Talking about a revolution

It's going to take a major reset to fix the crisis of masculinity

Screenshot from official trailer for Adolesence

I’ve been sick for the past week, and the only thing I felt up to doing was watching TV, which I don’t do particularly often. For the first couple of days, all I could handle was romcoms, so I dove into the Bridget Jones films, which I’d never seen. I worked my way up to the current season of White Lotus, then a Pelicot documentary, then topped it all off with an afternoon of binge-watching Adolescence.

I see parallels to the Pelicot case everywhere these days, and Adolescence was no exception. Throughout the Pelicot trial, my overwhelming thought was that men are broken. Yes, many of these men were ordinary, but many of them had troubled relationships with women, and an astounding number of them had deeply troubled childhoods. Some of them had been sexually abused as children, others physically or emotionally abused. Those who reported having happy childhoods were the outliers.

One of the things that has stuck with me from the Pelicot trial is the testimony of a psychological expert who said that the men suffered from relatively banal shortcomings, such as low self-esteem, and found themselves in a situation that made it easy for them to commit rape. They weren’t extraordinary, just in a particular place at a particular time. In other words, any number of men could become rapists given a certain set of circumstances.

His words echoed in my mind as I watched the third episode of Adolescence. When Jamie, a beautiful 13-year-old boy, starts telling the woman doing his psychological assessment that he knows he’s ugly and bad at sports, I thought of the Pelicot rapists. They did terrible things to Gisèle and deserved the guilty verdicts they got, but most of them seemed more damaged than evil.

And not just them. I know many incredible young people, boys and girls, who have poor visions of themselves. What is going on? Social media, surely, but it’s more than that. Many of the Pelicot rapists came of age before the advent of the Internet.

What is clear is that a crisis of self-esteem has repercussions that extend far beyond the individual. In the Pelicot case, that crisis resulted in mass rape. In the fictionalized world of Adolescence, murder. But what are the costs on a wider scale?

Experts have identified a myriad of elements as lying at the root of the problem, and it is impossible to single out just one, but it’s clear that the Internet and social media have exacerbated it. The experts in the Pelicot trial talked about the anonymity of online platforms making it possible for the men to engage in conversations and to share fantasies that they never would have had they been face-to-face with their interlocutors. And I think few would dispute that social media has been harmful for our children—least of all our children themselves.

So we know we have a problem. But what’s the solution? We can limit our kids’ access to social media, educate them about the falsity of it, teach them about authenticity, but let’s face it: social media isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s not just young people who are affected by it. And then there’s the problem of the Internet and all the anonymous chat rooms where men feel free to explore their most vile fantasies. We’re not going to shut down the web.

Before I got sick, I was down in Carpentras and Avignon doing interviews for the book. The deeper I get into the reporting, the more questions I have and the more problematic men’s views of women seem. The trouble is, that view is neither culturally specific nor unique to the time we live in. It is universal, or nearly so, and millennia old. In other words, nothing short of a complete cultural reorientation is likely to fix things.

Our work telling girls that they can be astronauts and aren’t responsible for household tasks is well underway—despite countertrends such as the tradwife movement. We have made far less progress in letting boys know that their worth is not linked to the attractiveness of the woman on their arm, that emotional vulnerability is a sign of strength rather than weakness, and that dominance is not the key to their masculinity or their happiness.

In Adolescence, Jamie says that he asked his victim out after she had been dumped because he figured she’d be vulnerable and less likely to reject him. Boys need to be raised to believe that girls are allowed to have their own preferences and that expressing a desire or rebuffing an advance from a boy doesn’t call his masculinity into question. As Soraya Chemaly wrote, we need to teach our sons to build relationships based on connection rather than control.

But who is going to do that in a society in which the opposite messages are widely accepted and in which we all have been raised on a diet of patriarchy? Even many people who call themselves feminists have trouble completely rejecting the norms we grew up with—myself included—and those who do are seen as radical and extreme.

We live in a world in which the tenet of male dominance has been widely digested on the most subconscious of levels, and for many, many centuries. Nothing short of a complete rupture with that way of thinking is necessary to free not only women but also boys and men from the strictures that prevent them from living authentic and fulfilled lives. But how do we break the cycle?