HIT television show Adolescence will be at the heart of a West End conversation about the online ‘manosphere’ and how it affects the way young people deal interact with the world.
Adolescence: A Panel’s Perspective will feature experts on business, creative arts, gender studies and violence to discuss the “collective lived experience” of people dealing with an increase in online misogyny.
Adolescence will act as a “touchstone” for the conversation as it showcases the “life-shattering” story of a young boy who is arrested for the murder of his female classmate, and analyses the online radicalisation and misogyny which lead to the crime.
Panel curator Paul Pulé says the show acts as an opportunity to discuss the online phenomenon of influencers such as Andrew Tate who push misogynistic theories and exploit young boys and men into believing the rhetoric.
Adolescence: A Panel’s Perspective curator Paul Pulé.
“It really effectively shows the pathos that’s unfolded as a direct consequence of strategic, intentional, and highly-funded approaches to polluting boys’ minds to send us back to the 1950s,” Dr Pulé said.
“The Trump 2.0 effect globally has taken the whole idea of flipping us back to that time of traditional family roles and heteronormativity to the nth degree, it’s really pumped steroids into that whole process.
“[It’s] not just giving excuses for boys to act badly, but also to dumb down the expectation and the fierce boundaries that girls and women have benefited from, from third wave feminism.”
Dr Pulé says the use of the term ‘toxic masculinity’ will be “intentionally” avoided in the panel discussion as counter-productive.
“As soon as you use that term, [many] men either switch off or feel defensive, and that’s a very difficult starting place to open someone’s heart… it doesn’t make sense in addressing those issues, to start from a place of blaming and shaming a person who happens to be in a cis male body,” Dr Pulé said.
Manipulation
“What’s important is to point out the strategic and intentional manipulation of people who happen to be on those bodies by forces that are exploiting them.
“There’s nothing advantageous about blaming and shaming boys for this situation, what’s advantageous is to look at the structural issues that set boys and men up to behave in terrible ways, and how we can change that for everybody’s benefit.”
Psychotherapist and consent educator Vanessa Vance will be on the panel and says she will be speaking to the “crisis of disconnection” that drives so many young boys and men into the manosphere’s clutches.
“A lot of what we’re seeing with this sort of manosphere and misogyny has to do with young men feeling isolated or disconnected; they don’t have the communities or the men around them that are the role models that they’re really seeking,” Ms Vance said.
“They’re going online, which is what everyone does when they’re looking for answers for things, and they find people very much available to groom them into the manosphere, and it creates that separation… this idea that somehow women are to blame for all of their problems.
“It’s a very screwed up way of looking at it, but then they take it on board, because it gives them a sense of purpose, but what we know is that also that group of men are actually the most unhealthy mental health-wise, so it doesn’t lead to really good outcomes for a lot of them.
It’s an important conversation for parents, according to Ms Vance, who may not be aware of the maelstrom of emotional exploitation when allowing their children internet access.
“The key thing for me about Adolescence is the parents… watching the intergenerational masculine stuff that takes place around fathers being able to emotionally regulate, being able to deal with their feelings, being emotionally available,” she said.
“I’m really interested in also [exploring] how as parents, we can show up for our young boys in a different way, in being more regulated and resourced to have these kinds of conversations.
“Schools aren’t really stepping up to deal with them quickly enough, they just can’t respond and react fast enough, so parents are an underutilised resource, and they need to be resourced to be able to resource their children.”
Adolescence: A Panel’s Perspective will be held on Thursday, November 27 at 5pm, at Moore and Moore Cafe in the West End.
More information is available via Humanitix.
by KATHERINE KRAAYVANGER