InAdolescence,Netflixsnewlimited series, audiences are introduced to 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper).
Hes a young lad growing up in your average English town.
His parents are busy.
Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in ‘Adolescence.‘Netflix
He shares a bathroom with his older sister.
Episode One introduces Jamie as a slight kid who hates needles and just wants to go home.
These spaces and beliefs have been amplified by popular mens-rights influencers like Andrew Tate.
Its the involuntary celibate stuff, Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) says.
Its the Andrew Tate shite.
(Tate rejected the characterization through a spokesperson in a statement toNewsweek.
And the ideologies offer them a really easy solution.
Hes denied the charges.)
My job was to sit in Jamies shoes, he tellsRolling Stone.
If I heard that the reason for this was female ideology, that would have been very attractive.
But as she watched, she found herself drawn in by Jamies story.
It showed he wasnt born evil.
He was just conditioned that way.
So when she saw Jamie on her screen, she couldnt help but immediately think of her students.
Because it gets parents talking.
And if they hear their kids talking like that, it clues them in.
We should be asking the men in our lives, Howdoyou perceive women?
How do you see them in certain situations?
Prosper had a gun and planned to commit a mass shooting at St. Josephs Primary School in Luton.
If Prosper hadnt been interrupted, he could have perpetrated the first school shooting in the U.K. since 1996.
Its also become a trending topic on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and TikTok.U.K.
Youre seeing impacts from lockdown.
They get messaging that you should have sex by a certain age.
You should have your first girlfriend at ages as young as 11 or 12.
And that puts a lot of pressure on people.
Young boys are in an unfortunate spot where there is messaging that makes sense of this right now.
This rhetoric acts as a confirmation bias of repeated rejections, victimizations, or humiliation.
That emotion is there.
And the manospheres rhetoric says, Here is a very nicely packaged answer.
Adolescencedoesnt pretend that it has a tidy solution to the problem of online misogyny and radicalizing communities.
They say it takes a village to [raise] a child.
It takes a village to destroy a child.
If were going to change the culture, there needs to be multiple solutions, he says.
We need everyone to lean into this problem to save these kids, to stop boys harming girls.
It is a question Thorne says the collaborators struggled with themselves.
Were still thinking about it, to be honest, he says.
I brought it up with Steven just the other day, whether we should have done it.
Its always a battle writing these shows what perspective you tell it from.
We could have told Katies side of the story, and sometimes I think we shouldve.
But we made what we thought was right at the time.
But she adds that she hopes progress in discussions around misogyny can happen without regressing into polarization.
Its not an us and them.
