Is Jamie in Adolescence a Psychopath or Son of Patriarchy?

By Andres Kogan Valderrama

HAVANA TIMES – In light of the Netflix series Adolescence and the multiple analyses made about it—covering the construction of masculinity, the manosphere, and how different institutions have failed to prevent such terrible situations—I would like to focus on the creators’ attempt to depathologize the crime committed by a 13-year-old boy and even go beyond that.

The reason I say this is because the series seeks to move away from the biopsychological view that explains how a 13-year-old can coldly murder a girl of the same age, attributing it to genetic or hereditary factors linked to psychopathy. Instead, it shifts toward a perspective where familia and educational neglect, bullying, and unsupervised use of social media are seen as crucial to understanding what happened.

In other words, the creators aim to hold society as a whole accountable for a brutal crime committed by a child—despite Jamie’s clear psychopathic traits, such as aggressiveness, manipulation, lack of empathy, and absence of remorse, all of which are present throughout the series and comparable to other real or fictional cases involving similar individuals.

Thus, the series focuses less on that and more on how patriarchal discourses targeted at men in the manosphere have taken root—discourses that perceive feminism as a threat and provoke violent reactions against women. This reinforces a dangerously violent idea of masculinity that can lead to murder, as seen in Jamie’s case in Adolescence.

Nevertheless, while I agree with the reading of the dangers posed by hate-filled narratives against feminism and women, I want to go further and question the very notion of psychopathy as developed by psychiatry. This concept is nothing more than a patriarchal and rationalist label which, as shown by antipsychiatric criticism, lacks solid scientific backing and has historically served as a form of social control.

That is not to deny that some individuals show more antisocial traits than others. Rather, these traits are not explained by unproven individual genetic factors but rather stem from a patriarchal society that has constructed a masculinity of death—one that prioritizes competition and domination over empathy, care, and interdependence.

It is no coincidence, then, that those labeled as “psychopaths” who kill, rape, and torture women, men, animals, and even corpses are, overwhelmingly, men. The problem is not individual, nor merely social (as suggested by the concept of sociopathy), but historical, rooted in patriarchy. We have been socialized to conquer and to appropriate our surroundings, as though we own the world.

Just look at homicide statistics: 95% of them are committed by men, which shows our significantly higher levels of violence compared to women, and how patriarchy has affected us. This goes beyond biological claims about strength or testosterone levels, as if once again the explanation must lie in biology.

But no—the violence we, as men, commit against women and against life on this planet is not biological. It is due to a patriarchal system that still weighs heavily on us. It can be seen not only in the manosphere but also in wars, drug trafficking and organized crime, dictatorships, extractivism, femicides, suicides, and so-called psychopaths or serial killers, even if that’s hard to accept.

In short, this is a much more structural issue than we tend to believe and far more difficult to reverse if we want to prevent situations like Jamie’s or similar real-life cases. Patriarchy is everywhere and reproduces itself through new technologies, which merely serve as new vehicles for this masculinity of death to continue claiming lives, all while disguising itself as psychopathy or some new manosphere identity.

In response, we must foster caring masculinities and buenos vivires (good ways of living) everywhere—spaces where men reconnect with their emotions, with others, and with Nature. This is the path to depatriarchalizing relationships and the world, which continues to be dominated by unsustainable economic systems and lifestyles that are leading us to extinction, even as we keep creating monsters to maintain the status quo.

Read more from Chile here on Havana Times.