THE TV critic at the Guardian, Lucy Mangan, is stingy with praise. It’s why I did a double take last weekend when I saw her five stars — the highest — for Adolescence. I haven’t always agreed with all her reviews but she’s been spot on about the five stars. There was After the Party — “best acting on TV all year” — and Until I kill You — “fearless TV that values intelligent viewers” last year. But to see “the closest thing to TV perfection in decades” in the headline for Adolescence made me reach for the TV remote control instantly. I didn’t even bother with a trailer which is my usual modus operandi. I’m a sucker for trailers.

We were hooked from the get-go. I’m not spoiling it for you by telling you it is a four-episode show about a teenage boy in the UK accused of murdering a teenage female classmate. It is told from four different perspectives — the police, a psychologist, the school and the parents, all trying to understand what happened. It is deeply engaging and equally disturbing.

We watched it in one day and I recommended it to everyone, warning them that it was heavy. Almost all my friends who are parents to children of all ages were rattled. I was deeply moved but also worried.

What are (y)our children really doing online?

Where are the role models our boys clearly need?

Adolescence gives us a peek into how easily teenage boys can be swayed by “manfluencers” like Andrew Tate, the content creator, banned on several social media platforms for posting hate speech and misogynistic comments. He has said women are men’s property, should be homemakers and should accept men having multiple partners. He was banned on Twitter (now X) in 2017 for saying rape survivors bore some responsibility for “putting themselves in that position”. Elon Musk restored Tate’s account. Tate and his brother are facing rape and trafficking charges in the UK, which they deny.

There is plenty of research to show the dangerous impact Tate’s influence has on boys. UK police, for example, last year linked Tate to the “quite terrifying” radicalisation of boys and young men in a 2024 report into violence against women and girls, according to a story in the BBC. Research at Monash University in Australia last year found that Tate promotes a “conspiracy-like matrix” that “tells boys they are disempowered by contemporary feminist movements, such as #MeToo, and that they need to reclaim their masculinity”.

According to the teachers interviewed in the research, they noticed that boys would first bring up Tate in classrooms “in a non-combative way” but his ideology was soon used as a “catalyst to challenge the women”.

Students believed Tate when he said he is a victim of the justice system and boys “know exactly the type of polarising figure he is, but they feel safe enough to put him into the classroom as a joke”.

But it is no laughing matter especially as we watch the story unfold in Adolescence. These are not innocent teenagers who will grow up to become misogynists, they are already there. They think they are entitled to women’s bodies and spaces.

I see this play out every day in Pakistan. Numerous men kill innumerable women for rejecting their advances or proposals. Last year, HRCP reported 346 victims of gender-based violence, which often gets cloaked as ‘honour’ crimes. There is nothing honourable about killing a woman for exercising agency.

Earlier this week, this paper reported on a man in Gujrat who killed his mother using an iron rod for not making him breakfast. She told him she was fasting and wanted to rest and he killed her. Yet most people get angry at that Aurat March placard which said ‘heat your own food’. These placa­rds tell us everything we need to know about society.

This is men’s entitlement, plain and simple. It comes up when actors like Danish Taimoor go on air and remind everyone, including his superstar wife Ayeza Khan seated next to him, about his right to polygamy. He is trying to clarify what he meant after the (rightful) outrage.

Where are the role models our boys clearly need?

I suspect women will have to keep dying until someone figures something out to criminalise misogyny once and for all.

Adolescence should be a wake-up call for everyone, especially schools who tend to take punitive approaches after an event. They need to realise it’s Andrew Tate today, it will be another ‘manfluencer’ tomorrow and he will be worse.

Parents can start by checking on what their sons are accessing online. What are you teaching them about how to treat others, especially girls? What kind of a role model are you as a father, husband, etc? I’m also looking at mothers who, unfortunately, favour or protect their sons and teach them that entitlement.

The writer is a journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2025