Lost boys: Adolescence debate misses the point

It is common to lament the role played by social media in corrupting young boys and men. Far harder to confront is the fact that so much of our culture has robbed them of meaning, status and respect.

Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo 3A29Y7F

Thank you for reading Reaction. As a subscriber you get our evening briefing from the team, and if you are a paying subscriber you get my weekly newsletter. I also wanted our readers to see this, by one of my favourite writers. Patrick Barrow has taken the debate this week in the UK about the TV drama Adolescence and penned something that gets well beyond the tabloid and social media talking points. It made me think. I hope you enjoy it. Iain Martin

I’m a boy. Or at least I was once. Those days are long ago. I’m more into the phase of life where I realise that ‘my words fork no lightning.’ But I do remember clearly that to be a boy was an active joy. Not merely being a child, you understand, but being a boy.

There came with it a certainty in what you had to do as part of the job spec. Run races, climb trees, linseed your cricket bat, kick a football in the dusk and look after girls, who were nice, if a little odd, but not as strong as you. There was, of course, the occasional amazonian exception but largely speaking the rules held good.

There were downsides, naturally. You weren’t allowed to cry, a chirpy optimism was de rigueur and you knew that, as life went on, you would be looking after everyone. It was your destiny and boyhood was spent in training for it.

For this, you got distant adoration, the occasional kiss and a sort of smiling indulgence on days when you were particularly boyish. When the girls and boys separated, the girls would whisper and giggle about nameless things and the boys would end up in an endless hierarchical battle of courage, prowess and marginal transgression.

This was seen as normal and not much cause to name a syndrome after.

Thus ended the Famous Five phase.

By adolescence, the power balance shifted somewhat. The great disruptor being that serpent in Eden, sex. Messy, literally and emotionally, and it’s true to say that while some boys never quite grew up near it or its impulses, some girls became rather too aware of its power. That’s life and part of God’s great tragicomedy.

For most though, it was the great experiment. And much joy and pain was to be had in blowing up the test tubes into which so much confusion had been poured while the Bunsen burner of lust and curiosity roared on.

These were experiments unguided by the Sauron’s eye of smartphones, laptops or anything much beyond late night foreign film or the occasional copy of Playboy. Life, as a whole, was both freer and more restricted.

It was freer because parental oversight was occasional and ungoverned by safetyism and neurosis. This, I should point out, was a mixed blessing. The unguarded fell through the cracks into the scandals that were the stuff of the Sunday papers. But then again, they still do. The promised lessons learned are never actually remembered.

It was more restricted because there was a prevailing sense of rules, societal expectation and a proliferation of authority figures. Not just coppers, teachers or park keepers but adults generally.

Enforcement by violence was ubiquitous. You got whacked at school and whacked at home. Off book, playground fights surrounded by a shrieking mob were commonplace. Casual violence of a serious nature was often meted out in corridors. Ambulances were a regular visitor to my secondary school. The sanction of caning or suspension came way before any thought of calling the police, who would probably have looked baffled.

I remember quite clearly, as one would, being threatened with a knife on two occasions and stabbed with an Afro-comb on another. There were kids who were well known as ‘troubled’ and went on to do all manner of things including trying to blow up a bus, committing a mortal stabbing, living off immoral earnings and committing suicide.

Up the junction, situations were also not infrequent. Boys school meets girls school and produces an infant school.

I point all this out in large part to dispel the notion that the past is entirely a foreign country.

Veteran readers old enough to recall Not the Nine O’ Clock News will know that the late 70s and early 80s became the stuff of satire: trendy social worker and angry academic agreeing that the best way to deal with all this was ‘to cut off their goolies’ (the obvious implication being that the perps had them in the first place).

It was, you see, a crisis of masculinity. Not the first either. Brief glances at social histories of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War will reveal that juvenile delinquency was widely acknowledged as a pressing problem. Absent serving fathers, exhausted mothers, and disrupted schooling all sowed the seeds of the Teddy Boys of the Fifties and the gangsterism of the early Sixties.

No smart phones were required, nor, indeed, had the much vaunted solution of National Service had notable effect. All that had happened was rambunctious youth had been trained in unarmed combat and the use of firearms.

Most boys emerged from my school experience as functional, responsible and to varying degrees successful human beings. That they did so was largely because, somewhere in their minds, they had retained a notion of what it was to be a man. To be tough – whatever that means – of course. To like a pint but hold it. To be a bit rough-edged on occasion (so much for the toxicity). But also to provide, to protect, and to be present and to contribute.

I met some of them for the first time in decades at a school reunion recently. Civil servants, City brokers, a pilot or two, a sprinkling of coppers, teachers and more. One of them even sports the sort of gong handed out by monarchs and last-minute absentees, including a consultant anaesthetist and a World Cup-winning rugby international.

So what are we to think, as we read agonised column after agonised column about the TV hit Adolescence lamenting the latest crisis in masculinity?

It must be phones, right? Well, up to a point. As history proves, they’re not a vital ingredient. They may, however, be the Devil’s seasoning to an already potent witches brew, because it is via them that the appeal to the seven deadly sins weaves its enchantment. Personally, I hate them. They are Orwell’s telescreen, albeit invited not enforced. The sinuous spirals of social media writhe in the pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth that they both create and encourage.

But, pausing only to point out that girls are no less immune to these forked tongues than boys, the blaming of the phone is like the blaming of Amazon for knife crime. It’s a culpability that looks at the means and not the motive, because without a void, the slitherings of the ‘influencer’ would have nothing to fill.

And a void there is. One could reel off the suicide rate, the academic underachievement, the poor health outcomes, the mean mortality and the general unhappiness by which men of all ages are increasingly defined. But these symptoms are well known. The cause less so.

Could it be that men have been robbed of meaning, status, relevance and respect? From little things to large, the very essence of manhood is being demeaned. Advertising has them as feckless, useless and pitiable. Their minor chivalries, from a held door to an offered seat, are now angrily rejected. Their best intentions from advice to protection are dismissed as patronising or paternalistic. Their struggles from adolescence to middle age are deemed laughable, and their value as one half of a parental duo, routinely portrayed as being run by “strong women”, as either unnecessary or marginal. Their restraint is condemned as a self-inflicted mental wound, their excesses as toxic.

Meanwhile, the industries, such as farms and military services, for which they were once destined, are either gone or negligible. Businesses now sacrifice their value and talent on the altar of diversity. Yet a connection is frequently drawn between success and wealth, a perception that has become so acute that those who fail to meet the standard often feel a sense of inadequacy. This is a notion fed by multimillionaire digital villain Andrew Tate, whose very existence is proof that the two things have no connection at all.

The great canon of male achievement from science, literature, exploration, music, medicine and communications is increasingly dismissed either as inherently wicked or a by-product of women not being in a position to compete

Their clubs and societies are demonised, even as women are encouraged to ‘lean-in’ to an increasingly extensive network of executive, industry and leadership organisations. The sports that gave them union, community, purpose, discipline and health are attacked as puerile, exclusive, too risky or, even worse, competitive.

More than this, the entirely reasonable pursuit of equality has turned into a battle of virtue in which women are always good, and masculinity is forever preceded by the all-pervasive adjective “toxic”. The joshing battle of the sexes is now pumped by a vituperative arms race that can benefit no party. That humanity is united in the fact that both sexes are capable of vice and virtue never seems to occur to those who participate in this contest.

Columnists are at liberty to make the most appalling commentary about men abound, even in the mainstream media, while female chief executives seem at ease in announcing discriminatory employment practices without any fear of sanction or rebuke.

So, I return to the boy I was. What would I tell him about his place in the world now? What would he intuitively know? Where might he end up, beside being a baffled father in a police station? Who would he end up listening to beyond Andrew Tate, because somebody tore down everything he was made to be and replaced it with nothing?

To be a boy was such a joy and now it’s just a sadness. I was one then, I have one now, I won’t lose him to this madness.