The Dangerous-Son Problem
Scott, a father of two boys ages 11 and 13, recalled recently hearing one say to the other, “What color is your Bugatti?” “That’s an Andrew Tate–ism,” Scott explained. “Someone’s criticizing him and he uses that as a retort: ‘Anything you have to say to me doesn’t matter because you don’t have a Bugatti and I do.’”
Scott was only vaguely familiar with Tate, a central figure in the so-called manosphere, who has been accused of human trafficking and has a massive social-media following among boys and young men. But social media disseminates content like bits of microplastics that build up in our bodies — and the bodies of our children. These cultural fragments — remarks, jokes, expressions — are often so far removed from their source material that kids have no idea where they even come from. This is how young people are exposed to the culture of the manosphere whether or not they even look for it. Scott sometimes catches bits and pieces of it in his sons’ conversations. “They talk about ‘pulling baddies.’ Chad, sigma — those kinds of words are ubiquitous among kids who have access to any screens at all. Maybe you don’t even need screens; maybe you just have to be a kid at school. The whole ‘brain rot’ way of speaking is very much coming out of that world.”
Like millions of parents, Scott has found the recent Netflix series Adolescence dreadfully resonant. Since its release, the show has been among the streamer’s most watched globally, inspiring a fresh round of impassioned hand-wringing about the influence of the manosphere. Its four episodes tell the story of the aftermath of a teenage girl’s murder. The perpetrator, we learn in the first episode, is a sweet-faced 13-year-old named Jamie, brilliantly played by Owen Cooper in an understated, natural style that makes him feel like a proxy for every young boy you’ve ever met, including, if you’re a parent, your own. Many people I spoke to said they gritted their teeth for the duration. “I wanted to throw up the entire time,” one mother of two told me.
While Adolescence’s ambitious form and impeccable casting make it some of the best prestige TV in recent memory, its record-breaking popularity gestures to a phenomenon that has to do not with the quality of its production but rather with a gut feeling shared by parents of teens: Something’s seriously off. We’ve given our children access to media technology that very few of us are capable of managing, and now they’re consuming content they are developmentally unequipped to handle.
No one knows what to do. In one corner, we’ve got the idea, pushed by Jonathan Haidt (author of the now-ubiquitous The Anxious Generation), that kids need more independence among their own peers, that “quality time” with adults is not what they’re missing. In the other corner, whenever we leave our kids alone, it’s far too easy for them to get sucked into toxic online vortices. Adolescence seems to argue that the example set by parents is the last line of defense against the manosphere — no pressure! The takes on this show have been coming in hot since it debuted, but they tend to be a little too smart for their own good. For the parents I talked to, it was impossible to watch without mapping their own experience onto the characters, as their children’s insecurities and their own flaws were brought vividly to life. (Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.)
“There’s this belief among moms I know,” said my friend Sonia, who has a 12-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, “where as long as we’re cool and self-assured and talk to our sons a lot, then for sure our sons will see women as human beings. But that doesn’t feel true to me. I think the way people relate to their moms isn’t always the same way they relate to other women. Just because I’m a cool feminist, my son will share my beliefs? I worry that on some level I’m relying on that. I’m like, He can watch all male YouTubers all the time because he has me around to remind him that women are worthy of respect! Yeah, I’m not so sure.”
Nikita teaches seventh grade in a rural school district and found Adolescence upsettingly familiar. She has daily conflicts with boys who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, which she saw echoed in Jamie’s repeated insistence that he didn’t do anything. Their conflicts in class seem to her like bids for a reaction from their peers.
“They’re looking for this hit of dopamine, which can come from negative and conflictual experiences as much as it can come from their phones, from doing sports. They look for dopamine wherever they can find it — even in conflict with an authority figure,” said Nikita.
Teenage boys’ extreme self-consciousness about perceived attractiveness is another part of Adolescence. (In episode two, we learn that Katie, the girl who was murdered, had called Jamie an incel in an Instagram comment.) Nikita has seen this obsession with looks in the classroom: “In seventh grade, I have boys who are just on the cusp of puberty, and some of them feel so small. I had them do New Year’s vision boards where they had to imagine their 2025 and what their hopes and resolutions were, and they were focused on their appearance — ‘I want to grow five inches.’ ‘I need to be bigger, taller, stronger.’ I think that’s always probably been hovering around boys anyway, but it’s more crystallized.”
Scott has noticed this in his son, too: “My older son is problematically vain. There’s a part of teenagerhood that’s always been about that, but it’s been injected with steroids. He thinks it’s the only thing that matters. If he can just be thought of as attractive, he’s won the whole thing. And I’m like, Oh God, please don’t hang your coat on that.”
These anxieties around looks are everywhere online. “Whenever I go on Reddit, it feeds me this page, r/malegrooming, and it’s guys polling the group about how to make themselves more handsome,” said Sonia. “And so often it’s guys in their early 20s being like, ‘I hate the way I look. What do I do?’ I just want to hug my kids and tell them, ‘Go get a hobby, be an interesting person, and get the fuck off the internet.’”
But in practice, devices are already so deeply ingrained into their routines. On an intellectual level, Sonia knows that leaving kids alone on an iPad is “like leaving them alone with the oven on,” but she lets that idea “fall out of my head every day. I’ll often find myself in my peaceful house, and that’s because my son’s in the next room watching YouTube shorts. And I completely forget it’s happening.”
Even parents who try to resist find it increasingly difficult as their children hit the middle-school years. Diane, a mom of three, told me her eldest, at 12, felt horribly isolated because he was the only kid in his class without a phone. Diane and her husband thought their community of parents had an understanding that they would all wait until their kids were older to give them phones, but in seventh grade, nearly everyone else caved. “It made me so sad,” she said. “He’s thriving academically on paper, but then he comes home from school and he’s like, ‘I don’t want to be at this school anymore because everyone is on their phones, they’re playing Brawl Stars, they sit next to each other at lunch and play, and I can’t be part of it.’ He was like, ‘There are so many things about myself I can’t control, but this is one thing I can.’” Diane and her husband gave him an old phone to use for Brawl Stars at school only, and their son was delighted. “It’s hard not to feel like the slippery slope has started, though,” she said.
While we catastrophize and play out the worst possible outcomes, our kids are just trying to live through their own adolescence, all while keeping a critical eye on their anxiety-ridden parents. My own 14-year-old son refused to watch Adolescence with his father and me because he assumed it would be “too dark.” He overheard us nervously discussing it afterward and was compelled to interject. “Bro, but, like, I swear,” he said to me, somewhat exasperated. “You and Dad always see the world in such a dark way! You never see the positive!”
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