Adolescence, and toxic masculinity
March 25, 2025 6:52 AM Subscribe

The Guardian: “Jamie has fallen under the spell of misogynistic influencers and suffered cyber-bullying for being an “incel”. His parents admit that he would shut himself in his bedroom and be on his computer long into the night. They assumed he was safe but he was secretly being radicalised. His story highlights the corrosive impact of social media on impressionable minds and has resonated profoundly with audiences. Parents of teenagers have been watching rapt, heartbroken and horrified in equal measure – with the show clocking up an astonishing 24.3m views in its first four days of release, four times more than the number two show. It tops the Netflix ratings in 71 countries, ranging from Chile to Vietnam.” [Also on FanFare]

* Guardian: Is this the most terrifying TV show of our times? Adolescence, the drama that will horrify all parents.
* The Standard: Is Andrew Tate an incel? Explaining the 'manosphere' terms in Netflix's Adolescence.
* BBC: Netflix's Adolescence makes UK TV ratings history
* Mirror: Netflix's Adolescence: The hidden meaning behind Jamie's half-eaten sandwich scene.
* Metro: The ‘harmful’ blackpill philosophy Netflix’s Adolescence didn’t tell you about.

posted by Wordshore (132 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite

Here in Portugal the show has resulted in a profusion of "let's explain the emojis," including an illustrated media release from the police
posted by chavenet at 7:22 AM on March 25 [8 favorites]

My brother was going to be watching this with my niece. Uncle better catch up.
posted by ginger.beef at 7:36 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Watched this, and then chatted about it over tacos and drinks with my husband and about-to-turn-12 year old. Was relieved that 12 year old was new to some of the concepts, 'red pill' and 'incel' for example, but as we were talking about it he connected it to some other things he does know about, like Andrew Tate. This show was a terrifying watch.
posted by fennario at 7:44 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

The thing that I'm a bit uneasy about is that a lot of the furor is taking the approach that "we need to do something because it's affecting the safety of young girls". But I'm not seeing similar calls for "we need to do something because it's affecting the mental health of young boys."

I have a niece and a nephew; they are both in their teens, and really, really great kids, both studious, kind, funny, sweet. But my nephew in particular is becoming a bit of a mini-Me - he has a bit of a weirdo brain, he's heavily into art and anime and music as much as he is sports, and he tried to start an existential conversation over Thanksgiving dinner one year (the rest of the family blinked, but I just told them "I recognize this brain, I got this" and kept things going). People are even starting to remark that we look alike. And if anyone gets their claws on that kid I will go off the chain in his defense.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:04 AM on March 25 [41 favorites]

Two things I genuinely wonder about - that is, I'm not asking questions as a gotcha:

1. How many tween/teen boys are really deeply engaged with these ideas to the extent that they act on them? Let's consider "acting on them" to include fairly minor stuff but not necessarily every act of misogyny, since we've all been in school systems and experienced widespread baked in misogyny long before Tate, etc. I think this is an answerable question - I'm not trying to say "this is more of the adults complaining about the youths".

2. One thing I worry about and it may just be the result of a seriously bullied youth: when I hear about a lot of pop culture attention being focused on a youth problem, especially a problem that can be cast as just "being cool" or "being rebellious" (like violence and violent misogyny) I worry that it will simply normalize the behavior, and that the teen/tween takeaway is not going to be "this is a scary consequence of seemingly everyday behavior, better tell a grownup" but "regular boys get really violent, boys have contempt for girls including the girls they ask out, and this is so normal and common that they made a whole TV show about it".

I will say that there were a number of TV shows about serious youth problems when I was growing up, and they did not in fact have the desired effect on the youth.
posted by Frowner at 8:10 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

I haven't watched the show (my wife did, and found it emotionally manipulative though well-acted), but to Frowner's point what I know of it makes it sound like Kids updated for the modern day.
posted by nickmark at 8:14 AM on March 25 [3 favorites]

Is there any sexual abuse?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:20 AM on March 25

Building on Empress and Frowner's points... People can't worry too much about the mental health of young boys, because the toxic model is only a slight exaggeration of socially "desirable" traits of strong dominance/authority orientation and empathy strictly delimited to members of the in-group. It's a through line that runs from football to Wall Street, touching nearly every workplace, with the culture of hegemonic militarism squatting grossly in the middle.

As happy as I am that this show was made (as it's a topic that desperately needs addressing), I have confidence that it doesn't turn to face the mirror fully enough.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:23 AM on March 25 [40 favorites]

In as much as four decades ago being shut up in your room meant you were alone and in order to be “corrupted” by shitty peers and skeevy adults you had to go outside; and today those things can happen in anytime, anywhere — this show will wake up a lot of parents who are foolishly assuming their shy stay at home boys are just reading books or wanking behind a closed door.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:27 AM on March 25 [10 favorites]

I haven't watched the show, but a benefit I see as a high school teacher is that parents may become more educated about misogynistic radicalization. Most adults have no idea who Andrew Tate is; their male children idolize him.
posted by chaiminda at 8:27 AM on March 25 [18 favorites]

As, as mentioned above, the parent of an about-to-be-12 year old, focusing on male mental health and developing healthy masculinity is something my husband and I have been engaged with for my son's whole life and I STILL don't know if it will be enough. I started thinking about this when he was a toddler, literally.

>this show will wake up a lot of parents who are foolishly assuming their shy stay at home boys are just reading books or wanking behind a closed door.

My kid's PC and video game consoles are kept in the family room, and as much as husband and I sometimes get so tired of Fortnite video calls happening constantly in our family room making it hard to use the space comfortably ourselves, this is part of why. I cannot believe the parents of his peers who are just now buying PC's for their sons, are putting them in the bedrooms. I know the location of the device isn't everything, especially when kids have phones and ipads (which, in our home, are also not allowed in bedrooms after 9pm; and my kid is a "family room kid" not a "bedroom kid" as yet), but the important thing to me is that it remains normal and natural that we know what his conversations sound like, we know how they are treating each other online (we read messages, and have disclosed that to him, no secrecy). I don't know, we are trying to keep it as comfortable as we can for as long as possible for things to be in the open, for him to see that we don't judge or jump down his throat about every comment. We are choosy about what we correct and what we let go, and why.

It's a scary time to be a parent, of any child, anywhere on the gender spectrum. Different gender identities have different unique challenges, but it's definitely not an easy time.
posted by fennario at 8:35 AM on March 25 [29 favorites]

This show was terrifying and I don't even have kids. I understand that kids at some point need privacy and trust, but nothing good happens on the internet for kids after 10:00. I have very good friends who have a boy this age and ignore most of his casual references to Hitler and Nazis that he manages to drop into every conversation. We don't go over there really anymore because I see it even if they do not. He was 8 years old and playing online games with people his parents were sure were other kids even though they admitted they didn't ever check.

I don't know how someone parents today if the internet is on 24/7.
posted by archimago at 8:35 AM on March 25 [11 favorites]

So this is the best television I've ever seen.

I watched one episode casually because it sounded interesting. Then I watched the other three episodes because I couldn't stop watching. When they finished at 2:30 am, I seriously considered just starting over and watching it straight through again.

It is brilliant. Brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, brilliantly shot. Every hour-long episode is ONE SHOT. It's going to have Emmy and BAFTA awards coming out it's arse.

It is squarely about mental health and boys. That is the entire four hour focus. Anyone who doesn't think the mental health of boys and teens is being red-pilled from online content is mistaken and needs to go look at Andrew Tates subscriber and follower counts and maybe spend some time time listening to Joe Rogan, America's most listened to podcaster until last month.

I think one of the things the show does best is illustrate how insidious this kind of indoctrination is, but also how normal and lovable your son is while he holding these thoughts and his head and saying these things when you're not around still is.

This family could literally be any family, the most normal boring family that is totally blown out of the water by the series of events in this show.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:36 AM on March 25 [38 favorites]

>Most adults have no idea who Andrew Tate is

Wow that is not my experience at all, but I am in very lefty and very feminist circles. The adults know and are aware of the negative influences of misogynist male podcasters including but not limited to Tate, and the male 6th graders I know make fun of him. The running nickname is Tater Tot. Of course their opinions may change a lot over the next few years.
posted by fennario at 8:37 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

>I think one of the things the show does best is illustrate how insidious this kind of indoctrination is, but also how normal and lovable your son is while he holding these thoughts and his head and saying these things when you're not around still is.

Fantastic point.
posted by fennario at 8:39 AM on March 25 [20 favorites]

I will say that there were a number of TV shows about serious youth problems when I was growing up, and they did not in fact have the desired effect on the youth.

Posted By Frowner

I think one of the points of the show is that This Is A Problem and It Could Happen To Your Family Now Because Online Everywhere, re: online incel stuff, which is something that needs to ring 5-alarm fires.
posted by lalochezia at 8:39 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

As happy as I am that this show was made (as it's a topic that desperately needs addressing), I have confidence that it doesn't turn to face the mirror fully enough.

While I agree with this analysis, I think it's important when raising awareness to present the facts first in story form and then the analysis (soon!) later, or the whole thing can be bashed as being "woke" and dismissed.
posted by lalochezia at 8:41 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

makes it sound like Kids updated for the modern day

It's nothing like Kids. It's a lot closer to a true-crime podcast like Serial but with brooding BBC-ish prestige TV production.

I think its artistic conceit is that the episodes are filmed in one shot with no cuts, they do it twice and pick the best one; or at least that's what my Mom tells me.

I've seen a few minutes of an early episode; mostly an interrogation scene.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:43 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

I watched it with my 14-year-old daughter over the weekend. She claims to have no idea what 'incel', 'red pill', 80/20 or any of that stuff is. I hope it's true. She thought it was a horribly boring show and while I'm a little disappointed that she didn't 'get' it, I suppose I'm also grateful. I'll just keep doing what I've been doing - watching things like this with her, sharing feminist TikToks and jokes and trying to gradually familiarize her with red flags in men.

I'm a bit ashamed at how intensely relieved I am not to have sons.
posted by kitcat at 8:46 AM on March 25 [9 favorites]

I cannot say I am relieved not to have a teenage daughter, because I would have done anything for my daughter to survive. But with as much molten fury as I have myself about the loss of rights I was born with, as much fear as I have about what the future holds for women in this country (look at how quickly things changed for women in Iran), there is part of me that .... I don't know if I could parent a daughter effectively right now. Hats off to those of you who are guiding and supporting them through this. I am just trying to raise a man that can have a healthy, happy life, who is not dangerous to women or to himself, who can adapt to the changing circumstances of the future, and reach as many of his goals as possible. A lot of that is the same for parenting, wherever on the gender spectrum our kids are, but yes, knowing the negative influences of toxic masculinity out there ... the way it is harmful to women and to the men themselves who choose to follow those influences, it's scary.

Being told by more than one teacher that he has an uncommonly developed interest in the wider world around him and builds inclusive community in his classrooms, and being told by more than one mother over the years that he stood up for or defended her daughter in some way ... gives me hope. I lean so much into supporting his friendships with boys whose families I know well enough to know they are leaning in to teaching and role modeling positive masculinity. But yes it is scary.

This show was one of the scariest things I've ever watched. As a parent you want to think "Well I'm not teaching my kid that...", you wanted to blame it, perhaps, on his father role modeling toxic masculinity and misogyny. And then you can't. You are forced to look at the fact that you being a good person and a good role model isn't enough.
posted by fennario at 9:06 AM on March 25 [24 favorites]

I don't know if I could parent a daughter effectively right now. Hats off to those of you who are guiding and supporting them through this. I am just trying to raise a man that can have a healthy, happy life, who is not dangerous to women or to himself, who can adapt to the changing circumstances of the future, and reach as many of his goals as possible.

Hats off to you. I feel like I'm doing the easier job, raising daughters. Especially as a mother - if I had a son, what's to say he wouldn't end up rejecting my influence outright? Working against the bigger culture feels impossibly hard.
posted by kitcat at 9:13 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

Is the whole thing on Netflix or is it given out weekly? I don’t have Netflix but will turn it on if I can watch and cancel but don’t want to sign up and have to wait.
posted by dobbs at 9:43 AM on March 25

Dobbs, the whole thing is on Netflix, and you can (and will likely be compelled to) watch it in one extremely thorny, bitter gulp. It is amazing. That kid... well, all the kids. Everybody in it. Everybody in it is phenomenal. The one-shot thing isn't just a circus trick, it's perfect for what the show is saying. The fact that they could do what they did with that show with all those adolescent actors so brilliantly rising to the insanely huge challenge is proof that this age group is not lost and could still make a brilliant future for themselves. But we really really need to step up and stop basically leaving these baby lambs out unprotected all night every night in a world full of wolves.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:52 AM on March 25 [13 favorites]

I'm genuinely surprised by all these posters saying their kids never heard terms like "red pill" or "incel". I guess I'm just Too Online but I thought these were ubiquitous by now.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:00 AM on March 25 [6 favorites]

I watched this with my daughters (16 and 14). They were able to identify literally all these tropes and terms, and could point to a dozen specific examples of boys who embodied each one. And we live in the middle of a big city, in districts that went Blue by huge margins.

Also, in response to fennario, I have only daughters and think it's much easier than raising sons would be. I can't imagine how much more attention I'd have to pay in order to keep them away from Tate/Rogan/Peterson/etc.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:02 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

Is there any sexual abuse?

I feel like this is kind of difficult to answer but if you mean - is there an adult sexually abusing a minor in this show? The answer is no. And there's also no direct portrayal of sexual abuse whatsoever.
posted by kitcat at 10:04 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

makes it sound like Kids updated for the modern day

Yeah, naw. It's not like Kids because since Kids there has been a complete social overhaul and childhood now does not resemble childhood before the internet. The point of the last episode, which is about Jaime's family, primarily his parents, and of the two of them, primarily his father, includes a long reminiscence about the father and mother when they were adolescents. From that episode we learn that the laissez faire raising that most kids have successfully worked with/around for most of human history to achieve a mostly functioning and reasonably happy maturity will not work at all, now, for many, many kids, at least not for groups of kids with phones, and this is because society has become malevolent and has allowed tech companies to treat children like an exploitable commodity, with entirely predictable results for the children, the adults they will become, and everyone who encounters the children and the adults they will become.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:07 AM on March 25 [31 favorites]

Reading this over, there's an aspect of this that I keep coming back to, which is that I literally only know Tate as a slimeball. What exactly is going on that kids are modeling themselves after him? Has anybody watched this guy and can give an ELI5 of his schtick?
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 10:10 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

> Has anybody watched this guy and can give an ELI5 of his schtick?

He's a teen movie jock, he boasts about how rich and great he is and all the girls he gets, and rants about how everyone else is dumb and worthless and you should treat them like shit. He speaks with the machine gun patter of a con artist.
posted by lucidium at 10:19 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

Has anybody watched this guy and can give an ELI5 of his schtick?

Sure. It's compelling, if you are a young, stupid and absolutely untouched straight boy. He's a pimp without totally saying he's a pimp, with a side order of the kind of masculinity that has this very thin veneer of "take care of your shit and stay focused on your goals" à la Peterson, that's not clearly misogynist. You're* drawn to him because he's a guy who's a champion fighter and who sticks relentlessly to his goals, and only then do you see that those goals are "exploit women, because their stupid little ladybrains lose control when you mistreat them as god intended, and get them to fund your lifestyle." Name brands, a truly cartoonish tough guy exaggeration of masculinity. Nothing that would appeal to anyone with an ounce of sense, but his target market is idiots and losers.

* Not you, nor me, but a solid 1/3 of my daughters' classmates.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:20 AM on March 25 [13 favorites]

I literally only know Tate as a slimeball. What exactly is going on that kids are modeling themselves after him?

I haven't watched him. But one thing that's happening is that boys and men are being made to feel increasingly insecure about their looks and their ostensible place within an 'alpha'-based male hierarchy. Anyone who has sons or nephews or access to young men needs to be fighting back against this.
posted by kitcat at 10:21 AM on March 25 [9 favorites]

Right, got it. Depressing all around, but the most depressing thing is the predictability of it all.

*sigh*
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 10:29 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

What exactly is going on that kids are modeling themselves after him?

Some of my son's acquaintances got into Tate via his health / body building / exercise focused TikToks along with his boasts of sexual conquests (which, when you are a horny teen, are compelling). And yeah I'd agree with outgrown_hobnail, it is "universally stupid and absolutely untouched straight" WHITE boys (at least with my son's crowd). It is partly why he doesn't hang out with a lot of the white kids (he is white) as they tend to be, in my son's words "pretty stupid and into dumb things." He wouldn't call them losers but he uses that language to describe them. The non-white kids he hangs with, noticeably, all have limits on the use of their phones and other devices which I think plays a role in their behaviour (my son has rigid rules about this as well). They also have parents who are engaged in how they present themselves to the world. All his classmates know the language of Tate (red pill, incel, etc.) and they can all point to people they know from school who would fit into those categories. The child of a family friend was into Tate for a bit but got out of it when Tate said something to the effect that "If you're not having sex for procreation you are gay" - I'm paraphrasing because I can't be arsed to find the actual quote as I only heard it via this kid.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:36 AM on March 25 [3 favorites]

Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:43 AM on March 25 [16 favorites]

And yeah I'd agree with outgrown_hobnail, it is "universally stupid and absolutely untouched straight" WHITE boys (at least with my son's crowd).

For the record, both my daughters were very clear that Tate's pretty popular with the black boys, too, but if I understood them correctly, the black boys were likely to see Tate as one among a whole palette of pimp-adjacent shitheads, mostly figures on the margins of hip-hop, whereas the white kids were likelier to have a narrower and all white or white-adjacent pantheon of misogynists. Their school is about 50/50 white/black, but nearly all the white kids are from middle-class families and only about half the black kids are.

All of them, white and black, who are into this ideology are relentlessly, over the top homophobic. I explained "methinks the lady doth protest too much" to them, and they were both like oh yeah that absolutely tracks.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:47 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

I watched the first 10 minutes last night and may not continue (I watched the trailer with my wife who was shook and likely won't watch). But we are the parents of four twenty-something kids (three sons and one daughter) and all are fully aware of these types of perils.

So...to any who are concerned about the future, my youngest son is studying to be a teacher, and is already a coach to both genders of highschoolers. My oldest son is a coach to adolescent girls. These men (and our daughter) are on to this bullshit and nip it quick.
posted by grefo at 10:50 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

Their school is about 50/50 white/black

Yeah we're in Canada so the numbers are gonna be different for us. It is more like 55% white / 35% "brown" (People from Subcontinent and Middle East mostly) / 10% "New to Canada" Black (Africans and Caribbeans). Definitely Homophobia is a key characteristic.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:52 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Thank you for letting me know about this series; I have a 10-year-old son and this kind of thing is on my mind constantly. His dad is a good masculine role model, and we talk a lot about how to treat people, and what content he sees online and how video editing can be used to make us feel a certain way (sad music vs. happy music, captions), but at some point he's going to be able to access more and more of this stuff, or his friends will, and it keeps me up at night. The weak link at this age seems to be peers with older siblings who are more online. He told us that one of his friends claimed "reading is for girls" and we all agreed that was untrue and dumb. But it felt like the opening shot in a battle that will last until he's an adult.
posted by castlebravo at 10:54 AM on March 25 [9 favorites]

The weirdest thing about Tate is that, physically, he's such a weenie. Just Google images of him if you don't know what he looks like. I never understood how this guy became an icon of Masculinity. There are others of that ilk that at least look the part of big, tough traditionally masculine guy.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:57 AM on March 25 [8 favorites]

I have a daughter, and while she's in her 20s now, when she was ~12ish, we had issues with the people that she was hanging out with online. We had to take her devices away from her more than once, which always improved her behavior, and tell her that she couldn't associate with some of them anymore.
As for Tate, I only know of him from his "x is gay" posts which are roundly mocked.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:00 AM on March 25

The weirdest thing about Tate is that, physically, he's such a weenie. Just Google images of him if you don't know what he looks like. I never understood how this guy became an icon of Masculinity.

I think lumping this in with "toxic masculinity" is kind of unfortunate in its lack of granularity, actually. While the Tate/redpill ideas are plenty misogynist (the one universal, yay...), the Very Online vision of masculinity doesn't gel with any of the strains of historical gender ideology I'm aware of. Quite a lot of the luxury consumerism/ preening dandy/ Onlyfans pimp stuff seems like it would get classed as "unmanly" in older systems.

Makes one wonder whether you could send one strain in to cancel out the other, somehow, and leave a blank slate behind.
posted by Bardolph at 11:12 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

The weirdest thing about Tate is that, physically, he's such a weenie. Just Google images of him if you don't know what he looks like. I never understood how this guy became an icon of Masculinity. There are others of that ilk that at least look the part of big, tough traditionally masculine guy.

I imagine that kind of helps, ie his physique doesn't look completely unachievable to scrawny boys, whereas aspiring to be Jack Reacher is just obviously silly.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.

Oh, I don't know. All the boys I know in that age range take every opportunity available to make fun of Tate (and Peterson). I think ridicularizing them is the absolute best solution, and it isn't really hard because they're ridiculous.

I mean: Andrew Tate warned people to beware his ‘Shadow Fist’ and got humiliated into next year – 17 thumping comebacks

[so be forewarned, if you dare criticize Andrew Tate, you must beware his shadow fist]
posted by chavenet at 11:24 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

Nothing that would appeal to anyone with an ounce of sense, but his target market is idiots and losers

I don't love this take because a) people need to call these boys in, not insult them (although that's definitely not the job of teenage girls) and b) it's missing the fact that work is being done to make young boys believe that they themselves are idiots and losers who have no choice but to listen to Tate and his ilk or else be left behind.
posted by kitcat at 11:31 AM on March 25 [29 favorites]

I remembered that I came across this really excellent video campaign fighting these toxic online influences a few months ago by a Canadian org called White Ribbon and wanted to drop a link here: My Friend Max Hate
posted by kitcat at 11:32 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

... but nothing good happens on the internet for kids after 10:00.

It is ALWAYS after 10 PM somewhere in the world, no matter what time it is where the kids are.

It feels to me like half the kids are getting out of phase sleep disorder around when they hit junior high but maybe that's just the kids I know. This makes for an interesting problem when you like to sleep at night to get up for work in the morning and your fourteen-year-old is going to be wide awake until 3 AM.

The weirdest thing about Tate is that, physically, he's such a weenie. Just Google images of him if you don't know what he looks like. I never understood how this guy became an icon of Masculinity.

By the time a guy turns to Tate or becomes an incel or a Nazi he has already figured out that he himself is a failure. This is what guys do after they fail - they find a community of other guys who feel angry and hopeless and wallow in power fantasies with them. Some of them have decided they are failures in life by the time they are ten, others wait until they realise they will never earn enough to feel financially confident. So the cohort is of weak men, identifying with other weak men. Tate is very clearly a highly flawed weak man. Naturally he appeals to guys who know that description fits them. He's an extremely successful highly flawed weak man, and that's what they aspire to be.

Tate got most of his money by selling crypto to guys that admired him because he practices sex trafficking, and who trusted him because he said the things that flattered them. His actual target victims were the male idiots, dumb enough to admire a his business plan. I don't know how many women he actually sex trafficked, but I know thousands of guys sent him money for his crypto scams.
posted by Jane the Brown at 11:51 AM on March 25 [14 favorites]

The weirdest thing about Tate is that, physically, he's such a weenie.

This seems to be endemic with top fascists. They’re either bloated sacks, like Trump or Mussolini, or wretches, like Hitler or Tate. I’m not for one second saying that beauty reflects inner goodness or some damn thing—I’ve never believed that. But I think that this kind of fascism really catches on with men who can believe shit hard enough to phase themselves into a different reality. If Andrew Tate had had a chin, he’d still be an asshole, but possibly he’d just be a local jerk who didn’t have the motivation to take it nationwide.

When I watched Adolescence, I had all the huge emotions, but one thing particularly confused me. How could Jamie have been convinced he was ugly? He was just a cute little kid! Then it hit me: I long ago stopped looking at teenagers like they look at themselves, like their current appearance defines their entire lives. The internet preyed on him just because he looked young in a totally normal way. He felt like he needed to see Chad in the mirror, that he never would, and that gave him a grievance that meant everything.

(The Doylist explanation is of course that the script was written and Owen Cooper was the best actor, so his looks were incidental.)
posted by Countess Elena at 11:56 AM on March 25 [4 favorites]

How could Jamie have been convinced he was ugly? He was just a cute little kid! Then it hit me: I long ago stopped looking at teenagers like they look at themselves, like their current appearance defines their entire lives.

That part really got me too. But there's a big difference between my teenage years and now. When I was a kid in the 80s/90s, there was no business of making boys feel insecure to turn them into consumers of supplements and podcasts and crypto. We only did that to girls to make them buy teen magazines and beauty products.
posted by kitcat at 12:11 PM on March 25 [9 favorites]

As parent of a PDAer boy, I have a more radical take on this than most people:

Adults have created the world we live in by creating and perpetuating systems of power, dominance, and inequality.

And as usual, adults think the problem they have created can be cured with a good dose of more adultism.

So today we're still coddling Big Tech oligarchs and policing children, instead of the other way around.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:16 PM on March 25 [25 favorites]

It's not that Tate etc are for failures, they're for guys who have bought in and/or been brainwashed into thinking that not being rich, or being short, or not finding it easy to have giant muscles make you a failure. They also believe in zero sum exchanges - and they believe that success is entirely determined by the approval of the worst kind of men, many of whom are themselves scam artists.

It's not about being a failure; it's about being conned into feeling like a failure, with a big helping of "being a success means that no one ever tells you no or criticizes you in any way, so if anyone tells you no, you're a loser".

I think that the quantifying nature of the internet is a big part of this - a structural factor that is only ideological in a deep way. Like, we've all been told that we ought to care if a guy is 6 feet tall, and that it's vaguely embarrassing if he's only 5'11". What kind of bullshit is that? I grant you that height bias isn't new, but the pervasive six foot discourse backed with the constant availability of sites where people can be sorted (or excluded) by height really feeds this whole thing. Before social media and the pervasiveness of dating sites, sure, a tall guy would get undeserved approval and a short guy would be treated badly - but being tall in a general sense was good enough. Or even being taller than your date*.

Now we've got this discourse put forward by grifters of all genders about how you have to be quantifiably the stupidest, worst kind of man in order to get a date or feel okay about yourself - you have to be six feet tall, built like a cartoon, have a bunch of stupid boring expensive cars, wear ugly tight clothes (see Tate), have a boring haircut, drink expensive boring booze, make some nonsense sum of money, etc. Not only should you avoid being an individual with any interesting features, but you also know to the millimeter how much taller, richer and more boring you need to be to "succeed".

And then repeat all that six foot discourse only for weight and muscles and cheekbones and hairline and income and cars etc etc etc.

This is absolutely terrible for anyone, but especially terrible for kids who are still trying to figure out how they ought to be in the world. Metrics have power. Lists have power. The quantified self is a nightmare.

*I, from a family of short men, attracted to short men, think this is all utter toxic bullshit anyway. Additionally, every time I, an AFAB person, see some awful woman or AFAB person making noises about how the man has to pay for everything, don't date him if he's short, he should bring you costly gifts, etc (as if he's buying you!) I get so angry I feel like my head will come off.
posted by Frowner at 12:16 PM on March 25 [25 favorites]

I watched the show this weekend and its beautifully made, written, and acted. I browsed Reddit after watching it to try to get a sense of how realistic some of the school scenes were/how endemic misogyny is amongst a schoolage cohort, and the general consensus was it's definitely present. This is, of course, a somewhat biased sample, but it seems to track with other UK reporting. Without wanting to hand teachers another problem to solve, facing meaningful consequences for misogyny in the classroom, or towards female teachers/staff would seem a good place to start? Some comments pointed that not all parents felt comments from their sons were worthy of discipline though.

Perhaps especially naively, I thought we agreed as a society that misogyny is a bad thing. Evidently this is not the case, and this is the deeper problem.
posted by eyeofthetiger at 12:22 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

I haven't watched it yet but of course this is the nightmare of every parent.

I will say that having spent 6 years working to provide martial arts mostly for kids and teens, and hiring teens, mostly boys despite good efforts, and having boys, and working on a university campus now...I do not feel heartbroken or without hope at all about young men.

For sure this is happening and it's real -- ffs, 11 people died here in an incel attack -- but there is so much more going on, I promise everyone who maybe isn't as embedded in youth today.

I've talked before about how my older son went down the Johnny Depp support vlog rabbit hole. It really bothered me at the time, and I got freaked out. But here we are on the other side and the conversations we had were really, really good. My kid's actions and relationships since have reflected more the values I hope he'll hold.

For internet stuff...I've probably erred on the side of too much access to things, but I wanted my kids to have a long lead up on gaming culture and internet shit while they were still more under my influence and roof. My position has always been both to be aware of what they're into (my oldest is 19, so this aspect is fading) and talk about it, but also to make other stuff more attractive or at times, mandatory.

I think it's really important for teens to have real-world responsibilities or domains they can sink their teeth into and places they can build real connections apart from their parents. Preferably multiple ones, preferably with people to mentor them and call them on their bullshit for real, but in a respectful way. But definitely to reach beyond the family and also to be able to have real positive (or sometimes negative; that's what learning is.) I think feeling helpless makes them especially vulnerable to this kind of thing. Maybe this is addressed in the show.

I think one of the things the show does best is illustrate how insidious this kind of indoctrination is, but also how normal and lovable your son is while he holding these thoughts and his head and saying these things when you're not around still is.

It's super normal for adolescents to not share all those things with their parents. I'm really glad a show is addressing this, but I think I will time my watching for when I'm not too stressed out because one thing my particular kids don't need is me getting freaked out.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:23 PM on March 25 [10 favorites]

How could Jamie have been convinced he was ugly? He was just a cute little kid! Then it hit me: I long ago stopped looking at teenagers like they look at themselves, like their current appearance defines their entire lives.

This is how I learned I needed to pay more attention and engage with this stuff before it got out of control - my cute son at 11 asked me to buy him "jaw strengthening chewing gum" to improve his jawline. At 11...
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:27 PM on March 25 [10 favorites]

facing meaningful consequences for misogyny in the classroom

I am super pro-public education and pro-education but I have to admit that in general I think my kids' time in public school has created a lot of challenges about misogyny and also masculinity. Even in my minority-caucasian, darn inclusive neighbourhood, my kids came home and still come home with the worst stuff, often via their teachers. I'll stop there because I could really rant about that.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:27 PM on March 25 [7 favorites]

If Andrew Tate had had a chin, he’d still be an asshole, but possibly he’d just be a local jerk

Sort of like terrible spelling in scam emails?
posted by clew at 1:19 PM on March 25 [3 favorites]

my kids ... come home with the worst stuff, often via their teachers

What the what! Can you elaborate?
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:30 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

When I was a kid in the 80s/90s, there was no business of making boys feel insecure to turn them into consumers of supplements and podcasts and crypto.

What? Muscle cars, GNC, protein shakes, the prom king, the popular rich dude in every teen movie? Rap and hard rock music from the 1990s? Trust me, it existed then too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:32 PM on March 25 [12 favorites]

This is how I learned I needed to pay more attention and engage with this stuff before it got out of control - my cute son at 11 asked me to buy him "jaw strengthening chewing gum" to improve his jawline. At 11...

Growth hormone would actually do the trick, and I think it's only a matter of time until a black market for HGH emerges which will cater to desires like your son's, and which individual parents will not find out about until it's too late.

For all I know it may already exist — remember the fad for zinc supplements that swept fraternities some years back? Last I heard it did actually add an in inch or two in height to the boys who took it.

There are many many problems associated with taking human growth hormone, not the least of which is that it tends to cause the pituitary to shut down and then you have to take it for the rest of your life.
posted by jamjam at 1:43 PM on March 25

This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.

It's not 100% hopeless- there are counter examples: Hasan Abi and Luke Thomas off the top of my head- where masculinity, intellect and empathy aren't at odds with each other, but it is true, we are currently living through a moment where reactionary grifters are ascendant.

Honestly, I don't think that it's so much "masculinity" per se, but more directness/ decisiveness that's what really appealing. Hopefully kids can get more exposure to folks, like say Bill Burr, who are coded "masculine" but definitely have thoughtfulness and self-examination as an important part of their persona. Each of these counter examples that I mentioned aren't perfect, but I feel like every bit of empathy is a little step in the right direction.
posted by ishmael at 2:00 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

> Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.

I've been telling my son stories about his great-grandfather who was a farmer and proto-hardware hacker. He could fix stuff and worked with a blacksmith to design and build his own badass tractor-forklift. He used to let me watch him weld metal objects together (he made me wear his extra welder's helmet). I saw him whack his thumb with a hammer, shrug, and just keep on hammering. I saw him pull an inch-long bloody splinter out of his hand and toss it aside like it was nothing. My dad tells me that when Grandpa went to the dentist and they were going to drill he'd tell them he didn't need anesthetic. The guy was tough as nails. He was solid. At the same time he was soft-spoken and gentle. He didn't have to put somebody else down to feel good about himself. I have memories of him cradling my younger sisters and all my cousins when they were infants. We all have fond memories of him taking breaks from farmwork to take us out for snacks. He was always unfailingly respectful to my grandmother. He was my dad's hero just like my dad is mine. We need more men like him in this world. Those of us who had men like that in our lives need to tell young men about them.
posted by technodelic at 2:01 PM on March 25 [13 favorites]

I've looked at some Andrew Tate videos out of morbid curiosity and what seems to spew forth is the opposite of masculinity. It is twitchy, almost reflexive fear. To me, classic masculinity was measured, and calm. We are in bizarre-o world.
posted by hankmajor at 2:50 PM on March 25 [5 favorites]

> It's compelling, if you are a young, stupid [...] boy

I think this is a potentially dangerous take because (a) most parents don't think their kids are stupid, and (b) it's not just "stupid" kids that are taken in by this stuff. The show touches on this; the boy is shown to be a bright student. Parents should not think they don't need to be concerned about this because they think their kids aren't stupid. Less stupid kids can dissemble better, too.
posted by merlynkline at 3:50 PM on March 25 [8 favorites]

Without wanting to hand teachers another problem to solve, facing meaningful consequences for misogyny in the classroom, or towards female teachers/staff would seem a good place to start? Some comments pointed that not all parents felt comments from their sons were worthy of discipline though.

Leaving aside how much work teachers already have thrust upon them, I don't know why this childrearing responsibility would not belong to parents. In this particular show we are talking about a 13 year old boy. There is no reason for a 13 year old to have a device -- any device -- that does not have parental controls on it. The idea that children need their parents permission to have social media accounts, and that parents have the passwords to those accounts and check them, has been around for ages.

We can certainly have a discussion about whether it's teachers or parents who should be instilling basic moral values like "women are not property or sexual objects and are deserving of the same respect as every other human on this planet and by the way don't stab them, hit them or rape them" but one of the things that the show made clear is that despite how upstanding and well meaning the literally dozens of adults involved in this perfectly normal child's life were, they all lacked any understanding of what was out there for him to engage with, let alone the existence and power of the content pipeline shoveling shit into his brain.

Algorithms are more responsive than parents and probably spending more time with their kids than they are. As soon as a kid with a bunch of Minecraft watching history Googles "big titties", YouTube is going to start serving Andrew Tate and Sneako and Fresh and Fit. So unless you are successful in actively having prophylactic conversations about toxic masculinity with your 13 year old, I would suggest parental monitoring of the content fire hose is the best defense against having your child radicalized.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:05 PM on March 25 [10 favorites]

Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.

See the previous threads on the man-o-sphere for constructive alternatives (and not the prior mythopoetic men's movement, more in the Theorizing Masculinities vein).

More directly, there's the still-somehow-vaguely-alternative* vibe modeled by channels like Internet Today.

Or, though more polarizing, Hasan Piker.

* as in skater/grunge
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:25 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

This seems to be endemic with top fascists. They’re either bloated sacks, like Trump or Mussolini, or wretches, like Hitler or Tate. I’m not for one second saying that beauty reflects inner goodness or some damn thing—I’ve never believed that. But I think that this kind of fascism really catches on with men who can believe shit hard enough to phase themselves into a different reality. If Andrew Tate had had a chin, he’d still be an asshole, but possibly he’d just be a local jerk who didn’t have the motivation to take it nationwide.

Nah, there are plenty of counterexamples of such men who would also be considered conventionally attractive by pre-2010 standards. Pete Hegseth, for example.
posted by eviemath at 4:26 PM on March 25 [3 favorites]

Okay, fine, "boys with low Wisdom scores".

And I don't have any parental controls on my kids' devices because my kids are clever and will more or less immediately figure out how to circumvent them, so we just talk about things. You do you, but IMHO parental controls just generate kids who view parents as thumbs to be got out from under and serve as a poor substitute for actually knowing your kids. Both kids were inoculated against religion and other forms of magical thinking real early through basic media literacy discussions, so they're both super skeptical about anything anyone tells them on the internet.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:28 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

The guy was tough as nails. He was solid. At the same time he was soft-spoken and gentle. He didn't have to put somebody else down to feel good about himself.

Yeah, I grew up in Farmville in the 20th century, and worked on the farm when I was a teen with veterans from the wars, and that was an education in masculine Stoicism and wry understated humour (and then I went to art-school and that was a whole other trip).

Ideology has always been a thing throughout human existence, but now Ideology has been compressed, warped, & extruded through demented pipelines fed directly into youth (and adult) brains. Now that I'm an old fart, I start to feel a little like my grand-parents in a way? I wonder what Guy Debord would have thought about The Spectacle the 21st century?

(If you've read this far, the spoilers for this show are done for. We went in blind and we were wondering if there was a twist in the first episode...)
posted by ovvl at 6:00 PM on March 25

Okay, fine, "boys with low Wisdom scores".

13-year old boys...young people of any gender...they have no wisdom and it's unfair to expect them to. Wisdom is experience.
posted by kitcat at 6:33 PM on March 25 [10 favorites]

He's a pimp without totally saying he's a pimp,

There are videos of him saying he was a pimp in interviews i believe.

Masculinity has been ceded to people like ....

How about Jack Murphy and his pay to play liminal order? He was selling manlyness at $5k. Tim Pool regular
if that helps. Does the help change if he was paying Tim to be on the show?

A bit more humor to the ceding - The Liver King.

a black market for HGH emerges

Existed for some time. Instead of a guy you know at the gym now it can be found online. Worse now as there are sites out there with homemade hormones with instructions which could kill.

been brainwashed into thinking that not being rich, or being short, or not finding it easy to have giant muscles make you a failure.

Spending time with social media will expose the male youth to young ladies who claim they are looking for a guy with a 6 pack, who's over 6 feet tall, and make 6 figures. Makes the leap into the quoted POV much simpler.

And while we're mentioning POS males you have Jack Dohorty who, based on his own statements, was running his own Only Fans pimp operation. It appears his OF girl just left him and it is being famed as because Jack no longer pulls in cash she's bailing. Jack is an ass but he made bank for some time being an ass with no observable skills or visible work. No work with no skills one had to study/labor for is gonna wash some head meat.

By the time a guy turns to Tate or becomes an incel or a Nazi he has already figured out that he himself is a failure.

Based on youtube reading content from one of the 'incel cesspools' 4Chan there are posts there about 'how I stopped being an incel: I got over thinking myself a failure' If it is counter programming it is good as it does come across as genuine users saying 'there is a way out'.

And over on youtube there is many, many videos about "males are abandoning dating" with the less toxic ones pointing out the public shaming/accusations videos are a valid risk with (Emily?) being a reasonable voice.

If you've seen the partner shaming content on social media ask yourself if that is the kind of public shaming you'd want to undergo and if not would you find a Tate-esque message more appealing?

"If you're not having sex for procreation you are gay"

That is also a message of a group called the groypers. They got tossed out of the MAGA movement AND known internet ass Josh Moon and Ethan Ralph also calls them losers I believe. Getting kicked outta MAGA and having Moon call your movement losers should not be seen as a recommendation. The guy leading them got mentioned on the blue when he pepper sprayed a gal who knocked on his door. That quoted message is going to be receptive in a sour grapes kind of way which can lead to wasted years grypoing.

Not mentioned by others (that I saw) is the flat wages from the 1970's VS the inflation in prices. Homes used to be smaller and more affordable but now how are the youths supposed to afford a home or a car as sold today? College has gone from something you can pay for with a job you work during the summer to now racking up a debt exceeding home prices in some markets is it shocking to see people adopt a self vision of loserdom? Meanwhile in other non-English speaking places the youth have a lie down movement and people like Peter Zeihan mentioning the dropping birthrates so it is hard to blame things totally on the Tate/Murphy/Fuenties/Peterson's of the world.

Cutting off access to Tate et al doesn't address the things that can be seen in other places. Blaming just Tate et al is simple VS tying to figure out a way to deal with the economic issues or with the effects of the Internet which allows for social shaming, the dumpster fire that is dating apps, or even the power of marketing selling people on how happiness is just one purchase away which leads to issues in some people.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:34 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

What the what! Can you elaborate?

Where to start - grade one, “boys don’t wear nail polish,” along with a series of readers that had, I shit you not, in the year of our lord 2011, a book about a girl who watches her brother skateboard, wants to, but realizes it’s better to support him by sewing up the rips in his jacket (another volume in the series showed white kids going back in time and amazing a Chief with their umbrella, yes I did get it removed) grade three “don’t cry like a girl,” “don’t run like a girl,” and other great gems from the principal, grade 6 teacher spent a period ranting about/to the girls for their clothing distracting the boys…
posted by warriorqueen at 6:52 PM on March 25 [13 favorites]

There are videos of him saying he was a pimp in interviews i believe.

Tate on the 'loverboy method.'

But, earlier, "I was a pimp in that sense."

Law & Crime segment. (not the greatest outlet, itself)

He's revolting, and I do think his individual influence is waning, so I'm not sure I'd take on the damage of going down that rabbit hole if you haven't already.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:59 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Great, another thing to be terrified about...
posted by subdee at 7:47 PM on March 25

I have not found a viable 'masculine role model' in my fairly long life, and I haven't become one either.

I don't see them in history, and I can't point to any in fiction.

I am inclined to think the male pole of "the lineaments of gratified desire" is a problem that human culture and evolution have not solved, and in my darker moments I believe those two great beasts yoked together have dragged us into a world in which it cannot be solved.
posted by jamjam at 7:52 PM on March 25

In other words, 'you can't get there from here.'
posted by jamjam at 7:55 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

My god. A whole thread about the desperate situation accelerating toxic masculinity and only a couple of men who aren't simply giving up? It was at the beginning of this conversation that EmpressCallipygos pointed out that the big noise around this series is coming from women:

a lot of the furor is taking the approach that "we need to do something because it's affecting the safety of young girls". But I'm not seeing similar calls for "we need to do something because it's affecting the mental health of young boys."

Don't leave this work to women who are already overloaded working to protect ourselves and our daughters. Christ. Step up.
posted by kitcat at 8:38 PM on March 25 [6 favorites]

My kids elementary school K-5 has one male classroom teacher, a male PE teacher. and the principal. my elementary school 30 years ago was the same.

That being said we have tons of amazing dads who are involved in school activities like the Lego club, garden club. I see soccer and little leagues coaches, scout leaders, etc. I think my school is probably about as close to 50/50 moms and dads doing drop off. That was def not the case 30 years ago.

I do struggle to think in someone in popular culture that would encompass non-toxic masculinity. Biden certianly showed he loved his sons and grandkids. Sitcom dads may have gotten slightly better over the years although Bluey's dad Bandit Heeler might be the best fictional farther figure out there now.
posted by CostcoCultist at 9:29 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

> And I don't have any parental controls on my kids' devices because my kids are clever
> and will more or less immediately figure out how to circumvent them, so we just talk about things.
> You do you, but IMHO parental controls just generate kids who view parents as thumbs to be got out from under

Very much this. Also, parental controls generally don't work as expected by the parents, even when not circumvented. But OTOH they might be useful tools when the conversation gets difficult, as long as they are part of the conversation.
posted by merlynkline at 12:38 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

So unless you are successful in actively having prophylactic conversations about toxic masculinity with your 13 year old, I would suggest parental monitoring of the content fire hose is the best defense against having your child radicalized.

taquito lad is 3 months old & I'm hoping we'll be able to keep on top of both the firehose monitoring and the prophylactic conversations because honestly I'm mildly terrified

(been entertaining impossible fantasies of buying a bunch of old tech & Truman Show-ing him into believing he's growing up in the 90s)
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:55 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. This is a problem for which I see no clear solution.

I mull on this a lot, as the father of a six year old boy. We're close and he's a lot like me and I'm putting a lot of effort into being a decent role model for him and his peers but I'm putting absolutely no effort into modelling masculinity for him. I just can't muster strong feelings about masculinity, I really have a lot of trouble even defining what it might be.

Is what I do masculine because I'm male? Fucked if I know. I like a lot of things traditionally coded as masculine but also a lot of things very much not. People I'm close to are a mixed bag in gender terms and they are people first with gender a secondary consideration and I suppose I'm trying to model that approach; be a good person, be open to everyone's humanity. But I'm damned if I know what to do if he decides he wants to be a masculine manly man and looks to others to define what that is.

I saw him whack his thumb with a hammer, shrug, and just keep on hammering. I saw him pull an inch-long bloody splinter out of his hand and toss it aside like it was nothing. My dad tells me that when Grandpa went to the dentist and they were going to drill he'd tell them he didn't need anesthetic. The guy was tough as nails.

I may well have liked the bloke but I'm really wary of promoting this picture of masculinity, the stoic manly caricature has done so much damage and you have a real problem when boys aspire to this but aren't built that way. It's OK to be an expressive man with feelings who is shit with your hands.
posted by deadwax at 2:23 AM on March 26 [13 favorites]

I do struggle to think in someone in popular culture that would encompass non-toxic masculinity.

Gareth Southgate. See a lot of what he's said over the last decade or so, including the Dimbleby Lecture of last week.

It is not a coincidence that he is detested, hated and constantly reviled by the extensive right-wing media and right wing politicians - see this 2021 Byline Times article - as well as the boorish, toxic, misogynistic and racist elements (of which there are many) in the wider football community.
posted by Wordshore at 2:26 AM on March 26 [5 favorites]

I can't imagine how much more attention I'd have to pay in order to keep them away from Tate/Rogan/Peterson/etc.

I wonder if keeping them away from it is the best way?

My son is in his mid 30s. He's a pretty balanced guy, big on social justice did a decade or so in NGO's as a volunteer, from the International Court of Justice in the Hague to a body that worked on protecting young girls in Bangladesh. He's a school teacher now.

Back in the day, he read everything Peterson wrote, when the latter came to town my son organised a group of his friends to go and listen so impressed was he by Peterson. For a long time he was fascinated by Rogan's podcast.

He'd tell me what they said, what he'd heard. I'd listen and nod. If he asked, I'd tell him how I saw it - whatever it was. Not attacking them, but looking at some of the assumptions, counterbalancing with my own view of the world, trying to model calm, dispassionate critical reason. It was not always easy! If I thought it was too grotesque and imbecilic for words, I'd listen in silence and leave it there. He knows me well enough to read my silence.

Sometimes it was a struggle to keep my patience. But I knew I'd have to let him find his way. Locking horns with him was never likely to produce a good outcome. Not least because whether I liked it or not, whether I understood it or not, plainly these people spoke to him and even in some way helped him in ways I didn't and couldn't.

One by one he dropped them all. He grew out of it. He spends hours and hours of the day with classes of 14-16 year old boys talking to them about this stuff. He has a particular distaste for Tate but as he told me, "Dad, it is important to them, it's in their heads, it speaks to them, the key is to respect that, to ask them why and to help them disentangle it and themselves from it and teach them English in the process." He's an English teacher.
posted by dutchrick at 2:44 AM on March 26 [17 favorites]

13-year old boys...young people of any gender...they have no wisdom and it's unfair to expect them to. Wisdom is experience.

Okay, then, "boys with low Wisdom scores in comparison to their peers". Is that okay with you?

Wisdom in the sense of "Wisdom score" is paying attention to what's going on around you, thinking ahead, thinking about the consequences of your words and actions. Not JUST experience.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:11 AM on March 26

I have not found a viable 'masculine role model' in my fairly long life, and I haven't become one either. I don't see them in history, and I can't point to any in fiction.

So back in the 1960s one aspect of the women's movement was "consciousness raising" groups, where women got together to discuss the kinds of shit they had going on in their own lives and whether the things they were dealing with were things that could be fixed, changed, or altered. A lot of women went from feeling that "yeah, this sucks, but I'm the only one with a problem with it and it can't be helped" to "hang on, this isn't fair and I shouldn't have to put up with it".

I wonder if starting a similar consciousness raising group amongst men might be the way to go here. The feminist movement did try to get that going for men back in the day, but maybe a separate movement started by men will do the trick.

Guys - those of you who are scared but don't know what to do and wanna give up, maybe try that?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:28 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

1. How many tween/teen boys are really deeply engaged with these ideas to the extent that they act on them? Let's consider "acting on them" to include fairly minor stuff but not necessarily every act of misogyny, since we've all been in school systems and experienced widespread baked in misogyny long before Tate, etc. I think this is an answerable question - I'm not trying to say "this is more of the adults complaining about the youths".

"Acting on them" could just be how they approach everything and anyone in life, and that's TRULY terrifying. It doesn't have to be murder to ruin their lives and others around them.

Misogyny is never minor.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:19 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

I saw him whack his thumb with a hammer, shrug, and just keep on hammering. I saw him pull an inch-long bloody splinter out of his hand and toss it aside like it was nothing. My dad tells me that when Grandpa went to the dentist and they were going to drill he'd tell them he didn't need anesthetic. The guy was tough as nails. He was solid. At the same time he was soft-spoken and gentle.

He sounds great! I do want men to be able to express physical pain though. That's a toxic part of masculinity, although maybe this person was a superhero who didn't feel pain.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:48 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

I do struggle to think in someone in popular culture that would encompass non-toxic masculinity.

Conan O'Brien.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:00 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Masculinity has been ceded to people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump.

Echoing Smedly, Butlerian jihadi's comment way upthread, I don't think masculinity has been ceded to them so much as they're just offering a power fantasy that's already in line with masculinity. Their message finds traction because masculinity is still defined by all the same traits as it always has been and lots of young boys who are eager to impress can't distinguish between a socially-appropriate level of manliness (whatever that may be) and an inappropriately toxic level. As long as we're content to accept a definition of masculinity that includes some acceptable level of toxicity, there's always going to be a race to the bottom.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:19 AM on March 26 [4 favorites]

Like, "boys will be boys" is the base of the toxic masculinity pyramid. If we could get people to stop thinking and saying that masc children are inevitably going to be shitty because they're born that way, a whole lot of other issues and behaviours would never arise, because the boys would be corrected out of those foundational shitty behaviours (that all children evince as they learn what society is) right away.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:23 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

Tate said something to the effect that "If you're not having sex for procreation you are gay" - I'm paraphrasing because I can't be arsed to find the actual quote as I only heard it via this kid.

You're actually not paraphrasing at all, that is in fact exactly what he said.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 6:51 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

If we could get people to stop thinking and saying that masc children are inevitably going to be shitty because they're born that way, a whole lot of other issues and behaviours would never arise, because the boys would be corrected out of those foundational shitty behaviours (that all children evince as they learn what society is) right away.

YES this a thousand times this, but ... by focusing on correcting them OUT OF shitty behavior we assume the baseline is that they will evince that behavior. What if instead of taking the baseline of correcting, we stopped even subtly rewarding or reinforcing the foundations of the shitty behavior. And we started rewarding and reinforcing boys showing protectiveness, strength, emotional regulation and other ideals that society will tell them corresponds to "masculinity" in ways that are pro-social, empathetic, and kind.

This is basically the way we've approached raising my 12 year old and I know a lot could change between like, 12 and 30, but I also think who he is as a person in the core of his soul has a strong foundation now. It may be shaken by different influences, but it is strong and I have hope it will endure.

Men were once praised for being stoic and hiding their pain - and we know this is toxic. What if we shift the focus to men learning emotional regulation, which means they ask for help and talk about their feelings but also can listen to others and think (with empathy) before acting. Giving your friend your spot in the art show because you've been selected before and she never has been, so you saw she was upset about it, that is putting other people's feelings before your own. Being able to say "Well, yeah, I am a little sad not to be in it for my last year in the school, but Jenny is so happy she got the chance and it felt good to make her happy." Bonus, the art teacher noticed how all of this went down, put BOTH kids in the art show, and praised my kid for his kindness and inclusion.

Men are praised for being leaders, which so often means going to war, being really sharp in business, whatever. Leadership is getting 12 other 5th grade boys involved in a plan to make sure to include a kid you saw being frequently excluded. Leadership is saying, when praised, "Well it wasn't only my idea, we all did it together." We have the opportunity to say to boys - THIS is real leadership. When people tell you "men are leaders" you can look inwards and say "Yes, I am a leader".

The protectiveness that society focuses on in men is like, beating people up and shooting all the bad guys. Standing up to sexist or racist bullies is protective. Being gentle to younger or smaller kids is protective. Keeping your baby kitten from getting out into the cold by being very extremely careful to close the door quickly, even when you have to politely chide your parents for it, is protective.

What if we take the time and energy to help them connect "masculine" traits with positive behaviors, and then we help create the circumstances where they can feel deep pride in themselves for those behaviors.

I am lucky that I have a community of people where we are all left leaning, SEL-oriented, involved with local politics and spend time in groups with each others' children. So my kid is around (a) other kids who are being taught to value these behaviors and (b) other adults besides just Mom and Dad who will praise and reinforce these behaviors.

I'm not foolish enough to think this is any guarantee, but it really grinds my gears when we take the default assumption that boys need to be punished into good behavior. I do NOT THINK the commenter I quoted is, on any level, saying boys are in some biologically determinative way less likely to be kind, I think they are correctly noting the profoundly bad social messages about masculinity that boys receive and that too many adults reinforce, beginning very young.

I appreciate and feel good about every ounce of "girl power" and "girls in stem" type programs, and I don't on any level want to take any of it away. But god DAMN we need some more community support for boys, leaders who will role model positive masculinity to boys, etc. Boy Scouts is a very challenging organization given the sex abuse, hiding of it, historic anti-LGBTQ stance and religious associations, but in my son's Boy Scout troop they really take seriously teaching and reinforcing some very good values around stewardship, kindness, positive leadership, etc. I don't see a whole lot of other spaces doing this for, specifically, boys, speaking to, specifically, boys.
posted by fennario at 7:08 AM on March 26 [8 favorites]

Yes, my youngest daughter is in Scouts - the only girl which I think is rare but girls aren't present in equal numbers. I'm only mentioning to reinforce that it's a really good place for boys. Those Scouts leaders, male and female, are saints. The male leaders, some of whom I've known for a long time because my eldest also did Scouts, are wonderful people, they are superbly modeling positive masculinity and I'm deeply grateful for the hard work they are doing for the sake of the community's children.
posted by kitcat at 7:51 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

I loved the format of 4 real time hours spread across months, and the acting was riveting.
One thing that puzzled me was that I see the role of the father's explosive anger shaping Jamie's reactions to the world as much or more than any manosphere influences, but that feels underplayed at the end when the parents conclude that they are good and it could happen to any family. When Jamie gets angry with the psychologist, I felt like I could see him channeling his father's rage. The father's pain as he cried into his son's pillow really moved me, but I wonder did he think he let his son down by not monitoring his computer use or by providing a role model of explosive rage?
This is not to understate the toxic masculinity currently being sold, my perspective comes from growing up in an explosive anger household.
posted by OrderOctopoda at 8:02 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

One of the many reasons this Canadian had fingers crossed for the Harris/Walz ticket in the last US election was the type of masculinity modelled by Tim Walz. It was so refreshing to see a man who had chosen to stand up for his community and family rather than chasing massive wealth or oppressive power over others, and who was so clearly thrilled to be surrounded by talented women.

I know there are many more men like that out there, and I would really like to see them come forward to show young people of all genders that there are different ways of succeeding and being “good” that don’t depend on the subjugation of women or anyone else. When I see those examples myself, I do my best to profile them, and resist the urge to give more bandwidth to Rogan et.al, even in the negative.
posted by rpfields at 8:24 AM on March 26 [15 favorites]

I don't know if people are aware, or if it matters, but both Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate were professional martial artists before they became influencers. I don't think they represent a new kind of masculinity at all, they are purveyors of the same old glorified violence that has always caught young men's eyes. The whole model is literally "You are better than anyone you can beat up" and that includes both men and women. It gets abstracted out to the economic world, where instead of "beating up" it becomes "buying up", and so Trump gets to ride that train as well. But it's still just about domination in the end. The new twist is not the message, but the channel (i.e. the internet, in all it's horrifying glory).
posted by grog at 9:03 AM on March 26 [7 favorites]

"Toxic Masculinity" has a lot of interpretations on a spectrum from more to less charitable, from more to less helpful to male people.

It can mean behaviors that people perform, in service of seeking to appear masculine, which are just self harmful almost always. Like if you think that being a man means binge drinking early and often, yeah you're actually probably better off not doing that to yourself, man.

It can mean behaviors which, taken too far, end up being self-harmful. If one's definition of masculinity is that a man never complains about physical or emotional pain, no matter how bad - yeah you're going to end up at a breaking point, physically or emotionally, you will die before your time, you will suffer needlessly when help is available, you'd be better off without that.

It can mean behaviors which harm others around oneself - like if you think that a man should gate-keep masculine spaces, occupations, activities, etc, then yeah of course that's going to end up denying some people access to those things, who might otherwise have benefitted themselves from them, or who might have benefitted others through that access.

At the ultimate, least charitable end, the end I imagine that it is used by the Tates of the world, it means that men are toxic inherently. It's not about men harming themselves through self-destructive behavior, it's not even that there are some select things men might do that might harm others around them, it's that male-ness is bad and icky, men are dangerous and always suspect, that the world is made better by excluding men from opportunities - economic, social, etc, and the only good man is one who thoroughly reviles his male-ness.

There are more definitions on this spectrum, of course.

One challenge I see is that there's a strong need for egalitarianism, that equal rights are deserved because people are equal. Strength is not exclusively the domain of men, because women can be strong, too. Women can be anything a man can be, so there's no justification to deny woman equal rights and opportunities to men. A woman can be a warrior, a worker, a protector, a provider, an inventor, a leader, a world-class athlete, etc. So if you try to define virtuous masculinity, you can't point to anything that is specifically masculine about it. Perhaps the reason that so much of what defines masculinity now is "toxic" is because those are the parts that few want to claim for the sake of equality? Virtuous gender-neutral personhood is fine, but like, is that actually a workable end goal, can we vanquish gender from our self-conception to the extent where that actually works socially?
posted by rustcrumb at 10:49 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

a series of readers that had, I shit you not, in the year of our lord 2011

Brief derail:

That's the Oxford Reading Tree series., first released in 1985 in the UK. The book whose image you linked to is called Survival Adventure and was published in 2011.

"In 2022, the book The Blue Eye was withdrawn from sale following allegations of Islamophobia on social media"

The author is Roderick Hunt, aged 86. He was born in South Africa and studied divinity and English at the University of Chester.
posted by CynicalKnight at 11:30 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

the type of masculinity modelled by Tim Walz

Tim Walz, in his heavy plaid jacket, sticking it out in a snowstorm: "There's no bad weather, there's only bad clothes!"

You can be tough in ways where you don't put other people down!
posted by gimonca at 11:55 AM on March 26 [5 favorites]

Right, to me positive masculinity means taking whatever competencies and proclivities and advantages you've gained as part of being socialized as a man and using them to raise people up, for humor, for assisting others and teaching those competencies.
posted by kitcat at 12:39 PM on March 26 [4 favorites]

I'm desperately reading through the comments in this thread, the way you claw through a pile of random keys because you know the one need is in there, somewhere.
I'm grateful for this thread.

I have three kids. girl (4) boy (6) girl (9).
My partner and I are... weird but sociable with a good circle of support. I am worried about this. We're all third and fourth generation american liberals and I'm basically through-the-looking glass on the montessori-crunchy-free range parenting stuff and back out the other side. Kids go to public schools and are required to do One Art and One Sport at all times, no matter what.
We will not raise anti-social american kids come hell or high water.

The screens are in the living room, no screens in the bedroom. The internet passes through two sets of filters before it hits a device. But there are only so many safeguards I can put in place, only so much I can do. My friends are also dads and we talk about this a lot. We're all progressive dads, we don't tolerate conservative idiocy, we all married therapists or healers or teachers. We talk about our sons. We talk about how to prevent the shit-heads on the internet, the Rogans and Tates, from getting to them. We remind each other - all the time:

"The first person who talks to your child as if they're an adult will have a tremendous amount of power over them."
(The first person who talked to me like I was an adult was my drug dealer. Thus I became a dealer and they became a distributor.)

We offer to talk to each other's kids as though they're adults and tell them the things we want them to know are true. This is manipulative. This is duplicitous. We do not care. We are good uncles. We trust each other. Being a good father means building a village of good adults who you can depend on to help you become an even better father.

When my partner and I decided to have kids we talked about what we wanted to give them.
She said, "creative and kind." I said, "resilient, adaptive." I remember, I was thinking about that dumb Bear Grylls meme. "Improvise, adapt, overcome."

My spouse and I grew up with different kinds of bad. She was unparented, isolated, alone every single day watching the same VHS movie. She was saved by summer camp and the kindness of a sociable family down the street.

I grew up in a fist fight.

I don't want to lose my baby boy to this stuff. I hate Andrew Tate with every molecule of my being. My son is so, so, so quiet. Kindergarten teacher says that he's "wildly popular, the problem is that every kid wants to play with him but he often wants to be left alone, or play in a very specific way." That's okay, I think, that's fine. So long as he is kind and the kids seek him out for affection rather than as an object of torment.

I am watching him like a hawk. If he's like me... well. I was bullied ruthlessly until eighth grade. Then girls noticed me. I noticed them noticing me. I forced myself to learn how to "not sound awkward." I forced myself to pretend to be confident with everything I said and did. I leaned hard into girls, into dating and romance and most especially older girls - I went to six different proms, I went to senior prom at my own school four times (every year of high school), I went to about a dozen homecoming dances, I got a car, I used music and language and talking and my love of performing to attract positive attention and make up for the bitter rage I held toward almost every single one of my male peer-group.

I think about my three kids. I hate the mathematics of the situation... I think, "they're going to be very attractive, they'll have that going for them." It makes a difference. This is cruel.
My two siblings were great looking teenagers, too. We were raised to behave ethically. This seemed to make the difference... so I am focusing really, really hard on raising resilient, empathetic children.

Sometimes he hits his sisters. I sit with him and ask him how he thinks that makes them feel until he cries. I feel miserable. I don't want him to cry. I ask him if he's ever seen me hit anybody. He says, "no." I ask him if he thinks I'd ever hit him or his sisters. He says, "no way, that's crazy." I ask him "why do you think that is?" He doesn't know. He's not there, yet.
I have him tell me the story from the perspective of the person he harmed.

We don't teach ethics in the American schools. When I'm in a dark place I imagine this is because it is at odds with capitalism. I teach him ethics, I teach all of them about the categorical imperative, the golden rule, I teach them about mindfulness and the importance of kindness to strangers and kindness toward smaller kids and I don't care that this is weird.
I will raise ethical children, so help me God.

I want them to feel repulsion at the thought of hurting another human being and I want them to enjoy the feeling that comes with being a safe harbor for other people. I want them to take pride in being a trusted friend, I want them to take pride in the confidence that comes with the sure knowledge that people trust you. I want them to seek out opportunities to show loving kindness to people in need. All of this (I believe) will inoculate them against misanthropic ideas, or codependency, or the "dark triad" and a host of other malignancies that haunt the hallways of our schools. I really want them to love people as much as their parents love people.
And love themselves for being lovers.

Ever single day that passes I feel a growing sense of panic and urgency. America is not a safe place for boys. I feel like I am in a race against time.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 1:27 PM on March 26 [15 favorites]

I'm desperately reading through the comments in this thread, the way you claw through a pile of random keys because you know the one need is in there, somewhere.

And your comment is the one I've been needing to be in here. I don't see how you could possibly be doing a better job.
posted by kitcat at 1:35 PM on March 26 [6 favorites]

Baby_Balrog, that all sounds amazing and about all you can do. I wish I could say I did as well with my kiddo, but even within my own struggles and his mom's struggles and our struggles, we managed to break a number of negative cycles handed down to us by our parents. He's turned into a remarkable teen and it sounds like yours will too.
posted by kokaku at 1:58 PM on March 26 [3 favorites]

I've watched three out of the four episodes and been moved and amazed. It's really a four-act play, set in real time, with that amazing single-shot camera work which immerses you in the action... the acting is exemplary. Owen Cooper is astonishing in the third episode with the equally incredible Erin Doherty (her breakdown at the end nearly made me break down, too). I'm running out of adjectives, but it's so serious and so good. And Fatima Bojang as Jade, the best friend of the murder victim, broke my heart.

I want to have a conversation about the show with my son, who thankfully grew up before smartphones. What a hellish world has been created for the young; I don't know if I would have survived my own adolescence if there'd been social media. And how abandoned and these children, who really are children, still.
posted by jokeefe at 2:15 PM on March 26

When my niece was in middle school, 8-10 years ago, it was PewDie Pie and similar who were flirting with anti-semitism and telling their followers that women were to be measured in conquests and you were a success if you were dating up from your number (being a 6 but dating an 8 e.g.). Prior to them was 8chan, after them there was the wave of pickup artists who promulgated the ritual of "negging" girls/women to make yourself more attractive to them. (WTF??) Tate and his ilk are a follow on from those, but also with a background of mens' rights activists and tech-bros who benefit directly from other men thinking that they are disadvantaged in society and there are magic tools or ways of behaving that will overturn the rules and help them become a success.

When you combine all of that with the emphasis on the concept of an "ideal look" for men and women, it's no wonder that young boys follow the you-tubers and tiktokkers who say they offer a way out of that. Just like girls follow the influencers who emphasize makeup and styling to overcome not having perfect skin and a perfect body. (My beautiful niece won't leave the house without makeup and my 1980's feminist self practically cries that it's come to that yet again.)

In the US, we have just elected a man who exemplifies everything that Tate, Peterson, and others have said will ensure success, along with his co-President Musk. And he has appointed a cabinet full of men just like him, and a few women who will not challenge that. I don't see why young boys wouldn't see this way of being as empowering. And it's awfully hard to challenge those ideas when a version of that success is playing out in front of them daily.
posted by drossdragon at 2:21 PM on March 26 [2 favorites]

I've watched it halfway so far - I am enjoying the one-shot style as a way of depicting how hectic school can feel as a kid (both my partner and I remarked we were getting flashbacks to how unpleasant a crowded stairwell was), and I think the casting is great - especially Jamie - you can easily imagine why his parents and teachers wouldn't suspect anything amiss.

On the one hand, none of this is particularly new. There have always been bullies, the intense pressure to be cool and fit in, and a lot of bad behavior as a result. My partner recently recalled how in his midwestern middle school in the 90s, the cool edgy boys were all reading Mein Kampf.

What seems to be new is how social media algorithms can snare people in toxic bubbles where harmful and/or hateful ideas appear to be the broad consensus. If your whole feed is people explaining that unless you have a "chad jawline" you'll never amount to anything, you're likely to believe it's true - there's a reason most people order that bogus hard gum are teenage boys. Meanwhile, social media also allows popularity to be measured and quantified to a scale never possible when I was a kid - the level to which tweens and teens analyze how many "likes" and comments their photos/posts get, and by who, is....clearly not healthy. Not to mention the stakes for any mistake or even just stumble can seem artificially high.

Roughly a decade ago a friend told me she liked teaching middle school because she enjoyed watching kids experiment with who they are - yes, sometimes there would be 'drama' that the teachers would need to manage, sometimes her students might be found crying in the bathroom....but generally, she found the kids to be good at bouncing back and continuing to experiment. I imagine that's changed.

Anyway, I don't know how anything improves without the various governments regulating tech. Not just for kids, but for adults too - nobody should be fed hateful content or conspiracy theories etc. if they haven't sought it out. And yet, TikTok and YouTube are found to push "masculinist, extremist and anti-feminist content" on any user that identifies as male. I'm sure plenty of kids are able to ignore it or learn how to think critically about it from their parents and/or teachers, but there will always be kids who are susceptible to it if they have access.
posted by coffeecat at 2:47 PM on March 26

Right, to me positive masculinity means taking whatever competencies and proclivities and advantages you've gained as part of being socialized as a man and using them to raise people up, for humor, for assisting others and teaching those competencies.

The problem (?) with positive masculinity is that it's just positive humanity. I bolded the part where I think we can try to make it masculine but it's sort of weak sauce. I've heard, and I wish I could remember details better, several relatively liberal types talk about how to solve the "problems with boys" and they all seem to peter out at some point when they need to confront the fact that we liberals don't really believe in uniquely male positive traits.

Of course at this point I can see all of the gendered structures we haven't thrown off and I see the people around me trying to build positivity humanity around the remaining gendered constructs and that seems reasonably worthwhile. In other words, Nick Offerman does a bunch of manly stuff and he acts like a nice guy. That's great. Being into manly stuff and being nice is a great thing to do, for anyone, man or not. I'll take a nice person with extremely gendered interests and hobbies over an asshole who's breaking down stereotypes any day. But it seems the battle is a lot bigger than this.
posted by Wood at 3:21 PM on March 26 [2 favorites]

we liberals don't really believe in uniquely male positive traits

if you do believe in uniquely female positive traits, that's still misogyny, it's just inside-out. I recommend working on that.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:33 PM on March 26 [4 favorites]

I wish I could remember details better, several relatively liberal types talk about how to solve the "problems with boys" and they all seem to peter out at some point when they need to confront the fact that we liberals don't really believe in uniquely male positive traits.

Struggle with this as a Mom. I choose to engage with what society says is masculine, but in a healthy way. Pretending those messages are not there, that all people are 'just people' WILL NOT HELP my son come to grips with the fact that society will force him to "be a man" - or punish him for not being. I don't like that, but I choose to give in a little. I don't have to say "men are protective, well all people are."

I don't think there are uniquely male traits, but I think there may be uniquely male-presenting experiences. Some of that is simply the experience of learning and mastering what society expects of you.

I am a (cis) woman, society expected very different things of me than they did of my brothers, my husband or my son. I have different demons, for lack of a better word, to battle in that regard. As others have said better above, it does no one any good to pretend we are all just people. We should all be treated equally, but we will not all deal with the same expectations, the same types of judgments. We have to prepare kids to deal with what they will really experience.

So I am trying to show my son some ways, role models and thought processes to deal with the judgments and experiences that he will face. My husband, his Dad, is very engaged on this as well but with more experience and understanding than me. When I hear that my kid declawed some bullies by making them laugh when they tried to make fun of him, that is my husband's influence.

Baby_Balrog, you sound like a fantastic parent. I am farther along than you (my son is 12) but the community of other adults who support the messages is SO impactful. I've been my friends' kids' sort of "other safe adult" to turn to at times. It is NOT manipulative. If your son gets shitty masculinity messages, having men to turn to to talk about that who will echo healthy thought process is amazing. At 6, I was so so worried that a lot of our teaching would not pay off. At 12 I can see that it has. No kid is "perfect" and no kid operates with the pre-frontal cortex of an adult. But you can see the effects of the groundwork we did at 2, 4, 6 and 8 ... you know?
posted by fennario at 3:38 PM on March 26 [3 favorites]

(For example, my husband was a stay at home Dad when our kid was 0-3. He got shit for being a SAHD, I got shit for not being a SAHM. He got shit for not being the breadwinner, I got shit for choosing money over my kid's best interest. We were each prepared for the different judgments we would get in this regard, and we each supported each other through them. No amount of "everyone is the same" would have helped with this.)
posted by fennario at 3:42 PM on March 26 [3 favorites]

I have not found a viable 'masculine role model' in my fairly long life

I had Pete Seeger. And later on, Marc Chagall. There's an African American man on Youtube, I think, who spends his time offering his services, gratis, to families who need repairs on their houses, or a fence built, or fixed. He pays for the materials himself and does the work to a very high standard. That's a "traditionally masculine" role for good: maker, helper, and protector.
posted by jokeefe at 4:44 PM on March 26 [4 favorites]

the role of the father's explosive anger

I'd be curious as to others' opinion on this. Did you have a sense of this from the beginning or are you referring to the scene with the kids with the bikes? If the latter... I found his anger unsurprising given the circumstances. I would not have been surprised to see the mother have exactly the same reaction.

If I'm completely off base and his reaction was not understandable, I'd be curious what people would consider an appropriate reaction to being bullied and belittled by people well aware of a miserable situation you're going through but completely unsympathetic to it and in fact mocking it.

This episode reminded me a great deal of some of the scenes in We Need to Talk About Kevin which was also an excellent and unusual presentation of a similar subject.
posted by dobbs at 5:06 PM on March 26 [3 favorites]

dobbs, I agree with you. I lost a child and I really think back on the amount of explosive anger I had under that stressor especially in the first 12-18 months. My perception was that while the Dad was human, I would not have described him as generally having an explosive anger issue. Yes, the story of the shed. But I took that as an extreme outlier which did not scare his children. I thought the scene with the bikes, the paint, those were a man under a stress most of you won't ever have to contend with, on his birthday of all days. My birthday is 100x harder than the anniversary of my daughter's death, and about 10x harder than her birthday. I thought his reaction to disagreements, even emotional ones, with his wife and daughter were more telling of his character and usual reactions. Also, his ability to control his emotions while watching his son forced to endure strip searching (understandably so) and ability to listen to the lawyer's advice, placing his child's big picture best interest first.
posted by fennario at 5:15 PM on March 26 [2 favorites]

I've been wondering that too. I'm married to someone with explosive anger and I found the Dad's anger not particularly over the top (but maybe I'm a bad judge).
posted by kitcat at 6:03 PM on March 26

I think that might make you a better judge, kitcat. You might notice signs others ignore or overlook or excuse.
posted by fennario at 6:08 PM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Well, I felt like he was exercising a respectable amount of self-control under the circumstances. I was really bracing myself in that episode for a level of anger/violence that never came. I thought for certain he was going to scream at his wife when she told him to get the sponge himself and things were going to get worse from there. Instead, every time he lost control of his anger he managed to gather himself again and make amends. For example, the incident with the kids on the bikes ends with him gently taking his wife's plant to bring it inside and worrying about his family getting paint on themselves. He speaks kindly. He doesn't slam the van door.

I think they did a really good job of portraying someone who is grappling with the sad birthright of male anger and violence - and who is making plenty of mistakes but putting in a very good effort.
posted by kitcat at 6:34 PM on March 26 [4 favorites]

if you do believe in uniquely female positive traits, that's still misogyny, it's just inside-out. I recommend working on that

WTF adrienneleigh? No I don't believe in that, I was posting in context to this thread with "masculinity" in the title, and in fact I do believe in a symmetric lack of intrinsic and uniquely positive feminine traits. I think your admitted and notorious disagreeableness is impairing your ability to read.
posted by Wood at 8:50 PM on March 26 [2 favorites]

These days I think about this Slate piece a lot: The Parents Who Want Daughters—and Daughters Only about ostensible feminists seeking sex selection to avoid the horror of having to raise a boy, or at least a cis boy.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:34 PM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Did you have a sense of this from the beginning or are you referring to the scene with the kids with the bikes?

For me, it was Jamie's terrifying outbursts in episode 3. The way he acted when he snapped into aggressive mode, his behavior seemed like a different person, which I thought was modelled on his father. The garden shed story also.
I agree that the bike incident was understandable. Stephen Graham played his part with great nuance.
posted by OrderOctopoda at 5:49 AM on March 27

BungaDunga - that article about tech people sex-selecting during IVF was so depressing I couldn't even finish it.

There is something deeply broken about our thinking in this country (in "the west"? I'm thinking about America but it appears this is a problem in most industrialized countries.)

My thinking covers a lot of ground, here, and I haven't found a good, consolidated critique that lines up with what I'm thinking. It boils down to, "we can't predict the future and any theory of change that is predicated on future predictions is probably wrong and always bad."

This was my fundamental criticism of "effective altruism" and its ilk. "Maximizing" and "optimizing" and all of this stuff. Garbage nonsense, throw it away, into the sea with it. I'm seeing this more and more on the left! I saw a post the other day bemoaning the massive turn-out at the AOC/Bernie rallies because, "it's happening again, they're gonna pull GOTV with DemSocs and then AOC will cave after the first primary and they'll push everyone to the centrist candidate and then the centrist will looooose!!!" I want to scream at these people. We're completely addicted to prognostication, we're completely sucked in by the alure of omniscience, that we know the future. It's a sickness, it's making us sick, and it's hurting our kids.

I used to carry on to an irritating degree about how "the child maketh not the adult." I was a teenage delinquent, significant criminal record, drop-out, ended up with a 2.0 GPA in high school, etc. Basic case of a rural teenage dirt-bag.
I went to college, excelled, now I'm doing great and everything's lovely. (Everything isn't "lovely" but my situation is very ...comfortable? I don't know).

I have parents dragging their angry, disaffected teenagers into my office for a "talking to" because they got busted with a back-pack full of mango vape carts or whatever. I talk to the kid. But then I talk to the parent. They always, always, always "fear for their future." Okay, I say, but the future is completely unknowable! You simply don't know what's gonna happen! I was considered a lost cause, born under a bad sign, doomed to a life of "living in a van down by the river," - and I'm sitting here in front of you talking to you right now, explaining that literally all of those people were wrong! (Except for Mr. Oster. You were a real one, Mr. O. Thank you.)

When I read that article and I see these blinkered rich idiots explaining all the terrible reasons they're paying eye-watering sums of money to sex-select an embryo in order to "have a girl baby" I want to throw my laptop.

You. Can't. Predict. The. Future. And most of the data demonstrates that - even if you try and "optimize" for some hoped-for-future result, you'll look back on your original goals with regret when that future arrives! They are trying to avoid "toxic masculinity" - and, who knows but that in twenty years when these IVF babies are adults, "toxic femininity" or (imo a much better social turn) "toxic self-centeredness" won't be the new cultural plague that we're trying to tear out at the root?

Effective altruism is so incredibly obnoxious and gross because it not only attempts to justify itself based on "what the future will be like" - but it goes further and deploys utilitarian thinking in order to justify objectively bad behavior today for a hamburger tomorrow. We don't know what will happen.

In 2000, when GW Bush was elected, we were all petrified, terrified, horrified, and completely shook by his "faith-based initiatives." This is it, everyone screamed. It's Gilead! This is where we're going! Straaaaaight to Gilead! And then in September of 2001 something else happened and whoops looks like we're going on a different kind of adventure!

Jack Donaghy in 30 rock has this great, throw-away quote: "The point of life is is to minimize regret." I look at these people and I think they understand this - but they operationalize it backward. Like, "I must know my future, so that I can minimize any chances of it turning out how I don't want it to turn out!" But I read it in precisely the opposite fashion. I have no clue how my little boy will turn out. He might really be my third daughter! Or my daughters are my sons and my son will bring home another son and I'll be the happy father of four boys! Or maybe they'll all become celibate, genderless monks at the Moon Convent, or perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. All we can do is execute the best possible - and most ethical - course of action in the present moment - and that sure as hell isn't chucking all the XY blastocytes in an effort to curb toxic masculinity. The future is unknowable. Ugh. I need someone to write a book about our obsession, our overconfidence in knowing the future and preparing for it "accordingly." So much effort wasted on a pointless and silly theology.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 6:41 AM on March 27 [10 favorites]

I found his anger unsurprising given the circumstances. I would not have been surprised to see the mother have exactly the same reaction.

But the mother (and daughter) didn't have the same reaction. The entire fourth episode the women in the family are expending energy on managing the father's inability to self-regulate his own emotions. It starts with the van - both the daughter and the wife urge him to just let it go for the day, and then ultimately go along with his first plan (washing it) and second plan (heading to the hardware store). After he snaps in the parking lot, they dutifully get into the van to go home. The dad shuts down again when Jamie shares his choice to plead guilty - the dad is unable to respond - and only then do the women in the car start to talk to pick up the slack. When they get home, the wife helps the dad work through both his anger and his sadness, and the daughter dresses up for her dad's birthday and makes suggestions for how they can pivot the day (popcorn, takeaway, rent a movie, etc.)

It's pretty clear the dad, like a lot of men, bottles up anger until it snaps. He works really hard at being neutral or even cheerful until he can't bear it. We see this with the young customer service guy - he could have responded to him, instead he just shuts down and then later takes it out on the kids in the parking lot and his own van. And in Jamie's life, he feels shame when his son isn't good at sports, to the extent that he can't bear to look at his son - which of course Jamie picks up on and internalizes as "I'm the problem" and not "my dad's a bit emotionally stunted."

We know from the fourth episode that everyone in the family is struggling with the fallout of what happened. The daughter reveals everyone gives her problems for being Jamie's sister, the mother desperately wants to move...but those two aren't having angry outbursts. Those two are constantly working to support the dad emotionally.

This doesn't make the dad a bad person, or even a bad dad. He clearly works hard and is loving towards all of the family members. They clearly all love him back, despite his faults. And it's easy to be sympathetic to him given his own upbringing had its flaws - and note the fact that his own father is currently stonewalling him, as he remarks that the birthday card is clearly written and sent by his mother and not his dad. But the model of "men have outbursts and women soothe them" or "men respond to shame and sadness by either shutting down or getting angry" isn't great for obvious reasons.
posted by coffeecat at 7:31 AM on March 27 [8 favorites]

But the mother (and daughter) didn't have the same reaction. The entire fourth episode the women in the family are expending energy on managing the father's inability to self-regulate his own emotions. It starts with the van - both the daughter and the wife urge him to just let it go for the day, and then ultimately go along with his first plan (washing it) and second plan (heading to the hardware store). After he snaps in the parking lot, they dutifully get into the van to go home. The dad shuts down again when Jamie shares his choice to plead guilty - the dad is unable to respond - and only then do the women in the car start to talk to pick up the slack. When they get home, the wife helps the dad work through both his anger and his sadness, and the daughter dresses up for her dad's birthday and makes suggestions for how they can pivot the day (popcorn, takeaway, rent a movie, etc.)

I see the father work to, and succeed at, regulating himself many times in that chain of events. I see a man whose internal feelings are 100x what he is letting out and who is doing his very best under absolutely immense stressors. I see a man who is pushed to the brink and still chooses to be kind. To ask for music. To laugh at himself. To recognize the effort his wife and daughter are putting in to giving him a good birthday, by working so hard to lean in to the family, lean in to the comfort and love they are offering. A man who is trying to show appreciation for the emotional labor and love and support he is getting from them. What is a family if not to trade that back and forth, I see him give and receive it, in that episode and in the first episode.

It is a cruel reading and interpretation, in my opinion, to deny the man the natural human response that he was stunned into silence in his grief at his son's decision to plead guilty and unable to respond. When my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, I was not able to speak. My poor father is deaf and was in the room and saw me basically collapsing but could not hear a damn thing and had no idea what was going on. Others had to "pick up the slack" to communicate. I actually rather often struggle to (or cannot) speak at all or coherently when I am under a really strong emotional stressor.

One thing I really noticed during and after my daughter's death, was how often (most of the time) my husband and I were on different wavelengths at different times. In our partnership, we often found strength when we saw the other having a moment of weakness. We often dug deep when we saw the other need more. Each others' birthdays were and still, 15 years later, are such times. God, the entire episode resonated so much. Seeing the other person trying hard to make your birthday a nice day, but you wanting to crawl into a box, being massively dysregulated, being upset, maybe even wanting to be just left alone, but trying to push through and go along with the joy because doing so reflects love to the person who offered it. I didn't see someone selfish, churlish, entitled. I saw someone who saw the work his family was putting in for him and who cared immensely about that.

I would be more likely to share your critical reading if he was, say, stubborn and grumpy and churlish about it when the daughter tried to shift plans and save the day. If he had lost his temper at the nosy neighbor. If he had tried to cancel the whole day when the van was spray painted, but instead he made the effort to push through things.

I think it's especially interesting to make the narrative choice to have this day be the father's birthday though because it forces us to have this specific kind of conversation and these kinds of differing opinions on it. Mine may be more forgiving because it reminds me so much of child-related trauma that my family went through, and I thought a lot of the husband-wife interactions around it rang emotionally true.
posted by fennario at 8:18 AM on March 27 [5 favorites]

fennario, you're grossly misreading me and being rather ungenerous - like I said, the dad is a very sympathetic character and is clearly a good guy and a good dad. And clearly the couple's therapy he and the wife are attending is working - he is trying to "save the day" as the therapist has urged him to focus on.

I also think you seem to be missing that my approach to analyzing that final episode is as a work of fiction. What is impressive about the show is it gives us four one-hour slices that feel quite real and loose, and yet they are carefully plotted and scripted - the episodes are extremely dense for one-shot takes. The fact that the fourth episode calls back the third episode, where Jamie's tough facade starts to crumble when he recalls how he interpreted his dad as ashamed of him for being bad at sports - that's significant. If it wasn't, the screenwriter wouldn't have done written that in. And we see that the dad's interpretation of what needs to be done in that situation is not try to process his own feelings of shame, or talk to his son about how he might feel, but to force his son to try boxing to toughen him up. That dad pretty clearly has no idea how much of an impact this made on Jamie, whereas the mom has an inkling that while it's not useful to think about it in terms of fault (which I agree, it's not), they could have likely done better.

There seems a clear symbolic parallel to the moment of Jamie looking for his father's eye contact while on the football pitch and not getting it, to him calling out to his dad on the phone after he's told his dad his decision to plead guilty and there is that long pause, "dad, are you there?" and his dad is unable to give anything back to him. I point this out not to deny the dad anything or to even be critical of him - merely to point out that the script gives us these two moments where Jamie sense shame in his father and makes bids for his father's attention, and the father is unable to give him attention - in contrast to the mom.

Likewise, we the viewer can know that the dad has a problem with shutting down when emotions get to be too much, because besides from seeing him do this multiple times in the episode, we hear his wife reference the couple's therapist instructions that this is something he needs to work on.

Again, to be abundantly clear - I'm not critical of the dad - he's an extremely sympathetic character in the show - and I'd say he's the most interesting. To me one of the messages of the show is that the issue of "boys today" is not the fault of parents even if sure, probably some parents could do some things slightly better - that's always been the case - no generation of parents is perfect. Rather, it suggests the problem is that parents generally think "if I just do better than my parents, it will be ok" which has in previous generations more or less been true - but the technological/media landscape has changed so rapidly that this is no longer the case. And that's clearly no individual parent's fault.
posted by coffeecat at 9:06 AM on March 27 [3 favorites]

'No you're being ungenerous.'

Okay.
posted by fennario at 9:17 AM on March 27

Look, I know tone can be easily misinterpreted in text, but I was trying to have a genuine discussion with you. If truly all you took from what I wrote is an opportunity to make a cheap shot against me, then clearly there is little point in further engagement with you. If your goal was to make me feel bad, congrats, you "won."

Anyway, I'll just throw out the end of a NYTimes review:

And even though Thorne, the co-writer, has been calling for laws to limit smartphone use in news media interviews, he said his show never laid the blame solely on technology. In “Adolescence,” he said, the boy’s school is underfunded and teachers are too stressed and overworked to stop bullying, the police are ignorant of how teenagers talk to one another on social media and the boy’s friends and family were oblivious to what he was capable of.

There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but Thorne said it also “takes a village to destroy a child.” He added that he just wanted “Adolescence” “to persuade that village to help these kids.”

posted by coffeecat at 10:10 AM on March 27 [2 favorites]

I have no clue how discussing the parts of a TV show and how one personally sees it could be trying to make people feel bad and do not see that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:54 PM on March 27

The entire fourth episode the women in the family are expending energy on managing the father's inability to self-regulate his own emotions.
I don't see him unable to self-regulate. I see him expressing annoyance/anger/desperation at what has happened and his inability to solve a problem but not in unhealthy ways and not ever directed at blameless people. The anger isn't uncontrolled at all until the very last scene in the hardware parking lot, and even then it is not irrational and not blind or entirely uncontrolled; it has the effect of solving problems, if imperfectly. (Most of "nonse" is gone thanks to the hurled paint, and though the van vandals escape unharmed, they do get properly scared and thus might not repeat the offense; plus he IDs them and will possibly later be able to solve that problem more effectively, emotion-recollected-in-tranquility-wise.)

It starts with the van - both the daughter and the wife urge him to just let it go for the day,
Well, he can't. He has work the next day and he can't go to job sites with misspelled "nonce" spray painted on the side of his work vehicle. That he does not react to their urging a practical impossibility (sit around the house eating a full English while an intolerable problem goes unsolved) with anger directed at them is proof of good anger management.

and then ultimately go along with his first plan (washing it) and second plan (heading to the hardware store).
Which is only reasonable. The van is essential equipment needed to maintain the single income stream that supports the family. Birthday or no birthday, the van must be maintained.

The dad shuts down again when Jamie shares his choice to plead guilty - the dad is unable to respond - and only then do the women in the car start to talk to pick up the slack.
Pointlessly, we know, given that Jamie has been radicalized and no longer respects anything women and girls say. But the family doesn't quite know that, yet. This is one of the saddest parts of the whole cripplingly sad ordeal, in retrospect. There's so much still yet to be discovered to be hopeless about for this family struggling against huge odds to stay hopeful!

When they get home, the wife helps the dad work through both his anger and his sadness, and the daughter dresses up for her dad's birthday and makes suggestions for how they can pivot the day (popcorn, takeaway, rent a movie, etc.)
None of that seems too off to me; it's all normal family behavior and the father throughout is laboring to show appreciation for their efforts to save the birthday. The whole little family is hard at work solving the problem of the day as they've been taught by their counselor. Watching it feels like being punched repeatedly in exactly the same spot until at long last we get to the tucking in the teddy bit at the very end, when finally, mercifully, I get the KO and can stop watching and proceed to the recovery process, which I guess is spending the next several weeks obsessively pondering this show.

It's pretty clear the dad, like a lot of men, bottles up anger until it snaps. He works really hard at being neutral or even cheerful until he can't bear it. We see this with the young customer service guy - he could have responded to him, instead he just shuts down and then later takes it out on the kids in the parking lot and his own van.
I think this is a bit of a misread. The hardware store clerk being another radicalized maniac isn't a problem the dad can solve--that's the problem affecting the whole world, this show is teaching us. The father doesn't have time to try to argue this stranger out of the same delusions that have caused him the loss of his son. He can only try to solve a small part of his smaller, family-sized share of the world-wide problem. We learn from the dialog that the bike kids followed the family to the hardware store and in fact are the exact kids that painted "nonse" on the van. Letting the ragebomb go off at precisely the right time so that he can use it to strongly encourage the neighborhood yobs not to do livelihood-endangering shit like that again is an extremely good tactical use of the bottled anger. And rage-tossing the paint can obliterates the slur just as rage-wrecking the shed got rid of a problematic shed so that a new, acceptable shed could be built so that, at the beginning of the episode, the camera could follow him into it and try to kill me with despair by making me watch him gaze at his lost son's bicycle and mourn. In conclusion, I think this father has managed his anger as well as can be expected of a non-robot, given the extreme strain he is under.

And in Jamie's life, he feels shame when his son isn't good at sports, to the extent that he can't bear to look at his son - which of course Jamie picks up on and internalizes as "I'm the problem" and not "my dad's a bit emotionally stunted."
He doesn't feel shame, he feels pity. He doesn't want his son to feel shame, so he pretends not to have noticed his son's sports mistake. It's sweet. Very, very ineffective, but nevertheless well-intentioned. Had his son not been destroyed, he might have interpreted the father's looking away accurately. Everything that man does he does out of love for his family.

We know from the fourth episode that everyone in the family is struggling with the fallout of what happened. The daughter reveals everyone gives her problems for being Jamie's sister, the mother desperately wants to move...but those two aren't having angry outbursts. Those two are constantly working to support the dad emotionally.
These are problems they can't solve. The daughter and father both know that they can't move away from the harassment, and the mother comes to understand that, too. The father isn't having angry outbursts; he is reacting with normal human frustration to thwart. The father's blow-ups are all at inanimate objects (shed that failed to satisfy; sponge that wouldn't materialize when needed; van that resisted efforts to un-nonse it) and declared enemies (yobs). They are utterly unlike Jamie's blowups in the third episode, where the rage is truly unprovoked, is "at" an innocent person, and is being used to intimidate and control that person. The father-rage in the fourth episode is there for the same reason the anecdote about the potentially humiliating bowling-shoes dance fail is there: the father, not raised by the internet, reacts in relatively healthy ways to frustration and humiliation. Jamie, raised by the internet, reacts very differently to humiliation (rage, not humor) and to frustration (ungovernable, murderous rage, not irritation). This episode is in the show to show us that Jamie did not learn these things from his father.

They clearly all love him back, despite his faults.
I don't think he is loved "despite."

And it's easy to be sympathetic to him given his own upbringing had its flaws - and note the fact that his own father is currently stonewalling him, as he remarks that the birthday card is clearly written and sent by his mother and not his dad.
Just as I simply love this character, no "despite" about it, the agonizing sympathy I feel for him is not because I'm sorry that a bad upbringing has made him a bad role model for his son; it's because he's showing with every decision, every action, every utterance, every tiny microexpression in that episode that he has overcome that bad upbringing and become a relatively good role model. He is in fact handling things as well as he possibly could handle things. It doesn't matter, though. He and his entire family are still doomed because they didn't realize what was going on behind their technologically unaware backs.

But the model of "men have outbursts and women soothe them" or "men respond to shame and sadness by either shutting down or getting angry" isn't great for obvious reasons.
I do agree that stuff is in there for a reason. I just don't think the reason is to show us that the IRL men's anger or IRL women's placating "isn't great for obvious reasons." The question the counselor is asking in episode three is partly "what is the pernicious influence that taught Jamie to explode in murderous misogyny?" It's not angry misogyny on the part of his father; that's a red herring; his father's temper is not like Jamie's at all. It's not contemptible weakness on the part of his mother and sister; they're acting out of love of and sympathy for the father, not fear of him. The tragic birthday card from his father clearly written by his mother is the way it used to work, and it was subpar; now we have made a lot of improvements and figured out how to be better parents than our own moms and dads, but we weren't prepared for this threat and it is stealing and destroying our children.
posted by Don Pepino at 1:02 PM on March 27 [4 favorites]

As someone already said, the father is a very nuanced character. We're not meant to villainize him, nor should we. Still, we also aren't meant to watch it and say "Ah, so it wasn't the Dad's fault, it wasn't anyone's fault except the internet's".

The way the police officer tries to repair his relationship with his son I think is really explicitly telling the audience 'This is what you need to do. Talk to your son, listen, show that you respect his ideas, spend time with him, tell him you love him, joke with him, repair things if you've neglected the relationship'. Jamie's father didn't manage to do that in time. It may not have worked anyhow, for all we know. But Jamie was profoundly affected by seeing his father be unable to look at him failing at sports. I'm not understanding how we know he was feeling pity, not shame. But in any case, being regarded with pity for a lot of people, especially men, is just as painful as being regarded as shameful, isn't it?

How men handle shame or a slight is at the core of the show. I can't agree with this:
he can't go to job sites with misspelled "nonce" spray painted on the side of his work vehicle.
He most certainly can. It's embarrassing, but he can wait to deal with it until he has a day off. It's the intolerance of shame and 'saving face' that makes him desperate to get that paint off. Contrast that again with the police Dad. He did feel ashamed that his son knew more than he did, but he caught himself before lashing out.

Shame intolerance makes men behave in awful, terrible ways. Too often, women are the victims.
posted by kitcat at 2:15 PM on March 27 [5 favorites]

I'm not understanding how we know he was feeling pity, not shame.
Yeah, I am not entirely positive I got that bit right, actually. It's a conversation between the parents where in my memory he explains that he didn't want the kid to feel embarrassed, so he wanted to be careful not to to look daggers at him or act embarrassed of him--or, exactly, look at him with pity. So he gazed into the distance. Jamie assumed his father was ashamed of him; the father said it wasn't that, he felt sympathy and didn't want to make things worse for the kid. But both he and Jamie remember that moment and both of them think of it as formative and problematic, and the father is et up with guilt over it. And I don't remember exactly what he said when he was explaining it to his wife, so I can't bring receipts.

he can't go to job sites with misspelled "nonce" spray painted on the side of his work vehicle.
He most certainly can. It's embarrassing, but he can wait to deal with it until he has a day off.
Yep, that's another good point. But also it is his day off, the van is a mobile advertisement of the business, and it's not unreasonable he'd want to prioritize salvaging his "brand" over eating breakfast. (So then the next reasonable counterargument is, how does throwing paint all over the side window and part of the windshield of your work vehicle make people feel confident that they should hire you as a plumber, plus now it's going to be that much more expensive to repaint because they're going to have to get the paint off the windows.) (Which is the worse business strategy for a plumber in wherevertheyare England? Leaving an unmitigated "nonse" on your work vehicle or turning it into a partially covered "nonse" by throwing a whole mess of imperfectly matched blue housepaint partly on the side of the van and partly on the windows in a manner that telegraphs you may have briefly lost your mind? I don't know. It does seem a bit better to mount a defense of some kind than to do nothing and let it stand. Not out of shame, more out of not yielding to despair and making it possible to live and work in the town.)

The way the police officer tries to repair his relationship with his son I think is really explicitly telling the audience 'This is what you need to do. Talk to your son, listen, show that you respect his ideas, spend time with him, tell him you love him, joke with him, repair things if you've neglected the relationship'. Jamie's father didn't manage to do that in time.
But if anything the detective is even more clueless and checked out than Jamie's father, leaving the parenting to Adam's mother. Adam is unique among the teens in being willing to talk about stuff to adults. He's the one who drags his father away to talk to him, not the other way around. Adam speaks first and keeps trying through more than a couple of dismissive attempts by his father to shut the conversation down. In fact Adam is embarrassed by the adult response to the problem and in particular his father's bumbling mishandling of the crime investigation, floundering around asking stupid questions because he has no idea what's going on. Adam's father does finally clue in and figure out that maybe he should make an effort, too, but it's at the end of the episode and only after Adam hammers him over the head repeatedly.

Every other kid in the show appears to have either given up on the adults as a viable source of support or to be loyal to the kidcode at all costs. They all adhere to an unwritten pact with their peers that their social lives and what is said on Insta constitute a no adults zone, and they don't talk about it to their parents or teachers, even if things are so bad that they're knifing one another and none of the adults tasked with protecting them has any idea why or what to do about it. Mr. Malik is their favorite teacher primarily because he is the most checked-out of all of them. He's late all the time and shows them videos and he doesn't know any of them and doesn't want to. Much the best kind of adult, if you just want to be left to your murdercult devices. The detective is no different from the other adults in the show; he has no idea. He just really lucked out with Adam.

Adam was bullied mercilessly but was not vulnerable to bullying in the same way Jamie was; miserable though he certainly was, he was nevertheless not susceptible to the misogyny cult. Alone among his peers, Adam didn't hesitate to speak honestly about what was going on in adolescent world. He had no problem talking to his father because he could see his father clearly and didn't revere him as an ubermensch to the degree that Jamie did his father--despite his father's superior jawline or whatever it was Jade said that was so cutting--and in fact could see his father's flaws clearly. So Adam wasn't hobbled by a need to save face in front of his father and could therefore be honest with him. Jamie, by contrast, with a comparatively involved and loving father, was completely secretive. Nobody in his family had any notion who he was becoming. I do not think we're supposed to assume that any of Adam's strengths had to do with a great job of fathering by the detective. I think the detective was just very lucky. Adam grew up and grew wise in time to dodge the Insta bullet.
posted by Don Pepino at 4:06 PM on March 27 [1 favorite]

The tragic birthday card from his father clearly written by his mother is the way it used to work, and it was subpar; now we have made a lot of improvements and figured out how to be better parents than our own moms and dads, but we weren't prepared for this threat and it is stealing and destroying our children.

Totally agree - I thought I had made that clear - but that can be true and the dad can still be flawed - that's not a criticism - all humans are flawed! And what's interesting to me about the show, and what feels insightful, is that it's easier for people to pinpoint cycles of physical abuse as cycles to break vs. other sorts of imprinting they might have gotten from their parents - including from loving parents. It's striking that both Jamie (to the therapist) and the dad (to his wife) say an identical line about how he's a good dad because he never hit the kids. Which of course is a good cycle to break - but parenting or teaching requires more than just avoid physical violence. Jamie really doesn't feel like he can say anything bad about the his dad - even though his dad's unwillingness to meet his gaze is a wound - the therapist really has to work to get him there.

I see him expressing annoyance/anger/desperation at what has happened and his inability to solve a problem but not in unhealthy ways and not ever directed at blameless people.

Except his wife and daughter? They are clearly on edge much of the time - his outbursts might not be directed at them but they do negatively affect them. Yes, sometimes he his able to distract himself with a song or fondly remembering his youth - the show captures well how it's possible with people like this to quickly transition between genuinely sweet moments (because yeah, the dad is a sweetie) to moments of anxiety where it's really unclear what's going to happen next. The wife and the daughter are alarmed by his behavior - the mood on the drive home is starkly different than the drive there, even before Jamie calls.

I think this is a bit of a misread. The hardware store clerk being another radicalized maniac isn't a problem the dad can solve

You misunderstand me here - yes, the dad can't solve the clerk, but he is responsible for his own anger towards the clerk, however reasonable. He could have taken a moment to do some breathing exercises in order to calm down, or he could have confided in his wife, etc. Instead he shuts down and silently rages until he physically rages against the other teens (who he has no way of knowing for sure are even the culprits - they are clearly jerks, but he doesn't have proof).

And as kitcat has pointed out, there are other options he had with the van. At the very least he could have enjoyed the special birthday breakfast his wife has made him, and then gone to the store to get some paint. But he's worried again about shame - every second the neighbors see it, clearly eats at him - understandable, but not his only option.

Anyway, again, I don't think this show is suggesting there are any easy answers here, because there aren't any - but the world adults have created certainly isn't ideal for anyone in all sorts of ways, some old and some new. But one message I think it contains is that especially in our current online age, where the stakes of a social teen stumble can feel so high, parents need to make sure their kids know it's okay to fail, it's okay to be rejected, it's ok if jerks are mean to you. You can feel bummed about it, but it's ultimately part of life - and it doesn't require you tear down a shed or throw paint on your van, frightening your family in the process.
posted by coffeecat at 4:31 PM on March 27 [1 favorite]

Guardian: '‘Men don’t want to be told they are toxic’: what young people really think of Adolescence. From criticisms of its ‘awful’ second episode, to calling its depictions of misogyny so accurate that it’s triggering - Guardian readers in their teens and twenties share their verdicts on the harrowing teen murder drama.'
posted by Wordshore at 12:44 PM on March 28 [3 favorites]

At the beginning of the fourth episode when I didn't know the father character, yet, he did seem potentially threatening--particularly after the third episode, after the psychiatrist asked so many questions about his anger issues. When the father comes in from the garden and is standing behind his wife at the sink, I'm on edge. But bit by bit watching him move through the breakneck race through huge emotional shifts, from grief to gentle humor, back to grief, to dread, to anger, to love again, and all over the map, I start to trust him. I hear him yell plenty, but not often at people. The way he speaks to his wife and daughter, the nosy neighbors, and the redpilled hardware store clerk is completely different from the way Jamie speaks to the psychiatrist. I agree that he has some anger management work to do so that he can tackle problems with better efficiency and avoid the inevitable additional problems he'll cause himself by tossing sheds and paint around. I do not think one of the inevitable problems he caused himself by tossing a shed was that his son watched that and decided it would be in keeping with the family creed and abiding by his father's example if he stabbed a girl to death. I do not think the father's relatively familiar and unfrightening anger has more than a micron to do with Jamie's terrifying, indeed homicidal, anger.

Except his wife and daughter? They are clearly on edge much of the time - his outbursts might not be directed at them but they do negatively affect them.
I think they're on edge because the people around them are targeting all of them, but the father in particular today, for harassment because someone in their family has been discovered to be a murderer. They want to protect the father from hurt, and they can't. They don't want him to feel awful. The anguish the daughter feels when she has to tell her father about the van kills me. This guy's wife and daughter do not appear to fear him; rather they appear to fear for him. There's this exchange, for instance: Dad: "Where's the sponge?" Mom: "It's under the sink!" Dad: "It's not!" Mom: Finishes her heartbreaking conversation with her daughter in an unrushed manner, then "I'd better go help your father." When she does get downstairs, he's found the sponge and bucket and is slopping water all over the kitchen in his mad haste to try his doomed-to-fail washing paint off with water scheme, and he's apologetic and promises to clean up the spill. This is not a man who yells at his wife and browbeats or frightens her. It's just not.

I don't see the interaction with the hardware store clerk in the same way you do at all. I don't see it as him bottling up rage that the hardware store kid caused. How could this meaningless hardware store clerk cause him any perceptible emotional shift after what he's been through? He just realizes the kid wants to talk about the scandal instead of giving him the magical solution to his van paint problem that he's deluded himself into thinking is at the hardware. The instant he sees the clerk can't help with his mission, he gives up on the conversation and racewalks away to the blue paint, right? I don't see rage-bottling; I see him avoiding an impediment and getting to the next step to solve his problem.

Yes, sometimes he his able to distract himself with a song or fondly remembering his youth - the show captures well how it's possible with people like this to quickly transition between genuinely sweet moments (because yeah, the dad is a sweetie) to moments of anxiety where it's really unclear what's going to happen next.
I don't think the Take on Me bowling shoes dance fail conversation about the father and mother's courting days is there to show that the father is "people like this" and is trying to distract himself and cheer himself up so he doesn't go on a dangerous rampage. I don't think we're supposed to think, "Oh, that cute story was him faking a peaceful temperament and now he's a raging bull: ominous." At least certainly that's not its main purpose. I think it's mainly there to demonstrate the stark difference between then and now and wake up parents in the audience. Like, "Look, we all remember GenX's walk-in-the-park adolescence. Compare that to the alien nightmare hellscape your children inhabit. Obviously no GenX parent who hasn't kept abreast of their children's emoji code and hasn't been paying attention to the hideous worldviews their children are becoming immersed in on the apps has any notion what to do about this. It's not surprising this guy--and by extension, you--wouldn't know what to do because the world changed to unrecognizable too fast for you to keep up, and the children have been actively concealing it from you. But now it is time to wake up: adolescence is not dancing to Aha with your crush at the school dance, anymore, it's a nightmare. Educate yourselves, figure it out, save your kids!"

The wife and the daughter are alarmed by his behavior - the mood on the drive home is starkly different than the drive there, even before Jamie calls.
Yeah, concur. And it's definitely partly because the father has just lost his mind and attacked the bike kids, thrown paint all over the van, and put the hardware store staff on high alert. But I think it's also partly because they've all been making valiant efforts all day to "solve the problem of the day" and these efforts have all failed. They are therefore going to suffer nearly intolerable pain, and not just for today but for the foreseeable future. Both parents have been deluded for most of this episode--mom thinks and dad agrees that a full English breakfast will save the day; dad thinks he can wash spray paint off a van with sudsy water and a soft sponge; dad further thinks if sudsy water won't work, the hardware will have the solution; mom and dad think they can tack a family outing onto the grim trip to the hardware and flip it around so it's celebratory. About their overall situation, mom thinks they can move away from the harassment, and dad thinks if he just combats it steadily, he can fix it and make life okay again for his family. They have all these beliefs because they came of age in the kinder, slower, gentler 1980s, and they are not natives of this new, terrible world. Through it all the daughter, a native of the contemporary world who is fluent in the apps and who therefore understands what's happening to her family, does what she can to accommodate her parents. What else can she do? She rides along on the family outing she knows is going to be hellish. She obliges her parents by shopping gaily for gewgaws while her father encounters mounting frustrations in the paint aisle, she gamely clambers back into the paint-splodged van, she tells a sad little joke to her brother when he calls from the juvenile prison. She is quietly clear-eyed the entire episode about what is in store for herself and her parents, whatever they do, wherever they go. Unrelieved misery is in store.
posted by Don Pepino at 3:12 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

I am the parent of four children with my former partner. My ex is trans, queer, and polyamorous. I am a cis femme queer, also poly. Three of our four children are:

a 30-year-old who is trans, queer, nonbinary, and poly
a 24-year-old who is trans and queer
a 17-year-old who is trans, identifies as a boy, and who describes his sexuality as either "gay" or "T4T." While the rest of us are white, the 17yo is Black. He socially transitioned when he was four.

And a 21-year-old who is a cisgender white straight man.

I have long thought that our family is, weirdly, the perfect breeding ground for my 21yo to turn into a right-winger, especially because my ex has a long-standing habit of neglecting him in favor of meeting the needs of the 17yo and 24yo (this is one of the reasons I left him), in part because, while I adore the 21yo and he is, in some ways, my favorite (they're all my favorite in various ways), I was never able to hide my enthusiasm for the other kids' queerness and transness.

Recently, during a phone conversation, the 21yo told me that that time he told me he was bisexual, when he was maybe 13, he was lying because he wanted to fit in.

And during another phone conversation, he said that something people were saying online was "going too far," and I felt an icy chill.
posted by Well I never at 8:21 AM on March 30 [4 favorites]

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