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The popularity of Adolescence

‘’ is a familiar though vague and highly contentious concept. This matters for educators and for education given the ongoing and widely disseminated concerns around male adolescence – concerns that, for many, seemed either to be confirmed or exacerbated by the UK Netflix mini-series Adolescence which was released globally on 13 March 2025. The series attracted and has been referred to as ‘’ for parents about the complexities of being an adolescent and the perils of navigating harmful content online. On 31 March 2025, convened a ‘conversation on rethinking adolescent safety’. As a result of that conversation, Adolescence has been made freely available to UK secondary schools, the rationale being that access to the show will . Below, we outline some of our concerns with the government response to, and prescription of, Adolescence.

The critique of ‘toxic’ masculinities

The emphasis placed on helping students ‘better understand’ a set of social dangers – and therefore how to avoid them – is highly problematic, for reasons well articulated by . Harrington challenges the opposition of ‘toxic’ (or ‘sick’) and ‘healthy’ masculinity, arguing that mainstreamed discourses individualise the phenomenon and thereby position it as a matter of individuals making ‘bad’ choices. As a result, the ‘solution’ to toxic masculinity is often framed as a matter of individual responsibility and redemption through ‘re-education,’ and the structural-societal conditions that produce or enable ‘toxic’ behaviours on a large scale are not considered. Harrington asserts that the ‘sick’/‘healthy’ logic is all-too-often used by state institutions, their agents and their proxies, to label men who are already marginalised, often along the axis of socioeconomic class. Their rehabilitation into ‘healthy’ masculinity hinges on their conforming to certain, conservative societal norms: fatherhood, the family, ‘responsibility’, and so on. Implicitly, the logic here is that masculinity, per se, is not a problem, so long as men conform to the ‘right’ version of it.

‘Implicitly, the logic is that masculinity, per se, is not a problem, so long as men conform to the “right” version of it.’

As well as capturing the problems implicit in Starmer’s response to Adolescence, Harrington’s work leads us to make the following observations regarding toxic masculinity:

• Public–political conversations around (toxic) masculinity often fail to recognise that masculinities (plural) are done in myriad ways, and that these ways are very likely never wholly ‘toxic’ or ‘healthy’.
• Nor does the public–political response to Adolescence acknowledge, as Harrington does, the tacit, intersectional biases that are inherent in ‘toxic masculinity’. For example, the ways in which socioeconomic status and ethnicity interact with one another, and how they shape conceptions of ‘toxic masculinity’, are often absent from public–political discussion.
• Gender is something we do, not something we are. Butler (2007) taught us this in the ’90s (aptly or ironically enough, the era of so-called ‘lad culture’).
• The UK Prime Minister wishes the Adolescence ‘conversation’ to be continued by schools and teachers. But a conversation about masculinities is a conversation about gender. New and binding was soft-launched in the summer of 2025 which appears to foreclose discussion of gender identity. It is therefore unclear whether that wider conversation can take place at all, and, if it can, in and on what terms. (We know of one RSE Lead, for example, whose school is consulting with lawyers before they begin redrafting their curriculum.)

Conclusion

We don’t disagree that the conversation Prime Minister Starmer hopes for is important. The timeliness of Adolescence cannot be questioned, given that the conversation about young-adult masculinity is taking place in the public sphere not only in the UK but also internationally (in , and to name just three countries). We question, however, what screening Adolescence in schools will bring to that conversation, particularly given the problems of some of its depictions (for example, the school and its teachers [ep.2]; the child psychologist [ep.3]). Consideration of those problems is beyond this blog post, but . What is needed, we argue, are more nuanced and research-informed discussions and understandings of adolescent gender identities and the societal forces conditioning them. Those discussions, as we suggest above, will be hard to start and to navigate given regarding gender, education and their intersection.

References

Butler, J. (2007). Gender trouble. Routledge.