This week I want to take a break from politics and geopolitics and talk to you about a Netflix series which should be mandatory viewing in homes and schools everywhere in the world.
When I first heard all the fulsome praise for Adolescence, the stirring British drama centred around a 13-year-old accused of murder, I was sceptical. As someone whose secret vice is an addictive consumption of the British procedural, I thought that perhaps for the Indian audience who had been fed on a diet of Netflix’s more garish, flamboyant fare, it was the unique understatedness of the British drama that was a relatively new experience.
Then there was the question of how bleak it seemed. Did I really want to be saddened and depressed by the story of an adolescent killer? I almost missed the most humane and nuanced television content created in decades.
It may be set in the United Kingdom, but it holds up, in the most visceral way possible, a mirror to all we have become and are in danger of losing every day. Adolescence is not just for parents. It is for and about all of us.
It is about the affirmations we obsessively seek from an imagined reality of other people’s lives on Instagram. It is about the phone filters we use to make ourselves look better. It is how we look at ourselves, constantly, through the eyes of others. It is about how men and boys look at themselves and the confusion they feel navigating rage and vulnerability. It is about how women and girls walk the utterly devastating tightrope between bodily autonomy and socially dictated hyper-sexualisation. It is about how social media has normalised the language of hatred. It is about the hours we spend tethered to our phones, unable to begin or end our days without the mobile, creating an alternative online universe in our lives — and thus inside of our heads. It is about the voices that gnaw at us, that won’t be silenced, that often threaten to spiral out of control. It is about the breakdown of interpersonal communication between husband and wife, teachers and students, parents and kids. It is about rejection, not fitting in, the cruelty of children, the loneliness of children and the impossibility of peer pressure. And it is in the end, still about the redemptive power of family and love, even if those bonds are now held together by strips of tape and breadcrumbs of hope.
{{/usCountry}}It is about the affirmations we obsessively seek from an imagined reality of other people’s lives on Instagram. It is about the phone filters we use to make ourselves look better. It is how we look at ourselves, constantly, through the eyes of others. It is about how men and boys look at themselves and the confusion they feel navigating rage and vulnerability. It is about how women and girls walk the utterly devastating tightrope between bodily autonomy and socially dictated hyper-sexualisation. It is about how social media has normalised the language of hatred. It is about the hours we spend tethered to our phones, unable to begin or end our days without the mobile, creating an alternative online universe in our lives — and thus inside of our heads. It is about the voices that gnaw at us, that won’t be silenced, that often threaten to spiral out of control. It is about the breakdown of interpersonal communication between husband and wife, teachers and students, parents and kids. It is about rejection, not fitting in, the cruelty of children, the loneliness of children and the impossibility of peer pressure. And it is in the end, still about the redemptive power of family and love, even if those bonds are now held together by strips of tape and breadcrumbs of hope.
{{/usCountry}}As feminists focused on the battles of women, we often say that the conversation is incomplete without including men and boys in the dialogue. Theoretically we often recognise that the societal biases that condition and stereotype us have the same impact on guys. But this series actually tells the story of men alongside women at a time when it has often felt impossible to do so.
The “manosphere” is real and it is here, at our doorstep. For anyone in India who thinks that this is “Western culture”, think again. The online universe of extreme, anti-women, machismo fuelled chatter can have a cult following, including among your kids. The mobile phone and social media have, in any case, collapsed all cultural and geographical boundaries.
We live in the world of Andrew Tate, whose account with 10 million followers, was restored by Elon Musk on X. Tate has been charged with rape and human trafficking, but that does not appear to deter his following among the faithful. In 2023, the BBC reported that Tate and his team were responsible for grooming and luring dozens of women, including minors, into online sex work. We live in a world where a high court judge says that grabbing an 11-year-old’s breasts, tearing her pyjama strings and dragging her under a culvert does not qualify as an attempt to rape.
We live in a world where we dare make no predictions for the boys or girls we are raising. If, at one point, we feared losing them to their imaginations, to the characters they impersonated in the books they read; today, we have almost no control over their consumption of toxic content on the internet.
Watch Adolescence with your parents, with your teenage children and in your classrooms. Bleak as the series sounds, grim as its self-reflection is, it is a call to action. A call for conversation, communication and compassion. It’s almost too real to watch. And for that reason alone, please watch it.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal