How Adolescence Misses the Mark on Incel Culture

By Alyssa Lyons

The praise for the recent U.K. show Adolescence is effusive. Popular publications like Slate called Adolescence the best show of the year while the Guardian said it was “such powerful TV that it could save lives.” In just three weeks, Adolescence became the 9th most watched Netflix series of all time. With all the hype, I was curious. So, I settled down to watch the show that captured the “miserable realism” of modern incel culture.

The term "incel" emerged during 1990s internet discourse. Initially, it was used as a self-identifier among men who were involuntarily celibate. As time went on, the term took on a newer meaning: it described men who felt entitled to have sex with women but weren’t able to.

Fueled with loathsome rage, these men would anonymously spout misogynistic rhetoric online exposing a deep and violent hatred for the women they claimed to desire. Incels form extremist online communities on the manosphere declaring that men are dominant to women and advocating for male supremacy. This misogynist thinking rationalizes and naturalizes violence against women both offline and online. In fact, it’s so naturalized in U.S. culture that the current president has sexually assaulted dozens of women since the 1970s and continues to hold office. And his vice president? Well, he believes that women should remain in abusive marriages and simply tough it out. It’s all part of a long genealogy that minimizes white male violence.

Adolescence is a fictionalized exploration of how incel culture impacts the development of young boys. Looking at the nexus between the online world and youth culture, Adolescence chronicles the story of thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). Jamie likes a girl at school named Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). She doesn’t return the sentiment, and she begins to tease him on social media. Feeling ugly and humiliated, Jamie quickly retaliates. The punishment for online bullying? Murder. Jamie brutally kills Katie Miller.

In Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, author Laura Bates calls the incel community “the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere” dedicated to “violent hatred of women.” Reductively regarded as a radical fringe group, Bates shows how the incel community is a microcosm of rampant and ubiquitous misogyny. In 2024, Emilia Lounela presented a paper at a conference on incel online communities, violence, and the construction of collective victimhood. She argues that misogynistic ideology and collective victimhood are central features of the incel subculture with many incels feeling like they’re not attractive enough to women. Subsequently, “incels’ loneliness is seen as the fault of women being shallow and cruel and rejecting them.”

The show depicts how Jamie has been influenced by online incel discourse. He believes that men are superior to women. He also believes that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men: the most attractive, successful, and ambitious men. This results in Jamie feeling rejected and resentful. He’s sad. And it leads to the loss of Katie’s life.

In many ways, Adolescence really does capture important aspects of online incel culture: from the 80/20 theory to the red pill. The show does reflect how online vitriolic discourse can shape what we believe and what we do. But from where I was sitting, I also couldn’t help but notice just how much the show misses, and perhaps misleadingly distorts, critical nuances of incel culture by centering incels as both perpetrators and victims of the culture they’ve created within the larger context of misogyny and sexism. 

Instead of challenging the online culture that sanctions and promotes violent retribution against women for rejecting men, Adolescence extensively humanizes the perpetrators of violence at the expense of their victims. For instance, while the average incel is in his mid-twenties, Jamie is an awkward pre-pubescent teen with a high-pitched voice. Immediately upon entering Jamie's world, the viewer is encouraged to familiarize themselves with his life and its many dimensions.

We get to know his family: his short-fused father Eddie Miller (Stephen Graham), his placating mother Manda Miller (Christine Tremarco) who tries to keep the peace, and a minimally present sister (Amélie Pease). The viewers also hear from Jamie quite extensively with much of the plot dedicated to highlighting intimate conversations between him and the evaluating psychologist Briony Ariston (who, of course, is a woman) who asks him about his friends, family, ideas around manhood and masculinity, and school.

Don’t get me wrong. During these moments, we can clearly see Jamie thinks very little of women as he flips furniture and tries to intimidate the psychologist. We also see his proclivity for violence and his own short fuse when it comes to women. But we also get to see the context of who he is: a privilege reserved only for Jamie and not for Katie.

We are shown Jamie’s school and told that his school isn’t the greatest for burgeoning minds. We’re shown Jamie's interest in art: he makes and sends his dad a birthday card from a juvenile institution. We see Jamie’s family’s dynamics, home life, and eventual collapse as they grapple with their institutionalized son and endure community torment on behalf of Jamie’s actions. All of this takes attention away from the brutality of what Jamie did and who he did it to.

Adolescence focuses very little on the victim of Jamie’s violence: Katie Leonard. We know she’s been murdered, but her existence is entirely off-screen. We have no idea about her family or interests. We know she had one friend who cared about her and is distraught by her death. We know that she cyber-bullied Jamie. But that’s it. Katie mostly exists as a plot device to illustrate the devastation wrought by the manosphere, online misogyny, and incel culture on Jamie, young boys like him, and their families. We never see Katie. We only know her through the distorted eyes of Jamie. And we must ask why.

And while it is disproportionately white men who are active in incel communities, the incel community is diverse. About 38% are BIPOC men. Incels are from across the political spectrum left, right, and moderate. They have varying religious beliefs, and hail from different parts of the world. As digital sexism and misogyny permeate everything from our online worlds to the highest political offices, we are being told and sold the story about incel culture from a white male perspective. Adolescence’s writers, directors, and creators are mostly affluent white married men. And one of the famous executive producers on the show has a history of abuse allegations. The victims? His ex-wife and their children.

With its focus on Jamie and how it tells its story, Adolescence reproduces a problematic dominant narrative that humanizes violent white men.