UK schools will show 'Adolescence' to warn teens about toxic 'manosphere'

British students will learn to beware of the woman-hating, rage-hyping "manosphere" if they watch Netflix's hit series, Adolescence, Prime Minister Keir Starmer hopes. He wants secondary schools to show the four-part series on a 13-year-old English boy who kills a female classmate, reports AP.

Starmer watched the drama with his 14-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son. Showing it in schools will “help students better understand the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalization and the importance of healthy relationships,” his office said.

Of course, Adolescence is not a documentary. The original idea was to write about a a boy knifing a girl, but not to blame parents, co-creator Jack Thorne wrote in The Guardian. "We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive." Then a colleague suggested "incel" (involuntary celibates) culture. That enable the show to "look in the eye of male rage," says Thorne.

When "Jamie" is bullied on social media, he turns to messages "about why he's isolated, why he's alone, why he doesn't belong," and is too young to question it.

Thorne's colleague Stephen Graham, was inspired by the "epidemic of knife crime" in Britain, he told Birmingham Live.

However, all the real-life stabbings Graham mentions in the interview have nothing to do with normal kids from good families corrupted by toxic male influencers, writes Stacy McCain. The attackers were very troubled teenagers from very troubled families.

In most homicides, the killer and the victim are male. In Britain, 26 males under 16 and 18 females were victims of homicide last year. Most were killed by a parent or step-parent.

Masculinity is the villain in Adolescence, writes Madeleine Kearns on The Free Press. The show presents males as natural predators.

“What we’re seeing in Adolescence isn't fiction; it's a reality," said Michael Conroy, founder of Men At Work, which teaches boys to respect women. "The risk of lethality is already there."

That's a bad message to send to boys, Kearns argues.