The case for a ban rests heavily on the argument, advanced most prominently by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, that social media is a primary driver of a worldwide deterioration in adolescent mental health. Haidt has met with leaders from the UK, France, Indonesia and the EU to discuss bans. The case rests on two core claims. First, that anxiety, depression and self-harm have risen among teenagers — particularly girls — across multiple countries and coinciding closely with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. Second, that even if much of the evidence tying social media to mental health is correlational, it is consistent enough to justify action now, rather than waiting for scientific consensus. It is a compelling story. But that doesn’t make it true.

The evidence that social media is a primary driver of declining adolescent mental health is weaker and more ambiguous than is often suggested, and in many cases difficult to interpret causally. At the same time, there are good reasons to think that the harms associated with smartphones operate less through social media itself than through the activities it displaces — sleep, in-person interaction, and sustained attention. To Haidt’s credit these are also central to his broader claim that adolescence and childhood have been “rewired”, with less time spent in independent real-world activity and more time mediated through screens. This distinction matters because it suggests that blanket bans risk targeting the wrong problem.

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There is still no robust evidence that social media, in itself, is a major driver of poor mental health among adolescents. Various researchers in the field have written damning reviews of Haidt, alarmed by the gap between the force of his argument and what the research actually shows, as well as his irresponsibility in whipping the public up into a frenzy that may prove difficult to correct.

One study of over 300,000 12- to 18-year-olds in the US and UK, for example, found that technology use had such a negligible association with wellbeing as to be “too small to warrant policy change”. To put this in perspective, the effect was roughly equivalent to wearing glasses. Other known risk factors, such as being bullied, had more than four times the association. Even umbrella reviews that summarize all the other reviews tend to conclude that the relationship between social media and mental health is “weak and inconsistent”.

Part of the reason for this ambiguity is that much of the evidence is vulnerable to basic problems of confounding. Teenagers who are already anxious or depressed may be more likely to spend large amounts of time on social media in the first place. Untangling cause from effect in this context is extremely difficult. The result is a literature that can just as easily be read as showing that unhappy teenagers use social media more, rather than that social media makes them unhappy.

Even longitudinal studies that follow the same individuals over time, examining whether changes in their usage makes their mental health worse, find mixed results. In one summary of 24 longitudinal studies, 38% found no overall relationship, 33% found that greater usage led to worse mental health, and 25% found effects only for specific subgroups such as girls or heavy users. One of the 24 studies even found the opposite relationship. Meta-analyses that pull together many longitudinal studies tend to find small negative associations, i.e. a higher social media use at one time point makes an individual’s mental health at a second time point very slightly worse — but nothing resembling a large or consistent effect. To be clear, none of this proves that social media has no impact. But it is far from the evidence base of a clear-cut case.

Even the headline claim of a global decline in mental health isn’t so clear. The latest World Happiness Report shows that under-25s in English-speaking countries have seen marked declines in wellbeing over the past decade. Elsewhere, including Asia and Europe however, trends are flat or even improving. It is not obvious why social media should be uniquely harmful in the Anglophone world. One suggestion is that smartphones interact with characteristics that are distinctly “Anglo”. In this reading, English-speaking people have a particular propensity for talking about mental health online which may explain why English-speaking people are particularly affected by smartphones. Another reading, of course, is that smartphones and social media are not related to these country differences at all. Perhaps it’s a result of particularly oppressive housing markets, as John Burn-Murdoch has proposed in the FT. In any case, if smartphones are the cause, their effects are far from uniform.

At the same time, our own experience and experimental evidence complicates the picture. Many of us report dissatisfaction with the amount of time we spend on our phones. And experiments that block smartphone use tend to find improvements in wellbeing. For example, one study blocked mobile internet access among a sample of Canadian and US adults for two weeks. They found that adults reported higher life satisfaction, lower levels of depressive symptoms, and greater ability to maintain attention. Further analyses indicate that these improvements were at least partly driven by changes to how individuals spent their time — replacing smartphone time with increases in offline activity (socializing in person, exercising, or reading a book), alternative types of media consumption (television and YouTube), and other digital communication (texting and video calls). Even participants who were not able to keep to the complete two week ban reported improvements to their wellbeing, indicating that a reduction in smartphone use can have a similar effect to a total ban.

Moreover, quite apart from their effects on mental health, social media or smartphones do appear to be damaging learning. In the 2022 PISA report (this is the international survey run by the OECD to measure 15-year-olds’ skills in reading, maths, and science across countries), researchers found an unprecedented drop in performance across all the OECD countries sampled — a drop equivalent to three-quarters of a year’s worth of learning. They highlight smartphone use as a key possible driver of this decline.

Backing this up, experiments that ban phones in schools find improved focus and boosted exam results. One study that followed 17,000 US students found smartphone bans improved exam results for low-achieving students (but not high), with students mostly supportive of the ban. In another study, students from Florida who were subject to a statewide ban had improved test scores of around 2-3% — not exactly a huge effect though.

However, there were short-term costs. In the first year of the ban disciplinary incidents and suspensions increased by 25-50%, but returned to pre-ban levels by the second year of the ban. How schools decide to implement bans and punish rule-breakers is likely to have a serious impact on whether such policies succeed in improving student outcomes.

The above results can look like a contradiction. Increasing social media use does not reliably worsen mental health, yet reducing phone use appears to improve well-being and student test results. But this makes more sense when viewed through the lens of displacement. Time spent scrolling is time not spent sleeping, socializing in person, studying, or exercising. The issue may not be social media itself, but what it replaces.

This is not a trivial distinction. The wider effects often attributed to social media may instead reflect the broader consequences of smartphones as multipurpose devices that restructure how time is spent.

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At the same time, banning social media would remove genuine benefits. Vulnerable individuals, as well as children who are isolated or not fitting in, can find connections and like-minded peers online. Social media is also an increasingly important source of information. One experiment that asked adults to deactivate Facebook for 4 weeks prior to the 2018 mid-term election, found that participants were less able to correctly answer questions about current events. If results like these hold up, this is not a negligible cost, particularly as these platforms become the primary conduit for news. These two features — finding like-minded people and gaining access to information — were once seen as the two defining virtues of the internet.

Framed this way, the issue is not simply one of mental health, but of how smartphones are restructuring young people’s time and attention. This points toward a different set of interventions: not blanket social media bans, but removing phones from classrooms, and introducing regulation that changes how these technologies are used, such as limiting addictive design features like endless scrolling feeds.

If the concern is specifically adolescent mental health, however, the case for focusing on social media is weaker. Prioritizing an ambiguous risk factor may have the adverse effect of drawing attention away from more substantial ones. Bullying, family instability, and pre-existing mental health conditions have far larger and more consistent effects on well-being. The trials now underway in the UK, Australia and elsewhere should help clarify the impact of social media bans and digital curfews. But in the meantime, blanket bans risk chasing a compelling story, while distracting time and energy away from interventions likely to have the greatest impact.

This seemed to me quite strange. A condition with no biomarker, diagnosed mainly by the presence of certain distinctive behaviors — significant deficits in communication, rigid patterns of thought, repetitive activities, obsessive interests, and so on — now attributed to a new population on the basis of very different behaviors. The solution to my incomprehension, I was told, was the concept of “masking”. Women and girls were better at hiding their antisocial tendencies, a fact which made them profoundly anxious. Languishing neglected behind deceptively sociable masks, a much larger group could now be members of the club too.

This all sounded suspiciously convenient, tying in with modern fairytales of personal authenticity and the supposed tragedy of hiding “who you really are”. We are all masking things about ourselves; Jung would call it having a persona. And many introverts find social engagements confusing and exhausting. More to the point: if someone is mentally agile enough, both to notice her own social deficits and then seamlessly compensate for them, why are we treating this as autism at all?

This week, my skepticism was boosted by the unusual sight of a scientist debunking a theory she herself helped make famous. For decades, the developmental psychologist Uta Frith endorsed the idea of an autistic spectrum in her celebrated work on the condition. But in a new interview in TES, she says that “the spectrum has collapsed”. Too many people with importantly varying characteristics are being included, and the concept is no longer a useful clinical tool.

That she did not say so earlier in her career was because of “the sensitivity of debates around overdiagnosis”, or so the interviewer reports. In plainer words: if you question the basis of a popular psychological classification like autism, people on the internet will act like you are trying to snatch their souls. Still, the now-retired Frith seems admirably unabashed. She proposes ejecting a large subgroup of people from the autism club: those diagnosed during teens or later, without clear intellectual or communicative impairments, but who exhibit “hypersensitivity” and “feel highly anxious in social situations”. Most of these, perhaps needless to say, are female.

As for masking, Frith says “it has no scientific basis”. She continues: “I expect we could say we are all masking, all the time, trying to adapt to our society’s norms.” What Frith notably does not say is that highly anxious, overwhelmed, or otherwise developmentally malfunctioning teenagers should be abandoned by the therapeutic professions; though based on some hostile responses to the interview, she might as well have done. Her basic point, obvious and unobjectionable, is that it is no good incrementally expanding the category of dogs to the point where it starts to include cats, because doing so won’t end well for either.

The concept of autism started off with a relatively clear set of criteria: the severe, devastating traits which have since been escalated by experts to something called “level 3”. We are talking lifelong social impairment, with little ambiguity in the challenges this presents. Unmistakable problems emerge early on in life as a child obviously fails to reach particular milestones. The issue mostly affects boys, and more occasionally girls. Such children are nonverbal or minimally communicative, prone to violent meltdowns and self-harming from an early age, physically disabled, and stuck in endless loops of compulsive behavior. They cannot change this behavior much, whether by present efforts or future ones. Like the Tourette syndrome of John Davidson, it is very much not the sort of thing that can be masked.

To these children and teens — often sequestered away from society’s judgmental gaze in grossly inadequate care settings, and facing uncertain adult futures — the expansive definition is an outrageous insult. As they can’t get angry about it, I’ll do it on their behalf. The idea that teens who can study for GCSEs, go to the shops, play sport, bunk off school, talk to therapists (etc. etc.) somehow belong in the same category is a cruel joke. These children possess verbal and social aptitudes only dreamt of by the parents of those rocking impenetrably in a corner. If some malicious academic had deliberately wanted to undermine comprehension of the core autistic predicament — to make such cases, already impossible to glamorize, compete unfairly for public attention and resources with more palatable others — they could not have done better than to push the spectrum idea.

Equally, we should hold some online activists accountable for paralyzing the discussion to the detriment of the severely disabled. In letting their own diagnoses get too close to a marketable identity, they leach attention away from those who actually need it, and bully those attempting to disagree with them in good faith. The good news is that Frith appears to be standing up to them. It would be great if she started a trend.

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This isn’t to say that the spectrum idea isn’t true. There is an autistic spectrum, just like there is a psychopathy spectrum and psychosis spectrum, though weirdly people don’t seem so keen to identify into those. These things are true in a completely boring sense, which is that for almost any set of cluster of manifestly abnormal human behaviors, it will be possible to find milder versions among a much wider group. Still, it doesn’t yet follow that the wider group has a disability, for there isn’t the same level of impairment.

And here there is another difficulty, for what counts as “impairment” is itself a spectrum — as indeed is “disability”. Most concepts are spectrums, in fact. Do children who present in a way that used to be called Asperger’s — now subsumed into so-called high-functioning part of the spectrum, without a trace of irony — have an impairment? The answer is: it depends on what you take to be the desirable norm. Relative to some standards of social aptitude they may well count as sadly lacking; though equally, in terms of cognitive gifts, they often stand head and shoulders above others. But for autistic children in the original and devastating sense, there are few such comforting nuances to be teased out.

When psychologists severed the connection between autism and unambiguous impairment, they left it unclear why there is a need for society to mitigate the effects of the condition at all. Why should we pay so much attention to people who have “failures of social comprehension”, “rigid forms of thinking”, “repetitive behaviors”, “narrow interests”, “sensory issues”, or any of other descriptions used to identify the wider class? I know people who mentally collapse if they lose their daily routines, endlessly regurgitate facts to politely bored listeners, don’t get jokes, and obsess about certain annoying noises or fabric feels — yet remain serenely unbothered by these trivial facts of personality. Indeed, many of them are highly successful in their careers. It would not occur to them that the very same tendencies are causing others to rethink their whole identities, or to apply for reasonable adjustments from work.

But in any case, as Frith points out, the most recent wave of expansion of the autism industry has been towards conditions emerging in female adolescence, that bear scarcely any similarity to the original archetype at all. This was the great feminization of autism, and it really hasn’t helped. Here, at least, there is often clear impairment: high anxiety, self-harming, emotional dysregulation, frequent school refusal, and so on. Yet equally there are very few signs of autism, in even the classic Asperger’s sense.

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Don’t just take it from me — take it from the National Autistic Society, forced to identify “twirling hair and reading books” as examples of suitably repetitive behavior in females for want of anything more convincing. We also learn there that “autistic girls may be more likely to be part of a friendship group and this could be a reason that teachers don’t notice their differences”. Of course, a different explanation might be: they are not autistic in any meaningful sense at all.

And even where they do suddenly exhibit “classic” Asperger’s-like symptoms — or even more severe tics — there is a confounding variable almost impossible to rule out. It’s called the internet: providing clever, magpie-minded girls with lots of encounters with other so-called autistic people, taking great pains to explain how their unique and exciting condition presents. This is not to say that teenagers exposed to this material will deliberately and knowingly feign, but rather that the barrier between behavior and such knowledge is porous — as when you find yourself unconsciously mimicking the accent of someone you are talking to. It is not an explanation you can use for the dysfunctional behavior of very young children. They have no idea what a popular stereotype of autism is, nor why it might sometimes feel tempting to let it into your repertoire.

Faced with a young adult exhibiting high anxiety or other severe emotional dysregulation, a much-neglected question is how a diagnosis will help her, in particular; which is not the same question as how it will help her parents or teachers, or any therapist paid to intervene. A diagnosis of level 3 autism helps the recipient, partly by managing the expectations of others and detaching certain behaviors from the realm of personal responsibility. Put bluntly: this person literally can’t help it, nor will he probably ever be able to help it. With Tourette’s too, properly understood, we get the correct inference: there is a bank of words and other noises coming out of the sufferer’s mouth, for which he is not responsible at all.

Yet transferred to teens with the possibility of meaningful behavioral change in their future, this is an atrocious message to send. It encourages a still-developing, inquisitive mind to start thinking of herself as a set of permanent neuroses for which she should be pitied and excused. It distracts her from the fact there are positive things she can do to change the situation — maybe not immediately, but definitely over time. Most minds are flexible, and that is their beauty; teenage minds especially so. “I can’t help it” may be literally true on day one of a new regime; but by day 100, she might be in a different place.

What the route to meaningful change looks like is a matter of professional contention, but there is no doubt they exist: good habits of mind and body to adopt, and other unhelpful ones to relinquish. Speaking as a formerly highly dysregulated teenager myself, I would say they include books to read, to give deeper understanding of human nature; social situations to force yourself into, to get lots of practice; fears to face, in order to better acclimatize; and screens to throw into the sea.

But that’s just my idea, and you will have yours. The point is that a happy, flourishing, independent life in future is still possible for nearly all of these hypersensitive girls; perhaps even likely, once the hormones and spiteful jostling for status amongst schoolmates have settled down. An official diagnosis — potentially feeding into school notes, university counseling services, reasonable adjustments at work, PIP payments, and eventually one’s entire sense of self as a person helplessly mired in dysfunction — says the opposite.

Welcome, dear reader, to the strange and warped online world of incels, where the fictional brutal murder of a girl is not a crime, but a punishment. Indeed, here is a society of boys and men where sexual failure is extolled as a virtue, sex is seen as contaminating and the real-life mass-killers of women are elevated to the status of martyrs.

Adolescence, Netflix’s much chewed-over drama is notionally about incels; Jamie, the disturbed boy at its center certainly sounds like one and murders a female classmate who contemptuously calls him one. While the show obviously wasn’t intended for incels — its target audience was the parents of teenage boys and politicians — many have watched it and have been avidly discussing its merits and demerits. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Stephen Graham, ought to listen up and prepare himself for some critical feedback.

For my sins, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit lurking on incel online spaces, in part out of a morbid curiosity to see what I would find there, but mainly because I want to better understand their political and intellectual culture — and because conventional writing on incels tends to be so phenomenally bad, with its sensational alarmism and self-dramatizing tone of moral shock (“I infiltrated the dark rabbit hole of incels and what I found there traumatized me to my core…”).

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In some ways, they (“involuntary celibates”) are boringly familiar: yet another victim group that defines itself in relation to an enemy (women) which it blames for all its problems. But in other ways, incels occupy a world that is as strange as it is unsettling, with its own folklore and incomprehensible vocabulary. “Foid” for example, is a derogatory term for a woman, while “Stacy” and “Chad” are two sides of the same reviled coin: respectively, a sexually attractive woman and a sexually successful man. Tyrone, Chadpreet and Chaddam are all ethnic variations on Chad, while a “currycel” is an incel from India. “LDAR” denotes “Lay Down and Rot”, “AWALT” means “All Women Are Like That”, “roped” refers to suicide and “mogging” is when Chads act in ways that threaten or diminish the masculinity of other men. Although Adolescence contains a brief reference to the “80/20 rule”, according to which 80% of women select from just 20% of the male dating pool, the show barely scratches at the surface of this subculture.

From what I already knew about incels and their contempt for “normoids”, I had fully expected that they would unanimously loathe Adolescence, if only because of the wave of adulation it had received in the mainstream media. But I was wrong: some actually liked it.

On one incel forum I found multiple discussion threads on the show. Traviscel* noted that although Adolescence was “blatant anti-incel propaganda”, it was nevertheless “psychologically accurate” in its portrayal of the killer, Jamie. “I liked how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia, and constantly fluctuated between being a troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power”, he explained. He particularly liked the third episode in which Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “The actress was amazing and so was the incel killer,” Traviscel continued, praising Doherty for her “skilled” portrayal of “a manipulative little whore” who entraps Jamie into confessing. As for Jamie, he was like “OJ [Simpson] in that he constantly denied he killed that bitch, despite getting caught red handed on CCTV”. “I liked how it had simple answers,” Traviscel concluded, which he took to be that Jamie was an incel because he was bullied and because “sluts” had rejected him. If Adolescence was indeed “anti-incel propaganda”, as Traviscel put it, it clearly had no effect in penetrating his breastplate of incel righteousness and self-pity.

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Many more, though, dismissed the show as unrealistic, “retarded”, fear-mongering and superficial. A recurring criticism centered on the casting of Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper. The broad consensus was that he was too good looking to convince as an incel. In a vote on “Would you let Jamie from Adolescence join the forum?”, over 80% said no, reasoning, as one commenter put it, “He’ll grow into a Chad.”

The other point of consensus, across all of the discussion threads on the show, was that the real victim wasn’t the murdered girl, Katie, but Jamie himself. Adamcel*, for example, confided that “I couldn’t see the perpetrator, a 13-year-old boy, as the villain in this, not even logically”, elaborating that Jamie’s violence was a morally intelligible, even excusable, reaction to being bullied.

Some incels were particularly scathing about how the show failed, in their view, to capture the complexities of the manosphere, ridiculing the scene in which one of the detectives working on the case speculates about the kind of mindset-material that might have radicalized Jamie. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank says, adding: “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” This, according to Dariuscel*, was to elide the “redpill”, which holds that women are superficial and only attracted to Chads, with the “blackpill”, which holds that incels, no matter what they do or how hard they try, will never find sexual intimacy or happiness with a woman. Tate, who is not only sexually successful with women but also potently shames other men who lack his confidence and “loverboy” skillset, is thus especially reviled among incels. “Andrew Tate,” Dariuscel clarified, “is a sex haver mogger masculinity coper that shouldn’t be associated with incels at all.” Tate, for his part, has distanced himself from incels, stating, via a spokesperson, that it is “unjust” for him to be made a “the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence”.

But what really got under their skin was how, as they saw it, the show had trivialized their ideological beliefs by suggesting that they had been brainwashed. Indeed, for incels, the idea that they have been tricked into their beliefs is intolerable, since it contains the fatal implication that those beliefs are untrue and can only be accepted through coercion. If incels believe that society is anti-male or that all women select men based on looks and status, it is because they really do believe this and because it captures their sense, however deranged it may seem to others, of how the world is.

In my brief trawl, I found that, unlike many other journalists who skirt around it, I didn’t want to cry or vomit or cringe in terror at what I saw and read. But I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible dead end the subculture is, ensuring the self-damnation of so many of those who seek solace and connection in going there.

It also made me acutely aware of how fantastically naive Adolescence is in its exploration of how Jamie came to embrace incel beliefs and in its implicit assumption that if only Jamie’s parents had been more assiduous in protecting him from the manosphere he would have been okay. Spend any time lurking on incel forums and you come to acknowledge that many of these men and boys are there because they want to be there and not because they’ve watched some ridiculous piece of Andrew Tate content or because they’re the unsuspecting victims of a vast grooming operation. They are there because they find it cathartic to vent about their frustrations, because they want to be understood and because they can express outrageous thoughts and feelings that they would be unable to express anywhere else. And because they clearly take great pleasure in defiantly transgressing the civilized norms of a society that they feel has rejected them and because sacralizing misogynistic killers like Elliot Roger is meant to enrage the normies.

Had the makers of Adolescence done their own bit of incel-trawling before writing the show they might have come up with a story that better captured the appeal of an oppositional subculture for boys and men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women and who have come to see their lives as hopeless. Instead, they contrived to make a clumsy and reductive drama that has served to fan the flames of a moral panic that shows no signs of abating.

Of course the smug and self-congratulatory makers of Adolescence would no doubt insist that if there’s a panic about the scourge of violent misogyny then clearly this is all to the good. But the thing about moral panics is they often take on a life of their own and materialize consequences that their instigators hadn’t intended or envisaged. One such consequence is the mass stigmatization of young boys, which is all the more sinister for concealing itself in the benevolent language of vulnerability and safeguarding.

Another and perhaps more unsettling irony is that Adolescence, in trying to expose the dangers of online misogyny, has massively amplified the most extreme exponents of it, catapulting incels to the center of a global conversation about boyhood, masculinity and violence. In doing so, it has brought the most fringe of subcultures to the attention of countless numbers of young boys who might previously not have heard it or had viewed it with indifference. For some incels, all this sudden fervent attention is unnerving, while for the more ideologically strident among them, it is to be welcomed. As one poster triumphantly put it, “Good, that means inceldom is spreading. They can’t ignore it anymore.”

***

*Some names have been changed

The outrage was immediate. Flaubert was hauled before the courts on grounds of obscenity. His crime was rejecting idealism, showing life in its inglorious and alluring undress. But he was acquitted because the society he captured so perceptively was more guilty than he.

Post-Flaubert, many novels were written with righteous social purpose. Some, such as Zola’s Germinal and much of Dickens, brought about political change. Yet this movement, realism, was still an “ism” with the distortions and biases those prisms are susceptible to. It is still fiction. At its best, fiction is indeed the telling of lies to reveal deeper truths. What happens though if the intention to reveal a deeper truth is not present at all? What happens when we are swamped by fictions? In excess, any medicine becomes a poison.

The realm of politics is one beset by fictions — sycophancy, propaganda, spin, solipsism, the colossal distance between rarified worlds and street life. It has been ever thus. Yet the recent swerve of politicians into an infantilized Lalaland has felt particularly jarring. It now feels as if they actually believe the fictions they evoke and certainly expect us to. Earlier this year, the Labour MP Stella Creasy opposed changes to Home Office guidance on refugees, claiming, “Frankly, this process would deny Paddington Bear — he did the same thing, he came by an irregular route, but we gave him sanctuary.”

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In the US, this lapse into sentimental fabulism has been taking place for some time. For years, Democrats have clung hubristically to The West Wing, particularly Martin Sheen’s fictional President Jed Bartlet, like some alternative universe where Trump didn’t happen. There was more than a hint of the Kennedys to Bartlet, bolstering the “what could have been” Camelot myth that haunts American liberals. Once, there may have been a nobility to such legends, but The West Wing obsession merely revealed the smugness, complacency, denial, and callous aloofness of the Democrats that helped spawn President Trump. For when fiction becomes delusion, the comfort blanket becomes a straitjacket.

What’s needed then is a hefty dose of gritty uncompromising realism. A cultural reset by telling it like it is. The Netflix knife-crime drama Adolescence appears to be such a moment. It is well-shot, acted, the subject — in which a child is radicalized on the internet — is devastating, and it is generally superior by, admittedly low, mainstream standards.

Yet there is something off from the beginning, with the 13-year-old protagonist appearing more like the cherubic Pears Soap bubble boy than a murderous incel. Of course, physiognomy is deceptive, but the intention was clear from the beginning — our sympathies were being purchased on questionable terms. The implication is clearly, how could such an innocent doe-eyed boy do such a thing? This appeals to white liberal middle-class viewers, cracking open a bottle of white and penitentially subjecting themselves to an “important” series. It does so by chastising them, one of the bourgeois’ prevailing kinks, but also by terrifying them into a moral panic, and by providing a pat answer to a quagmire of a problem.

The response to the show has revealed how far we — and our leaders — have fallen down the fictional rabbit hole. It has been treated as if it were a documentary. In a more innocent time, this could be forgiven, but not now.

From behind the curve, Keir Starmer led the way, placing this work of fiction at the heart of the Government’s attention and proposed future policy. He has encouraged the series to be shown in schools and parliament, and voiced concerns of “a problem with boys and young men”. There has been no shortage of actual violence in society, its unpalatable realities demanding urgent attention. The figures for knife crime in the UK make for grim reading. Knife Crime Statistics | The Ben Kinsella Trust – over 15,000 in London alone in 2023/24. Yet Starmer and his administration have only been shocked into action by a fictional miniseries. As a result, they are now campaigning not against gang culture, Islamist radicalization, the collapse of the extended and nuclear family, the blight of fatherlessness, the economic deprivation that fuels crime, drugs and violence, the ghettoization of communities — but against the spectre of the online Manosphere. They have found a conveniently hateful hate figure in the guise of Andrew Tate, and a convenient stooge in the alienated white working-class boy, one of the few demographics it is now acceptable to deride and exclude.

There’s a cyclopean simplicity to Adolescence and its ilk: one explanation, one solution, one villain. This chimes with the wave of articles that fuel this moral panic. This is, accordingly, an apocalypse of young boys and smartphones, as if girls aren’t susceptible to social contagion. Regardless of the undoubted impact of being terminally online on young boys (or any of us), this stands as a monumental example of concern trolling. We know from previous moral panics (comic books, Mortal Kombat, gangsta rap, video nasties, satanic panic), it leads nowhere. Indeed, some (stranger danger, paedogeddon) have led us to our current dire situation: kids stuck indoors, stuck on parent simulator tablets and devices, with the added development gap of lockdown warping their pliant minds. Self-declared progressives now find themselves the inheritors of censorious “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. All of which is predicated on them hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need.

The subtitle of Madame Bovary — “Provincial Manners” — is rarely mentioned but it is apt. For all their metropolitanism, elite liberals often live in villages within cities, celebrating multi-ethnic culture the way a visiting diplomat or an aloof travel writer might — the food, the music, the color. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly pointed out that this was a clique far more parochial than anyone from the “provinces”, where you are forced to be with people who are different. In wealthy parts of a city, you can choose circles of friends who think the same way, with the threat of exile for anyone who deviates from in-group conformity, which, unsurprisingly, is a collection of compelling fictions.

The other reason for the primacy of fiction is more insidious — control. The damage to free speech under specious weaponized hate-speech legislation is overtaken only by that done to equality under the law by the new sentencing guidelines in favor of ethnic, cultural or faith minorities. Those of us concerned about the Overton window crawling endlessly Right should recognize it is not some rebirth of fascism but rather the collapse of the liberal-Left into illiberalism.

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The three tribes of MAGA men

By Poppy Soweby

Few among us would lament Andrew Tate being ushered from the stage and therein lies the danger. Who is next after that fails to solve anything? The truth is such campaigns don’t solve anything but simply obfuscate and misdirect. Their quick-fix solutions will do nothing about the underlying factors, the soil of despair, alienation, rage. So, others will step in — Islamist mullahs, gang leaders, misogynists, groomers and grifters of various types. Andrew Tate is not the creator of the alienation and debasement, he, and his kind, are the exploiters of political and social failures. The red pill only works when boys are already feeling disenfranchised. Where the damage began, and who profited from it, will remain obscured and unchallenged.

For them, nothing will change because the political class will not change. It does not care that generations of working-class boys will emerge into a world that has no place for them, even as it relies on them materially. They face economic precarity, the dismantling of industries and trades, and are effectively locked out of creative industries monopolized by the rich. If non-white, their marginalization will be co-opted or treated as the sum of their existence. If white, there is the bonus of being discriminated against for their “privilege”. It is arguably even worse for girls, if grooming gangs and their cover-up is anything to go by. The aloofness of the powerful, snug in their own fictional world, sows a whirlwind for others, with the victims, and their stories, vanishing like the murdered girl Katie in Adolescence.

It’s scarcely a surprise, then, that those in whom society has no investment tend to reciprocate. And there is little to suggest that Labor will address any of the underlying economic causes of alienation, crime and violence. Taking phones away just isn’t going to cut it. Meanwhile, we are like Bovary, believing untruths. Until we face the true stories we do not want to hear and set aside our comforting fictions, others will remain locked in tragedies of our making.

But it stuck with me, because for a split-second something remarkable about social norms in my part of the British Isles felt very palpable: that in this country — at least, where I live — a woman can run for miles, alone, and know that the physical risk to her from male strangers is so low as to be negligible. And to a far greater extent than anyone seems to realize, we owe this extraordinary social achievement to an aspect of male socialization contemporary culture seems hell-bent on dismantling: male emotional repression.

Last week, everyone decided young men’s emotions needed another airing. The media class determined en masse that the TV drama Adolescence was actually a documentary, and that we need more internet censorship to stop boys’ feelings going wrong. Speaking at the Dimbleby lecture, the former England footballer Gareth Southgate popped up to lament the way young men are turning away from real-life mentors to “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers”, who teach boys that “strength means never showing emotion”. And, on cue, Victoria Derbyshire invited three young UK men onto Newsnight, where they discussed when they last cried. “Even Keir Starmer is worried.”

Two out of three could not remember; all agreed that there’s a general, culture-wide pressure on men to restrain their emotions. Implicitly, we’re to understand that this is A Bad Thing. And we might be forgiven for imagining that all these young men really need is Elsa’s message in Frozen: “Let It Go”. What could possibly go wrong? Watching that clip, though, I remembered the running club I encountered in the countryside a couple of summers ago. It struck me: are we sure we know which feelings men would express, and how they’d express them, if they felt truly empowered to Let It Go?

While there’s plenty of overlap between men and women, on several important axes the sexes are markedly different. These differences include physical strength, sexual aggression, propensity to violence, and normative approach to handling conflict. Violent aggression is much more common in men than women, and the difference between the sexes grows larger the more lethal the aggression. Men are also vastly more sexually aggressive than women: 98% of the individuals prosecuted in the UK for sex crime are men.

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The majority of victims of sex crime are women: one in four women reports having been subject to some form of sexual violence since the age of 16, while among men that falls to one in 18. 94% of survivors of rape or attempted rape are women, and within the UK’s legal definition of rape all rapists are, necessarily, male. Most murders of women are by men, and of female victims of homicide between 2009 and 2020 in the UK, most were killed by a man. In 87% of cases, the murderer was an intimate partner.

But this is not, or not only, a female victimhood story. The majority of victims of violent crime are men, and men murder each other far more frequently than they murder women. Between 2010 and 2024, 570 homicides were recorded in the UK, of which 156 were female and 414 were male: a male-on-male homicide rate nearly three times higher than for women.

Rather, it’s a story about male aggression. The asymmetry comes about because, as Louise Perry has pointed out, most men can murder most women with their bare hands, and the reverse is not true. For the sex difference in propensity to violence and sexual aggression is attended by a similarly marked sex difference in physical strength.

These days, for complex and mostly well-intentioned reasons, such differences tend to be downplayed. No one wants to be constrained by stereotype. This egalitarianism has been taken to some strange extremes, such as the tendency of fantasy-type movies to include fight scenes in which petite women trounce huge, hulking men. (Again in Frozen, at the end tiny Anna punches Hans over the side of the ship with a single blow.) Combined with shrinking families and changing social patterns, such pervasive movie falsehoods accumulate to mean it’s now possible for a woman, especially a middle-class one, to get all the way to adulthood before realizing how much stronger men are — let alone the subtler sex differences.

And where these differences are noticed, it’s often to get them wrong. One common stereotype across both sexes, for example, is that women are more emotional than men. Men tend to make this claim because they want to think being emotional is bad; women, conversely, because they think being emotional is good. But the claim itself has always seemed strange to me, because it fits so poorly with the evidence.

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As I’ve already noted, men commit the vast majority of violent and sexual crime. And these are offenses that tend, with the exception of the odd psychopath, to be perpetrated in a high pitch of emotion, whether anger, lust, or some other intense, irrational state. This isn’t to excuse violence, of course. But we might wonder whether it’s not so much that men are less emotional than women than that they experience a different and possibly more extreme spread of feelings.

This is not to assert that there are no quiet, gentle men who feel things deeply, or that there’s anything wrong with such a personality. Where people of either sex are unhappy, there’s often a complex mix of internalizing (that is, introspective or self-directed) behaviors, such as sadness or rumination, and externalizing responses, such as hyperactivity or aggression. And while there’s a great deal of overlap between the sexes, internalizing appears to be more common among women and externalizing more common among men.

The increase in public support for emotional expressiveness might well bring relief and reassurance, at least to those men who are more prone to internalizing. But what about those men — who are, remember, as a group far bigger and stronger than women — who feel intensely, but tend to externalize negative emotion? Which is to say: what about the men who have a propensity to respond to sadness or anger with violence or aggression? It strikes me that, among this group, a far more prosocial message overall than “Let It Go” might well be “Suck It Up”.

And this brings us to the real heart of the matter. If “Let It Go” is a risky message, at least for men who tend to externalize, “Suck It Up” is not much of an alternative — at least not on its own. It invites the question: “Why?” Why, that is, should men accept this demand for self-restraint? The question is especially mordant when both the aggression being restrained, and also the restraint itself, are denounced as “toxic masculinity”. You would need a truly inspiring reason to accept so bewildering an edict; and yet to my eye no such reason is currently on offer. (I don’t think being invited on Newsnight to talk about crying counts.)

In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free program of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.

But the core of the problem isn’t men being told to control their feelings. It’s the poverty of the ends to which that control is then ordered. Because even strength and aggression are not bad as such: both domestic public order and international freedom from conflict rest ultimately on a capacity for violence. But the kind of violence that upholds public order or defends a nation isn’t comparable to (say) that employed by the machete-wielding teenage gang members that crashed a birthday party in Essex over the weekend. On the contrary: the capacity of public-spirited individuals — almost always men — for controlled violence is what stands between us and that kind of chaos and fear. The willingness of a few good men to be prosocially violent in an emergency is the ultimate guarantor of the peace in which I can run alone.

Encouraging men to repress the extremes of their emotional range is not wrong or cruel. It’s civilizationally essential. But there has to be a why, or few will bother — and those that do will do so for purely selfish ends. And then, before long, you won’t have a civilization; just (at best) warring tribes, or (worse still) omnium bellum contra omnes.

Obviously things aren’t anywhere near that bad. If they were, I wouldn’t be betting only on advancing age to keep me safe on my runs. Perhaps instead of a Labrador I’d have a Rottweiler. Perhaps I’d have a running machine in my panic room. But if we don’t want things to get worse, we can’t go about encouraging men to “Let It Go”. With heartfelt apologies to the sensitive ones: overall, male emotional repression is good, actually. What’s missing isn’t more masculine emotionality. It’s honor, appreciation, and a more transcendent reason for sublimating aggression and sexuality than just being able to take selfies in a Lamborghini.

And knowing where your children are is little reassurance when the media they’re consuming represents something you’re certain is horrific, but don’t quite understand. I think that fear explains the avid response to Netflix drama Adolescence, which across four episodes, each filmed in real time and (audaciously) as one shot, tries to unpick the nightmare of a teenage boy (Jamie, played by Owen Cooper) who stabs a teenage girl to death. The motivation for the attack is initially obscure, but the investigation rapidly fixes on Jamie’s involvement in the online subculture known as the “manosphere”.

In the final episode, which focuses on Jamie’s shattered family, his parents struggle with their own culpability — the degree to which they should have known the path their son was on, and stopped him. His mom (Christine Tremarco) frets about all the time Jamie spent on his computer, unmonitored; his dad (Stephen Graham) remembers how he too has been pushed “incel stuff” while looking for workout content. The series ends with Jamie’s dad in his son’s disarmingly childish bedroom, sobbing: “I’m sorry son, I should’ve done better.”

The series deliberately resists offering backstory that might make Jamie more explicable. There’s no domineering father, no neglectful mother; nothing that might reassure the viewer that this could never be their family. Only a gentle-seeming boy who did well at school and caused no trouble before this one devastating act. Graham, who co-created the series as well as starring in it, says the series is a reaction to the spate of real-life, child-on-child knife crime: the intention was to “hold that mirror up to society and say, ‘Just have a look at this, because it is happening. It has happened.'”

He also says he knew nothing about the manosphere before he started work on this project, and you can tell. The world Jamie is drawn into is never shown on screen. Instead, it is represented through the efforts of baffled adults to understand an impenetrable language of emojis and posting (in one scene, a detective’s son painfully talks him through the meaning of “red pill”). Adolescence is unsettlingly realistic about, say, the simmering anarchy of a school full of teenagers, but when it comes to online, this is a boomer version of zoomer life. It can look at the symbols, but has no way of deciphering them beyond the inevitable cry: “Take away their phones!”

Confronted by something as shattering as children who kill, the only act that feels possible is witness. Adolescence shares a lot stylistically with Gus Van Sant’s 1999 film Elephant, which was his response to the Columbine massacre — the high school shooting in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 and injured 23 (Klebold and Harris also killed themselves, and one of the survivors recently died of her injuries, bringing their toll to 14). Like Adolescence, Elephant uses a real-time structure and long, watchful camerawork; rather than being filmed in one take, it has a looping structure that brings together the last minutes before the atrocity from the perspectives of several kids.

Elephant‘s title was intended as a reference to the impossibility of comprehension. Van Sant told an interviewer he was thinking of the parable of the five blind men encountering an elephant: “One thinks it’s a rope because he has the tail, one thinks it’s a tree because he can feel the legs, one thinks it’s a wall because he can feel the side of it, and nobody actually has the big picture. You can’t really get to the answer, because there isn’t one.” The enormity of the event resists understanding.

A year before Elephant, Michael Moore had satirized attempts to find a simple, singular cause for the shooting in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, which was particularly scathing about media efforts to blame Klebold and Harris’s acts on the boys’ consumption of violent media.  Bowling for Columbine has aged badly for several reasons, not least its elevation of Marilyn Manson (the rock star who was erroneously blamed for inspiring Columbine) to the status of moral authority. Moore was correct that scapegoating movies and video games was inane, but he also deliberately overlooked the degree to which Klebold and Harris were immersed in the aesthetics of bloodshed.

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From the earliest stages of their plan, Klebold and Harris had seen their actions in cinematic terms. One of the missed warning signs of their plot was a senior-year film project they collaborated on called Hitmen for Hire, in which they played hitmen picking off fellow students. They left behind a cache of tapes (nicknamed the Basement Tapes) detailing their plans, and intended for release; these were later destroyed by law enforcement for fear that their circulation would inspire copycats.

And Columbine itself was planned for the cameras. Although the death toll was shocking (especially at the time, when a school shooting was a new phenomenon in America), Klebold and Harris intended it to be much, much higher. They had planted bombs in strategic locations with timers set to ensure maximum fatalities, and maximum publicity. These failed to go off, but journalist Dave Cullen (who has covered Columbine in more detail than probably anyone) describes what was supposed to happen:

“The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the ‘fun’ part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history.”

Klebold and Harris had learned their sense of drama from the films they watched and the games they played. That doesn’t mean that media turned them into killers. (A folie a deux between psychopathic Harris and depressive Klebold probably did that, and Harris specifically may have been dangerous under any conditions. “If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done,” writes Cullen.) But media profoundly shaped the kind of killers they became.

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The failure of Klebold and Harris’s bombs meant they did not achieve the total infamy they hoped for. But they achieved enough to have become cultural figureheads of a sort, to a certain sort of person. They wrote the script for the gun massacres that have since become regular occurrences in the US. At Cullen’s estimate, 54 shootings with 300 fatalities (and many more injured) have been directly inspired by Columbine since 1999.

In September last year, a British teenager tried to join their number: 19-year-old Nicolas Prosper executed his mother Juliana Falcon, brother Kyle and sister Giselle with a shotgun, then headed to a primary school where he intended to accomplish the “massacre of the century”. He was specifically obsessed with Columbine, making him one of thousands of “Columbiners”, as the Klebold-Harris fandom is known. To them, Columbine was an act of nihilistic heroism, and Klebold and Harris are idols to be emulated. With sad inevitability, there has even been at least one shooting in which Elephant was cited as an inspiration.

Few people have pushed back against Adolescence’s implicit thesis that tiny incels turn into killers. Those who did have not come from the Left like Moore (the Left allowed its free speech muscle to waste away during the 2010s, when it assumed that the right side of history had won and all that was left to do was gloat at the losers) but rather from the manosphere itself. Andrew Tate fans in particular seem to have been exercised by Adolescence, with some calling it a “character assassination” of their hero.

Unfortunately for the Tate fans claiming “moral panic”, it is only weeks since the conviction of Kyle Clifford for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, and the murder of her mother Carol and her sister Louise. At the trial, the prosecution revealed that Clifford had spent the night before watching Tate videos; the crown argued that Tate’s self-declared misogyny was a direct encouragement for Clifford’s abhorrent violence.

It is no longer particularly controversial to draw a line from what is watched and read, to what is done. That is partly because the escalation of user-generated content means that those with an interest in violence are no longer limited to material that might come under the definition of “art”. Van Sant had a reason for staging the high school massacre of Elephant, and his reason was to look at the nature of violence and the lives it scars. The Columbiners who make fan illustrations of Klebold and Harris are simply showing their admiration for Klebold and Harris.

Adolescence, notably, doesn’t explicitly show the stabbing that instigates the story. The emotional impact of the assault comes from watching someone else watching it: Jamie’s father is shown grainy CCTV footage of his son attacking the victim. Perhaps a judgement was made here that, in a drama leaning so heavily on the risks of media contagion, it would be hypocritical to offer anything that might gratify those attracted to violence.

For all Adolescence’s will to refuse pat answers, though, I suspect there is still a certain truth about violence that it is not willing to acknowledge. Children who kill do not have a single “type”, as the FBI school shooter threat assessment conducted after Columbine found. There is no checklist you can turn to that tells you who will or will not become a murderer. But there are commonalities among those who do: a history of psychological issues, tensions in the home, an obsession with death.

It was true in 1999 that it took more than a first-person shooter to make a massacre, and it’s still true if you substitute “incel TikToks” for Doom. A child like Jamie who appears to shift from “nice” to “vicious” with no outward signs is rare to the point of being mythical. Despite Adolescence’s meticulous verisimilitude, Jamie is a kind of monster: the ultimate distillation of those parental fears about what might become of your child, lost in the wilds of social media.