In Every White Boy, a Potential Killer

Netflix’s Adolescence ramps up the anti-male propaganda

oops! Male rage again! MALE RAGE -- the words ring out --

worse than RING AROUND THE COLLAR, worse than KISSED

THE GIRLS AND MADE THEM CRY, jeezus, male rage

in kindergarten. MALE RAGE. You've got

male rage; I look inside myself and scrounge

for all this male rage. Must be there

somewhere. Must be repressing it. I write poems

faster and faster, therapeutically, to make sure

I get all the rage out. But someone's

always there to say, Male Rage -- more Male Rage.

I don't leave the house, workin' on my male rage.

—Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, 1982

**

Yup, 1982. The whole poem is here.

By now, nearly everyone knows the predictable story told in Adolescence, the 4-part Netflix miniseries that has garnered gushing accolades from pundits and was reportedly viewed 6.9 million times in its first week alone. It tells of a 13-year-old British boy [above] who stabs a girl to death because she taunted him online as a sexual loser.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the series was “really hard to watch” with his teen children; but he also welcomed having it in every British school so that no boy can escape the indictment. Now is the time, according to the series’ creators, to “look in the eye of male rage.”

Various reports have framed the story as shining a light on the “manosphere” that allegedly turns boys bitter and “toxic,” and there are a number of references to “that Andrew Tate shite,” as a female police officer wearily terms it. But manosphere influence is not developed in any depth in the series, perhaps because the writers, despite their allegedly thoroughgoing research, didn’t feel themselves on firm enough ground. Instead, the series takes aim at masculinity itself, the familiar whipping boy that Di Cicco had already pegged back in 1982.

As the story opens, we see pictures of the boy, Jamie Miller, cherubic in his school uniform while haunting music plays. We already know that he must be the killer, a sweet-faced pubescent boy (from a loving family, it turns out) who killed a girl in cold blood because she hurt his feelings. As the story unfolds, we come to see that Jamie has uncontrollable rage that alternates, almost second by second, with self-loathing and appeals for validation. He has no history of sustained bullying, abuse, trauma, or mental illness. His violence thus remains closed off from any non-gendered explanation. He has simply done what any boy might do.

This theme of fragile masculinity emerges most powerfully in the third episode of the series, when a brilliant female psychologist, brought in to assess Jamie in detention before his sentencing hearing, delves into the boy’s attitudes. Skillfully maneuvering past his defenses, she gets Jamie talking about, and soon acting out, his submerged darkness. Behind the sweet face there is a hair-trigger anger, explosive and threatening, not unlike that of his father before him, who once destroyed the family shed for no reason Jamie can remember.

Jamie has felt inadequate in front of that father for a long time. Always poor at sports, small and awkward, he used to notice with pain that when his father came to his matches, he would look away whenever Jamie made a mistake. Now Jamie hates himself and feels himself a loser, ugly and doomed to fail with the girls he likes, and desperate for an approval he won’t believe. He is pathetic, but also terrifying in his rudderless resentment.

So caught up is he in his agonistic toxicity, in fact, that he can’t even grasp the humanity of Katie Leonard, the girl he killed, still fuming months after her death about what a “bitch” she was to him. “Whatever claims you make about her character,” the psychologist tells him damningly, “she’s gone.” He is so narcissistically deluded that he thinks it is a mitigating circumstance that he did not sexually assault the girl while killing her. Most boys “would have touched her,” he claims, but he didn’t. “So that makes me better,” he appeals to the psychologist. “Don’t you think?”

Even the seen-it-all psychologist is staggered by the depths of his moral vacuum. As she prepares to leave the interview, telling Jamie that she will not need to visit him anymore, he doesn’t want to let her go. “Do you like me?” he keeps asking, as if that is all that matters. She is so faithful to her profession that she won’t lie to ease the way out; but she cries, seemingly in pity and horror, as soon as she is alone.

The series does not touch upon any of the actual problems that boys face today, such as father absence, poor education and job prospects, high substance abuse and suicide rates, or the culture’s sadistic promise that “The Future is Female.” The murdered girl’s cruelty is presented as an isolated incident that only a misogynist would blame, while boys’ actual loneliness and longing for validation are not seriously engaged.

In fact, Adolescence works strenuously against the idea that the British justice or education systems, or anything in British society, could be failing working-class boys like Jamie. On the contrary, the series stresses the decency and compassion of those involved in Jamie’s case. “I hate juvenile cases,” says the psych-evaluator, a kindly woman, when Jamie is first arrested and brought to the police station. “No one likes ‘em,” says the admissions officer (perhaps the only respectable white male character in the series, in a bit part). Here are no political interests, no craven indifference, no crude political correctness. We are even to be thankful for the ever-present British surveillance cameras.

The only possible social criticism is voiced by the female police officer when explaining why the case gets to her. “Everyone will remember Jamie,” she says angrily. “No one will remember Katie.” The implication—that British society celebrates male killers and forgets their female victims—is not endorsed by the film (her partner counters that their investigation is a way of honoring Katie) but it is acknowledged as an understandable point of view.

**

A bald racial politics is also evident in the show’s casting. All of the bad or weak characters are white and male, from the schoolboy who doesn’t attempt to hide his gauche delight in news of the killing, to the class yob who makes oinking noises when the two detectives visit the school, to the acne-scarred functionary at Jamie’s detention center who, needy and ingratiating but with a hint of insolence, can’t keep his eyes off the pretty young female psychologist. She, in turn, while noticing his predatory gaze, is intent only on doing her job in her usual scrupulous manner.

All of the admirable or at least decent adults in the series are either female or black. In particular, there is the black detective [above] in charge of the case, a tough, compassionate, and principled investigator who is also a loving if at times distracted father. The only sympathetic student at Jamie’s school is Adam, the lead investigator’s son. There is a black girl who attacks Ryan, Jamie’s friend, but she is picking on a murderer’s accomplice, so her violence is justified.

The series ends with Jamie’s father, who is making his wife and daughter’s lives a misery with his temper, which is set off at the beginning of the fourth episode when someone spray-paints “Nonse” on his van for his 50^th birthday. He has a weird encounter with a young man at a hardware store—who expresses incel-like support for Jamie—and brutalizes a boy in the parking lot before throwing the paint he bought at his van. The mother and daughter are trapped by his rage, helpless to free him or themselves.

As he and his wife sit afterwards at their home, talking about whether they could have somehow prevented Jamie’s violence, we learn that the father was made as he is by his father, who used to beat him. He swore he would never do that to his family—and he hasn’t—but his anger frightens and unsettles them nonetheless.

The women and girls of Adolescence do not have similar problems with violence or anger. Jamie’s mother and sister are sad, not angry, and are primarily concerned to comfort and protect the father. The mother cries her tears in secret in order not to burden him. Women do their best, the series suggests, to manage and tame the unpredictable violence of their men, but they cannot do it alone. Jamie’s mother is perhaps even afraid to admit to her husband the role that his “terrible temper” may have played in influencing Jamie. “Don’t say that!” the father reacts, wounded, when she mentions it. “I didn’t give him that, did I? Did I?” and she backs down: “No.”

It is time we all stopped lying to men about the harm they do, the series suggests.

Adolescence ends with Jamie’s father in tears in his son’s room. He is presented with sympathy, but his broken ineffectuality is our last image. He cannot be Britain’s future.

Perhaps the black police officer’s son, Adam [below], will be.

**

All of this would be bad enough if it were in any sense true. But it isn’t, as William Collins shows in his scrupulously researched blog The Illustrated Empathy Gap. I will quote him at some length on what British crime statistics show about the faux-realism of Adolescence:

About 8.7% of stabbing victims are female, about 13.1% of knife crime offenders are female. Like other forms of non-domestic violence, knife crime tends to be male-on-male.

Non-whites are about 5 times more likely to be knife crime offenders than whites (though whites account for most knife crimes due to weight of numbers). Non-whites are also more likely to be the victims of knife crime, by a similar factor.

Only about 4.5% of knife crime victims are under 16, so the story of “Adolescence” which associates this age range with the problem is misleading.

In short: white male adolescent offender and young white female victim is the least common combination in knife crime. The probability of the plot of Adolescence diminishes rapidly still further when the personal and familial characteristics of Jamie are taken into account.

**

In sum, 13-year-old white boys are highly unlikely to kill their female classmates, particularly if, like Jamie, they are from normal homes with no history of violence or mental illness. The whole of the series is an ideologically-driven fantasy.

The truth, though, will not deter the British government from using Adolescence to promote yet more anti-male propaganda in schools, of which there has already been far too much, extending back decades (see, for an Anglo-American overview, Christina Hoff Sommers’ still-relevant The War Against Boys (2000), in which she inveighs against “the relentlessly repeated proposition that masculinity per se is the cause of violence” [p. 63]).

Prime Minister Starmer, who has twice called Adolescence a documentary, has met with its creators to brainstorm about curbing misogyny. What will this look like? Mass apologies by boys to girls? Parents reporting their boys to police for accessing “online misogyny”? Differential criminal sentencing based on race and gender? Social media bans? Such ideas have already been instituted in one form or other and are not likely to improve behavior or morale. Sanctimony about white male rage, as Di Cicco saw over 40 years ago, is the cheapest of currencies.

It's probably too much to ask that governments try listening to boys themselves.