William Golding’s classic novel “Lord of the Flies” takes its newest form in a Netflix adaptation set in the 1950s. After young boys are stranded on an island, the children descend into chaos, factioning off and committing unspeakable acts of violence. Two main character foils — Jack and Ralph — represent not only two factions but two clashing ideals of masculinity, as Jack seeks domination and Ralph wrestles with compassion. Cody Mello-Klein reports on why this struggle couldn’t be more relevant today, in 2026, for Northeastern Global News in an article titled “Why is Netflix’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ striking a chord? It knows boys are in trouble, experts say,” published on May 12th.
It doesn’t take an expert to note the rising extremity of gender roles, the resurgence of “trad-wives,” culture wars with gender and sexuality at the center, hyper-masculine alt-right pipelines targeting young men, and performative, aggressive masculinity being modelled everywhere from YouTube to the White House. Mello-Klein explains that “the push and pull between traditional and more modern ideas of what it means to be a man has become fodder for reactionary politicians and in the online manosphere, where hypermasculine influencers like Andrew Tate trade on muscles and stereotypical gender norms.” However, Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of Psychology at Northeastern and a member of the WGSS executive committee, explains that “This is not a rotten barrel of apples. This is a group of young people being shaped by what’s going on in our adult world.”
In other words, patriarchal, damaging hyper-masculinity is reactionary, rather than inherent. Mello-Klein notes that in every U.S. state, young women are more likely to have a B.A. than young men. As the job markets shift to reflect that educational disparity, men are facing rising levels of hopelessness and frustration.
“Some of the lostness comes from that [sense that], ‘We’ve been given this really clear framework, but we see that it’s not working,” Rodgers said.
Read the full article here.
