Netflix’s Adolescence, a four-part thriller about a 13-year-old murder suspect, has hijacked Britain’s political conversation. Annie Kelly explains why the series hit such a nerve: it maps the online pipelines that radicalize boys in their own bedrooms, dramatizes the deadly consequences of misogyny, and spotlights the adults too clueless to confront these threats. Within weeks, MPs demanded it be shown in classrooms, tabloid headlines frightened parents over coded emojis, and right-wing investigators branded the show a taxpayer-funded anti-incel psyop involving Sophie from Peep Show.
Come listen as Annie breaks down how virtuosic television managed to inspire breathtakingly cynical discourse about race, youth violence, and fictional portrayals of social issues.
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Annie Kelly on Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/annieknk.bsky.social
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 322, Adolescence.
The Manosphere Strikes Back.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Travis View, and Annie Kelly.
Hello, everyone.
It's your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly, here.
Before we begin the episode today, as QAA's resident Roman Catholic, I'd like to thank all of you who sent me messages of condolences about the passing of Pope Francis.
It really means a lot.
I was also sincerely touched by those of you who pledged to support me if I were to launch a bid to become the new pope.
Right now, let's just say I'm considering my options.
It's true that transitioning from national baby to supreme pontiff does seem like the natural progression at this point in my career, but there's a few minor barriers to my succession.
There's never been a British Pope, as far as I'm aware, so obviously it would be incredible to break that glass ceiling.
However, my advisors tell me that to ensure the stability of my reign, I'd need to eliminate JD, the Pope-killer Vance.
Between childcare and my work for this podcast, I just don't know if I have time to wage war against the United States.
So all that is to say, I'm grateful for all of your support and I'm currently weighing up my options.
Watch this space.
Da Vinci Code movies have taught us anything.
It's that, really, if you want to become the Pope, Annie, it's just going to take some minor explosives, a helicopter, and maybe Tom Hanks as well.
So I wouldn't give up hope just yet.
Yeah, now we're thinking schismatically.
I like it.
I mean, also, from my knowledge of Catholic history, which comes from the Assassin's Creed series, you may have to fistfight.
Some assassins who come and try to kill you.
So, you know, it's a risk.
It's a risky profession, being Pope.
Yeah, that's it.
I probably need to do some training like they do for the Marvel movies where I get all buffed before I can...
Yeah, you gotta study the blade.
Actually, I don't even think you have to.
I think you just have to, like, kill somebody with a hood and, like, find their hideout.
And I think they just give you the gloves with the knives in them.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Well, that sounds doable.
Well, it's all a simulation anyway, so I think you just have to go to Abstergo.
Okay, now I've gotten way too deep in the Assassin's Creed lore.
Travis, you should have never mentioned it.
Let's continue.
However, this episode is not going to be discussing spiritual matters.
Instead, today, I want to examine a much more earthly cultural controversy that's been unfolding in my country.
So, firstly, I want to begin this episode by asking my QAA colleagues for a bit of an international vibe check, because sometimes, being British, it can be difficult to tell what's normal in the strictest sense of the word.
So here's my question, everyone.
Did your country have a two-week period in March where it suddenly felt like the only permitted topic of conversation was the new gritty issues-based Netflix drama Adolescence?
No, I can't say that was the case over here.
I mean, I follow a couple different social media feeds, but I don't think that one was what dominated in March.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I guess you've been having all of that tariff stuff and things of that nature, like actual serious news, I guess.
Yeah, here it seemed people were a lot more concerned with a particular moment in the Minecraft movie.
That seems to be what was the topic of conversation.
And I also don't get out much either to even know if there's kind of a trending sort of conversation amongst peers.
But I do feel like I talked with other film people about adolescence because of the way that it was shot.
I think there was some conversation.
Going around in, like, the entertainment industry about, you know, this kind of unique show that took on these, you know, took on this very serious topic but did everything in one take.
So I feel like there was a little bit of talk around it.
Okay.
I mean, it's good to know we're not an empire that's totally in decline then because, yeah, I mean, speaking of the tariffs, actually, yeah, Steve Bannon did an interview over here where he's talking about the tariffs and at one point he's just like to the British interview, he's like, you guys don't make stuff anymore.
It's true.
We don't.
But I do feel like one thing that we do still do is probably our only export is like pretty good mid-budget drama.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
It's just the one thing we've got going for us.
You make luxury vehicles and high quality television.
I mean, I personally have seen Peep Show through its entirety, maybe three or four times.
I have to guess.
Yeah, Peep Show.
Exactly.
Bought us five more years of soft power, I think.
So, for those of you who aren't from the UK and therefore presumably not subject to the government-mandated viewing sessions we'll be discussing later, Adolescence is a four-episode drama, co-written by Jack Thorne and the actor Stephen Graham, who also stars.
It was directed by Philip Barantini, the director of the celebrated 2021 film Boiling Point, and was released on Netflix on the 13th of March 2025.
The series follows the story of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy who is arrested on suspicion of murdering his classmate Katie.
The subsequent police investigation into his motives reveals flashes of a murky online world that Jamie and his fellow classmates have been inhabiting, which the adults around Jamie, his parents, teachers and the police, barely understand.
Now, I know the last episode I helmed for this podcast was also about a Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, and I promise that I'm not transitioning into becoming QAA's TV critic, a title which we all know that Jake rightfully owns anyway.
But the way that this series briefly became a political and cultural flashpoint in this country really interested me.
To many liberal left commentators and politicians, it was touted as shining a much-needed light on the dark corners of incel culture and the manosphere.
For many on the right, it was a sleekly crafted bit of woke propaganda designed to demonize traditional masculinity.
Some enterprising sleuths even did some digging to find suspicious hints of government funding involved in the production of the series.
Could this really be the first state-sponsored anti-incel psyop?
Of course they thought this was.
I mean, also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't all major television and film productions in the UK get a little bit of government money for that soft power?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time, yes.
Although I think because this was Netflix-funded, it probably wouldn't have.
But I honestly don't know.
But yeah, you're right, all of the traditional kind of TV companies like the BBC, but even like Channel 4 and stuff like that, a lot of them have some form of state funding.
I think it evens out because we're about to publish a premium episode about A Working Man, which is about Jason Statham hunting down and killing human traffickers.
And it's supposed to take place in Chicago, but guess where it was shot?
London.
So you know what?
You get a little bit of propaganda and a little bit of truth side by side.
I can't argue with that.
Do you know, that's really funny because I said the other day, I was like, Chicago kind of reminds me of London.
Like, it's the one American city which I think, like, has kind of London vibes.
And I don't know quite enough about architecture to know why I think that.
I think it's like there's a lot of these, like, big Victorian old kind of, like, factory buildings, which London has a lot of too.
Well, Statham clearly thought that.
And the director, David Ayer, thought that London could stand in for Chicago, so.
You're not the only one.
I feel vindicated.
Everyone looked at me like I was insane, but I feel vindicated.
I will say that that's not something that Chicagoans talk about.
Having grown up there, they don't go, you know, this is the one city, one city that looks like London, people say.
People compare us to the UK.
They don't really say that.
They just go like, we got the best pizza.
All this chatter about adolescence couldn't help but pique my curiosity.
I've been researching and writing about the manosphere for about 10 years now, so when it comes to demonising masculinity, I'm something of an expert.
A few people have asked me for my professional take on adolescence, so I'm going to use this episode to give that here today.
But I also want to talk about the strange, intense response that the show generated from the government, the media, and the manosphere itself, who predictably did not react graciously to their big moment in the spotlight.
The one thing that everyone seems to begrudgingly agree on about adolescence is that it's an incredibly well-made piece of cinema.
Each episode is shot in one single continuous take, which alongside the grim subject matter, creates an unbearably tense, claustrophobic atmosphere the entire time you're watching.
The first episode begins with you, the viewer, following along like a spectral passenger as the police drive up to Jamie's family home, literally crash through the front door into their lives.
Come, come, come.
Police!
Get down on the floor!
What's going on?
I haven't done anything!
You've got the wrong house, I'm telling you!
You're making a big mistake!
I'm gonna do it!
I'm gonna do it!
Clear! What's coming out?
What's going on?
What's going on?
Police!
Suspect found!
Show me your hands!
Get your hands in the air!
Get your hands in the air so I can see them now!
This is D.I. Bascom.
I have a warrant to search your premises, sir.
Where's your son?
Where's your son?
He's in his bedroom.
What do you need me for?
Where is he?
Mum!
Hey, he's only a kid, bitch!
Okay.
Hey!
Jamie Miller.
What's going on?
The time is 6.15am and I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder.
You do not have to say anything.
Mr. Miller!
Mr. Miller, I will arrest you for obstruction.
Please stop.
Please.
I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder.
You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention one question.
Dad, I haven't done anything!
Something which you later rely on in court.
Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Dad, you haven't done anything!
Do you understand?
Do you understand?
Just tell him you understand, Jake!
Or I understand!
Okay, good.
Intense.
Very harrowing.
It's so intense.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been speaking to some people about this show and they were like, oh yeah, I just binged all of it just in one sitting.
And I was like, I genuinely don't understand how you could do that.
Like for me, I needed breaks between the episodes.
Do you know?
Like there was that one shot thing is like really intense.
Yeah.
It's so, I mean, like you mentioned, it's very claustrophobic and you don't get, you're kind of trapped with whatever piece of the story is unfolding.
And this is incredibly hard.
You've got lines from the mother.
You've got lines from the father.
You've got lines from the head officer and Jamie himself.
And you've got to get these performances.
You've got to hope that everybody's performance is good on the take where the choreography works.
So this kind of stuff is incredible.
Incredibly difficult to do.
I haven't researched deeply how it was done, whether they actually did one take with everything or if they used camera tricks to cut in certain places.
There are other sort of famous one-take films, like the Russian Ark is one of the earliest ones that I can remember, at least.
They used some camera tricks, you know, going behind a column or, you know, passing by somebody's shoulder where the camera briefly turns enough to black that they can kind of sneak in and edit there.
But I don't know.
I don't know how this was done technically, only that it looks really good.
Yeah, so from what I understand, because my husband, Paul, actually, there was one shot where he was like, there's no way.
That's it.
They've cut that.
They've subtly cut it because it goes through a window and then up into the air, basically.
And he was like, no, no, no.
That's some trickery.
But he looked it up and each one of them really is one take.
They just attached it to a drone.
So yeah, they really did it.
Part of me wonders if it's all drones.
Like, I'm starting to wonder if we're at the moment in film and television where the drone kind of, like, becomes the third-person camera, like you're playing GTA, you know what I mean?
That it's so small that you can kind of, if you have a really, really talented operator, you know, you could theoretically just hover this thing throughout a house and out a window, and I guess it sounds like at least for one section that they're actually doing that, which is crazy to me.
The second thing that everyone appears to agree on about adolescence is that Owen Cooper, who plays 13-year-old Jamie, being investigated for murder, and Stephen Graham, who plays the father, Eddie, are both fantastic actors.
Graham, in particular, feels heartbreakingly convincing as a loving but distracted dad, who is completely blindsided by the revelation that his baby-faced son is suspected of murder.
Ah! For fuck's sake!
Please, here, what's going on?
Stop it, don't come here.
Listen to me, I'm explaining to your wife, your son, he's been arrested on suspicion of murder, right?
He couldn't.
He's taken him to the station for questioning.
You can follow us there, it's on Haywood Street.
Do you know where that is?
Of course I do, yeah, it's around the corner.
You might be entitled to compensation for any mess that we've caused you today.
Fill this in and get it back to you.
bleeding door in love.
Why don't you need guns for the 13 year old?
He's 13. Do you understand what I've said to you, Bart?
Of course.
Do you understand what we're telling you, love?
There's no way he's done this.
Look, he's had guns in his face and everything.
I hope he's here happy with yourself.
Dad!
Jay, Jay, it's all right, lad.
Don't do your body, son.
Jay, Jay, Jay, me and your mum are gonna follow, OK?
Jay, don't say nothing, OK?
Let's go.
Dad!
In episode one, we see him veer from vehement protesting of Jamie's innocence to what I found probably the hardest-hitting scene in the entire season, where the investigating police officers are interrogating Jamie, with his father acting as the supervising adult.
The police play CCTV footage conclusively showing Jamie stabbing Katie, his classmate, to death.
Graham barely says a word, but just sort of collapses in horror and disbelief at what he sees.
I haven't done anything wrong.
Okay.
I'm now going to play you some footage.
This is of you and Katie from the car park last night where a confrontation happened.
Okay? Okay?
I think that's enough.
Okay?
That's where we are.
*Sigh*
How did you get home without anyone seeing you, Jamie?
Hmm?
You threw away your clothes.
We didn't see when it happened, but we know it happened.
You kept your trainers.
Too expensive, am I right?
There will be blood on those trainers, Jamie.
And with this tape as evidence, it's not looking good.
Do you want to give us a reason why?
Hmm?
Why would you do something like this?
You know, it's crazy.
It's like, I feel like American people will be mad at me for saying this, but I really feel something like this is really only capable with British actors because it's
I mean, you get one shot within each take, which probably involves so much setup and preparation that even with digital, you can't just do this over and over and over again.
I mean, I suppose you could, but it would be pretty intense.
And it's not like it's an action scene.
It's not like it's something out of Bad Boys where it's just about the choreography and the stunts and stuff.
You have these...
Deeply, deeply emotional performances, especially from a young, you know, this young actor.
I think the whole thing is really impressive because the acting has to be perfect from everybody.
You can't just do, like...
You know, 99% of TV and film where you're shooting one person's reaction and the other person is off screen and then you're switching and so you have all of these opportunities to get it exactly the way that you want.
It's like, we gotta film this scene from a play until, like, every actor gets it right, not to mention the camera choreography.
So I can't imagine the kind of preparation and work that went into this.
I would assume there were, like, heavy, heavy rehearsals and that it was treated in a lot of ways like a stage.
Which, let's be honest, the Brits, they're better at us.
Yeah, Stephen Graham, is he well-known over there in the United States?
Have you guys heard of him before?
Yes, yes, yes.
He's the father, right?
Yeah, he's the father.
Yeah, he's been in a bunch of stuff.
He's recognizable.
I couldn't name stuff off the top of my head, but when I first booted up the series, I was like, oh, it's him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's got one of those faces, doesn't he, where you're like, oh, what's he from?
And then you look him up and you're like, oh, like everything ever.
Everything ever, yeah.
Just one of those character actors who's like a chameleon that he just is so good in everything that he kind of...
The actor becomes invisible, which is the best compliment you can give somebody who's an actor.
Yeah, he's pretty famous over here.
I wasn't sure if he'd broken the United States, I guess, because he often plays, I guess, characters with regional accents here in the UK.
But it is one thing that when we get to the right-wing backlash to this show that I found really funny was that even when all of these commentators wanted to slate the TV show, they would always start off by being like, but of course I believe that Stephen Graham is a fantastic actor.
He's one of the best.
They were like, it's not his fault that he's doing this progressive brainwashing.
In the final scene of the whole show, Jamie's mum and dad discuss with one another where they think things went wrong and reveal their bewilderment at the online content the teenager was consuming before turning to violence.
He never left his room.
Come home, slam the door straight up the stairs on the computer.
I'd see the lights on at one o 'clock in the morning.
And I'd knock and I'd say, Jamie, come on, son, you've got school tomorrow.
And the lights would turn off, but he never said nothing.
We couldn't do nothing about that.
All kids are like that these days, aren't they?
You know, you don't know what they're watching in their room, love.
Could be watching porn or anything, do you know what I mean?
Look at that fella that popped up on my phone.
Going on about how to treat women and how men should be men and all that shit.
I was only looking for something for the gym, weren't I?
You can't keep an eye on them all the time, love.
We just can't.
I mean, there's an interesting little, I guess, just sort of line where I was just looking for something for the gym, which, of course, touches on something that's very real, which is the fact that a lot of people get into, like, right-wing or red pill content because they first find, you know, health and fitness content or business content or something fairly innocuous,
But that serves sometimes as a transition to something not quite as beneficial to the people who watch it.
Yeah. And I actually read an interview with Graham where he says that's actually a real story.
That's how he he like first came across Andrew Tate.
Apparently he was just looking for a workout video.
Next thing you know, he was kind of like, yeah, just sort of filling his feed.
And he was just like, who the hell is this?
I'm curious if this is the first sort of scripted content we've seen that shows the characters of a...
You know, young parents in a situation where they are discovering this Manosphere content for the first time.
You know, to us, I mean...
Annie, you know, this is like, you know, your education is, you know, you have your doctorate in this stuff.
And we look at it all the time.
But if we think about, you know, parents in their, you know, I would guess their mid-40s, early 40s, late 40s, early 50s.
It's not, like, my parents know about it because they listen to QAA.
You know what I mean?
But I think there is this really kind of important moment of seeing a parent be like, damn, like...
I thought he was just watching porn.
And then there's like one level deeper on the internet for like young troubled men that's like worse and brooding.
And the discovery of that to the point where it's worked its way into this very popular Netflix show is, I mean, we know how popular it is, but it's interesting to see it kind of tackled in like this scripted sort of scenario.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that's part of why this show blew up.
Do you know?
I think the huge amount of time and attention and sympathy that the script spends with Jamie's family really strikes a chord with viewers.
The creators of the show have actually discussed how they didn't want their audience to be able to point the finger.
Jamie's home life is having caused his behavior, or for parents to watch complacent that it couldn't be their son.
Yeah, because like every, I mean, if we think back about the content we watch about young troubled men who end up stabbing somebody, it's like Joker, or it's like, what was the series with, I think it was a British series, maybe not, with Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson,
where she's following the serial killer, and we're following this, and we like...
The serial killer.
It's like, it's really fucked up the way that we portray these violent men in, like, a lot of sort of scripted content that's, like, meant for entertainment.
And it's always, there's always a highlight on their home life.
Like, they had a horrible, abusive parent.
If you go back to the original Stabber, Psycho, you know, I mean, it's all about this, you know, his abusive mother and, you know, the trauma that has, like, totally warped his brain.
So to present a violent kid in a household, in a hell...
The selfie household, I think, is very new and very original.
It's not something people are used to seeing.
In TV, which is so fucked up, it's in TV they're not used to seeing it, but, like, in real life, you know, all you have to do is go on Our Nice Guys, you know, on Reddit, and there's pages and pages of potential Jamie's.
If you watch, I was watching Below Deck the other night, and there's, like, a relationship that forms on the boat, and you can tell that the guy is controlling and...
Violent and short-tempered and you're like, oh, there's a Jamie that's waiting to come out.
So it's like we see this all the time in real life, but it's rare that we see it in sort of like scripted TV.
We wanted, from the get-go, from the very beginning, the three of us wanted Eddie to represent the everyone.
And we wanted him to come from an ordinary family.
And within the con...
The construct of the characters that Jack had created and then, you know, we're blessed to be able to play as actors and bring all of our own influences to it.
But what we were able to do and what we really wanted to do, we wanted to be mindful from the very beginning that there was no way where you could point the finger.
Look, conventionally, and rightly so, you may see one of these dramas that would be told from the perspective of the victim's family, and rightly so, do you know what I mean?
But what we wanted to do with this was we wanted to...
Look at it from a different perspective, but also eliminate some of those things that you would normally point the finger at.
So Dad wasn't particularly violent in the house and didn't raise his hand to Mum or the boy or anyone like that, or his daughter, do you know what I mean?
Mum wasn't an alcoholic.
Jamie wasn't abused sexually or mentally or physically by another family member.
So we wanted to eliminate those possibilities and have a look at it from a different perspective.
And then you kind of go, well, who is to blame?
Who is accountable?
Maybe we're all accountable.
Now, I don't want to cheapen the writing in the show, which was really much better written and more nuanced than a simple do-you-know-where-your-kids-are-tonight public service announcement, but I do think this recognisable everyman quality that Graham talked about in Jamie's family was particularly effective in getting viewers,
and especially parents, to sit up and pay attention.
It is, after all, a pretty frightening thought that there might be signs that your own little darlings are going down a similar path to Jamie that you as a parent are missing.
There's one scene in particular obviously designed to highlight the cluelessness of the adults as to their children's online environment.
In this part of episode 2, Detective Inspector Bascom, the police officer investigating the case, has to be schooled by his own teenage son as to the secret meanings behind emojis which the victim left on Jamie's Instagram.
He had assumed they were meant to be friendly.
They in fact reveal a much more sinister online language.
"What are you talking about?" "Insta.
You've been looking at Insta, right?"
Yeah.
Okay, so you've, um, you've seen what she wrote?
I have.
Okay.
Looks like she'd be a nice, right?
Isn't she?
The dynamite.
What do you think that means?
I don't know.
It's an exploding red pill.
Pills, the blue pills, means you see the waters.
That's from the Matrix.
You've been watching the Matrix?
What?
Don't worry.
Don't worry, carry on.
The Matrix.
Carry on.
Red Bull, it's like...
I see the truth.
It's a call to action by the manosphere.
Manosphere?
Which is where the 100 comes in.
The 80 to 20 rule.
Adam, Adam, listen.
My brain can't take all this.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Just break it down.
80% of women are attracted to 20% of men.
Women.
You must trick them, cos you'll never get them in a normal way.
80% of women are cut off or...
Oh, she's saying he's an incel.
Dad.
He's 13. How can you be involuntary celibate at 13?
Who isn't celibate at 13, huh?
She's saying you always will be.
That's what they say.
You're an insult.
You're going to be a virgin forever, basically.
And all those people have hired, which means they're agreeing with her.
Now, maybe it's just because I'm poisoned by reading a lot of this content, but it's very difficult to me to imagine someone, even someone who is not online a whole lot, in the year of 2025, to associate the term red pill with the Matrix still.
I feel like it's evolved and expanded and reused so much that it's sort of like it's deviated from that origin that when people say red pill, the first thing they think of nowadays is not the Matrix.
No, it used to drive me crazy when I was first writing about this.
And obviously you'd have to write about the red pill or, you know, people referring to themselves as red pills.
And you'd always have to include the line, which originally comes from the science fiction movie, The Matrix.
And I get so sick of writing.
I'd be thinking the same thing.
I'd be like, oh, but it's so far removed from that now in this online context.
But I think you're right, Travis.
I wonder, I doubt people are still having to write that these days.
It feels like people all understand that kind of online context to it now.
I mean, yeah, I think there's something about this scene which doesn't actually just ring true at all to me.
The way the kid is talking about...
These sort of manosphere tropes where it's like it's a call to the action by the manosphere.
You have to trick women into liking you.
It just doesn't...
It doesn't sound like the way I've heard teenagers talk about this stuff.
It doesn't.
It feels like the writers were trying to convey something to the audience very, very quickly and succinctly.
And they didn't do it quite as artfully as some of the other writing is.
This is why we'll be launching the QAA consulting wing.
You can hire us to come onto your film and TV projects and we will help you craft language that is authentic to our poison brains.
I'll tell you this, guys.
I was at a wedding over the weekend in Florida, of all places.
And inevitably, you know, it was a bunch of old friends and co-workers who have become lifetime friends from my wife's old job.
But there's a lot of new people inevitably who I hadn't met and I always have to, there always comes a point in the night where they ask what I do and I have to explain it and I've gotten really good at succinctly summing up the podcast in a way that isn't frightening.
Initially, you know, initially where they're like, oh god, is this guy gonna, is this, he's gonna launch into like a crazy diatribe?
And I will say that like talking about red pills and blue pills, like the understanding of it in the modern sense is not as widespread as we would like to think.
I feel like I have to explain that.
Yeah, maybe we are just all poisoned.
But I think the thing that gets me is he knows what incel means.
You know, he goes, how can a 13-year-old be involuntary celibate?
So I guess I'm like, you know what an incel is, but you don't know what red pull is?
I don't know.
Yeah.
There's also this crazy thing that I think is interesting that, like, I remember we were talking to Liv a couple episodes ago, and she was saying how, like, I can't remember if she was, like, 26 or 27, but she's like, I'm basically old.
Like, the culture is so young that essentially past 23, like, you're considered old, and you're like, oh, well, like, why haven't you figured your life out or whatever?
And I wonder if that in some way kind of trickles down to the point where it's like, if you're 13 years old, they're like, well, why aren't you, like, banging a ton of women right now, you know?
Like, you're at the age, like, I wonder if there is, like, a pressure on, because, like, I can tell you guys, at 13 years old, I was having my bar mitzvah.
I was like, am I gonna kiss?
I had a girlfriend at the time we'd been dating for two weeks.
I was like, am I gonna kiss her during the slow dance if they play a slow dance at my bar mitzvah?
Are we gonna kiss if they do champagne?
They said something.
I don't know if they still have this, but they would go snowball or they would go champagne snowball.
And you would have to kiss the person that you were dancing with before changing partners.
And I was like, are we going to kiss?
Is that appropriate?
I don't know.
It's my bar mitzvah.
Do you kiss at bar mitzvahs?
What's going on?
So, like, the idea that at 13 that you could even be considered or even think of yourself as, like, an incel is extremely disturbing.
So, before I'd actually even watched the show, I'd been contacted about this scene in particular by a journalist called Gareth Watkins, who wanted to know if I'd come across any of these emojis being used that way in my research on the manosphere.
I explained to him I hadn't, and he went on to write a very good article for Liberal Currents about the impact of the series, which I will put a link to in the episode description if you're interested.
Not every British journalist, however, is as diligent as Gareth, and so a wave of scare stories came out in tabloids like the Daily Mail, which verbatim copied the TV series' assertions with headlines like...
Are your children texting secret in-cell emojis?
These are what the seemingly innocent symbols actually mean, and parents may be shocked.
Yeah, this is just the worst kind of clickbait, because it's the kind that, like, taps into the very primal and understandable anxiety that parents have about what their children are up to and what's going to happen to them.
Are they doing things I don't know about?
Would that make me irresponsible?
And, yeah, it's really, really gross stuff.
No, I mean, I remember there was always this stuff at the time when I was a teenager.
It wasn't like about incel stuff, but it would be like, you know, here's the secret tech speak that your children are using to suggest that they're going to go and smoke weed together or take pills, you know, and here's the acronyms that they use.
And I guess there's something sad to me where it's like, at least then those kids are going out to party.
Do you know?
Now it's like, yeah, if they're staying in.
Yeah, very, very sad.
So I actually did end up visiting some incel forums to see what they were saying about the show, which we will go into a little bit later.
But one funny thing was that I found them all reacting to this news story, and they were as nonplussed as I was.
Some earnestly attempted to investigate.
I don't think I've ever seen a single person within these spaces use these emojis in context.
Maybe they are exclusive to an ethnic forum or something?
Most of them, though, just found the whole thing very funny.
Life Fuel.
These retarded Karens are going to terrorize sex-having non-scum kids for using emojis.
JFL.
I hate to correct you, Jake, but it's Norm Scum.
Norm Scum.
And is Life Fuel the person he's responding to, I guess?
No, Life Fuel means like a white pill.
It's like, oh, this is like fuel for me.
Oh, this is fuel for my life.
Okay, got it.
The article Getting It Wrong gave them Life Fuel, I see.
That's right.
Life Fuel.
These retarded Karens are going to terrorize sex-having norm-scum kids for using emojis.
J-F-L.
What is J-F-L?
It stands for just fucking lol.
So, um, yeah.
So they do use their own impenetrable little language.
Like, it is correct about that.
Just fucking lol!
Not the emojis.
So they do have their own private little argo that they use to, like, communicate with each other.
Just not the emojis in the show.
It's not even lol.
It's just fucking...
Law.
The semantics don't even line up on this right.
Oh no!
An acronym I don't know!
Adolescence's influence didn't stop at the tabloids.
Just six days after the drama first aired, it was raised in Parliament by Anneliese Mitchley, the Labour MP for Knowlesley, hometown of the show's star Stephen Graham.
Everyone is talking about Adolescence, the series by Nosley's own Stephen Graham and Christine Tamarco.
It highlights online male radicalisation and violence against girls.
The creators of the show are calling for screenings in Parliament and schools to spark change.
So will the Prime Minister back this campaign to counter toxic misogyny early and give young men the role models they deserve?
Yes, and at home we are watching adolescents with our children.
I've got a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.
It's a very, very good documentary to watch or drama.
This violence carried out by young men, influenced by what they see online, is a real problem.
It's abhorrent, and we have to tackle it.
We are putting in specialist rape and sexual offences.
Teams in every police force doing work on the 999 calls.
But this is also a matter of culture that I think it's important that across the whole House we tackle this emerging and growing problem.
That looks like a place where things get done.
I could be very wrong.
But I also feel like this kind of would be a good thing to show kids in school.
I remember when we were growing up, we would watch drama.
I can't remember any specifics, but I know for a fact that we watched dramatizations about drugs.
I think for us it was like, don't get pregnant.
That was really what they were worried about.
They were like, don't smoke weed.
Don't get pregnant.
Those were kind of the big lessons that were really hammered home by our, you know, our gym teachers who doubled as the sex ed teachers for some reason.
At the end of the month, Keir Starmer hosted a roundtable in Downing Street with one of the writers of the series, Jack Thorne, and producer Joe Johnson.
He opened the meeting with a lengthy treatise on the powerful emotional impact of the show.
And I was talking to a friend about it the weekend who's also got a boy.
And he actually said that he couldn't see it through because it just got to him too much.
Thinking about his own boy, what might have happened, what could have happened.
And actually he stopped watching it.
I think that tells you how compelling it is because it instantly contacts with...
The fears and worries, not just of young people, because I was really struck by how riveted our children were to it, but also, frankly, the fears and worries of parents and adults across the country.
And partly, I think, it's because it shines a light.
It shows a problem in our society.
It's sort of a torch, if you like, that shines intensely brightly.
On a combination of issues that many people don't know how to respond to, and perhaps there isn't one single sort of silver bullet response, some policy lever that can be pulled, it's actually much bigger than that, almost a cultural issue.
The devastating effect of misogyny on our society, very powerful.
The dangers of online radicalisation and this sense of young people being on their own, very often in their bedroom or wherever, isolated.
With that online radicalisation.
The challenges our children, schools and families face every day.
We all know about that, but it's intensely brought together.
And then, equally concerning, how commonplace it is.
This is not something that's depicting an unusual set of circumstances.
It's commonplace, it's banal even, and that makes it even more powerful.
How functional.
That looked nice.
I feel like if this was happening in America, it would be Trump and all of his advisors being like, the Obamas put out, leave the world behind.
The Obamas are going to launch an EMP weapon of magnitude, and we've got to be prepared.
This seems like such a normal, functional government.
I know that you guys have your own complaints and stuff, but compared to the...
No, I mean, I'll be honest.
I think people got a bit weird about this show, including the government.
But it is always nice to remember that we're not as weird as the United States.
Anne Mensah, the vice president of Netflix UK, was also in attendance.
Following the roundtable, the streaming platform announced that it would make the show available to all secondary schools in the country in partnership with Tender, which is, quote, a nationwide charity harnessing the power of drama and the arts to educate children, young people and adults about healthy relationships.
Mensa, give a statement.
Adolescence has captured the national mood, sparking important conversations and helping articulate the pressures young people and parents face in today's society.
We're incredibly proud of the impact the show has made and are delighted to be able to offer it to all schools across the UK.
This is a big Netflix win.
Nothing that they love more than being educational as well.
The version of that here was the Leonardo DiCaprio movie about the comet hitting and exploding the world.
Everybody for a couple weeks after was like...
That's how fucked up America is.
Literally the end of that movie, I'm going to spoil it, is that the meteor hits and everybody fucking dies.
We watch something like that and we go, oof, boy, we should be really talking about this.
We should be thinking.
That was what we...
We talked about for like four, like, oh, have you seen Don't Look Up?
Ooh, powerful.
It's powerful.
And it's like, yeah, it's about fucking like a meteor that's going to just like blow up and nobody's paying attention or cares.
That's the kind of shit that gets like traction in America.
Something this nuanced and real and down to earth and important.
People would run away from it, I think.
Meanwhile, politicians who confessed to not having watched the series, such as Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition, were grilled by journalists on their dereliction of duty.
Last minute or so together, we also heard from the Prime Minister yesterday that he's watched that TV, the Netflix series Adolescents.
What have you learnt from that, Mrs Badenoch?
Well, I haven't watched it.
I don't have time to watch anything these days, to be honest.
But I have read about it.
The Prime Minister has had time to watch it, Mrs Bader.
Yes, well, they have.
And so what I understand is that this is a fictional representation of a story that is actually quite different.
And I think it's an interesting story.
It certainly touches on some of the things that are happening in the world today.
But it is not the biggest thing that is happening in the world today in terms of what is happening to people.
But many would say for a leading politician such as yourself not to be in tune with what a lot of people are talking about, that's almost a dereliction of duty, some would suggest.
Not least as you have a child approaching their teens.
Yes, yes, I do.
So I pay attention, but I'm not going to watch every single thing that everybody's watching on Netflix.
I do know what they're watching and I know what it's about.
And I've given a view that it is a work of fiction that is interesting, that touches on a problem in society, but there are bigger problems such as Islamic terrorism and that kind of radicalisation.
And the story which it is based on has been fundamentally changed.
Bizarrely, that wasn't even Baden-Ock's only media appearance, where she was harangued by a journalist for not having watched the show.
There was actually another one on the BBC which went much the same way.
That presenter similarly made the same slip of the tongue as Keir Starmer and accidentally referred to the show as a documentary.
I mean, I'm a little torn on this one, I have to say.
On one hand, it's like, it's a little silly to expect, I can't, have you not seen the Netflix show that everyone's talking about?
Like you're like a co-worker listening to like, you know, someone, you know, some sort of like, you know, people talk about Severance.
You haven't seen Severance.
You've got to.
You've got to see it.
It's so good.
Yeah.
Guilty.
I've got to hand it to her.
If you could see that the same question was coming and you're about to get the same thing, definitely in her possession, I would just lie.
I would just be like, yeah, I have watched it.
Yeah, it was really good.
So, you know, kudos to her.
Politician of integrity.
She won't pretend to have seen something that she hasn't, even if it's just going to get grilled over it.
She said she didn't have time to watch anything, and I bet that's not true.
I bet she's got a couple sneaky.
I bet she's watching Love is Blind UK.
Come on.
But it is funny though that it's like...
It's like, have you seen all of the real violence perpetrated by young men out in the world?
It's like, no, no, I haven't done anything about that.
But it's like, oh, but when the series that came out, the series that everybody is watching that represents that, like, oh, you haven't seen that?
It's so funny how it takes a scripted show or movie for people to be like, wow, we should really wake up to this problem.
Right-wing backlash.
Now, I was raised better than to ever defend a conservative politician, but I couldn't help but feel ever so slightly sorry for Baden-Ock here.
She probably doesn't get a lot of free time, and there's no real reason she should have to use it watching a show which, however emotionally resonant, is ultimately a work of fiction.
There was one remark that Kenny Baden-Ock said in that appearance on LBC, though, that stuck with me, that the story that adolescence is based on has been, quote, fundamentally changed.
This would be a comment that she later clarified in an interview with much more sympathetic and much more right-wing outlet GB News.
The PM had a meeting yesterday about this Netflix show.
Do you think white boys are being wrongly singled out here?
Well, I think adolescence is a fictional story.
It's based on a real story.
But my understanding is that the boy who committed that crime was not white.
So people can do whatever they like in fiction.
The Prime Minister should not be building policy on fiction.
He should be building policy on reality.
So this claim immediately intrigued me.
Although a lot of the marketing around adolescents emphasised its kitchen sink-style veracity, I hadn't heard that it would have been based on a true story.
Had there really been a black teenage incel murderer I'd never heard of?
Predictably, there was pretty much nothing online that corroborated Baden-Ock's claims, apart from a huge amount of posts from anonymous British right-wing accounts on the Everything app, all of which seemed to mainly be using each other as a source to claim that the show had The claim eventually went international,
reaching such a fever pitch that the eternally incorrect social media personality known as Ian Miles Chong decided to add his take with his usual regard for factual accuracy.
Netflix has a show called Adolescence that's about a British knife killer who stabbed a girl to death on a bus, and it's based on real-life cases such as the Southport murderer.
So guess what?
They race-swapped the actual killer from a black man-slash-migrant to a white boy, and the story has it so he was radicalized online by the red pill movement.
Just the absolute state of anti-white propaganda.
Elon Musk, who seems to have some kind of inbuilt homing beacon when it comes to online content that contains racially incendiary misinformation about the United Kingdom, responded to this with, wow.
Oh my god, did Ian Miles Chong even watch the show?
He doesn't stab her on a bus?
Yeah, I also love that he couldn't even be bothered to just research whether it was a black man or a migrant, so he kind of just like...
You just like, black man slash migrant, whatever, you know, one of those.
That's its own problem, but yeah.
So, if the involvement of these two hasn't already confirmed it to you by now, this is totally, factually wrong.
In fact, in a way that only as talented a poster as Ian Maelstrom can manage, there's three inaccuracies in that short post alone.
Adolescence is not about a real teenage killer.
As you point out, Jake, the stabbing does not take place on a bus, and it was already in production when the Southport killings happened last year.
It's like in Family Feud, he's got like three exes on the board.
Where the confusion seemed to have occurred was through right-wing accounts on X selectively editing an interview with Stephen Graham, in which he acknowledged how hearing multiple real stories of teenage girls being murdered by boys their age had inspired him and his co-writer Jack Thorne to explore the issue creatively.
The right-wing internet machine then played its usual game of telephone with the contents.
Here's one such garbled retelling by former InfoWars minion Paul Joseph Watson.
The show portrays the face of toxic online misogyny, knife crime radicalisation and incel violence, as a 13-year-old white boy from a married home who spends a great deal of time on the receiving end of a moral inquisition by a stern-faced Karen child psychologist.
The show's star Stephen Graham said, We made a piece that was based on truth and things that are happening in Britain with young men stabbing young girls to death.
But that's...
Not true.
The producers admit adolescence was primarily based on Hassan Sentamu's murder of a 15-year-old black girl.
Hassan Sentamu was a Ugandan immigrant.
Quite clearly not a white British boy.
It was perhaps the only example in modern television history where they race swapped a character to the gainful employment of a white actor.
So despite the fact that it would have been both historically and contemporaneously accurate, there was very little concern for diversity casting here.
Oh boy.
I have not seen Paul Joseph Watson in a while.
Sorry.
His hair is, it's leavened itself.
He's got kind of like a mushroom top cut now, which is very funny looking.
Here's failed Reform UK politician and semi-failed anti-woke comedian Leo Keirce.
An adolescence is a gross but entirely predictable misrepresentation of reality.
Look who they got to play the killer, some skinny white kid.
Honestly, can you spot the difference?
The writer says he was inspired by real-life stabbings, but he's a bit coy about which specific ones.
In actual fact, it's pretty easy to find out which ones.
Here's an extract from the Radio Times interview with Graham where he details the news stories that troubled him.
Where it came from, for me, explains Graham, is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy.
I just thought, why?
Then there was another young girl in South London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop, and there was this thing up north where that young girl, Brianna Gay, was lured into the park by two teenagers and they stabbed her.
I just thought, what's going on?
What is this that's happening?
The one line in that which the Wright seized on is the story of the young girl in South London stabbed at a bus stop.
That references 15-year-old Eliane Andam from Croydon, who is stabbed to death by her best friend's ex-boyfriend, 17-year-old Hassan Santamu.
There are some faint similarities to the plot of adolescence.
In both The Real Event and the TV show, the teenage killer used a kitchen knife.
In both cases, the victim and killer had had previous non-violent altercations, which could be interpreted as threatening the killer's sense of masculinity.
The day before he murdered her, Andam and her friends had thrown water at Santamu after running into him in a shopping center.
In the TV show, it's revealed that the victim, Katie, began cyberbullying Jamie after romantically rejecting him.
But there are obvious key differences, too.
Chiefly, location.
Adolescence takes place in a town somewhere in the north of England.
Andam and Suntamu were in South London.
In the show, Jamie follows Katie to a car park and confronts her alone.
But in real life, Andam was defending her friend, Suntamu's ex-girlfriend, when they met at a bus stop.
And, as so thoroughly investigated by the internet's eagle-eyed race scientists, Jamie is white, but Santamu was black, and although most of the online outrage machine didn't think it was worth mentioning, so was Eliane Andum, the bright, popular teenage girl whose life he stole.
But that's just one of the cases that Graham mentioned.
In the case of Ava White, a 12-year-old girl from Liverpool killed by a 14-year-old boy in 2021, after asking him to stop filming her and her friends, we don't know the race of the perpetrator due to court reporting restrictions set in place for minors.
In the case of Brianna Gay, a transgender teenager stabbed to death in a park by two 15-year-olds in 2023, a judge suspended those restrictions due to the intense public interest in the case.
Both murderers, Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Radcliffe, are white.
That's not to mention the cases of adult murderers that have been directly linked to the manosphere in this country.
In Plymouth in 2021, a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison shot and killed five people, including a three-year-old girl.
His internet footprint showed a heavy use of incel forums.
In July 2024, a former soldier called Kyle Clifford killed his ex-girlfriend, her mother and sister with a crossbow after forcing his way into their home.
The prosecution found that in the days before he carried out the murders, he'd watched up to ten Andrew Tate
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Now...
Given the enormous human tragedy of these stories, where so many women and girls' lives were cut short in the most brutal way imaginable, it feels extremely distasteful having to run through this kind of ethnic checklisting of the perpetrators.
But I do think it's necessary as we discuss the right-wing reaction to this show, because if that's the kind of content soup you were swimming in, you would genuinely come away with the impression that no white man has ever been responsible for this kind of crime.
Online radicalisation, incel culture, violence against women, these are all very real problems.
But my concern is this.
Will this perpetuate a narrative that the biggest problem in society and the biggest threat posed to women and girls comes from working-class white boys?
Does it run the risk of demonising them?
They are already told.
To check their privilege.
They're already told that people who look like them are responsible for all of the world's evils.
They're already the worst performing at school.
It is always easier for celebrities and politicians to jump on a bandwagon if the problem is seen to be white Brits.
Do you think that Netflix would commission a series on the threat to women posed by illegal immigrants and asylum seekers?
Do you think that Netflix would commission a series on the threat to women posed by foreign people in Britain?
Foreigners are three times as likely to be arrested for sex offences than British citizens.
Asylum seeker Abdulazidi doused a woman and a child in acid in Clapham.
That kind of violent misogyny, perpetuated by men from Middle Eastern nations, very rarely gets raised in the House of Commons, does it?
I mean, that's just not true.
You know, acid attacks, honour killings, these have been the subjects of, you know, countless British BBC documentaries.
They've been discussed on Newsnight and they have been discussed in the House of Commons as well.
It's just absurd to say that they haven't.
Not to mention social media.
Anytime that happens, there is a huge, you know, these guys, you know, Andrew Tate adjacent influencers, you know, there's a huge push on social media to bring awareness about that because it aligns with their own racism.
Some right-wing commentators went as far to make the argument that it would do calculable damage to young white boys' self-esteem if proposals went ahead to show the TV series in schools.
Most adolescent boys dislike Andrew Tate, and the ones who like him are disproportionately black and Asian, not white.
I think another difficulty is that, you know, it's just hooey to think that the main threat of violence posed to women and girls, particularly girls, are white working-class boys brought up in stable two-parent families.
I mean, that's just...
And, you know, the main writer of the series claimed that he'd based it on three real-life cases.
In every case, the perpetrator was not a white, working-class teenage boy from a stable family background.
And you can see why, you know, the appalling...
Murders by Axel Rudicabana has prompted a kind of moral panic about this.
But this is a complete misdiagnosis of what the causes of that episode were and what the kind of solution is.
And the idea now that this is going to be shown in schools, and there's been a real clamour for adolescents to be shown in schools to teach boys, you know, why they should resist these kind of toxic influences.
The idea that these poor...
Mites are going to have to sit through this hooey and self-flagellate afterwards and explain to their classmates why it is that masculinity is toxic and should at all costs be handled with tongs.
It's awful to think.
They're in a bad enough way as it is without being demonised.
First of all, school is...
Sitting through a bunch of hooves.
That's what it is.
You sit there and you listen to a bunch of shit.
You're bored.
Sometimes it's interesting.
Sometimes it's not.
This kind of shit drives me nuts.
What's wrong with sitting in school and learning about...
These are the consequences that can happen if you give in to...
Violent urges, let's say.
You know?
But everything has to be about race.
Everything has to be about whose team are you on?
I mean, nowadays, when a school shooter goes in and murders a bunch of kids, we don't even talk about the fucking guns anymore.
We don't talk about the guns.
Each side tries to go, oh, they're a Republican?
Oh, no, they're a Democrat.
Everybody wants to just...
It's all about blaming.
Who's responsible for this?
And usually, it's which race is responsible for this?
Or which political party or affiliation is responsible for this?
Instead of just going, how about like, let's not like, let's work together so that kids don't get killed.
The idea of people like this, this fucking...
God!
Reflective, bald-headed, buttoned-up vest, you know, stuffed into a vest, you know, just, like, dismissing this as if it's, you know, some kind of propaganda.
Oh, poor kids in school are gonna...
You know, by the way, by the way, dude, like, when you get a television rolled into your classroom, at least that's how it was back in the day, I'm sure they pull some kind of screen down, or maybe the...
Blackboard itself has a screen in it.
That was the best day!
By the way, when your teacher turned the lights off and you got to watch something, especially something that was, like, dynamic, interesting, that had good acting, interesting cinematography, like this, this would have been, even if I walked out of it with 90%, that was awesome,
I didn't have to listen to the teacher talk all day, and 10%, hey, like, I'm thinking about the themes from the show, like, I don't want to go through what that kid did, like, whatever, if you take away 10% of a lesson from it, you know?
Because most of the- Most of the time, at least when I was growing up, you know, we didn't see, we didn't go, we weren't watching, I didn't watch Voyage of the Mimi and be like, hey, there, everybody is this race on it, or everybody is this, you know, what does that mean?
It was just like you take in the story.
I don't know.
What a waste of oxygen this guy is.
Funny enough, that's Toby Young, who's a right-wing journalist, among other things.
But a fun thing you might want to know about him is that he once wrote an article where he complained about how no one showed up to his stag do.
What's a stag do?
Oh, so a stag do here is like a party that you traditionally would have thrown the day before your wedding, where all of your friends would have thrown you a party.
Okay, like a bachelor party.
Yeah, yeah, a bachelor party.
Yeah, that's, I think.
Anyway, yeah, it's sometimes just like, you kind of, yeah, sort of try to pose it as, you know, what's up with our modern world?
And everyone was just like, your friends don't like you.
Oh, wait a minute.
So he said, let me get this straight.
I'm going to derail this episode.
Sorry.
He wrote an article saying, nobody showed up to my bachelor party.
And like the angle was that like men are being like pussified somehow that they don't want to get drunk the night before their wedding.
Oh my god, what a waste.
What a waste of time.
How sad.
There's also one little quibble I want to make.
Gareth Watkins also makes this in his article for Liberal Currents, but everybody keeps on saying that Jamie is working class.
The class system in the UK is so demented.
But he's not a working class kid.
You know, he lives in a semi-detached house.
His dad owns a business.
You know, he's probably earning decent money.
He sort of says he does these emergency jobs in plumbing.
Like, you know, they, you know, not like super wealthy, but they're not working class either.
They just have northern accents, which is something that, yeah, a lot of the pundits in this country just can't quite, like, wrap the difference between.
If Jamie has his own computer, I'm guessing he can probably run a couple games on it.
Like, if he's got his own computer in his room, that already is a symbol of...
Wealth in some, you know, or at least comfort.
I mean, I think it's one of those things where, you know, I think they wanted them, they didn't want, I think, the writers, I mean, they didn't want Jamie to look like he came from, I think, you know, a really, really rough background, like he's not living in a tower block or something like that, because then viewers, I think, wouldn't relate to him.
They'd be like, well, that couldn't happen to my kid, because my kid, you know, so he just lives in this really, if you're British, you've just been in houses like their house hundreds and hundreds of times, you know, that's just like...
The normal British house.
So it's, I don't know, it's kind of, yeah, it's a bit of a thing where these commenters, they say white working class because that sounds more sympathetic, but they mean white.
Do you know?
They mean white.
It seems like the filmmakers basically did everything they could to kind of standardize the family and the kid so that the only thing that would really stand out is this boy's actions, the consequences that happened to him and the story.
And yet...
Even being so careful about doing that and saying, hey, we don't want to draw from this.
We don't want to draw this.
We don't want to make, you know, we don't want the conversation to be surrounding race or this or that or the other thing.
And despite that, they've done it anyways.
It just goes to show you that, like, if you've got something to say that's true and somebody doesn't like it or it makes them feel bad, they'll reject it.
They'll rebel against it because they don't want to have to.
Nobody likes to feel bad.
And they certainly don't like to see that on TV, you know, so I get it.
In fairness to Toby Young, I did enjoy the show, but I will confess to being a little bit puzzled by the proposed rollout of adolescents in schools myself.
In fact, it kind of feels like a misreading of a major theme of the show, which is that it's the adults who need to get to grips with the dangerous online environment that their kids inhabit.
To the show's credit, I don't think it is just about online radicalisation.
I think it also points to wider institutional failures that have let Jamie get to the point that he has.
The second episode, for example, follows the detectives through Jamie's ordinary state school as they interview students and hunt for the murder weapon.
There, they are confronted with a chronically underfunded system at breaking point.
Everywhere they go, burned-out, overworked teachers helplessly try and fail to manage their large, chaotic classes.
The police officers are appalled, and there's a funny line in how they express it.
Do you know what?
I honestly, I just, I can't stand this fucking place.
We're only here because you wanted to come, mate.
Yeah, I know, but...
Does it look like anyone's learning anything in there to you?
It just looks like a fucking holding pen.
Videos in every class.
So, yeah.
I find it funny that what's being proposed as a lesson from adolescence is that they should show more videos in class.
The state and media reaction to adolescence was so overwhelming that one and surprising journalist, Charlotte Gill, decided to investigate further.
Unfortunately, we don't have much time to talk about Gill properly in today's episode, but she's quite a fascinating character.
After having a fairly uninspiring career as a mid-rate right-wing commentator, she seems to have finally found a niche branding herself as the UK dog, documenting what she describes as, quote, woke waste, which seems to be essentially any kind of government funding that goes to causes she deems too liberal.
Charlotte looked into Tender, the drama-based youth charity that partnered with adolescents to deliver the rollout of educational materials alongside the show in schools.
What she found was truly underwhelming, but reinforces a slightly unkind thought that I've had before, which is that you can make anything sound like a conspiracy if you just don't quite understand how stuff works.
Charlotte Gill says, I don't know if adolescence is a psyop, but let's just say that Tender, the charity working in conjunction with it, was very ready to go, PR-wise, on the day of its release, the 13th of March.
Tender received £3.4 million in taxpayer funding from 2020 to 2024.
So, if you look at Tender's website, it looks like the vast bulk of what they provide is educational drama workshops for young people and programmes for schools that focus on teaching healthy relationships.
As they put it.
We have been engaging children and young people in healthy relationships education since 2003.
Our range of short and long-term programs use drama and the arts to prepare young people to have happy, equal relationships and inspire them to champion healthy relationships in their peer groups and communities.
We work with primary, secondary and specialist schools as well as a variety of youth settings, alternative provisions and community groups.
So, yeah, I've kind of looked a little bit into it and it seems like, you know, they're kind of using drama to sort of teach kids about, I don't know, things that might be relevant to them.
So, you know, how to act if, you know, someone is pressuring you into, you know, doing something sexually that you want to do about things like abuse, about, you know, online kind of sexting and stuff like that.
All that kind of standard stuff, I guess, that teenagers have to have to navigate in the world of relationships.
Now, I have no idea if this material is any good, but that doesn't particularly matter.
What's important is that it doesn't feel to me like there's anything improper here.
The vast majority of schools in this country are funded by the state, so a charity who works with schools receiving various grants and contracts in order to do its job doesn't seem particularly alarming to me.
But Gill's powers of deduction don't stop there.
She continues in the same thread.
The state-funded charity launched it at a special screening on the day.
So what Charlotte is discovering here is popularly known as comms.
The charity focusing on young people and relationships worked with a TV series which also focused on those themes and then hosted a premiere and launched a press release on the day of its launch as part of a wider media strategy.
This is, yeah, this is another example.
It's like, this is like pretty...
Basic PR work that any charity does all the time, and they frame you as a conspiracy.
Yeah, just the way they were suspiciously ready to go, as if the only legitimate way for, I don't know, for this charity to work with this TV series would be for them just to stumble across it.
It's just not how stuff works.
If the same kind of conspiracies were around when I was growing up, they would be like, why are the guys from G.I. Joe telling our children how to handle social situations?
These are military operators.
The military is secretly telling kids what they should do if a friend is mean to them or not to steal somebody else's candy.
Do you remember that, Travis?
The lessons that we got was during Saturday morning cartoons where, you know, G.I. Joe would basically come on and be like, be nice to your friends.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, yeah.
Include people.
And you may be kidnapped by anyone by any moment.
Those were basically the two main lessons.
You know what I think the problem is, actually?
I think adolescence is too real.
I think if, like, some Fortnite characters or maybe, like, a couple guys from Minecraft, like, came onto your TV and were like, you shouldn't stab women to death.
Like, maybe that would resonate a little bit more with the kids.
But then Charlotte comes through with a shocking reveal for a charity that specifically focuses on drama.
Charlotte Gill writes, That's right.
The dastardly villain behind all of this was perhaps our most nationally beloved character actress, Sophie from Peepshow.
So Gil does this a lot, finding publicly available uncontroversial connections and sort of just making noise like she's uncovering a dark conspiracy.
But the insinuation was enough.
In the right-wing imagination, the show was now officially a government psyop.
No surprise then when we learn that the charity partnered with Adolescence, the group that helped launch it.
Tender received over £3 million in government contracts and grants over the last four years.
And yesterday, Tender's CEO met with the Prime Minister.
Starmer rejected a new inquiry into the grooming gang scandal.
But he's all in on crafting new policy and laws based on a work of literal fiction.
Government-funded, deliberately misleading, a carefully honed tool of indoctrination.
That is the last Paul Joseph Watson I'll play you, I promise.
He's hard to listen to.
He's hard to watch.
Yeah, they're like jump cuts, so there's like no pause between any word.
It's really grueling.
He just looks like it...
If you were talking to him in real life, that your face would just be, like, covered with skin.
You know, he just looks like a kind of guy who would just be spitting all over you.
I agree, but I don't think he ever leaves that flat, so it's not too much of a worry.
Yeah, his computer screen is just, like, dried specks.
Just dried specks of phlegm.
The Metasphere strikes back.
Perhaps the most surprising thing for me watching Adolescence was how much it differed from the chatter surrounding it, both positive and negative.
Despite being billed as peering into the dark heart of the Manosphere, Adolescence rarely talks about it directly.
The dramatic focus is much more character-based.
Apart from the scene where Detective Bascombe's son explains the dubious manosphere emojis, there is this one throwaway line.
"I think I've been in a book."
You all right?
Yeah, um...
We got all that Instagram stuff wrong.
What do you mean?
Katie was bullying Jamie.
Oh, no!
That's what it was.
Incel stuff, you know what that is.
Yeah, I do.
No, I don't know what that is.
What is it?
It's the, um, involuntary celibate stuff.
It's the Andrew Tate shite.
Oh, fucking hell.
I've heard the boys talking about him.
When a clip of this reached the Manosphere itself, it was widely mocked as evidence of the Creator's total ignorance.
And Andrew Tate's notorious incel, that's what he's being charged for in Romania, isn't it?
Not that I'm a fan of Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate, and they're in Parliament trying to get him extradited to Britain.
Andrew Tate extradited for being a virgin.
I love that clip because it's just so naked what this whole show is all about.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's that there are people saying things online that young men like.
We do not like that young men like this.
Therefore, we're going to make a television show where the man talking about this is a big, stinky, murder-face man.
Even though, again, I'm not a fan of Andrew Tate.
This is not what we should be condemning him for, and this is just being used to, again...
Condemning him for being a virgin.
Condemning him.
Oh.
My God.
They're like, a virgin?
Andrew Tate?
No, no, no.
He traffics women.
That's what he's being charged for, you fools.
Dude, Andrew Tate gets pussy by forcing them to be trafficked from one country to another.
You can't call this guy a virgin.
Oh, my God.
I feel just like I want to give up.
This is so...
Stupid.
Do they even realize how horrible they sound?
No.
Yeah, I think that's the impression I got watching that too, Jake.
I mean, yeah, obviously Andrew Tate is not a virgin.
The Romanian trafficking case against the influencer and his brother charges the pair with tricking women into thinking they're in a relationship with them before manipulating, threatening them into sex work, which is a tactic known by anti-trafficking charities as the lover boy method.
Having said that, I do find it funny when people from different factions of the manosphere act like there's this huge and obvious difference between their exact flavour of extremely online misogyny, or that ordinary people are somehow embarrassing themselves by not immediately grasping it.
Ultimately, to most regular adults who don't spend all day consuming this stuff, you know, Andrew Tate's incels stuff, it all looks repulsive and extreme and they don't have much desire to investigate further.
But none of that even really matters because the Andrew Tate incel shite line is quite deliberately meant to be anachronistic and emphasise precisely how out of touch the adults are with this world.
Even the Andrew Tate reference writer Jack Thorne says isn't meant to condemn the influencer so much as demonstrate the adult's cluelessness.
I thought this show was excellent.
I mean, watching it thinking about young children and things and you go like, wow, this is not the world I want them to grow up in.
Especially when you're dealing with...
Incel Culture, Manosphere.
I know Andrew Tate's name is mentioned in this, although you've said you don't really want the show to be dominated by that name.
It is mentioned in this show, but it's only ever mentioned by adults.
And that's really deliberate.
Because Andrew Tate is the way that adults understand this issue.
Whereas actually, the people who are doing the real damage are not him.
He's not taken seriously by kids.
Really.
You know, like, you know, there's a lot more pernicious presences out there that are the real damage.
You know, but it's not just about the parents, it's about everything.
It's societal, it's governmental.
Do you know what I mean?
You know, we need to be talking about male rage and how male rage has been enabled by social media.
So I'm just gonna do a really boring expert.
Quibble here.
I've seen Thorne say something like this a couple of times in interviews, that Tate isn't taken seriously by teenagers, and I do think I understand what he's getting at.
I don't think it's the full story.
It's true, and it's something that I think a lot of liberal commentators miss when looking at Tate's content, that a lot of it is deliberately funny.
That bizarre, over-the-top machismo thing he's got going on is meant to be a little bit silly, even tongue-in-cheek.
But that's not to say that the underlying messages he sends about wealth, power and women aren't very much still taken seriously by his audience.
In fact, I argue that the silliness is part of how he's managed to transmit his message so effectively, because content which has this tone of playful, bombastic fun will always spread further than a dead-eyed, monotone rant straight to camera.
This is something I went into in a bit more detail in Julian and I's ManClan episode about Andrew Tate, so please do go check that out if you find yourself frustrated that this little mini rant was so short.
Despite being a fairly prolific poster, Tate was somewhat slow to respond to the reference.
That's perhaps because he was too busy fleeing Romania with his brother to the United States, then turning around and fleeing back to Romania when they found themselves entangled in yet another criminal investigation led by the Florida Attorney General over there.
Hilariously, they spun this whole embarrassing debacle in the statement that said, innocent men don't hide.
When he finally did comment, it was through a very sanitized, un-Tate-like statement to Newsweek through his spokesperson.
The reference to Andrew Tate in adolescence is an attempt to pin broader societal issues on one individual, which is neither fair nor accurate.
Whilst online influence is a valid topic, it's unjust for the public to make him the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence.
I just love the idea of Andrew Tate talking about wider cultural and systemic factors.
I mean, it's just like so obviously not his voice.
He's like, this is definitely a problem in society that Andrew Tate has no responsibility for.
However, when actor Ashley Walters, who plays Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe in the show, get this interview in which he name-checked Tate.
I think one of the great things we can do as men is just set the example that to be vulnerable is okay.
We're talking about influences, right?
We're talking about the Andrew Tate's and whatever influence in young men.
We can influence young men just the same.
By continually bombarding them with those positive messages and letting them understand that to be vulnerable, you know, to cry, to talk to people about how you feel, to be in places, in women's spaces and be cool and stuff like that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Tate gave a strangely passive-aggressive response that mostly made reference to Walters' previous criminal record and musical career with the early noughties garage rap outfit So Solid crew.
Super disappointed Asher D sold out with bullshit that I caused stabbing as if I don't preach the total opposite, especially with a past like his.
Everyone sells their soul in the entertainment industry or you don't get the acting jobs.
He knows it's bullshit, could have stood on business, but was afraid of backlash.
Guess he isn't so solid after all.
Everyone sells their soul in the entertainment industry or you don't get the acting jobs.
I got a couple acting jobs and I definitely didn't sell my soul.
It's still very much a part of my body and I don't feel...
I really don't feel...
And there was a situation where I felt like I was selling my soul and I walked out of that situation.
I was still able to get...
No, and the idea of, like, selling your soul in this instance, just, like, not having a particularly positive view of Andrew Tate.
I mean, yeah, what theology is being worked with here?
Andrew Tate wasn't the only one in the alleged sex criminal community to have a take.
Russell Brand, the comedian-turned-actor-turned-rumble pundit, also popped up to give his usual unique combination of peace and love spiritual babble, which nonetheless manages to shoehorn in the usual hard right talking points.
A cultural artefact might tell a story that talks about poverty, decline, despair, loss of religious affiliation, breakdown of communities, because if you want to tell a story about Britain and violence...
Talk about them three little girls that were murdered in Southport.
That tells you a story about knife crime in Britain.
So what is the cultural artifact that's being elevated?
Is it a story about three little girls being murdered by a kid that was first generation?
I think was he Rwandan?
I don't know enough about the story.
But what I know is, is he weren't a white working class kid.
I know that.
Now, I'm not captivated by the subject of race.
Let me say it again because this might become a cultural artifact if it gets deployed.
I believe we're all part of one human family and our job here is to love and serve one another.
And the reason I know that is because it's in the Bible and I don't have to think about it myself because God tells me what to think instead of me making it up in my tiny little mind.
Oh boy, he has really...
I haven't seen him in a while.
He has really unbuttoned his shirt a couple more buttons.
Yeah, I also had this discovery recently because I did a guest appearance on a podcast which is called On Brand, which sort of deconstructs his weekly rambles, I guess.
And I also had a kind of a like, wow, he's got much more right wing since I...
Since I last checked in with him.
Yeah, I mean, I just love the kind of, you know, bringing up Axel Rudakopana, being like, he wasn't white, by the way.
But then doing this sort of, I don't care about race really at all.
It's like, well, why'd you bring it up then?
Yeah, and why did you go like, why did you say that the kid was like Rwandan if you didn't actually know?
You're like, I think he's Rwandan, but I'm not really, I'm not that familiar with the case.
He then went on to fly very close to the sun indeed, given he had been officially charged with rape, indecent assault and sexual assault by the Metropolitan Police just three days before this video was published.
The incel phenomena is in itself quite complicated because male and masculine archetypes were vilified so excessively that people stopped wondering what a man was and what a man is supposed to be.
The world of sex got very, very complicated.
What constitutes consent?
We all know what those rules are.
Anyone that's ever had sex knows what it is to be in a sexual dynamic.
And sexuality, like all animal power, has areas of nuance and complexity to it.
But in this time where masculinity itself was put on trial and vilified, any male archetype or cultural figure that benefits from the ongoing flow of male archetypes, and there's a few of those that you might want to list right now,
will be vilified.
Young men need role models.
They need male role models.
They need processes of initiation.
And when I say need, what I mean is this.
Throughout history, they've always been there.
Throughout history, you go to some tribe in the middle of nowhere that ain't been touched by culture.
At the age of 13, 14, boys are taken away from their mother, often wounded in some superficial way or another, to indicate that they're no longer boys but are, in fact, men.
When you have a culture that vilifies masculinity and infantilises the population, wanting people to drink soda pop their whole bleeding life and play on video games their whole bleeding life, they don't know what it is to be a man.
They don't have their father take them out and say, this is what I used to do, son, now you're going to do it.
This is your job.
This is your role.
This is the way we operate.
Part of our function is we protect the community, and in particular, protect and honor women.
This is a guy who's got no sinus problems, I can tell you right now, because you can't talk.
Like that, without breathing.
He's mastered circular breathing, but instead of playing an instrument, he's just yelling at the camera for like 45 seconds straight.
I didn't love that he talked about sex and said animal power.
That doesn't sound good.
No, I mean, it's actually, it's a bit of a shame that this is an audio-only podcast, because seeing the minute he brought up consent and sexual power, just seeing both of you guys' eyebrows just like shoot up, it would have been a great reaction.
Yeah, I don't like that he was, you know, what's wrong with video games?
I mean, I think I am going to play video games all my bleeding life.
And I think I'm also probably not going to like hurt somebody or potentially like be charged with a crime as he has.
So it's just funny.
Like, I remember watching Russell Brand and like get him to the Greek, which actually is so funny because it has both Russell Brand and Diddy in it.
Wow.
But like.
Here's a guy who was, everybody loved him.
I mean, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, like, everybody loved him because he was, like, he really had it made.
He was this kind of, like, kooky, like, British character actor who was, you know, really good at kind of making fun of that, like, bohemian sort of, like, phony, you know, burner kind of person.
And, like, look what he's done with it.
Like, people spend their whole lives trying to get to, like, that point in their acting careers.
I don't know.
It's just crazy how time will turn something so innocent into something so, I don't know, just gross feeling.
I was kind of interested by what he was saying about, you know, men needing role models and needing to be initiated because it sounds to me like Russell Brand has maybe been getting a little bit Robert Bly-pilled.
Robert Bly, for those of you who aren't familiar, was one of the founding leaders of the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
The movement's central thesis was that modern men in the West weren't being properly initiated into masculinity by their community elders as they would have been in the pre-industrial era and as a result were becoming dangerous to their community.
Once again, this is something Julian and I covered in more detail in ManClan if you're interested in hearing more about this.
And we actually had a bit of a disagreement because I was a bit more sympathetic with it than he was.
I promise when I started writing this episode, I really wasn't expecting this to be such an advert for ManClan.
No, it's good.
It's just that relevant.
It is.
And, you know, I think it's interesting because like...
You know, I don't know, 100, 200 years ago, when life expectancy was a lot shorter, you know, 13 was more like 25. You know, I can understand the argument that the milestone means something more because people typically lived,
you know, late 30s or early 40s.
You were considered, that was like, you know, a fairly comprehensive life.
But nowadays, I mean, it reminds me of this haiku from this book that we used to keep in our bathroom growing up.
It was called Jewish Haikus.
And the poem was, it was like the day of my bar mitzvah.
It's like, today I am a man.
Tomorrow I return to the eighth grade.
And it's like a perfect example of like, we go through these rituals, these sort of things to signify we've become an adult.
But really, we're just children still.
And emotionally and developmentally wise, like...
I can tell you that after my bar mitzvah, when I returned to the eighth grade, I was still very much an eighth grader.
No, that's a really good point that I guess there was a time when 13 would have been when you were probably starting work of some description, do you know?
But our kind of initiation rituals that we have these days kind of don't quite fit with the fact that you are still very much expected to act like a child still at that age.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Centering in self-voices.
One thing that often gets missed in discussions of adolescence is that Jamie isn't actually an incel, at least not from the information that we're given.
There's an interesting scene in episode 3 which centres around his conversation with a female forensic psychologist.
There, he gets interrogated about both his views on women and his social media activity.
And while it seems like he's familiar with the incel subculture's views of women, and even sympathises with some of them, he doesn't personally identify as a member.
What do these emojis mean, Jamie?
What do the kidney beans mean?
They're kidney beans, right?
She's pretending like I'm part of one of those truth groups.
What truth groups?
The ones that say that women don't want us, we don't care.
Are you part of those?
No.
But you know what they say.
Yeah, because everyone kept on going on about with incel stuff, so I had a look, but I didn't like it.
And was you being an incel what she was saying with all of these?
Yeah.
Could you explain them all?
Want love, won't get it.
My throat's killing.
A red pill exploding.
That's the same as the red pill.
And then that's an 80-20 thing.
What's an 80-20 thing?
Where 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men.
But I don't think they're right about that, though.
Now, you might argue that Jamie is simply doing what's known as hiding his power level here.
After all, he even says he agrees with what is, at least in the show, described a little simplistically as the primary incel principle, the 80-20 rule.
But I'd argue that young men who think like this, sympathising with incel viewpoints while not signing up wholesale to the ideology, are actually a much larger demographic than self-described incels themselves.
One part that I think the show does really well is by highlighting what more commonplace parts of Jamie's teenage personality make him especially susceptible to rhetoric like this.
He has cripplingly low self-esteem, calling himself ugly, and this makes him both an odd mixture of vulnerable and aggressive with the female psychologist.
Do you think girls are attracted to you?
No. Of course not.
Why of course not?
Because I'm...
I'm ugly.
How does that make you feel?
Aren't you supposed to say I'm not ugly?
What I think isn't important.
Yeah, you don't say the things normal people say, do you?
Well, how would you feel if I did say you're not ugly?
I just don't know why you don't say the things normal people say.
You thought I should have contradicted you when you said your dad was ashamed of you and you think I should contradict you now when you tell me you think yourself ugly.
I don't know.
I'm interested in the fact that you think you're ugly, Jamie.
Yeah, I'm...
I'm fascinated.
I'm interested in it because what you think is more important to me than what is true, okay?
So how do you feel about being ugly?
How would you feel?
You don't know.
You're not.
You're pretty.
This isn't about me, Jamie.
You don't think you're pretty.
I'm not the interesting person in this room.
You don't think you're pretty.
You do think I'm ugly.
I haven't passed judgement on either of those things.
If you think about it, for very good reason.
Oh, for very good reason.
I want to understand you.
To understand my understanding of my understanding of my understanding.
Yes.
The other bloke is much more easy.
Okay.
Him checking wherever I understand was much easier.
Wherever I understand what I did.
Look, look, I didn't fucking say that!
You fucking put your words in me mouth!
He's like a fucking trap in here!
You! Jamie!
What was that?
Hey?
What the fuck was that?
Signal away like a fucking queen, yeah?
These were some of the best scenes, I thought, in the show.
The fear from the psychologist felt so authentic, and you have this amazing one-take performance from this, you know, really young...
I mean, this is really, really tough to pull off in a way that isn't laughable or just really cheesy or totally misses the mark.
It is really tough to be that consistent performance-wise without getting to edit.
During these scenes was kind of, for me, when I was watching the show, when I was like, oh, there is something really special here and worth talking about.
Yeah, I agree.
I think this was the most kind of electrifying episode for me as well.
Because before that point, he's sort of just being played.
He's playing a scared little boy.
Yeah.
Do you know?
It's like in...
Primal fear, when Edward Norton finally, when you finally get to see who Edward Norton's character really is.
I felt similar about, you know, I felt similar about that during this scene.
Yeah, and I think for anyone who's familiar with incels and the subculture, I think it's a really recognizable portrayal.
He's both hostile and self-loathing and pitiable, but kind of very threatening underneath it all as well.
It's so interesting to me how the critics of this show made it so one-sided because over the course of this episode and just thinking about the show and talking about it, it's so clearly about two things.
It is about, A, male rage, young male rage.
Whether you want to say white rage or not, I think you could make a fair point either way.
But it's also about bullying and cyberbullying and labeling people.
There's actually two things going on here, and I think that you could have easily watched this if you didn't have something to defend within yourself.
You could watch this show and be like, wow, it's about two things.
It's about online bullying and it's about like male rage and young people's propensity for violence, which is absolutely something that is way more prevalent in our culture now, or at least it's way more in the public sort of conversation about young people committing these like horrible
acts of violence.
You know, and so to take away that it's like, oh, this is it's white.
It's attacking these male influencers.
It's attacking masculinity.
You're kind of missing like half of the content in some ways.
Jamie, this is our last session.
What?
But what I would encourage you to do, whatever happens next, is take advantage of any mental health services that are offered to you.
Why?
I think you'll benefit from coming back.
No, I won't.
Well, that's just what I think.
And then you come back.
You see me?
Unfortunately, I'm needed elsewhere.
What?
It's just like fucking honesty.
I hope you take what I said seriously.
Thanks for your time.
I'll ask Frank to come back in now.
Thanks for my time!
Frank and honesty, I'm grateful that you spoke to me.
You think I'm being honest?
Are you going to tell the judge all that?
I think you've spoken to me with honesty, yes, but all I'm advising the judge on is your understanding.
My understanding, yes.
It doesn't seem like a proper goodbye.
It is.
It doesn't seem like one.
Yeah, that's enough.
Come on.
No, no, no.
We haven't finished.
We have, thank you.
No, no.
Can I ask you something?
Yes.
Do you like me?
I was here as a professional, Jamie.
Don't you think like that then?
My job was to assess me as a professional.
Not like that, not fancying you.
Just as a person.
Okay, so come on.
Don't you even like me a bit?
What did you think about me then?
Decide, come on!
This was really useful.
Don't you go fucking tell anyone that, didn't you?
Don't you dare!
Come on, come on, come on.
Don't you go fucking get the fuck out of me!
Don't you dare!
Hey, hey, hey!
The fuck?
Don't you even like me a bit?
Jamie, come on, ma 'am, please.
What did you think about me now?
Okay, okay.
Tell him I don't have a mind!
Tell him I don't have a mind!
Damn.
You know what?
Amazing unsung hero here in performance is the guy who plays the guard.
This was something that struck me when I was watching the show.
The way that he acts reminds you that Jamie is still a child.
And that's because he's kind of gentle and friendly with him.
And I think that that was a really amazing choice in both the writing and how that actor portrayed it.
It's something that's kind of like a lot of people probably won't think about because the main event is really Jamie's relationship with the psychologist and this amazing performance you get from the young actor during this whole episode.
But I remember watching and thinking that the guard...
Had a really kind of tough job to do as well because there's something that comes across that's like, oh no, this kid is, he's in jail or he's in this juvenile detention center, but he's still a child.
And the way that the guard sort of is gentle with him and treats him, you know, kind of nicely, you know, he doesn't treat him like a prisoner and he doesn't treat him like a criminal.
I thought it was like a very nuanced relationship and something that was worth noting.
Yeah, it's actually like a feature of the show, which I haven't really gone into here because it's not super relevant for our purposes.
But there's a bit in that episode where they explain that there wasn't sort of room for him at the youth prison.
So he's actually in a mental institution, isn't he?
And he's complaining about that.
He's like, I don't belong here with these people.
Right, with all these crazy kids, yeah.
Yeah, which I think that choice is deliberately made, again, to kind of just sort of show that Jamie is kind of falling through the cracks.
All of these failing institutions, you know, from the school to the prison, that all of these places are just kind of not really operating correctly.
And that's something else that, like, none of these right-wing influencers are picking up on, which is the third sort of aspect of the show.
You have the cyberbullying, you have young male rage, but then you also have, like, the complete and utter failure of these institutions, which is something that you would think that they would be interested in because it could offload, and in some ways does offload some of the blame.
You know, from the internet culture in which Jamie, you know, immersed himself.
Adolescents had such a human and sympathetic portrayal of Jamie as a lost and lonely young boy that it made me wonder what the incels themselves thought.
Did they recognize some parts of themselves in Jamie?
Or would they subscribe to the view of more mainstream right-wing commentators that the show was intended to demonize them?
The answer was kind of both.
As could be predicted, given how prevalent a claim it was over the manosphere in general, there were plenty of complaints that Jamie had been race-swapped by what the users called Jewflix.
But there was also a particularly incel-coded version of that argument which argued that it was incels, not white boys, who were being unfairly blamed for violence against women, when the problem there was supposedly much more likely to be sex-havers, as one review put it.
The acting is good, not gonna lie, and it's only four episodes.
It didn't give me laughs, but at times it made me shake my fucking head.
Even though it did not have the all-men-bad formula, it still has that blue pill trope that incels are violent, when in fact most black pillers are too introverted and high-strung to carry out violent acts.
Normies are statistically more violent.
So it's kind of just made me laugh because it's just like the exact same argument as like all of those white right-wing commentators were making where they're like, we're not the problem.
You need to be looking at black kids.
And the incels are going, we're not the problem.
You need to be looking at the normies.
Others were less impressed.
It disturbs me how acclaimed and popular this series is, despite being so inaccurate.
It was obviously astroturf by the UK government, but it is chilling how effective it has been as propaganda.
It is actually informing policy, and they are talking about showing it in schools.
Adolescence is completely fictitious, but they are treating it like a documentary.
We are now being implicated in fictional crimes.
It is basically blood libel.
Oh.
But, like, all, you know, when we watched shit in school growing up, and maybe kids today have it different, but, like, it was always fictional stuff.
It was always parables.
I mean, everything!
Even if you go back to the Bible, like, so much of that stuff and so much of these things that we learn in, like, religious texts that are supposed to inform morality are parables.
It's fiction.
They're not actually supposed to be based on real events.
It's a story in some ways makes things easier to swallow because you can pull the message out as opposed to have to, like, you know, sort of weigh it against the re- The general consensus seemed to be that the show was anti-incel propaganda,
a term I found quite funny given how hostile and off-putting this community manages to be without any outside help from the state.
Still, there were some users who found themselves surprised by how sympathetically Jamie was portrayed, though funnily enough many of them took this to be some kind of mistake on behalf of the writers rather than intentional.
There were also quite a few comments that praised the show for depicting Katie as having bullied Jamie, which they considered an honest portrayal of the cruelty and shallowness of women as a whole.
Actually, this was a fairly common take across the manosphere, I found.
I want to come at it with the angle that women don't want to discuss.
And they don't want to discuss because I've gone online, I've gone on X, I've gone on Insta and YouTube, and I'm looking at the response to this and all of it from women.
Is around how the next generation of men are the issue and we're all being radicalized to be violent towards women and yada yada.
And they fail to notice.
There was one aspect of balance the show tried to give and portray is that how brutal and horrible women can be to unattractive boys and men.
It's mentioned how this...
The character, the female, the girl character that was murdered, she was bullying this boy, and she harshly, very harshly rejected him when he plucked up the courage to approach her.
Now, again, this should go without saying, nothing justifies murder, obviously.
Nothing justifies you as a man getting physical and losing your rag and losing your temper and getting emotional with a woman.
But...
Even for the sake of women's own safety, I think they should always let a guy down gently, man.
Be rude.
Where's your common decency?
I did a video on this titled Women Hate Incels.
It is incredible how disrespectful, rude and demeaning some women, not all, I wouldn't even say most, but a large enough percentage of some women can be so horrible to guys that they're just not attracted to and that generally tend to be this incel type.
Although, of course, several users complained that the actor, Owen Cooper, was too popular or good-looking to be a believable incel.
I saw one commenter refer to him as a Chadlet, which was a new one for me.
Cute little term, I thought.
All the same, it was clear that at least some users did recognize themselves in the show.
One commenter wrote, I binge-watched it.
Honestly, it wasn't really that bad.
Although it was blatant anti-incel propaganda, I at least appreciated that it was psychologically accurate.
I like how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia and constantly fluctuated between being troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power.
Like most movies and TV, I kinda wish the fantasy women depicted were more like that in real life.
Like anime, they were all depicted as being caring, strong, and competent people.
Except the town trollop that got murdered, lol.
I also like how every episode felt like a separate but related chapter.
Episode 3 was by far the best episode.
The actress was amazing, and so was the incel killer.
The actress was skilled at being a manipulative little whore, yet also having a tinge of disgust at the surface throughout.
she has to hide just enough till she finally traps the incel.
There was something about the way the psychologist was constantly creeped out and disgusted by all the men there, even the guards that seemed spot on.
Conclusion.
I disagree with the vast majority of the Wright's critiques of adolescence.
It's obvious to me, for example, that nearly all of the qualities in Jamie that right-wing or manosphere commentators claimed were being demonized, such as his whiteness, his family background, or even his loneliness, were actually intended to do the opposite.
The writers wanted viewers to be able to see themselves in him and his family and appreciate the complexity of their situation.
They feared that otherwise audiences might dismiss the problem as being located with a separate, other class of people, which, given the furious responses of various commentators doing exactly that, it seems that they were largely vindicated.
Having said that, I did think that James Walton, the TV critic for The Spectator, was on to something when he said that despite the series' claim to gritty veracity, it was actually something closer to a horror film.
And also, I think that might have been part of its appeal, not just as a sort of thesis, but also why people enjoyed it so much, because in a way it's a kind of horror film, and what horror films have always done is played on, obviously, people's darkest fears.
Yes. In a slightly entertaining fear.
And in this case, I think one of...
Our darkest fears is we don't know what the hell our children are up to on the internet.
And I don't.
And it is a bit of a fear.
So I think part of its appeal was that it was titillating.
I think that shouldn't be titillating for parents.
This means that every time the show has to choose between factual accuracy and what makes for great drama, they choose the latter.
It's more frightening that Jamie has shown no previous interest in violence, because it makes viewers wonder what's lurking in the minds of their own children.
But it's not particularly accurate to how incel or teenage murderers operate in real life.
As Jason Okuyunde, writing for the London Review of Books, writes, I'm not saying that the right-wing commentators are correct in wanting Jamie to have been replaced by a character with a background like Rudika Barna or Santamu.
But the fact is that most teenage killers are nothing like Jamie, who has no history of offending or indications of propensity towards violence beyond spending too much time in his bedroom tapping away at his computer.
18-year-old Nicholas Prosper, who murdered his mother and younger siblings, was obsessed with mass shootings at U.S. high schools.
Daniel Hussain, who had just turned 18 when he murdered his sisters Biba Henry and Nicole Smallman, had written a demonic contract signed with his own blood.
Ruta Cabana, who murdered three children at a dance class in Southport, was obsessed with extreme violent material and had a kill list.
One of Brianna Gay's murderers, Scarlett Jenkinson, had a fixation with serial killers.
The other, Eddie Ratcliffe, a fascination for knives.
The defense barrister for Sentamu, who murdered 15-year-old Eliane Andam with a kitchen knife, described his violent streak as coming from his lived experiences from when he was a little boy.
Teenage killers, in other words, tend to be profoundly disturbed, detached in their home lives, and fascinated with extreme violence.
In some instances, parents have been well aware of their children's radicalization, but their attempts to get help for them have been futile.
Now, this isn't to say that I don't believe a boy like Jamie could be at risk from the manosphere in real life, but I think that by focusing mainly on the most extreme acts of violence that erupt from that space, we risk overlooking the more ordinary, everyday hostility towards women that it cultivates,
and the quieter but still damaging effects that hostility has.
To me, the most significant danger of the manosphere going mainstream has never been young boys being transformed into murderers overnight.
It's that they'll absorb a worldview that slowly corrodes their relationships, their politics, and their souls.
Of course, that's not necessarily the stuff of hard-hitting drama, and none of my boring expert quibbles would even really be a problem if it weren't for the fact that adolescence is being politicised beyond what I think the series can really sustain.
Given the huge amount of publicity around it, our state institutions have clearly felt the pressure to look like they're doing something.
The problem is, nobody is entirely sure what.
Some of the people involved in the show have mentioned banning social media for under-16s.
It's an idea that I would probably have said was patently unworkable a few years ago, but does actually seem to be moving ahead in Australia, although there's still well-founded doubts as to how well it will work.
Some critics have pointed out teenagers will just end up using less regulated spaces, which will almost certainly host nastier content than the main platforms.
But they may not even need to do that.
YouTube is notably exempt from the ban, for example, and that's hardly a platform that's lacking in Manosphere content.
The show has clearly tapped into some real and not totally unjustified fears.
Even Manosphere influences themselves commenting on the show, Powerful stuff.
Really excellent episode.
It's very interesting to have something like this become kind of a cultural phenomenon, and then the characters, or, you know...
The internet culture that's kind of in the spotlight, you know, being forced to kind of comment on it because it's become this cultural thing and how it's being absorbed by the government and our ability to interact with fiction more easily and readily than the real world.
I mean, there's a whole lot.
Going on here without even getting into the stylistic choices and, you know, incredible art that's being created, you know, within the sort of world of the show.
So there's a lot going on here, and you put it together in a way that I think got me, at least, to think about all of these different aspects coming together over this one show, and it's just a reminder of how fiction and art can really spawn these much larger and more important conversations.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I mean, I think, yeah, whatever my quibbles were, where there were bits that I was a bit like, oh, I don't know if that would happen like that.
It's clearly been effective, you know?
It's clearly been effective in getting people to discuss this stuff, even if, yeah, I'm not particularly sure what the state reaction is really doing, other than just sort of feeling like they need to be seen to be doing something.
It's kind of quite a funny relationship between, yeah, TV shows and the government.
Jason Okoyundi, the writer who I quoted in the...
It was actually only,
yeah, it only seemed to like really grab.
People's attention and the Prime Minister who was back then, Rishi Sunak, only sort of, you know, kind of said, you know, we're going to right the wrongs and we're going to, you know, do this kind of inquiry when, yeah, when there was a BBC drama about it.
You know, even though everyone knew that it had been wrong before, that these people's innocence had been conclusively proven, that was kind of what spurred some actual actions, some actual justice for so many of those people was the BBC drama.
It's kind of funny how it can affect politics that way.
I think it's easier for us to be emotionally affected by drama and fiction and film and TVs than it is in real life.
You know, oftentimes you see in movies and stuff when people are witnesses to horrific acts of violence or some kind of, you know, insane disaster.
They fall to the ground weeping and screaming and crying, and yet when the same thing happens to them in real life, they stand there with a blank expression, unable to move, they don't know what to do.
You know, the way we react to things in real life is so unpredictable and so different, I think.
Across all our different types of personalities and backgrounds and stuff.
And in some ways, fiction is easier to interact with because there seems to be kind of an agreed-upon sort of standard of behavior that...
That makes sense to us, whereas the real world does not.
So it doesn't really surprise me, actually.
And given all of the work that we've done over all of these years, so many people, especially people who are terminally online, process emotion and their belief system through movies and TV shows.
And we really do have kind of like movie brains, all of us.
I want to observe, like, this is, I mean, this is really not a new phenomenon.
Like, fiction has often been used to sort of advocate for social issues.
Like, prior to the Civil War in the United States, the work that really got a lot of, like, white Northerners to understand the brutality of slavery was Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is a fictional account.
And, you know, in the early 20th century is, you know, what helped a lot of people understand the inhumane working conditions and unsanitary sort of packing conditions of like meat packing plants was a work of fiction, which is like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
So this is, I mean, this is just a normal human thing is that, you know, the power of fiction and the power of fiction.
I wonder if there were pro-slavery people at the time who were Uncle Tom's Cabin as a psyop.
Is that something that we've just developed to guard against our emotions being used against us in that way?
I don't know.
I'm sure they didn't have language like PSYOP like we do now.
But I bet – yes, of course.
I bet that this is a dirty trick.
They're trying to manipulate us to have sympathy for slaves.
This is not reality.
I mean there's always going to be – it's like – like I said, when somebody tells you something about yourself that is true and you don't like it.
You will do everything you can to try to keep yourself from having to admit that there's this, like, ugly thing.
There's this thing inside of us because nobody wants to believe that they're a bad person at the end of the day.
Nobody wants to think that they're broken inside.
You know, we're always trying to look at these outside sources to explain away and give context to these feelings or emotions that we have that are inexplicable.
It's just humans are very complicated and reality is crazy and it's unpredictable and it's, you know, it's hard to make sense of everything in this, like, crazy world.
But movies and TV, you know, we are disconnected from it enough that we don't take it.
And we can sort of, I don't know, like wrap our minds around concepts or pieces of history or ideologies that we normally wouldn't be able to.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
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That's, you know.
We've also got a website.
That's qaapodcast.com.
And Annie, where can people find more of your work?
You can follow me on Blue Sky, which is mostly where I post these days.
The good place.
And also, like Annie was saying throughout the episode, that premium subscription, by the way, on Patreon will give you access to our miniseries, like ManClan, that Annie was referencing.
So if you're interested in hearing more of Annie talk about the thing that she is a doctor in, you should subscribe for those $5 and check out that show, ManClan.
There's some other miniseries, too.
There's Spectral Voyager, which is kind of like Unsolved Mysteries but Responsible.
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If you've been thinking about doing it, you know, go ahead, take the leap, check it out.
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listener until next week may the deep dish bless you and keep you you you you you Oh, oh, oh.
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How does the next person know when...
Why have we paused it again?
Next, you don't understand how incredible this is.
Like, this is all one video.
You've told me.
I would say easily five minutes every bit of this episode.
Yes, but how?
Like, there's no director in this shot.
There's nothing going on.
How do they even know?
Look, watch.
How did he know to do that at the right time?
Someone's told him.
How do you even know the camera was on him?
'Cause there's one camera in this whole thing.
Right, now watch, it's gonna follow this fella.
It is absolutely incredible.
How can you not understand how incredible that is?
I get it, but I've not even enjoyed the show, because every two seconds...
I don't think you appreciate how good this is.
Video point of view is 10 out of 10. As a videographer.
