Here’s another one of my sex and relationships education guides to…. Where I cover a TV show or film and take all the fun out of it make it educational. This time it’s ‘Adolescence’.
Why Adolescence
There’s been a lot of chat about Adolescence and a lot of people are worried about it. So much so that the UK Prime Minister has backed calls for it to be shown in schools. I think they would be much better off trying to make Sex Ed not suck so much to be honest (as you can see in my Bad Sex Ed Bingo card). But the show deals with themes that are right in the BISH wheelhouse so I thought I’d cover it here. There’s a lot in the show and I can’t cover all of it, but the main themes we’re going to cover here are gender, lack of consent, bullying and feelings. But first:
Are you being made to watch adolescence?
The first learning point is that no-one should be made to watch Adolescence. Being made to watch something is not consensual. I’ve got a resource here about how to watch something on TV with someone more consensually, called ‘How to Netflix and Choose’ so I’d invite you to read that. If you want to. #Consent
You shouldn’t be made to watch Adolescence in schools either: for several reasons. It’s a 15, so you’ll need to be in year 11 or above to watch it all together. It also contains extremely upsetting scenes, which may trigger stress or even a trauma response. Imagine if you or one of your classmates had experienced some kind of violence, and you were watching a TV show about violence and couldn’t escape. Awful.
Going to school isn’t exactly very consensual. Your choices are ‘go to school’ or ‘get in trouble for not going to school’. As I explained in my book about Consent, that’s barely consent at all. However, there are ways to make school and learning more consensual when you’re there. Just making you watch a video isn’t it. A good teacher is more of a facilitator, making it easier for you to take part in learning which works for you. I’ve got a lot more about this at my blog about watching Videos in RSE at Bish Training, my website for practitioners.
Also, as the Police say in episode 2, there’s very little learning when people are just watching a video. It’s boring and passive and a crap way to teach.
If someone’s putting you in the position of having to say ‘no’, here’s how to do it.
Content notes (spoilers)
There’s a good chance that you might find some of the scenes upsetting or difficult to watch, I know I did. It contains a scene of someone being stabbed to death, but the scene is on a laptop showing footage from a CCTV camera, so you can’t see blood or wounds. There is also a lot of violence throughout, punching and kicking, violent yelling (from adults and kids), threats, etc. You might want to read this from the BBFC which has guidance on what happens in each episode. If, like me, you don’t like needles, you should know that they show a blood sample being taken in the first episode (the BBFC missed that). There’s also a lot of violent language, swearing, discriminatory language, women hating language, as well as sexual language (but no sex scenes).
Okay let’s start. I’m trying to avoid massive spoilers and so this is all quite broad. But, you will get more out of this if you watch the show first.
Masculinity and femininity
A lot of the show is about masculinity and femininity, so let’s take an idea from my Teach Yourself Sex Ed course about gender culture and you.
In order to be feminine what do you have to be? You have to be [choose at least 5 separate words]. In order to ‘be masculine’ what do you have to be? You have to be [choose at least 5 separate words].
You could ask a search engine if this helps, perhaps do an image search of ‘how to be feminine’ or ‘how to be masculine’.
What do you notice about each of your lists? How do the different lists relate to each other? Do these traits or values come up in Adolescence very much? Who is doing which? As you probably know, in our culture men are supposed to do masculine things and women are supposed to do feminine things. But actual real life characters are much more complex. Do characters who are women do any of the things on your ‘masculine’ list? What about the characters who are men, do they do anything on the ‘female’ list?
You might find my article about how to be a man, featuring the masculinity donut helpful.
Zooming in and zooming out
I think this is a useful way of thinking about gender. When we ‘zoom in’ on a person, we can see that they are doing lots of things that are coded as masculine, feminine, both, or neither as they go throughout their day. People respond and act differently related to whatever it is they are dealing with in their lives. You can probably see that in the show I think.
When we ‘zoom in’ we see in a molecular way how gender plays out in the day to day. If we zoom out we see that the characters in the show are still meant to behave in gendered ways. For us, the trick is to make use of ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’ to help us to be/do our gender in ways that feels good for us. It’s what is known as ‘a becoming’ …. Crucially, everything we do also has an affect on how everyone else can ‘become’ too, because doing anything always involves other people.
Think about some of the adult characters in the show: how are they feeling about their gender do you think? Perhaps imagine a time in their lives when they felt ‘yes, this feels really good to me’.
Who gets to be a main character?
In episode two DS Frank (one of the Police officers) says that she’s concerned that the story is all going to be about the killer, Jamie, and not his victim, Katie. Katie doesn’t get to be a character and we don’t see her family (though we do see Jade, her bestie). Simone de Beauvoir (French existential and feminist philosopher) talked about the ‘subject’ and the ‘other’. Looking carefully throughout the show, who gets to be the subject of their own story and who is the ‘other’ in someone else’s story? Who gets to be a main character?
Try the Teach Yourself Sex Ed Module about The Self.
Bullying
There’s a lot of bullying in Adolescence. You might want to read my article about How Bullying Happens, but to summarise, it’s where someone’s freedoms are restricted through violence in an environment that encourages it. There’s also sexual bullying which does a similar thing but relating to sexual and gendered stuff.
In the show, for each case of bullying, try thinking about how it can be minimised at each of the various levels.
Too often the advice is about the individual being bullied, but what about the people around us, the communities we’re in, and the broader society that we are part of. Hopefully you’ll see that as the circles get bigger there is more that can be done.
Once you’ve done that, have a look at how a change in one area can help make a change in another area. Let’s say in Adolescence that the school would stop their teachers yelling at the kids. Over time, how might that help make a change happen in other areas? What would that do, what else?
Influence
Some of the show (and a lot of the chat about the show) is about the influence that people on social media have on people. Let’s think about influence and how that works. If you think about someone that you admire, what they say, what you can learn from them about how to live your life, that kind of thing.
- How come you found out about them?
- Can you remember the first moment that you realised you like them?
- Do you remember how you were affected by this?
- What did you do with the new ideas you were hearing? How did it contribute to your learning?
- What have you been pleased to notice about yourself?
- How have people responded to you?
Notice how it’s active? You bring your own ideas, life experiences, circumstances to it. In some ways you were looking for it or were primed to be interested in it. Then it affects the rest of your life, you learn things, others respond. Sometimes we might say the influence is bad, or good, but it’s never just the influence that’s doing ‘the thing’.
The way that some influencers are talked about is completely different to how other influencers / influences are talked about. We should remember that there is always an active element to being influenced by an influencer. What would you do if you had a mate in this situation? What could Jamie’s friends and family have done? How about the school? If Andrew Tate was hit by a bus tomorrow, would that make a difference?
You might find my article on how to make friends useful here, because it explains some of the philosophy of this a bit.
Feelings
We like to talk about feelings here at BISH. Let’s say there are (according to the first Inside Out film) five key emotions: joy, sadness, anger, worry, and shame. Which of these emotions are being felt the most by the characters?
If you read my advice articles above, you’ll see that if we can feel our emotions then we can make use of them. Think of some of the key moments in the show and consider how each character could actively process what is going on for them.
From my article about self esteem and how we feel about ourselves.
How is their body being affected? What kind of emotional state could they recognise? How might they tap into memories, or use their imagination to think of strategies for dealing with this? What could they do next? How will that affect their body?
Consent and violence
My friend and colleague, Elsie Whittington, has done research on consent as a continuum. (In fact we write about it in this academic article we recently wrote). At one end of the continuum is active consent, which is where we are more likely to experience joy and fun. This is because active consent gives us the freedom to choose to agree, it increases our capacity to act.
At the other end, there is no consent, where we are given no freedom to choose to agree. This is where harm, unhappiness, sadness, and violence happens, because our capacity to act is decreased or stopped altogether. Not all violence is the same, being killed is incredibly violent.
But if you look at the whole show, for each scene, where are they are on the scale of ‘no consent to active consent’? Zoom out and look at the whole show, all the characters. How much consent is there? Zoom back in and think about how, in each scene, as the plot progresses, how could there have been more consent? How might that have resulted in less violence?
What difference would it make if we put consent – the freedom to choose to agree – at the centre of everything we do in society?
Other resources
There were other issues that came up in the show which I have resources about too, so I’m just going to flag them up here. Here’s one about how to get a girlfriend (or boyfriend, or themfriend) and here’s one about how to be attractive. You might find this helpful about how to feel better about our bodies, and as part of my Teach Yourself Sex Ed series I’ve got a module about bodies (if you want to get nerdy). There’s also my advice about Sexting and the Law and how it’s the people who share images without consent that are more likely to get in trouble.
© Justin Hancock, 2025 Find out more about me and BISH here.
I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.
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