Why so sus about young men?

At the centre of Dark Places, the 2015 thriller by Gillian Flynn (of the Gone Girl fame), are the brutal killings of four women, a single mother and her two daughters, aged 9 and 10. The main accused is Ben, 15-year-old son of the dead mother and brother to the dead sisters.

What’s Ben like?
Well, he keeps to himself at home, finds his sisters annoying, pines for the affection of an absentee father, moonlights as a janitor at his school, and hates most things about his life. Out in the world, nobody likes Ben very much, nor does anyone pay him any attention. At home, his mother worries about the strange contours of his boyish adolescence, which she cannot relate to, no matter how much she tries. The day of the murders, she is devastated when she finds out that there are rumours going around town about Ben sexually abusing several younger girls at school.

I had just finished reading Dark Places when the Netflix series Adolescence premièred to worldwide acclaim and let loose an avalanche of think pieces.

Most of the progressive discourse around the show follows a narrative that has become commonplace over the last few years: we have a crisis of dangerous incels (involuntary celibates) who are being initiated into the Temple of Toxic Masculinity by its influencer-missionaries like Andrew Tate. Sometimes the Temple is referred to as the Manosphere, but regardless of the precise term used, there is a cult-like connotation to it. The cult is supposed to have its own symbology and language — red pill, blue pill, rules about the coded meanings of different colours in heart emoji, etc., — which make it all the more menacing and inaccessible to the uninitiated (we, the innocent liberal-progressives, of course).

One need not look too closely at the articles, op-eds, tweets, and reels perpetuating this narrative to realise that despite their concern about what’s becoming of young men, their calls for raising boys better and correcting the definition of masculinity, they are utterly devoid of any empathy for the subjects of their enquiry. Why is that? Maybe, it does not seem cool to empathise with boys because it brings one uncomfortably close to the cultural cesspools occupied by Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), who are admittedly an exceptionally odious and idiotic bunch. Also, maybe because it provides no virtue-signalling brownie points, which have become the primary motivation for the savvy crowd Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to in her 2021 essay, It is Obscene. They are the so-called sophisticated-take specialists, whose social-media-friendly kindness is mostly reserved for displays of empathy towards oppressed identity groups. The greater (or more obvious) this oppression, the more brownie points are up for grabs. It’s the flip side of intersectional activism. Following this logic, since we live in a deeply patriarchal society, young men cannot qualify as an oppressed entity regardless of their circumstances. Therefore, they cannot be empathised with safely. The agreed-upon role for them is that of problematic entities, potentially violent (or, at least, toxic) beings, all of them.

Curiously enough, we seem blind to the irony that by imagining the existence of a violent beast living inside of all men, no matter how young (as the makers of Adolescence seems to point out by casting the most childish-looking 13-year-old they could find) we are sending out the exact same message as MRAs or male influencers like Tate. The only difference is, we are telling boys that it’s a terrible thing to have the beast inside of them, and they must learn to keep it in check at all times. The Tate-template, on the other hand, is telling them that it’s their God-given right to let the beast out, or even that the respect they get from other men, and the attention they get from women, depends on how ferocious they make the beast, how callous they are about its wildness.

Yet, no one finds it worth their time to sit beside a boy and tell him the truth: there is no beast. No one can be bothered to explain to young men that their fight is neither with themselves nor with women, but with a socio-economic system that pits men and women against each other and capitalises on everyone’s insecurities.

It is always difficult for one generation to understand the behaviour of the next, and to easily assume the worst, particularly where adolescents are concerned. The current panic about teenage boys, therefore, is not unprecedented.

In the 1980s America (which forms the setting for Dark Places), for example, this mania took the shape of narratives revolving around Satanism instead of inceldom and social media. During the “Satan panic years” (as The New York Times refers to them now), young people, especially boys, who didn’t fit the mould of nicely-behaved, toeing-the-line adults, were suspected en masse of everything from cattle-mutilation to child-abuse and murder.

In Dark Places, Ben is tried in the court of law as well as the collective consciousness of his town. Everyone looks at him and sees an utterly unlikeable boy. Due to the popular narratives at play — Satanism, child abuse allegations, Ben’s teenage angst — they find it easy enough to jump from “unlikeable boy” to “murderer”. He is found guilty and given a life sentence by the jury, although all evidence against him is highly circumstantial, and the supposed eyewitness, his only surviving 8-year-old sister, has been coached extensively by a prosecution-hired psychiatrist. He spends years in prison before his sister, now grown up, sets about righting a wrong and proves him innocent.

In pitting one unlikeable-boy-narrative against another, by comparing Dark Places and Adolescence (the former written by a woman, interestingly enough, and the latter by men), we may open our eyes to the inherently flawed nature of generalisations, and panic may give way to nuance.

As important as it is to understand the hate and misogyny flowing freely across social media platforms, and act against it, it would not serve us well to classify as guilty-until-proven-otherwise anyone who doesn’t deliver our precise idea of correct social behaviour. Also, despite the idea’s incompatibility with our outrage-rewarding digital platforms, we would do well to remember that every time we dismiss an individual’s humanity with blanket suspicion, we only push them harder towards those who would encourage them to justify that suspicion.