The Script Boys Still Carry: Adolescence, The Velvet Rage, and the Roles We Hand Them
A Netflix series, a landmark queer text, and a personal story all point to the same truth: boys are still handed a script that warps them—and too often, breaks them.
On Sunday, I wrote about Alan Downs’s The Velvet Rage—a book that gave language to the shame so many of us grew up breathing. Downs described how gay boys learn early that who they are isn’t acceptable, so they perform. They overachieve, they charm, they harden themselves, all in the hope of winning approval and avoiding rejection. It’s a suffocating script.
I suppose if I were a proper social critic, I would have known that the Emmy’s were also Sunday night and could have combined all of this into one essay, but here we are. Appropriately so, the buzz Sunday night centered around the Netflix limited series, Adolescence.
Of course I had seen it, but in the midst of everything going on at the time, I suppose I put it out of my mind. If you aren’t familiar, it’s Four episodes, each shot in a single unbroken take. I watched them all in one sitting. When it ended, I sat in there for nearly an hour staring at the screen and weeping.
At the center of the series is Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. Owen Cooper — who just made history as the youngest male Emmy winner at fifteen — plays him with such unnerving precision that you almost forget he’s acting.
The genius of the show is that it doesn’t give you an easy out. You can’t just label Jamie a monster and change the channel. You have to sit with him, minute by unbroken minute, and watch him try to live inside a script he doesn’t yet understand.
That script insists boys prove themselves through dominance, that women exist as validators, not as people who might say no. Rejection isn’t written into the lines. So when Katie laughs him off, it isn’t just embarrassment—it’s collapse. At thirteen, he hasn’t yet been given the tools to understand that her no is simply a boundary, not an existential threat. And in a culture that tells boys they are owed affirmation, even sex, her refusal feels like humiliation. The rage that follows isn’t innate. It’s the by-product of a role he’s been told to play.
Critics have pointed to Katie’s rejection as central to Jamie’s breakdown. Some have tied it to the online “manosphere,” the forums and influencers who preach that women owe men submission. As Paula Mejía noted in The Atlantic, Jamie’s collapse is framed against “the online spaces where young men are told feminism has damaged them,” places where rejection gets twisted into humiliation.
But the internet is only a megaphone. The underlying script is much older. It’s the same one Downs dissected for queer men. It’s the one we see at Westmore, where Ethan memorizes and shouts fraternity trivia until his tongue goes dry, scrubs floors until his knuckles bleed, all to prove he is worthy. Eli wore the masks easily—lacrosse star, golden boy—and Ethan envied it, even as it crushed him.
And it’s not just about gay kids or straight kids. It’s about all boys. The culture still trains them to measure themselves by conquest, and then acts surprised when some implode. In our current climate, with Christian Nationalism pushing the language of male headship and female submission front and center into the mainstream, the script is being reinforced, not dismantled.
Most boys won’t turn violent. Many will turn inward, some toward silence, depression, or addiction. But if we keep handing thirteen-year-olds a script that tells them they are owed obedience, that women can’t say no, that weakness is shameful, then we shouldn’t be shocked when some reach the ugliest possible conclusion.
That’s why I cried when the credits rolled. For Jamie. For Katie. For Ethan. For the teenage version of me struggling with that script. And for my own sons, who are growing up in a world where sadly this script is still often the default.
Further Reading
If you want to pick up The Velvet Rage or explore other books that shaped me, I’ve curated a collection on Bookshop.org. Buying through that link supports independent bookstores—and it helps sustain this project.
Pick it up here: Amazon | Bookshop.org
Watch the Netflix Series Adolescence
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