An education

‘Adolescence’, thirteen-year-old boys, and Mr Pigden

Couple of quick notes before we get down to business: first, the academic

Sam J Pay

is looking for adult female volunteers to take part in a research project about TV recommendation algorithms and depictions of sexual violence. You can find out more here or email her on samantha.pay@oii.ox.ac.uk.

And second: I wrote this piece before reading this post by

In Her Nature

which addresses similar points from a different perspective (and with a lot more stats). I think Rachel and I might not actually be very far apart in our core beliefs, but if you think I’m talking total baloney here you’ll probably like her piece a lot more.

An education

During one of the lower points of the #MeToo phenomenon, a bunch of oddballs on Twitter started having a go at dads. If a man posted something like ‘Having daughters has been a massive eye-opener about how male violence affects women’, he would instantly get his virtual head kicked in. The argument, such as it was, was that these dads should be ashamed — ashamed, I tell you! — to admit that before they had a daughter, they had not always understood what it was like to be female.

This kind of performative contempt was characteristic of the blighted dynamics of Twitter in the mid-2010s. These people are now on Bluesky where they behave like a demented government-in-exile, busily noting infractions and conducting imaginary tribunals. Thankfully, most Bluesky posters regard them as a quaint vestigial phenomenon, like the Manx parliament or the pelvic bone of a snake, and the punishments they issue no longer have any effect. Nobody takes Bluesky as seriously as they used to take Twitter. This is a healthy sign that we are, as a species, still capable of learning and growing.

In real life, where well-intentioned people don’t enjoy being yelled at, the only effect this behaviour has ever had is to repel people who might otherwise have been on your side. But as well as being tactically counterproductive, the assertion that men should not learn anything new from the experience of having a daughter always struck me as being baldly stupid on its own terms. Being a parent to any child is a rare opportunity to experience the world in the raw through someone else’s eyes, and to understand things that you haven’t understood before. If being a parent doesn’t shift your thinking one iota, then congratulations on being an unbending narcissist I guess.

Thankfully, it has always been entirely safe for mothers of boys to say that having sons is revelatory. (Mothers have always talked about how having children changes them, and if you want to try to stop them, good luck.) And so it has been for me. Before I had sons I didn’t spend any time thinking about things from boys’ points of view; why would I? I was mostly interested in myself.

I didn’t know that one day a four-year-old boy would give me his beloved pink flowery wellies and say sadly ‘I can’t wear these any more. They’re supposed to be for girls’, in a tone of voice that revealed it had been another Extremely Rough Day in Reception Class. I didn’t know that there comes a time when boys just stop crying -- like, one day they’re crying and the next day it just disappears from their behavioural armoury, as though a FLASH message had been sent around the network. I didn’t know that a quiet, rule-abiding boy complaining to his teachers about low-level bullying is irritably told, again and again, to toughen up and stop making such a silly fuss. I didn’t know that when that same boy finally loses it and kicks his tormentor to the ground, everyone will congratulate him and the teachers who witness it will smile behind their hands; good job, mate! I didn’t know that schools give out awards at assembly for dance and art and sport and writing junior doggerel, but not for being good at science or maths.

Fundamentally, I hadn’t realised that we spend a lot of time forcing boys into moulds, and then after a few years we spend a lot of time shouting at them for being mould-shaped.

It’s not coincidental that in my list of things I didn’t know, most of the crunch points occurred at school. There’s a lot in Adolescence, the astonishing TV drama from Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, about teachers and schools. Schools, after all, are where kids spend half of their waking hours. (Much of the other half, as Adolescence points out, they spend online.) One of the minor themes in Adolescence concerns inspirational teachers; think of Mr Pigden, the PE teacher with whom football legend Ian Wright was reunited in the most emotional video ever made. (Wrighty never got the ‘boys don’t cry’ memo, thank god.) Mr Pigden figures keep cropping up in Adolescence. A no-nonsense detective talks about a great teacher who helped her to survive a rough school; Eddie, the kind if unreconstructed father of the central character, reminisces fondly about a good-natured geography teacher from many years before.

Drawing is another minor theme. The no-nonsense copper’s Mr Pigden had been an art teacher; the young psychiatrist (brilliant, brilliant Erin Doherty) talks about picking up drawing again after a long break. And the central character Jamie, a thirteen-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a girl in his school, starts to draw again while awaiting trial. From a conversation between Jamie’s parents, we learn that Jamie loved drawing but at some point stopped doing it in favour of locking himself in his room with his computer, where he was sucked down an Andrew Tate rabbit hole of violent misogyny.

Drawing is a basic solitary act of creation and self-expression; you don’t need friends or teams or special equipment to do it. It is also the antithesis of staring at a screen. To become good at drawing you must pay close attention to the real world around you, not the world as you think it is or the world as you would like it to be. You must look closely at shapes, and note the counterintuitive colours of light. It’s also a pursuit that is insanely coded as ‘girly’, and is thus seen by many families as being slightly disappointing in a boy. Jamie’s dad Eddie talks ruefully about his attempts to force Jamie away from his drawing and onto the football pitch, to ‘toughen him up’. (I can’t be the only parent of conscription-age young men who is now absolutely terrified about what it is we have been toughening them up for.)

Drawing and inspirational teachers go together in Adolescence. I think the writers are saying that even if kids have decent, loving parents (as Jamie does), they also need to be supported in developing at least one genuine enthusiasm: an avenue for self-expression that is entirely unmediated by social pressure. And to do this they need someone outside the family, someone without any preconceptions of them, who will help them to identify their own inclinations and capacity for intellectual or creative pleasure. These two things — a talent or enthusiasm, and a good teacher — will enable them to put a part of their self-esteem somewhere safe, where it will survive the knock-out, drag-down horror of being thirteen years old.

But most teachers, sadly, are not Mr Pigdens. In the second episode of Adolescence two police detectives visit the school attended by Jamie and the murdered girl. For an hour we see a swirling mass of chaos, disruption, violence and shouting. These kids are explicitly unsafe at school, and they know it. (A lot of teachers have been irritated by this portrayal, but I have an unfortunate reason to know that schools like this do exist.) Even teachers who have the requisite empathy and skill are too tired and burned out to do much more than physically turn up for work (although one teacher does her best to support the dead girl’s traumatised best friend). In his police interview Jamie says that his favourite subject is history; but when we meet his history teacher, the slobby and unprofessional Mr Malik, we discover that he despises his pupils and wouldn’t be able to pick Jamie out of a line-up. All the adults around Jamie had a Mr Pigden, but Jamie himself never did.

Adolescence focuses on a working class family; this is not, it’s fair to assume, a family in which anyone listens to Woman’s Hour. But although attitudes to raising boys differ between classes — most middle class parents would be delighted if their son had a talent for drawing — for some time I’ve nursed the impression that while us middle-class parents are parenting boys differently, we’re not necessarily doing it any better.

When we decry gender stereotypes — and I do; who do you think paid for the flowery wellies? — we tend to emphasise the way they disadvantage girls. Sexist stereotyping absolutely does disadvantage girls and women, every day, in a thousand ways. But much less is said about how it also conspires to limit boys’ freedom of movement. Some years ago I was a part (with esteemed author and Substacker

Sarah Ditum

) of a Fawcett Society commission into gender stereotyping, and you don’t get much more middle class than that. When the commission’s conclusions were released to the press, Fawcett emphasised the material outcomes that gender stereotypes have for girls, such as poor self-image and restrictions on future career paths. But the commission’s own evidence actually showed that boys’ future career paths were impacted to pretty much exactly the same extent; try being a boy who wants to go into nursing or childcare instead of bricklaying or plumbing. And I suspect that when it comes to being oppressed by images of idealised bodies, being a boy is now as miserable as being a girl, which is not what any of us meant when we campaigned for equality. Almost every thirteen-year-old boy is obsessed with whether or not he will grow to be six feet tall. They all want insane abs and biceps like Popeye. (They are, of course, far less likely to see boys’ bodies sexually brutalised.)

The middle classes — and I am as guilty as anyone of this — bleat on about how boys should be ‘more like’ girls: they should cry more, ask for help, express their emotions, be more verbal, confide in people. But contrary to popular impression, boys are not congenitally stupid or unobservant. They know that this kind of behaviour attracts ridicule, while ‘typically male’ behaviour attracts approval; go find any studious, quiet boy in a school playground and ask him how affirmed he feels. Boys pick up on the fact that when they are punchy and impulsive and chaotic and loud, we say smugly ‘They’re just like dogs! Lots of exercise and so much food!’ Show me a parent who isn’t delighted by a small muddy boy with scabby knees.

If we think boys don’t notice these things, we’re kidding ourselves. And we’re raising boys in this world, the one that lies to them about what is required of them. We penalise them for exhibiting sensitivity in childhood, and then sneer at them for not being able to produce it in adulthood. We can have one of these things, but we can’t reasonably expect to have both. Not that that stops us.

The first sequence in Adolescence reminds us insistently of the physiognomy of a Year 8 boy: the soft skin, the gangly giraffe legs, the thin, snappable arms. The girls in his class are likely to be taller (in Adolescence a Year 9 girl kicks the living shit out of a Year 8 boy), more emotionally developed, more socially aware, and with stronger friendships. They are also probably getting better marks. I’m not saying girls don’t work hard for those things, or that they don’t pay through the nose for them; I’m just saying they are observable differences for our Year 8 boy. He is desperate to talk to girls, either for cachet or simply because he doesn’t want to spend all of his time fighting and playing football; but they rarely return his interest. Most of the authority figures in his life — his mum most of all, but also most of his teachers — are female. If he is from a single-parent family with a largely-absent father, there is quite a good chance he doesn’t have any close relationships with men in positions of authority.

As far as this boy is concerned, the world is run by women and girls hold all the cards. The very last thing he needs is to be told that he and his maleness are unwelcome, bad and wrong, and that he must exculpate his sin before anyone will offer any comfort. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re back to our dad on Twitter; but at least our Twitter dad is an adult. The thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t know anything of the world beyond his home and his school; he is nowhere near ready to understand the structural nature of female oppression. How could he be? Most girls of his age don’t understand it either. (Honestly, it’s been my experience that most adults — including lots of women — don’t understand it.) It’s the grown-ups who’ve screwed all this stuff up; the average boy has done sod all. He didn’t create the world’s power imbalances; they are, quite simply, not his fault.

I worry that in schools particularly, our well-intentioned efforts to support girls end up being anti-boy purely through omission. In their lessons and resources schools rightfully pay close attention to the potential of girls and women: women in STEM, International Women’s Day, Ada Lovelace Day, case studies of female civil rights leaders and scientists and astronauts and athletes. Because of parallel efforts in children’s publishing, they also have shelves full of books in which girls are spunky and clever and boys are stupid and smelly. Of course, it’s much easier to add a few ‘inspirational’ lesson plans and put some posters up on the classroom wall than it is to make meaningful changes in the adult world. When I’m queen I’ll ban these things from any school or multi-academy trust in which 70% of the staff are women and most of the top 10% of earners are male. Or at least force them to put their pay stats up on the wall next to their poster about the Suffragettes.

But in all my years of seeing my boys go through schools, I didn’t see one piece of work about the potential of boys, or the ways in which gender stereotyping harms boys, or the ways in which men are special and brilliant. I’m not saying we shouldn’t celebrate girls, or take seriously the ways in which they’re trapped by gender expectations; I’m saying we should do the same for boys. If we don’t, we shouldn’t be surprised when all of this leaves young boys bewildered and antagonised. One of the things Adolescence so beautifully illustrates is how much effort we expend telling boys things, and how little time we spend listening to them. This would never have occurred to me before I had kids. But having sons has been a massive eye-opener.

For more on the pigeon-holing of young adults, try ‘I know what boys like’