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Last weekend I was on a panel at the Oxford Literary Festival (sponsored by The Telegraph, if you please) and the topic was the Southport riots. In considering the subject, the excellent Tony Sewell, aka the Lord Sewell of Sanderstead, aired the view that one big cause of social unrest in Britain is that white working class boys are left behind. They’re bottom of the barrel, whether in school, higher education prospects, health, happiness, or projected income. Sewell, the chair of the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, knows the stats well. His report found that “systemic racism” is not what lies behind disparities in outcome in Britain: it’s class, and poor white youth, mostly boys, do by far the worst.
This wasn’t the first time the topic of struggling working class white boys hit the headlines. There has long been a panic about the effect that feminism, and more recently MeToo, and the discourse of “toxic” masculinity have had on their psyches, leaving them no choice but to turn to that barbarian Andrew Tate in droves.
The topic has once more caught fire since Netflix’s Adolescence came out, the miniseries about an English teenage (white, working class) boy accused of the murder of a female classmate.
So revered is Adolescence as a – perhaps the – document for our times that
Keir Starmer has on multiple occasions intoned reference to it in Parliament, mistakenly and hilariously calling it a documentary. It has provoked anti-woke fury among those who believe that a white boy is the fall guy in a story of violence by another ethnic group; it is always safe, they point out, to blame a white cisgendered heterosexual male.
And it has provoked that whiny mixture of faux indignation and performative sentimentalism among those who feel, as their sons turn to Tate (or know boys who do), that they must hold their nose and take seriously the idea that perhaps this squashed, left-out, derided demographic – once the backbone of the Empire – has been given a raw deal since in the decades since wokeness began its institutional creep.
Despite its zeitgeistiness, I have refused to watch Adolescence. I may be among the last few, at least in the chattering classes, who have not tuned in.
There are several reasons for my refusal. One is that the miniseries is obviously far too depressing. When I turn on a streaming platform these days, I want something jollier, something more along the lines of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or The White Lotus.
The second is that, while I recognise that this group is suffering, I simply don’t feel inclined to indulge in either the huge pity party, or the jamboree of toxic-masculinity-awareness-raising, that Adolescence has inspired.
Yes, masculinity is in crisis, but the truth is that masculinity has always been in crisis – ask any social historian. And as with all moments of media-friendly crises of masculinity, we find ourselves talking about men like they are helpless little flowers. It is odd.
Working-class white boys are found to be treated badly, and therefore to do badly and act badly. One of the big issues cited is that they don’t know their worth or purpose anymore in a society constantly calling them “toxic”.
Very sad, but it is possible to get over such slights and thrive anyway. Women faced derision for almost all of history for simply being women – they were seen as neurotic, nervous, intellectually inferior, limited to backbreaking domestic labour and breeding. Any who tried to go beyond this were stymied, ridiculed and often simply barred.
Of course there was no educational encouragement or even guaranteed access, unlike that enjoyed by every single child in Britain today. And it was completely acceptable for husbands to beat or rape wives seen as intransigent, or just irritatingly alive. And still women by and large obeyed the law and tried to get on.
Some sniping about “toxic masculinity” is hardly a life sentence.
And if boys are small men, and men are meant to be tough (which is why so many are frustrated now, we are told, in this “feminised” society) can’t they hold strong even in the face of adversity?
The idea that if we don’t give them all a big cultural and social hug they’ll commit violence and become arsonists and misogynists isn’t good enough.
Why can’t we expect them to be decent, hardworking people … even in tough circumstances? It might be good for them, even though we’d immediately be told we are crushing them with “unrealistic expectations”.
Yes, young white men need help and encouragement and resources and schemes and mentorships and to not be told they are worthless. But they are not entirely victims either. They do have a bit of agency; they do have their own will.
I don’t wish the draft on anybody’s son but it does occur to one that in days gone by, the majority of these rootless boys without obvious or easy prospects, held back by socioeconomic class (in far more rigid, brutal times)
would have donned a uniform and gone off to war. Many would have died, which is a tragedy that is every parent’s worst nightmare.
For many, though, it was the making of them: they were scalded into men, they tasted valour, heroism and – for the more thuggish – the satisfaction of the appetite for brute force and combat, sanctioned by the state.
Let Britain be saved from a war like those that our 20th-century forefathers and mothers experienced. May conscription never be necessary again. But let us find some way to get our ne’er-do-wells, stragglers and miserable young men into something bigger than themselves, to stop them gravitating to all that is lower, nastier and meaner.
Zoe Strimpel is a journalist, historian and author who writes a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph. She covers gender, dating, identity, and topical events. You can find her on Twitter @realzoestrimpel.