There is a moment in „Adolescence“, the Netlfix show that everyone, everywhere seems to be talking about at the moment, where Briony, the psychologist assigned to assess 13-year old Jamie, accused of murdering a girl at his school, asks Jamie if his dad is friendly with other women. Jamie assumes Briony is implying his dad cheats on his mum. “No,” he answers. “He loves my mum”. When Briony reframes the question, Jamie is just confused and annoyed. “No, his mates are his mates,” he answers. It’s established that all the mates are men, just like Jamie’s mates are all boys.
Why must it all be on schools to fix social problems they didn’t cause?
This short exchange is the crux of the issue in „Adolescence“, and yet nobody seems to be talking about it. Almost all the many debate and opinion pieces I’ve seen so far about „Adolescence“ and misogyny amongst teenage boys externalise the issues. They tell us the answer to the problem of young boys becoming recruited into online misogynistic cults led by Andrew Tate and his acolytes and committing horrific crimes against women and girls, lies in tighter control of the online world and access to it. Mobile phones should be banned in schools. Social media should be banned for under 16s. Schools should teach lessons on the dangers of online misogyny. Schools have now been given free access to „Adolescence“ so they can use it to teach students about the dangers of online misogyny. Schools again. Why must it all be on schools to fix social problems they didn’t cause?
What a lot of people are missing is, the internet actually creates social ills far less often than it merely magnifies and intensifies them. The internet provides a space for beliefs to mutate, uncensored and divorced from real life contexts and human, face to face connections that foster empathy. The truth is, the misogyny explored in Adolescence was not born on the internet. The online “manosphere” and incel culture is simply a more extreme version of attitudes that have their roots in the offline world and which surround and influence Jamie.
Jack Thorne and Steven Graham, the creators and star of the programme, have said they didn’t want the show to be about blaming the parents. They wanted to convey that this could happen to any family. There is truth in both statements, and it’s certainly the case that Jamie’s parents, Eddie and Manda, have good intentions. They appear ordinary, hard-working people. They have an older daughter who is academically successful and hasn’t committed crime. They aren’t alcoholics, drug addicts or afflicted by any of the other stereotypes that we associate with the families of teenagers who murder.
But what struck me most about „Adolescence“, and what the parents in the show never recognise, is the simple truth it reveals: we don’t raise boys to actually like women and girls. We don’t raise them to see women and girls as people with independent lives and feelings and opinions, who are interesting and funny and worthy of respect, empathy and care. We don’t teach them that women and girls have value as human beings, irrespective of whether they’re young or hot or take care of them or agree to have sex with them. And until we start raising boys to see all this, any other social change we attempt to engineer through laws, education or other means will be doomed to fail.
Men are king
In the world that 13-year old Jamie inhabits in „Adolescence“, men are kings. In reality, the adult men in Jamie’s world actually have very little social or financial power in the wider world. Jamie’s dad Eddie, a plumber, works 14-hour days in the belief that he’s doing right by his family, leaving the work of the house and raising his children to his wife Manda, even though she also, apparently, has a job. Eddie secretly knows that as a working-class man, he doesn’t have real power, though it’s never directly acknowledged. But he can wield it in his own house and his own community.
I spent over a decade working as a teacher in communities just like the one Jamie’s family lives in, and I quickly learned: patriarchal power is law. A middle or upper class man is assured enough of his status to be able to risk showing a more gentle kind of masculinity. A less “powerful” man cannot risk this within patriarchy. Masculine in working-class culture means, as psychologist Briony spells it out to Jamie, “men who mend things…like to make things…They like sports. They like going to the pub.” Jamie agrees wholeheartedly with this description. When Briony asks Jamie if his dad is loving, he scoffs: “No, that’s weird”. Still, it is Eddie who holds the power and Eddie who Jamie’s entire world centres on.
One of the first indications we get of this in Adolescence is when Jamie, without hesitation, asks for his dad to accompany him in the police car and to be his significant adult, while he is questioned by detectives. Jamie knows that his dad is his best chance of protection in the patriarchal world he lives in. He cares desperately about his dad’s opinion and whether his dad thinks he murdered Katie. His mum’s opinion is of no apparent consequence to him. Later, awaiting trial, Jamie calls home and doesn’t even acknowledge his mum or his older sister, even though he knows they are there too, listening in to the call. The only person he wants to speak to is Eddie. Nobody in the family questions or contradicts this.
When questioned by Briony, Jamie can describe his dad as “a kind person” who “likes all sport,” even lawn bowls. All Jamie can say about his mum is she cooks a great Sunday roast. He’s disgusted at the thought of being seen in any pictures with his sister on Instagram. We learn nothing in „Adolescence“ about who Manda and Lisa are outside of their family relationship to Jamie. We are never shown what Manda’s job is or her interests beyond her caring responsibilities. Hopefully this is intentional, showing that Jamie actually doesn’t see the women in his life as fully human, because he’s never been taught or expected to. Instead he sees Eddie, who we’re intended to read as a good husband and father, a decent man, flying into rages and ordering his wife and daughter around.
Jamie tells Briony that his dad is often angry, that he once pulled down a shed in a rage, but describes this as “angry in a normal way”. While Eddie gets angry like this, Manda and Lisa’s job is to try to soothe him and silently comply with his orders, so they don’t make him angrier. The focus in „Adolescence“ is the impact of Jamie’s crimes on Eddie, not Manda or Lisa, and while this can be partially explained in terms of the show’s themes, it does leave a lingering discomfort that this reflects real life. In so many “ordinary” households in the UK, men set the weather like this, and women have to live with it. Men’s opinions are the only ones that matter.
The best way of getting it done is to play to society’s misogynistic scripts
It is easy, and the easy answer, to read Jamie’s treatment of women outside of his family unit as the fault of the internet subculture he’s been radicalised into. To him, women and girls are objects, there to serve him. He tells psychologist Briony in unintentionally chilling detail, how he deliberately took advantage of Katie’s vulnerability, after she had been bullied on social media, thinking this would make her more likely to go out with him and possibly have sex with him. He’s then angry that she turned him down, his rage eventually spiralling into murdering her. We see Jamie practise the same kinds of behaviour on Briony, trying by turns to overpower her through compliments and physical and verbal intimidation.
It has more than slight resemblance to the kind of behaviour his father displays at home. Ironically, Briony is the only woman who Jamie really “sees” at all, but the implication is always that if she wasn’t young and pretty in his eyes, his behaviour would be very different. Briony also knows how to play the patriarchal game, initially winning Jamie’s attention by bringing him a sandwich and a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows she’s brought specially. Later, when Briony leaves the room for a break after Jamie has shouted aggressively in her face, he knows exactly what he’s doing, when he tells her to bring him another hot chocolate when she comes back. Of course, she does it. Despite her professional qualifications and life experience, Briony knows she has a vital job to do and limited time, so the best way of getting it done is to play to society’s misogynistic scripts.
Less cynically, she’s probably also absorbed that disrespectful behaviour is to be expected and explained away if it comes from boys, but is entirely different if it comes from girls. Briony earns some level of grudging respect from Jamie, but only by pandering to his needs and enduring his abusive behaviour without showing signs of fear or walking away. When Jamie pleads with her, at the end of their time together, “Do you like me?”, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s also the wrong question, and it reveals much about how Jamie has been taught to think. There are too many men out there who, if they think about women at all, only think about whether women like them, and blame the women if they do not. This is the roots of incel culture. Men never seem to ask themselves whether they can genuinely say they like women, and how they show that. Do they, in fact, deserve to be liked? To be liked is a reciprocal situation.
All women have to make themselves likeable to me
But the sad thing is, men can get by day to day and even forge successful lives and careers without either liking women or trying to be liked by them. No woman can afford to do the same. All women, even if they’re lesbians or asexual, have to pay attention to men’s opinion of them and attempt to make themselves likeable to them, or they find life very hard. Men perform to men and care about the opinions of men because within patriarchy that’s what matters. We only have to look at Donald Trump – able to simultaneously lead the most powerful nation in the world and be a convicted abuser of women – to see that.
I found „Adolescence“ a tough watch, not because it’s violent (it isn’t, particularly), or even because of the scenes in which Jamie tries to physically and verbally intimidate Briony, but because it took me back so acutely to everyday life in the kinds of communities I taught and was a Deputy Headteacher in all those years. In the second episode, we see Jamie and Katie’s school, which bristles with male hostility. Male teachers in the “man” uniform of shirts and ties attempt, sometimes successfully, to keep order by shouting aggressively and taking up physical space. Female members of staff, dressed like sitcom mothers and aunts, are solely responsible for pastoral care, told to “fuck off, Miss”. Female DS Frank stands no chance of uncovering the details of Katie’s murder; to underline this, the ineffectual female deputy head forgets to introduce her to a class of mostly boys, only paying attention to her male superior. DI Bascombe is able to get further, by first earning the respect of one of the teenage male witnesses, once the boy establishes the police officer was popular and had status when he was at school, then by chasing the boy down and physically overpowering him in the street. In a world where displays of masculinity and physical strength rule, women have no chance. I couldn’t tell you how many times I felt completely inadequate in my job, because I couldn’t physically intimidate or shout down a 15-year old boy.
Patriarchy operates by enforcing cultural scripts of dominance. Men dominate women, and they dominate other men who the patriarchy has coded as weaker, usually because of their social class, size, race or sexuality. These “weaker” men often seek to enact the power they’ve been raised to feel is their right, sometimes by dominating still weaker men but much more often by dominating women. Within patriarchy, women always lose, even if they team up with the powerful men in their domination of women. But men lose too. They lose out on real, human relationships that involve meaningful connection, with each other (because a lot of men’s so-called friendships actually possess none of these qualities at all), but most importantly with women.
How can you tell if a man likes women?
I started really thinking about all of this after I read Celeste Davis’s article last year, “The men who like women and the men who don’t. Yes we can tell”. I taught boys for over a decade, I was part of a school management team, I have a Masters degree in Gender Studies, I have two teenage sons and I like to think I’m a pretty reflective feminist. But this article put it in really stark terms for me and it completely changed the way I think. I’m not lying when I say I think about that article every single day. I think about it every time I meet a man in real life, and I think about it every time I see a man in the media, or consume art by a man. It has made me reflect, sometimes really uncomfortably, on people whose work and art I once loved, people I thought I liked. So how can you tell if a man likes women? This is what Celeste Davis says:
“It’s in the listening, the curiosity, the respect. It’s in the eye contact. It’s how they speak of other women or speak over women. It’s whether or not they ever read women authors, listen to podcasts hosted by women.”
In short, it’s whether they see women as creatures who exist to serve and care for them and their needs, or whether they genuinely see them as people in their own right, who are worthy of respect and regard. I’d add another to that list as a lesbian: does a man have any lesbian friends? Is he prepared to invest in a woman knowing he’ll never have sex with her?
I think this school of thought is having a moment. Recently, lesbian musician Lucy Dacus said in an interview that “the most important binary in the music industry”, famously unkind to women, is no longer about straight versus queer artists but about “people who love women and people who don’t.”
We can make a start with what we can control
So we can continue to shout for lawmakers and governments and schools to do more. We can get a little more reflective and acknowledge that we should actually know where our 13-year olds are at 10.30 pm at night, and we should take the phones and tablets out of their rooms long before they go to bed. We can even say we’ll speak more about misogyny and Andrew Tate at home. But all of this will be for nothing if our sons don’t have any female friends. If they spend their weekends being taken out with their dad to do “manly” things while their sisters go shopping with their mum, if they see their dad calling the shots over everything, while their mum tries to keep the peace and does most of the work around the house.
Yes, this doesn’t happen in every home, but it happens in far more than it should. If boys are to grow up to properly like women and girls, they need to spend time with them and be privy to conversations about how issues like sexism, online misogyny, periods, beauty culture and a raft of other issues actually affect them. It’s the start of building empathy. There are huge structural issues that get in the way of this, based on our society’s obsession with segregating men and women, which patriarchy depends on, but we can make a start with what we can control, in our own homes. It would be something.
My two sons have two mums and no dad, so some of this is completely alien to us anyway. I don’t think I’m a perfect parent – some days I’m not even sure I’m a good one – but I do think we raised our sons to see both of their mums, and the women in our wider family – as people, with their own lives and interests and feelings. They’d say I’m always at a concert, and my wife can beat anybody at Super Mario Party. If either of my sons asked us, “Do you like me?”, we would be able to say, honestly, yes, I do. And if we replied, “Do you like me?”, most days, I think they would say yes.
The article was originally published on Substack.