From Half Man to Louis Theroux's Manosphere, is TV's tackling of toxic masculinity only further alienating our young men?

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

I can’t tell you how many people, when I said I was writing about masculinity this week, replied, "Oh, yes. Toxic?" It seems you can no longer have one without the other, which is a damning indictment on the state of man, or men, before we even get started.

In last week’s RT, Christopher Eccleston lamented: "Masculinity is in crisis, and it seems it’s particularly white, working-class boys who are being neglected.” Right on cue, Richard Gadd, he of the Emmy award-winning semi-autobiographical stalker tale Baby Reindeer, returned to our screens with something equally disturbing, but probably more familiar.

Half Man, Gadd’s drama following the dysfunctional relationship between two men – meek Niall (Jamie Bell) and volatile Ruben (Gadd) – unblinkingly charts what Gadd calls "male existence and repression, internal brokenness and hardwired expectations". He deliberately doesn’t use the word "toxic", but it’s not exactly The Likely Lads and, with a glance at the news headlines, its subject matter feels horribly real and widespread.

Why so? We could cite any number of things: social media pressures, economic schisms, absent fathers and neglectful mothers, except we’ve already had a prize-winning drama to show how no one is immune.

As well as hoovering up Emmy and Golden Globe awards (with no doubt BAFTAs to come), Jack Thorne’s Adolescence inspired questions in Parliament and a national conversation after its sweet-faced protagonist, 13-year-old Jamie, went, seemingly overnight, from drawing monsters at the kitchen table to becoming one himself.

Why was it so powerful? Because Stephen Graham’s loving, anguished father spoke for parents everywhere when he wailed, "He was in his room, we thought he was safe," and the question that keeps every parent awake, "Should we have done more?"

We could comfort ourselves that nice boys behaving well don’t make good TV, and that such stories are exaggerated for dramatic effect.

If that’s your chosen solace, you’d do best to avoid Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Netflix), in which he meets online stars from Marbella to Miami, all young men with noms de plume like HSTikkyTokky and Sneako. What used to be the mythical universal male delight in wine, women and song has evolved into a pursuit of power, wealth and, yes, still women.

Their contradictory, cartoon misogyny – including "one-way monogamy" – would be funny if their inane but increasingly extreme material wasn’t garnering millions of online clicks and slipping into teenagers’ bedrooms. I don’t know a parent who isn’t concerned.

Inevitably, Theroux’s own poker face soon appears in their online content – for these self-appointed leaders of men, attention is both fuel and reward, and Theroux and his cameras provide plenty. I hope the net result of his dispatch from the dark side is positive, but I’m not convinced.

And while such dark tales are told – with good intention – by writers Gadd, Thorne et al, they can only add to the real-life alienation of young men described so powerfully by Eccleston.

I don’t have the answers. Instead, I offer you one of Bill Bailey’s guests in the new series of Extraordinary Portraits (iPlayer). Darryn Frost is the young civil servant who risked his life to save others in the London Bridge attack of November 2019, using a narwhal tusk to confront a man bearing two knives and claiming to be wearing a bomb.

Still affected by the trauma of that day, Frost says he seeks only positive things, "using the incident as a vehicle for doing good in this world as much as I can". It’s very moving and, amid so much darkness, a welcome beacon of light.

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