A new social contagion has taken hold in Britain. It’s spreading like a pox via the internet. It’s worming its way into people’s minds and making them think daft and even dangerous things.
No, I’m not talking about Andrew Tate and the other lowlifes of the “manosphere”. I’m talking about the insane fawning over Adolescence, the Netflix drama about a 13-year-old boy who kills a female classmate after being brainwashed by Tate and other braggarts on the internet.
Honestly, it’s like a new religion. Critics are genuflecting at the altar of Adolescence in the way we once might have bowed to the Holy Bible. They see it not only as a gripping drama about a dreadful crime but as a divine revelation about the struggles facing boys in the modern world.
The Australian
Which, of course, it’s not. In fact it’s an exercise in diversion and/or transference (I’m no expert in psychology). We’ll get to this soon.
It is “complete perfection”, says the Times. It could “save lives”, gushes the Guardian. It should be shown in schools, says British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, so that we may deliver troubled teens from the devilish lure of “toxic masculinity”. Why not be done with it and build a Church of Adolescence, where every boy aged 11 to 16 may come to have their original sin of blokeishness washed away? This chattering-class contagion, this cultish idolising of a TV drama, is starting to unnerve me even more than the crap spouted by Tate.
Adolescence is a four-part series that tells the story of Jamie, a teen in an unnamed English town. He seems sweet, if a little vexed, like all adolescent boys. But darkness dwells in him. He stabs to death a young girl and we soon discover why: he has been morally corrupted by the fiends of the manosphere.
And, of course, he happens to be white.
[…] The series is not without its merits. The first episode, where we discover what Jamie did, is a taut and heart-rending hour of TV. The acting is first-class. But is it, as the Guardian insists, an “urgent and vital” drama whose “killer combination” of “artistic virtuosity” and “gut-punch power” may help repair our broken societies “before even more people die”?
Erm, no. It’s a four-part TV series, not the Second Coming. In fact, where Adolescence may be good drama, as a reflection on the state of the nation it is worse than useless. It has foisted on to the world an utterly skewed view of 21st-century Britain and its boys.
Let me put this plainly: it is unheard of for a working-class boy from a stable family to commit a horrific knife crime because he saw stupid stuff on the internet.
That’s the story Adolescence tells. Jamie comes from a warm family and has a strong dad who loves him. Yet he suddenly finds himself in the grip of blind murderous fury because a girl posted a mick-taking emoji on his Instagram page (I’m not making this up).
This isn’t an “urgent and vital” truth the world must hear – it’s hogwash. It’s a scenario that exists entirely in the heads of Adolescence’s aloof producers and its delirious cheerleaders in the cultural elite.
It’s no wonder that the elite are fawning over it.
The truth about knife crime in Britain, and the online subcultures that glorify it, is far more complicated. And far more discomfiting. The terrible reality is that Britain’s black boys from fatherless homes are the most likely to get swept up in knife violence.
A government study in 2022 found that black Londoners, despite making up only 13 per cent of the capital’s population, were responsible for 61 per cent of knife murders. They’re likelier to be the victims, too: 45 per cent of knife murder victims in London were black, mostly youths. The reasons for this are complex and tragic.
[…] Or what about the subculture of Islamism? Hundreds of Britain’s Muslim men and boys were enticed into the murderous arms of Islamic State. There was a point in the 2010s when more British Muslims were fighting for jihadist militias overseas than were serving in Britain’s own armed forces. The violence these young men visited on women, Christians, Kurds and homosexuals in Syria and Iraq was truly hellish. Yet you want us to have sleepless nights over a fictional skinny kid called Jamie?
The image of Britain pushed by Adolescence is, in essence, misinformation. It is spectacularly unusual for a working-class boy from a decent, productive family to be sucked into extreme violence. That so many smug cultural influencers around the world are currently wringing their hands over a kid like Jamie is surreal.
It’s horrible, too. It is a grotesque libel of Britain’s working-class youths, the vast majority of whom are good kids who want to do right by their families and communities. Of course, the reason the woke elites are so drawn to Adolescence is precisely because its tragic villain is a white kid from the working class. It’s always open season on that section of society. You risk being accused of Islamophobia or racism if you worry out loud about certain cultural tensions.
And let’s not forget the British PM has, if not literally then virtually, declared Islamophobia enemy number one.
But fearing white kids? Stirring up a moral panic about that most dreaded of social groups: white working-class men? Knock yourselves out.
[…] This could all backfire badly. The reason some boys fall under the spell of creeps such as Tate is because they feel so demeaned by mainstream society. And now, thanks to Adolescence, all they’re seeing is headline after headline about their “toxic masculinity”, about what a lethal menace they are.
It’s a dark irony: a drama designed to raise awareness about boys going to dark places on the internet could end up encouraging more of them to do so.
The series obviously uses the manosphere as a substitute for Islamism for, well, obvious reasons. The truth though is the manosphere is difficult to define. Are there parts of it that are misogynistic? Yes. Are there parts of it that promote what can be fairly called toxic masculinity? Again, yes. But the one thing it is not, is violent, especially compared to Islamism. Adolescence reminds me of the terrible The Handmaid’s Tale where the author substitutes radical Islam for Christianity.
The key to understanding all this is that reality is racist. Islamism instead of the manosphere, even though the former is far more realistic: God no, that would be raaacist. Knife stabbings by Muslim immigrants and fatherless black kids: Raaaacist!
But at least it shows how backed in the corner Starmer and his ilk are when they can’t acknowledge reality but can’t keep turning a blind eye to knife crime and the threat of radical Islam. It’s no wonder they are fawning over Adolescence as it provides them with an escape hatch. Unfortunately for them the British public isn’t stupid and my bet is they are seeing right through it.
