Adolescence is the new hit Netflix series everybody’s talking about, based on several instances of teen boys stabbing their female peers in the UK. The murderous protagonist, 13-year-old Jamie, is a white boy from the north of England—a fact many commenters are crying foul over. They say it’s fashionable to demonize white boys as racist, homophobic, or in this case, misogynistic.
But my problem isn’t that white boys are the villains. It’s that the four-episode series demonizes masculinity in general.
The show’s premise is that Jamie (played by Owen Cooper) is a normal boy from a good family who brutally stabs a female classmate after getting sucked into online “incel culture,” where unappealing men blame women for the fact that they’re not having any sex. This influence, combined with the terrible temper he has inherited from his father (played by series co-creator Stephen Graham), leads Jamie to kill a girl he’s attracted to. Meanwhile, every male character we meet in Adolescence is either evil, pathetic, or completely nondescript.