The Baffling Gender Politics of Netflix’s New Stanford Prison Experiment

This article discusses all six episodes of Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment.For decades now, scholars have argued over what—if anything—we should have gleaned from the Stanford Prison Experiment. That it was unethical to place two dozen male college students in a university basement repurposed as a prison, designate a few of them guards and the rest prisoners, and encourage the former to discipline the latter, was apparent by the time its mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, ended what was supposed to be a two-week exercise after only six days. As the extent of Zimbardo’s manipulation came to light, the 1971 study lost credibility in academic circles, even as its pop-cultural legend kept growing. Fifty-five years after it was conducted, perhaps the only definitive conclusion to draw from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the Stanford Prison Experiment is not worth repeating.But just try telling that to the reality-TV machine, let alone a platform currently at work on the third, all-celebrity season of a competition series that cheerfully (and, of course, non-lethally) recreates the horrors of its international hit anticapitalist battle royale ...