Adolescence

In the last week the internet has been ablaze with comments about Netflix’s new mini-series titled Adolescence.

The immaculately produced show follows the story of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who is accused, and guilty, of murdering a young girl from his school.

The motive? Jamie’s acceptance of ‘toxic masculinity’ – specifically the manosphere of online misogynistic content.

I have written before on this topic, and there is no doubt such content exists in vast quantities in both the darker, and more mainstream areas of the internet. And it is certainly true that the ideas picked up by the show are ones that parents and teachers are wrestling with daily.

The show has been so influential that the UK PM, Kier Starmer, has called for the programme to be shown in schools to raise awareness of the issues.

The hyper-masculine Andrew Tate, a man currently accused of sex trafficking, has been the primary focus of worry by concerned bodies, as a homing-beacon of the movement.

However, manospheric content is far more ubiquitous, and can be far more extreme than even Tate’s content, and given the unlimited access many children have to the internet, it is not hard for both boys and girls to find.

Those who rely upon a relatively small knowledge of Tate to address ‘toxic-masculinity’ often show themselves to be misinformed about the topic because they fail to address what Tate gets right in his social analysis, and how these glimmers of truth make the lies even more dangerous.

In the show, Jamie commits the murder because he is being bullied by his victim, Katie, who is commenting on Instagram posts, calling him an ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate).

Whilst it may seem odd, as the show points out, to consider the ‘celibacy’ of a 13-year-old boy, such sexualised content is found throughout schools of all types across the country.

The show does, through this cyber-bullying, hint that life might be hard for young boys in UK schools. The statistics around the falling academic standard for working-class white boys in particular have been well known in educational circles for over two decades. However, this does not seem to draw the help or sympathy it should.

Whilst violence and murder rates due to manospheric content still remain relatively low compared to other criminal motivations, they are growing and will only get worse so long as the key questions are not asked – questions the show answers in part, but fall short on completing.

Firstly, boys are drawn to Tate and the manosphere because they get one thing right – boys and young men today do feel that they are trapped, pushed down, and neglected.

As boys watch their female peers do increasingly well academically, and be pushed into STEM and hired first through DEI programmes, this can be perceived as unfair and be hard to process.

Working class boys in particular, who already have low prospects, watch as their prospects shrink ever further.

What seems to be the response? Talk therapy. Coax boys into accept life as it is now. Lines of often female counsellors to tell them that they understand, and that they just need to be more open and vulnerable.

For young boys, just trying to understand what it means to be men, this is a crucial point of failure on the part of the education and social system.

Mass fatherlessness means that boys have little hope of maturing properly. As the show exhibits, a collapsing British education system means that positive role models in the form of male teachers can also sadly be increasingly rare (although there are many exceptions to this!).

Through PSHE lessons, boys are taught at increasingly young ages to explore their sexuality and explore pornography sensibly – something driving them increasingly into the darkest parts of sexual violence, addiction, and degrading misogyny.

The system seems to have identified the problem, but is incapable of reaching the required solutions because of perverse incentives and misplaced values.

Boys need ambition, something to fight for, empowerment to do good; drive, motive, and a chance for heroism.

However, society seems to have decided that, when done by men, these virtues are ‘toxic’.

Boys are left with two choices, reject their masculinity, or just fall into an all-out embrace of real toxicity.

The programme does however, whether intentionally or not point to one avenue of action.

At the end of the final episode, we see Jamie’s parents struggling to work out whether they played a part in creating the monster Jamie had become. In this discussion, they talk about how Jamie would lock himself in room for hours on his computer well into the small hours of the morning, becoming increasingly isolated from the real world.

The implications become that perhaps the internet is to blame for all these problems, and in that regard, the programme is partly correct.

But the act of allowing your child unrestrained access to the internet should, itself, be a crime under parental neglect.

The technology we have access to is harmful for adults, let alone children, and yet many parents have completely taken their hands of the reigns. Vast swathes of children are being raised by their computers, their unruly peers, and their schools.

It’s little wonder that quiet monster are being created in the glare of a smartphone screen, and that behaviour standards in schools are plummeting (in part evidenced by the mass migration out of education by teachers and home-schoolers).

According to Catholic doctrine, a parent has the primary responsibility for the education of their child, but many are just handing them over to the world to be raised and wondering why they come back damaged.

Nevertheless, technology is actually the secondary issue. Smartphones and social media must be banned for children at least under 16, probably 18 (particularly given the quiet acceptance of child-on-child sexual abuse through sexting etc). However, what drives these boys to their computers and the manosphere?

It’s a society that has forgotten what masculinity is; that shuts down the opportunities for boys to truly become good men; all under the guise of equality and concerns about ‘toxicity’.

The positive differences between boys and girls are being melded as boys are encouraged to become more effeminate and placid.

But they are not stupid. They can tell that there is something wrong about the claims that to be a man is to be a force of evil oppression. And they can also see the clear differences between men and women.

The problem of toxic masculinity will not go away until acceptance of true masculinity is established.

Unfortunately, that masculinity, the type promoted by Catholicism, is at odds with our society – and therefore the problems will not get fixed.

Boys will not be taught that there is virtue in leading one’s family, taking up the fight for a just cause, or the ambition to become the great men of history they are no longer taught about.

Instead, they must become androgynous, hypersexualised, confused people, void of the characteristics and virtues that call them to Christ-like masculinity.

In the meantime, schools will continue to quash the masculine spirit of boys, and parents will continue in their sedentary pursuit of calm through handing their boys over to the evils of the internet. The government will try some internet crackdowns, but these will likely just result in further suppressions of free speech.

We can only hope, pray, and act so that the Church steps into the breach, and boldly proclaims the untold joys, struggles and positives of true masculinity – a masculinity that boys can only find in relationship with their Creator.

Catholic Herald version - https://thecatholicherald.com/adolescence-what-the-new-netflix-drama-gets-right-about-boys-and-what-it-gets-badly-wrong/