Similar to ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Netflix’s Adolescence has brought to the fore of public consciousness a crisis that has been brewing for some time now – the masculinity crisis and susceptibility of young men to the Manosphere.
Whether this can be turned into effective action remains to be seen not least because it’s not clear that politicians and policymakers have a good grasp of the root causes of this crisis.
This is most obvious on the right, where there is sometimes a refusal to engage with the fact there is a problem at all. Some there are making an active effort to downplay extreme online misogyny as nothing more than a moral panic with no real impact in the real world. This. Is. Simply. Delusional.
There is endless evidence of the hold that influencers like alleged serial rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate has on young boys which shapes interactions with women and girls and the often overlooked impact on male social relationships. During the course of my postgraduate research into the manosphere and radicalisation in schools, I have had female teachers on the verge of tears telling me that they don’t feel safe in their own classrooms, and it is not uncommon to witness intimidation, sexploitation, and violence against female students by boys beholden to Tate et al.
Those who stick their heads in the sand because of the ideological kinship between the Manosphere and the right must be made to own this partnership and know that they are contributing to and perpetuating violence against women and girls.
However, from all sides of the political spectrum proposed solutions reflect a lack of understanding both of technology and young men. Policies such as mobile phone bans (in school or otherwise) or restricted social media access are well meaning but won’t work in isolation.
Such measures target the supply of online hate without addressing the demand from young people for it. They underestimate the ingenuity of young people in circumventing blocks that are put in their way, and perhaps worst of all they elevate online misogyny to the status of ‘forbidden knowledge’. Young people, especially young men, like to push boundaries. Declaring something off limits only makes it more enticing.
Really, we should be focusing on why there is so much demand for this stuff. Sadly, there is a poor societal understanding of the root causes for why teenage boys are susceptible to the Manosphere. Sometimes this is rooted in lazy thinking (e.g. assertions that all masculinity is toxic) or a reluctance to lift open the bonnet on how the social changes of the past few decades are perceived. Teenage boys who are susceptible to the Manosphere perceive men as losing out as social developments favour their female peers in an assumed zero-sum world.
Society is changing in ways that are frightening to many young men coming into it. They lack experience of what it was like before but are keenly aware that ‘something’ has been lost. What this something is, whether it exists, and where it sits in the context of patriarchy, feminism, and a wide range of complex social and economic dynamics is hard for adults to even grasp. Without awareness of the baseline status quo of patriarchal structures, measures to alleviate this can appear unfair. Then someone like Tate comes along and says it’s okay to be male, all these changes are bad, all these terms are nonsense. It’s a powerful hook.
It does not matter that this zero-sum situation is not true, what matters is the perception of truth which in turn sets identity and the boundaries for what is thinkable.
Due to the confluence of lazy thinking and lack of a modern vision of masculinity that is not contrived or artificial (e.g. Do you have a men’s mental health™ problem? Have you considered talking to your mates at the pub?) manfluencers like Tate have filled a void. Relatively reasonable anxieties are addressed by him and other like him and morphed in a way that bakes in the extreme misogyny which legitimises violence against women and girls.
So how do we meet this demand side and counter the Manosphere authentically? There are two interconnected principles that must be front and centre of counter-radicalisation efforts to tackle this crisis – agency and meeting people where they are.
For change to be organic and sustainable you must lead those susceptible or already captured to the door without opening it for them. Change is dynamic, not static and it is a process that cannot be rushed. For mindset changes to be sustainable individuals must believe they are in control and are coming to certain realisations by themselves – albeit unaware that they are being nudged.
Secondly, the initial process must involve speaking in a language that can be understood. Otherwise, the gap between where the reality of those susceptible/captured and where you want them to end up is too jarring and they will default to what they know to avoid the discomfort of dissonance and a suddenly unstable identity.
Taken together, the discursive strategies that can be employed can appear uncomfortable. For example, one narrative that I found works more effectively than most is “you wouldn’t like it if that [the women that Tate et al talk about] was your Mum/sister/girlfriend/friend etc”. This line of argument is unsatisfying because basic moral decency should apply irrespective of personal relationships.
Nevertheless, this narrative is a starting point that can be built on. It respects agency by nudging the individual to answer that they wouldn’t like that very much and it speaks in a language that is unavoidably relatable to their lived experiences – thus forcing the issue in a way that cannot easily be dismissed and influences because it heavily prompts in one direction without necessarily being realised.
Adolescence should be seen as a call to action, not a warning of what might happen but a wakeup call to what is already occurring. Yet to be effective, we need to have a clear understanding of the problem at hand otherwise we risk perpetuating this crisis.
Click here to read the first article in the Men Against Boys series.
