Adolescence: Misogyny Isn’t a Mystery

It was one of those nights that ended in algorithmic surrender. I was scrolling through Netflix and Adolescence, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s highly streamed drama, had been sitting on the Top Ten list like an unspoken dare. When I heard the UK’s education ministry had plans to show it in schools as a tale against online misogyny, I finally gave in.

The series opens with an interesting aesthetic take — all one-shots and naturalistic angles, a documentary-like style that reads like it’s trying to pass off as socially urgent cinema. At its centre is Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old who, we learn in the opening episode, has killed his classmate. The murder is not the mystery here — the motive is. Adolescence is more interested in excavating why this happened than treating the act itself with the horror it demands. This, ultimately, is its greatest failure.

Let’s name the crime: femicide. A girl is dead because a boy thought her life was worth less than his pain. But Adolescence can’t seem to say the word. Instead, it offers us Jamie. Jamie crying. Jamie folding into himself. Jamie as victim. Jamie as case study. Jamie, endlessly. The girl — whose name you might have to Google after — is offered barely a silhouette. She exists in the series as absence, as afterthought, as justification for a boy’s emotional architecture. This is not subversion. This is erasure.

Graham and Thorne’s intention — to explore male vulnerability and the toxic conditions that turn boys into perpetrators — is evident. But the good intent does not make up for the narrative imbalance. The series, for all its ambition, walks a tiresome path: Let’s understand the boy. The result is a kind of emotional laundering of a violent act. It frames misogyny as unfortunate, sad, even poetic but not dangerous. Jamie is the kind of boy who asks for extra marshmallows in his hot chocolate — a detail meant to disarm. After nearly throwing the cup at his psychiatrist in a fit of rage, he mumbles an apology. The scene lingers for empathy to settle in — or at least, that seems to be the intention. And yes, male creators have every right to explore the male experience — but not at the expense of silencing the girl whose life was taken.

Adolescence mentions terms like incel, manosphere, and Andrew Tate but more so name-drops these words like hashtags. But beyond that, they remain unexplored. The incel (involuntary celibate) community, rooted in resentment towards women and often glorifying violence, is mentioned but never unpacked. The manosphere — a cluster of online spaces where toxic masculinity thrives and misogyny is disguised as self-improvement — is painted in vague strokes. Even Andrew Tate, a figure who has built an empire off of hypermasculine posturing and anti-women rhetoric, becomes more of a reference point than a framework for critique. These online ecosystems that radicalize boys and foster hatred against women are treated as backdrop, not battleground. DS Misha Frank, the female police officer in the case, is the only voice asking briefly about the girl’s story but is sidelined before she can open that door. The show’s refusal to meaningfully imagine her interiority, her family, or her world, is not just a creative oversight. It is a political one.
The real tragedy is not just the murder. It’s the story’s failure to name it for what it is: a symptom of patriarchal violence that kills girls and women, again and again, with alarming banality. When media like Adolescence fail to frame femicide as systemic — and instead isolate it as a tragic anomaly — they perpetuate the same structures they think they’re critiquing.

Yes, the school scenes felt eerily real — digital detachment, teachers flailing in front of a generation shaped by Reddit threads and TikTok tribalism. Yes, the portrayal of a system unable to comprehend the extent of its failure was compelling. But compelling isn’t enough. Not when the cost of omission is another silenced girl.

We don’t need more stories that try to understand why men hate women. We need stories that scream it is wrong. That this hatred is fatal. That it does not need empathy. And like too many of the institutions it attempts to critique, Adolescence ultimately fails the girls it never truly sees. It leaves the viewer to sit with Jamie’s actions, to weigh them, to maybe even forgive them — but when femicide is so often socially silenced, a story like this needs more than ambiguity; it needs a stance. The series gives us every reason to understand the boy — his home, his hurt, his rage — but we never even get the chance to meet the girl he killed.