"Patriarchy" Doesn't Make 13-Year-Old Boys From Intact Families Stab Girls

Adolescence could have been a profound tale. Instead, it is a fantastical, hackneyed assault on responsible, traditional men.

In Adolescence, the much-discussed Netflix drama released last month, Jamie Miller—just 13 years old and from an intact, white, working-class family in the north of England—has committed the premeditated murder of a female classmate who was bullying him online.

Being called an “incel” by this girl and her friends made Jamie angry. So angry that he borrowed a friend’s kitchen knife, followed her, and stabbed her to death in a parking lot.

Before I get into the profound problems with this show and its reception, I should note that Adolescence features world-class acting and takes on eternal themes: love and loss, family and fatherhood, anger and helplessness. It is made up of sharp vignettes in which single cut scenes make already raw interactions even more visceral. At one point in the first of the four episodes, Jamie’s dad—a tough, honorable man—cries in resigned horror at the footage showing his beloved son committing this heinous crime. The scene is any parent’s worst nightmare, and its acting is superb.

If the show’s creators had told Jamie’s story simply as a riveting (though horrifying) tale that embodies real aspects of the human experience, Adolescence would have been uniformly profound.

Instead, by its second episode, the show becomes a master class in how to cheapen otherwise excellent art through over-determination and ideological politicization.

There is potential value in the prescient treatment of the online right and the plausible effects of the misogynistic “manosphere” on an average-looking pubescent boy. Unfortunately, Adolescence traffics mostly in a progressive fantasy. In this ideological make-believe, traditional masculinity and the traditional family are the breeding ground for, rather than a bulwark against, toxic masculinity.

Male Violence and Female Fear

In episode two, a 40-something Black police detective, fairly senior in his profession, is somehow entirely unaware, in the year 2025 (a quarter century after Columbine), that premeditated murders by white teenage boys are typically mixed up with issues around popularity. Why is this seasoned cop so unbelievably naive? Because he’s tall, handsome, and muscular, and was popular as a teen. That is, he has proximate access to the spoils of toxic masculinity even if, as a faithful husband and caring father, he spurns those spoils. Accordingly, he needs his teenage son—not nearly as good-looking as his father, and thus implicitly vulnerable to the manosphere himself—to explain to him that emojis have meanings. Again, this is a successful police detective in 2025, who we are supposed to believe has been inured, by the blinders of his traditional masculinity, to any knowledge whatsoever about the online right, the misogyny it peddles to teenage boys, and the fact that teens often communicate in ways that are opaque to adults.

Then, in episode three, a discussion between Jamie and the attractive, white, 30-something female psychologist interrogating him reveals that the boy’s dad has never hit him and rarely gets angry, but he once tore down a shelf when he was enraged and, another time, was disappointed by his son’s subpar performance in a soccer game. We also learn—brace yourself—that Jamie’s grandfather likes to go to pubs and that Jamie would like to touch girls in sexual ways. In the course of this conversation, Jamie blows up at the psychologist twice, physically intimidates her, and then taunts her for being afraid.

From all this we are supposed to gather, with the good doctor, that Jamie’s violence toward women, from screaming to murder, has something—something societal, something systemic—to do with his dad’s penchant for sports, his grandfather’s taste for beer, and his own heterosexual impulses. What about the thousands of boys with beer-guzzling grandfathers, sports-fan fathers, and straight male libidos who do not murder female classmates in response to online slights? We’re not supposed to entertain that question. In the Rousseauian imagination of Adolescence, evil resides not in the eternal, individual human soul, but in the socially constructed, misogynist ether.

Finally, in episode four, Jamie’s dad explodes in anger at the neighborhood youths who vandalized his plumbing truck, shaking one of them by the collar and threatening him before throwing a can of paint at the ground in the parking lot of a hardware store. Later, he confesses to his wife that he tried to be better than his dad, who beat him with a belt; but, as the day’s events show, he ultimately failed because he still has a temper. In a last, heart-wrenching scene, the bereaved father tucks Jamie’s teddy bear into bed while offering a tortured apology to his son.

The message is clear. Men who approximate what has traditionally passed for the virtuous iteration of masculinity—faithful marriage, well-fed family, blue-collar work—are, if they ever lose their tempers in ways that upper-middle-class women who become psychologists find jarring, self-evidently responsible for the creation of 13-year-old woman-killers. In progressive fantasyland, evil is not an endemic part of each individual’s human nature, but an omnipresent, amorphous outgrowth of patriarchy as manifested by Western men.

Beware of cops, of plumbers, and of anyone who doesn’t look upon them, as upon all traditionally masculine men, with preemptive contempt.

Progressive Fantasy Is Not Reality

Michael Hogan writes in The Guardian that Adolescence “isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction” but “unavoidable fact.”

Except it isn’t.

The UK has indeed been facing an epidemic of stabbings. These crimes are typically perpetrated both by and against males between 15 and 24 from unstable families and/or living in poverty. So, in reality, contra the progressive imagination, the number of 13-year-old boys from two-parent homes plotting and planning to stab girls (let alone actually doing so) is vanishingly small. There’s no reason to think that will change.

Does this mean that 13-year-old boys from functional homes are unaffected by the growing “manosphere” online? That such boys would not benefit from more direct and meaningful engagement with their fathers and other male role models? That social media use is good for teenagers’ emotional and social development?

Of course not.

Indeed, if Adolescence would stay in its lane—”all-too-plausible fiction”—rather than perpetuate the blatant lie that Jamie is some kind of male prototype, the show might have engendered reflection and conversation along exactly these lines. But honest engagement with questions of manhood and masculinity does not interest today’s progressives.

Writing in The Atlantic in February, Jill Filopovic offers an eloquent articulation of how the female-dominated left now views the old-school masculinity vilified by Adolescence. According to a traditional understanding of manhood, Filopovic allows, “real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate the kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority. There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like me are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect.”

Adolescence is powered by the progressive fantasy that there is some as yet untried third option. That we can reject men’s protection of others as sexist, denigrate high moral standards as relative, view marital and professional commitment as merely an individual lifestyle choice, and insist that men evince virtues no differently than women—and somehow produce a society that women like Filopovic would like to live in.

What mainstream feminists like Filopovic and progressives more broadly fail to realize is that the broad denigration of the “traditional model” for virtuous, protective, competent masculinity is precisely what leads, predictably and invariably, to the infantile, embittered, and entitled “masculinity of MAGA.”

This is why near-universal respect for the traditional model was so dominant for so long. Until quite recently, almost no one in any position of influence was airheaded enough to believe that the cultural, political, and sexual manners and mores of most men would prove essentially indistinguishable from those of most elite, college-educated women if we just “smashed the patriarchy.” Until quite recently, most people understood that the indiscriminate, purposeless aggression and misogyny that Filopovic calls “MAGA masculinity” is not a more extreme iteration of yesteryear’s protective, authoritative patriarchy, but what inevitably emerges when you smash it.

We should dignify, respect, and support males like Jamie’s dad—culturally, politically, and economically—for the hard and necessary work they do. Not just because the cultural elevation of traditional, Judeo-Christian-coded manhood militates against the misogyny of today’s manosphere (though this is empirically true), but also because traditional manhood is really just what unisex virtue tends to look like when manifested by males in modernity.

And if we fail—as we appear to be failing—to reinvigorate respect for traditional manhood at scale, will 13-year-olds begin knifing their female classmates en masse? Probably not. Contra Adolescence and its progressive fans, evil is the opposite of systemic.

Just like each individual’s human experience, which is what great stories are supposed to convey.

The fictional Jamie is a complex, tragic character ensconced in a compelling, vivid ecology. That could have made for such an insightful, evocative tale.

If only Adolescence had just told it.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at Law and Liberty.