The misogyny of young men on the internet is not so different from misogyny elsewhere
At first I thought it was just me. After watching the much-lauded Netflix drama Adolescence — obligatory if you are a parent of teenage boys — I didn’t feel especially shocked. Yes, it was well-structured, with some great acting, but a truth-telling expose of why some boys become violent misogynists? An “unnervingly on-the nose call to action”? I hate to be that person, but I just couldn’t feel it.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if the scriptwriters hadn’t been so self-congratulatory about the whole thing. As Ben Sixsmith has written here, there’s a real problem in “how the series is being framed”, treated as documentary evidence to promote policies which surely require a little more consideration. From a feminist perspective, this seemed to me particularly suspicious.
Adolescence positions itself as offering shiny new insights into the nature of misogyny — a new type of misogyny, mind, that the old folks wouldn’t understand. As one of the young characters tells his dad — the detective inspector investigating the murder of a teenage girl — “you’re embarrassing yourself”. Poor old DI Bascombe isn’t emoji-literate. Once we learn about red-pill emojis and revenge porn and the modern-day deterioration of masculine norms, it totally changes everything. Or possibly not.
After watching the series to the end, and seeing all the handwringing over “masculinity in crisis”, I raised it with some female friends my age. What was I missing? To me this seemed to be telling the same old story that all of us have been hearing ever since the first time a boy hit us and we were told it’s because he was sad. Or because he was left out. Or because the world is “confusing” for men and boys in ways that it wasn’t before, and because “no one” ever talks about this. That men and boys who hurt women and girls may feel sad, ashamed, inferior, ugly — that they may embrace the worst ideologies in response — is not exactly news. It is something feminists — many of us mothers of boys — have been discussing for decades. The trouble is, feminists tend to ask more of adult men than that they wrench mobile phones from the hands of their sons.
Pro-feminist men, as Adrienne Rich already noted in 1976, are “increasingly aware that their disorders have something to do with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it”. Why see any connection between the misogyny and sexual objectification with which women my age are familiar — which men our age have done little to question — and the rise of the incel? Why bother, when you can choose to view it as a different language and culture entirely (thankfully, Hello! is on hand to explain “the 43 emojis Netflix’s Adolescence didn’t warn parents about — and the sinister meaning behind them”)? Since Adolescence was shown, there has been no particular increase in attention paid to feminists who critique mega-brothels, pro-prostitution politics, or pornified definitions of women as masochistic, submissive, inferior beings. Is it opportunistic of me to think there should have been? Perhaps, but it is no more opportunistic than using a story about the death of a teenage girl as a prompt for fussing over phones and “left behind” boys. It’s no more opportunistic than pretending the beliefs of Andrew Tate are unrelated to the woman-hating which nice, “normal” men view as entertainment.
Extreme misogyny and entitlement in teenage boys is hardly a modern development
Whilst Adolescence is well-written, there were times when it felt clunky, the dialogue marred by an effort to “do the issue” in such a way as to ward off precisely the kind of criticism I am making. The brief scene in which DI Bascome and DS Frank discuss whether it is bad for so much attention to be on the perpetrator Jamie rather than the victim Katie, before quickly concluding that no, when you think about it, this is all about Katie, had a box-ticking feel. It is, surely, a conversation no one genuinely involved in a case might have, but one which a couple of scriptwriters may well do. The final episode, in which the relationship of Jamie’s parents seems to function to tell us that things were simpler back in the day, felt deeply contrived. It also, in the context of scriptwriters wanting a genuine discussion about the state of masculinity, veered towards being offensive.
Yes, it is fiction, but if you are going to claim your drama is also bigger than that, you need to be clear about what your position is. When I asked my own friends what they felt about Adolescence, there was frustration at how little was really new in terms of gender politics, and at how cruel it was to women and girls to pretend otherwise. The focus on mobile phones and the supposed neglect of male psychology denies us continuity, the space to point out that actually, we have always been conscious of the threat of falling victim to a boy’s “sadness”. Some problems may have escalated since our teens — thanks, not least, to porn which does not become magically harmless the moment a boy turns eighteen — but extreme misogyny and entitlement in teenage boys is hardly a modern development. It wasn’t all dancing to A-ha at the school disco. Girls have always been hurt, and the fathers of boys who do the hurting always have someone to scapegoat. It used to be us; now it is phones and influencers. Why bother with an actual feminist approach?
As a mother of teenage boys, I do question myself about this. Of course I worry about the things they encounter online. I know that what I have seen of their Instagram accounts — generally endearingly earnest (the political stuff) or very funny (the football commentary spoofs) — is not the entirety of what they are looking at or creating. I am torn between the need to respect their privacy, and constant anxiety over the existence of a private space which wasn’t there when I was their age.
At the same time, as a feminist, I have spent years watching women with detailed, careful analyses of misogyny both online and off face ridicule, dismissal, even accusations of “promoting stigma” from many of those who will wear “hating Andrew Tate” and “liking Adolescence” as a badge that proves they’re not complicit in any harms. When one of the writers of Adolescence claims that the incel idea “that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men — would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod”, I want to scream “the problem here isn’t phones!”. It’s not even that we don’t understand “isolated” boys enough.
It’s not seeing or treating women and girls as people, and there’s never an age at which female non-personhood becomes a safe fiction in which men can occasionally indulge. The solution has to start with adults and the things they choose to create and consume. It’s time to stop blaming kids and emojis for the world men have created and are creating still.
