Will Society Let Adolescents Be Their True Selves?

A few years ago, my daughter and I jointly discovered Andrew Tate and his supremacist masculinity verbiage after a casual remark during mixed-gender football play. We did not think much of it then, as we were homeschooling and perhaps shielded from contact and most day-to-day occurrences within such sub-cultures. However, last year, my daughter returned from school in a complete rage. Some of the boys in her class had put forth ideas of how science supposedly proves men라이브 바카라 superiority over women in various domains during a discussion. It was the first of many such incidents that she had to confront, both inside and outside school.

What unfolded over the next few weeks of learning more about this phenomenon was a disturbing revelation of how harmful ideologies around masculinity, disseminated over digital ecosystems, penetrated the lives of adolescents, capturing their attention during a critical phase while they were navigating their identities. We came across many discussions where both men and women expressed concern about the growth of this ideology for the past many years.

Some men mourned the loss of friendships due to ideological differences, while women voiced increasing distrust and exhaustion when engaging with men who subscribe to these beliefs. People are often seen growing into these ideologies gradually, with early signs manifesting in humour—masked misogyny presented as comedy or sarcasm. Anyone who speaks out against this disguised misogyny is personally attacked rather than countered with logical arguments. For instance, we came across an Instagram reel where a male influencer points out the irony of moral policing men engage in—through a comedic script. The comments were completely divided—between those who fully agreed with him and those who mocked him, accusing him of posting content to pander to women in hopes of personal gain. We began to see this pattern everywhere: haters attacking people라이브 바카라 appearances and mocking their identities.

More concerningly, we found that Tate라이브 바카라 hyperbole had an extended as well as an adjacent network of Indian variants—content creators who peddled not only misogynistic messages, but hybridised narratives merging or sometimes predicated upon caste supremacy, valourising acts of violence that are caste-based atrocities. The comments in some of these accounts we scrolled through were filled with young followers, many of whom appeared to be adolescent boys or young men, fawning over these supposed articulations of cultural history and pride, expressing gratitude for helping them “understand their rightful place in society”. This phenomenon cannot be blamed solely on influencers, who are simply riding the attention-grabbing, money-making trend that continues to stand the test of time. Rather, the issue lies in the triangulation of the same messaging across multiple sources—movies, news articles, social media, and personal experiences in a largely patriarchal society.

Conversations with men and boys in communities where we work as part of a community-based mental health programme reveal two important perceived aspects of their identity validation. The first is the pressure to demonstrate income potential in the macro landscape of increasing precarity to financial stability, and the second is the ability to attract and secure relationships with women. Non-conformity to either of these expectations invites peer ridicule and social emasculation. A 16-year-old boy from one of these communities once said, “If I cannot earn enough to support a family, I am not a man. If I cannot find a wife because I am poor, I am not a man. So, tell me, what path is left for me?” His statement exemplifies how economic instability may interact with traditional masculinity expectations to create vulnerability toward digital content and enhanced liabilities to its more deleterious effects, promising restored status within increasingly uncertain socioeconomic landscapes.

These are not new pressures, but historically persistent expectations around masculinity that have been transformed in the shape of messaging and engagement by the tools of modern culture, which is the digital landscape. While previous generations may have navigated these challenges through localised social structures, the modern adolescent turns to online spaces in the hope of finding belonging and security amidst perceived threats, becoming trapped in systematic pathways of ideological engagement. These pathways are characterised by algorithmic amplification and peer validation.

What makes this particularly difficult to address is how these ideologies incorporate seemingly legitimate critiques of social contradictions and pretend to be insightful. The ability to select and string together facts that support their agenda is what gets them a wide audience. In a conversation about masculinity and its meaning, a 31-year-old entrepreneur from Bangalore mentioned that she first came across Tate while researching narcissism. All it took were a few keywords to lead her to Tate. Although she felt that not everything he said made sense or was acceptable, she believed there were certain aspects one could apply to life. This allowed her to defend Tate to some extent. This culture capitalises on gender insecurities, producing content laced with toxicity that in some parts can still be defendable. Acceptance of any level is dangerous as lines are difficult to draw and gauge.

For the modern adolescent, these content creators acknowledge real tensions that occupy their lives, offering simplified yet compelling narratives that appear to provide clarity amid confusion. They recognise legitimate adolescent grievances—about social isolation and contradictory expectations while channelling these grievances toward harmful conclusions and targets—with an unlimited potential of reach guaranteed by new media라이브 바카라 all-encompassing availability and penetration.

It is tempting to dismiss the current discussion in the wake of the Netflix series Adolescence as yet another adult-centred moral panic over technology, the kind that has accompanied every technological shift from novels to television to video games. Social media may indeed represent the contemporary mechanism through which adolescents engage with broader social narratives, but what demands our attention isn’t the medium but the specific content that is thriving within it and the vulnerabilities it exploits. Isolation creates a fertile ground for extremist ideologies. Adolescence is a commentary on the complex social dynamics that push young people toward identity-affirming but ultimately harmful online communities. The series spotlights the risks of ideological permeability within what are presumed to be protective family environments and vulnerability to digital radicalisation processes operating beyond parental oversight. Our analysis, therefore, needs to consider structural factors that create vulnerability to liabilities arising from harmful digital ideological messaging.

Robert Epstein argues that the adolescent crisis is not universal across cultures. Rather, it is a specific manifestation arising from how industrialised societies have progressively extended childhood while simultaneously failing to integrate young people meaningfully into adult society. Instead of environments where adolescents are treated as emerging contemporaries with opportunities for diverse exposure and relationships, modern adolescence frequently involves infantilisation coupled with segregation into age-specific subcultures divorced from meaningful adult interaction or participation in social production and governance. Much of the modern adolescent라이브 바카라 day is spent in peer-group environments that occupy time without offering genuine responsibility or purpose. Meaning must be manufactured rather than discovered through authentic contribution. The resulting developmental vacuum enables receptivity to simplified narratives about identity, purpose and belonging peddled by digital supremacists.

Adolescents engaging in identity clarification is a developmentally expected and appropriate process; however, contemporary social structures are inadequate in offering opportunities for constructive and reflective exploration. As tools of modern culture, digital spaces are inextricably engaged in mediating developmental vulnerabilities during critical periods of identity construction. In atomised competitive landscapes where adolescents often develop, success appears as a zero-sum proposition with catastrophic consequences for ‘losing’, supremacist ideologies promising competitive advantage through in-group membership become increasingly appealing. We argue that perhaps one has to frame this less as ideological receptivity and more as compensatory meaning-seeking, wherein Tate and the many variants provide synthetic fulfilment of these meaning requirements, promising clear identity markers within otherwise fragmented developmental landscapes.

Addressing this crisis requires moving beyond both technological moral panic and individualised interventions toward recognition that meaningful integration into adult activities, clear pathways to recognised social roles, and diverse cross-generational relationships that provide guidance and perspective may have the potential to reduce vulnerability to extremist messaging. This calls for a radical shift in how the world of adults perceives and engages with adolescence, not as a stage marked by default by crisis, or impulsivity, or an extension of childhood, but as a developmentally unique phase marked by maturity and creativity that demands appropriate opportunities for responsibilities, contributions and social integration.

Educational approaches, both within the school environment and outside of it in recreational centres or other youth spaces, may need to discard simplistic digital literacy frameworks focused primarily on technical skills or misinformation identification, instead, adopting critical pedagogy that supports adolescents in interrogating the psychological, social, and algorithmic mechanisms through which digital content shapes identity formation processes. This means teaching not merely what to think but how thinking itself is influenced by digital environments designed for engagement rather than developmental well-being.

Parents may need to resist the urge to quarantine these ideological influences as contamination and rather engage with these influences as opportunities for dialogic exploration of foundational questions regarding identity, purpose and social belonging. This means creating family environments where difficult ideas can be discussed honestly without shame or immediate judgement.

However, even as we write this, we have to ask how ready are we as a society to offer adolescents, especially boys, this radical reframing of gender and an unhindered exploration of their authentic selves. In our work, we are confronted every day with families in extreme psychosocial distress, caught in cycles of harmful generational alcohol use, domestic violence and child neglect. In our neighbourhoods, we encounter everyday instances of oppression where sometimes, even in households where women earn, the man is approached for permission to spend every penny. In such contested terrain, how does one detach the performance of traditional gender roles and reconfigure expressions as beings around empathy and human connection?

Would it be possible to leverage the same new media platforms to amplify counter-narratives and role models with the courage to reject domination paradigms? Perhaps extremism at any stage of society cannot be avoided, but is there a possibility of mitigating its platforming? While it remains to be seen if any such radical reclamation of this new digital territory is possible, it is certain that social reinvention is moot to creating developmental ecologies where authentic selfhood becomes possible beyond the constrained parameters of normativity.

(Views expressed are personal)

Lakshmi Narasimhan is a mental health researcher & practitioner. she is Director of research at the banyan and BALM

Aishwariya Ramesh is a senior research associate at the banyan academy of leadership in mental health (BALM)

This article is part of 바카라라이브 바카라 April 21, 2025 issue 'Adolescence' which looks at the forces shaping teenage boys today—online misogyny, incel forums, bullying, and the chaos of the manosphere. It appeared in print as 'Time To Reboot'.