What The Hell America!

Adolescence, Netflix’s breakout series, spotlights how the manosphere influences boys—opening the door to deeper conversations about porn, violence and the urgent need to truly listen to kids.

“Your body, my choice.” That misogynist credo is the crux of the blockbuster Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, the third most-watched English language show of all time on Netflix, with over 130 million views to date. Over the two months since it was released, the show continues to provoke debate about the impact of social media on the mental health of boys, in a world dominated by the manosphere, and its power to transform boys’ into violent misogynists. 

Surprisingly, porn was the one missing element in the otherwise brilliant four-part Netflix drama.

The show centers on a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, a typical lad, vulnerable, like so many other young men, to the venom of online misogyny spewed through unbridled social media, chatrooms, blogs and podcasts. This angry ideology, masquerading as manly virtue, blames women for male alienation and promotes violent sexuality and the dehumanization of women—the very narratives of porn.

This venom that flows through freely available mainstream porn seamlessly merges sex, the abuse of girls and women and physical pain—and is watched by nearly all boys. In the U.K., almost 80 percent of all children have seen “coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts” in pornography. Half of all kids in the U.S. have seen online porn by the time they are Jamie’s age—many much younger—and one-quarter of teens “agreed that most people like to be spanked, hit or slapped during sex.” 

The daily suffering of online misogyny recently became personal for one of us, Ashley, while rooting for a favorite team with her chosen family during a March Madness basketball game. In between three-point baskets, her preteen niece kept dropping unseemly references. The adults caught on that she was reaching out for help. Turning down the volume, they gave her supportive attention. She was then able to divulge that the boys in her junior high school were pressuring her and her friends to do violent and disturbing sex acts they learned while watching porn.

It was not sex that Ashley’s niece feared. It was violence. Porn, like the manosphere, fuses the two—and women and girls suffer. 

It is not a generic or inclusive “people” who are violated in porn. It’s overwhelmingly girls and women. Studies from around the world across many disciplines and decades have documented how porn manipulates young men into dehumanizing women as mere objects for their aggressive pleasure. Porn explains the rise of sexual “choking”—really, strangulation. Typically, a young man reaches for his partner’s neck without asking permission. The manosphere is surely proud.

The still-developing adolescent brain responds differently to porn than adult brains. … Kids who watch porn are more prone to dating violence and poorer self-reported relationship skills.

Adolescent boys who consume porn, studies also show, are more likely to value girls only for their appearance and sexual skills, and to believe women should obey men. They are also more apt to devalue sexual consent and to endorse the view that raped women deserved it. 

Ashley, a survivor of male sexual violence from a young age, including image-based sexual violence, has been utterly shaped by all this. She has lived through the complex, development trauma in childhood from such horrors. She has invested considerable life force to healing herself and remains acutely aware of the damage done and promoted every time a child clicks a porn video—the damage that is the responsibility of the adults who make, distribute and promote such abuse.  

To understand violent masculinity, we need look no further than Pornhub and the hundreds of other so-called “tube sites” which provide the visual panorama of the manosphere by hosting endless scenes of men abusing women. But many boys also feel unfairly excluded from this sexual entitlement, feeding the “incel”—involuntary celibacy—culture which lured in Jamie and demonizes women. 

These messages are particularly powerful to young boys. The still-developing adolescent brain responds differently to porn than adult brains. It makes sense that kids who watch porn are more prone to dating violence and poorer self-reported relationship skills. Porn, in other words, cultivates and results in precisely what unfolded in Adolescence, which mirrors the wider violence by young men against girls, typically using knives in the U.K. and firearms here.

Of course, Jamie was himself victimized by online bullying, and so sought refuge in the manosphere. More likely, he was parroting other alienated boys he met online while gaming, a fantasy world rife with sexism and sexual harassment.

Incels advance what they call the “80-20 rule”: that 80 percent of women are attracted to only 20 percent of men. Hence, women, as they see it, force their involuntary celibacy. Jamie felt himself part of the rejected and dejected majority, which was reinforced by his peers through mocking emojis on Instagram.

The adults in Adolescence were baffled by this symbolic language, which is the lingua franca of social media, and by the manosphere in general. This generational chasm leaves even well-intended parents, teachers and authorities oblivious to the online lives of children, and the grave perils and wide-ranging personal and social consequences of turning kids loose to incels and other predatory factions of the manosphere.  

“You must trick” girls, said Jamie, “because you’ll never get them in a normal way.” His trick was to approach Katie when he thought she was at her most vulnerable. That is another message kids learn from porn, where whole genres are devoted to predatory men taking advantage of runaways, refugees, schoolgirls needing higher grades, mothers unable to pay the rent. 

Normally, Katie was above Jamie’s station in the school pecking order. But she, taking a cue from porn, sent nude selfies to another boy, who promptly sent them around the school. Her shame was Jamie’s opportunity. He asked her out. Yet she refused. Enraged, Jamies stabbed her—again and again—and she bled to death. 

Did porn cause Katie’s murder? Not in any straightforward way. Undoubtedly, though, porn is the water through which many young people now swim, which many adults refuse to see and name. It is the cultural ecosystem that presents women as both hypersexualized and repulsive objects. 

We need to view porn and the manosphere as a public health issue—not a problem for each kid’s parents to solve in isolation.

Porn, too, like the manosphere and much of the internet, is not curated, vetted or categorized like a public library. The big social media companies lobby mightily to stop any content monitoring. Kids, never mind adults, often confuse online fantasy for nonfiction, which is compounded by the appalling lack of comprehensive, scientifically sound sex education in the U.S.

The porn industry is only too happy to fill the gaps, which often frightens and confuses girls, and contributes to their self-surveillance, internalized sexism and sexualizing themselves—a whole other major challenge.

At the very end of Adolescence, Jamie’s sobbing father says, “I should have done better.” But parents are ill-equipped to take on the power of Big Tech, which profits from the terror of porn and the manosphere to reign supreme.

But there are solutions.

We need to view porn and the manosphere as a public health issue—not a problem for each kid’s parents to solve in isolation. Society, culture, government, healthcare providers, educators and families must hold Big Tech accountable. We need to initiate conversations with kids—including in schools—on the empirically demonstrated harms of porn. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to do what Ashley did while watching the basketball game on television, what Jamie’s parents seemingly never did: Stop what we are doing and simply listen.

It’s not enough to talk at young people. They get that everywhere. They need a good listening to—by all the people in their lives, not just parents. Adults need to create space to attune and connect with kids—to give them safe, gentle and brave spaces in which to reveal what’s on their minds and hearts, and voice their lived realities with less fear of further shame. And we need to respond to their questions with age-appropriate honesty. And when we don’t know the answers, we need to have the humility to say so. We can be vulnerable, too. 

When we are not here for children, as we saw in Adolescence, they take their angst online, and heed the manosphere and porn. Men, especially, are needed—men showing up with realness and honesty, so women are not solely responsible for shaping boys into good men. To heal, we need the full partnership of authentic men, not the male personas of porn and the manosphere.

“Boys are a little lost,” said Hannah Walters, another star in Adolescence and the cofounder of the production company. She is right that “pornography has a huge thing to do with it.” But we would never know this unless we listen to kids, especially girls, who in their own way echo the powerful statement attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” That summarizes not only the manosphere but also porn.