Nate Jacobs, from Euphoria, is one of those villains who unsettle us because they don't look like a villain. He has no scar, no wicked laugh: he has a good body, a future in sports and a family of impeccable appearance. And yet, wherever he turns up, the people who matter to him begin to measure their words, to hide their phones, to calculate what reaction each gesture will set off. Nate does not lash out from uncontrollable impulse: he installs a climate. He watches, isolates, threatens, withdraws affection and gives it back as a reward, and resorts to force only when everything else has already failed. That sustained pattern —not the isolated blow, but the regime of fear surrounding it— is exactly what criminology has learned to name, thanks to decades of feminist criminology, as coercive control.
// The theoryCrime has a gender too
For nearly a century criminology studied the offender as if gender were a minor detail. It was feminist criminology —with Carol Smart and her pioneering Women, Crime and Criminology (1976), and later with Ngaire Naffine— that showed violence cannot be understood without asking who commits it, against whom and under which cultural mandates. Within that framework, the sociologist James Messerschmidt offered a decisive idea: crime is sometimes a way of doing masculinity. When a man feels he does not embody the virile ideal demanded of him —success, dominance, impenetrability—, aggression and control can become a resource to prove that threatened manhood. It is not that biology drives men to dominate; it is that a cultural script rewards domination and punishes vulnerability. And on partner violence, the criminologist Evan Stark took the step that changed everything: he proposed looking at coercive control as a pattern —surveillance, isolation, degradation, threat, the micromanagement of everyday life— and not as a sum of physical episodes. The key question stops being "how many times did he hit her?" and becomes "how much freedom did he steal from her?".
Not an outburst, a regime
The biggest mistake when thinking about partner violence is to imagine it as a storm: a man who "loses his temper" and then regrets it. Stark showed that the deepest harm rarely lies in the isolated episode, but in the permanent structure surrounding it. Coercive control works as a sustained deprivation of freedom: the victim learns to anticipate the abuser's mood, to give up friendships, to ask implicit permission for the most basic things. The threat does the work the hand need not do every day. That is why many victims do not report "a blow": they report —when they can— a whole life shrunk down. Nate Jacobs embodies that mechanism with clinical precision. His power does not lie in brute force, but in the ability to make whoever is in front of him believe that any way out will be worse: that she will be humiliated, exposed, destroyed. Fear is his instrument of government, and the silence of those around him, his greatest ally. Where others see a boy with a bad temper, feminist criminology sees a recognizable and documented pattern.
Get the map of theories for free
Subscribe to the criminal archive —one case a week, no spam— and I'll send you The map of theories: the great currents of criminology on a single sheet.
// The subjectManhood as an inherited cage
What makes Nate a textbook case is that his violence does not spring from nowhere: it grows out of a wounded masculinity policed from within. The series hints at a rage rooted in shame and in a family secret —the father's— that Nate experiences as a threat to everything a man is supposed to be. Messerschmidt would describe it like this: when virile identity is perceived to be in danger, the subject doubles down on the performance of toughness he believes is demanded of him, and dominating others becomes the proof that he still "measures up". Hence Nate's obsession with image, with control of the body and of desire, with showing himself impenetrable while fearing that what he hides might be discovered. The jealousy, the phone surveillance, the need to know everything about his partner, the isolation of those who could offer her support: none of these are scattered outbursts, but the ordered pieces of a single system. Nate does not just want his partner; he wants her obedience, her silence and the certainty that no one will see the crack he himself cannot bear to look at. The shame that inhabits him does not excuse him, but it explains why he turns into a cage for others what is, above all, a cage for himself.
Nate Jacobs
// The crackThe wound does not justify the cage
The crack in this case is the temptation to let the wound become an alibi. It is true that Nate suffers, that he carries a real shame and fear, and that his violence is better understood in the light of that pain. But feminist criminology does not dig up those roots to soften the judgment; it does the opposite: to dismantle the idea that "he has it hard too" could weigh more than the freedom he strips from others. To explain is not to exonerate —understanding that coercive control is a learned pattern, with a cultural script behind it, does not return a single day of freedom to someone who lived shrunk by fear, nor does it make less real the harm done to someone who had to ask permission to breathe—. On the contrary: naming the mechanism serves to protect her. If we know the danger lies not only in the visible blow but in the invisible regime of surveillance and threat, we can recognize it sooner, believe those who report it and stop demanding proof of bruises when what they describe is a prison without bars.
There is a second crack, more reassuring and therefore more dangerous: dismissing Nate as an exceptional monster, a fictional case with no echo in the real world. It is exactly the reverse. The character matters because his logic is everyday and recognizable: the admired boy, the "good catch", the one no one would believe capable of anything, who exerts control precisely because his façade shields him from suspicion. Feminist criminology has warned of this for decades: the intimate-partner abuser is rarely the stranger in the alley, but the person who is trusted, and his best shield is the disbelief of those around him. Nate is fiction; the circuit that sustains him —the masculinity that needs to dominate, the surroundings that prefer not to see, the victim who is not believed— is not fiction at all.
Look at the pattern, not just the blow
Nate Jacobs teaches us to read what usually stays out of focus: partner violence as a system, not as a scene. Feminist criminology trains us to stop asking only "was there physical aggression?" and to start asking "how much freedom has been lost?": whether someone has stopped seeing their friends, whether they weigh every word, whether they live attuned to another's moods, whether they fear the consequences of leaving. That shift in how we look is what makes it possible to recognize coercive control while it has yet to leave visible marks, and to take it seriously as what it is: a deprivation of freedom. It also disarms the cultural script that feeds it —the idea that to dominate is to be a man, that jealousy is love and that vulnerability is weakness—. Because behind almost every Nate there is a discourse that taught that controlling was loving, and a milieu that preferred not to look. Dismantling that discourse and believing the victims is, in real criminology, the first measure of protection.
Three key takeaways
- Nate Jacobs embodies coercive control (Evan Stark) read through feminist criminology (Smart, Naffine): partner violence is not a one-off outburst, but a sustained regime of surveillance, isolation, jealousy and threat that deprives the victim of freedom.
- His masculinity is a cultural script, not a fate: following Messerschmidt, domination is a way of "proving" a manhood threatened by shame and a family secret. The perfect-boy façade is his best shield against suspicion.
- To explain is not to exonerate. Understanding the mechanism —the pattern, the script, the underlying wound— does not lessen responsibility: it serves to recognize coercive control in time, believe the one who suffers it and protect her. Memory is for the victim, not for the abuser.
Sources · further reading
- Smart, C. (1976). Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Messerschmidt, J. W. (1993). Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
- Naffine, N. (1996). Feminism and Criminology. Temple University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Nate Jacobs?
Nate Jacobs es un villano de Euphoria, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. On the outside, the model son: athletic, handsome, destined to succeed.
¿Por qué Nate Jacobs se convierte en villano?
Nate Jacobs and feminist criminology: coercive control in a relationship is not an outburst, it is a regime. The textbook athlete who turned masculinity into a cage for everyone around him.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Nate Jacobs?
El caso de Nate Jacobs se analiza desde la Criminología feminista. Feminist criminology studies how crime —and partner violence in particular— cannot be understood without gender: who commits it, against whom and with what cultural script behind it. Nate Jacobs, from the series Euphoria, is a textbook case of coercive control (Evan Stark): not an abuser of sudden fits, but someone who imposes a permanent regime of intimidation, surveillance and threat on his partner and those around him. Beneath the surface of the successful teenager beats a masculinity built on shame, a family secret and the need to dominate. Understanding it does not excuse it: it serves to name the pattern and protect those who suffer it.
