A new Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, about a 13-year old boy who stabs a girl – a classmate – to death has been called cacophonous and gripping. It has been called flawed. It has Jack Thorne (one of its creators), parents, teachers, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, lawmakers (at least in the UK), and opinion writers thinking about social media, violent misogyny, and, to a lesser extent, the cruelty of teenage girls. Some think that some boys have taken on the misogyny of the incel online subculture, and that those boys are a problem for schools.
Stopping here to say that schools can also be a problem for students: A Bleak Picture For Young Black Male Students.
Anyone who says “boys will be boys” is a problem, including White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt: video here.
“Boys will be boys” is a common, but unacceptable, excuse for bad behavior. Equally uacceptable: “we do what we want.”
Ask Eric about excusing unacceptable behavior. See one reader’s response (read all the way down to the letter from the special education teacher), then see Eric reconsider how bad that behavior actually was.
DOGE is a problem. So is pornography. (Maybe not all pornography? Go read Wikipedia on pornography. Think about pornography as “a major influencer of people’s perception of sex in the ditigal age.” Maybe we can talk about pornography another day.)
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a problem. Remote voting by proxy is unconstituional for new parents, but constitutional for US Representatives who didn’t want to get COVID?
Boys and men face their own disadvantages.
Richard Reeves on Rebuilding Masculinity, interview by Daniel McDermon, The Sun, June 2025: “… the problems facing men [and boys] are not largely about exclusion or oppression. … Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the ‘feminist woke takeover of institutions’ is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.”
I’ll be thinking about this interview for a long time. If you read nothing else from this post, spend some time with it.
If you can’t get past the paywall, contact me. I’ll send you a PDF.
Other things I’m thinking about:
What is masculinity?
Does hypermasculinity make one less of a human being?
Why aren’t we all celebrating the West Point graduate who became the first woman to compete in – and complete – the Best Ranger Competition?
Here is the source material for the tiny tyrants in the erasure poem above and a PDF of the underlying study. That study, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, can also be found here.
