What Adolescence Gets Wrong
Adolescence is a moving work of art but a misleading representation of the challenges facing British boys.
Alek Minassian was an awkward kid in my high school. He’d meow at students in the cafeteria and could never look a woman in the eye. “I’m afraid of girls,” he often declared unprompted in a high-pitched childish voice. Most students thought it was a weird verbal tick.
He was odder than the typical teenager at Thornlea Secondary School, a brutalist sixties creation whose forbidding architecture—rumour had it—had been designed to reduce distractions by cutting pupils off from fresh air, sunlight and other stimuli of the outside world. Windows were a luxury reserved for classes in a newly-built wing from whence you could glimpse the onyx-grey skies over Toronto.
Minassian ran away from girls down our dimly lit corridors. I thought he had a learning or developmental disability, but he seemed harmless. My friends and I never felt physically threatened by him. After we graduated, we filed his name into some remote part of our psychological archives.
But one sunny April day in 2018, he resurfaced. Minassian put out a cryptic Facebook message proclaiming, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun,” rented a van and mowed down innocent pedestrians on a busy Toronto street, killing eleven people. When he could no longer see through the windshield, he ditched the car. Cops cornered him in front of a glassy new high-rise as he repeatedly reached for his pockets, flashing what looked like a gun.
He wanted to be killed by the police, but it didn’t work. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison.
Minassian’s violence illuminated a bizarre digital community most parents, principals, and politicians had never heard of. Involuntary celibates, or incels, congregated on digital forums like Reddit and 4chan where they rued their status at the base of the modern pyramid of sexual relations.
According to the incel worldview, the dynamics of the mating marketplace are set by “Stacys,” attractive popular girls, and “Chads,” the Chris Hemsworth-like minority of men women are attracted to. Average-looking folks—“normies” and “betas”—occupy the middling rungs. At the very bottom are incels, guys whom no woman would sink so low as to partner with.
There’s no point in living, many incels believe. They take the “black pill” accepting the hopelessness of their existence. In rare cases, this despair leads to violence, as with Minassian.
The most popular Netflix show in the world today is about a teenage boy who kills a young girl after she spurns his advances and cyberbullies him. He stabs her to death in a parking lot and heads home to bed. A swat team breaks down his door the next morning.
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