When Adolescence was released on Netflix on March 13, I knew nothing much about it. I thought it could provide a solid crime drama escape from local politics which were intense that week, what with the Budget that Didn’t Fly and Ebrahim Rasool’s ill-chosen comment about Trump.
The series was ‘limited’, so it had appeal for me. Too many television series these days drag on interminably. It had Stephen Graham in it, the quintessential ‘hard Northerner with heart of gold’ actor in British TV and movies. Perhaps it would be another of those bleak ‘northern realism’ productions, like Happy Valley, (which is decidedly bleak and certainly not happy), but was absorbing.
Adolescence did turn out to be bleak, absorbing, and emotionally harrowing.
It shows us a Britain in which police and parents appear amazingly ignorant about what their 13-year-old kids are up to on social media or out on the streets at night, or even what an ‘incel’ is. (Maybe they should talk more with their kids and not at them? Use it, don’t use it.) British schools appear to be filled with feral, out-of-control children, and staffed by over-empathetic or completely intimidated teachers-cum-minders. (I am sure we have some very similar ones as well). If Episode 1 is to be believed, British cops go into full anti-terrorism mode when arresting a teenager with no criminal history in his parental home.
Trust me, with my undergrad major in Drama to support my assessment, the series was a good piece of ‘theatre’ with excellent acting.
What I didn’t know until a day or two after my binge viewing was that it was also unleashing what Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill has called an’ insane’ level of moral panic among the liberal metropolitan elite in Britain. And a tsunami of fractious social and mainstream media commentary from all and sundry.
As Fraser Nelson noted in his column in The Times: “Fiction — books and television — can put problems on the agenda.”
British ‘kitchen sink’ or ‘realism’ drama has a revered history of doing just this for the left. Back in 1969, for example, Ken Loach’s film, Kes, from Barry Hines’ book, A kestrel for a knave, successfully raised and pushed the issues of class and inequality in connection with Britain’s education system and the 11-plus exam. The exam streamed children into either academic or vocational paths, and was criticised for frequently disadvantaging working-class children. The central character in Kes was Billy, a bullied, puny, white working-class boy, just like Jamie in Adolescence.
But what exactly was responsible for the tragedy in this new British realism drama and what issue it is illustrating, is in contention.
Many X commentators predictably chose to view the show through a race lens.
Some were angry that the accused boy in the show was white, because the inspiration for the show, the producers and creators tell us, was the news of two murderous attacks by black teenagers. They interpret the show’s failure to accurately depict the facts of real events as another example of media’s failure to truthfully reflect the country’s race and multiculturalism problems.
Clearly these critics do not realise that artistic creations rarely, if ever, replicate the exact reality of whatever inspired them.
Other commentators felt the choice of a white boy indicated the drama’s deliberate intention to attack white males.
There was also some complaining that the drama did not take on the widespread, long-running crimes committed by Muslim grooming gangs who prey on white girls, as some would have wished. Instead, it chose a knife crime, another crime plaguing Britain.
In Episode 2 of Adolescence, social media’s perniciousness, the manosphere and the misogyny preached, pushed and popularised by influencers like Andrew Tate as well as the widespread dissing of ‘incels’, a slang term for involuntarily celibate men, usually portrayed as white), are identified by one of the minor characters as being the contributory factors, the real villains as it were, in this drama, centred on the murder of a young schoolgirl by a young schoolboy.
Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister. wants the drama – a slip of the tongue had him calling it a documentary – shown in schools. He has indicated he’s keen on the idea of anti-misogyny education in school.
Liz Truss, a previous Prime Minister, said he would be mad to make social policy, based on a TV show.
But Toby Young of the Daily Sceptic thinks that’s exactly what Starmer is out to do. Young says the drama is propaganda, partly funded by the state, intentionally has a white boy from a working-class family as the perpetrator, and will be used to justify increased online censorship.
In the Spectator, Flora Watkins chose to focus on phones and the evil internet. She is signing up to the Smartphone Free Childhood movement and is appalled at the way in which children can access what a detective in the TV drama calls ‘that Andrew Tate shite’: the misogyny and the abuse.
But can Britain’s youth violence and crime simply be blamed on phones, social media, open access to the internet and the popularity of Tate among confused young men?
Nelson says Tate is a perfect villain for parents, but he can be countered by offering other appealing and better models of masculinity. He points to “the unequal distribution of fathers” in Britain. “95% there for those at the top, 60 per cent absent for those at the bottom.”
“Why not discuss this two-parent privilege?”, he asks.
I’d hazard that a father, or other male figure who is around in a boy’s life, also needs to present an honourable masculinity that is appealing enough to counter the powerful lure of Tate’s pimp-like strategies to attract and treat women, gain riches and be successful.
I watched Adolescence as a parent of a son who survived the modern media world and school to emerge into adulthood apparently OK. How specifically he managed this, I am not sure. But he did have the advantage of two parents.
Maybe I am simply lucky, but I also haven’t had too many experiences of toxic masculinity in my life to date. That could be why I also share writer Niall Gooch’s irritation with what he describes, in his UnHerd article provoked by Adolescence, as “the way society increasingly rewards classically feminine characteristics, consensus, inclusivity and the therapeutic mindset – while penalising typically masculine ones, such as preference for directness, individual action and robust but non-personal disagreement.”
Society is turning to women to a degree that is dangerous for the development of young men. No wonder so many are listing conservative.
Gooch says that “we need to be honest as to why they (men) feel frustrated and suffocated. We need to have some difficult discussions about how feminist advances of the last few decades have created losers as well as winners.”
Conservative MP Nick Timothy made some salient points in a long X thread on Adolescence, pointing out that knife crime and youth violence had been a problem in Britain long before smart phones and Andrew Tate.
“With fewer jobs in industry and more in education, care and services, many conventional male careers and men’s traditional role as the family breadwinner have gone. Especially for less educated and lower-paid men, their identity is less secure, and their status is lower.”
(Just think how much more this applies in South Africa because of our massive unemployment. No wonder we have a violent crime crisis.)
Timothy doesn’t want a debate about masculinity as toxic or a retrograde culture. He proposes we try instead to reconcile “the reality of who and what boys and men are with our society today and the economy of the future.”
I too want to see masculinity de-stigmatised. Society needs the return of respect for ‘manly virtues’, even if they may need updating from the ‘hard work, courage and a disposition to do good’ identified by US President Theodore Roosevelt.
Any efforts to combat school violence, misogyny and bullying, however, cannot only focus on the role of boys and men. In Adolescence, and the screeds written and posted in response to it, little attention has been paid to what I term the Mean Girl element, toxic femininity.
Katie, the schoolgirl victim in Adolescence is only ever seen under attack, face down in a dark CCTV footage. We never see or meet her alive. But her texts to Jamie, her murderer, are catalysts.
Her role, and the role of girls in school violence, bullying, and misogyny, whether passive or active, should not be left out of any discussions on the real issues being injected into the national conversation by a fictional television crime drama.
Adolescence may go down in television history, not only as a major hit, with millions of viewers in its first weeks, but as a major change agent. It remains to be seen, however, whether those changes will be good or bad.
Hopefully the SA Human Rights Commission, which is working on a code of behaviour to curb violence and bullying in South African schools, is paying attention to the Adolescence debate. It may prove more useful than worrying about teacher race ratios.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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