March 27, 2025 • 22 mins
A new TV series has reignited conversations around incel culture, social media, and gender-based violence. Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ follows the fictional story of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who’s arrested following the murder of his 14-year-old schoolmate Katie. To understand more about the world Adolescence portrays, TDA spoke to academic and social sciences expert Dr Anthony Collins, who works on issues of violence, gender and cultural studies.
Hosts: Emma Gillespie and Zara Seidler
Guest: Dr Anthony Collins
Producer: Orla Maher
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already and this this is the Daily h this is
the Daily ODS. Oh now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
the twenty eighth of March. I'm Emma Gillespie.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
I'm Zara Seidler, a new.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Netflix show has shocked and captivated audiences around the world
over the last week, and it's reignited conversations around in
cell culture, social media, and gendered violence. Adolescence is a
four part series that tells the fictional story of a
thirteen year old boy called Jamie who's arrested following the
murder of his schoolmate, a fourteen year old girl named Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
M I watched this series literally one go. I could
not look away. It was so captivating, And when you
learn that it was shot in one take, it just
makes it even more unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, it's got all.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Of this kind of critical and technical acclaim because those EPISO,
so it's a shot in one take, they unfold in
real time.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Yeah, And then, of course you know, there is, as
you said, that technical side, But then there's the story itself,
and it's the journey of this unbelievable actor playing a
young kid Jamie who goes from a seemingly innocent young
child to a radicalized inceel. That has started new conversations,
not just in our office, not just you know, in Australia,
(01:23):
but around the world about things like online safety and
gender roles.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, it's been a really interesting conversation, and so we
wanted to understand a little bit more about that world
that Adolescence portrays. So I'm bringing in an expert for
this one to find out how accurate the show is.
We are talking to academic and social sciences expert, doctor
Anthony Collins, who works on issues of violence, gender and
cultural studies, and Anthony Collins joins us Now welcome to
(01:51):
the podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Everyone is talking about this Netflix series Adolescence. Is it
an accurate reflection of in cell culture and online bullying
when we're talking about a twenty twenty five context.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Firstly, I'm a little bit surprised that everyone is talking
about insult culture in relation to the series, because I
think it's an interesting cultural moment that what jumped out
at people was this idea of insult culture, which is
barely referenced in fact when you look at the series.
I mean, it's relevant. But there's one mention of Andrew Tait,
(02:26):
and there's maybe I can't remember two or three mentions
of insul culture throughout the series. But there's something in
the historical moment that when people watching that and hearing
those trigger words like Andrew Tait insul are like, oh,
that's what this is really about. For instance, if you
just read the script, you may not think that this
(02:47):
is really about it because it doesn't get into the
substance of it. It doesn't do a dive into the
online world of insult culture, how people get into it,
who's saying what there? And insult culture almost becomes this
kind of black box to explain how you've got this
absolute terrib faced little kid. And the next thing is like,
(03:07):
oh no, he went from being an innocent little child
to possibly a murderer who knows it does the work
of saying that it's an explanation without actually explaining, And
I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I think it kind of speaks to this fear that
we have online in schools across parenting, the unseid of
that show and what we don't see and what we
don't learn about in cell culture. But this kind of
outcome at the end of this horrifically violent crime.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Yeah, I mean that's really important context. And I think
the way you identify that anxiety, it's like, my little
boy could be a monster because of things I don't
understand that are happening out there. And I wonder whether
parents are more freaked out by this show than kids are,
given that.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
It doesn't go deep on that in cell culture context.
How would you define in cell culture? Where did it
come from? What does this all really mean?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
One of the most interesting things the word insul was
not coined by an insult. It was coined by a
feminist to describe herself. It was like used by kind
of a woman thinking critically about gender to describe her
own experience, which is the experience of being kind of
on the outside, outside of the world of relationships and sexuality,
(04:32):
and the kind of feeling of being like socially rejected,
socially marginalized, and this recognition that some people feel like
that they're just not part of a social system that
is specifically portrayed in the media as being the way
to happiness, love, sex, all of that, that's how you
get happy, and that many people feel radically on the
(04:56):
outside of that. And what's so interesting to me is
that insult cultures is like alienated men talking about themselves
using concepts that they have taken from feminism and just
turn them upside down. So all of those kind of
cultural problems of the transition from girlhood to womanhood suddenly
(05:18):
get rewritten to describe the crisis of masculinity that these
young boys are being put into a world where they
expected to aspire to an idea of masculinity. They expected
to be super buff, they expected to be rich and
drive fast cars and to have a kind of social
power like that have an authority in society, and if
(05:40):
they don't have that, then they are kind of losers.
They feel excluded from literally the dream of happiness as
people in the society. And that's a kind of a
radical exclusion for people who feel and also the fact
that it's really hard being a teenager, that feeling of
(06:01):
like you're growing up, you don't know who you are.
Shit is weird around, you don't fully understand. But people
are kind of being mean. And what comes along for
people who are doing that, particularly for young people, and
I radically online that their social interactions are not primarily
with people. They're primarily in the virtual domain. And into
(06:21):
this gap, into this terrible space, comes the story that
is being actively aggressively sold into young people's news feeds
of a certain version of the crisis of masculinity. And
it's being sold by, on the one hand, kind of
insult influences from the respectable face like Jordan Peterson through
(06:44):
to the pariah face like Andrew Tate. Like Andrew Tate
is like the bogey man under the bed in this
whole kind of culture. But it's also being aggressively sold by,
in fact, a much bigger network, which is the whole
rise of conservative political power, the culture wars, you know,
like men aren't allowed to be men anymore. The woke
(07:06):
mind virus has made it impossible to tell a joke.
What is essentially a kind of conservative discourse that is
meant to master up support for something that otherwise has
no rational justification for its support.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
So these culture wars, I'm really interested in understanding born
out of these culture wars, we have alienated groups of
young people. We're talking about young men in those awful
teen years, and that somehow they are being targeted by
these radical influences. But that is tied into to an algorithm. Right,
(07:45):
what yes, what is the role of the algorithm because
that's a uniquely contemporary context.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
The algorithms are controlled, right, I mean, on the one hand,
it's supposed to be like you like something, you get
more of it, so you controlling it, but it's also
being deliberately manipulated, and that manipulation is being paid for.
So what we see is is someone like Andrew Tate
is enormously wealthy because he makes money out of the algorithms,
(08:14):
and he invests some of that money back into the algorithms,
similarly with all of them, but there's also huge politics
behind this. Elon Musk is the most powerful algorithm manipulator
on Earth at the moment. They don't make the alienation.
They walk into the space created by the feelings of
(08:34):
alienation and they write it into a story to say, well,
what's gone wrong with you is that man hating feminists
have tried to destroy your place in the world to
try and make sure you will that you will always
be treated with contempt and society and so you should
be angry with them. So it's a way of misrepresenting
(08:58):
reality in order to incite anger and that is the
danger within in cul culture is it starts with the
existing feelings of alienation, but it takes people into a
paranoid universe. They feel bad because they are being persecuted,
and that is where the risk is.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Something so shocking about adolescence this Netflix program, though, is
that it tracks this journey of alienation for someone.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
So so young.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And we've heard mainstream conversations about the dangers of in
cell culture and the likes of Andrew Tait, But I
think maybe the person that we're imagining is being influenced
on the other side of that is a much older person.
Did it strike you the age of the character at
the heart of this and is that a realistic narrative?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Yes? I was struck by that, and it is absolutely unrealistic.
Thirteen year olds are not running around murdering people, statistically
killing other people around eighteen, and they did until they're
about twenty seven. It's really interesting men men are doing
the murdering, and they're doing it from young adulthood to
early mid adulthood.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
But are there foundations that are being laid at there.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yes, the foundations are being laid there. But also the
use of the thirteen year old child, and not just
any thirteen year old child. This was not like basement
dwelling slub of insult fantasies. This was a boy who
you know, but it wouldn't melt in his mouth. And
this is just creating the drama, creating the sentimentality to
(10:35):
enhance the shock feeling. It's purely for the television narrative.
It's not about describing reality. But if it was, you know,
acne faced, overweight, seventeen year old, then we wouldn't be
having this interview.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Well, I was going to ask you, do we need
to be shocked?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Are you worried that there's maybe these obscure dark corners
of the internet, the way that we speak about them,
these online conversations, that maybe they are more prevalent and
more mainstream than many of us. Realizing that this show
might be aiming to kind of shock us into that realization.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I'll differentiate. I don't think we need to be shocked.
I think we need to be worried. I think we
need to be very worried. And what I'm differentiating there
is if we're shocked, then we will be shocked for
forty eight hours, seventy two hours we will have some interviews,
it will trend, and then next week it'll be forgotten,
(11:30):
because that's just moral panics rising and falling in society.
We need to be worried by which I mean we
need to be thinking about this all the time because
it's much more serious than it's being depicted. Yeah, it
is absolutely apocalyptically, catastrophically serious, and we need to be
(11:52):
thinking about that because when we're shocked, we do dramatic,
irrational stuff like than the Internet. But when we worry,
then we do what people like me are supposed to do.
We do research. We say, well, what's really going on.
We're really going to talk to a lot of kids
in depth a lot of time. We understand what's going on,
and then we think it through and say, look, we
(12:14):
need to do this, so we don't need to do
it in the mode of freaking out. We need to
do it in the mode of thoughtfulness. So, yes, we
need to be extremely concerned about infesol culture. It's much
worse than you think. It's much worse than it's portrayed
in adolescence. But we need to re orient ourselves towards
(12:35):
it so that we're not just freaking out and clutching
at straws. This is a comprehensible thing. It can be understood,
it can be responded to. It must be understood and
responded to in.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Orienting ourselves towards responding towards that action over outrage that
you've described.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
What is a role of communication here?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
How important is two way communication between adults and young people?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Because I guess this show tells us.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
That there is this relationship between teenagers and their parents
that is disconnected from the realities of those young people.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You know, in adolescence.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
We have a suburban life, this family, this everyday typical
nuclear family, This nice, hardworking mum and dad who have
no idea what's going on in their kids room behind
closed doors at night time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Is that a big problem.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
I'm sure it's a big problem. The question is is
it a new problem? Has there ever been a point
in the history of Western societies where teenagers and their
parents who were having long, heartfelt conversations about the personal
details of their lives, and teenagers were not like sighing
or rolling their eyes just be cringed out by their
(13:51):
parents and wanting to be the opposite of them.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Okay, but there was a common thread in.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I suppose the lived experiences of tin across generations, that insecurity,
that young budding romance, puberty, all of the rest. But
now we have this new context of this online radicalization
that a generation of parents hasn't lived through.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
Yeah, and in the nineteen fifties teenagers were listening to
rock and roll and their parents were freaking out. This
is not a new story. This part of shaping your identity,
part of getting into that stage where like, I'm not
a child anymore. I'm going to experiment with being an
autonomous human being, and part of that is experimenting with
what I was told not to do. Now it is
(14:36):
organized in a particular way. Okay, it is organized by
the algorithms. That's the only thing that's new. The process
is old, the technology is new. So now Andrew Tate,
who no one should know his name, but now every
young boy in the world knows who he is. That's
what's new. And there is this kind of generational feel like, well,
(15:00):
we don't know what's happening on the internet, but they've
never known what's happening. They've never known what is happening
when their kids were smoking indeed, but.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Did smoking weed and listening to rock and roll make
outcomes worse for women? Did listening to rock and roll
increase gender based violence the likes of I suppose that
there are more sinister outcomes? Maybe exactly when we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
This, this intel culture increases violence against women. That's a
thing that it does. What's different now is that the
idea of it being a gender war is now explicitly articulated.
It's like, you are being undermined by women, you must
take your revenge on them. That is a new and
(15:46):
appalling idea that needs to be looked at, but it's
also part of a broader set of ideas. And so
if you watch what's happening in US politics at the moment,
a whole lot of things being promoted, Like a whole
lot of forms of bullying and hatred are being promoted.
There's a whole new normalization of racism and racist violence.
(16:10):
There's a whole new normalization of xenophobia. These are multiple
forms of hatred and legitimation of violence that are going on.
Violence against women is one of them, and it's all
part of a weird nostalgia for a time when men
ran the world, and there's terrible anxiety that they have
(16:31):
that that era may be starting to be over and
they can't cope. So hidden in this is also a
story of things getting much better and people being elder
say they can actually talk about gender now, They can
actually say, well, we can talk about how masculinity is
being constructed. That language didn't exist two generations ago, and
(16:53):
those acts of violence were being completely and utterly covered
up and hidden so that people who experience against that
stuff were like ashamed. It was not in the media.
Now it is. That's actually really good. So insult culture
it's doing a work of saying, well, you should treat
women like this, you should treat women with contempt. If
(17:17):
you don't feel like you're dominating women, then you are
failing as a man. That's new that all it's doing
is trying to reinstate something that used to be there,
which they feel like was lost. So when insult culture
says you need to have you know, you need to
control your women, it's literally saying what generations before always said,
(17:39):
but then got told hey, stop doing that, and it
became less legitimate to say for men to talk about
women in that way, and that they started feeling a
bit nostalgic about that, and so insult culture is bringing
it back. So in a sense, it's the swing of
the pendulum from the heyday of gender equality to the
(18:02):
beautiful days of the nineteen fifties when everyone knew their place.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
So what needs to change. We don't want this moral
panic and culture of outrage. We want to understand thoughtfully
what's going on. But how do we reduce the influence
or the appeal of in cell culture for young men?
How do we create safest baces online? Recognizing that young
people are going to be online, they are going to
(18:28):
find social media, they are going to find these communities,
and their parents won't know about them.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, that's the hard work. That's the hard job. That's
the job for which there's no little platitude like five
point plan. If we do this, it'll be fine. Sixteen
year olds off the internet, you know, talk to your kids. Yes,
that's all true, but it's a bit trite. What we've
got to do is, yes, we've got to give kids
(18:55):
ways of knowing what they're feeling. And that's one of
the things that's been getting really better and better compared
to my generation, that kids have got to be able
to express things, communicate things, but also they have to
be able to think critically so that when lack Andrew
Tates starts telling them something, they've got to be like,
(19:16):
what's that really about? What's it going to do if
I follow this thing, if I joined this cult, if
I follow these influences, what's it going to do to me?
For me be able to think about that, to be literate,
be critically literate of their world, their media, their social interactions.
And what's so interesting if you look at the United
States and at the moment, they're deliberately shutting that down.
(19:39):
They're literally banning teachers from teaching about how to understand
your world. You're literally not allowed to talk about these things.
And that's deliberate. They're deliberately removing the conditions for people
to understand what's happening to them. And the big thing
is to support people, not only young boys, to support
(20:01):
people in moments of vulnerability. This whole problem starts at
a particular point, the idea that when adolescent boys feel vulnerable,
the aspirational idea of masculinity that is forced on them
is that they may not show that vulnerability, that if
they show that vulnerability, they become contemptible. If that could
(20:24):
be dismantled in soul culture would simply evaporate. They would
have no reason to exist. How to do that complicated, tricky,
long above all along ongoing process. But the terrible thing
we've done by associating aspirational masculinity with the absence of
(20:48):
vulnerability is an apocalyptic catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Doctor Anthony Collins, thank you so much for coming on
the podcast today sharing your expertise.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I think you've given all of us plenty to think about.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Great Thanks for having me. Thanks for the chat. I
think it's an important topic. We should be thinking about it.
We shouldn't be freaking out about it, we should be
thinking about it.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Such an interesting conversation and really valuable to hear some
of that kind of expert analysis and input into a
conversation that is playing out in so many different spaces.
So really really helpful podcast there, and that wraps up
another week of the Dally os podcast. Thank you so
much for tuning in each and every day. It's been
(21:32):
our biggest month ever of podcasts and we could be prouder.
Thank you for making that possible. We will be, of
course back later today with the headlines. But until then,
enjoy your day.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Cargottin woman from Gadigol Country.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on
the lands of the Gadigol people and pays respect to
all all Aboriginal and torrest rate island and nations.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
Already and this this is the Daily h this is
the Daily ODS. Oh now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
the twenty eighth of March. I'm Emma Gillespie.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
I'm Zara Seidler, a new.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Netflix show has shocked and captivated audiences around the world
over the last week, and it's reignited conversations around in
cell culture, social media, and gendered violence. Adolescence is a
four part series that tells the fictional story of a
thirteen year old boy called Jamie who's arrested following the
murder of his schoolmate, a fourteen year old girl named Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
M I watched this series literally one go. I could
not look away. It was so captivating, And when you
learn that it was shot in one take, it just
makes it even more unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, it's got all.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Of this kind of critical and technical acclaim because those EPISO,
so it's a shot in one take, they unfold in
real time.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Yeah, And then, of course you know, there is, as
you said, that technical side, But then there's the story itself,
and it's the journey of this unbelievable actor playing a
young kid Jamie who goes from a seemingly innocent young
child to a radicalized inceel. That has started new conversations,
not just in our office, not just you know, in Australia,
(01:23):
but around the world about things like online safety and
gender roles.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, it's been a really interesting conversation, and so we
wanted to understand a little bit more about that world
that Adolescence portrays. So I'm bringing in an expert for
this one to find out how accurate the show is.
We are talking to academic and social sciences expert, doctor
Anthony Collins, who works on issues of violence, gender and
cultural studies, and Anthony Collins joins us Now welcome to
(01:51):
the podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Everyone is talking about this Netflix series Adolescence. Is it
an accurate reflection of in cell culture and online bullying
when we're talking about a twenty twenty five context.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Firstly, I'm a little bit surprised that everyone is talking
about insult culture in relation to the series, because I
think it's an interesting cultural moment that what jumped out
at people was this idea of insult culture, which is
barely referenced in fact when you look at the series.
I mean, it's relevant. But there's one mention of Andrew Tait,
(02:26):
and there's maybe I can't remember two or three mentions
of insul culture throughout the series. But there's something in
the historical moment that when people watching that and hearing
those trigger words like Andrew Tait insul are like, oh,
that's what this is really about. For instance, if you
just read the script, you may not think that this
(02:47):
is really about it because it doesn't get into the
substance of it. It doesn't do a dive into the
online world of insult culture, how people get into it,
who's saying what there? And insult culture almost becomes this
kind of black box to explain how you've got this
absolute terrib faced little kid. And the next thing is like,
(03:07):
oh no, he went from being an innocent little child
to possibly a murderer who knows it does the work
of saying that it's an explanation without actually explaining, And
I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I think it kind of speaks to this fear that
we have online in schools across parenting, the unseid of
that show and what we don't see and what we
don't learn about in cell culture. But this kind of
outcome at the end of this horrifically violent crime.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Yeah, I mean that's really important context. And I think
the way you identify that anxiety, it's like, my little
boy could be a monster because of things I don't
understand that are happening out there. And I wonder whether
parents are more freaked out by this show than kids are,
given that.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
It doesn't go deep on that in cell culture context.
How would you define in cell culture? Where did it
come from? What does this all really mean?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
One of the most interesting things the word insul was
not coined by an insult. It was coined by a
feminist to describe herself. It was like used by kind
of a woman thinking critically about gender to describe her
own experience, which is the experience of being kind of
on the outside, outside of the world of relationships and sexuality,
(04:32):
and the kind of feeling of being like socially rejected,
socially marginalized, and this recognition that some people feel like
that they're just not part of a social system that
is specifically portrayed in the media as being the way
to happiness, love, sex, all of that, that's how you
get happy, and that many people feel radically on the
(04:56):
outside of that. And what's so interesting to me is
that insult cultures is like alienated men talking about themselves
using concepts that they have taken from feminism and just
turn them upside down. So all of those kind of
cultural problems of the transition from girlhood to womanhood suddenly
(05:18):
get rewritten to describe the crisis of masculinity that these
young boys are being put into a world where they
expected to aspire to an idea of masculinity. They expected
to be super buff, they expected to be rich and
drive fast cars and to have a kind of social
power like that have an authority in society, and if
(05:40):
they don't have that, then they are kind of losers.
They feel excluded from literally the dream of happiness as
people in the society. And that's a kind of a
radical exclusion for people who feel and also the fact
that it's really hard being a teenager, that feeling of
(06:01):
like you're growing up, you don't know who you are.
Shit is weird around, you don't fully understand. But people
are kind of being mean. And what comes along for
people who are doing that, particularly for young people, and
I radically online that their social interactions are not primarily
with people. They're primarily in the virtual domain. And into
(06:21):
this gap, into this terrible space, comes the story that
is being actively aggressively sold into young people's news feeds
of a certain version of the crisis of masculinity. And
it's being sold by, on the one hand, kind of
insult influences from the respectable face like Jordan Peterson through
(06:44):
to the pariah face like Andrew Tate. Like Andrew Tate
is like the bogey man under the bed in this
whole kind of culture. But it's also being aggressively sold by,
in fact, a much bigger network, which is the whole
rise of conservative political power, the culture wars, you know,
like men aren't allowed to be men anymore. The woke
(07:06):
mind virus has made it impossible to tell a joke.
What is essentially a kind of conservative discourse that is
meant to master up support for something that otherwise has
no rational justification for its support.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
So these culture wars, I'm really interested in understanding born
out of these culture wars, we have alienated groups of
young people. We're talking about young men in those awful
teen years, and that somehow they are being targeted by
these radical influences. But that is tied into to an algorithm. Right,
(07:45):
what yes, what is the role of the algorithm because
that's a uniquely contemporary context.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
The algorithms are controlled, right, I mean, on the one hand,
it's supposed to be like you like something, you get
more of it, so you controlling it, but it's also
being deliberately manipulated, and that manipulation is being paid for.
So what we see is is someone like Andrew Tate
is enormously wealthy because he makes money out of the algorithms,
(08:14):
and he invests some of that money back into the algorithms,
similarly with all of them, but there's also huge politics
behind this. Elon Musk is the most powerful algorithm manipulator
on Earth at the moment. They don't make the alienation.
They walk into the space created by the feelings of
(08:34):
alienation and they write it into a story to say, well,
what's gone wrong with you is that man hating feminists
have tried to destroy your place in the world to
try and make sure you will that you will always
be treated with contempt and society and so you should
be angry with them. So it's a way of misrepresenting
(08:58):
reality in order to incite anger and that is the
danger within in cul culture is it starts with the
existing feelings of alienation, but it takes people into a
paranoid universe. They feel bad because they are being persecuted,
and that is where the risk is.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Something so shocking about adolescence this Netflix program, though, is
that it tracks this journey of alienation for someone.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
So so young.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And we've heard mainstream conversations about the dangers of in
cell culture and the likes of Andrew Tait, But I
think maybe the person that we're imagining is being influenced
on the other side of that is a much older person.
Did it strike you the age of the character at
the heart of this and is that a realistic narrative?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Yes? I was struck by that, and it is absolutely unrealistic.
Thirteen year olds are not running around murdering people, statistically
killing other people around eighteen, and they did until they're
about twenty seven. It's really interesting men men are doing
the murdering, and they're doing it from young adulthood to
early mid adulthood.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
But are there foundations that are being laid at there.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yes, the foundations are being laid there. But also the
use of the thirteen year old child, and not just
any thirteen year old child. This was not like basement
dwelling slub of insult fantasies. This was a boy who
you know, but it wouldn't melt in his mouth. And
this is just creating the drama, creating the sentimentality to
(10:35):
enhance the shock feeling. It's purely for the television narrative.
It's not about describing reality. But if it was, you know,
acne faced, overweight, seventeen year old, then we wouldn't be
having this interview.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Well, I was going to ask you, do we need
to be shocked?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Are you worried that there's maybe these obscure dark corners
of the internet, the way that we speak about them,
these online conversations, that maybe they are more prevalent and
more mainstream than many of us. Realizing that this show
might be aiming to kind of shock us into that realization.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I'll differentiate. I don't think we need to be shocked.
I think we need to be worried. I think we
need to be very worried. And what I'm differentiating there
is if we're shocked, then we will be shocked for
forty eight hours, seventy two hours we will have some interviews,
it will trend, and then next week it'll be forgotten,
(11:30):
because that's just moral panics rising and falling in society.
We need to be worried by which I mean we
need to be thinking about this all the time because
it's much more serious than it's being depicted. Yeah, it
is absolutely apocalyptically, catastrophically serious, and we need to be
(11:52):
thinking about that because when we're shocked, we do dramatic,
irrational stuff like than the Internet. But when we worry,
then we do what people like me are supposed to do.
We do research. We say, well, what's really going on.
We're really going to talk to a lot of kids
in depth a lot of time. We understand what's going on,
and then we think it through and say, look, we
(12:14):
need to do this, so we don't need to do
it in the mode of freaking out. We need to
do it in the mode of thoughtfulness. So, yes, we
need to be extremely concerned about infesol culture. It's much
worse than you think. It's much worse than it's portrayed
in adolescence. But we need to re orient ourselves towards
(12:35):
it so that we're not just freaking out and clutching
at straws. This is a comprehensible thing. It can be understood,
it can be responded to. It must be understood and
responded to in.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Orienting ourselves towards responding towards that action over outrage that
you've described.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
What is a role of communication here?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
How important is two way communication between adults and young people?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Because I guess this show tells us.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
That there is this relationship between teenagers and their parents
that is disconnected from the realities of those young people.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You know, in adolescence.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
We have a suburban life, this family, this everyday typical
nuclear family, This nice, hardworking mum and dad who have
no idea what's going on in their kids room behind
closed doors at night time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Is that a big problem.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
I'm sure it's a big problem. The question is is
it a new problem? Has there ever been a point
in the history of Western societies where teenagers and their
parents who were having long, heartfelt conversations about the personal
details of their lives, and teenagers were not like sighing
or rolling their eyes just be cringed out by their
(13:51):
parents and wanting to be the opposite of them.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Okay, but there was a common thread in.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I suppose the lived experiences of tin across generations, that insecurity,
that young budding romance, puberty, all of the rest. But
now we have this new context of this online radicalization
that a generation of parents hasn't lived through.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
Yeah, and in the nineteen fifties teenagers were listening to
rock and roll and their parents were freaking out. This
is not a new story. This part of shaping your identity,
part of getting into that stage where like, I'm not
a child anymore. I'm going to experiment with being an
autonomous human being, and part of that is experimenting with
what I was told not to do. Now it is
(14:36):
organized in a particular way. Okay, it is organized by
the algorithms. That's the only thing that's new. The process
is old, the technology is new. So now Andrew Tate,
who no one should know his name, but now every
young boy in the world knows who he is. That's
what's new. And there is this kind of generational feel like, well,
(15:00):
we don't know what's happening on the internet, but they've
never known what's happening. They've never known what is happening
when their kids were smoking indeed, but.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Did smoking weed and listening to rock and roll make
outcomes worse for women? Did listening to rock and roll
increase gender based violence the likes of I suppose that
there are more sinister outcomes? Maybe exactly when we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
This, this intel culture increases violence against women. That's a
thing that it does. What's different now is that the
idea of it being a gender war is now explicitly articulated.
It's like, you are being undermined by women, you must
take your revenge on them. That is a new and
(15:46):
appalling idea that needs to be looked at, but it's
also part of a broader set of ideas. And so
if you watch what's happening in US politics at the moment,
a whole lot of things being promoted, Like a whole
lot of forms of bullying and hatred are being promoted.
There's a whole new normalization of racism and racist violence.
(16:10):
There's a whole new normalization of xenophobia. These are multiple
forms of hatred and legitimation of violence that are going on.
Violence against women is one of them, and it's all
part of a weird nostalgia for a time when men
ran the world, and there's terrible anxiety that they have
(16:31):
that that era may be starting to be over and
they can't cope. So hidden in this is also a
story of things getting much better and people being elder
say they can actually talk about gender now, They can
actually say, well, we can talk about how masculinity is
being constructed. That language didn't exist two generations ago, and
(16:53):
those acts of violence were being completely and utterly covered
up and hidden so that people who experience against that
stuff were like ashamed. It was not in the media.
Now it is. That's actually really good. So insult culture
it's doing a work of saying, well, you should treat
women like this, you should treat women with contempt. If
(17:17):
you don't feel like you're dominating women, then you are
failing as a man. That's new that all it's doing
is trying to reinstate something that used to be there,
which they feel like was lost. So when insult culture
says you need to have you know, you need to
control your women, it's literally saying what generations before always said,
(17:39):
but then got told hey, stop doing that, and it
became less legitimate to say for men to talk about
women in that way, and that they started feeling a
bit nostalgic about that, and so insult culture is bringing
it back. So in a sense, it's the swing of
the pendulum from the heyday of gender equality to the
(18:02):
beautiful days of the nineteen fifties when everyone knew their place.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
So what needs to change. We don't want this moral
panic and culture of outrage. We want to understand thoughtfully
what's going on. But how do we reduce the influence
or the appeal of in cell culture for young men?
How do we create safest baces online? Recognizing that young
people are going to be online, they are going to
(18:28):
find social media, they are going to find these communities,
and their parents won't know about them.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, that's the hard work. That's the hard job. That's
the job for which there's no little platitude like five
point plan. If we do this, it'll be fine. Sixteen
year olds off the internet, you know, talk to your kids. Yes,
that's all true, but it's a bit trite. What we've
got to do is, yes, we've got to give kids
(18:55):
ways of knowing what they're feeling. And that's one of
the things that's been getting really better and better compared
to my generation, that kids have got to be able
to express things, communicate things, but also they have to
be able to think critically so that when lack Andrew
Tates starts telling them something, they've got to be like,
(19:16):
what's that really about? What's it going to do if
I follow this thing, if I joined this cult, if
I follow these influences, what's it going to do to me?
For me be able to think about that, to be literate,
be critically literate of their world, their media, their social interactions.
And what's so interesting if you look at the United
States and at the moment, they're deliberately shutting that down.
(19:39):
They're literally banning teachers from teaching about how to understand
your world. You're literally not allowed to talk about these things.
And that's deliberate. They're deliberately removing the conditions for people
to understand what's happening to them. And the big thing
is to support people, not only young boys, to support
(20:01):
people in moments of vulnerability. This whole problem starts at
a particular point, the idea that when adolescent boys feel vulnerable,
the aspirational idea of masculinity that is forced on them
is that they may not show that vulnerability, that if
they show that vulnerability, they become contemptible. If that could
(20:24):
be dismantled in soul culture would simply evaporate. They would
have no reason to exist. How to do that complicated, tricky,
long above all along ongoing process. But the terrible thing
we've done by associating aspirational masculinity with the absence of
(20:48):
vulnerability is an apocalyptic catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Doctor Anthony Collins, thank you so much for coming on
the podcast today sharing your expertise.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I think you've given all of us plenty to think about.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Great Thanks for having me. Thanks for the chat. I
think it's an important topic. We should be thinking about it.
We shouldn't be freaking out about it, we should be
thinking about it.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Such an interesting conversation and really valuable to hear some
of that kind of expert analysis and input into a
conversation that is playing out in so many different spaces.
So really really helpful podcast there, and that wraps up
another week of the Dally os podcast. Thank you so
much for tuning in each and every day. It's been
(21:32):
our biggest month ever of podcasts and we could be prouder.
Thank you for making that possible. We will be, of
course back later today with the headlines. But until then,
enjoy your day.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Cargottin woman from Gadigol Country.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on
the lands of the Gadigol people and pays respect to
all all Aboriginal and torrest rate island and nations.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
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