There is an especially heartbreaking scene in Netflix’s extraordinary new series Adolescence that sums up our current discussion around masculinity and angry young men better than anything I’ve ever seen or read.
In it, repairman Eddie (Stephen Graham) and his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) break down in each other’s arms as they go over the reasons why their son Jamie (Owen Cooper) might have murdered a young girl in his school.
Could they have done anything to divert their son off a path that led him to choose senseless violence over a bright future? They dwell on the computer that they bought him, which he used into the early hours of the morning. Should they have pulled the plug – or at least knocked on his door a little more?
Graham penned the four-part series with His Dark Materials screenwriter Jack Thorne after hearing about the stabbings of two girls – 12-year-old Ava White from Liverpool and 15-year-old Croydon teenager Elianne Andam.
“I just thought: ‘What’s happening? How have we come to this? What’s going on with our society?’” he told The Guardian at the premiere of the show. It’s a question occupying the minds of parents and experts alike.
In a report published earlier this month titled Lost Boys, the Centre for Social Justice warns that modern boyhood has gone horribly awry. The independent think-tank points to some startling facts: Boys in the UK are “struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime”. While young women are increasingly progressive, their male counterparts are signing up to right-wing and ultra-conservative, regressive ideologies.
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Read MoreIt would be easy to blame the manosphere for this dire predicament. That’s partly what Adolescence implies, with mentions of incels and teenage boys “taking the red pill”, much to the bewilderment of coppers and parents who aren’t as steeped in internet culture as their own children.
But, as the Centre for Social Justice warns, Andrew Tate and his merry band of masculinist blow-hards are merely symptoms of an underlying problem: “The deeper truth is that too many boys are growing up without the guidance, discipline, and purpose they need to thrive.”
This is not to downplay the threat of online radicalisation or the shocking levels of misogyny on the internet. But there are plenty of young men who don’t succumb to the siren call of Tate and the manosphere – we should be asking what makes a person vulnerable to their influence in the first place.
While the third episode of Adolescence has received universal praise for its live wire depiction of a child psychologist going head-to-head with an unrepentant Jamie, it’s the second episode that sticks out for me.
The police officers question Jamie’s friends at his school – a chaotic institution in which cyber bullying runs riot and teachers are checked out. “These kids are f**king impossible,” one exasperated male teacher says. “What am I supposed to do?” This, I think, gets closer to the heart of what ails young boys.
Here are the basic ingredients, according to the Lost Boys report: failing schools, a lack of positive male role models, and dimming economic prospects, particularly in shrinking industries like construction or agriculture, which used to employ non-university educated young men by the droves.
Now throw in a soupçon of toxic influencer ideology and supercharge everything by hooking it up to the internet. It’s easy to hyperfixate on the last two steps as the two newest components for young male alienation.
But if any of those fundamental ingredients were taken out of the equation, boys might be better able to see through the faux-aspirational promises of the manosphere. After all, it’s easy to think that misogynist content creators are piping nonstop sexist drivel into their audience’s ears 24/7.
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Read MoreThe truth is that it usually comes delivered with a side of cheerfully anodyne subjects – goofy pranks, health and fitness, gaming chat, self-help tips, travel content and more – which helps to sugarcoats the rancid stuff about women and minorities. The question is why some are able to develop a discerning ear while others can’t.
It may be that such beliefs, if held loosely enough, evaporate on contact with real life. For some boys, it may be curative enough to enter grown-up, mixed-gender spaces such as university or the workplace, where you must learn to relate to women not as mothers or potential girlfriends but as three-dimensional beings and even – gasp – as friends. But will this happen if you can’t afford to go to uni, can’t find a job and don’t have the money to socialise in the dwindling number of pubs or clubs available to you? It’s doubtful.
Violent misogyny wasn’t invented overnight. In 2010, the now-defunct Zoo magazine printed advice from actor and advice columnist Danny Dyer telling a heartbroken reader that he should “cut his ex’s face so no one will want her”. Dyer said he was misquoted and does not condone violence against women.
The manosphere isn’t a momentary blip – it’s the latest continuation of a long history of hatefulness, now made hypervisible and accessible on a scale that even the unrepentant lads mag hack would find shocking. But the factors behind the alienation and disenfranchisement of young men have been brewing for years now. Tackle those first, and the rest will follow.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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