There was an Adolescence in the early 1990's called Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane as Fitz, a forensic psychologist who was able to get into the minds of rapists, murderers, and other toxic men because in his heart he too was a toxic man capable of rape and murder. Even Fitz admitted that the world would be a better place, though a less fun place, if it was run by his long-suffering wife, his eye-rolling daughter, and his female police colleague who repairs his bridge burnings. The series creator was Jimmy McGovern, who provided the authentic Northern working class authenticity while delivering a message about dangerous white working class males that coincidentally matched elite prejudices. An especially memorable three part cliffhanger starred Robert Carlyle as a quiet working class male who suddenly shaves his head and starts murdering Pakistanis. It was compelling viewing, everyone watched it and talked about it the next day. Fitz was full of energy and charisma, he talked about the human dark side in a way that made other TV seem sanitized in comparison. It was very very good TV, and it was also ... tendentious, it had tendencies and it wanted you to come away with the same tendencies.

The media was very anti-male in the early 1990's, and it had a monopoly. If you were a well-intentioned people-pleasing teenage boy as I was at that time, the media was telling you that you and your peers were broken like the characters in Cracker, and the way to fix yourself (and to make yourself intriguingly different as a romantic prospect) was to identify with female emotions, to share your vulnerabilities (as if other people would find that charming and interesting), to make yourself small and simpering in case your scary masculine energy intimidated a girl who was just about to unveil some previously silenced feminine wisdom that we could all have learned from. Kurt Cobain was slouching around advertising the rejection of masculinity. I read "The SCUM Manifesto" at the age of 16 and I wasn't shocked by it - I just thought, oh, these are the men from Thelma and Louise, both pathetic and violent.

The early manosphere that I remember was the blogosphere of men who had grown up under that monopoly influence and were finally able to compare notes and explore alternatives to the media message. How has it been working out for you, is your life going as well as it should be, taking advice from women about how to be a man? We all have the catalogue of male evil, and we only have to browse a bookstore to find out about the latest way of how "not to be that guy", but have we been educated at all about female kinds of bad behaviour, apart from a trained ideological reflex that it's statistically no worse than men, that if you were a real man you'd rise above it, that it's a response to male bad behaviour (indeed, one of the feminist complaints about Adolescence was that it suggested that a girl would gratuitously bully a boy from the badness of her heart, just to enjoy her social power to hurt him, when the message should have been that it was a reaction to far worse harassment she was suffering from boys). How is it working out for you in relationships and in the workplace when you're blind to female kinds of bad behaviour? This ability to compare notes so that you're not alone is what's now being targeted when they talk about the evil "algorithm", which just means putting you in touch with people who have the same interests as you do.

Replies: @Astre, @Mike44

It is absolutely imperative to completely and permanently boycott the so-called "entertainment industry".

Cancel your cable TV subscription, cancel your Netflix subscription, cancel your Amazon Prime subscription, stop going to the movies etc.

If you live in the UK, sell your TV. As long as you have a TV in your house, they will charge you a BBC fee.

As long as we keep giving them money, they will keep spewing lies.

Replies: @Astre, @Don Trumpleone, @Achmed E. Newman