OH, the BBC. The front cover of Radio Times for the week beginning yesterday draws our attention to a season of FEMALE-LED shows. Of course it does. The viewing public wants nothing more than another tranche of hard-boiled, resourceful, compassionate girl-bosses leaving their male colleagues trailing helplessly in their wake. After all, who could possibly object to a female boss?
Quite a lot of women, according to surveys, and probably quite a lot of men, but you’d never know because any objection from men is now routinely dismissed as ‘mansplaining’. And the viewing public is neither here nor there: the public wants what the public gets.
As a writer, you can make anything happen. It needn’t be realistic or representative; in fact, if your intention is to shape and change public perception – public consciousness – then realistic and representative are not your priority adjectives. It cannot be accidental that Radio Times just happened to blazon FEMALE-LED across its cover. The writers and the BBC want you to be impressed. If you have daughters, these are their new role models.
(In much the same way, the BBC wants you to be really invested in the Women’s Super League: average attendance last season 6,814, or slightly less than Grimsby Town of League Two – and even that figure is artificially inflated by the 28,000 who show up at Arsenal).
The perfectly reasonable counter-argument is that bosses are increasingly female, a trend that will only continue as the higher-education gap between men and women increases. That might – might – be perfectly reasonable if one wasn’t aware that other forces were at work. It is not enough for dogs to succeed; cats must fail. So the BBC’s flagship soap opera chimed in last week with (and here I quote from Radio Times):
‘The unsettling storyline about Joel’s attitudes towards women comes to a head in a special episode of EastEnders, as his behaviour culminates in him violently lashing out at Vicki. It’s followed by [a] documentary on BBC Three, exploring the topic of misogyny and toxic masculinity in young males, very much on the public’s mind after Netflix drama Adolescence. ‘Manosphere’ is the term given to the virtual community that promotes men’s rights and opposes feminism, leading vulnerable youngsters into extreme views. It’s at the fore, owing to figures like Andrew Tate who are preying on susceptible schoolboys such as Joel through online influencing that’s difficult for parents to police.’ (Unspoken support registered for the Online Harms Bill).
Where to begin?
For one thing, I doubt that ‘toxic masculinity’ is very much on the mind of the public in, say, Keighley or Exeter or Northampton. It is well known that white working-class boys are the very base of the educational pyramid, but that probably isn’t on the mind of EastEnders writers. Adolescence is on the mind of woke headmasters in Dorking or Brighton, who probably agree with the Prime Minister that it’s really a documentary. These are the kind of headmasters who mandate Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism as part of the ‘PSHE for Parents’ programme and then wonder why boys are disenchanted and inclined to turn to someone – anyone! – who doesn’t regard them as toxic.
Note also the nasty elision in the sentence: ‘“Manosphere” is the term given to the virtual community that promotes men’s rights and opposes feminism, leading vulnerable youngsters into extreme views.’ The message to boys couldn’t be clearer: your only contribution to this debate is to shut up.
This might help to explain why young men are drifting back to church. After all, they can always find a sense of purpose in Christianity and a place where they will be valued for practising the masculine virtues. It’s not as though the Church of England has sold its birthright for a pot of message, raising to the primacy the personification of feminised, bureaucratic, passive-aggressive religion. Perhaps young white men flock to Leicester Cathedral, where their Eucharist of October 5 ‘to celebrate Black History Month’ was blazoned ‘Standing Firm in Power and Pride’.
Power and Pride: the very essence of Christ’s teaching.
The preacher was the Rev Guy Hewitt, ‘a Barbadian British Anglican priest, racial justice advocate, and specialist in social policy and development’. That’s a direct quotation from the Church of England’s Racial Justice Team website, a team that also includes an ‘Anti-Racist Learning and Development Specialist’ who develops ‘anti-racist learning strategies, policies and strategies for implementation. She brings expertise in evaluating change through evidence-based practise’ [sic].
One hundred years ago, the BBC and the Church were the great cultural and moral leaders of the nation. They would no doubt argue that they still are, morality in 2025 not being what it was in 1925. They would happily insist that they are in the vanguard of progress. Perhaps; but, to quote dead white male (and Catholic convert) G K Chesterton, ‘progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative’.
Oh, and the toxic young men in Adolescence and EastEnders were both young white men. That may just be a coincidence, of course. Or maybe it’s progress.
