‘Adolescence’ is a Tough but Necessary Watch for Any Parent of a Boy
And we should learn from it.
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TW: Gender based violence
Adolescence has been on Netflix’s top 10 for weeks and has sparked important awareness and dialogue about masculinity, especially as the concept of masculinity develops in boys during adolescence itself.
But unlike many books and some health classes, as well intentioned as they may be, Adolescence brings the consciousness of what many boys are going through to the 21st century and to 2025. Because at this age, boy get more messages, literally and figuratively online than in person or in books. We simply cannot turn a blind eye to the separate universe that our children encounter online.
A few months ago I did a piece on the “Manosphere” and our need to have interventions for children and partners as part of school curricula comparable to the ineffective and flawed D.A.R.E. program to deter drug use. Because, as Adolescence demonstrates, the consequences without any intervention can be as severe as it gets: a boy killing a girl, as the central character, 13 year old, Jamie Miller does.
One of my favorite scenes in Adolescence happens in the first episode when the officer investigating the case, DI Luke Bascome (Ashley Walters, who always gives a great performance) and his partner, DS Misha Frank, are going in Jamie’s school to try to understand what happened and aren’t coming up with answers. They keep going to classrooms and interviewing students, but aside from hearing about and seeing a few middle school quarrels; they don’t have enough to understand motive. Even though they have a tape the that seems like concrete evidence of Jamie committing the act, it is very important to Luke to know the why—for the case, but also for his own understanding of what boys can do. Then, Luke’s son, Adam, who also attends the school pulls him aside. Adam tells his father he’s not going to find anything with his methods. He says the true evidence lies online.
Adam starts with the overarching question about the source: “do you know about the Manosphere?”
“No,” Luke said.
Adam then goes into Manosphere canon: red pill (which of course Dad thinks is only about the Matrix) incels, and the 80/20 rule. I talk about a lot of this in the other article, but for a brief synopsis: the red pill means you take the things you want out of life and become a WolframAlpha Male; the blue pill means your a SheepBetaman who just lets life step on him and women consent to what they want (Lord forbid); incels are involuntary celibates who blame women as a unit for their misery, and the 80/20 rule means 80% of women are only interested in 20% of men, who have Mr. Wolf qualities.
While a lot of this may sound ridiculous, many of these philosophies are based on real pain. Pain of not being wanted, desired. Feeling not good enough. Incomplete. These feelings and insecurities are real and natural in the society we live in. I’ve written about my own experiences with these feelings many times here.
We are in a reality where men and boys commit suicide. One where people who assault women and promote violence become Supreme Court justices and presidents. Where the average CEO is male, white, and 6’+ tall. Last time I checked, CEOs don’t need to dunk. Where male attractiveness and standards down to minutia are openly debated.
In 2025, societal norms and preferences are more exposed than ever. You could be around some influences who support you, and then go online and see that your entire appearance and personality is under scrutiny. So if boys go online, see the majority of people, including girls promoting for example: affluent, popular, tall, light complexioned, boys and men, who appear confident and well desired by women—the standard has been set.
Of course, women encounter many same obstacles, sometimes in different ways, but sometimes much worse—as is the core of this story: the epidemic of male violence against women. But apathy is one hell of a drug—once your world becomes so narrow to only seeing the worst of your circumstance. Your circumstances as they now stand in this 80/20 red pilled world, with incels around the corner. There’s no room for the femicide, sexual assault statistics, intimate partner violence in that world. And male apathy is only a stone’s throw away from animosity, and that’s how this male pain turns into violence. For, now, it’s more than I just don’t care about those things women face—now, they deserve it. And now it’s either cheer on others as they act on it—or do it yourself.
Like most cults, online forums are ripe with people and ideologies that prey on people who are hurt and feel alone. There really are men who feel helpless and alone in their struggles and yearn for connection, understanding, and support. There really are men who yearn for intimacy with women and have never felt it. And there really is a large portion of men who feel that the way they look or their socio-economic status is not valued in a romantic partner—while seeing examples of what is valued online, of course algorithm assisted, in line with what they read on these forums. There is a plethora of messages we see in media, social networks, and exist at the foundation of patriarchy and gender constraints themselves, that make perfect sense as contributing to these insecurities. And all this is compounded by the fact that men don’t have many spaces, with little judgement, where they can express their frustrations with these messages, let alone sometimes get acknowledgment that their frustrations are legitimate—from boyhood onward.
What happens next is the classic strategy of control and gaining followers: Take these truths and manipulate them into conformation to an ideology.
There’s many layers to the Manosphere’s ideology that you can parse out online, but it mostly boils down to—the source of your pain, and by many standards, the measure of your success, revolves around women. Yes, there is this odd dichotomy of women being a primary source for pain but also absolutely necessary, in an objectified way, for male prowess. Ironically, this messaging actually makes boys less free than they were before subscribing. Manhood, really one’s personhood, is tethered to other people, validation from women as romantic partners. And, in turn, validation from male counterparts for demonstrating this success. This makes almost every interaction, including rejection, a referendum on one’s masculinity. This is an insane way to live. But Jamie being rejected by his classmate, Katie, and yes, the ensuing teasing comments, was the catalyst for him killing her. His friend even supplied him with knife thinking it would be fun to ‘scare her.’
We all naturally want to be validated by people we like in life, to have them see us how we want to be seen, but the reality is that is not always going to happen. And the reality is, for some, acceptance, friendship, romance, and physical intimacy is going to be harder to find than it is for others. At a young impressionable age, like 13 year-old Jamie Miller, a teenager’s experience in all forms of intimacy and popularity can feel like your entire wold under a microscope—who did what first, where someone is on the social popularity chain. These accomplishments are everything. All of these common themes through adolescence are only exponentially increased over social media, where people can flaunt their popularity and cyberbully others they deem inferior. Thus, boys can feel cornered: lack of spaces in real life to express their vulnerabilities without judgement, experience bullying, or even unhealthy friendships that compete for popularity in school and online, all with constant comparisons to more “alpha” men seen in media and social platforms. Then, while in this lonely corner, a corner of the internet opens up and says: we’ll take you in.
But how does all this lead to killing someone? Well it doesn’t always, but as Jamie Miller story shows, which absolutely has comparisons in real life, it can. But as lead actor, and short brolic king, Stephen Graham (playing Jamie’s father, Eddie) alluded to: if it takes a village to raise a child, it can take a village to fail them.
Village, community. Irl, online.
It’s easy to just say the Jamies and Elliot Rodgers of the world are few and far between, and thus we don’t have a Manosphere radicalization problem, but that mindset does immense harm.
First, any pattern of these attacks is too much. We cannot normalize any pattern of gender based violence into the fabric of our global society. Also, seeing these events as mere outliers and crazy people detaches it from all the real structural patriarchy and oppression. Just like Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy, Cosby, Matt Lauer, etc., are “just” one man—that’s not telling the whole story of how they got there. 75+ million people voted for Donald Trump to be the president of the United States. All of these stories involve countless enablers and bystanders including many other men, and a few women, with power who upheld the atmosphere for their abuses to continue.
While enablers can certainly be people we interact with in person, over the past few decades, the whole concept of friendship and companionship itself has changed.
Maybe a manifesto with red pills and Alphapackas was too ludicrous for my middle school in the late 90s-early 2000s BX even among the most problematic boys, but now you can find a forum with a chorus of thousands of boys and men of all ages across the world that use this language to support diminishing women’s agency, consent, and humanity, and then range from sympathizing to supporting violence against women.
Just like with police, you could say it’s a small percent of individual officers who actually shoot people in comparison to every single police officer in existence—though I would debate that based on what you consider a small percent of the people we pay to protect us—but once you add their partners aiding them, the ones standing by, the ones who would have done the same if they had the chance, the ones who hear about the acts and don’t speak up, the supervisors who want to make situations ‘just go away,’ and the unions who seem to standby all police officers who ‘fall in line,’ and then filter for race and economic status of the victims—now, you have not a small percent but a vast majority, not a bad apple but a thriving forest.
The same is true for male radicalization that leads to violence against women. There may not be many men and boys who commit these acts on a percentage basis of all men and boys. But once you add those who egg them on in school to harass girls, the ones who support their violent ideations online, the ones who fantasize about these acts in journals and manifestos, and the ones who even help facilitate—exactly what percentage of men and boys are we talking about now?
On the surface Adolescence’s final episode, depicts the difficulties of being the family of the boy who killed a girl. Which alone, is an important story to tell. But the thread throughout all of the show, that’s truly on display in the final episode, is this is an imperfect, working class family that is truly trying.
The final episode especially focused on Jamie’s father, Eddie. Eddie was the person who was with Jamie through this whole process. The searches; interrogations rooms. Eddie saw the tape of Jamie killing Katie. He is the primary male influence at home. Yes, that means that the father sometimes works hours and isn’t home as often as he’d like. It means Eddie isn’t always going to offer the ideal amount of support from a male figure for Jamie. And yes, that means he won’t always know how to give that support, like when he didn’t know how to deal with Jamie’s difficulties in sports in the moment. But Eddie is intentionally tying to be the stop of generational trauma, abuse—not perpetuate it. He says that because his dad hit him, he knew he’d never hit his son. And after Jamie found a passion and demonstrated skill in drawing, this is something Eddie was proud of. His marriage to Owen’s mom Manda, had its issues of communication, parenting debates, and time spent together, but overall we are given a picture of a loving marriage.
The scary truth is: it can be a home that isn’t abusive, with parents who provide basic necessities, stability, care for their child—and this can still happen.
The show ends on the subject of really Jamie’s unofficial member of his home: the computer. His parents debated whether or not they should have bought the computer, whether they could have done more, such as put monitoring his online usage. Manda tells Eddie that they likely will have to accept it: they will have to live with this feeling of what could have been done. The reality is, kids in 2025 are going to need access to a computer in some form. The question is how to make that access as safe as possible—but some families are too busy, too overwhelmed, including by technology itself, to seek answers to this question. And some unfortunately still believe boys “raise themselves” or just “will be boys.”
But it’s not just the Millers. It’s not only on the parents. Society must do more. Specifically the US, UK, and Canada, where there are examples every day of this kind of gender based violence. It is imperative that as a society we, as in mental health professionals, educators, influencers, elected officials, those with any platform, acknowledge we have an epidemic of online male radicalization. Without intervention, it aint going anywhere. The internet only gets bigger. Algorithms only magnify the magnified.
Sure, taking down some of these forums, as Reddit has, is a step, but that just means a new forum will pop up, or telegram or signal chat. It is the principle that is the true epidemic. If we can have D.A.R.E. in schools, health education about STDs; if we can have state, local, and nationwide messages about drugs; and ridiculous things like mass undocumented immigrant voter fraud , we can do this. We can have mandatory intervention programs in schools as we do with drugs. As we do with gangs. And we must do it with both children and their parents. The parents must know these communities exist; they must know that even spending hours isolated online can be unhealthy, especially when it replaces human interaction. And most importantly, they must reject these toxic, sexist premises in their own household. I don’t have kids besides this cat who should be a tax dependent, but if I had a son, I would definitely rather he smoke weed than harm girls.
The Manosphere and its ideologies is an ecosystem. An ecosystem is held up by many components that can either help it thrive or be dismantled. We all have a role in that ecosystem. First we must acknowledge and address the problem at its roots before it grows in our own backyard.
Very thoughtful. I agree with most of it. To say it's just the crazies IS not the way to address the problem, but on the other hand, we aren't watching closely enough for signs of mental illness in children. The manosphere only exacerbates the problem