In “Adolescence,” there are no clear answers for why 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) murdered a female classmate. Yet in the final moments of Netflix’s hit limited series, Jamie’s parents shakily point at one culprit: Jamie’s online life.
“Look at that fella who popped up on my phone, going on about how to treat women and how men should be men and all that s–t,” Jamie’s father Eddie (Stephen Graham) says to his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco), in one of several offhand references to Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist with a huge online following. “You can’t keep an eye on them all the time, love. We just can’t.”
The creators of “Adolescence” aren’t as evasive about what drove Jamie to murder in the four-episode show.
“It was someone I worked with called Mariella [Johnson] who said, ‘You need to look into incel culture,’” “Adolescence” writer Jack Thorne told TheWrap. “As soon as I started looking into it — and I spent a long time down some very dark holes — the thing that I discovered was this isn’t as easily othered as I thought it would be. This isn’t as easy to put in a box and go, ‘Oh, this is just crazy people thinking crazy thoughts.’ Actually the logic of what they’re talking about, I could understand the appeal of it.”
A portmanteau for “involuntarily celibate,” incel has become shorthand for an online subculture that blames and objectifies women while often promoting violence against them. It’s not just a niche corner of the internet. In 2022, a senior counter-terrorism officer for the U.K. described incels as an “emerging risk” that made up 1% of all referrals to the organization. Several mass murderers across the world have been linked to incel-related forums, including the community’s poster children of sorts: Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 others at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014, and Jake Davison, who killed five people and injured two in England in 2021.
Most of these violent offenders are the same profile: white, male, heterosexual, angry and chronically online.
“There’s a weird combination in Western culture with white boys having a certain sense of entitlement and that sex should be relatively easy to get,” Anne Speckhard, director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, said. When these young men realize that sex isn’t “easy” to get, it can lead to anger. “The ‘black pill ideology’ is basically a terrorist ideology, because it encourages political violence that you should kill the Chads and Stacys,” Speckhard continued, referring to the community’s terms for popular, conventionally attractive men and women.
“I genuinely believe there’s nothing more dangerous than a lonely, resentful, angry boy,” Benjamin Zand, the filmmaker behind “The Secret World of Incels,” told TheWrap. “They feel as though people don’t like them, and they want to get paid back.”
That danger and volatility comes across the clearest in Episode 3. Up until that point, Jamie is portrayed as a teary-eyed and overwhelmed child. But when child psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) pushes him on the murder he’s accused of committing, Jamie lashes out repeatedly, screaming so intensely that Doherty’s trained professional flinches.
Film and television has never shied away from depicting troubled young men, from Alex Frost and Eric Deulen in “Elephant” to Evan Peters in “American Horror Story: Murder House.” But “Adolescence” is distinct in the empathy it lends to its central subject. Instead of depicting Jamie as a soulless monster, the limited series takes care to show how young this boy is, how much his parents love him and how very little they knew about his online life. In this way, the series is less a typical crime drama and more a reflection on how this toxic online movement is radicalizing young men.
But through its very existence and the series’ empathy, there may be a silver lining. Giving a face to this phenomenon could help people cope with it, and the show is already having an impact on a governmental level. After the series’ creators said they want it to be shown in the U.K.’s Parliament, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he watched the show and praised it for shining light on a “growing problem.”
“‘Adolescence’ gives me a bit of hope. It’s a more positive take on this, and it feels like it will reach a lot of people,” Zand said.
A complicated history
The first incel community was actually created by a female Canadian college student in the 1990s. The goal of that first forum was for people to connect over their seemingly hopeless romantic lives. Three decades later, the incel space looks very different from “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project.”
Incel is a culture within the “manosphere,” a collection of websites and forums that dwell on masculinity and oppose feminism — accused rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate is one of the manosphere’s most prominent figures. (Tate and his brother Tristan recently left Romania where they were under house arrest over sex trafficking allegations and came to the United States.) But the incel community is distinct in that it takes common insecurities and places the blame solely on women. Young men typically get sucked into these forums after they search for ways to improve their appearance. That basic, relatable search can lead them to posts dedicated to “looksmaxxing,” a term many in the incel community use for optimizing your appearance and that Zand said is often an “entry point” to more toxic forums. Once they start taking advice from these forums, it’s easy for impressionable, lonely young men to be brought in further.
“People congregate on the internet because they’re bored and don’t know what to do with themselves, they’re despairing. And then they get in a group of other despairing people, and they’re offered an answer, and that’s what’s really sad,” Speckhard said.
Zand has been covering incel culture professionally since 2020. In that time, he’s watched these ideas evolve from being “extremely niche” to becoming more mainstream. Part of the reason for this is the echo chamber of social media — but another reason is COVID.
“It just ramped up the anxiety of a lot of people and got them very, very used to being alone in their home and interacting only on the internet,” Zand said. “A lot of the guys I met would have been — for want of a better word — maybe dorks in school, but they were just normal kids. But because of this new world that is a lot more remote, they got even more detached.”
People who struggle socially or who have mental health problems are also disproportionately drawn to these forums. For her 2021 study, “Involuntary Celibates’ Experiences of and Grievance Over Sexual Exclusion and the Potential Threat of Violence Among Those Active in an Online Incel Forum,” Speckhard interviewed 800 people who self-identified as incels.
“A lot of them said, ‘I know I’m autistic or I’m on the spectrum. I don’t know how to communicate. I’m painfully shy.’ The things they wrote on their survey, it was pitiful,” Speckhard said.
The impact of “Adolescence”
Though mainstream understanding of the incel community is growing, it often happens from a distance. When looking for subject matter experts for his documentaries, Zand has run into experts who refuse to talk to incels “on principle.” “They see it as akin to talking to a terror organization or something,” Zand said.
It doesn’t help that these spaces are incredibly difficult to enter. Most members of the community are skeptical of mainstream media and are not social. Getting them to open up in any capacity can be a precarious and time-consuming process. That’s why Zand has been so happy to see “Adolescence” take off the way that it has.
“You’re never going to be there in the same way that you can write a scripted series to truly live in those moments,” Zand said. “The impact of this has been incredible.”
The numbers back him up. Since its premiere on March 13, “Adolescence” has been viewed more than 24.3 million times globally. The series is currently Netflix’s No. 1 English-language series globally, and on a local level it reached the No. 1 spot in 71 countries.
The series has also gained the approval of academics who specialize in exploring these spaces and their impact on society. Lisa Sugiura, an associate professor in cybercrime and gender for the University of Portsmouth, called the series “well-researched and presented” though noted it was “harrowing.”
“It is not just a dramatic amplification, rather it highlights the real risks of young men and boys being exposed to misogynistic algorithmic online narratives. It shows how this can happen to any teenager,” Sugiura told TheWrap.
Hope for the future
As the series continues to grow in popularity, there’s already proof that it’s educating people. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer praised the drama for depicting the “emerging and growing problem” of knife crime orchestrated by young men in the U.K. and noted that the government is taking steps to add rape and sexual offense specialists to police forces.
But there’s a chance “Adolescence” may be more than a preventative measure for at-risk kids. Because the series leads with empathy — showing Jamie as a young boy who fell down a horrible path rather than depicting him as a monster — it may help people better understand those who have already been black pilled — the most extreme form of incel culture. Whereas the red pill in this community, a reference to “The Matrix,” typically refers to “awakening” to the group’s beliefs, people who have been black pilled believe that the system is too broken to change. The only options left, as this nihilistic belief goes, is to either fully give up, die by suicide or go “ER,” a reference to the mass murderer Elliott Rodger.
“We are in very divided times of echo chambers, and the one thing that definitely doesn’t work is shouting at one another, especially if you’re trying to de-radicalize somebody and bring someone back,” Zand, who has firsthand experience questioning the beliefs of many incels, said. “You have to start at a position where they think you at least respect their basic humanity.”
Looking ahead, that’s what Zand is striving to do as he is in the midst of creating a YouTube series that “brings humanity back to these conversations.” The filmmaker and journalist hopes this space will become a “more positive” version of media that caters to men rather than the Andrew Tates of the world.
“It feels like we’re in this crisis moment where we need to start talking about it. We need to start finding solutions to it,” Thorne said.
