Netflix's Adolescence: Ten “Teachable” Takeaways

The blockbuster series has created a powerful pathway for conversations about the misogynous manosphere, and its pernicious influence in the lives of boys and young men.

By Jackson Katz

When a TV show breaks through the clutter of entertainment media and enters the realm of a cultural event, it's likely due to more than great acting or clever storytelling. Chances are it’s captured the zeitgeist in some meaningful way. Touched a nerve. Struck a chord. Choose your metaphor.

So it is with the British crime-themed Netflix series Adolescence. It’s the third most-watched Netflix series ever, with more than 124 million views since its March premiere. In the UK, where it was first released, it set records with 66 million views in the first two weeks! This in a country with a population of 69 million people.

Countless articles, reviews, and critiques of the series have appeared in publications over the past few weeks, and the show has been the subject of endless discussion and debate on news programs, chat shows, and podcasts. Some people might be skeptical that there’s anything new left to say about this subject. Fair enough. But the mainstream debate has missed some key elements.

My work has long been focused on issues of masculinities and violence, especially men's violence against women – all of which figure prominently in Adolescence. For that reason, I wanted to add a few notes to the ongoing chorus of commentary about this remarkable series.

Moreover, as a media literacy educator and content creator, I’m also interested in this as a media spectacle. The eminent UCLA philosopher and cultural studies theorist Douglas Kellner (full disclosure: my doctoral committee chair) explains that media are a “profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy.” They teach us, he writes, “how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire.” Media spectacles like Adolescence do much more than simply entertain. Among other things, they can illuminate tensions and tears in the social fabric and give us a shared experience and vocabulary to discuss pressing social problems.

The creators of Adolescence have provided us with a powerful “teachable moment” about topics of immense importance and urgency: the normalization of misogyny and violence in the lives of young people, the role played by social media and the misogynous manosphere, and the apparent disconnect or even negligence of parents, teachers, and other adults.

The artists have done their job. Now it’s up to those of us who are professional educators and media commentators -- as well as parents -- to take advantage of the opportunity and open lines of inquiry and discussion. In that spirit, I offer the following (non-exhaustive) list of takeaways from the momentous Netflix series:

1. Stephen Graham, one of the stars of Adolescence and also co-writer of the series, regularly cites the great African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” As he told The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon, “What if we’re all kind of accountable? The education system, parenting, the community, the government…I’m not blaming anyone. I just thought maybe we’re all accountable and we should be having a conversation about it.” He’s absolutely right. I’d like to add a slight twist on the great proverb. I’ve been saying this for years: If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to raise a rapist. Or an abuser. Adolescence makes clear that the problem is not reducible to “dysfunction” in individual families; the entire society plays a role in socializing our children – and that includes the media that streams 24/7 into our homes and our children’s phones.

2. Too many men – including fathers -- have outsourced their responsibility to women to engage young people on the topics of relationships, sex, gender equity, misogyny, and related areas. That’s largely because, I think, many adult men are uncomfortable with this subject matter, and not confident in their ability to be effective. This isn’t good for kids, who need guidance from men as well as women on this and so much more. It’s also unfair to women -- including mothers -- who are unduly burdened with responsibilities, and often have to take up the slack in the education of both their daughters and their sons.

A key message this series has for men is that the status quo is not working. More adults in general need to create space for conversations with boys and young men, and that includes conversations about the manosphere, porn, and other parts of the media-saturated world that children, teens, and young adults are immersed in. Even if it makes us uncomfortable. In the vacuum created by our failure to do so, manipulative charlatans in the misogynous manosphere and politics – most of whom are men -- have rushed in and wielded disproportionate, often disastrous influence on our sons.

3. Some feminist commentators have praised Adolescence for the ways in which it has generated increased attention to the harms of the misogynous manosphere, while noting glaring absences in the show’s storyline. One major critique involves the girl, Katie, who was murdered by Jamie, the story’s 13-year-old boy protagonist. The philosopher Kate Manne puts it like this in a powerful essay that explores many dimensions of this angle:

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

It's worth noting that Manne’s critique explicitly leaves room for an empathetic response to Jamie’s parents, Eddie and Manda Miller, as well as to him. She writes:

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 for both Jamie himself and his family that his life is now in ruins. He’s a thirteen-year-old boy operating under the influence of pernicious social forces: one of the major strengths of the series is 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 it.

No. My complaint is that we never get to sympathize with Katie.

4. Other feminists, too, have raised concerns about the shortcomings of the Adolescence script. A key question is whether the focus on the boy and his family -- at the expense of the girl and hers – is a trade-off by the filmmakers that is nonetheless worth making. This might be a false choice; perhaps they could have included more about Katie without sacrificing attention to the central storyline. That would entail both writing and artistic decisions that I don’t feel qualified to judge.

The show’s co-creator and co-writer Jack Thorne did say, as reported in The Daily Mail, that he never considered delving more into the victim Katie's life. “I think doing an episode on Katie or spending time with Katie's family would have sort of taken us into a story that we weren't telling, and that would have been a mistake.”

Arguably, the series became a cultural phenomenon precisely because it focused on the boy and his family. That is both because male-centered narratives have long been more valued than women-centric ones in patriarchal cultures, and because of the classic Journalism 101 scenario of “man bites dog.” (Everyone expects dogs to bite people; it’s only news when the unexpected happens). And in truth, TV is dominated by endless crime shows with female victims, many of which do express empathy for them, but with little attention to the sociological circumstances, family backgrounds, or inner lives of the perpetrators.

The writers and director of the series are not experts in gender-based violence. But they were onto something those of us in the gender violence prevention field have long known: you have to understand and change the gendered belief systems and social norms (e.g. masculine entitlement) that underlie men’s abuse of women for there to be any hope of significantly reducing the ubiquity of misogynous abuse over the long term. In my talks and trainings, I frame the problem like this. If your goal is to provide services to women as victims and survivors, it makes perfect sense to center them and their experiences. But if your goal is prevention – if you’re trying to figure out how to stop the violence from happening in the first place – the spotlight has to shine brightly on boys and men, and key features of the culture that produces them.

5. Speaking of key features, one aspect of media culture that was barely mentioned in the series is porn, a profoundly influential force in the sexual psyches of heterosexual boys and young men. Dominant narratives in the manosphere about male entitlement and female subservience intersect and overlap with ubiquitous messages in porn. Gail Dines, author of Pornland and executive director of the organization Culture Reframed, which describes porn as the public health crisis of the Digital Age, said this about Adolescence:

“The adults in Adolescence were baffled by this symbolic language (mocking emojis on Instagram), which is the lingua franca of social media, and by the manosphere in general. This generational chasm leaves even well-intended parents, teachers, and authorities oblivious to the online lives of children, and the grave perils and wide-ranging personal and social consequences of turning kids loose to incels and other predatory factions of the manosphere. ‘You must trick’ girls, said Jamie, 'because you’ll never get them in a normal way.’ His trick was to approach Katie when he thought she was at her most vulnerable. That is another message kids learn from porn, where whole genres are devoted to predatory men taking advantage of runaways, refugees, schoolgirls needing higher grades, mothers unable to pay the rent.”

Dines said that while porn didn’t cause Katie’s murder in any straightforward way, “porn is the water through which many young people now swim, which many adults refuse to see and name. It is the cultural ecosystem that presents women as both hyper-sexualized and loathsome objects.” Hannah Waters, who had a cameo role as a teacher in Adolescence and is also the show’s co-producer, concurs: “Boys are a little lost. They’ve got loads of pressure on them and pornography has a huge thing to do with it too.”

6. The study of extremist subcultures in any given society often generates useful and important insights into the cultural mainstream, because groups that express fringe beliefs are often articulating a less-filtered version of sentiments held by people in more “respectable” precincts. Likewise, it's a mistake to think that Adolescence is only about the relatively small number of boys and young men who are either incels (involuntarily celibate), or are otherwise radicalized online by the misogynous manosphere. It’s much more useful to think about the ways in which increasingly overt expressions of misogyny have migrated from the dark corners of the Internet into more mainstream parts of our culture.

Feminist author and cultural critic Soraya Chemaly put it this way:

I’ve spoken to many parents who express being powerless in the face of the Manosphere. Like educators, they are unsure about how kind, “normal” boys end up cheering publicly for rapists and quoting and defending misogynistic influencers. When a boy parrots a toxic influencer, calls girls and women “females,” repeats cherry-picked evo-psych stats to justify sexism, and says troubling things about women, it’s tempting to think, “Something went wrong.” Surely, Manosphere spaces are dank extremes, and boys and men are being manipulated and radicalized by corrupted forces on The Big Bad Internet.

But the truth is that many parents aren’t powerless—they’re just patriarchal. They’ve already taught their boys, often without realizing it, to equate masculinity with dominance, emotional suppression, and entitlement. When boys absorb more extreme versions of those beliefs online, parents are shocked—but the foundations are laid at home, in classrooms, on sports fields, in places of worship. It’s in who got to speak at the dinner table, who did the emotional labor, who took time off for childcare and school volunteering; chores, allowance, what boys were praised for and what girls were punished for. It’s in the jokes, the clothing, the family friendly entertainment. It’s in the fact that we generally don’t think of our traditions and habits as what they are: outcomes of ideology.

7. One of the many tensions in “men’s work” over the past thirty-five years has to do with priorities. Do we recognize and attend to men's own wounds first, before getting around to more “political” discussions about men’s responsibilities to work against sexism and all forms of men's violence toward women? Or is focusing on the many sources of pain and suffering in men’s lives -- before addressing the ways in which misogyny harms women and girls -- a hopelessly selfish and privileged approach? The debate around Adolescence brings that dilemma home once again, because – as discussed in #4 above -- the script centers on Jamie’s emotional and identity needs, even though he is the one who committed the murder.

At the risk of oversimplification, the position I have long taken on this matter is that it’s a false dichotomy. It’s not simply one or the other. We can’t put off addressing the harms men cause to women. But addressing those harms often entails examining closely the ways in which narrow and destructive ideologies of “manhood” contribute simultaneously to men’s violence against women and to men’s suffering.

8. Not everyone loved Adolescence. It was vilified in many parts of the right-wing media ecosphere, by a multitude of critics that ranged from talk show panels on the GB News channel in the UK, to right-wing provocateurs here in the U.S., like the author and podcaster Matt Walsh, and anti-feminist psychologist and self-help guru Jordan Peterson.

The show’s creator Stephen Graham said and/or implied in numerous interviews that he wanted to tell the story about an outwardly happy and healthy traditional family precisely because he didn’t want to reinforce stereotypes about “broken homes,” or give people in the majority white, middle-class culture an excuse to turn away.

But many conservative commentators aren’t buying it. Many critiques of the show from both the British and American right focus on race and echo a false but deeply resonant complaint on the populist right, that the show’s focus on a white blue-collar family represents an elitist liberal vilification of white working-class boys, when gender-based violence is a problem caused primarily by dark-skinned immigrant young men. On his podcast, Walsh said that the real problem in the UK is an epidemic of violence by non-white populations of migrants, and the show was “deceptive propaganda” that created a “fantasy world in which young white men are the actual problem.”

The show’s co-writer Jack Thorne has pushed back on the “race-swap” claim. 'We're not making a point about race with this,” Thorne said. “We are making a point about masculinity. We're trying to get inside a problem. We're not saying this is one thing or another. We're saying this is about boys.'

“They've claimed that Stephen [Graham] and I based it on a story, and so they're saying that we race-swapped it, because we were basically here and then ended up there, and everything else, and nothing is further from the truth.”

(Note: In my new book Every Man, I discuss the predictable ways in which the right uses fear and resentment toward the racialized “other” as a means to deflect attention away from problems in the dominant culture, including sexual violence. We are the virtuous in-group; They are the dangerous and pathological out-group.)

For his part, Jordan Peterson was similarly dismissive of the show and its champions in politics and media. Appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored, he blamed the problem addressed in Adolescence on his familiar targets: liberals and feminists who, he claims, have “radically demoralized” young men. “Sixty years,” he said, “of radically demoralizing quasi-feminist dimwit hedonistic leftist propaganda shoveled at them from Grade 1 all the way through university, and of course they're going to turn to figures like Andrew Tate in their desperation.”

9. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his government would support the screening of Adolescence in high schools throughout the UK. Like many Americans, I was impressed by that promise, especially in the present moment, when our own federal government is being run by a reckless and radical right-wing administration that has made devastating cuts to domestic and sexual violence services, and is attempting to dismantle a half-century of progress toward gender and racial equity.

I would love for kids to see and discuss the show, in forums with adults who have been trained to facilitate those conversations. But I'm with those who argue that parents and other adults are the real target audience for this series. It should be seen, studied, and discussed by faculty, staff, and administration in K-12 education, as well as colleges and universities. Teachers and other educators – women, men, everyone -- often find themselves managing the trauma that plays out in young people’s lives, but receive little guidance or training about how to deal with it.

I think it’s especially important that fathers and other men see and discuss Adolescence. In the past few weeks, several different fathers I know have told me they had to stop watching the series after one or two episodes. It was just too intense. There’s a lot to unpack there, and people have to take care of themselves. But let’s just say that sometimes it’s necessary to lean into discomfort. As James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

10. One of the show’s major narrative arcs traced the journey of Jamie’s parents, from initial denial all the way through to a deeply painful reckoning. Many people found that part of the story moving – and deeply resonant. I suspect that a key reason why many men in particular find the series discomfiting is that they relate directly to Jamie’s father, Eddie, and his sadness and remorse over his failure to protect his son. Spoiler alert: one of the most poignant scenes in a series filled with them was near the end, when Eddie finally allowed himself to experience profound sadness and grief about what his son had done. The brilliance of the writing, acting, and storytelling invites the viewer to share Eddie’s pain, and provides a cathartic release for millions of parents who can never be certain their kids are truly safe in the cruel world we have left them.

Finally, it's important to note that the Miller family’s story in Adolescence, however realistically portrayed, is fictional. It’s up to all of us to change the conditions that can lead to these sorts of preventable tragedies, in our families and in the larger society.