We Need to Talk About Netflix’s 'Adolescence'

Spoiler warning: This article discusses the events of episode 3 in Adolescence.

Netflix’s recent 4-episode show Adolescence is an exploration into how young boys today are influenced by some dangerous messages fed to them by social media. Particularly, it shows how kids think as a result of manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, who was name-dropped in the show.

Episode 3 brilliantly demonstrates the line of thinking young boys fall victim to as a result of the manosphere. As a man who grew up with manosphere influences myself, to say that it was relatable would be an understatement.

Fortunately for me, I escaped the mental trappings of misogyny and self-victimization before anyone else was irreparably hurt. The same cannot be said about the character Jamie (13 years old) in the show. Let’s dive into the psychology reflected in the interview between Jamie and his therapist, an adult woman.

I recognize that there are some important themes well worth exploring about the therapist character and her reactions to Jamie’s emotional outbursts, but those themes will be mostly outside the scope of this piece.

Here are some of the most important points about Jamie that stood out to me:

Jamie is attracted to women and says he thinks they aren’t attracted to him.
He says it’s because he’s ugly.
He thinks the therapist interviewing him is pretty, objectively speaking, and shows signs of resentment about it.
It’s clear that he feels powerless compared to her because of this and lashes out at her in what is clearly a compensatory move. He wants to feel powerful because he feels powerless.

Through my work, I try to nip this problem in the bud by informing men that their dating problems aren’t a result of them being “ugly.”

[Y]ou think of yourself as ugly. To you, it makes sense to think this way because you have been rejected so many times by so many girls, and only ugly people get rejected, right?

From your male point of view, the first thing that determines whether or not you’re attracted to a girl is if you find her physically appealing. If you don’t find her appearance attractive, there is almost zero chance for you to want to date her, right? And, if you think she’s hot, there is almost nothing she can do to make you not feel physically attracted to her. She could be a crazy racist who believes that vaccines give you autism, but if she’s physically beautiful, there will always be some part of you that will make you want to sleep with her or go on at least one date with her to see what the possibilities are. You might think that, maybe if she can stop being a racist and learn some science, you’d be willing to try to make it work. Physical beauty might make you give even the most disgusting and immoral human beings at least a second thought. Looks are just that powerful. You assume that girls operate in this same exact way when it comes to how they feel about boys and men, so you rationalize having been rejected as you being ugly. A lot of young boys harbor this same misconception.

The truth is that most women’s attraction to men operates a lot more holistically, meaning that a woman can feel attraction to a man if he is very appealing in some way, even if he is unappealing in another way. For example, a woman can actually feel attracted to an ugly, short, fat, bald man if he has other things going for him. In fact, women are so different from men in this regard that, sometimes, a woman can completely lose attraction for a guy she thinks is absolutely gorgeous if he makes just one wrong move. Believe it or not, hot guys get rejected, too.

A man can look exactly like a woman’s number one celebrity crush, and she can feel like she’s falling head over heels in love for him. But, if he says just one thing that turns her off, there’s a very real possibility that she could never look at him the same way ever again. Every time she is reminded of him from that point forward, she could feel dry and disgusted when she once felt attracted and excited.

A woman can feel absolutely nothing for a man one day and eventually warm up to him with excitement and affection because of how he behaves. She can also be smitten over a man enough to dedicate pages upon pages about him in her diary, yet be completely bored of him the next day because of how he behaves.

Of course, some men operate in this same way, but for various reasons, this phenomenon is a lot more common and pronounced in women than it is in men.

— Excerpt from Never Lonely: The Uncensored Guide on How to Attract and Be Loved by Women

The downward spiral of messed up thinking that Jamie demonstrates all started with a misconception about attraction. It’s a common misconception I once believed as well. It’s an incredibly disempowering misconception that does indeed lead to a lot of the messed up thinking that exists today in the real world.

Some other notes I took on the episode:

Traditional therapeutic talk methods aren’t proving to function so smoothly with Jamie, an issue commonly seen with boys and men.
Why? We aren’t conditioned to talk about our feelings because it can be seen as relinquishing even more power.
Therapeutic talk can make us feel even more vulnerable, and it’s hard to allow ourselves to feel more vulnerable when we already feel powerless. Cats only show their bellies when they feel like there’s no threat, when they feel safe.

We will feel resistant to relinquishing more power when we already feel powerless as a result of feeling undesirable. Adolescence showcases this sort of psychology masterfully.

“Red pill” content by influencers like Andrew Tate signals to these young boys and men that they can take the power back through toxic messages rooted in misogyny. Needless to say, it’s unfortunately an extremely appealing message.

I believe the answer to heal this divide is to provide boys and men with resources that empower them in dating from a position of love rather than hate. It’s a pretty big endeavor I try to take through my work here.

Let’s talk about how Jamie felt about Katie.

Jamie murdered his classmate Katie. This isn’t an unrealistic representation of the real world consequences that have stemmed from the manosphere. Laura Bates has documented many similar cases in Men Who Hate Women.

Let’s break down some of the things Jamie said about Katie in episode 3:

He said he asked out Katie while she was “weak” after everyone started calling her a “slag” and “flat,” saying that it was a “clever” move. To ask her out when everyone else didn’t like her. “Her weakness made her more gettable, was your theory,” the therapist summarized.
He felt the need to resort to such tactics because there’s no way he would feel confident in himself under any normal circumstances.

Therein lies the issue in so many real life cases, and a central issue I discuss in the chapter about consent in my book:

One common case I see time and time again, but don’t see being discussed very often, is a guy who believes that he must trick a woman into bed, or trick a woman into liking him, and he can’t imagine a reality in which a woman would happily choose to have sex with him out of her own free will. This is due to a combination of low self-esteem and a socially programmed belief that women view sex in a negative way. These sorts of beliefs cannot coexist with proper beliefs about consent in the same mind without significant cognitive dissonance.

These guys have a deeply seated belief that they are inherently unattractive, and that the only way to experience anything sexual would be through nonconsensual means. These sorts of beliefs are so prevalent that you will often see ad copy in our industry that revolves around robbing women of their agency, and those ads will have disturbingly high click-through rates. So much of the marketing language from pickup artists involves using words such as “trick” and emphasizing potentially problematic phrases such as “triggering hard-wired responses in her brain,” as if women could be programmed like robots without free will.

As boys, these guys were not raised to have any confidence in their own desirability or value as a partner. This low self-esteem is often perpetuated by their own voluntary negative psychological feedback loops that they take comfort in. In other words, they will consciously choose to keep believing that they are inherently unattractive, and seek evidence in their world to fortify that belief, while ignoring any evidence to the contrary. This choice reinforces a stable sense of reality that they’re used to.
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These same guys often tend to buy into the idea that men like sex better than women do, or some variation of “women don’t like sexual things.” This idea can easily be ingrained into our brains during the formative years of our youth when we see both younger girls and older women reacting more negatively to sexual subjects than men do. A young boy might tell a sexual joke and his male peers may roar with laughter while his female peers will disparage him in disgust even if said joke was not actually degrading toward the opposite sex. Women and girls will often react more negatively to sexual subjects, especially in more conservative cultures, because of a self-defense mechanism called self-marginalization, formed in response to an oppressive societal system that chastises women for not being sexually pure. However, young boys generally do not have the intellectual capacity to take such complex sociological factors into consideration when forming their beliefs about gender differences.

The combination of these two factors (low self-esteem and the belief that women are fundamentally less sexual than men) can often lead to young boys developing pessimistic attitudes about their sexual futures. The thought of any woman actually being sexually interested in them will hardly ever occur to these boys. And, for reasons both biological and societal, during and after puberty, they will still feel an immense pressure to initiate sexual activity with the women they are attracted to. However, if their entire belief system leads to the conclusion that any sexual activity they could possibly engage in would be nonconsensual, this will sometimes lead to them feeling tempted to perpetrating sexual harassment or assault.

Even if these boys temper their urges in order to conform with the rules of polite society, they still might end up thinking that engaging in sexual activity with women would need to involve tricking the women into it somehow, which is in direct opposition to a healthy and consensual sexual interaction. This is why there constantly seems to be an air of manipulation around much of the existing pickup artist literature. For example, many self-proclaimed gurus teach the concept of “frame control” in a way much akin to gaslighting rather than the healthier way of using it to maintain your own confidently joyful mood.

Similarly, some men go through life believing that they must manipulate the environment or use power imbalances in order to have a shot at having sex. They chase power and succeed in their careers because they seek to use that power to satisfy their sexual desires. They resort to such nonconsensual methods because they truly do not understand how consensual methods would ever work for them. In order to avoid becoming one of these pathetic skid marks on the underwear of society, aside from always respecting safe consent practices, you must do the work of learning to like yourself in a non-conceited manner, think about what women might actually like about you as a person, and realize that women actually like having sex despite all of society’s efforts to brainwash everyone into thinking otherwise.

Imagine a man who believes that he is, in one way or another, attractive to women (without being so narcissistically full of himself that he fails to take others’ feelings into consideration). He believes that women can sincerely be as interested in sex as he is. He knows that, if he expresses his interest to a woman, there is a real chance that she will genuinely reciprocate that interest. The thought of nonconsensual sexual activity doesn’t even cross his mind because he’s going to look forward to potential consensual sexual activities instead. The latter will be the path of least resistance, after all. Thus, he has a greater chance of developing healthy relationships with women where he sees them as partners with agency rather than as objects to conquer. There is always the chance for this type of man to become an assailant for other reasons, of course, but he still has a greater chance to better understand, and adhere to, universal rules of consent.

— Excerpt from Never Lonely: The Uncensored Guide on How to Attract and Be Loved by Women

Another thing that Jamie said reflected another common psychological phenomenon of how peer pressure affects our preferences and attraction mechanisms:

Jamie liked Katie.
He finally admitted that he didn’t mind that she was “flat” like everyone was saying, but it was tough for him to admit it.
He initially said she wasn’t his type because of pressure to conform; if everyone else thought badly of her, he felt pressure to say that he didn’t like her, either.

This happens a lot in real life, and it also happens the other way around. Our preferences, and sometimes even our attraction, are influenced by the standards and conventions of our environment, even at the cost of how we really initially feel.

Jamie said some other harrowing things, but let me just summarize by saying that his festering insecurities about attraction, and unfulfilled need to be liked, eventually made him a monster.

His insecurities about attraction were rooted in a deep misunderstanding about attraction itself, a misunderstanding that I try to correct with the content I write here. All these boys think girls don’t like them because they’re ugly, that they have zero chance at love because they’re ugly and nothing will ever change that except for plastic surgery.

Keep in mind that this isn’t just fiction.

Adolescence showcases troubling real life phenomena that’s going on all across the world like a mental pandemic. There are solutions to these problems, but we all need to put forth a substantial effort to make sure that our world’s boys and men understand that they can be empowered through love rather than the vitriol spewed by the likes of Andrew Tate and the rest of the manosphere.

I’d like to thank Deb Burns for recommending this show to me.