"Misogyny isn’t men hating women; it is men hating in women what they have been taught to hate about themselves." -- Succinct and painfully accurate. I haven't watched this series yet but hope to soon as I've heard a lot about it. As always, thank you for what you do!
This is such a powerful and moving piece. I really appreciate how you name the emotional isolation and shame at the heart of so much of what’s going wrong with masculinity today—especially for boys and young men trying to find their place in a rapidly shifting world.
Reading this, I kept thinking about the concept of patriarchal masculinity, which scholars like Bell Hooks and Riane Eisler have explored deeply. The traits that are hurting boys—emotional suppression, homophobia, the drive for domination and control—aren’t inherent to men. They’re a product of patriarchal systems that have long dictated what’s “acceptable” for boys to feel and express.
This also echoes ideas from Gabor Maté, particularly in The Myth of Normal, where he shows how trauma, disconnection, and emotional repression manifest in everything from addiction to chronic illness. What we call “toxic masculinity” often begins as unhealed pain in boys who never had safe spaces to feel or be vulnerable.
A few other books came to mind as I read: “Nurturing Our Humanity” by Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry, which explores how societies rooted in domination (rather than partnership) shape everything from our gender norms to our politics; and
“The Wheel of Change” by Eisler, which offers a hopeful framework for rewiring systems—from education to economics—to prioritize care, connection, and mutual respect.
Your call for radical imagination and more expansive visions of masculinity is right on target. And yes—it’s not just boys who need this shift. We all do. Thank you for creating stories that move us in this direction. I’ll be picking up Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future—sounds like something I want to read with my kids.
I reflected about the sentence: "Misogyny isn’t men hating women; it is men hating in women what they have been taught to hate about themselves".
This is indeed paradigm shifting, but I think that we need an even more profound revolution of the narrative.
The impression I get when I read discourses on misogyny is that:
1) Any negative feeling towards women is labelled as “hate”.
2) Negative feelings towards women are originated by a toxic and discriminating culture or ideology.
3) Women have no part in the process: they are just spectators of a dynamic acted by men.
4) Negative feelings towards women are sign of hostility, and they shouldn’t be there.
What I think instead is that:
1) Men feel any kind of negative emotion towards women: sadness, bitterness, resentment, anger, envy, fear, you name it. Non distinguishing them leads only to misunderstanding and stigmatizing. Hate is a very extreme emotion: it’s the one that we reserve for an existential threat and is a mix of anger (to fuel us to face an enemy), fear (to beware our enemies) and disgust (not to be impeded by compassion for our enemies). It is very energy draining and almost never experienced in reality.
2) Culture and ideologies influence how reality is perceived, and therefore contribute to the creation of emotions, but negative emotions originate by unsatisfied needs under the influence of culture and ideologies, not by culture and ideologies themselves.
3) Women are part of the process, since they interact with men and contribute to men’s needs being satisfied or not. This does not mean that women are responsible for men’s emotions, since everybody is only responsible for their own emotions, by controlling their own inner narrative.
4) Negative emotions should not be seen as signs of hostility, and they should be there whenever it is necessary to notify an unmet need or push to action to have the need fulfilled. Negative consequences follow whenever emotions are ignored, repressed, stigmatized or managed unproperly. In such cases, negative escalation often happens.
If you don’t agree, please read the above points once again while switching the terms “men” and “women”. Does it feel different or not?
Congratulations! You win the first prize for the first article I read about incels that is empathetic towards boys and men! 😉
However, I’m surprised that you can write so enthusiastically about Adolescence. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard from a video from Marco Crepaldi, a psychologist who studied the incels phenomenon and even wrote a book about it, that this series portraits it in a very unrealistic way. The main character, especially, is even too young to act in the way he does.
Coming to your interpretation, I think that you are overemphasizing the role of culture in repressing feelings in boys and men, at least as a primary cause.
Most incels even have nothing to do with toxic masculinity ideals: they are just boys or man who cannot get into a relationship and cannot deal with rejection. They become growingly insecure and only then become easy prey to whatever ideology caters to their shame, insecurity and resentment.
Among the causes of inability to deal with rejection, I would mention that overprotective parents leave boys less and less opportunities to experience and process failures. Also, the negative consequence of rejection is magnified through exposure on social media, and comparison with fake representations of success.
Among the causes of failures to establish relationships, those mentioned by Crepaldi as most recurring are emotional dependence, lack of personal independence, lack of personal interests and lack of social skills. Of course there is variability between different people.
None of this is usually obvious to the boys, and unfortunately nobody tells them. Maybe, nobody even knows! The concept of emotional dependence is, in my opinion, particularly elusive and underrated, and is also at the root of many episodes of violence within intimate relationships.
Rather than receiving useful instructions on how to improve themselves, boys who cannot get into relationships are mocked as losers or, on the opposite extreme, reassured that nothing is wrong with them. Study on men’s loneliness may be well known as you wrote, but I don’t see them in the media, or they don’t drive action.
Boys become men complaining with women because they still cannot be in a relationship, and women laugh at men talking like having sex is their right. Of course it is not, like it is not my right to go into a bakery asking for bread without having the money, and at the same time of course it is, like it is my right to have a job and earn the money that I need to buy it.
I would just like to add a few words about other categories in the manosphere: one is the Men Going Their Own Way, that is: men who are tired of women and prefer to live on their own. They are often labeled as misogynists. However, there are similar movements of women who are tired of men and prefer to live on their own: one of those is the 4B movement in Korea. Should we call it misandrist? Or should we stop putting labels and pointing fingers, recognize that we have a problem of communication between genders and try to communicate more between each other instead of everyone in their own bubble? (By the way: thank you once again for trying to facilitate this process)
Another is Men’s Rights Activists. Honestly, I don’t even know much about them: I just read women writing on papers about how upset they are than men, as privileged as they are, have the nerve to reclaim their rights. Well, as much as I know, men’s claims are typically about the use of so called “positive discrimination”, that in their opinion represent a sort of “overcompensation”, or about a distorted use (in their own view) of the concept of politically correct as a tool for censorship. One can agree or disagree, but the easiest way to trigger an escalation towards radicalization is refusing to discuss openly (and, possibly, empathically).
[Note: I’m sorry if my tone in the end seems “heated up”. I didn’t mean to sound aggressive]
Having very recently watched this series, I thank-you for a deep and insightful, and even hopeful, take. If my son was 20 years younger, I would definitely be buying your latest book to read with him. I suspect we'd both learn quite a lot!
This show was honestly made by and for privileged people to feel some sense of moral accomplishment by tugging their heart strings. If you swap the ethnicity of the boy to Somalian or Afghan, the intended message behind the film would not resonate.
While the average person struggles against real problems, privileged people are making up shows and analyzing them to feel good about themselves, coming about with academic, ivory tower ways to socially engineer society based on their myths.
Of course you can’t see it, you are part of the cohort I’m describing. What is making me think is the fact that there are real problems real people face, yet this made up story is front of mind for people such as yourself.
Looking outside in, as I’m a real person among real people facing real problems rather than abstract, ivory tower problems, it’s easy for me to see.
You literally know nothing about me. But you act as if you were talking to a person who’s not real, or who does not have real problems… doesn’t that strike you as absurdly arrogant?
There is of course an intersectionality to the understanding of oppression and violence, that white people, like me, can't understand, but does that make the focus on masculinity of this series, irrelevant?
(Full disclosure: I have not actually seen Adolescence, I am basing my thoughts strictly on what I have read on substack, both here and in other articles. I have also made a generally successful effort to avoid the manosphere and parts of the internet adjacent to it for a while now, so it is possible I am working with outdated information ).
1) there is always a bit of sleight of hand I notice when people discuss the feelings of men and boys. It is always “men feel lonely/unloved/ugly/<whatever>”. Discussion for whether men are actually lonely/unloved/whatever is much rarer, and (outside of the manosphere anyway) usually contains a distinct undercurrent of judgement (“how dare you be upset that dating is hard” or similar, depending on what is being discussed)
2) I find just how young Jamie is (13 iirc) undermines whatever good might come of this show. I am afraid we will start expecting emotional maturity from people (both boys and girls) who are simply not mature yet.
Hi, I’m not sure what you mean with your first point, given that those observations are based on data that is now widely available (men’s loneliness and mental health epidemic, suicide rates etc). As far as point no. 2 is concerned, that’s exactly the point: the fact that at 13 boys are already exposed to those kinds of harmful messages when they still don’t have the maturity to process them is THE point. That is where social media is doing the most harm.
"Misogyny isn’t men hating women; it is men hating in women what they have been taught to hate about themselves." -- Succinct and painfully accurate. I haven't watched this series yet but hope to soon as I've heard a lot about it. As always, thank you for what you do!
Thank you Justin!
This is such a powerful and moving piece. I really appreciate how you name the emotional isolation and shame at the heart of so much of what’s going wrong with masculinity today—especially for boys and young men trying to find their place in a rapidly shifting world.
Reading this, I kept thinking about the concept of patriarchal masculinity, which scholars like Bell Hooks and Riane Eisler have explored deeply. The traits that are hurting boys—emotional suppression, homophobia, the drive for domination and control—aren’t inherent to men. They’re a product of patriarchal systems that have long dictated what’s “acceptable” for boys to feel and express.
This also echoes ideas from Gabor Maté, particularly in The Myth of Normal, where he shows how trauma, disconnection, and emotional repression manifest in everything from addiction to chronic illness. What we call “toxic masculinity” often begins as unhealed pain in boys who never had safe spaces to feel or be vulnerable.
A few other books came to mind as I read: “Nurturing Our Humanity” by Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry, which explores how societies rooted in domination (rather than partnership) shape everything from our gender norms to our politics; and
“The Wheel of Change” by Eisler, which offers a hopeful framework for rewiring systems—from education to economics—to prioritize care, connection, and mutual respect.
Your call for radical imagination and more expansive visions of masculinity is right on target. And yes—it’s not just boys who need this shift. We all do. Thank you for creating stories that move us in this direction. I’ll be picking up Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future—sounds like something I want to read with my kids.
Thanks a lot ❤️
Thank you so much for this article. As a mom of boys this is such an incredibly insightful and inspiring take. I appreciate you!
I reflected about the sentence: "Misogyny isn’t men hating women; it is men hating in women what they have been taught to hate about themselves".
This is indeed paradigm shifting, but I think that we need an even more profound revolution of the narrative.
The impression I get when I read discourses on misogyny is that:
1) Any negative feeling towards women is labelled as “hate”.
2) Negative feelings towards women are originated by a toxic and discriminating culture or ideology.
3) Women have no part in the process: they are just spectators of a dynamic acted by men.
4) Negative feelings towards women are sign of hostility, and they shouldn’t be there.
What I think instead is that:
1) Men feel any kind of negative emotion towards women: sadness, bitterness, resentment, anger, envy, fear, you name it. Non distinguishing them leads only to misunderstanding and stigmatizing. Hate is a very extreme emotion: it’s the one that we reserve for an existential threat and is a mix of anger (to fuel us to face an enemy), fear (to beware our enemies) and disgust (not to be impeded by compassion for our enemies). It is very energy draining and almost never experienced in reality.
2) Culture and ideologies influence how reality is perceived, and therefore contribute to the creation of emotions, but negative emotions originate by unsatisfied needs under the influence of culture and ideologies, not by culture and ideologies themselves.
3) Women are part of the process, since they interact with men and contribute to men’s needs being satisfied or not. This does not mean that women are responsible for men’s emotions, since everybody is only responsible for their own emotions, by controlling their own inner narrative.
4) Negative emotions should not be seen as signs of hostility, and they should be there whenever it is necessary to notify an unmet need or push to action to have the need fulfilled. Negative consequences follow whenever emotions are ignored, repressed, stigmatized or managed unproperly. In such cases, negative escalation often happens.
If you don’t agree, please read the above points once again while switching the terms “men” and “women”. Does it feel different or not?
Hi Francesca,
Congratulations! You win the first prize for the first article I read about incels that is empathetic towards boys and men! 😉
However, I’m surprised that you can write so enthusiastically about Adolescence. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard from a video from Marco Crepaldi, a psychologist who studied the incels phenomenon and even wrote a book about it, that this series portraits it in a very unrealistic way. The main character, especially, is even too young to act in the way he does.
Coming to your interpretation, I think that you are overemphasizing the role of culture in repressing feelings in boys and men, at least as a primary cause.
Most incels even have nothing to do with toxic masculinity ideals: they are just boys or man who cannot get into a relationship and cannot deal with rejection. They become growingly insecure and only then become easy prey to whatever ideology caters to their shame, insecurity and resentment.
Among the causes of inability to deal with rejection, I would mention that overprotective parents leave boys less and less opportunities to experience and process failures. Also, the negative consequence of rejection is magnified through exposure on social media, and comparison with fake representations of success.
Among the causes of failures to establish relationships, those mentioned by Crepaldi as most recurring are emotional dependence, lack of personal independence, lack of personal interests and lack of social skills. Of course there is variability between different people.
None of this is usually obvious to the boys, and unfortunately nobody tells them. Maybe, nobody even knows! The concept of emotional dependence is, in my opinion, particularly elusive and underrated, and is also at the root of many episodes of violence within intimate relationships.
Rather than receiving useful instructions on how to improve themselves, boys who cannot get into relationships are mocked as losers or, on the opposite extreme, reassured that nothing is wrong with them. Study on men’s loneliness may be well known as you wrote, but I don’t see them in the media, or they don’t drive action.
Boys become men complaining with women because they still cannot be in a relationship, and women laugh at men talking like having sex is their right. Of course it is not, like it is not my right to go into a bakery asking for bread without having the money, and at the same time of course it is, like it is my right to have a job and earn the money that I need to buy it.
I would just like to add a few words about other categories in the manosphere: one is the Men Going Their Own Way, that is: men who are tired of women and prefer to live on their own. They are often labeled as misogynists. However, there are similar movements of women who are tired of men and prefer to live on their own: one of those is the 4B movement in Korea. Should we call it misandrist? Or should we stop putting labels and pointing fingers, recognize that we have a problem of communication between genders and try to communicate more between each other instead of everyone in their own bubble? (By the way: thank you once again for trying to facilitate this process)
Another is Men’s Rights Activists. Honestly, I don’t even know much about them: I just read women writing on papers about how upset they are than men, as privileged as they are, have the nerve to reclaim their rights. Well, as much as I know, men’s claims are typically about the use of so called “positive discrimination”, that in their opinion represent a sort of “overcompensation”, or about a distorted use (in their own view) of the concept of politically correct as a tool for censorship. One can agree or disagree, but the easiest way to trigger an escalation towards radicalization is refusing to discuss openly (and, possibly, empathically).
[Note: I’m sorry if my tone in the end seems “heated up”. I didn’t mean to sound aggressive]
Having very recently watched this series, I thank-you for a deep and insightful, and even hopeful, take. If my son was 20 years younger, I would definitely be buying your latest book to read with him. I suspect we'd both learn quite a lot!
This show was honestly made by and for privileged people to feel some sense of moral accomplishment by tugging their heart strings. If you swap the ethnicity of the boy to Somalian or Afghan, the intended message behind the film would not resonate.
While the average person struggles against real problems, privileged people are making up shows and analyzing them to feel good about themselves, coming about with academic, ivory tower ways to socially engineer society based on their myths.
I honestly can’t see any of it in the show… what specifically is making you think this?
Of course you can’t see it, you are part of the cohort I’m describing. What is making me think is the fact that there are real problems real people face, yet this made up story is front of mind for people such as yourself.
Looking outside in, as I’m a real person among real people facing real problems rather than abstract, ivory tower problems, it’s easy for me to see.
You literally know nothing about me. But you act as if you were talking to a person who’s not real, or who does not have real problems… doesn’t that strike you as absurdly arrogant?
There is of course an intersectionality to the understanding of oppression and violence, that white people, like me, can't understand, but does that make the focus on masculinity of this series, irrelevant?
(Full disclosure: I have not actually seen Adolescence, I am basing my thoughts strictly on what I have read on substack, both here and in other articles. I have also made a generally successful effort to avoid the manosphere and parts of the internet adjacent to it for a while now, so it is possible I am working with outdated information ).
1) there is always a bit of sleight of hand I notice when people discuss the feelings of men and boys. It is always “men feel lonely/unloved/ugly/<whatever>”. Discussion for whether men are actually lonely/unloved/whatever is much rarer, and (outside of the manosphere anyway) usually contains a distinct undercurrent of judgement (“how dare you be upset that dating is hard” or similar, depending on what is being discussed)
2) I find just how young Jamie is (13 iirc) undermines whatever good might come of this show. I am afraid we will start expecting emotional maturity from people (both boys and girls) who are simply not mature yet.
Hi, I’m not sure what you mean with your first point, given that those observations are based on data that is now widely available (men’s loneliness and mental health epidemic, suicide rates etc). As far as point no. 2 is concerned, that’s exactly the point: the fact that at 13 boys are already exposed to those kinds of harmful messages when they still don’t have the maturity to process them is THE point. That is where social media is doing the most harm.