Bonus Dispatch: This isn’t my usual day to publish, but the timeliness of this subject demanded it. Regular programming returns this weekend.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has announced that a Netflix drama, Adolescence, will be screened in schools across the country. The series depicts a white, working-class 13-year-old boy who is suspected of murdering a female classmate after being indoctrinated by the “manosphere,” a misogynistic online realm that glorifies violence toward women.
The series is being lauded as essential education; the writers have been invited to Parliament to discuss its themes, while some seek to ban kids from smartphones or monitor their internet usage to fight the scourge of online misogyny. Across the country, Adolescence has been embraced by public figures, school administrators, and politicians as a mirror held up to British society.
But it’s no mirror. It’s a simulacrum.
Obscuring the Real
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard thought that modern life would increasingly be governed by symbols rather than substance, by representations that no longer refered to anything real. He argued that in contemporary society the suppression of ideas would occur less through overt censorship and more through the proliferation of images that supersede reality. In this cultural condition, media spectacles and constructed narratives no longer reflect reality, they replace it.
Adolescence is a case study in this process.
The truth about youth knife crime in Britain looks very little like the television series. Knife crime has risen drastically in recent years and these crimes are overwhelmingly concentrated in impoverished urban areas, shaped by gang violence, broken families, and the long-term failures of mass immigration. The type of perpetrator depicted in Adolescence, a working-class white boy, is, in fact, underprepresented in knife crime statistics.
No one denies that toxic misogyny can fuel violence, but the majority of these crimes are not born of abstract internet ideology, but of realities we have chosen to ignore. Some argue this shouldn’t matter because Adolescence is fiction, but if that were true, we shouldn’t be demanding a fictional series shape education policy or use it to drive a public moral reckoning. The response reveals that this television series is being treated as a stand-in for reality – and that is precisely the problem.
In the current cultural moment, reality is burdensome, while a Netflix series gives people a tidy, palatable morality tale. It targets the familiar villains: whiteness, masculinity, internet radicalization. It flatters the sensibilities of those who want to feel they are confronting violence without being asked to confront anything politically or socially uncomfortable. The working-class white boy becomes a useful symbolic vessel, cleansed of socioeconomic messiness, free from racial implications, pliable enough to absorb any amount of public projection.
Meanwhile, the real stories - the ones that resist this neatness - are rarely given this level of sustained cultural attention.
An Inconvenient Truth
Take, for instance, the grooming gang scandal: decades of systematic sexual abuse against working-class white girls in towns like Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale. Networks of middle-aged men from ethnic minority backgrounds targeted vulnerable white girls, often in foster care or from broken homes, exploiting them with calcualted cruelty, subjecting them to repeated rapes, forced abortions, and unspeakable violence. Thousands of victims, decades of institutional failure, and a documented pattern of authorities looking the other way because the perpetrators were ethnic minorities, mostly Pakistani, and they feared being called racist. This is a national disgrace.
And yet, there has been no government-backed nationwide moral campaign or curriculum-wide reckoning. A 2017 drama, Three Girls, based on the scandal, inspired nothing at all on the scale of Adolesence. The government refused recently to even launch a new national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal.
We need to ask why it is politically safe to talk about misogyny when the perpetrator is a fictional white boy, but not when the perpetrators are ethnic minority men whose victims are working-class white girls? Why is fiction allowed to dominate the national discourse while reality is left out? The answer, in part, is because the truth is politically radioactive and involves difficult conversations about immigration, policing, and multiculturalism.
Absent Fathers, Broken Boys
We’re told it’s toxic masculinity that Adolescence is critiquing, but in practice the term has undergone a concept creep. What was once a narrow category of male aggression is now used to condemn many expressions of traditional masculinity: stoicism, protectiveness, ambition, and physical strength. At the same time, there has been a drastic rise in single-parent families over the last fifty years, with 90% of those being single mothers. Half of these families live in relative povery.
Societal trends have normalized the idea of single-parent homes to the point that having a traditional family has become optional, something quaint or even stifling, rather than foundational. But in a culture that often treats marriage as a lifestyle accessory rather than a necessary moral commitment, boys grow up unmorored. Fatherlessness is not neutral; it is one of the most consistent predictors of dysfunction, violence, and despair across every measurable category. We raise boys without fathers, without structure, and without an approved model of healthy manhood, and then act surprised when they turn to the grotesque caricatures offered by the manosphere.
The Murder of Reality
Power selects which victims matter. Our moral energy is being directed not by reality but by stories that are most narratively useful to the regime of symbols. Adolescence, and the specter of violently misogynistic white boys, is a safe vessel for “concern.” It asks no uncomfortable conversations about immigration, class, assimilation, or institutional complicity. It flatters the sensibilities of those in power while leaving politically inconvenient victims – like working-class white girls – unseen and unmourned.
In this way, we are not simply watching a TV show, we are witnessing the triumph of narrative over evidence as the simulacrum displaces harder truths. It absorbs political attention and it gives journalists, educators, and politicians something to gesture toward, a way to “raise awareness” and feel righteous, without doing the tough work of confronting reality.
Baudrillard believed that when media spectacles replace our perception of the real world, we have not only distorted the truth, we have murdered it. And then we drift further into a landscape where fiction feels more urgent than fact, and scripted drama becomes the blueprint for public life. Today, the symbol has overtaken the thing itself and the spectacle demands action while the data is discarded. This is not the age of awareness, it is the age of the simulacrum, and we are not reckoning with reality, we are burying it.