by Michael Deacon, Telegraph
Liberals gushing over Netflix’s Adolescence are desperate to distract us from certain far greater social problems
What on earth has got into our ruling class these past two weeks? We’ve had the Prime Minister ordering every secondary school in the land to show its pupils Adolescence. We’ve had Newsnight asking teenage boys when they last cried. And we’ve had anti-terror police telling the nation’s parents to report their sons to Prevent if they catch them watching “misogynist videos online”. Listening to these people’s ever more hysterical raving, you’d think that the single greatest threat facing our country was “toxic masculinity”.
It isn’t, of course. But then, that’s the very reason why middle-class liberals are so eagerly stoking this moral panic. They want us to talk about fashionable Netflix dramas, “incels” and Andrew Tate in order to stop us talking about certain problems that are far worse.
For all their ostensible anxiety about “toxic masculinity”, middle-class liberals are rarely happier than when they’re lecturing us about it – because it’s slap-bang in the middle of their comfort zone. Here is an issue where the villains almost invariably seem to be white and male, their crime is old-fashioned sexism, and the proposed solution is a crackdown on social media. All perennial favourite themes of middle-class liberals.
If they were really worried about misogyny, you’d think they’d have had quite a lot more to say about grooming gangs – both when the scandal first emerged, and in January this year, when it briefly returned to the spotlight. Surely nothing could be more misogynistic than the mass rape of underage girls. Curiously, though, middle-class liberals appear to have forgotten about that particular subject. And so swiftly, too.