Adolescence has struck a chord with everyone with this important message 

A recent Netflix series, Adolescence, is hitting headlines for several reasons —Owen Cooper's performance, how meticulously the story is crafted, how accurately it deals with a sensitive issue, how they acheived episodes in single takes and one that is most talked about is the important message and what it tries to say about masculinity.

The show questions how adolescent boys are suffering as they are unable to navigate masculinity and its true meaning within a society that glorifies dominance, toughness, and control. Even the social media influencers teenagers are following are contributing to a broader crisis in the mental health of young men.

Read on to know in detail about the one powerful message in Adolescence.

Adolescence gives a crucial message: here is what it is

Adolescence opens with a gritty scene where some police officers and commandos are crawling towards a house early in the morning. The men in black with guns and armour break into an ordinary-looking house. The man of the family first encounters them and warns them that they have made a mistake. An adult girl is scared, and so is her mother. They straightaway enter the room of a teenage boy when the father reveals that he is a kid. And here we see the commandos pointing a gun towards a 13-year-old, while the kid ends up peeing in his pants, witnessing the horror.

The way we connect with the kid throughout the series and wish him to be innocent, the more we get to understand how behavioural patterns are influenced by toxic masculinity. The series very intelligently tells an extraordinary story in a very ordinary manner. Adolescents often face peer pressure or bullying about their body or appearance, which could be overwhelming. In the show, the boy commits the crime of murdering her classmate under the influence of online "incel" culture.

Adolescence shows how the lanaguage of violence could be easily picked up by kids from the world around them — bullying in the school canteen, Ryan being beaten up by Jade and mocked by his peers, later when Jamie is seen fighting with another inmate in the prison and finally Jamie's father getting violent with boys who graffitied his van.

The message is clear that in this world, violence is often seen as an answer to everything, but the question that Adolescence raises is whether a 13-year-old would be able to figure out the difference.

What does the co-writer of Adolescence say about the message it tried to give out?

Jack Thorne, the co-writer of the show, wrote in The Guardian about his experience of researching for the show. He writes how Jamie in the show basically resorts to a tragic crime for "resetting" a female-dominated world by manipulating or harming others.

"One of the central ideas—that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men—would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: What do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive."

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He further rightly pointed out how the family institutions, educational institutions must be held accountable.

“Jamie is not a simple product of the ‘manosphere.’ He is a product of parents who didn’t see, a school that couldn’t care, and a brain that didn’t stop him. Put 3,000 kids in the samsituation and they wouldn’t do what he did. Yet spend any time on forums on 4chan or Reddit, spend any time on most social media platforms, and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces. Parents can try to regulate this, schools can stop mobile-phone access, but more needs to be done."

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