Adolescence and the rise of misogyny

Earlier this month, Netflix released a new drama series starring Stephen Graham titled Adolescence. It’s a 4-part limited series and has been released to critical acclaim. I watched it today and I can see why there’s so much talk around it. It opens with a police swat team charging into a normal suburban street at just gone 6am. Inside, an alarmed family are confused as they are shouted to get down on the floor - two normal parents, with an older teenage daughter and a younger boy - and the police pass by the mother, then the father, the teenage girl and then start reading the 13 year old boy his rights, as the charge is announced of murder.

Each episode is shot in a single take with a single camera following the action, handing off from character to character, as it follows the different parts of the story.

SPOILERS BELOW

Episode 1 follows the boy (Jamie) from his home to the police station, the procedure as he is detained, discussions between different characters, and eventually the police interview where we as the viewers are shown the CCTV footage of him stabbing a girl - a girl in a younger year but in some of his classes.

Episode 2 follows the police around the school, as they ask for anyone with information to come forward. Here they’re looking for witnesses, the weapon, and the motive behind Jamie’s actions. In doing so, we are treated to an inside look of an average high school - how the teachers are overstretched and demonstrating that there are gaps in the system. I’d like to believe this is a slightly more pessimistic view of the school system, however at a school that size there are more opportunities for students to be failed. Eventually a student comes forward and explains some of the emojis used on some of the instagram posts, and we are introduced to the idea that the victim (Katie) was calling Jamie and ‘incel’ (aka involuntary celibate), and the police realise that she may have been bullying Jamie.

Episode 3 follows a psychologist visiting Jamie in the detention centre. This is her second visit and the almost entire episode is located in a single room between the psychologist and Jamie. We understand that Jamie is intelligent in many ways, but still very young and immature in others. He has angry outbursts and demonstrates that he is very much a boy in puberty; he is confused about what is appropriate and what isn’t, and he shows just how insecure he is about the way he looks. He voices a figure: “80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men. You must trick them, because you'll never get them in a normal way.” This and other misogynistic ‘facts’ help support incel theory - that you are not choosing to not have sex/be in a relationship, it’s a thing that is being done to you.

Episode 4 follows Jamie’s family back at home. It’s his dad’s birthday and they’re desperately holding onto the facade that everything is ‘normal’, but it quickly falls apart when they notice that the word ‘nonse’ has been spray painted on the side of the dad’s van. He tries to clean it off, while all the neighbours claim not to have seen anything and the mum calls the police, who offer little to no help. They then decide to drive to a DIY store where the dad gets some help from a store employee who recognises him and says he believes his son is innocent - that he’s seen the photos of the victim and the video footage and it all looks staged and fake, and that there are a number of guys like him on the internet who support his son and would like to get involved with helping him. In the van on the way home, Jamie calls and tells his dad that he is changing his plea to guilty. His dad can’t bring himself to reply. When they get home, the mum and dad reminisce over the times they had with Jamie when he was a little boy and tell each other that they’re good parents, that they don’t know where they went wrong. The series fininshes, with the mum and daughter going to make breakfast for the dad for his birthday and the dad in tears in Jamie’s bedroom, sobbing, saying he should’ve done better.

SPOILERS OVER

The thing about this whole series, is how simple it is; it isn’t a complicated to follow crime story, there are no twists and turns, it just is what it is. The terrifying thing about this whole series is how normal everything seems. Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco and such normal, middle class, unremarkable parents. There is nothing about them that suggests bad parents, in fact, in the last episode they list all the things they did to meet Jamie’s needs - they took him to football practice, they bought him a laptop, they went on family holidays together.

More importantly, this idea of insipid misogyny that is a very real threat to boys today. Earlier this month, we saw the Tate brothers freed from Romania and hop on a private jet to Florida (while they are still being investigated in Romania and the UK for human trafficking and rape). Though they are not “free” - they have been transported back to Romania today (Sunday 23rd March) for court appearances, it does undermine the severity of the charges. The Southport attack in July 2024 saw a 17 year old Axel Rudakubana murder 3 young girls aged between 6 and 9 years old, and attempt to murder 10 others (children and adults). Although no motive was heard at the prosecution, an article from the BBC says that families of the victims believe that Rudakubana could have been radicalised by Tate and similar influencers.

King’s College London (KCL) conduct data analysis every International Women’s Day (in March if you’re unsure when it is). Their 2025 data shows that 50% of people polled believed that “giving women equal rights with men, things have gone far enough in my country”. The most surprising discovery in this data, was that it was not older men that predominantly believed this, as might be suspected, it was actually younger men from the group of Gen Z age group that were the majority in this belief. If this data is accurate, it suggests that misogynistic male influencers like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan are not without power and influence on younger minds potentially like Rudakubana and the fictional Jamie from Adolescence.

Focusing on Great Britain in KCL’s data, for the same statement as above (When it comes to giving women equal rights with men, things have gone far enough in my country), we can feel better to know that Great Britain % who agreed with that statement was 26th out of 30 countries - we tied with the USA, and only Canada (34% agreed), Poland (27% agreed) and Japan (27%) had lower levels of agreement with the statement than Great Britain.

Another statement outlined in KCL’s poll was “Men are being expected to do too much to support equality” and the trend of gender/age followed the previous question - it was younger men who more likely agreed with this statement, and, again, GB ranked low on the list - 28 out of 29 countries. GB had 33% of poll takers agree with the statement and only Italy had a lower percentage (32%).

However, 42% of respondents in Great Britain agreed with the statement “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men”, which placed GB right in the centre on the average, and again, young men are mostly likely to agree with this.

This data is quite revealing. Even if Rudakubana wasn’t influenced by the “manosphere”, there are other woman killers who have been, like Kyle Clifford, who watched Andrew Tate videos and murdered his girlfriend, her sister and mother in 2024, or Jake Davison, who killed 5 people in Plymouth in 2022 and was a self-described incel, or over in Canada there was Alek Minassian who killed 10 people and attempted to kill a further 16 in a spree killing in Toronto in 2018 and was also a part of the incel movement. This is a very real threat and Adolescence reminds us that in a digital world, where children have screen time and phones from a young age, this rhetoric (that is also ending up in political office - Trump) is reaching impressionable people who are developing with this message ingrained.

If you're interested in reading a bit more about incels and what this all means, you can read this article from the BBC.

Women are not safe. This show and KCL’s data is a reminder that there is a large minority who believe women have too much and feminism has gone too far. Women will continue to be unsafe. It’s not all men, but the numbers are growing.