In a solemn warning that will be familiar to every single parent that has lived since the time of Socrates, Sir Gareth Southgate used his shot at delivering the Richard Dimbleby Lecture this year to lament that young men are going off the rails. He said that they are wasting their time on lurid distractions, failing to develop a healthy respect for their womenfolk and looking for role models in all the wrong places.
In what the BBC describe as a ‘wide-ranging’ talk, ex-England manager and player Southgate spoke about both his own experience of missing a crucial penalty at Euro ’96 and, in a very thinly veiled way, Andrew Tate. Southgate denounced Tate and other ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain’ – as indeed anyone must who wants to be allowed to swim in the overheated pool of today’s ‘acceptable’ public discourse.
Without wanting to issue that tiresome, squirming caveat, ‘I’m no fan of Andrew Tate, but…’, I do recognise the man’s abundant shortcomings both as a private individual and as a template for the plastic adolescents he so deftly moulds at a distance. But it really is about time someone not only challenged this attempt to demonise Tate as the root of all evil in the e-village, but also wrested this hobby horse from the collective grasp of these gormless, moralising slebs and kerb-stomped its stupid stuffed head into straw.
Too many among our Great and the Good seem willing to blame the directionless drift of contemporary youth and young manhood on the rise of online bronzed, aged perverts like Tate. It is of a piece with the willingness of Noel Edmonds and Bernard Manning to warn us of the dangers of a non-existent drug called ‘Cake’ – as they and many other celebrities unthinkingly did in that famous episode of late-1990s satire Brass Eye.
Tate crops up, too, in the Netflix drama, Adolescence, which I watched this week. Because of course he does. This slavishly praised drama – or ‘documentary’ if you’re Keir Starmer – centres on a 13-year-old boy who has stabbed a teenage girl to death. From this premise, it provides a conveyor belt of things Britain’s anxious, credulous parents are presumed to both fear and not quite understand, like ‘Insta’, modern schools and ‘the manosphere’.
Adolescence has much to commend it. Virtuoso direction, certainly – the highly innovative single-shot approach is very effective and creates real claustrophobia. And writer / actor Stephen Graham is very moving and compelling, as is 15-year-old Owen Cooper, who plays Graham’s 13-year-old son, the teenage killer.
But is this really the most insightful way to confront the horrific wave of teenage stabbings in the UK – not least the horrific murder in Croydon of Elianne Andam in September 2023, which apparently inspired Graham? By focussing in on a town in Yorkshire and the struggles of a white working-class nuclear family, when their bright, sensitive lad stabs a girl to death for dissing him on the socials… Even by Netflix standards, it’s beyond parody.
The reality is, there are dark forces that are radicalising British youth. But rather than explore those forces, it’s far easier for Netflix to blame the ‘toxic masculinity’ promoted by social-media influencers and supposedly infusing white working-class families. The sheer dishonesty of the social-justice output on TV can make it near enough unwatchable.
Young British men do face genuine challenges, threats even. Atomisation. Deindustrialisation. Emotionalism. The devaluation of brawn. And the creeping authoritarianism, should one feel inclined to say anything about any of it.
There is a limit to what TV dramas or Gareth Southgate can do about any of it. So while there are far greater, more systemic, civilisational threats to our young men than a vaguely ridiculous, weak-chinned kickboxer of a certain age offering cod-sage epigrams on the red pill, it probably doesn’t hurt to flag him up as a wrong ’un.
But what happens when someone does come along with a message of hope, and a recipe for self-reliance and renewal for young men – one that doesn’t depend on misogyny, status-symbol nihilism or indeed the ultimately elitist and meaningless shadow play of spectator sport?
When Jordan Peterson first emerged back in 2017 it was with just such a direct appeal to young men, aspiring to develop actual traditional masculine virtues. He may since have become eccentric and preoccupied with Biblical exegesis. But his 2018 breakthrough book, 12 Rules for Life, offered a message that Southgate would surely endorse. That taking responsibility is what makes life meaningful. Learning how to be a man among men. Don’t whine. Tidy your room. Stand up straight, shoulders back and be kind to animals. And so on.
And what did our cultural and political elites, who are now wringing their hands over Tate, do then? They denounced Peterson as near enough far right, a quasi-Christian hypocrite, a stern, conservative moralist, a charlatan, a cargo-cult intellectual. In 2018, Channel 4 News famously launched a deranged attack on him, with presenter Cathy Newman woefully underestimating him during an interview and being subsequently mocked online.
It was around the same time I was on an episode of the BBC’s The Big Questions to discuss ‘the crisis in masculinity’. Within five minutes we were talking about toxic role models. No one at that point had heard of Andrew Tate, however, and the bogey man was, laughably, James Bond.
So Tate and his ilk have not replaced a steady supply of wholesome public male icons. Rather, he is enjoying the vast space in the male imagination cleared by the active demonisation and persecution of young men and maleness as intrinsically ‘toxic’, creepy or weird.
If you ask me, the best thing to counter the likes of Tate, and to actually ease the pain and set young lads back on the right path, is not BAFTA-bait like Adolescence. It would be some decent old-school film and TV that celebrates men. War movies, especially the fun kind, like The Great Escape, showing decent chaps being resilient and resourceful. Anti-authoritarian movies, like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, instead of today’s stream of equal-opportunities drivel approved by Nurse Ratched. And feelgood escapism, like The A-Team, Starsky and Hutch, even The Rockford Files. Square-jawed heroes, taking on bad guys and winning. Not superheroes, just regular, handsome but flawed men. Give them – and frankly, me – the brief delusion that men are not the problem after all.
Or maybe, I dunno, more youth centres and ping pong. Worth a try, I suppose.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.
