A Difficult Phase

Hi there! Thanks for subscribing. Here, in the moments where you still like me, I'm going to take the opportunity to do book announcements:

Be Not Afraid, my horror comic with Lisandro Estherren, is out in June. Pre-order it at your comic shop so that stores will stock it!

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out in October. You can pre-order that at all the usual places, but the most ethical option is Bookshop.org.

As always: Be prepared, mentally and emotionally, for DC Pride.

I’m going to preface the following with a disclaimer: I am as busy, right now, as I ever have been in my life. 

“Busy” is a good thing, and I’m not complaining — I have a lot of projects I really care about. But I am currently promoting two books in two different formats, finishing both books simultaneously, contributing to a writers’ room for an anthology, still writing a third major project, and turning in reported pieces, while also running a newsletter, raising a child and (I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea) training a puppy. It is in this state of mind — tired, stressed, mind in a million different places at once — that I traditionally fuck myself by posting a spicy Take on the Internet and getting yelled at. 

Is this going to be the take that does it? Maybe. Maybe not. The tragedy of Takes Disease is that you can’t tell which ones will ruin your life until they’re posted. Conditions are ominous, though. If this were a disaster movie, I would be pointing to the blueprint of my ship and assuring you that it’s unsinkable. If this were an action movie, I would be telling you I have two weeks to retirement and showing you a picture of my pregnant wife. If this were a horror movie, I would be… any given person in a horror movie. They’re all doomed, and stupid, and so am I. 

So I’m going to hedge what I have to say here, knowing that I may not be contributing to the conversation so much as fulfilling an ancient curse on my family line. I’m also not going to invest much energy in defending it — if you disagree, then you disagree, and that’s fine. I might disagree with myself two weeks from now, but for now, this is what I think.

 My Take, this morning, is about the critically acclaimed Netflix miniseries Adolescence, which has been widely hailed as a chilling dissection of incel culture and what the Manosphere is doing to our young men.  

My take is: I didn’t particularly care for it! 

Allow me to explain. 

I will preface this by conceding, loudly and clearly, that Adolescence is a stellar piece of filmmaking. Every good thing you’ve heard about it, style-wise — the long takes, the realism, the performances — is true, and I am not immune to its appeal. I was riveted throughout the first episode. But as the series wore on, I liked it less and less, and eventually, I realized that I just don’t think Adolescence has a moral compass or a political consciousness that is equal to the heavy material it’s trying to take on. 

The show is a four-hour miniseries about a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, who is accused of stabbing a female classmate to death. There’s no mystery; by the end of the first hour, we know he killed her. The question is why. As the series progresses, we explore Jamie’s school, Jamie’s family, and  Jamie himself, as he speaks to a therapist to determine whether he’s competent to stand trial. 

Obviously, there is a shock factor here — the extreme youth of the defendant, the extreme brutality of the crime. Jamie still looks like a very little boy, and behaves like one (when the police burst into his room, he wets himself and has to be changed by his father) when not murdering and sexually assaulting girls. This leads us to view him as fundamentally innocent, and sure enough, we learn that he’s been led astray by The Manosphere, and its Ideas About Women. He asked the girl out, she made fun of him on Instagram, and he stabbed her to assuage his ego. 

To be clear: Children do not have the same moral understanding as adults, nor do they have fully functioning pre-frontal cortexes. They literally can’t be held responsible in the same way adults are. There really are cases where kids this young kill their classmates, and they are tragic. That said, “Jamie Miller” is not a child; he is a fictional character, and I think it’s fair to ask why this was the fictional character Adolescence created in order to tell a story about online radicalization and male supremacist hate crime. 

When young children kill each other in real life, there is almost always a precipitating factor, other than “the Internet.” Maybe parent left a handgun unattended. Maybe the child had an undiagnosed mental illness. Incel killers are ideological killers — they kill, not for personal gain or vengeance, but as a form of political terrorism. The men who kill for ideology tend to be much older teens, or adult men, who can be held accountable for their ideologies and actions: Elliott Rodger was 22. Alek Minassian was 25. Roy Den Hollander was 72 years old, with decades of very public men’s rights activism behind him, when he was accused of murder, a charge he only escaped by killing himself.  

Jamie, our fictional incel, is 13, and looks about eight or nine. So, right away, there’s some fancy footwork here: Adolescence claims to present a portrait of a manosphere-fueled killer, but also makes him implicitly unaccountable for his actions and beliefs, due to his age. The show can only do this by distorting the truth of who these killers typically are. 

Furthermore: Adolescence just doesn’t exhibit any in-depth knowledge of MRA culture. “The Manosphere” is less an explanation here than it is a handwave. We get a few hot-button phrases (“red pill,” “80/20”) and we get an understanding that the sexual politics of Jamie’s peer group are pretty rancid (the inciting incident for the murder was that the victim’s boyfriend shared a nude photo of her online — Jamie presumed the post-sexual-assault shaming would knock her down a few pegs and make her “gettable”) but we do not get any deep or detailed or (God forbid) political analysis of what it means to hate women, to hate women enough to kill them, to hate women as a member of a hate group that means to strip civil rights from women, to hate women in a patriarchy where sexual and verbal and physical violence are all standard and tacitly permitted means of keeping women in line and elevating men to positions of power. 

What I’m saying is: If you watched Adolescence in a vacuum, you would conclude that “misogyny” was a youth craze that surfaced on the Internet a few years back, like eating Tide pods, rather than being the foundation upon which Western society has been built for millennia. This is a cop-out, and leads to my second quibble: Even as a story about misogyny, Adolescence is really only interested in telling the stories of boys and men. 

There are practically no women in this thing, and when they exist, they’re so underwritten that they barely register. We follow a male cop, struggling with how to raise his teenage son in these Manosphere-ridden times — he has a female partner, with a few lines and no backstory. We follow Jamie’s father, wrestling with his own childhood history of abuse and his anger issues as he wonders how he failed his son — we also meet Jamie’s mother, whose characteristics are “nice” and “loves Jamie’s father.” Jamie’s sister floats on the edges of some episodes, an indistinct and mostly silent presence; a female friend of the victim gets a scene in Episode 2, but not much more than that. The only female character given any depth is Jamie’s psychologist, and it is no coincidence that her episode is far and away the best of the series. 

I didn’t realize exactly what I disliked about Adolescence until I hit its finale, in which we mostly abandon Jamie to revisit his family. I say “family,” but really, I mean “Jamie’s father” — played by Stephen Graham, the co-creator of the series. Graham has not-so-subtly handed himself the plum role, and Episode 4 lets him hog spotlights and chew on scenery to his heart’s content. 

We learn about how Jamie’s father grew up. We learn about how he fell in love with his wife. We learn about his anger issues. We learn about why he’s really a nice guy despite his anger issues (mostly due to the ministrations of the wife, who makes a point of saying “this isn’t you” and “you’re a good father” every time the viewer’s sympathy strays away from him). We learn how Jamie’s father feels about incels, which is Not Good — apparently, this man raised his son to be a violently misogynist killer by the time he was twelve years old without ever exhibiting a whiff of sexism himself. 

Now: In reality, the parents of violently misogynistic children are often violent misogynists themselves, or at least significantly more invested in patriarchy that Jamie’s father is ever shown to be; think of Brock Turner’s father, Dan A. Turner, lamenting that his son’s life was being ruined over “twenty minutes of action.” Think of all the parents, mothers and fathers alike, who claimed their sons were being made “unsafe” by #MeToo. Then again, showing us that would require treating misogyny as a politically significant belief system, not a weird Ringu-style Internet curse that happens if your son gets too much screen time, so I can see why the miniseries doesn’t address it. 

To resume: We learn about the childhood of Jamie’s father. We learn about the sins of Jamie’s father’s father, and the way Jamie’s father tried to be better than Jamie’s father’s father while fathering Jamie. Finally, in a climactic, tear-besodden, seemingly endless monologue, we get to see Jamie’s father talk about Jamie’s fucking soccer games, and how he didn’t support Jamie enough at the soccer games, and how maybe everything would have been better if he’d cared more about the soccer. Then we — once more — get a vindication of Jamie’s father’s fathering, in the form of his daughter who turned out pretty well (it seems, from the few lines she’s been given) and then Stephen Graham talks to a teddy bear, and that’s it. End of Adolescence. 

They’re going to run into the victim’s family now, right? I kept thinking, throughout this episode. At the hardware store. At the movies. Somewhere. We’re going to see the impact this girl’s death had on someone other than her murderer’s dad, right? He’s not the point of this story. Is he? 

Reader: He is, and as the episode wound to a close, I realized I’d just watched an entire miniseries about the sexual assault and ensuing murder of a thirteen-year-old girl without learning anything about that girl, other than the fact that she was once mean to her murderer on Instagram. The series’ lack of interest in girls and women is so profound that even the girl whose murder kicked it off is somehow beside the point. Her life, her death, are mere backdrop to the story Adolescence wants to be telling, which is a story about Fathers and Sons, Boys and Men, the Nature of Masculinity — men discussing men discussing men, while a child not much older than my daughter dies to prove a point. 

At this point, I want to address the elephant in the room, or rather in the credits sequence: We are informed, at the beginning of every episode, that Adolescence was PRODUCED by BRAD PITT. Pitt has been vocal about wanting to examine “masculinity” in his projects. (“BRAD PITT IS GOING TO FIGHT TOXIC MASCULINITY,” runs one representative Vogue headline.) Pitt is also divorced and estranged from his children, after (his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, alleges) he got drunk and physically attacked both her and their kids. Specifically, Pitt “grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her;” when his children tried to intervene to protect their mother, “Pitt choked one of the children and struck another in the face.” The two went to court because Jolie refused to sign “a nondisclosure agreement that would have contractually prohibited her from speaking outside of court about Pitt’s physical and emotional abuse of her and their children.”

Pitt has denied all these actions, and has publicly denigrated Jolie to boot, which is pretty standard (and, I might add, pretty pathetic) in these situations. So, while I acknowledge that we all have to get our money from somewhere, I do not think the former Mr. Jolie would have co-signed this project if it were a feminist manifesto, and I think its statements about misogynistic violence deserve to be viewed with extra skepticism, given that they come from (or, at least, were approved by) an abusive man. I will leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks about how often “masculinity” discourse is a shell game used by abusers — Pitt, Justin Baldoni, Jonathan Majors, Junot Diaz, and let us never forget the original Good Man, Hugo Schwyzer — so that they can seem to engage in self-reflection, or feminist discourse, without ever actually holding themselves accountable or centering women and girls. 

Is that “man-hating?” I don’t know. It also pisses me off when you claim to be doing a story about the death of Nex Benedict and end up profiling Chaya Raichik. It pisses me off whenever a newspaper runs yet another “They Voted For Trump… But Didn’t Expect THIS” piece, wherein we behold the tragedy of someone who just figured out that the rise of fascism might be a bummer for them, personally. Ignoring the victims in order to focus on their killers does the killers’ work for them — it buys into the premise of the murder, which is that the killers are more interesting, more important, more human than the people who died. 

Sure, chalk it up to personal bias, if you have to: My own kid is 1,000% more likely to be murdered by an incel than to become one, and I would like to think that, in that story, her death would be slightly more important than some screenwriter working out his trauma around his Dad not attending enough Little League games. Still, making a miniseries about Toxic Masculinity and only focusing on male characters is like making a miniseries about Hitler and only focusing on his painting. It’s not until you see who’s getting hurt, and how badly they’re hurting, that you get the point.

But, like I said, this is Take Season, and I want to qualify mine as much as possible. So, rather than hammering down on the series’ defects, I will talk now about what it did well — the justly acclaimed third episode, which is a two-hander between Jamie and his psychologist, played by Erin Doherty. 

When Doherty comes on screen, the show gains its moral compass. She is the only fully fleshed-out female character in the show’s run, and she is also the only glimpse we get at the series’ core question: How Jamie interacts with women, and specifically, how he deals with an adult woman who is in a position of authority over him. The answer, predictably, is that he’s not great at it. We see him manipulate, neg, charm, boast, cajole, and ultimately erupt into screaming rages when he doesn’t get what he wants; we understand, by the end of the hour, exactly what makes him capable of murder. Yet the real pleasure and terror of the hour is watching Doherty react to him, and tracking her character’s journey over the course of the episode. 

The psychologist, whose name is Briony, strikes us as a kind person. She’s an adult who has chosen to work with children, who respects children as people in their own right, and as a child psychologist, she presumably holds empathy for troubled and difficult kids. We see her trying to hold that empathy and respect for Jamie; to give him time, to give him help, to truly understand him and even help him to understand himself. We also see that, by the end of the episode, her empathy for Jamie is gone. He clearly terrifies her, but he also disgusts and depletes her. The more she knows about him, the harder it is to care. 

Jamie insists that he didn’t kill the girl — but she was a “bullying bitch.” Didn’t kill the girl — but “should have killed her.” Didn’t kill the girl — but when he had a knife on her, he could have raped her, and he didn’t, and “other boys would.” 

It is at this point, when Jamie demands credit and praise for just not raping someone, and specifically for not raping someone right before he killed her, that we see Briony completely shut down. She stops trying to give him therapy, or understand him, and just asks the questions she’s been sent to ask: Does he understand that murder ends a life? Yes. Does he understand that murder is illegal? Yes. Does he understand that murderers go to prison? Yes. If he understands those things, then he’s competent to stand trial. The episode ends with Jamie begging his therapist to tell him she likes him as she refuses to answer. 

Here is what I submit to you: If that episode had been the final episode, if that moment had been the final moment, then I, like everyone else, would be praising Adolescence. Switch the fourth episode with the third, or (better yet) axe the fourth episode entirely, and the whole story ends with Jamie going on and on about his Dad and his soccer games and his bullies and how he needs to be understood and sympathized with and helped and saved and liked, liked, liked, do you like me, while a woman recoils in horror and disgust at his very existence. Boom. End of Jamie, end of series, we’re done. 

That ending works for me, because it breaks the chain of men thinking about how men think about men, and puts the emphasis back where it belongs: On the victims. In the world we live in, every woman is the actual or potential victim of some guy like Jamie. In Doherty’s final moments on screen, a woman who lives under the threat of misogynistic violence faces the source of that violence, and — ultimately — finds the strength to turn away from it and reclaim her own life. End the series there, with her, and you’ve told the story about the Manosphere that actually needs telling.

Or, I guess, you could end it on a twenty-five-hour-long monologue where a dude cries his face off about how important it is to cheer for your kid at his soccer games. It’s your call, Adolescence! Certainly, we all make mistakes sometimes. I probably have, by writing this. And with that, I’m signing off. 

Adolescence is on Netflix.

At my other job: I took stock of the Democrats' pivot to transphobia.

Now, in the name of not being completely sour about everything, I will tell you about a show that I have greatly enjoyed: HBO's The Pitt. Specifically, I will share with you my personal – and definitive – PITT POWER RANKINGS:

1. MCKAY, aka BRAD DOURIF’S DAUGHTER.

A single mom with an ankle monitor, rage issues, and a zero-tolerance policy for incels, she seems almost purposefully designed to be my favorite, but I accept the pandering.

2. NOAH WYLE, aka NOAH WYLE.

His character has a name, but he’s Noah Wyle, and this is his show. 

3. MOHAN, aka SLOW DOCTOR.

She’s slow because she cares! 

4. MEL, aka GIRL NERD DOCTOR.

Again, you can’t give a character a love of puppies, babies and autistic people without playing to the cheap seats, but I live up there, and I love it.

5. SANTOS, aka TOP GUN.

This woman's whole life is just people shaking their fist at her and yelling "Maaaaveriiiiiicccckk!!!!"

SPECIAL MENTION: WHITAKER, aka BOY NERD DOCTOR, aka PEE GUY.

As a journalist with a long-time Twitter presence, I too know what it’s like to be peed on every time I try to do my job.