The Free Press
Adolescence is the new hit Netflix series everybody’s talking about, based on several instances of teen boys stabbing their female peers in the UK. The murderous protagonist, 13-year-old Jamie, is a white boy from the north of England—a fact many commenters are crying foul over. They say it’s fashionable to demonize white boys as racist, homophobic, or in this case, misogynistic.
But my problem isn’t that white boys are the villains. It’s that the four-episode series demonizes masculinity in general.
The show’s premise is that Jamie (played by Owen Cooper) is a normal boy from a good family who brutally stabs a female classmate after getting sucked into online “incel culture,” where unappealing men blame women for the fact that they’re not having any sex. This influence, combined with the terrible temper he has inherited from his father (played by series co-creator Stephen Graham), leads Jamie to kill a girl he’s attracted to. Meanwhile, every male character we meet in Adolescence is either evil, pathetic, or completely nondescript.
The drama begins when a SWAT team breaks into Jamie’s family’s home. As police point a gun at Jamie and place him under arrest, he pees his pants. It’s a rare moment of sympathy, a young bed wetter caught up in a terrible event. Jamie could be any boy. Worse, he could be your boy!
And down at the police station, his true colors emerge. A detective inspector shows security camera footage of Jamie stabbing his classmate Katie seven times in a parking lot. Jamie pulls his sleeve down, then sniffles into his hand. “Do you want to say sorry to Katie’s mom?” the DI asks him. But Jamie says nothing, avoiding eye contact.
Jack Thorne, Adolescence’s co-creator, said in an interview that his intention with the series was to “look in the eye of male rage.” But he also admits that when he and Graham began writing the story, they struggled to work out Jamie’s motive for the murder. An assistant suggested they look into “incel” culture. And they thought it was the perfect fit.
And so, in the second episode, we learn through the DI’s son, who goes to Jamie’s school, that the source of the young teen’s corruption was “a call to action by the manosphere.” A detective sergeant summarizes: “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff, the Andrew Tate shite”—referring to the British American self-described misogynist influencer who has recently become something of a folk hero among disaffected young men.
According to Thorne, Jamie was “indoctrinated” by the likes of Tate and “voices a lot more dangerous than Andrew Tate’s” in the online manosphere. And he parrots their misogynistic talking points.
We see this in episode 3 when Jamie, who by now has been living in a juvenile detention center for the past seven months, has a sit-down interview with a criminal psychologist, Briony Ariston (played by Erin Doherty). She directs the conversation like a gender-studies seminar, drilling down on “what being a man feels like” as well as “how masculine men feel about women.” Jamie recalls how his dad would “look away” whenever he performed poorly at sports and how his mother isn’t good at anything except cooking a roast. These are the details offered by the show to explain how misogyny becomes murderous.
During the session, he explodes into a rage multiple times, and on one occasion, after Briony tells him to sit down, he yells at her: “You do not control what I do in my life! Get that in the fucking little head of yours.”
She remains motionless. Finally he demands, “Do you like me?” Screaming in her face, “Don’t you even like me a bit?”
When Jamie is removed from the room, Briony breaks down in tears—which is surprising, given that it’s her job to evaluate troubled youth. It’s almost as if the show is trying to present her as just another victim of toxic masculinity.
The name of the show, Adolescence, implies that the forces Jamie faces are an inevitable part of growing up, something all boys experience in today’s hyper-online age. “What we’re seeing in Adolescence isn’t fiction; it’s a reality,” Michael Conroy, the founder of Men At Work, which teaches boys to respect women, told the Daily Mail. He seems to suggest that all boys are latent predators, saying, “The risk of lethality is already there.”
Weirdly, audiences seem to be lapping up this binary portrayal of manhood, which attracted over 24 million viewings in the first four days. Since Adolescence was released earlier this month, the show has gained a 100 percent score among professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with one saying it “could save lives” for its unflinching portrayal of toxic masculinity.
Writing for The Guardian, Thorne suggested “There should be government support” in curtailing the digital influences that inspire these latent predators to do terrible things—“because the ideas being expressed are dangerous in the wrong hands, and young brains aren’t equipped to cope with them.” And indeed: British politicians have urged for the series to be shown in schools and in Parliament.
But the show sheds no light on how boys are radicalized. I have no doubt that the manosphere is a force for bad, but blaming it as the main reason for violence against women strains credulity and misses many other factors involved.
Take hardcore online pornography, which encourages men to throttle and abuse women. A third of British men say they watch porn at least once a week, and one in five teenagers ages 14 to 18 say they have a porn habit. Children are first coming across it as young as 7. Some of these videos involve underage and nonconsenting female participants, with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen,” “Extreme Choking,” and “She Can’t Breathe.” A considerably higher proportion of young people are exposed to porn than follow, or have a positive view of, Andrew Tate.
And there is considerable evidence that porn is linked to male violence. For instance, in May 2018, a 14-year-old girl in Dublin was sexually assaulted and murdered by two 13-year-old boys, who, like Jamie, did not suffer from any mental disorders and came from good families. One of them had accumulated tens of thousands of images of hardcore and disturbingly violent pornography on his phone, seemingly without anyone noticing.
And yet Adolescence makes only passing reference to the ubiquity of porn and its influence on young men.
Of course, there are other factors that can influence a boy to become violent: substance abuse, childhood trauma, exploitation by criminal gangs, or the allures of radical Islamism. But sometimes the most truthful explanation as to why kids commit atrocities is that there is no good explanation. As Lionel Shriver explores in her novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a boy who kills his classmates with a crossbow, the violence committed is shocking precisely because it is so disproportionate to the perpetrator’s perceived grievances.
Thankfully, such violence is rare. Which is why pushing out a faulty narrative about the problems of boyhood will do nothing to “save lives” as people suggest, but perpetuate damaging stereotypes about young men. Suggesting all young men are predators in waiting is destructive. Boys, like girls, have immense potential for good. It’s this notion, and not feverish morality tales like this Netflix series, that need to be taught in schools.
