Adolescence exposes the dangers of online misogyny and social isolation, and what adults can do to stop it.
In the last 15 minutes of the final episode of Netflix’s new mini-series Adolescence, I found myself weeping. That’s not something I do often in films or TV shows, but I’m glad that I can. I was crying for all the young boys out there like Jamie in the show, and there are many, and for their parents, so valiantly trying to save their sons.
Adolescence tells the story of 13-year-old Jamie who has been arrested for allegedly murdering a girl from his school in a small U.K. town. What begins as a police procedural becomes a moving tale of boyhood, the manosphere and well-intentioned teachers and parents trying to keep boys on a path to their better selves.
I was moved by the power of the story, but I was also weeping for the families I had met in real life a few weeks earlier. With colleagues from Equimundo, we interviewed parents and teenage boys in Kansas—in a city that might be the American equivalent of the small town in Adolescence—about their lives, the manosphere and their struggles. One of those families invited us into their home to tell us about their 14-year-old son who had committed suicide.
After sending a sexually charged message on Snapchat while joking around with some male peers, the young man had come under police investigation for a sexual offense. He was ostracized by students at his school and on his sports teams. He was required to give up his phone and all of his social media accounts and eventually had to change schools. He languished in isolation. After his death, his parents found a poem in his backpack that he had written shortly before he took his life.
“… despair has set in
Some people say it is a joke
But no
This is my life.
As I lose all my cookies, I think to myself
Is this really a game?
What has caused me this pain? …”
Like the story of Jamie in Adolescence, this young man was caught in the social media world where reputation is everything. To post is to live—to be seen and to have purpose while stuck in the confused in-betweenness that is modern adolescence. And it is to be barraged by messages about the worst of manhood, urging young men to take it out on women, to dominate them, to trick them and to not take no for answer. Lots of boys see these posts, recognize the playbook and see through it.
Too many, though, get sucked in. Feeling confused about what modern manhood is, about who they can be, socially isolated in our post-COVID world, too many young men are desperately alone. A national survey Equimundo carried out in the U.S. in 2023 found that 65 percent of young men ages 18 to 23 said “no one really knows me well.” A third saw no one outside their homes on a weekly basis. And nearly half had thought of suicide in the past two weeks. (Our partner Beyond Equality, a U.K. charity, is currently asking these same questions to young men in the U.K.)
Not surprisingly in our U.S. survey, many young men, goaded by online influencers, blamed women for their plights. Two-thirds of men thought their reputation could be destroyed with a single comment—a theme that happened in the life of the young man whose parents we met and to the protagonist in Adolescence.
To post is to live—to be seen and to have purpose while stuck in the confused in-betweenness that is modern adolescence.
Young women—both in the show and in the real-life U.K. and U.S.—are also not okay, facing similar rates of anxiety, suicide ideation and mental health. The difference, though, is that boys and young men are far less likely to seek help or tell anyone about their despair. The manhood we often raise boys into in the U.S. and U.K. is one that says, “Go it alone, stick it out, fix yourself.” Failure and showing vulnerability are simply not culturally accepted options.
The other thing Adolescence gets right is how much time young men spend online and how much they trust these harmful voices online. More than half of the young men we interviewed in the U.S. said their online lives were more meaningful than their offline lives.
For adults and parents, we get annoyed at our addiction to our devices but most of the time we can make a conscious effort to spend less time online. For adolescents, the part of our frontal cortex involved in impulse control and future planning is not yet fully developed, while the pleasure-seeking part of their brains is pulsing. This mismatch means many teens feel ill-equipped for the complexity of their social and emotional lives, and most adults don’t know how to help them.
On social media, where nefarious influencers use addiction-inducing algorithms and are motivated by profit and fame, the situation is doubly fraught.
When the Trump administration pressured the Romanian government to release misogynist online entrepreneur and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate … it certainly feels like the caring adults have left the room.
So, what can we do? Much of the responsibility falls to teachers, who too often feel overwhelmed by the scope of the problems they are supposed to solve—and the show gets that part right too. Many organizations—Equimundo, along with Lifting Limits and Beyond Equality in the U.K.—are encouraging teachers to be involved with the rapidly changing online and offline lives of young people and serve as liaisons to their parents. Their goal is both to get young people offline and also to inculcate a sense of critical thinking about what they engage with online—to reject the extreme material and instead consume content that is harmless and positive, of which there is plenty.
We need all the adults in the room to do their part. To push for content moderation on the sites young people frequent and to hold the most nefarious producers and purveyors of harmful, misogynist content accountable. We also need legal accountability. In a moment when the Trump administration pressured the Romanian government to release misogynist online entrepreneur and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate—whom Trump says he admires—it certainly feels like the caring adults have left the room.
Lots of parents watching Adolescence will ask: Is this realistic? Can this happen? Isn’t this an extreme example? The answer is yes, yes and yes. It is a cautionary tale, and an extreme one. But as the parents we interviewed in Kansas know, the online lives of young people are their real lives. And tragedy can ensue.
Most of our sons and daughters will be okay. We have to believe that and it is true. Adolescence does pass and most of us come out unharmed, happy and healthy. But we need lots of help along the way.
One of the characters in the show, a police officer with her own baggage from her middle school years, says, “Why do all schools smell the same? It’s like a combination of vomit, cabbage and masturbation…” It’s a funny line, perhaps painfully true. But it also hints at what is missing in too many young people’s lives: adults who are passionate about teens. Those who love working with them (and it certainly helps if we train them well and pay them adequate salaries) and parents with the love and time and energy to guide.
Our children will mostly be okay. The lesson from Adolescence is that it would help a huge amount if we, the adults, didn’t make it worse.