The boys are angry: Ask them why

A newly released crime drama miniseries, Adolescence, written by Jack Thorne and directed by Phillip Barantini, has captured the attention of the public, burning up the internet with opinions and analyses. Largely, there has been high praise for the emotional heft it wields, the technical aspects — the four episodes are shot in single takes with no edits — and the superlative performances. To a lesser extent, there has been critique, mainly from women, of the “invisibilising” of the victim.

Without any spoilers, the premise revolves around a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who is arrested within minutes of the start for the murder of a young girl, Katie. What follows is a cautionary tale. In four tight episodes, we watch systems that one assumes are trustworthy — parenting, schooling, social environments — unravel. The roving finger points towards online bullying, Andrew Tate, the manosphere, apathetic teachers and naive parenting. It is a powerful narrative that compels one to bear witness.

In a world away in Bengaluru...

A few years ago, the subject of Andrew Tate came up within a group of young drama students in Bengaluru. Tate is a self-professed misogynist who claims to help young men “get rich and attract women”. He currently has a slew of cases against him including for rape and human trafficking. I hadn’t heard of him then and had no idea that teenage school boys in Bengaluru were following him avidly.

The girls in the group said they were upset because boys who were fans of Andrew Tate were also quick to denounce equal rights and gender parity. An unexpected conversation followed. One boy pronounced that all the boys in his 9th standard class were Andrew Tate fans. He quoted Tate’s infamous 80/20 mythology, “80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men.” Thus, the pressure to be part of the 20%. He said that teenage boys found Andrew Tate inspiring because he made them feel that they could “do it”. Meaning, they could get past all the hurdles of adolescence, including body image, peer pressure and sexual insecurities.

Teens and ‘woke’ modernity

While the Andrew Tate euphoria has cooled since that day, the manosphere is full of other influencers who advocate for what they call “traditional masculine values of courage, self-discipline and order” to support their disdain for ‘woke’ modernity. While incel culture might be a world away from Bengaluru, adolescence today is a minefield that no one over 40 can claim to have experienced. Because young people are already more vulnerable to the negative effects of stress, the pandemic exacerbated their mental health issues, and this has now been further intensified by the questionable ethics of the online market.

Many adults I spoke with argued that bullying and other teen pressures have always existed. I asked some students about this, and here is what a teenager who experienced extreme online bullying said: “It’s obviously different. You didn’t have the internet that snowballs humiliation and self-loathing. If one person said something nasty to you, it would remain there. Now a single online comment is magnified by re-sharing.” There is also an enormous need for homogeneity fostered by the youth and beauty market. Most adults speak in abstraction about beauty standards while still subscribing to them.

One student suggested a moratorium on lines like “You’ve lost weight/ She’s pretty/ She’s hot” because they are easily weaponised. “There’s nothing wrong with looking good,” she said, “but the words ‘You’ve lost weight’ implies many things that are rarely good.” I’ve heard a young boy say, “Boys won’t like girls who are black or fat.”

Imagine, this impoverished idea was articulated in the city of Bengaluru, which is allegedly modern. The same day, I heard that boys from Class 5 upwards were rating girls on a hotness quotient. And that the “hot girls” were doing it as well, rating other girls as well as boys.

There are no easy solutions. Young people find community and, yes, even solace on social media. If they cannot find an adult who is willing to speak openly about tough subjects, they will find ample and often questionable voices on the internet.

Padmini Ray Murray, who works on the intersection of technology and gender, says, “The biggest obstacle we face is the idea that the online is a space ‘out there, ’ separate from the fabric of our lives.”

Involve all stakeholders

The answer, therefore, is not in throwing out smartphones and denying young people screen time. Rather, it resides in having those difficult offline conversations with them about vulnerabilities, fears, gender and sexual energy.

There are several existing national initiatives and non-governmental services that aim to strengthen crisis intervention and adolescent mental health support across India. Bengaluru-based Sa-Mudra has been focused on youth wellness and empowerment for 17 years, their vision being a crime and suicide free society. Most of these initiatives include helplines, such as the Yuva helpline.

I spoke with Shobha Managoli, Founder Trustee of the Shloka Deviah Trust, who said that their mission is to involve multiple stakeholders through active engagement with parent and school management and faculty communities. Through programs such as ParentUp, Parent Empath and EcoCampus, they offer resilience training, offline and online counselling and medical referrals.

Back to Adolescence, the TV series in which there was no looking away from the long arm of socially expected masculinity that is tragically traditional and utterly hegemonic — the gym-honed body, the appetite for football versus the negation of the arts, the primacy of wealth and acquisition, the internalised emotions, the violence of word and action. These unrealistic expectations burn a societal hole that cannot be healed by one player alone.

In this post-pandemic moment in time, we must recognise that schools and parents' function within a larger framework of history, tradition and laissez-faire capitalism. We have to each look inwards, address our prejudices and fears, and seek solutions as multiple weavers and quilters of a single lihaaf (quilt) that is relatively safe for our children.

The writer is an actor, director and filmmaker who writes on culture, society and the arts.