The male loneliness epidemic is a phrase that refers to the social isolation crisis among young adult men: fewer close friendships, higher rates of suicide, and a desperate craving for intimacy. Much of the public conversation frames finding a girlfriend as the only cure. We rarely ask: why do many lonely men feel entitled to women? And why does pop culture keep propelling the idea that young men – with a bit of pushing and shoving – can get the girl? We constantly see films and books where the male doesn’t take no for an answer and constantly lurks around in a woman’s life, disguised as “yearning,” all while ignoring how debilitating that persistence feels like from the other side. In particular, the film Obsession (2026), an indie psychological horror, observes Bear (Michael Johnson), an awkward music store employee, as he navigates his feelings for his childhood best friend Nikki (Inda Navarette). Beneath the ordinary appeal of Bear, he proves to be a “dangerous incel who thinks he’s a nice guy.” *Spoilers ahead* Bear buys a mysterious item, the One Wish Willow, and desperately wishes for his longtime friend Nikki to love him “more than anyone else in the world.” The wish manifests as Nikki losing access to her own bodily autonomy and free will. A sinister force takes over following the wish, and a double of Nikki becomes obsessed with Bear, just as he wished for, even if he did not mean for it to go this far. Nikki forces herself into Bear’s life and watches over his every move. What started as a story about unrequited love slowly spirals out of control into manipulation, violence, etc. At first, Bear selfishly chooses to stay with Nikki, as this new Nikki loves him entirely. Realizing his mistake, Bear calls the number listed on the One Wish Willow, and an entity informs him that there are no reversals. The curse can only be broken if Bear (the wisher) dies. Throughout the film, Bear realizes that the real Nikki is trapped – she is in hell while her double is next to Bear – but he continues to prove himself as a selfish man and chooses his own pleasure from being “loved” while she suffers indefinitely in his place. Why should the woman have to face the consequences of a man’s faults? The nice guy archetype perpetuates the belief that the girl is a “prize to be won,” reducing a woman to just an object they can toy around with and obtain. The archetype translates in the film as sexual assault: Bear treats Nikki’s body, her possessed one, as a reward – he has sex with Nikki’s possessed body despite knowing that the real Nikki does not consent. Bear’s face remains unseen, while Nikki’s remains blank, staring off and completely unengaged, emphasizing her dissociation and unwillingness, and his anonymity as the perpetrator. Although Obsession is a work of fiction, the film speaks to reality. One instance of this is the fate of 23-year-old Khesani Maseko from South Africa, who took her own life after being raped. This illustrates how a woman takes the fall due to a man’s actions, time and time again. Obsession sparked widespread discussions upon its release. Viewers noted that watching it is unsettling, particularly for women, because it reflects the real-life dangers of men who feel entitled to a woman’s body, time, and affection. While most critics recognize the movie as a critique of rape culture and modern male entitlement, certain segments of viewers have shockingly misread the film, blaming the female character for her erratic, possessed behavior rather than pinpointing the issue with the man who stole her autonomy in the first place. Obsession (2026) is an important social and political film. As the audience, we should think of the male loneliness epidemic as a self-inflicted issue. If there is one thing to take away from the movie, it is realizing that a man’s loneliness, even the nice guy’s, does not entitle him to a woman’s life. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole
By Angela Song
Every year, on the day of atonement, the ancient Hebrews would take a goat, lay upon it all the guilt and misdeeds of the community, and cast it out into the wilderness alone, blameless, and burdened with sins that were not its own. Isabel Wilkerson, in the book Caste, traces how this ritual is ever present and evolving. The scapegoat transformed from a sacrificial animal into a people, designated, generation after generation, to absorb the anxieties, failures, and moral debts of a dominant culture so that everyone else could move forward feeling clean. The scapegoat doesn’t create the community’s sins but simply carries them. And crucially, it gets blamed for the suffering that follows. In Palestinian culture, the goat, or the maeaza, is a living, breathing part of daily life. Foundational to traditional livelihoods across the region, the maeaza provides milk, meat, and wool. It represents adaptability, deep rootedness, and survival against difficult terrain. It is one of the oldest symbols of Palestinian pastoral existence, of a people concretely, intimately connected to their land and to each other across generations. What does it cost to produce the feeling of cleanliness? And what does that mean that so many of us, right now, are paying that cost without knowing it? The mechanism Wilkerson describes requires above all, one thing. It isn’t hatred, although hatred definitely helps. It’s not even ignorance, though ignorance is an undoubtedly useful security blanket. It requires that the community be able, at the end, to feel clean. To disperse from the ritual lighter than they arrived. To return to their lives with the quiet, unexamined sense that the world is, despite everything, more or less as it should be. What the scapegoating ritual offers is a resolution to a question that every hierarchical society must answer, again and again, in order to hold itself together: is the order of things just? The suffering of the designated group, when the ritual is working, answers: yes. The suffering is over there. It belongs to people who are, in some manner the community has agreed, quietly and collectively, different enough to have deserved it. It is a belief that operates below articulation, in the register of feeling. Clean is a feeling, something that cannot be replicated or articulated universally. I’m sure you have seen the devastating video accounts of the genocide occuring in the West Bank, but to truly witness what is happening is not simply to feel sad. It is to have that feeling dissolve and to be left standing in what remains. What remains, for a Western spectator who allows the full weight of Gaza to land, is not comfortable nor will it ever be. It is the recognition that the civilization which produced you, whose values you were raised to inherit, whose institutions you were taught to trust, whose moral vocabulary you use to navigate the world itself is providing the weapons, the diplomatic protection, and the cultivated silence for something its own courts have found plausible grounds to call a genocide. It is an identity crisis of the first order. And most people, when faced with an identity crisis of the first order, look away. This is understandable. The looking away is not always passive. At this moment, it has been structured. The algorithmic suppression of Palestinian voices on media platforms at precisely the moments when documentation was most urgent. The professional and social penalties for naming, plainly, what is being seen. The reclassification of grief as propaganda, of a child’s name spoken aloud as some kind of threat. These are the reproduction, in modern institutional form, of an ancient communal agreement: we do not follow the goat into the wilderness. In the original ritual, the wilderness was the place where the suffering went so the community would not have to see it. What our platforms and our newsrooms have been quietly building for two years now is a wilderness of a different kind, a perceptual wilderness with a purposeful managed distance. It has a set of conditions under which a person can know, in some general abstract sense, what is happening, and still, at the end of the day, feel clean. The cost of producing that feeling is borne, as it has always been, by the people in the wilderness. But there is also another less visible cost paid by everyone who accepts the arrangement. It is the cost of what you must close in yourself to sustain it. The questions you learn not to ask. The images you learn to scroll past. The names you allow to remain nameless. This is not nothing. This is, in fact, everything; what you close in yourself in order to look away is precisely the capacity that would allow you to look clearly at anything at all. The maeaza, in Palestinian pastoral tradition, is known for something the original ritual’s architects did not anticipate: it comes back. It knows the terrain. It survives the difficult land. It finds water where other animals cannot. It returns. James Baldwin wrote in 1979 that the Palestinians had been paying for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. He wrote it as though it were already too long. It has now been more than seventy years and over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. This moment requires the willingness to feel what feeling clean has been costing us, and to decide whether we are willing to keep paying it, regardless of the security and inherent comfort it provides. Not for the sake of politics, but because the part of yourself you close to avoid feeling is not a part you get back easily. The world you will be left with, when the wilderness has swallowed everything it was asked to swallow, will be one you built by looking away. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole
By Meena Ford
After watching news coverage around Chikei Rick Chow’s acquittal from murder charges, after wrongfully shooting 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, I am disheartened by the antonym within Parole Board malpractice. In films that depict the plight of black males in America within our Criminal Justice System, like The Kalief Browder Story and When They See Us, how are there still consistent failures within the correctional facility release process, that only result in wrongful imprisonment and unjust release. Korey Wise, from the exonerated five, was repeatedly denied parole because he maintained his innocence. In the New York state prison system, inmates are generally expected to admit guilt and show remorse in front of the parole board to be granted early release. A Mandatory Remorse statement is required by inmates to acknowledge responsibility for their actions and participate in rehabilitation programs while admitting guilt. Wise adamantly refused to do this. The board reported inconsistencies in statements during his parole hearings, he struggled to walk the line between stating his innocence and showing remorse for simply being at the scene. His rambling answers ultimately hurt his chances. The aftermath of not accepting a plea deal or admit to the crime, Wise ultimately served nearly 13 years in adult prison. After losing multiple hearings and repeatedly facing denial because he wouldn’t admit guilt, Wise stopped attending his parole hearings entirely. The constitution promotes Habeas Corpus as a right to a judge’s review and prohibits indefinite imprisonment. The constitution requires a trial to declare guilt and establish punishment. The Bill of Rights: Fifth Amendment requires a right to due process and protection against self-incrimination.The Sixth Amendment requires a right to a speedy, public, and fair trial “to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor”. The Eighth Amendment requires the right to protection against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments… (and generations of codifications by all levels of the judicial branch expand on these inalienable rights. If all of this is true, then how can a privatized system – which is only an extension of our government – legally be allowed to review if an inmate can be released? FACT: In order to proceed with release, Parole boards heavily favor inmates who take responsibility for their crimes. Owning up to the offense demonstrates that the individual understands the magnitude of their actions and “supposed lack of insight or remorse, or failure to take responsibility for the commitment offense, or disciplinary violations – or any combination of these as evidence of present dangerousness” (Hammond, 2016). [there are inconsistent statutes across the nation, so this was quoted from a google search] Texas is an example of a median, harsh punishment, red state: Eligibility Requirements: Time Served: Most inmates are eligible for parole after serving 1/4th of their sentence, Parole Guidelines Score: The Board uses a matrix that merges ‘Risk Assessment’ (likelihood of reoffending) and ‘Offense Severity’. The Parole Board Procedures: Automatic Review: The review process begins automatically 6 months before an inmate’s initial eligibility date (or 4 months before subsequent reviews), Voting Panels: Files are reviewed by a 3-member panel (usually 1 board member and 2 parole commissioners), Victim Involvement: Victims have the right to request interviews with the lead panel voter and can submit confidential protest letters. Despite inconsistencies, most prisons require inmates to provide a.) A sworn statement of guilt admitting to the crime to establish conviction and secure penalties, frequently resulting in a reduced sentence or b.) A remorse statement (allocution): it is unsworn and occurs post-conviction; it serves to humanize the defendant and request leniency, but it does not determine guilt. There are often further processes without the inmate nor their attorney present. Again, Article I and Article III of the constitution in addition to the explicit codification in the Bill of Rights establish parole boards are not only illegal, but proof of generationally systemic complex unconstitutional behaviors. How then, when up for parole as ruled by a judge, not limiting a jury’s verdict of guilt, attorneys specialized-laymen arguments backed by the evidence, does a “board” get the deciding vote? If our judicial branch distributes authority to judges, then only a judge can rule guilt and establish appropriate punishment. If a judge’s ruling -the final confirmation of all criminal court trial proceedings- establishes a minimum time required of an inmate until ‘Sentence Termination Release’, then why don’t we argue to reform components of government sanctioned institutions that are in contempt of court through the ability to challenge an inmate’s fate? What I’m trying to argue is that an inmate is only required to respond to a judge’s authority. Yes, our government’s actions are based upon actions of the court that are handed down to bureaus — however, allowing this to impede on an American’s right to parole, set by a constitutional authority, is illegal. No matter how a parole board’s reviews process around court ruling, a high authority declared termination of sentence at a minimum and maximum. Therefore, a board has no constitutional authority to deny an inmate release. The requirement for all actions in deciding the fate of an inmate must abide by the rights under the constitution, therefore Bill of Rights, and all relevant Statutory Laws. If there must be a review or Parole Trial, it must be reviewed by a jury of their peers, original attorneys (in the event that this is appealed some type of designated survivor order), and without appeal, a randomly assigned impartial judge. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole. BibliographyHammond, D. (2019, October 5). CDCR parole suitability factors. Criminal Defense Heroes P.C. California DUI Defense. https://www.donhammondlaw.com/blog/post-conviction-relief-cdcr-parole-suitability-article/
By Raven W. M.
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