Labelling toxic masculinity as ‘incomprehensible’ is a cop out – here’s why

The very first words spoken in the television series Adolescence take the form of a voice note sent to detective inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) from his son, Adam (Amari Bacchus), asking to stay home from school because of a stomach ache. Luke listens to the message, not buying Adam’s malingering for a second. Then he gets into his unmarked police car and, seemingly oblivious to the link, begins to complain to his sergeant about his own stomach problems, which are the result, he says, of his wife telling him to substitute eating apples for smoking cigarettes. 

It’s an effective opening scene: in very little dialogue, we learn plenty about Luke as a husband and father, while the quiet domesticity and humour contrast with the crescendo of the police raid that is about to take place. The scene also hints at how adept men are at creating narratives in which they are victims rather than being responsible for their circumstances. But more than that, it sets up the idea that one male’s behaviour can often mirror that of another, using Adam and Luke to foreshadow the show’s central father-son relationship between Jamie and Eddie. 

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In doing so, the show subtly asks viewers to compare males that society might deem ‘monstrous’ with those considered ‘good’.

This question of depicting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ men in fiction is something I have been interested in since I began writing my first novel, The Passenger Seat. The book explores the connections between male friendship and violence through the story of two teenagers, Teddy and Adam, who commit several acts of violence while on a road trip together. It also portrays a friendship between two older and better- adjusted men, inviting the reader to see similarities in these seemingly very different relationships. Just like the violent teenagers, the older men also create narratives in which they are not responsible for their actions, while performing their masculinity in ways that affect how they treat those around them, especially women.

One of the things that drove me to write the novel was the experience of reading various news reports in which male violence was labelled as “incomprehensible”, as though there could be nothing to learn from a closer examination of it, let alone of the men who commit it. This strikes me as an ultimately unproductive response, especially given how often such violence occurs. To label something as incomprehensible is to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of trying to comprehend it. It may be comforting to think that dangerous and harmful men are nothing like the rest of us; it is harder to ask ourselves about the ways in which they are.

Read more:

• Adolescence writer Jack Thorne: ‘I was as angry as Jamie in lots of ways’
• We must change our relationship with masculinity to stop vulnerable men turning into Andrew Tate
• Keir Starmer is watching Adolescence. Here’s how his government can stop it happening in real life

Fiction can be a way to confront this problem. With its ability to portray nuance and complexity in male characters, as well as to invite comparisons between different types of male behaviour, as Adolescence does, it can help us to face the uncomfortable fact that those who commit monstrous acts are not monsters themselves, but humans. 

The acclaim that the Netflix show has received is at least partly because it achieved what few recent pieces of fiction have managed: it offered a human depiction of a violent perpetrator and his family, without exonerating him or condoning his actions. 

Finding this balance was something I thought hard about while writing The Passenger Seat. I wanted to ask some difficult questions about masculinity without presenting the reader with easy answers or a comforting resolution. I knew the novel had to commit to dwelling in Teddy and Adam’s inner lives, regardless of how unsettling their violent actions were. It wasn’t a case of morally exonerating them (I don’t think any of the men in my novel come off well), it was simply the only way to get beyond what was ‘incomprehensible’ about male violence.

Much of the reaction to Adolescence has focused on its supposed revelation of a ‘crisis in masculinity’. One review I read even said it was a call to action. But a work of fiction cannot be a call to action. Those need to come from individuals or movements, not from pieces of entertainment or art. Given the prevalence of male violence, it would be hard to argue against the existence of a crisis in masculinity but, at the same time, such a label is inevitably simplifying. It is an easy shorthand for what is a complex, intersectional and often ambiguous issue. 

That kind of simplification is something I was explicitly writing against in my novel. I think we need to keep hold of the complexity and the ambiguity when we think about masculinity, which is why fiction is a useful place to go to explore it.

The Passenger Seatby Vijay Khurana is out now (Peninsula Press, £10.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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