Secondary schools in England to tackle ‘incel’ culture and teach positive role models | Relationships and sex education
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/15/secondary-schools-england-to-tackle-incel-culture-relationships-sex-education
Posted by DarkSkiesGreyWaters
36 Comments
“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…
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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.
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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.
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.
I wonder if Incels would disappear once Elon Musk or someone invents the “SexBot-3000” ?
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.
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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.
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?
I think how everyone, especially children now engage with the modern media climate is the biggest culprit and it’s gonna be borderline impossible to tackle. It isn’t just a matter of simply introducing more ‘better’ male role models for children. It’s gotta involve constant teaching and reinforcing media literacy training at an increasingly younger age so kids understand how and why things are presented to them in such a way.
There’s always bad role models out there but nowadays we are all bombarded with highly personalised social media, Tik-tok, Youtube and 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 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 are making personalised NSFW companion personalities of it that people will talk to, flirt with and likely adopt said views of, and you know people will engage with this interactive generated slop and will believe to be true because it is presented as such.
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I believe current research is suggesting inceldom needs to be looked at inline with mental health rather than ‘ideology’
I might be fudging this slightly but it all showed something like;
5-10x higher rates of depression
3-6x higher suicidal ideation
10-15x more likely to be on the autism spectrum
These vulnerabilities make it more likely for them to get locked into incel world views etc
This sub is a strange one. 99% of the time it’s all moaning that not enough is being done to support young men.
The government then announces something to try and help and half the comments focus on a netflix program rather than the actual good news that someone’s actually trying to solve the problem. I don’t care if the idea was inspired by a documentary or a drama, it’s a positive change.
This is a fictional drama promoting anti white working class boys. They should be showing the BBC drama three girls. Which is based on facts and covers the most misogynistic community active in the UK Muslim men of foreign origin. Arranged marriages, honour killings, child brides and incest. All these are forced on women in their own communities.
Unironically i feel like we need more shows like Sharpe back on. Approachable heroes who embody a positive but flawed masculinity and who faces both positive and negative consequences for it, but it never dwells on the meaning. Its just sharpe rocking around.
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**The Diary of Timmy, Age 13, 2026**
So today was weird. Our school started this new program to “tackle incel culture” or whatever that means. We had this assembly where the teacher talked a lot about how boys like me are supposed to be careful because apparently we’re all at risk of becoming, like, dangerous or something if we don’t act right. She said boys are “wired” a certain way and that if we don’t learn to control ourselves, bad stuff could happen.
She showed us these videos of really angry guys who got mad because they didn’t have girlfriends, and then said we need to look up to “positive male role models” instead of turning into that. Honestly, it made me feel like being a boy is some kind of problem or defect. Like, just because I’m a boy, I might be dangerous unless I’m super careful.
After the assembly, in class, we had to write about what makes a good male role model. Everyone was super quiet. I didn’t want to say anything because it felt like the teachers were watching us like we’re ticking time bombs. I just wrote “Be nice” and hoped that was enough.
The whole thing made me kind of scared to talk to anyone about girls or feelings. What if I say the wrong thing and people start thinking I’m one of those “bad” guys? I don’t want to be that kid who everyone thinks is a problem. So now I’m just trying to stay invisible until this all blows over.
I don’t like the idea of schools treating all young boys like they’re born with some horrific original sin and that only the state has some kind of “cure” for it
Anyone saying this is a major problem, anyone saying “Adolescence” should be taken seriously or is “based on true events” is talking utter bollocks.
What “real life events” bear any resemblance to this show?
There has not been a single incident of a boy murdering a girl in the UK as a result of “incels” the “manosphere” or any other made up bullshit boogeyman.
There have been a couple of incidents of adult men who committed murder and who identified themselves as incels, but literally one or two in the last 20 years. Hardly the major concern it is being portrayed as, and NONE of them were children and one of the examples I could find cited other issues alongside their “incel” status.
Jake Davison aged 22 who perpetrated a mass shooting in 2021 (identified as an “incel” however he had WAY more issues than that and was also described as having ADHD, Autism, various other mental health problems and a fixation with weaponry. His attack was against male and females alike, seemed random rather than targeted and seems to be in response to an argument with his mother)
Ben Moynihan aged 18 who stabbed 3 women in 2014 – he is the ONLY example i can find that cites his hatred of women as his motivation (he was also autistic btw).
There is NO evidence that connects youth violence and so-called “incels”.
“Adolescence” conflated several issues that are not remotely connected in real life, at all – namely youth knife crime: the VAST majority of this crime is *not* being committed by white british boys from stable homes, with mum and dad in the home who spend a lot of time in their bedroom and watch “that Andrew Tate shite” as portrayed in “Adolescence”.
There is NO connection **whatsoever** between knife crime, youth violence and the alleged “manosphere”. It’s utterly fabricated bullshit masquerading as fact – to the extent we now need to teach this shit in school?
Then there’s this idea of “the manosphere”, which in and of itself conflates various subcultures, lumping together some negative subcultures, with larger and much more positive male groups/spaces. “That Andrew Tate shite” also includes people like Jordan Peterson (who couldn’t be less like Andrew Tate if if tried) and plenty of other public figures who do not subscribe to Andrew Tate’s particular brand of fuckwittery.
Healthy masculinity and male spaces are (and have beem for a long time) either directly, or by association, derided as toxic and are being portrayed (by propagandist nonsense like Adolescence) as a fundamental problem that threatens the fabric of our society, despite there being little to no evidence to support this.
We as a society have spent the last several decades systematically erasing all male-only spaces, attempting to suppress all forms of masculine expression and indoctrinating generations of kids to believe that masculinity is responsible for all the ills of our society.
We have labelled natural and normal masculine behaviour as “toxic” and suppressed the expression of normal masculine feelings and behaviour.
Men no longer have any spaces where they can just be men, with other men, which is an absolute travesty – ALL male only spaces have been eliminated, and they have been modified to accommodate femininity. Masculine forms of expression and feminine forms of expression (I’m clearly talking about on average here btw) are different and masculine forms of expression can be easily misinterpreted by non-masculine people as offensive, bad, discriminatory etc. But that is not because they *are* it is because those people do not understand – it’s like if a regular person went to work in lets say mental health services – the “humour” they would hear might make them feel highly offended and upset, however, those people are not being offensive, they are expressing dark humour as a way of coping and there is a **SHARED UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN THE MEMBERS OF THAT GROUP** about what the intent is and about the meaning of it – if you are not a member of that group you would not understand that and would be upset by it, however, that does not make you right and them wrong, it just means you don’t understand that culture. If you then try to force your way into that culture and demand it changes to accommodate you, you’re going to cause some problems.
Since masculine spaces have been forced to accommodate everyone, normal masculine behaviour that manifests itself in these spaces is now considered by default to be oppressive, discriminatory, non-inclusive and toxic.
Men have been forced to retreat to online spaces because they have had their real-world spaces taken away, however they are now being hounded and demonised there too. What do people think will be the result of all this?
We are failing men enormously in the west and we are all going to suffer for it (are already). However, we as a society are so far gone that literally any mention of masculinity, protecting men, protecting men’s interests, allowing men space for themselves etc will be met with derision, abuse, insults and further alienation and marginalisation.
How do we think that yet MORE demonisation of men/boys, masculinity etc is going to help?
Take Jordan Peterson as an example – there are THOUSANDS of men who have turned their lives around watching his videos. There are MANY men specifically saying that he is the reason they are still alive and haven’t killed themselves. There are husbands, sons, friends who are still alive, hell that are BETTER husbands, sons and friends, because of him.
Yet HE is getting lumped into the whole “toxic manosphere” thing. So, how is teaching young boys that what he is telling them – to take responsibility for themselves, to voluntarily shoulder the burden of life and use it to strengthen yourself, to aim at the highest possible virtue and to live your life in service to and pursuit of that (and the betterment of your family, friends and community) – is “toxic” and “dangerous going to impact them???? Have any of the people spouting this shit even bothered to look and listen for themselves? Highly doubtful.
We are not doing well in the West and doubling down on this ill-informed, emotionally driven nonsense is not going to pull us out of the slide we are in.
So tired of this pseudo gender war. I Does anyone really think that separating boys and further reinforcing the trope that men are abusers and women are victims will be positive? Abusive people are the problem, they come in many shapes and sizes, the rest of us need more solidarity not lines of division.
Muslims are statistically more homophobic than other groups in this country, should we separate their children into special classes?
Starting out by calling them incels and potential murderers isn’t a good start.
I don’t get it. You’ll let people like Andrew Tate have his platform to spew crap, essentially shaming women, but you don’t want teachers talking about the dangers of incels because it, *looks at notes* shames men…..? In what reality is it bad to say “don’t be toxic towards others”? And trust me, femcels also exist and I do feel the discussion should go both ways when required.
There’s lots of instructions on how boys/men should treat girls/women, we get bombarded with this every day, but when do girls/women get taught how to treat boys/men? I don’t see it anywhere. That’s probably one of the reasons there are so many divorces and OF “models”.
having majority women teachers combat “incel culture” based off a work of fiction like Adolescence is just more virtue signaling
This is what happens when we have a lack of local community and society, and increasingly online lives. Blaming young men for this isn’t the answer though. This is one of the problems with free market fundamentalism, it doesn’t provide an answer or a solution for everything, and sometimes the opposite.
Humans are social animals and children learn from role models and guardians. If there is a gap, something else will fill it, sometimes malign.
I don’t think there’s a simple solution to it, it’s more of an anthropological and philosophical question. The way we live has changed drastically and continues to do so.