Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
Netflix’s hit series Adolescence seemed to capture the current anxiety surrounding young men and what they might be getting up to online. The show tells the story of a teenage boy who, seemingly out of the blue, stabs and kills his female classmate after she calls him an ‘incel’ online. The message of the show points to influencers like Andrew Tate and the so-called ‘manosphere’ as the cause for the boy’s violent tendencies.
For the uninitiated, the manosphere is a term which incapsulates the various YouTube channels, chat forums and other corners of the internet where men can get advice on everything from parenting skills to relationship advice – often with a sexist twist. Many took the message of Adolescence and ran with it. The UN has ‘sounded the alarm over online misogyny’. Politicians even argued that the show should be compulsory viewing for school-age children.
But others are worried that the Adolescence effect has caused something of a moral panic. Figures like Tate might enjoy online popularity, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that young men are all turning into misogynists. In fact, the finger-pointing around discussions about toxic masculinity and what boys should and shouldn’t do has, some argue, pushed young men into the hands of Tate and his contemporaries who preach pride instead of shame about being a man.
As one person interviewed by the Manchester Evening News put it, some kids have never heard the word ‘masculinity’ without the word ‘toxic’ added to it. Critics also argue that relationships between men and women have, in many ways, never been better. Sexism used to be the social norm for our mothers and grandmothers, but is increasingly becoming an anomaly.
Do we need to reassess what we mean by misogyny and toxic masculinity? Are we in danger of writing off all young men and boys as having a problem with women that needs fixing? Or is the new world of identity politics and online content influencing men to behave in a way that is unacceptable, whatever you term it? What is really going on with how men feel about women in the real world, away from laptop screens? And if we’ve failed to succeed up until now, how can we change how we talk to our sons about what kind of men we want them to be?
SPEAKERS
Julie Bindel
journalist; author, Lesbians: Where are we now?; feminist campaigner; podcast host, Julie in Genderland
Dr Az Hakeem
consultant psychiatrist and medical director, Psyche Clinic; author, Trans and Detrans
Nina Power
writer and philosopher; author, What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents
Dr Stuart Waiton
senior lecturer, sociology and criminology, Abertay University; author, Scared of the Kids: curfews, crime and the regulation of young people; chair, Scottish Union for Education
Dr Joanna Williams
academic; author, How Woke Won and Women vs Feminism
CHAIR
Ella Whelan
co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; journalist; author, What Women Want
