Adolescence is an intervention: what can we do about boys lost in the manosphere?
Adolescence puts one thing very clear: we are failing as parents, as a society, if we keep giving our young children unsupervised access to the internet
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I keep hearing from parents that they canāt bring themselves to watch Adolescence. A series, which opens with the arrest of a young lad in his bedroom at the family home, is just too distressing even to think about. And yet, it really is a must-watch, as upsetting as the show is.
And many are watching. The show has become a national talking point, with Keir Starmer saying heās watched it with his teenage children. Will this lead him to take serious action and look at a social media ban for children under-16?
āThese social media spaces aren't benign, they're not neutral, with a child's best interests at heart,ā says Daisy Greenwell from grassroots campaign Smartphone Free Childhood. āTheir only interests are snaring as much of their time and attention as they possibly can, so that they can turn that into data and turn that into money for shareholders.ā
A survey by the Youth Endowment Fund last year showed that one in four teenagers have been shown real-life violence on social media platforms served to them algorithmically, and that 68 per cent of teens were now afraid to go out.
āI think it's been almost a decade for the Online Safety Act to come into force,ā says Greenwell. āThatās trying to make the internet and social media safe for kids, to make the content less harmful, and so predators can't contact kids as easily. But that's assuming children should be in these places at all. It it can't be made safe, then we should just keep our kids off them because there's no other way of ensuring that your child is going to be safe online.ā
Adolescence really does feel like a galvanising intervention into this issue where many parents feel they have lost control and their kids time and lives taken away from them.
Former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate delivers the 2025 Richard Dimbleby Lecture.
Michael Leckie/BBC
The show particularly addresses is the effect on boys. Todayās online world can quickly draw in young men into extreme āmanosphereā content delivered by Andrew Tate and co. In a speech this week, former England manager Gareth Southgate called those people, ācallous, manipulative and toxic influencers whose sole drive is for their own gain.ā He described a social environment where ātoo many young men feel uncomfortable opening up to friends or family... when they struggle, young men inevitably try to handle whatever situation they find themselves in, alone... they sped more time online falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.ā
Itās exactly this environment Adolescence explores.
The boy at the centre of the drama, Jamie (played by Owen Cooper) is not an incel. He tells his child psychologist Briony this ā and that he doesnāt hate women. But then, chillingly, goes on to demonstrate just how the whole manosphere culture, which includes incel discourse, has warped him.
His victim, Katy, had sent topless photos to a boy at school, who then shared it around everyone else, devastating her. At this point Jamie asked her out on a date, thinking she was in a āweakā moment. She laughed him away and then mocked him as an incel on Instagram. He felt he was bullied. He confronted her, carrying a knife, and his temper struck.
But he tells Briony that he thinks heās better than other boys he knows because during the attack he didnāt touch her body, when he could have. āDo you understand what death is?ā Briony says to him, appalled.
Courtesy of Netflix
What we have here is an intelligent kid with clear problems being made into a monster by a school culture informed by the manosphere. He considers himself ugly and thinks Katy picked on him because he was the ugliest of all the boys. He also lies about his sexual encounters, thinking a 13 year old should be active in this way.
This is a world of fear. The boys are afraid of girls, viewing them through this content as some kind of alien, hostile group who value only certain types of good-looking boys ā the 80:20 rule is referred to, that 80 per cent of girls only like 20 per cent of the boys ā and have to be manipulated or dominated to control, with sex being the primary objective. The girls are fearful too, as well they might be.
And all this is spiralling in online areas away from parental eyes.
Author and psychologist, Steve Biddulph, who wrote Raising Boys and the recent Wild Creature Mind, says,āAdolescence is television and filmmaking at its very best, and also it very skillfully brings together the forces that are causing so much damage and suffering for young people and their families in the 21st century.
āEverything I have written about over the last 20 years is in there: The brave way that fathers have stepped away from the violence they experienced in their own childhoods (and how hard that is without help). The awfulness of schools where there is not proper engagement, the male role models are defective or missing. The filmmakers pointedly included male teachers who were hapless and underequipped, barely past their own adolescence.
āAnd of course, the horrendous stealing of childhood, and of young love, by the intrusion of ugly and violent pornography into the bedrooms of a generation of shockingly young children and teens. It is very hard to navigate early sexuality and romance when such a debased view of the opposite gender is flooded into your eyeballs and your mind.
āAnd finally the channeling of all this confusion and mistrust between boys and girls into tangible hate by opportunistic idiots with misogynist Youtube channels. As one Australian broadcaster termed it "Mandrew Hate".ā
A new study from Dublin City University demonstrates how quickly algorithms feed āmale supremacistā material to young menās accounts. They created different dummy profiles of different types of users on TikTok and YouTube to test how soom they were recommended such material. āAll of the accounts, both those which sought out manosphere content and those which sought out gender-normative (generic) content, were fed toxic content within the first 23 minutes of the experiment, and manosphere content within the first 26 minutes,ā reports the study. If an interest in that content was shown, the amount of anti-feminist or ātoxicā recommendations increased exponentially.
Ashley Walters as Detective Inspector Bascombe in Adolescence
Courtesy of Netflix
Yet this isnāt to say that boys are simply taking in this kind of material without critical judgement. If you speak to teenage boy, youāll find cynicism about Tate. Coverage of a 2023 YouGov poll found that one in six boys aged six to 15 had a positive view of him. But the vast majority had a negative opinion of him, including 63 per cent of 13-15 year olds. When quizzed, it seemed the things they did like about him where the lifestyle elements, not the misogyny.
Now of course, as Southgate pointed out, Tate and his ābrofluencerā ilk deliberately use this more Menās Health lifestyl content as a means to grab young menās minds. Seeding in misogyny is merely one part of the cold exploitation of alienated young men for monetary gain. And many young lads can see this too.
There is a huge risk in underestimating and demonising boys, and stoking the fires of resentment and creating more alienation. School lessons around equality and initiatives which focus on female achievement and LGBTQ+ inclusivity have been a welcome development in education. However, if boys are painted as the problem to be overcome and not also celebrated and told they are special too, then thatās troubling. The thought that a certain sector of humans are inherently corrupt due to their sex is a reductive one, to say the least.
Many would say these are necessary correctives to a male-dominated society. And making things too delicate around boys risks something like 2023ās Maaate campaign by the Mayor of Londonās office, a well-intentioned but flat attempt to tackle misogyny and violence against women through mild banter. If a friend says something sexist, us blokes should say, āMaaate.ā Women can sleep easy now...
Misogynistic and sexual crimes need hard edged approaches with regards to punishment, in my view. But when it comes to boys and prevention, there must be nuanced understanding rather than damnation. Particularly since, again, boys arenāt stupid. They can see through overly-performative adult box ticking exercises in which they are the fall guys.
Speak to an evolutionary psychologist and theyāll tell you that studies show boys and girls are not the same. On a broad spectrum of behaviour viewed over time, boys are more likely to be violent, more likely to have problems communicating, and are more prone to risky behaviour. One aspect of this is a tendency for boys not to explore or talk about their problems. Shame, self-disgust, rage can build since it is unexpressed. Iāve been there as a boy: you think youāre the only one feeling this bad, even though the others around you may feel the same way. Talking? Ungh?
The Campaign Against Living Miserably point to self-isolation, an inability to express their pain, as a key reason why three times as many men take their own lives as women.
In this manner, the social media age appears to be particularly damaging for boys as it diverts them even further into isolation. And of course this is where extreme material can be views and extreme opinions can take hold, in those silent hours alone.
Courtesy of Netflix
Adolescence depicts all this in devastating fashion. In one moment, the parents of the boy killer, Stephen Grahamās Eddie and Christine Tremarcoās Manda talk about where it all went wrong. Eddie worries if his temper has been passed on, but stresses he never hit Jamie like his own father had hit him.
Manda, says, āHe never left his room, heād would come home slam the door go straight on his computer. Iād see the light on at one oā clock in the morning. Iād knock ad say Jamie youāve got school tomorrow. The light would turn off but he wouldnāt say anything. ā
Then as Eddie breaks down over whether they should have done more, his wife says, āI think itād be good if we accepted maybe we should have done.ā
Which is really where we are at now with Adolescence. Responsibility. And then, what next? Well, there is hope.
The show even depicts a way out in the parallel story of DI Bascombe (played by Ashley Walters) and his own son Adam, who is at the same school as Jamie. In one crucial moment, Bascombe, having been at the school looking for the murder weapon and seeing the awful behaviour of the kids, he offers his son a lift home and to go for some food. Previously the pair have been frosty and distant. Bascombe breaks this by saying to Adam, āI love you and I want to spend time with you.ā Soon theyāre both laughing and easy together.
āThereās so much power in speaking your feelings,ā Walters told the Standard, āLetting them be words in your mouth instead of thoughts in your mind. Sometimes things donāt come out right. But especially for men, thatās all fear-based. Whatās behind anger and aggression? Fear. Itās people struggling to say how they feel because theyāre scared of being judged.ā
This is what the show is really all about. That something can be done.
Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller
Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix
Biddulph is also keen to embrace the answers in the show, although he feels there is a weakness in the drama in this respect:
āThere is only one flaw I can find in the program, but its an important one. Its premise is āhow could this happen in a loving family?ā And in fact, while it is ā just ā plausible, it is incredibly unlikely, because the risk factors for young people who kill are actually that they have a violent father. And Jamie did not.
And they often have a mum who is distant and cold, or has so many struggles of her own emotionally that she does not bond with her child. And finally, being neurodivergent does not help, unless (as happened in my childhood) adults notice you, care for you, and provide a source of connection. Jay had a loving mum, a dad and sister who cared.
The only error they made was one being made by a whole generation of parents really until we began to get a handle on this. Kids should not have online devices in bedrooms.
The damage of pornography lies in the doseage ā occasionally seeing something is going to happen, but getting addicted requires daily long access in privacy, and that is something that a parent can and should simply not allow. The same is true for online influencers. Jamie was 13. He is a child. What is he doing cruising the alleyways of the internet when we would never let him cruise the alleyways of his town?ā
And this here is the action point. We need to fix the way parenting and teaching happens because smartphone culture has got out of hand. We ā and the authorities ā need to stand up to the tech companies.
āI would like to see them raise the age of social media to 16,ā says Greenwell. āThereās a private members bill in Parliament, the Safer Phones bill, which they watered down to the point of nothing. The government didn't want to do it, but I think a really obvious thing would be to raise the age to 16.ā
That would be a major move. But this is also a bigger issue regarding our treatment of young people. Class comes into it too. Provisions need to be on offer for kids whose local services and clubs have been severely cut by government after government. What else is there to do but get on screens?
You donāt have to be a woke parent to be worried about this stuff. Iād wager that even if your views are that men should be men and feminism is wrong, you still donāt want your child being exposed to extreme content and developing their hearts and minds and bodies in a lawless place away from parental input.
The point the show makes most powerfully, in my view, is the need for parental love and attention, as a means to intervene from screens and their attendant isolation. Take your boy out boxing if you like, so long as the time is spent together. This should go beyond politics.
It is a safeguarding issue for all children. And things have to change. Adolescence is this yearās Mr Bates and the Post Office, one which demands action.
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