This article contains spoilers for the show Adolescence.
Netflix has a hit on its hands with the incredible popularity of its newest thriller Adolescence. Having already received over 24.3 million views in the last week, it’s the most popular British show on the streaming platform at the moment. Although it is not based on any specific real-life incident, it could not feel more pertinent.
The show is not only cleverly shot in one take, it is a snapshot of an hour in four separate days of the life of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who was arrested for murdering his female classmate, Katie.
It throws you into the middle of a police raid on the teen boy’s house at 6 am, forcing the viewer to feel sorry for the boy who seems genuinely terrified as if he has no idea why the arrest is happening. It is revealed about 40 minutes into the first episode that Jamie did, in fact, kill Katie and it was caught on CCTV. The rest of the show applaudingly focuses on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘who’.
Netflix has to be given its flowers on this one, the show is excellent. Amid calls by members of Parliament to add this show to the British school curriculum, it is no surprise why this British thriller has caught the attention of the nation.
The Radicalisation of Young Boys
As mentioned, the show doesn’t ask who did it. It asks how we got here — and that question opens the door to a disturbing reality about how young boys are being radicalised in plain sight.
There is a new type of terrorism radicalising young boys and it’s unfortunately in every school, in every city, and in every country across the world – incels.
The word ‘incel’ stands for ‘involuntary celibate’ – a group of heterosexual men who blame society and the world at large for their failure in the romantic and sexual sphere.
Adolescence does a great job at giving the audience the shakedown on this group and some of their dog whistles, but in case you are unaware, I’ll give you a bit more context.
The incel movement started as a subsection of the ‘manosphere’, a collection of blogs, websites and forums promoting mainly misogyny, but also traditional views on masculinity and of course, it’s fiercely anti-feminist or could even be described more broadly as anti-women. To give you an idea of how hateful these groups actually are, a while ago I briefly went undercover on some incel forums for a potential article and couldn’t continue because I couldn’t handle how disgusting their views on women were.
It’s not just Incels in the manosphere, there’s men’s rights activists, a group called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), ‘pick-up artists’ and some father’s rights groups. We’ll focus on incels for now, but there are countless discussions to be had on the other subsects.
Incels’ main ideology is that they believe that women are too powerful in the world of dating and sex and that women are ruining their lives by rejecting them. Incels are the most violent and dangerous manosphere subsection and have committed multiple violent attacks on women around the world.
In the show, the character Adam mentions two incel dog whistles which the police completely miss because they aren’t schooled in the right – primarily Gen Z – online lingo.
Adam mentions the ‘Red Pill’ ideology which is based on the film The Matrix. In case you’re unfamiliar with this terminology; two pills are offered to the protagonist Neo, the Blue Pill which is seen as ‘ignorance’ and will cause him to go back to his life of normalcy or the red pill, which would give him clarity on the truth, but could never go back to his old life knowing what he knows. In the manosphere, taking the red pill is usually the first step into becoming an incel and many with right-wing views will ‘take the red pill’ and admit that their past views on women were wrong and the “truth” is actually that feminism is evil and that society is biased against men.
Adam also mentions the 80/20 rule which is based on an actual principle to do with economics: the Pareto Principle. This principle was founded in the 1900s in Italy where it was discovered that the top 20% of richest people in the country owned 80% of the land. In the case of the manosphere, they’ve co-opted it to say that the top 20% of the most good-looking, rich and popular guys can get with 80% of all women. They call the men in the 20% ‘Chads’.
Incels also believe that they can become so red-pilled to the point of being ‘black-pilled’ where they believe there is nothing they can do about it. It gets all a bit weird and eugenics-y but basically a lot of incels believe that they were born so ugly and undesirable that they have, since birth, been destined to fail. Of course, they’re particularly horrendous to people of colour and trans people, because ultimately these are traditional right-wing views on crack. Ironic, isn’t it, that their main ideology is based on a film directed by two trans women? But I digress.
When the police find out about the entire incel ideology behind Jamie murdering Katie, DS Misha Frank clumsily brings up Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate is seen as a martyr to the incel cause, and he’s often the most well-known figurehead associated with the movement. While Andrew Tate does not identify as an incel, his messaging is often weaponised by incel communities and others within the manosphere. He’s kind of the top of the iceberg when it comes to incel culture and then as people (almost exclusively young boys) begin to find themselves agreeing with his views, they become more and more red-pilled until they become fully black-pilled and indoctrinated in the incel mindset.
The thing is, people like Andrew Tate are everywhere. On social media as well as being pervasive in traditional everyday culture. How many times do we hear a ‘ball and chain’ joke in the pub, or someone says ‘man up’ in response to male emotion or someone tells a little girl that that boy is pulling her hair because he fancies her?
What Does Adolescence Say About Young Boys?
What a lot of people found most shocking about Jamie being red-pilled is the fact he is A) white and B) comes from a relatively normal family.
Although you can see how the family tiptoes around the dad when he’s angry on his birthday and how he handles it when his wife doesn’t reciprocate his sexual advances, mostly it seems like his radicalisation comes out of nowhere.
Adolescence tells us that it could be your son, your brother, your nephew or your friend who could be consuming this media, and you only find out when it has gone too far.
Jamie’s insistence throughout that “[He hasn’t] done anything wrong” is cleverly worded because even though he murdered a person in cold blood, in his head it was justified because she rejected him.
His true personality comes through when he is questioned by a female psychologist in episode three and accidentally confesses, but the signs were there from practically the first episode when he picks his dad to be his support person, rather than his mum. His dad doesn’t even know what food intolerances Jamie has, but his mum does. Jamie still picks his dad because he respects his dad more, even though his dad has been clearly more absent in his life. He can’t even tell the police where Jamie was on the night of the murder, or why he was out and about at 10 pm on a school night.
Misogyny and top-of-the-iceberg incel ideologies are so pervasive in society that so many signs of anti-women radicalisation get missed before young boys start getting violent. The show is a wake-up call for parents of young children to pay attention to what your kid is doing online and what they are watching. Call out adults around your kids who are being misogynistic and don’t ever let anyone ever get away with the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse.
I do not envy parents of Gen Alpha, because the internet has never been more dangerous for young kids, but I remember the boys idolising Jordan Peterson back in the 2010s when I was in Sixth Form. Incel ideology is not new, but it finally has a name.
Adolescence is the wake-up call the world needs, but it’s up to us to pick up the phone and have an answer for it before it gets too late and we lose another real-life Katie.