August 22, 2022 - 3:15pm
When Lionel Shriver’s story of a troubled teenager, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was adapted for screen in 2011 it launched the career of young actor Ezra Miller.
In 2012 Miller came out as queer, saying “I don’t identify as a man, I don’t identify as a woman, I barely identify as a human.” And in the ensuing years, outlandish and expressive clothing came to typify the actor, who became somewhat of a standard bearer for queer identity.
But recently, Miller’s life has taken a strange turn. Throughout 2022 a string of bizarre allegations have hit the headlines, and last month the actor was arrested twice for assault and then only a few weeks ago for felony burglary. What went wrong for the promising young actor?
Miller’s troubles may just be another predictable story about the price of early fame, but it could also speak to something more troubling about contemporary culture. Shriver’s award winning novel asks how society and parenting shapes the minds of young people. It seems prescient now. Have our permissive mores and hyper-liberal culture driven young people to distraction?
Shriver joined Freddie Sayers to discuss these questions.
Shriver thinks that older people are doing a disservice to the youngest in society. By allowing young people to deny reality when it comes to their gender “the grownups are failing to be grownups” she says.
“But I think that we have led a generation astray by indicating to them that if they simply get the right relationship to their sex – let’s talk about sex, not gender – the right relationship to their sex, then they will know who they are.”
“It’s clear that children do flourish when given limits, and total freedom is a kind of hell,” Shriver added.
Join Freddie Sayers and Lionel Shriver for the full discussion.
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SubscribeI think this quote by Ezra Miller inadvertently summarizes an issue I have with the LGBQT movement. It has become hollow and inhuman. There is no love or self-sacrifice to it, it is just a paean to shallow sex and a ‘might-makes-right’ mentality.
LGBQT involvement in US public schools is not about children at all, but about gaining converts to their sex cult. By pinning everything on ‘gender’ instead of sex, people who have no business being around children have created a Trojan horse with which to bypass parental safeguards. This in itself is maddening, but the fact that the US government endorses this behavior makes it sinister as hell.
“LGBQT involvement in US public schools is not about children at all, but about gaining converts to their sex cult.”
Correct. It’s blatant grooming.
Why the hyper focus on a very, very small subsection of the population, who seem to celebrate their psychoses rather than seeking profession help?
…canaries in the Marxist coal mine.
Because it’s now affecting an increasingly large number of children. It’s turned into another outlet for teenage disaffection, but this time with long-term catastrophic consequences.
Mental illness, gender confusion, narcissism and noncery seem to have a strange habit of coalescing in certain people all at once.
I think so too. I’m under the impression that it culminates in people whose sense of self-worth is derived from the number of followers they have on Twitter.
Mental health is important but it seems to be the “go to” for not just young people today. Taking personal responsibility for your actions is conveniently sidestep by announcing mental health issues. In come the psychiatrists, talk therapists and psychoanalysts. The medical industry and dependency drug prescription is growing on the back of real mental health issues and new mental health issues (identity crisis and licence to behave badly) as of Ezra Miller. This navel gazing, stupefying indulgence will only render our species even more incapacitated, pathetically weak, confused and stupid. All this started with rightful gay movement for them to be able to live peacefully and within society as they were. The message was of peace, not indulgence. There was no need to go further. Yet we continue to pander in the realm of nonsense and absurd. This is rendering mental health industry a joke and real sufferers will be those that really need help to be categorised with the indulgent. We have created a rod for our backs. Why are we surprised when it hurts us? Why was it such a crime to smack a badly behaved (confused) kid who needed that correction? Lack of limits and boundaries esp for children is poor parenting, lack of taking personal responsibility for adults and blaming it on mental health shows for a weaker society.
‘The medical industry’ sums it up… there are some doctors (including myself until I retired) who are trying to resist the medicalisation of every day life, but I’m afraid it’s not just doctors who get addicted to interfering with people’s lives but plenty of counsellors, psychologists, faith healers and so on who are jumping on the bandwagon.
Agree with most of this … except the smacking, which I think indicates a failure on the part of the parent & teaches a child that violence is justified in the face of disobedience.
*violence*
Ezra is fixated on 12 year old girls. I don’t think he’s confused. I think he is an average, typically highly-focused nonce who is using the costume of gender identity issues to cloak his criminality. It used to be nonces hid behind a suit and tie and a respectable job in a respectable institution. Some still do. Others peacock around in women’s clothes and divert attention with their pronouns.
Thank you for your words about LA Times…it is true. This newspaper is a BAD journalism with BAD editorial policies. IT IS A SAD DOWNWARD SPIRAL of what you nce was one of the leading US papers…
When I was young(er), back in the 1970s, some other young people of my acquaintance managed to mess up their lives and careers by over indulgence in alcohol and drugs despite having no exposure whatsoever to questions of gender identity. ‘Too much cheesecake too soon..’ as Roxy Music put it. No need to blame anything else, least of all parents
This would have been an interesting discussion but I found Ms. Shriver militant and not very insightful about these issues.
I see it the other way around.
It is the failure of sane people in Western society to be militant about our mental, moral, and cultural decline that is the problem.
Keep quiet about the leak in the ship, lest you sound too militant. Better that we should all go down together, insightful to the last.
Yes, this is why I left academia. Spent too many years feeling like I was arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.