Life Ancient And Modern

My acquaintance with the term 'incel'
is a distant one, I am the the wrong age,
the wrong faith, and the wrong sexuality
to engage with the latest media wildfire
lit up and set running by the drama 'Adolescence'.

But I understand what 'incel' means
-involuntary celibacy for those for whom
sexual intimacy is a thing intensely to be wished
where abstinence leaves young men conflicted
and angry well beyond all rationality. 

If male teenagers are anything like they were
when I was a teenager, the pressure they live with
is that they are expected to marry, but see marriage
as offering them sex with fewer strings,
whilst financiers see marriage as the chance
to saddle the young couples with all the debt
that can be devised, whilst families want decorum
and children from their offspring who simply want
a space of their own to work out what and who to be. 

Money, sex, and power/order, are the primary colours
that every society blends to manage the sense of choice
in different societies, where each colour pulls against the other.

Down the ages monks robes have been tied with a cord,
which had three knots in it, to remind them of their vows.
The first knot is for poverty, the second is for celibacy,
and the third is for obedience, the primary dividers
of family and society unified, under control, muted.

No issue that those monks, the trapped 'incel youths',
or we, can face falls outside those three contrary pressures.