The Trouble With Adolescence

By Kate Manne
Artwork by Hernan Bas

In the second episode of Netflix’s Adolescence, Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) gets her longest piece of dialogue, a short monologue that lampshades one of the central problems of the series:
It does nothing to illuminate or even vivify the plight of the female victim.

“Do you know what I don’t like about all this?” she tells her partner while visiting the school right after one of its students, a 13-year-old boy named Jamie (Owen Cooper), has murdered his classmate, Katie (Emilia Holliday). “Right, the perpetrator always gets the front line: A man raped a woman. We’ve followed Jamie’s brain around this entire case. Right? Katie isn’t important. Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her. That’s what annoys me. That’s what gets to me.” 

Adolescence is a well-made, technically brilliant show that continues an important conversation about the radicalization of young men via the manosphere in general and incel culture in particular. The operative word here, however, is continue: Feminists have been shouting about these problems for well over a decade—often into a void. And while bringing the conversation to fresh ears is certainly welcome, there’s a real worry that it’s the right thing for partly the wrong reasons. 

The central reason to care about incel culture, and the radicalization of young men, is that it harms and kills women. A secondary—and also important—reason is that it is clearly detrimental to most if not all of the young men who fall prey to its influence. Unfortunately, the structure of Adolescence leads to an exclusive focus on the second issue, with little attention paid to the first one. In fact, there’s even an element in the storyline that comes close to victim blaming. 

One of the major strengths of the series is that it highlights that [Jamie] is too young to be fully responsible for his actions, in ways that rightly make us uncomfortable with the carceral response to his wrongdoing.”

The motive for Jamie’s crime—a brutal stabbing—becomes clear in the second episode, during the two detectives’ visit to the school. His victim, Katie, had bullied him online by calling him an incel on his Instagram page. This after Jamie tried to ask her out (which we learn in the next episode). Katie left emojis on Jamie’s photos that implied he was not among the 20% of men to whom 80% of women are attracted, according to incel lore. She also used emojis to say that he had been “red-pilled” (turned into an incel), and so on. 

According to the story, this was Jamie’s first encounter with incel culture or terminology. He then looked it up online, and says most of it didn’t resonate with him. He does admit that the “80/20” rule rang true, before labeling himself ugly. It’s a poignant scene that well-illustrates the fact that many if not most incels are perfectly ordinary-looking young men, despite their exaggerated concerns about “lookism.” These are young men who are often searching for a way to justify a pre-existing sense of victimhood, rather than people who are genuinely disadvantaged because of their appearance. 

Despite the scene’s strength, the plot is troubling. Young men are typically not radicalized by being bullied by their victims, or by women generally. Many of the pressures that push young men into the manosphere are driven by intra-masculine competition, a sense that your status as a man is dependent on outdoing your peers in “getting” or “pulling” women. Adolescence misses the mark in attributing the push to incel culture as originating from female peers like Katie. 

It’s all the more troubling because Katie is not only an unlikely source of Jamie’s exposure to incel culture, she’s also his victim. Yes, it is true that boys and men who perpetrate misogynistic violence are often in pain themselves, and that they frequently perceive their victims as wrongdoers. But usually this dynamic is just that: perception. In standard cases of incel violence, the victims have done nothing wrong. They are perceived as having sinned because of a potent sense of male entitlement and female obligation. It’s not that she actually owes him sex and love and admiration; it’s that he illicitly feels entitled to these goods. It’s not that she has actually let him down; it’s that he feels betrayed because he felt that he owned her. It’s not that she has actually bullied him; it’s that he is fragile, volatile, and takes everything far too personally. 

That brings me to another problem with Adolescence: It is devoid of the moral ideas and concepts that typically permeate incel thoughts and language. In the third episode, Jamie is interviewed by a child psychologist, Briony (Erin Doherty), who is preparing an independent report for the upcoming court case. In dribs and drabs, he discloses his asking Katie out, and his feelings of pain and humiliation after she rejects him. The actor who plays Jamie, Owen Cooper, convincingly pulls off Jamie’s alternating childish vulnerability and frighteningly angry outbursts. 

But the script lets him down. Nowhere does Jamie say the kinds of things that incels—even those in the manosphere’s looser grips—almost invariably say to justify their behavior. A striking through line in these young men’s words is that they feel they deserved the sexual and romantic attentions of women. They feel betrayed by the world, and women in particular. They don’t just hate women indiscriminately. They see women as owing them sexual and social favors. When they perceive women as letting them down—either individually, or in general—they speak of teaching her a lesson and what she had coming and the fact that she deserved it. Or, in the words of Elliot Rodger, the patron saint of incels: “You [hot blonde] girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime… Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration. You think I’m unworthy of it. That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.”

Of course, one story is just one story: None can be perfectly representative, and Adolescence is not a PSA or an after-school special (and is all the better for being nuanced and messy). But missing something as big as the moral concepts incels invoke make it at best an incomplete, and at worst a misleading depiction of incel culture. That doesn’t change the fact that the series is sparking important conversations. And I must admit that I feel ambivalent about that fact. It’s not just that it took a male series creator and a male-centric storyline to finally get people interested in an issue that’s long been at the forefront of feminist consciousness. It’s also that the lens of concern risks doing an injustice to girls and women. 

Ask yourself why Adolescence has hit the mainstream and gotten parents to finally have tough, and overdue, conversations with their boys—a development that’s certainly welcome. It’s not primarily because the series highlights the risk that radicalized boys will do something terrible to their female peers and partners. It’s mostly because the show highlights the way the boy’s life, and his family’s, can be ruined by his youthful and clueless misdeeds. The series opens with a harrowing scene of a SWAT team beating down the door of Jamie’s suburban family home and arresting him in his bed. He wets his pants, highlighting his youth and vulnerability. And we can’t help but empathize with his parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco)—disbelieving then incredulous that their son could have carried out a stabbing.

I feel for them, I do. And I feel for Jamie. My complaint about the series is not, as some might have anticipated, that it is himpathetic—my term for the undue or disproportionate sympathy often extended to male perpetrators over their female victims. It’s not undue or disproportionate to feel gutted both for Jamie himself and his family that his life is now in ruins. He’s a 13-year-old boy operating under the influence of pernicious social forces. One of the major strengths of the series is that it highlights that he is too young to be fully responsible for his actions, in ways that rightly make us uncomfortable with the carceral response to his wrongdoing. 

No. My complaint is that we never get to sympathize with Katie. We never learn anything about her, other than that she was a bully. We do not even learn the first thing about her from her best friend, Jade, when she’s interviewed in the second episode. Katie is not only an unsympathetic character, she is barely a character at all. It’s an instance of what I’ve elsewhere called herasure. 

Adolescence is dimly aware, I think, of these failures and omissions. But the show addresses them only via awkward side monologues that do little to make up for its fundamental problems. In the third episode, after Jamie calls Katie a bullying bitch—his one implicitly moralistic utterance, which comes more or less out of nowhere—the psychologist Briony registers what is happening: “You understand what death is? You understand that Katie’s gone and she can’t come back? That whatever claims you make as to her character, whatever claims you make about her, she’s gone.” She’s gone and she was never meaningfully there in Adolescence. Her murder is merely a vehicle for exploring our—often justified—fears for our boys’ moral futures.

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The Art of the Manosphere
Hernan Bas

For nearly three decades, Miami-based artist Hernan Bas has created narratively rich tableaux that use humor to unsettle the familiar, exposing the surreal and absurd elements that lie hidden within ordinary life. Often featuring one or more young male figures caught in the midst of unfolding events, Bas draws from a wide array of references, including youth culture, mythology, art history, television, literature, poetry, the occult, the history of queer activism and religion. 

In “The Conceptualists” series featured in this portfolio, Bas depicts young artists obsessively engaged in conceptual art practices, confronting and reinterpreting art historical influences. For example, “Conceptual artist #16 (Performance based; the founder and reigning champion of a weekly pillow fight tournament)” references George Bellows’ famous boxing paintings. Instead of reinforcing traditional ideas of masculine aggression, though, Bas replaces the typical boxing scene with two boys engaged in a pillow fight on a mattress ring decorated with ribbons. 

Throughout his career, Bas has consistently blurred the lines between the intimate and the public, often reframing historically male archetypes and exposing them through a queer lens. In doing so, his work not only disrupts dominant narratives of power and strength, but invites viewers to reconsider masculinity from a more vulnerable and emotionally nuanced vantage point. —Alicia Pestalozzi

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