I am the father of two wonderful boys. There is nothing in the world that comes close to the joy and fulfilment I feel by being their father, and the opportunity I have to be an integral and essential part of their development, both as people and men, is something I regard as both a privilege and a duty. I feel this despite the fact that, in general, society regards fatherhood as somewhat optional. I fully acknowledge that the reality of this situation is the result of many fathers having chosen to be absent, either through feckless disregard towards their responsibility, or the ‘societal nihilism of fatherhood’. But still there it is. The positive regard that society holds me in as a man has very little to do with how good a father I am. I feel lucky then that I do not give a fig about society’s evaluation criteria in general, either towards men or women.
What I do care about, very deeply and passionately, is not allowing my sons to grow up thinking that their gender (or indeed their ethnicity, religious belief, sexual preference or sexual identity), is a problem. The world has benefited enormously from men and masculinity, as indeed it has women and femininity. Nature saw fit to evolve us in this way and our success as a species is the result of what we each bring. For sure there is toxic masculinity; this is a topic I explored in antidote through the ‘Here Among the Flowers’ project, an attempt to show that masculinity is no more inherently toxic than femininity. Men and women are subject to negative emotion and those negative emotions manifest in different ways. In men it tends towards aggression (low agreeability), whereas in women it manifests as over wrought anxiety (trait neuroticism). Both are problematic both for the individual and collectively at a societal level, but only at the extremes. Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics (which ironically will be a vanishingly small percentage of the population) can understand that the problems associated with the extremes of a distribution will only manifest in a tiny percentage of the population. By the time it becomes problematic, you’re a good two or even three standard deviations away from the mean, meaning that the sample you are basing any judgement on is so under representative of the population distribution as a whole, that making those judgements is unequivocally the very definition of bigotry. Correlation is not causation so even if the value of r is say 0.9 between being guilty of a violent crime and being male, that correlation provides zero insight into how likely any man might be to represent a risk (of violence) to you, male or female (although you are still three times more likely to be subject to a violent act as a man than a woman).
What does all this have to do with my two sons? Adolescence, both in terms of the age they are now and the Netflix TV show, which has let lose a tyrannical monster of raging moral panic about men and masculinity. That heuristic has been let lose in all its rampant, vile glory. The media is not interested in representing reality to you (I say ‘you’ here because I barely interact with it these days; I do not have a TV and have not interacted with ‘mainstream media’ for over six years, and I feel much better for it. I also recently deleted my Facebook account and have never had a Twitter or Tick Toc subscription). It is not interested in representing reality because no one is really interested in reality, not least when it comes to consuming entertainment. Most of reality is boring to us because it is, well, reality. Our heuristically driven brains crave signals that are distinct from the background because those are the ones that most strongly resonate with us. System One thinking, as Daniel Khaneman described it, prefers the emotional to the logical.
Events as portrayed in Adolescence certainly happen, indeed just such an incident took place only a few months before the airing of that show. This is close enough in the timeline for this to be purely coincidental, nevertheless the events happen just rarely enough for them to reside in our consciousness more sharply than the vast background of otherwise well adjusted, morally sensible, sincere and gracious humanity that represents ‘normal’. But as I said, we aren’t interested in normal because normal is rational and logical, and our brains just don’t work that way.
None of this would be a problem except we’re extrapolating a definition of masculinity and defining the existence of a real problem based on a vanishingly small set of data points. The likely hood of any man, over a 50-year period, murdering someone is about one in 1111 or 0.09% of the male population. For contrast, women who murder are about 0.0002% or one in 10,000. So yes, a man is ten times more likely to murder someone than a woman but using that data point to make some assessment about men and masculinity in general is no better than using similar data prevalence to make an assessment about the propensity of say someone from a black ethnic group being guilty of the same, or indeed any, crime.
Correlation is not causation, and making any judgement that they are is lazy at best and bigoted at worst.
Presentation is not representation and a TV series does not reflect reality; it specifically has to distort it in order to be even worthy of being ‘entertainment’, which is what Adolescence is (in a bizarrely perverse kind of way).
Of course, if we carry on with this collective denigration of men, if we continually pump out the message that men and masculinity are ideologically problematic (remind me again which toilet my anatomically and hormonally female transwoman friend should use), then do not be surprised if the backlash panders precisely to the very negative traits we are lambasting. It will be your failure though and just like you get the government you deserve, so you will get the men (and women) you deserve.