Back in 2020, pop star Harry Styles caused a stir when he made the supposedly taboo move of appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine wearing a dress. 

The stir was probably to be expected, sadly. Though such fashion choices used to go largely uncommented upon, sexuality and gender has become a hot topic issue, and any public suggestions of gender fluidity or queer sexuality tends to prompt hysteria from conservative commentators. But it wasn’t just this group who had something to say. Styles’ dress also prompted a wave of discourse amongst progressives around “queerbaiting”.  

Like so many contemporary culture clashes, at the heart of these arguments lie questions about the self: how much of someone else’s identity are we entitled to? 

Queerbaiting and the demand for the entire self

At its heart, queerbaiting is a term applied to a suspected marketing strategy. The claim is that some artists and public figures court the attention of queer and allied audiences by pretending to be queer – or at the very least, suggesting that they are – in order to increase their fanbase, general public standing, and sales.  

But knowing whether a public figure is actually queerbaiting, or if they are indeed queer, requires demanding access to key aspects of their identity, that once upon a time, we might have been more okay with them keeping private. Queerbaiting thus normalises our desperate hunger for, and perpetuation of, gossip – but here, it casts feeding that desire for gossip as some kind of moral act. 

The least harmful examples of these investigations into public figures’ identity markers are basically just online gossip. For example, discussions around the sexuality of actors like Hugh Jackman, or filmmakers like Baz Luhrmann, have existed for a long time. The most harmful examples resemble old-fashioned “outing”. For instance, just a few years ago, one of the key players of the TV show Heartstopper felt pressured into publicly revealing their sexuality to avoid accusations of queerbaiting. “I’m bi,” he wrote. “Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show.” 

The need for a private self

Discussions about queerbaiting have tricked us into believing that we are not just entitled to a celebrity’s personal life because we are snoops, but because we gain something morally through that demand.

While it might be a well-intentioned, certainly – we should be suspicious of the behaviour of the ultra-rich and public figures trying to gain more capital, particularly when it comes to the harnessing of marginalised identities – that suspicion does not undo the need for privacy. 

The demand that people must “out” themselves has always been problematic – but now, in an increasingly dangerous international political climate, such as the Trump administration emboldening anti-LGBTQIA+ groups, it has become actively harmful. When we try to convince ourselves that  the entitlement to someone’s sexuality or gender is  “logical” or reasonable, we start sliding down a pretty slippery slope, at risk of ending up in a place where marginalised groups have no right to privacy, in a world that has the potential to become only more hostile. 

More than that, queerbaiting enforces a categorised, inflexible and outdated understanding of gender and sexuality that progressives have done a lot of work to abandon. Demanding that someone label themselves, when they might not be ready to do so, or might not even have the personal language yet to decide what precise label that they would use, makes the spectrum of sexuality seem unnervingly rigid.  

After all, experimenting with a fluid sexuality and gender can be, in some cases, a slow process. Forcing someone to label themselves, when they may just be at the beginning of that journey, goes against so much good work that progressives have done to create a freer culture. The worry is not, necessarily, that celebrities themselves are being harmed by queerbaiting – but that the direction of the public discourse will have a trickle down effect, one that will normalise non-ideal practices and behaviours.  

It was the philosopher John Stuart Mill who most carefully laid out the importance of the “private sphere.” For Mill, every person should be entitled to thoughts, beliefs, and sometimes even actions, that were outside the remit of the state and others – that belonged only to them. Mill foresaw that trying to police such a private sphere was akin to a kind of intellectual fascism: as soon as we let go of our private selves, we make our whole selves controllable.  

Importantly, Mill believed that actions and beliefs in the private sphere stopped being ungovernable when they harmed others – he did not think that we were just free to do whatever we liked, under the guise of our privacy. But he did believe that we were entitled to a self which was ours and ours alone. 

We would do well to remind ourselves of Mill’s argument. Celebrities sign up to giving a great deal of themselves to the public eye – but that does not mean that they need to give all of it. Even a public figure is allowed a private self. And when we forget that, and we start demanding more and more, we normalise the harmful attitude that privacy is something that can be given up, rather than an inalienable right that we should all enjoy. 

One of the most potent allegories ever to be developed by a philosopher is Plato’s allegory of ‘the cave’.  

The story centres around a community of people who are bound, from head to toe, while facing a wall. For the entirety of their lives, nothing is to be seen other than two-dimensional shadows cast by whatever passes between their backs and the source of illumination (the sun or a raging fire). Knowing of no other way to see the world, the chained viewers believe that all of reality is represented by the shadows they perceive. Worse still, they have no concept of ‘shadows’ that might shake their conviction that what they see is ‘real’.  

Then, one fateful day, a single individual manages to break their bonds. Free to roam, they encounter a three-dimensional world of colour. Then – only then – do they realise that their life has been defined by error; that the shadows that they once took to represent the whole of reality are nothing more than a simplistic rendering of something far more complex, compelling and beautiful. Inspired by this new understanding, the person returns to liberate others. At first, they are mocked, labelled a lunatic and accused of heresy. Eventually, enough people are freed from their shackles and learn to see. 

I used to think it was obvious that everyone would jump at the opportunity to be liberated from ignorance. Most of my working life has been animated by Socrates’ great maxim that, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. After all, is it not the capacity to acknowledge – but also to transcend – our instincts and desires, that makes us human? Is it not obvious that a refusal to examine our lives and to make conscious choices, is actually a refusal to embrace the fullness of our humanity? And is it not the task of philosophy – especially ethics – to equip us so that we might better manage complexity once the chains of unthinking custom and practice are loosened? 

As it happens, the ‘shadows’ are far more attractive than I had supposed. In a world of increasing complexity, I have been surprised to see an increasing number of people yearning for their chains in the hope that they might recover the simpler two-dimensional world that they have left behind. I see this in an urge to force what is inherently complex into a deceptively simple form. This is an escape back into a world of shadows – an easier path than that of learning how better to deal with complex reality. 

The truth is that most of the important things in life are complex. The ‘messiness’ of the human condition comes from the fact that we have the capacity to make conscious (and conscientious) choices in circumstances of radical uncertainty.

Too often, the choice is not between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Values and principles of equal weight can pull us in opposite directions. It is easy to become ‘stuck’, or to face the prospect that the ‘least bad’ alternative is your only viable choice. 

Ethics can help us address this messy reality. Not the impossible, flawed ideal of ‘ethical perfection’ – but rather being equipped to live in the uncomfortable light of reality … in all its complexity. We need people to become ‘champions for the common good’. For without dedicated care and attention, our ethical foundations begin to erode. 

Ours is a complex world. But when we embrace the ethical dimension of our lives; when we step into the light, nothing can overwhelm and everything becomes possible. 

With your support, The Ethics Centre can continue to be the leading, independent advocate for bringing ethics to the centre of everyday life in Australia. Click here to make a tax deductible donation today. 

Adolescence, the exemplary new Netflix series that has become immediate water cooler conversation fodder, is built around a filmmaking decision that might have, in lesser hands, felt like a gimmick. Each of the four episodes of the show are filmed in one continuous, unbroken take. 

Here, the decision is not just an inspiring feat of filmmaking verve. It also has a thematic point. Adolescence concerns the murder of a female high school student – the accused is 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). The show carefully explores the fallout of that violent crime, in particular, what it churns up in the heart of Jamie’s father, Eddie (Stephen Graham, also the show’s co-creator).  

The themes of Adolescence are laid out early, and clearly: misogyny; the anger in the heart of teenage boys; and, in particular, the forces that influence adolescents. These themes coalesce in one of the major questions of the show: who shapes the identity of young people, and, pressingly, young men? Is it their parents? The world around them? Or, most worryingly of all, the bad ethical actors who have made their careers through stoking the fires of hatred? 

That unblinking, never-cutting camera allows us to explore this question with striking clarity. The camera never looks away. So painfully and shockingly, neither can we.  

Who makes our children?

Unlike many other works of art based around crime and murder, Adolescence is not, particularly, a whodunit. It is more like a whydunit. We do have questions early on as to whether Jamie actually committed the crime of which he has been accused, but this is not the focus of the show. Instead, the mystery is a broader, harder, more probing one: why do young men commit acts of violence against women? More specifically, who formed Jamie’s ethical identity?  

Eddie, Jamie’s father, seems to worry that it might be him. He spends the show wracked by guilt, confronted with the knowledge of his son’s suspected crime, and terrified that he did not do enough to stop him from walking down a very dark path. But is he solely to blame? The beauty of Adolescence is that it instead leaves those “responsible” for the dark parts of Jamie’s personality nebulous. 

In his groundbreaking work, Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor provides an answer – albeit a worrying one. He argues that identity is formed by a collective. In his view, human beings are defined and constructed through their relationship with others – we become who we are, by virtue of who we interact with. On this view, parents are of course responsible for the shaping of their children’s ethical makeup – but they’re not solely responsible. 

And they’re particularly not responsible when adolescence hits. Every parent to teenagers knows that rebellion against the older guard is inevitable – and parents are often the last people that children will confer with. That, according to Taylor, leaves children susceptible to other formative ethical forces – and in the case of Jamie, those are the bad misogynist actors that he is surrounded by, from his schoolmates, to the ever-pressing threat of online radicalisation. 

The spectre of the other

Taylor’s view is particularly troubling when combined with the writings of another philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. In his major work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that ethical identities are especially formed by the rules of inclusion and exclusion. People become who they are by deciding who they are not, forming an in and an out-group that gives them a sense of security in their own personhood. 

In Adolescence, it’s exactly that exclusionary nature that seems to lead Jamie down his dark path. His world, like the world of far too many teenage boys, is defined by strict and dangerous binaries: boys versus girls, winners versus losers. His worldview, when we get to hear it, seems defined by hatred for what is different, and a desperate clinging to that, which he sees as the same as himself. When such strict battle lines are drawn, violence is a natural endpoint. 

What then do we do to attempt to get our teenage boys back on the right path? Away from violence, hatred, and exclusion? Adolescence, bravely, doesn’t offer a solution. In fact, that’s exactly what Taylor and Agamben show us – that one simple, pat, generic solution doesn’t have the power to change anything. 

After all, if we take the work of those philosophers to be true, then we see the entire social environment as constitutive of identity. That means parents. It means friends. It means the entertainment young men consume. It means what they hear in the playground.

Our gaze must significantly broaden – and we must not consider the likes of Jamie to be an outlier. Instead, we must see him as a product of an entire social system.

When, in the final episode of Adolescence, Eddie asks his wife, “shouldn’t we have done better?”, the initial impulse is to assume he means the two of them. The better read is that he means all of us.