Featured image: Netflix

It almost felt as though the whole world came to a standstill when I watched the first episode of Stephen Graham’s four-part series Adolescence.

The filmed-in-one-shot series follows 13-year-old Jamie and his family from the moment of his arrest when he is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie. 

Instantly, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “This is going to be some Andrew Tate-type bullshit.”

Growing up at a time when rape culture was only just beginning to be discussed, I left school with an existential sense of anxiety about what it meant to be a woman and how these feelings might shape my experiences with men at university. 

When encountering threatening situations with men while out and about and realising that my friends had all shared similar experiences, I felt for a long time that my vulnerability was entirely limited to the physical world and that I could take certain precautions to palpably keep myself safe.

It wasn’t until I met my friend Georgie — who told me that her Instagram photos had been deep faked as nudes and posted on an ‘incel website’ — that I began to notice the overwhelming emergence of misogynistic content online.

Upon witnessing the recent rise of online discourse advocating for the reinstatement of dominant masculinity and the traditional nuclear family model, the expectation that women should embrace submission as ‘tradwives’ has resurged.

This type of content was followed by the internet’s choice to mock Amber Heard throughout her highly publicised trial with Johnny Depp, despite the serious domestic abuse context to the trial. This reaction reflected the mentality of much of the world when it came to the degradation of women. 

During this internet mockery, a sexist post about Amber Heard came up on my ‘For You page’. I had never had content like this show up on my Instagram – so I clicked on the post and explored the page. Disgusted by what I saw, I clicked off and hoped to never see more posts like that.

Within an hour, my feed was flooded with sexist “memes” (if you could call them that) and degrading content about women.

As someone who can reasonably recognise how absurd this information is, I started to wonder how a younger person might not be able to decipher normal content from this extremist content. 

I have since been very sceptical about how algorithms on social media perpetuate some incredibly unhealthy standards for the younger generation – in particular for younger boys.

In an attempt to ignore the rise of “Tateism” online, it has become almost impossible to brush away the incredibly harmful views that he bolsters on his social media pages. He has stated that women “belong at home,” “can’t drive” and are “a man’s property.”

He has also claimed that rape victims should “bear responsibility” for their attacks and has attempted to normalise hitting and choking women during sex.

In one infamous video where he describes what he would do if a woman accused him of cheating, he says: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the man that floods the screens of children and teenagers throughout the world.

Adolescence powerfully captures the way that 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) interacts with this type of content on his Instagram. In Episode One, the detectives – Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Frank (Faye Marsay) – bring to Jamie’s attention the Instagram posts he had been liking, which prominently feature models in minimal clothing. 

Detective Bascombe asks him: “Are these the types of women you are attracted to, Jamie?” To which he replies, pretty assuredly, “Yeah.”

It felt unsurprising to me that while Jamie, completely unfazed being shown this type of image, Jamie’s Dad – played by Stephen Graham – looks unsettled and concerned to see that his son had been liking and commenting on these posts.

In Episode Two, the detectives go into Jamie’s school to carry out further investigations. We see the heartbreaking and powerful reaction of Katie’s best friend when being questioned. Although, strangely, she seems almost unsurprised by the detectives asking her about the comments posted by Katie on Jamie’s page.

It’s clear that the detectives are off target with questioning. Seemingly trying to draw the connection that Katie’s commenting of emojis on Jamie’s page meant that they must’ve been friends or had had a romantic relationship, something was falling short creating a cohesive story.

It isn’t until Adam (Amari Bacchus), Detective Bascombe’s son, breaks down the use of the emojis in the comments that he comes to realise the darker meaning behind everything. 

Adam tells his dad: “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it. You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.”

Having never interacted with or seen and realised that these emojis were being used on Instagram, I felt completely clueless.

Adam refers to the “red pill” and describes its use as a “call to action by the manosphere.” The “manosphere” refers to a collection of online forums that promote masculinity, misogyny and oppose feminism. He then proceeds to clarify Katie’s comment, which features the dynamite emoji, symbolising an “exploding red pill” — a reference to someone being an incel.

Adam describes the “100” emoji, which refers to the ’80/20′ rule.

He says: “80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men. Women, you must trick them because you’ll never get them in a normal way. 80 percent of women are cut off… she’s saying he’s an incel.”

Finally, Adam clarifies that all the colours of heart emojis mean different things: “Red means love, purple – horny, yellow – ‘I’m interested, are you interested,’ pink – ‘I’m interested but not in sex,’ orange – ‘You’re going to be fine.'”

Since watching the show and realising how little I actually knew about the ways in which hate spreads online amongst the younger generation, I realised how important it was for this show to be made and embedded into conversation.

Not only do I believe that we need governmental action with social media laws, and have a tighter crackdown on these incel forums, there is a fundamental need to start having conversations in schools, and with parents, about the ways in which we can monitor young people’s online content consumption. 

Algorithms draw younger people into these echo-chambers that perpetuate the same harmful stereotypes and content, creating a generation of extremist thinkers. This type of online interaction, in Katie’s outcome on Adolescence and for many in real life, can be fatal.

I think back to when I was growing up and I first had social media. I was lucky enough to come from a family that encouraged me to pursue whatever I wanted in my career, so long as I was happy. I was taught by my teachers how to hold my own in a room of men without fading into the background. I learnt the hard way how to protect myself from physical harm and to stand up for what I believe in by using my voice. 

All of this online content is a regression into a time that doesn’t accept the need for diversity and equality in all spaces. We need to continue to uplift younger girls in the way that many of us experienced by the older women in our lives. 

A hard line needs to be drawn in the sand by those with powers of intervention at a time where it is needed the most.