Adolescence is a Netflix show about a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller (played by Owen Cooper) who is arrested for murdering a female schoolmate, Katie Leonard (played by Emilia Holliday). Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, it has amassed 66.3 million views since its launch and is being described as an “international water cooler moment” for its emotionally charged story and technical brilliance. It’s also been called a “wake up call” for parents because it draws attention to the dangers of misogynistic influencers online, unregulated social media use, and a so-called “crisis in parent-child communication.”

I’ve noticed there are some gaps in the global conversation about the show. For instance, I hope its success will bring attention to backlash politics in education, specifically how the predominantly female teaching workforce has been framed as causing boys’ disengagement in school, as well as various other mental health and behavioural problems. I also hope the show will prompt a rejection of the status quo of coercion and fear which exists in many classrooms, as well as prove why we must challenge restrictive gender stereotypes that limit so many young people in schools.

Professor Debbie Ging writes that Jamie’s secondary school in Adolescence is “depicted as chaotic and underfunded, where teachers have lost control of the pupils.” She also observes that the show portrays male teachers as being part of the problem, suggesting the show “subtly challenges reductive attempts” to blame Jamie’s socialisation into patriarchal masculinity on the “feminisation of education.”

Morwenna Griffiths explains that ‘feminisation’ in education refers to “a concern that the high proportion of women teachers leads to an inappropriate femininity of culture within schools,” and that this has been “bad for boys.” The good news is that research continues to show that boys are in no way disadvantaged by being taught by female teachers and that students simply want teachers to be good at teaching and keeping order.

In my 17 years’ experience as a high school teacher, I have never felt that my gender has negatively impacted on my ability to connect with, teach, or inspire young men. However, I’ve been acutely aware of assumptions which persist in schools and the wider community about teachers – more than 70% of whom are women – being “too soft” or that they need to “crackdown” on student misbehaviour using “old-school discipline.” A political candidate last year even discussed the benefits of “healthy fear” in schools and flirted with the idea of bringing back the cane.

There are perhaps many viewers of Adolescence who have no idea that while female teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic language and behaviours by male students, they have often simultaneously been blamed for boys’ disengagement, underperformance, or general “malaise”, as was the case in 2021, when China’s education ministry issued a notice titled ‘The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents,’ which suggested the prevalence of female teachers made boys “weak, inferior and timid.”

In 2022, Hungarian officials claimed boys were being subjected to a so-called “pink education” that was becoming “too feminine.” Here in Australia, Kevin Donnelley has claimed that everything from the way teachers teach, to the structure of classrooms, to the curriculum has been “feminised.” This is a misguided claim, given that white, male, British authors still dominate school reading lists. I’m still trying to figure out how the desks, chairs, and whiteboard in my classrooms are feminine. Perhaps I should paint the walls blue?

It seems the spectre of what one could consider ‘pink peril’ looms large.

We won’t get anywhere if this kind of defensive ‘backlash politics’ about female educators continues. It will only feed the manosphere* and can be read as a type of “diversionary debate” concealing what could be called the ‘real crisis of masculinity’ in schools – i.e. not female teachers, but the prevalence of homophobia and femiphobia, or the anxiety about homosexuality and discomfort with anything ‘feminine’ which boys exhibit.

The gender straitjacket

In February this year, I gave a workshop at the English Teachers Association of Queensland about engaging boys in English. I highlighted the urgent need to address the rigid gender stereotypes that limit boys’ engagement and success at school, referring to what William Pollock calls the ‘gender straitjacket,’ a metaphor for the “constricting assumptions, models, and rules about boys that our society has used since the nineteenth century.” The gender straitjacket, he says, not only constrains boys, “but everyone else, reducing us all as human beings, and eventually making us strangers to ourselves and to one another – or, at least, not as strongly connected to one another as we long to be.”

It saddens me that while boys may read voluntarily for pleasure and relaxation in primary school, by the time they transition to high school they are less likely to read due to dominant masculine stereotypes and consider subjects like English to be less ‘masculine’ due to its perceived irrelevance to traditional “men’s work”, lack of set answers, and emphasis on emotions.

Research by the eSafety Commissioner has shown that social media can “empower, limit and harm young men” as they navigate notions of what is considered normal and natural within a heteronormative culture, but it’s important to note that boys’ disengagement was evident long before the arrival of social media; for instance, their retention rates have been lower than girls since the early 1980s, boys have always been expelled and suspended in greater numbers than girls, and they have always succeeded less at literacy.

But improving boys’ engagement in school will not be as simple as banning social media or justifying this grim reality with simplistic claims about classrooms being too feminine or boys just being “naughtier than girls.” It’s far more complicated than this. For instance, teachers “often have lower expectations of boys than girls” and treat them “less favourably,” causing them to feel angry or annoyed, with some boys in this study “admitting that they end up living up to the stereotype.”   

Cleary, teachers must reflect on their own gender biases in the classroom because this can shape not only the academic success of young men, but their sense of self-worth, too.

Healthy fear?

At the risk of sparking a #notallmaleteachers hashtag, it’s worth noting that the creators of Adolescence sought to portray the school in the show as what sociologist Raewyn Connell refers to as a masculinity-making device; a place that is not neutral in the construction of gender, but instead is actively engaged in this process.

This becomes clear as Detective Misha Frank (played by Faye Marsay) is shaken as she walks past a classroom, hearing a male teacher yell over a video the students are watching. “Right! That’s it! Not another word! Put your hands down and watch the video!” Seconds later, we see Mr. Curtis yell, “Stop that!” to silence a male student who oinks at detectives.

We know fear is detrimental to valuable learning, and considering Jamie is used to this context, is it so shocking that he barks in the face of clinical psychologist Briony Ariston (played by Erin Doherty) to threaten her? Ging writes that it is unclear whether this “chilling display of performative male domination” is indicative of Jamie “channelling the scripts of masculinity influencers or those of real men in his life.”

Indeed, Adolescence invites us to reflect on the many nefarious influences beyond social media on young men’s behaviours and attitudes. Look around, like a house of mirrors, the exact source of everyday sexism and misogyny is hard to discern, as it is reflected across all levels of society, from parliament, to the police force, to medicine, retail, hospitality, mining, construction, sport, gaming, prime time radio, and reality TV shows. In sum: it’s everywhere, the manosphere just packaged it up and commodified it.

Prof Michael Salter believes that even if we “cut off social media tomorrow” we would still have “high rates of violence committed against girls and women by teenage boys because frankly they’ve always been the group most at risk of committing gender-based violence, well before the internet.”

Against this backdrop, female teachers must navigate an escalating culture of misogyny, while school leaders are grappling with a rise in violence, threats and abuse from students and parents alike. Considering this, while the content of Adolescence is confronting, Jamie’s attitude about women and violence hardly seems shocking when we peel our eyes off Netflix and instead examine our own communities.

What now?

Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne describes the show not as a ‘whodunnit’ but a ‘whydunnit’. We must now ask, what now?

I’m not convinced we need the MA-rated show to be played in all schools, as suggested in the UK. Can you imagine the tardy, dishevelled Mr. Malik in Adolescence being tasked with educating his students on complex topics like Incel** culture or misogyny, likely with no training, resources, or support?

Clearly, tasking an already burnt out workforce with the job of dismantling misogyny may be tricky territory. Andy Mison wrote this week about the expectations many in our communities have about educators, such as that their duty of care is “endless” and that they “can solve society’s problems.” This, he believes, is a contributing factor in the growing violence in our schools.

Overwhelming expectations on teachers become clear in Adolescence as the school community grapples with the tragedy and the need for grief support. One teacher asks, “So we’re security guards and social workers now? Great.” Here, the show reflects the reality that teaching has become more time-consuming and more physically and emotionally demanding, and it is female-dominated jobs which tend to be undervalued socially and financially.

Sophie King-Hill, associate professor at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, also offers a word of caution about how we engage young people in this conversation, warning that “showing the series as a teaching tool risks framing boyhood as monolithic, with one particular – and problematic – way of being a boy.” It is this “blame culture” that can lead to “feelings of worthlessness in young men and boys, which shuts down vital dialogue and also may lead them to resort to looking for direction from negative spaces such as the manosphere.”

Writer and researcher Josephine Browne writes that “extensive social change takes time, and language matters.” You may not have noticed, but I haven’t used the term ‘toxic masculinity’ in my article. This is because many researchers have pointed out the potential risks of the term, suggesting that just as showing Adolescence in all classrooms could add to ‘blame culture’, so too could the term ‘toxic masculinity’ which has the potential to provoke defensive and hostile reactions among some men. 

Browne writes that the term ‘toxic masculinity’ “simplifies the complex contextualisation of decisions around the practices of men. It exempts the men who participate in the labeling from self-examination. And it has become an easy target for conservatives calling for ‘real men’ to ‘fight back’.”

The hype of Adolescence will not translate into tangible change in schools and communities if we can’t examine our own beliefs and challenge limiting views about what young men need, and which undermine the many female teachers who work hard every day to support them. For instance, I am unconvinced that what boys need most in the classroom is barely-trained retired athletes or ex-Army personnel, or that they simply need more “blokes” to “talk about last night’s football.” These views perpetuate social constructs of gender that stitch all of us more tightly into gender straitjackets.

Newsflash to those who don’t work in schools: some female teachers follow football, and shock horror – some young men don’t. For instance, Jamie in Adolescence talks about being “really good at getting out of PE” with his clinical psychologist and expresses a sense of shame about not being “sporty.” Unsurprisingly, research shows that for some boys and men, Incel forums – where Jamie was seemingly radicalized – likely provide the validation and space they need to feel valued and understood when they are contending with unmet self-esteem needs or feeling unable to meet masculine norms.

Beyond a doubt, we need more male teachers, but not for the old reasons of having “strong” role models or even father figures for boys. On the contrary, research shows “children’s role models tend to be their peers or relatives – suggesting there is no deficit of role models for children,” and “while a male teacher may be a positive and reassuring figure for some children, there is scant evidence that fatherless children require compensatory male teachers.” 

We need more male teachers for many reasons, notably because they could allow students to observe “men who are non-violent and whose interactions with women are positive” and because by “working in roles that are typically viewed as appropriate only for women, men can help to break down the polarised differences that foster gender inequalities.”

My hope is that we can sustain the sudden global interest in boys’ disengagement and the influence of misogynist influencer culture beyond the water cooler and convert the sense of alarm into genuine reflection on our own communities and workplaces, including schools. Even better, the sense of alarm the show has generated could galvanize real action on dismantling the limiting gender stereotypes that feed the manosphere and perpetuate backlash politics which undermines teachers.

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* The manosphere is a loose network of antifeminist and male-supremacist men’s rights groups and communities which has flourished thanks to the technological affordances of social media (Ging, 2019).

** Incels are men who believe they are denied sex due to their inferior physical attributes, the influence of feminism, and women’s biologically prescribed desire for alpha males. The incel subculture is characterised by articulations of despair, self-loathing, and sometimes suicidal ideation.

Source: https://antibullyingcentre.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DCU-Toxicity-Full-Report.pdf

Lead image: Elisabeth Lucas Art Collections