Adolescence movie is a wake-up call to fathers
Jaimie and his father in a still from the movie Adolescence. Photo Netflix
Christian Life
If you listen to women, you are a loser. That is what Andrew Tate propagates on his video channel. According to him, women are the property of men. And he has an influential voice today, since many young boys have no other role model besides him. Where are their fathers?
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Do you know what a red 100 emoji means on Instagram? Or a yellow heart? Or kidney beans? Nowadays, youth are living in a parallel online world. And this can be a huge problem. The movie Adolescence shows what can happen if children get stuck in the algorithms of social media, and parents are living in ignorant bliss.
Jaimie Miller is only 13 when he is arrested on the suspicion of murder. Camera footage shows how he mercilessly stabs Katie Leonard, a girl from his school. It takes a long time before the police and a psychiatrist are able to unravel the dark mystery of why a young teenager would do this.
Violence
Often, people believe that something must have gone terribly wrong in the youth and family life of a murderer. But the worrying aspect of Adolescence is that Jaimie comes from an average middle class family, the one that could live next doors.
How is this possible? The answer lies in the world that is unknown to many adults. The one of misogyny, emojis and cyberbullying. The one where a red 100 refers to the statement that 80 per cent of women are attracted to only 20 per cent of men, and where a yellow heart is a sign of friendship and a kidney beans emoji means that someone is an incel (involuntary celibate), a man who will never have a woman.
“Women are hypocritical and demanding, men should put them in their place once and for all.”
These messages are all related to what is known as the “manosphere”, where content creators promote macho behaviour and propagate anti-feminism, masculine values and sexist statements. They blame women and girls for all kinds of problems in society. Often, these manospheres encourage violence against women and girls.
Bubble
Well, you may say, this is so absurd, my children would never engage in this. They are generally good people, have decent marks at school, and get a Christian upbringing.
However, adolescents are very easily drawn into this male bubble, even when they are not specifically looking for it. Two Dutch journalists put it to the test. On TikTok, they pretended to be a 16-year-old boy. Within two minutes, the algorithms presents videos to them with the hashtags #motivation, #mindset en #succes, commonly used by people in the manosphere.
And when TikTok notices that a user looks at this type of content longer than at an average post, it will show more and more of the same. Soon, the videos are about sigma males, men who turn their pain into power and are independent.
Within two hours, Andrew Tate enters the screen with financial advice. According to him, the problem is that men are stuck in the matrix. With that, he refers to a conspiracy theory that society is run by an elite that wants to enslave people. Tate advices young men to escape out of this simulation to the real world where they can earn loads of money with crypto coins, e-commerce and drop-shipping.
But that is not the only meaning of the matrix. Often, it refers to other conspiracy theories. Good-looking and muscled men claim, for example, that 90 per cent of men go unnoticed by women and that women only want the best. The main message in all these posts: Women are hypocritical and demanding, men should put them in their place once and for all.
Algorithm
These ideas are not new. They have been discussed on special forums for years. However, via social media, they are now accessible for everyone. And you don't have to search specifically for hate against women to encounter the content. Anyone who likes expensive cars, wants to improve his health or feels lonely risks being drawn into the rabbit hole, and it is difficult to get out of it again as the algorithm will only take the user further into the manosphere.
Dutch psychiatrist Esther van Fenema warns that especially young boys are vulnerable to falling for the beliefs Andrew Tate is preaching. Today's polarisation very much contributes to that, she says in an interview. Either people belong to the woke and not so masculine side, or they are part of the group around Andrew Tate. Role models that are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum are barely around.
Part of the cause of this polarisation, Van Fenema says, is that there has been a lot of attention to women's rights, gender equality and diversity. And with that, boys have been left on their own, she warns. As a result, teenagers fall for the “toxic masculinity” that Andrew Tate propagates.
Spectrum
So, what can be done against that? Psychiatrist Van Fenema stresses that it is crucial for boys to have a role model they can identify themselves with. In other words, responsible adults should fill that position before figures like Andrew Tate do it.
It is important, says Van Fenema, that these role models show a diversity of masculinity so that adolescents realise that it is not as black-white as the online world often insinuates. Between “woke and not so masculine” and “Andrew Tate's masculinity” is a spectrum of masculine features and characteristics, she explains. In other words, boys should know that they don't have to be like Tate in order to be masculine.
Mother
The movie Adolescence shows how important the role of fathers is. Part of what made Jaimie vulnerable to the influences of the manosphere was his feeling that his father was emotionally absent in his life and did not give him the validation he desperately needed.
Therefore, Adolescence is a wake-up call for today's fathers. Many adult men have remained children at heart, and not in a positive sense, former college teacher Nico van der Voet wrote earlier in the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad. “They work to enjoy their money and with their phone or a bigger screen, they fill their spare time.”
“Boys want to see something, an example. Someone who sits next to them, even when it is in silence. Someone who says: “I don't always understand you, but I am here.””
And this emotional absence can lead to huge problems for their children. At a young age, when boys discover that they are different from their mother because she is a woman, they start detaching themselves, coach, teacher and journalist Nathan Vos writes in an opinion article.
If that happens in a good way, they attach themselves to someone else, someone who sees them and is able to let them go when necessary, someone whom they can be themselves with. Ideally, this person is their father, Vos writes, or someone else who can show them the way from boyhood to manhood.
Struggle
However, if the attachment does not take place, boys will start looking for someone else to identify with, he points out. Online coaches seem to be a good alternative for them with their advice to be strong and independent. But they do not talk back, and neither provide good advice on healthy relationships. Only loneliness remains, according to Vos. And then it is only a matter of time until the fuse is lit, and until it goes terribly wrong, as it happened to Jaimie Miller in Adolescence.
Boys search incredibly hard for direction, Vos writes in his article. “They don't want a sermon, or to be in the right. They want to see something, an example. Someone who sits next to them, even when it is in silence. Someone who says: “I don't always understand you, but I am here.””
Nico van der Voet agrees. Even though fathers do not have the same authoritarian role as they used to have in the past, they should realise that they can still get respect and authority if they have something to pass down to their children, he writes. “Especially Christian fathers have something important to say to their children.”
It is as writer Sophie Braut from Norway points out in Dagen: “Christians have a fundamentally positive view of gender differences. It is the most constructive contribution we can make to society to improve the situation of men (and, with it, women). The Bible's words about mutual subordination are a mindset based on respect and admiration for the opposite sex. In this lies a corrective to the Marxist “struggle for privilege” attitude that has served us very badly in the 140 years since Marx’s death.”
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