In “The Instant White-Hot Wild,” the last episode of the third season of The Boys (2022), Soldier Boy tells Billy Butcher about his father before they go after Black Noir at Vought Tower. The man, he says, never laid a hand on him: he couldn’t be bothered. He told him he was a disappointment. When Ben came home from World War II as America’s first superhero, welcomed with parades, his father was still unimpressed: he had taken a shortcut, and a real man doesn’t cheat. Then Soldier Boy admits that he always wanted kids. (Spoiler warning: this file reveals his relationship to Homelander and what he does with him in the fifth and final season.) Soldier Boy, played by Jensen Ackles, is Ben, one of the first volunteers for Compound V, the Vought substance that grants superpowers, and for forty years the face of the company: propaganda hero, actor, singer and leader of the team Payback. In 1984, on an operation in Nicaragua, his teammates betray him and hand him over to the Soviets, who experiment on him for decades. The series wakes him up in a Russian lab, turned into a radioactive bomb, and gives him a son he didn’t know he had: Homelander, created in a Vought lab from his sperm.
// The theoryManhood as a test
Feminist criminology asked a question the discipline had dodged for a century: why is the vast majority of violence committed by men? Patriarchy theory answers by looking not at “men” but at a model of man. The Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell called it hegemonic masculinity, a concept she put forward with Tim Carrigan and John Lee in 1985 and consolidated in Masculinities (1995): the way of being a man that a society places at the top, associated with strength, toughness, dominance and the absence of vulnerability. Beneath it, other masculinities sit lower, subordinated or marginalized. James Messerschmidt, in Masculinities and Crime (1993), carried the idea into crime: violence is often a resource for “doing” masculinity, for proving it to others when legitimate means fail or fall short. That model is not biology: it is learned, and it is inherited.
A real man doesn’t cheat
The father’s sentence is the core of the character, because it makes the test impossible. If Ben was weak, he was a disappointment; if he made himself strong with Compound V, he was a cheat. Connell describes hegemonic masculinity as an ideal almost no one reaches and everyone must keep chasing. Messerschmidt explains what a man who is denied it does: he proves it by other means, and violence is the one closest to hand. The Boys makes the metaphor literal: Soldier Boy’s shortcut is a syringe, and he spends forty years trying to prove, on other people’s bodies, that he didn’t cheat.
// The subjectThe hero who had to be the only one
The series shows him in three moments that draw the same hierarchy. In “Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed” (season three, episode 7), one of Black Noir’s memories takes us back to the eighties: Soldier Boy brutalizes the young Gunpowder during a training session and, when Noir complains that he lost the role of Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop because of what Soldier Boy had been saying about him, beats him and threatens to kill him if he ever tries to outshine him again. This is hegemonic masculinity in action: the top spot belongs to one man alone. In “The Last Time to Look on This World of Lies” (episode 5), Butcher hands him Crimson Countess, tied up, his former partner and Payback teammate. Ben tells her he loved her and waited for years for her to come rescue him; she answers that she hated him, that they all did. He kills her with a blast. And in the season’s last episode, facing Homelander, who offers him a family and introduces him to Ryan, his grandson, Soldier Boy tells him that if he had raised him, he wouldn’t be a weak, sniveling crybaby starved for attention, and calls him a disappointment. They are his father’s words. Then he tries to kill him, and strikes the boy when Ryan attacks him. Queen Maeve carries him out through a window as he explodes, and he ends up sealed in a pod again, with Grace Mallory looking on.
Soldier Boy
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 crackThe son who takes after him
The showrunner, Eric Kripke, told Variety that the third season is, in many ways, about fathers and sons, and about how fathers pass their trauma down from generation to generation. Soldier Boy is that thesis in uniform: the humiliated son becomes the father who humiliates. The fifth season (2026) follows the thread to the end. Homelander takes him out of cryostasis and puts him in the Seven, and in “King of Hell” (episode 4), at the Fort Harmony base, Ben finds Quinn, another of the first Compound V subjects, a decorated soldier who despised him for never having seen combat. Frenchie goads him, calling him a fraud and a coward; Soldier Boy incinerates Quinn, then breaks down in tears over the body. Later he gives Homelander V-One, the version that grants immortality, in the name of Stormfront, whom they both loved. In episode 7 he tells him he is not a god and that he is leaving. Homelander chokes him unconscious and freezes him again: the son can’t take no for an answer either.
The theory has two limits here. The first: it was born to explain men’s violence against women, and Soldier Boy’s violence falls mostly on other men. It fits better with the half of Connell’s work about the hierarchy among masculinities, the one that puts the “weak” and gay men at the bottom, than with the half about control over women, although the killing of Crimson Countess falls squarely within it. The second matters more. Explaining Soldier Boy is not excusing him. Many scorned sons don’t throw a car into a house, as Mother’s Milk recounts Soldier Boy did the night he killed his grandfather, or shoot a priest on the mere suspicion that Mindstorm has brainwashed him. His father’s contempt explains the script Ben learned; it does not decide for him each time he chose to follow it.
What is inherited is the yardstick
Patriarchy theory does not say that men are violent by nature. It says that a model of manhood teaches men to measure themselves by dominance and to punish vulnerability, their own and other people’s, and that this model is passed on at home before anywhere else. That is why the prevention it proposes is not locking up monsters one by one, but changing the yardstick fathers use to measure their sons. Soldier Boy inherits no blow from his father. He inherits a sentence, and he repeats it to his son word for word.
Three key ideas
- Patriarchy theory sees male violence as the product of a model of manhood, Connell’s hegemonic masculinity (1995), and Messerschmidt (1993) describes violence as a resource for proving that manhood to others.
- Soldier Boy, scorned by a father who called him a disappointment and a cheat, becomes a superhero through Compound V and spends decades imposing himself through violence: he abuses his teammates, kills Crimson Countess and ends up calling his son, Homelander, a disappointment.
- The crack: the theory was born to explain violence against women, and his falls mostly on men; and explaining the script he learned does not excuse him for each time he chose to follow it.
Sources · further reading
- Carrigan, T., Connell, B. and Lee, J. (1985). “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity”. Theory and Society, 14(5), 551-604.
- Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. University of California Press.
- Messerschmidt, J. W. (1993). Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
- Connell, R. W. and Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept”. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829-859.
- Kripke, E. (creator) (2019-2026). The Boys. Prime Video. Seasons 3 (2022) and 5 (2026).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Soldier Boy?
Soldier Boy (“Ben”) is a villain from The Boys, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. His father never hit him: he couldn’t be bothered.
Why does Soldier Boy (Ben) become a villain?
Soldier Boy, of The Boys, and patriarchy theory: the Vought hero who injected himself with powers to earn his father’s respect, and who measures everyone, his son included, by the yardstick of manhood that humiliated him.
Which criminological theory explains Soldier Boy?
Soldier Boy's case is analysed through Patriarchy and crime. Patriarchy theory, with Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity (1995) and James Messerschmidt’s work (1993), understands much of male violence as a way of proving manhood in front of others. Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), of The Boys (Prime Video, 2019-2026), is Ben, a son scorned by his father who volunteered for the first Compound V trials and was for decades Vought’s great hero. Betrayed by his team in 1984 and tortured for forty years in a Russian lab, he returns in the third season for revenge. He is also Homelander’s biological father.
