THE recent Netflix series Adolescence swiftly became the new talking point for the progressive liberal left, aghast atthe message it conveyed: that a 13-year-old, white middle-class boy from a caring family can be so influenced by internet misogyny and ‘hate’ that he stabs a girl to death.
But as the Spectator pointed out: ‘Violent boys do not usually resemble Jamie. They tend to come from broken homes, have pre-existing mental health problems, be absent from education and known to the authorities.’
Any youth violence is concerning, but co-creator Stephen Graham was inspired by the murder of a black girl by a 17-year-old black male with a record of violence against girls; in Adolescence, both victim and perpetrator are white and in their early teens, a very different scenario.
But so seriously has Adolescence – a work of fiction – been taken that Sir Keir Starmer described it as a ‘documentary’. More worryingly, despite its violence and sexually explicit language, he favours showing it in schools.
The Spectator commented: ‘Adolescence’s lesson, coming soon to a classroom near you, is that every sensitive young man can transform into a murderer through overexposure to what it clumsily calls the “manosphere”.’ In these pages, Edward Howard concluded that the series was but another assault on the already demonised white male.
Adolescence-obsessed politicians, however, are so concerned about alleged ‘white privilege’ that they overlook the fact that white working-class boys lag behind all other groups educationally.
And while men are responsible for most violent crime, and most domestic violence victims are women, most victims of ‘stranger’ violence are male.
Also sidelined are men’s health problems and the fact that millions are missing from the workforce, even while ‘labour shortages’ are cited to justify open-door immigration.
And there is little concern about a real ‘crisis of masculinity’ that’s resulted from this white male marginalisation: male suicides, which far outstrip those of females. One MP who recognises the problem is Jake Richards, Labour MP for Rother Valley, who raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Questions this month. He said that many men are ‘suffering in silence’.
Despite all this, the ‘entertainment’ industry continues to combat ‘toxic masculinity’. In TV adverts, men do the housework while also looking after the children while mothers are busy doing something somewhere else. According to media watchdogs, showing women doing housework is ‘misogynistic’, and so little boys are left to choose between the ‘violent male’ and the ‘house-husband’ as their role model.
Dramas like Adolescence teach them that the internet may ‘make them toxic’, but this prophecy seems self-fulfilling, as more young men turn from TV’s woke nagging to the ‘manosphere’ where internet ‘influencers’ like Andrew Tate vent against alleged female power while humiliating and exploiting women.
This is indeed a problem, but as they used to say, ‘Give a dog a bad name, and he’ll answer to it’. Lecturing little boys about violence and misogyny will likely make them violent and misogynistic; however, the ‘entertainment’ industry, that most zealous promoter of ‘diversity’, is run not by angry feminists but largely by privileged white males.
They fail to see that adding ‘feminism’ to a toxic mix of sex, violence and profanity simply tells the very worst sort of males – cowardly bullies – that ‘strong women’ are too weak to withstand their sexual advances.
At the same time, cowardly bullies are taught that ‘women control everything’, and conclude that they must be controlled – ironically, the sort of Andrew Tate misogyny at which Adolescence takes aim.
Concern about disaffected young males is nothing new, but the answer is no longer military discipline, or single-sex clubs channelling their energy and superior strength into competitive sport and positive pastimes. Now, all-male settings are regarded as sexist, and boys have little chance of projecting themselves into an apparently female-dominated world. No wonder their reaction is ‘What special talents can I offer the world – what am I good for?’
Society’s response seems to be ‘Nothing – women can do everything’, ignoring the fact that maternity leave and/or part-time working leads to a ‘shortage’ of staff in a female-dominated workforce.
As to manual labour, teams of female construction workers, hole diggers and rubbish collectors are conspicuous by their absence.
The not-very-liberal left, while priding itself as progressive, is helping to regress our culture to more savage times. While regarding themselves as grown-ups, increasingly, they exhibit all the symptoms of a troubled adolescent’s delayed development. Sadly, their zeal for defeating ‘toxic masculinity’ is matched by a toxic indifference to the real problems of both males and females.
