Adolescence has a woman problem ...Middle East

A week after it’s release, Netflix’s Adolescence is a runaway success. It’s been watched by over 24 million around the world and it’s warnings about the online misogynist radicalisation of young men have been spoken about by Kier Starmer. I’m loathe to do down a TV series that’s sparked a vital conversation about the online misogynist radicalisation of young men. But I can’t help but noticing, while so many of its men are fully fleshed out, too many female characters have not been fully drawn. Adolescence, ironically, has a woman problem.

I appreciate the series, created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, might not be for women. I hope, even, that the nerdy technicalities of the one-shot concept draw in the sorts of men who might otherwise turn their nose up at an “incel drama”. If this prods those guys into finally understanding how misogyny has been turbocharged by the internet, and that they have the power powers to de-influence young boys, then great. I just wonder how much better Adolescence could have been if its women were padded out a bit.

Episode one opens with a police raid on Jamie, a 13-year-old boy suspected of killing a female peer, Katie. Manda (Christine Tremarco) is his hysterical mum who clings to victimhood when accusing the armed police throwing her to the floor when actually, DI Luke Branscombe (Ashley Watlers) corrects her, they just asked her to get down. And while already we know so much of DI Brascombe’s life, down to the cause of his severe reflux – literally, what’s happening in his insides – we know relatively little of his female partner, DC Misha Frank (Faye Marsay).

In the second hour, we’re led round a school by a doddery female teacher, who, we’re to believe, has no idea of incel ideology, of the manosphere, of the fact that boys’ time spent online correlates with their foulness. Is it beyond all conception that a woman with two degrees might read a newspaper once in a while? That she might notice the difference in kids’ behaviour over the decades?

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Adolescence will send chills down any parent's spine

In the school, we we get to hear a bit more about Katie from her friend Jade (Fatima Bojang), who is furious – and violent with it. “She was my best friend, miss. She was the only one who actually… thought I was OK. I don’t know what to do anymore… it’s not like I have anyone else,” she tells a teacher. But there’s nothing of who Katie actually was, simply what Jade got from the friendship. I can’t imagine anyone, even in grief, describing a relationship as so transactional. Hearing a young girl speak so callously and selfishly, when teenage girls’ engagement with one another is at least 10 per cent made up telling each other how much they love one another feels perverse.

Later in the episode, Frank points out that “the perpetrator always gets the frontline” and that “everyone will remember Jamie, no-one will remember her”. It means its not really useful for us to find out why Jamie killed his schoolmate and allows Luke to remind her of her duties: “We’re here for Katie, we’re here for her parents”. He then goes on his chase of Ryan – against Misha’s wishes, who mutters a “fuck sake” under her breath – and, ultimately, he gets a hold of a truth she couldn’t be bothered trying to find. Branscombe is the hero, not Frank.

In this broadly pro-cop drama, the masculine realm of the police station works efficiently and calmly, protocols followed and maintained, whereas the traditionally female world of a school (75 per cent of teachers are women, indicative of how few realistic role models young boys get) is portrayed as dark chaos; “a holding pen” as Branscombe puts it.

The third episode nears perfection, with Erin Doherty’s child psychologist Briony Ariston necessarily parking her own selfhood as she assesses Jamie ahead his trial. It makes sense that her psyche is not explored, and overall its a great representation of a woman trying to do her job under pressure.

Where it misses, however, is in the description of Katie’s bullying. I have seen various arguments made that Katie’s treatment of Jamie has given the male audience an excuse to suggest she brought it on herself. If those viewers want to show their true colours, fine. Any decent person would reason that imperfect victims exist and no amount of emoji-teasing on Instagram justifies a multiple stab wound slaughter.

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What Adolescence gets wrong about incel culture

Rather, my issue with Katie’s bullying is in the continuity of it all. Why would a girl whose nudes had been leaked online continue to engage in online bullying? It might make sense, in some roundabout way, but without more insight into her humanity, it just doesn’t add up.

Only by the fourth and final episode of this supposedly realist drama do we see women – Jamie’s mother and sister – in some depth. We get backstories and behaviours, tidbits and the feeling they’re actual people even when the cameras stopped rolling. Notably, Manda, Jamie’s mum, asks her daughter Lisa (Amelie Pease) what she’s doing on her phone, showing that mothers perhaps hold daughters more accountable than fathers do their sons.

I get it. Adolescence is laser focused on male anger. But what’s the point in caring about the consequences of that anger – the dead girl at the centre of the story, the women existing in misogynist spaces – when so many of the crucial female characters are just not worth caring about?

The writers are certainly capable of making three-dimensional characters. If you look around Jamie, you see he’s as much a product of the offline world as the online one. That the men around him have helped, in small ways, to navigate him towards this path.

We’ve got the ultra-hench copper who’s fallen for the myth that the gym, rather than attentive fatherhood, is his route to masculine perfection. There’s the scruffy temp teacher who can’t recognise that he is actually well regarded in his young class of lairy boys and should step up accordingly. Then there’s the insecure security officer, looming over a much smaller woman to offer up – in the kindest way, he thinks – how unfair it is that she gets to do a professional, well-paid job, while he’s impotent to effect change despite his CCTV, his many all-seeing eyes. Finally, in Stephen Graham’s performance we get to see the borderline abusive dad whose anger so poorly masks his searing sorrow.

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Adolescence is the new Mr Bates vs The Post Office - and it could change laws

Adolescence goes some way to point out that misogyny is not in what emoji your son is using (or even what Discord servers he’s on) or an infection that can be just cut out. At the very least, slang, especially online, constantly renews and evades adults’ understanding. I don’t believe sexism or violence to be innate in men. But I do believe it’s an inherited condition.

All of these male characters’ villainy, no matter how tiny, is pointed out. Because this story is about not just boys’ extremism, but also men’s lack of ability to tackle it. Jamie isn’t just sucked in to the blue light and red pills of his computer, he’s pushed towards its dark torments by the gaps other men have left where role models should be.

And unfortunately, in the show’s glaring mistakes around women, its creators leave me with no option other than to wonder if a small grain of that same villainy lives in them, too. It’s a shame that more couldn’t have been made of women’s comparable – and imperfect – ways of dealing with life. I have a feeling it just would have made all of us care even more about what is, on so many levels, an incredible and important series.

‘Adolescence’ is streaming on Netflix

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