The Dangerous-Son Problem

Netflix's Adolescence has upped the panic over teen boys' internet brain rot.

- Kathryn Jezer-Morton

SCOTT, A FATHER OF two boys ages 11 and 13, recalled recently hearing one say to the other, “What color is your Bugatti?” “That's an Andrew Tate-ism,” Scott explained. “Someone’s criticizing him and he uses that as a retort: ‘Anything you have to say to me doesn’t matter because you don't have a Bugatti and I do.”

Scott was only vaguely familiar with Tate, a central figure in the so-called manosphere, who has been accused of human trafficking and has a massive social-media following among boys and young men. But social media disseminates content like bits of microplastics that build up in our bodies—and the bodies of our children. These cultural fragments—remarks, jokes, expressions—are often so far removed from their source material that kids have no idea where they even come from. This is how young people are exposed to the culture of the manosphere whether or not they even look for it. Scott sometimes catches bits and pieces of it in his sons’ conversations. “They talk about ‘pulling baddies.’ Chad, sigma—those kinds of words are ubiquitous among kids who have access to any screens at all. Maybe you don’t even need screens; maybe you just have to be a kid at school. The whole ‘brain rot’ way of speaking is very much coming out of that world.”

Like millions of parents, Scott has found the recent Netflix series