Tate-Pilled Boys Are a Problem for Schools

I watched the four hourlong episodes of the Netflix series “Adolescence” in one extended, horrifying gulp. The story follows an angel-faced 13-year-old British boy named Jamie who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, and lays out the effect on his family and peers. The show is fiction, though the creators say they were partly inspired by the shocking reality of violently misogynistic young men. “What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” Stephen Graham, who is a writer of the series and also stars in it as Jamie’s bereft father, recalled thinking after one particular assault. “And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again.”

You know by the end of the first episode that Jamie is guilty; the police have video of Jamie stabbing Katie. So the central question becomes why did he do it, and the explanation rolls out over the next three episodes. His family is loving, if imperfect, like most families. Jamie’s father, a plumber, is disappointed in him for not being an athlete and doesn’t quite know how to relate to his sensitive, artistic son. Jamie is bullied in school and filled with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and other purveyors of sexist online content to make himself feel big.

In the third episode, a pretty, young psychologist, Briony, draws out the “inciting incident” for the murder. Katie sent a photo of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it without her consent — something all too common in the real world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, thinking she might be amenable because “she might be weak,” since “everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat or whatever.”

Katie turns him down, saying she’s not that desperate, and mocks him as an incel on Instagram. His entitlement and shame drive him to kill her. During the episode, Jamie mocks and menaces Briony, at one point standing over her, cursing at her and roaring in her face — it seems that every time she gets him to show his soft, vulnerable side, he turns on her, using undermining “negging” techniques that were often promoted in the online manosphere as far back as 20 years ago, before it was even called that, back when its levels of misogyny were quaint by today’s standards.

Jamie’s treatment of Briony reflects an unfortunate reality: Female teachers in Britain have sounded the alarm about incel culture — in 2022, The Guardian reported that 70 percent said they have faced misogyny in schools, evidence that many red-pilled boys feel the need to reassert the power dynamic of male supremacy even to adult women. In 2024, Cosmopolitan U.K. reported on “school in the era of Andrew Tate.”

Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer at the school of education, culture and society at Australia’s Monash University, was a primary-school teacher before she went into academia, and she told me she experienced “sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny just as a daily experience in the classroom,” from teenage boys. She started reading news reports of teachers experiencing “a wave of misogyny” after Tate became popular in Britain and she wanted to see if Australian teachers were dealing with the same problems.

They were. Wescott published her research in 2023, and she said that teachers pointed to the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020-21 as the period of radicalization for a “vocal minority” of their male students; these boys were stuck at home and melting their brains on the internet.

In a qualitative study of 30 teachers from across Australia, Wescott quotes Amanda, who teaches at a public school in Melbourne and describes the dramatic change in one boy during that period. When she met him in Year 7 — the equivalent to seventh grade in the United States, so when he was probably 12 or 13 — he was creative and polite and in a dance troupe. Two years later, Amanda said, he was “writing these disturbingly misogynistic messages, literally saying, ‘No, Andrew Tate is being vilified. He’s in the right.’ I’m like, ‘Who is that boy? Because that’s not the boy that I’ve seen for the last couple of years.’”

Wescott describes the “gendered disdain” that these boys have for their female teachers’ expertise and an overall attitude of dismissiveness toward anything associated with women. An English teacher named Sarah explains, “If we read something that’s by a woman,” some boys say, “‘Why do we have to read this myth?’”

Other teachers described boys uttering sexual slurs about them in the classroom, talking about their bodies or just generally expressing a loathing of women. Sarah said one boy, who had been harassing her all year, ended up spitting in her water bottle. Witnessing the harassment of their female students was also painful for these teachers. Some of the teachers Wescott spoke to ended up leaving the profession, and she told me she still frequently gets emails from teachers who are experiencing untenable levels of gendered harassment.

My one criticism of the show — which is incredibly well acted and riveting — is that “Adolescence” is something of an after-school special for parents, scaring them straight about what’s on their kids’ phones; it has fueled a political push to regulate social media in Britain. In its excessive moments, it reminded me a bit of “Go Ask Alice,” a pseudo-memoir of a suburban girl in the 1970s who falls into drug addiction and dies. It’s worth saying that very few boys, even among those who embrace and mimic noxious figures in the manosphere, will be driven to perpetrate deadly violence against their female classmates.

When I said this to Wescott, she agreed that Jamie’s trajectory in “Adolescence” was an outlier, but she had a different concern. “I think that our preoccupation with this show, with the extreme expression of this kind of radicalization, will mean that the other sort of daily and maybe more mundane expressions of misogyny in schools will be ignored,” she said. They shouldn’t be.

End Notes

Girls, interrupted: In The Wall Street Journal in January, Matt Barnum wrote about how girls had “suffered greater test-score declines than boys” since 2019. “Some suspect the rise in behavior problems during the pandemic years prompted teachers to pay more attention to boys, who tend to act out more in class,” Barnum reports.
Cleansing this newsletter with life-affirming art: I just saw a sublime exhibition of Suzanne Valadon’s paintings. Valadon was a self-taught artist who was part of the Parisian avant-garde in the late 19th and early 20th century. “Whether using anonymous models or her own reflection, Valadon painted women of all ages and all body types with a constant desire to capture their truth, without idealizing or hiding anything,” Louise Darblay explains on Art Basel’s website. An antidote to internet nightmares: Touch grass, see beauty.

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