Where "Paul American" and "Adolescence" meet
The rise of the angsty young men genre
Adolescence has taken the Internet, pop culture, and the UK Parliament by storm. The four-part Netflix drama about a 13-year-old who murders his classmate, uses the series to examine mental health, social media, bullying, and sex with young teenagers. The series comes as an influx of discourse has centered around “men in crisis”, largely focusing on their mental health, misogyny, and loneliness.
As Netflix released their series, HBO Max released their new reality series centered on Logan and Jake Paul, Paul American. The shows certainly have their differences: Adolescence is a drama, Paul American is not; Netflix’s series came to critical acclaim, Paul American has a 1.9/10 rating on IMDb. But at the core of these programs is the same argument: men and boys are not okay.
I covered this earlier in the autumn, and that earlier article mentioned Logan Paul and his podcast, in which he interviewed Donald Trump. Young people are struggling, with a myriad of socioeconomic issues; loneliness, crushing student debt, climate crisis, joblessness, inflation, and soaring rent. Social media, and the compounding isolation, self-consciousness, and anxiety that it causes, has defined Gen Z like no other. In Adolescence, 13-year-old Jamie Miller walks into his home angry, skamming his door, his mother says in the final episode. He stayed in his room, awake until late at night, the glow of the computer screen. In the show, Jamie stabs a girl in his school who rejected him when he asked her out. He is referred to as an “incel” on Instagram, a term meaning “involuntarily celibate”. He oscillates, between anger and frightening misogyny with the pleading of a hurt young boy who wants to be liked. It is both disturbing and heartbreaking. Obviously, the show is a work of fiction. But the story of Jamie Miller’s descent into violent misogyny, like many other boys today, begins with men like the Paul brothers. Let me explain.
Logan Paul, the elder Paul brother, gained prominence in 2014 through the social media site Vine (a precursor to TikTok). Jake Paul soon followed, and once Vine ceased to exist in 2017, which is when the Youtube “Vlogs” (video blogs) began to take off. Both boys lived in content houses, where multiple content creators lived and filmed together; think of it as a high-end fraternity, complete with a swimming pool and McMansions. Jake’s house, Team 10, had a rotating membership of creators. For a time, he was on Disney Channel, before the studio terminated his employment due to complaints from neighbors over Team 10’s behavior. The vlogs were brainless, yes; but ultimately harmless. At first. After Jake’s Disney Channel role ended, the vlogs began to get more suggestive, even as his audience stayed young. One controversy began over a vlog titled “I lost my virginity”, with a thumbnail of him and his then-girlfriend partially nude. Besides the piles of money the Paul brothers raked in; however, they were behaviorally normal 19-year-olds: immature, pranksters, foolish. This was similar to other vloggers at the time, such as the Nelk Boys.
At fifteen years old I, like Jamie Miller’s character in Adolescence, watched these videos. I ultimately stopped, becoming too mature for them. Since COVID, a shift has taken place. Where the Paul brothers once did slapstick comedy with a side of boxing, the elder brother now hosts far-right idealogues on his podcast, and Jake stars with him in their own reality show. The Nelk Boys, another former prank group, also host MAGA world characters on their platform.
Boys like Jamie Miller never stood a chance: you don’t need to read Project 2025 when a vlogger-turned-boxer with a sports car lays it out for you.
In the final episode of Adolescence, Jamie’s father Eddie begins to unravel, telling his wife about the his purported failings as a father. He looked away when Jamie failed at soccer, he tells his wife; he pushed the boy to do sports when he wanted to draw, he had a temper. Eddie is upfront about his machismo, even if he doesn’t use the word itself. Greg Paul, patriarch of the Paul clan, exhibits the same traits. Their father says that if they didn’t end up boxers they would “end up doing porn”. Logan goes so far as to admit that his father was physical with the pair. Even as a teen watching Team 10, I understood Greg Paul’s fatherhood, I saw it on soccer fields, at schools, at work. He has the bravado, the “toughness that masks mental weakness”, the machismo to set his sons up for failure. Failure looks like different things. For Eddie Miller, it meant his son retreating into extremist corners of the internet, radicalizing him against women. For the Paul brothers, it is the slide from prank videos into fascist sympathy.
Both Adolescence and Paul American are cautionary tales in their own right, but only Adolescence’s was intentional. In the former, the social media climate towards women very much affects the attitudes towards women, leading to a tragedy. In the latter, the Paul brothers live a life of decadence with fast cars, mansions, gorgeous women; their money coming at the cost of young men like Jamie Miller. The Paul brothers, and the other men of their strata are, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “careless and confused…They smash [sic] up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”. It will be up to future officials to clean up the colossal mess they have made on young people’s minds.