Young men have been social scapegoats for far too long

Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s new fourpart drama, Adolescence, landed on Netflix this week. Filmed as a set of intense single-take chapters, the series describes 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who stands accused of a violent murder.

- S A U L P A R K E R

It tackles the issue of online misogyny, the “manosphere” and its villainous poster boy Andrew Tate, returning the problem to the forefront of the public imagination.

This content comes hot on the heels of Kyle Clifford’s sentencing last week for the brutal murders of a mother and two daughters, where the court heard of Clifford’s exposure to Andrew Tate’s podcast content hours before his attack.

I have spent the past two years exploring the impact of masculine influencers on young men and boys, analysing media content in depth, and talking with 100 young men and the adults in their lives – and working with a range of organisations to explore constructive solutions to this problem of our times.

During that period, we have seen reams of media headlines, a series of horrific real-world impacts like those of Kyle Clifford, and a great deal of concern in schools, governments, families and the media.

We’ve seen Andrew Tate removed from social media platforms, only to be reinstated to X by Elon Musk, and witnessed the terrifying impact of the Trump campaign mobilising manosphere-adjacent influencers to pull young male voters into their orbit.

It’s not enough to view masculine influencers as a problem to fix or as a content trend to be squashed

The impact of the manosphere has never been greater, and many intelligent, well-meaning people and organisations are trying to grasp what to do about it. To have any hope of having a positive impact on this bleak situation, we have to look at the phenomenon in the round. It’s not enough to view masculine influencers as a problem to fix or as a content trend to be squashed.