Like, it seems, everybody else, I’ve been watching Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s brilliant and terrible Netflix series Adolescence. It does what only great drama can do, which is to make a big thing in the outside world feel intimate and personal. In this case, the big thing is boyhood, a condition hauntingly embodied in Owen Cooper’s searing performance as a 13-year-old accused of murdering a girl he knows from school.
Adolescence is set, of course, in England, but it has a particular resonance in Ireland. It brings to mind the terrible death of Ana Kriegel in Lucan in 2018. Her killers, Boy A and Boy B, were also 13-year-old boys. And like the kid that Cooper plays in the series, those boys came from stable, loving families. They were not freaks of nature but products of a profoundly troubled culture.
Much of the trouble is certainly to do with the way feral capitalism is conducting a vast uncontrolled experiment on children’s brains, flooding them with pornographic images and brutal misogyny. The social media giants have been allowed to frack adolescent minds, extracting vast profits from sedimentary needs and desires while leaving kids and families to deal with the toxic sludge. One of the reasons Donald Trump is going to war with the European Union is that it is the only major power that has shown any real interest in protecting children from the depredations of his tech bro buddies.
But the crisis of boyhood is not all about mobile phones and Instagram accounts. Porn and misogynistic influencers exacerbate the crisis – but they have not created it. The underlying problem of boyhood is manhood. We rightly think of adolescence as a rite of passage. But passage into what? Into a distorted and dangerous idea of what it means to be a man.
While watching Adolescence I kept thinking of a presentation I attended in the US last autumn – a talk that left me close to tears. It was given by the development psychologist Niobe Way. She probably knows more about adolescent boys than anyone else on the planet, having spent nearly four decades working with them to understand their social and emotional lives.
Way’s talk was so moving because it consisted almost entirely of direct quotes from boys. The first set of quotes were from 13 to 15-year-olds. The second were from those same boys at 16-18. So we were given a kind of “before” and “after” diptych – what these kids felt when they were entering adolescence and when they were leaving it.
What Way has found in her deep encounters with the boys in early adolescence is the overwhelming importance of intimacy, trust and friendship. Friendship, that is, with other boys. They were acutely sensitive to and articulate about the need to have someone of their own age they could trust with secrets – which meant to them not so much sex as problems in their families.
[ Adolescence in teenagers’ own words: ‘Parents have absolutely no idea’Opens in new window ]
These boys said things such as “sometimes you need to spill your heart out to somebody and if there is nobody there then you gonna keep it inside, then you will have anger. So you need somebody to talk to always”. The best friend is the one to whom “I can just tell them everything pretty much, like they won’t make fun of me, like they won’t laugh or anything, like if I told them something you know, embarrassing”.
In this stage of early adolescence, Way’s interlocutors were willing openly to express love for their friends: “When I need help they’re there for me, when I feel lonely they comfort me. You could tell them anything ... it’s like you’re giving yourself to them”. One of them said: “I think our relationship is wonderful because we, like, I can’t explain the feelings that I have for him. If something would happen to him, I probably won’t feel right.”
Going into adolescence, therefore, these kids had a very sophisticated understanding of their own emotional needs. They knew that what they needed was a deep intimacy that was not sexualised. They understood how vital these relationships were to their own mental health: “without friends you will go crazy or mad or you’ll be lonely all of the time, be depressed”.
The heartbreak, though, is in what happens next. Way explains in her book Rebels With a Cause that “as the boys in my studies reached middle to late adolescence their language in the interviews began to shift from love and desire to frustration, anger, sadness or simply indifference”. They had let go of the intimate friendships that were so vital to them. As one boy put it: “like my friendship with my best friend is fading ... it’s like a DJ used his crossfader and started fading it slowly and slowly and now I’m like halfway through the cross-fade.”
Why does this sundering happen? Because the boys are becoming “men”. The culture instructs them that manhood is about putting on what the kids themselves call “a suit of armour”. Emotional vulnerability and the human need for intimate connection must be denied. One boy told Way he had built “a brick wall around me: I don’t want nobody knowing me and being able to break me apart and do anything they want with me”. Way concludes that “maturing” in this culture means “becoming stoic and not needing relationships any more”. In this passage into manhood, emotional sensitivity and non-sexualised love are ditched as female – or, worse, gay – qualities. As one 16-year-old puts it, “it might be nice to be a girl because then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless”.
Way’s studies are heartbreaking – but also oddly hopeful. What the young boys she talks to show again and again is that there is nothing “natural” about male violence. Boys want love and trust and intimacy just as much as girls do. The manning-up that is all the rage in the world of Trump and Andrew Tate is as brutal towards boys as it is dangerous for women.
