are shown to attend.
So we haven’t yet completely feminised young men then?
I think there seems to be a massive conflation between incels and “Andrew Tate” like figures, which I don’t think is fair. Incels are abstaining from sex and don’t want to engage in dating because they’re tired of the dating world and their lack of prospects. Andrew Tate is repulsive, but he’s not an incel, the guy never shuts up about sex or how to have sex with women. Also really annoys me that this initiative is being based on a work of pure fiction. Stats show that kids with loving supportive parents and stable backgrounds very very rarely are the ones committing those sorts of crimes. Ironically the Netflix show was apparently based on a real crime, however the case it was based on, the perpetrator was a teenage boy with a very troubled background and immigrant parents. If they’d portrayed the character coming from that kind of background, I’ll bet my right arm the show would not have actually aired because racism. And no I’m not against immigrant parents I appreciate the vast majority are loving and kind and raise their kids well. I’m just pointing out the obvious changes for the Netflix show, to make it fit a certain narrative.
How about we address the education gap for boys instead of singling them out in a sea of toxic ideas that everybody perpetuates. Are we supposed to ignore the blatant sexism you see on social media about boys/men like it doesn’t shape these ideas in the first place.
I know the article specifically says it’s about avoiding demonising these kids for what they are but I have zero faith this isn’t going to backfire. Young boys/men are doing worse by every metric that matters, it’s going to be a tough dialogue imo.
‘What the purveyors of victimhood culture do not seem to grasp is that in weakening dignity, and in undermining the principles that deem all men and women to be moral equals, they unwittingly destroy the safeguards that prevent bad actors—such as hoaxers and narcissists—from climbing the social hierarchy through dishonesty and manipulation. In incentivizing weakness and reliance on third parties to intervene in disputes, students invite a paternalistic authoritarian apparatus to develop. While they seem comfortable with an authoritarian apparatus on their university campus today, we should not be surprised if they demand an authoritarian state to police the citizenry tomorrow. The logical endpoint of a victimhood culture will not be a progressive utopia. On the contrary: The further this culture radiates outward, the more likely it will make victims of us all.’
The War on Dignity – Commentary Magazine
I wonder if Incels would disappear once Elon Musk or someone invents the “SexBot-3000” ?
If they’re going to teach boys how to ask girls out, will they teach girls how to not crush a boys self esteem when they turn them down, as that’s half what sets boys off down an incel pathway. The consistent rejection, lack of social skills and girls thinking they get to emotionally destroy someone without a care, you’d think half of it would be common sense but some kids are vindictive and take pleasure in making someone know/feel they’re beneath them.
A real potential solution to the male role model problem would be to encourage more male teachers into schools. Especially Primary, as I didn’t have a male teacher the entire time I went to primary school. If you have these classes taught by a woman, it’s going to fall flat.
For roughly the past 10-15 years, young boys growing up in the UK have faced significant criticism regarding masculinity, or indeed even denying them the perception of “male” behaviours, hobbies, etc. They’ve been taught that traditionally masculine behaviours are undesirable, and often, even if implicitly, encouraged to feel shame and guilt for being part of the “privileged” male group. The current crisis of “incel culture”, with all its unfortunate and appalling behaviours, is a classic result of a suppressed group leaning toward extremes as a counter-force to that suppression. It’s a textbook example of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Unless this issue is addressed, and new generations of boys are taught that positive masculine characteristics are good, not bad, the situation will only worsen, further polarising society and leading to dangerous behaviours, particularly along the male/female axis.
How about stopping discrimination against boys by misandrist, feminist teachers, who punish them more harshly than girls for the same rule infarctions, and who grade them less than girls for the same test results? How about teaching British children to be proud of Britain and British culture instead of sending them home on “multiculturalism day”?
But apparently it’s more important for the incompetent idiots mismanaging Britain’s schools to implement changes in reaction to a fictional Netflix documentary.
30 year old male youtubers with an audience of teenagers is where the issue is.
Fundamentally of course this will never work because the people implementing it have no understanding of how teenage boys think or what things are relevant to them. Andrew Tate, for example, whilst certainly a violent misogynist is not an incel or really associated with them. He’s also not been relevant for about two ish years.
The fact that the government seems to be basing policy over a fictional TV drama and suggesting that Gareth Southgate (a man who brings to mind a host of appealing and definitely not out of touch adjectives like ‘ineffectual’, ‘meek’, and ‘vaguely laughable’) would be someone that the teenage boys of today would consider at all cool is just evidence of how comically ineffectual they are.
Pretty sad that kids aren’t learning at home how to be a decent human being.
The elephant in the room is the breakdown of the family. When most kids could rely on having married parents during their upbringing then *most* kids were exposed to positive male role models. Adults have collectively decided that what they want for themselves is more important than what their children actually need. We are living with the consequences of that selfishness.
Honestly i dont think “positive role models” is the education that will fix this problem.
Theres tons of positive and negative role models out there, the issue is, imo anyway, the state of the family unit and how people parent. Parentings hard, its even harder if you dont know how, its even harder if your a single parent, or poor, or lack education, or lack time, or work multiple jobs, etc etc.
Kids have access to the internet, parents have stressful lives from cost of living to hours worked/commuting, that doesn’t make excuses, but also means parents are more likely to allow their kids time on phones, computers, games etc to make their own lives easier. Then that opens the whole can of worms of the internet and how its policed.
Its not simply a “lets show them good role models”, “lets educate them on misogyny” because people with these issues probably do have good role models, but they also have bad, and they are probably learning a lot from social media while their parents struggle on through life.
Its not a simple fix, but like everything else they want it to be, so this might be a right step in the right direction but i cant see much changing solely down to lifestyle issues in the UK.
it would seem that a govt. minister’s idea of a *’positive role model’* is always the same:
– i.e some simpering, weak-gripped, soy drinking, lib dem sort that gets troubled by a 2kg dumbbell, who devises an academic course alongside grifting academics who’ve never done anything societally productive in their careers
– said type occasionally goes to schools to do a talk what masculinity means and bores all the boys to sleep
– alternatively, it will be a middle aged lady working in education whose party trick is to hector and then hector again at young males, and has built an entire career out of doing so. despite not once producing anything of value
– said lady shouts down any and all criticism and insists that yet another round of hectoring will solve the problem
shockingly, teenage boys aren’t inspired by either of these – who knew?
We can start by actually recognising that boys exist as a separate thing to the doubleplusungirls the people staffing our schools seem to think they are.
Showing them a television show isn’t going to do anything when they have to be taught by people who devalue them.
I think how children have evolved to engage with the modern media climate is the biggest culprit and it’s gonna be borderline impossible to tackle and it isn’t a matter of simply introducing more ‘better’ male role models for children. It’s gotta involve schools offering media literacy training at a young age so they can actually understand how and why things are presented to them in such a way.
There’s always been bad role models out there but nowadays everyone is bombarded with highly personalised social media, Tik-tok, Youtube, generated AI slop. where all that content is driven by an unfeeling algorithm were if money is to be made, you encourage engagement by rage baiting and grifting a parasocial audience and the younger you ensnare an audience them the more and longer you can milk them.
…Just to present a recent example. We have Grok that prevalent AI Chat bot recently calling itself Mecha-Hitler and talking about white genocide and now they making companion personalities of it that people will talk to and adopt said views, especially children being what they see on modern media that will believe to be true.
I’m sure we’ll have very normal responses to this one.