Adolescence was the Dystopian Coming-of-Age Reflection and the World was its Mirror

As Adolescence racks up the Emmy nominations, it's worth revisiting its message long after the discourse

Nathaniel Cole is a workshop facilitator and researcher focusing on masculinity, mental wellbeing, relationships and sex education for young people, typically with young men and boys.

He writes: “My goal in life is to reduce sexual violence for young people. I have travelled throughout the UK delivering sessions designed to encourage young men and boys to truly interrogate their relationship to masculinity and guide them to understand their feelings to express themselves better.

In doing that, I have heard a wide range of views, which is challenging, but I relish the opportunity to listen to what young people are feeling and create a space that allows them to be challenged without shutting down.”

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Sitting in a classroom, set up in a horseshoe shape of chairs, with the tables pushed to the edge of the room and stacked on top of each other, boys are practising empathy, practising vulnerability, practising humanity.

I ask the boys about love, about who they love and how they tell them. One then tells us about why he doesn’t tell his father he loves him anymore. He sits opposite me as a 17-year-old but remembers being 12 like it was yesterday, as he sat around his family after an emergency, telling his family how he honestly felt about them.

“He said, ‘Don’t do that! Why are you acting like a girl for?’ That was the last time I told my Dad that I loved him”

In another session, a boy tells me about a relationship that he was in. “I felt so trapped, I wasn’t free” his friend consoles him by rubbing his shoulder, telling him that it’s okay.

This happens after the boys are settled in, after we’ve played games, and I’ve introduced myself so they know this isn’t a normal lesson, this is something different.. I want to know what they’re thinking and feeling.

Using an emotion wheel, which is a visual tool that helps people identify their emotions, I ask the boys where they line up on it, and go from there.

It’s a great resource as boys can also say how they feel by ticking a feeling, rather than saying it out loud, which can be unfamiliar for some.

When the boys realise that it’s a space for them, their bravado drops and their opinions start flowing freely. I ask them what they think about the way we experience the world, about how people are treated.

They will tell me that ableism, racism and sexism are wrong. They casually say people should be treated equally in life. However, when I mention another word, there is an energy shift; boys may even jump out of their chairs as they try to get their points across to me about it.

Feminism.

“Feminism has gone too far. Women are gold diggers. Women get away with too much. Women lie. Feminists want to kill men.”

When I ask where these views come from or where they’ve seen them, they tell me, “I’ve just seen it online, there was a video with a woman saying that”. Now I must tune in to what they’re saying when they share these messages. They’re saying they don’t want to be on the losing side, they don’t want less from their life, and they are being told that by a variety of influencers and in their lives.

Influencers like Andrew Tate, HS Tikky Tokky, Austin Wayne, Fresh n Fit plant their messages behind traditional values, dating tips, fitness advice, and money-making schemes. They won’t name it, but also weave misogyny throughout their content, slowly pulling in their audience and encouraging them to think similarly. All delivered in a manner which young men and boys are familiar with at school - someone trying to sound like they’re right and repeating a point until it becomes true. These influencers appeal to the insecurities and pain points that boys feel and speak in ways they do on the playground, just in front of a screen instead.

As we move through a session, I also hear, “If you cry, you’re weak; you can’t tell people your secrets; they’ll use them against you; I feel pressure from my family; I need to grow taller; I want to have abs.”

Therein lies the issue: boys have precious few spaces or people to share their insecurities with. They are not being raised or taught how to build and nurture friendships or other relationships that are emotionally safe, where they can truly share what’s on their mind without being thought of as a joke or weak. The narrow parameters boys give each other for emotional expression harms them.

This understandably creates a lot of anger and frustration as boys don’t have an outlet for what they’re going through, which is then turned towards the women and girls in their lives. Teachers, parents and peers become the target because they’re being told by misogynistic influencers, friends and sometimes adults in their lives that feminism and women are the cause for this.

The message is clear. That boys and young men need to act differently to rebalance the scales of society. To go out into the world and demand attention and take what’s theirs. It’s emotionally powerful and draws them in, speaking to what they think they need and deserve: power.

In this search for power, we have to ask: Why do boys and men feel powerless?

I know that you may roll your eyes at that question, when in the UK at least, we know that men are getting the benefit from our gender inequality, if we look deeper, we can see that everyone is worse off in an unequal society with narrow definitions or expectations of what boys and men can or should be.

Netflix’s record-breaking show, Adolescence, helped bring this question to the forefront of people's minds again. Leadership coach, David McQueen was brave enough to say that we’ve been here before, with suicide rates of young men, revenge porn, knife crime, educational achievement and expulsion rates. Soon, a new day will come along with a new concern about a group being ‘left behind’.

The show has struck a chord with many people who were, until this point, unaware of the experiences of teenagers in the UK. Unaware of their communication styles, unaware of what their schools were like and unaware of what they think. It’s important to remind ourselves that Adolescence is a drama, and like many pieces of work, influenced by real-life stories of violence. It probably resonates because it forced people to realise that parenting never really stops, and while we may know someone, we only know what we have seen of them. The show's storyline of Jamie, a boy who was potentially bullied, goes from being seen as an innocent child to a murderer, forcing people to think about how this has or could happen. In the fanfare of the show, though, there is also a victim, Katie, who is all but forgotten about. It’s unfortunately a common theme in the news of Jamie, a potentially bullied boy, goes from a brother, friend and son to a murderer of Katie, who’s all but forgotten about in the fanfare of the show.

Jamie was called an incel. You would end up with a circle if you created a Venn diagram about negative attitudes towards women with incels and misogynists. The difference comes in how they socialise in our society. A raging misogynist can have a successful career, family and plenty of friends. An incel, however, is more likely to be Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) and socially isolated, the latter is encouraged amongst incels. Jamie could fall somewhere between a red or a black piller because of how his violence manifested, but there’s more to it.

For the last 20 years, community advocates, researchers and scholars have been warning about a Male Supremacy Project.

You can read up about that in your own time, but ask yourself, what is more appealing? Trying to figure out how to healthily exist in a fractured society or win at the game called life? Boys have been told by those around them long before social media that they need to win at all costs, be the best and look a certain way.

I have been privileged enough for boys to open up to me about their struggles. They have told me about the impacts of the cost of living crisis, abandonment by fathers, divorce of their parents, their breakups, eating disorders, pressure from family, being impacted by murder and suicide. Their lives are hard, and while they have the tools to navigate these hardships, they are not encouraged to use them in the environments and friendships they find themselves in. Leaving dedicated adults working for Charities, C.I.C.s, Councils and Schools like myself, trying to put pieces together of broken young people.

In this landscape, many can be left wondering what to do and who to trust. I will say that it’s important to understand that young people will learn from those around them, whether in person or online, regardless of age. It’s not as simple as ‘boys will be boys, ’ but boys will teach boys if nobody else offers equitable guidance or balance. There are a variety of organisations trying their best and some influencers are trying to infiltrate media with a healthier message of expression for young people. Ultimately, we need changemakers working together to push culture and menswork away from male supremacy and towards building an equitable society, but they need your help to be platformed, grow and continue to do important work.

Not everyone is on the ground working with young people day in and day out, but that doesn’t mean making this change isn’t everyone’s responsibility. Create work that challenges notions of masculinity, of emotionality and weather a storm if it comes. Remember that there are many ways young men and boys can be, and they will lean on what we show them. Millennial men became present fathers, as well as violent misogynists. Gen Z are sober curious, but these are more than trends; they are ways of life that young people are finding themselves in. Tomorrow's men are about being pulled towards male supremacy, what are we doing to challenge that?