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June 21 2025 - 12:00pm
When I was a boy, my friends and I used to scare each other at Cub camps by telling scary stories or repeating urban legends. Insane serial killers, ghosts and demons featured heavily. It was all good, clean fun — to be expected if you put half a dozen imaginative nine- and 10-year olds in a tent together in the dark. Many others will no doubt have had similar experiences.
It’s a little less fun, however, when grown adults in positions of power and responsibility get each other worked up with tales of folk devils, the latest of which are the spectres of “incel culture” and the “manosphere”. Jack Thorne, writer of the Netflix drama Adolescence, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time this week, suggesting that those twin monsters were “terrifying things that are coming for our young men”. In his telling, they are damaging the psyche of teenage boys by promoting narrow and superficial images of manhood.
Thorne is not entirely wrong, of course: boys need a wide range of role models, beyond the conventionally handsome and chiselled Adonises of Instagram and fitness TikTok. He mentioned his own admiration for Jarvis Cocker, who inspired him growing up in the Nineties as a “skinny weirdo”; I was also a bookish, shy and slim teenager, so I can sympathize.
Nevertheless, we should be skeptical of the more hyperbolic concerns about influences on teenage boys and young men. For instance, while 84% of 13 to 15-year-old boys in the UK have heard of Andrew Tate, only 23% hold a positive view of the influencer, compared to 53% who have a negative opinion of him. At the height of Adolescence-mania back in the spring, when questions were being asked in Parliament about fictional events in a TV programme, the BBC interviewed a teenage boy who said he didn’t even know what “incel” meant — his middle-aged father had to explain the term.
What’s more, the critical net seems to be cast far too widely when it comes to media figures who speak predominantly to men and boys. Jordan Peterson is often lumped in with more crude and sinister figures, even though his message of personal discipline, individual responsibility and self-denial is entirely at odds with the sexual libertinism and aggression pushed by Tate and others. Meanwhile, prominent gym influencers are mostly supportive, good-natured and encouraging of their audience, with Joey Swoll — who has a predominantly male following of millions — posting videos commending the efforts of gym novices and rebuking any rudeness to them.
There is undoubtedly also a political agenda at play in the establishment preoccupation with supposed bad influences on boys. Reading some of the critiques, it’s hard to escape the impression that in many cases their real sin is daring to tell young men that there are distinctively masculine virtues and roles in society, that there is nothing wrong with the desire to be assertive and direct and admired.
For obvious reasons, this is a much more attractive and engaging message than the finger-wagging and hectoring which male energy and initiative tends to attract from most manifestations of Official Britain: schools, universities, workplaces, and the BBC. Healthy masculinity, in this view, comes from male self-abnegation — from becoming passive and compliant, and embracing therapeutic openness. Perhaps that is good for some men, but for many others it will only lead to frustration and unhappiness.
