Introduction: I’m your host this week, Iona Italia. My guest is William Costello. William is a PhD student in Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is part of a lab run by the eminent evolutionary psychologist David Buss. His research focuses on incels—involuntary celibates—and the community of men who identify in that way. I wouldn’t always turn to someone at such an earlier stage in his research career to provide expert opinion for Quillette, but William is exceptional, as I think you will quickly notice.

We focus on the recent Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, which first aired less than three weeks ago and which is already on track to be their most-watched series ever. The series depicts the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who views himself as an incel (i.e., someone who will never have success with women) and murders a classmate after she rejects his attentions. It has attracted widespread media and political coverage and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who has repeatedly mistakenly referred to this fictional story as a “documentary”—has suggested that it should be shown in all British schools, to combat a supposed epidemic of misogyny. We discuss what the show gets both right and wrong about incels and William helps counter some of the overheated responses to this emotive, exquisitely filmed fiction with facts and statistics that provide a much more accurate picture of the situation. I hope you enjoy my conversation with William Costello.

Iona Italia: So first of all, what are some of the things that you think that Adolescence got right in their depiction?

WC: So, one thing I think it got very right is, whether it’s intentional or not, they very accurately depicted the kind of confusion that a lot of adults bring to this topic, to the incel topic, to the manosphere, to the troubles of young, very online teenagers that they’re raising. So it depicted the adults, the detectives, the teachers all being very confused, lumping incels in with Andrew Tate, all in one monolith. And I think that is very accurate of how adults approach this topic. I also think something that they did that was a bit more sophisticated is rather than having a character go down the rabbit hole of incel ideology, they showed how incel ideology being around or even being able to be levied as an insult, as it was by the woman, the girl in the show that was bullying him that he ended up killing.

She called him an incel online and a lot of friends liked that comment on Instagram and this public humiliation was the trigger for him to go confront her, which led to her being stabbed and killed. So the idea that a young boy of thirteen, the show talks about—well, every young boy at thirteen is to some level or other an incel, right? They’re not really expected to be very sexually active. But it shows that even a boy as young as thirteen, given the manosphere type content that’s around now, is feeling increasingly feeling pressure to present themselves as someone who is either currently somewhat sexually active or is the type of boy who is going to be.

In episode three, it shows Jamie, the protagonist, having an interview with the psychiatrist, and he’s at pains to show a lot of bravado, showing how sexually successful he was and how far he had gone with girls and really keen to prove his masculinity in this way. And I thought it was a bit bold of the writers of the show to depict the victim, the girl who ends up getting killed, as the bully, insulting him about being an incel and that the implication was he was going to be a virgin for life.

I thought it was a realistic depiction of how some violence like this might unfold, a tragedy like this. But we have to be very clear that if a tragedy like this unfolded, it would be a huge outlier in terms of a young thirteen-year-old boy who had never been in trouble before, is getting on well in school, has friends, stumbles upon having a knife, is humiliated online publicly, feels like he has to confront the girl and things get out of hand. So that is a plausible depiction of what might happen, but it would be a huge outlier.

The writers of the show have said that they were inspired by the epidemic of knife violence in the UK. Now, what they depicted in the show is not prototypical of knife violence in the UK at all. There is no epidemic of manosphere-inspired violence among young people in the UK or anywhere. So it just simply isn’t an epidemic on that level. I would wager that there is an epidemic of knife violence, but you can draw a straight line of causality from something like drill music far easier than you can from manosphere ideology.

II: What is drill music? Sorry.

WC: So drill music, if you’re not familiar, it’s a mix between rap and grime, but very linked with gang culture. There’s literally examples of teenagers or young, typically black adults in London stabbing and killing each other and then writing a drill music song about it. They’re encouraged to do this. And you can actually quantify the body count associated to that subgroup or culture in a way that you can’t with manosphere. So it was an unusual decision.

I don’t want to hold their feet to the fire too much for having to be hyper-realistic in their portrayal. But when they’re claiming that this is inspired by the epidemic of knife violence, then I think they have an onus to be accurate. They have even more of an onus to be accurate when the show is now being brought up in parliament and the prime minister is describing it as a documentary. We have the leader of the opposition being raked over the coals on radio because she hasn’t seen it. There’s plans to roll it out … It aired seventeen days ago, by the way. And in that time, it has become Netflix’s most watched mini-series of all time. And it’s on track to become one of their most watched shows of all time, period. And now there are plans, government-backed plans to show it in every school in the UK.

Now, there’s no evidence to show that this type of intervention would be effective to challenge a problem which, like I say, is fictitious in the first place. It’s really taken on a life of its own and it’s escalating at a crazy pace. And I think everyone needs to take a little bit of a perspective because policy decisions on any topic should be based on sober research rather than a really highly emotive piece of performance art, no matter how powerful that piece of performance art is.

II: Yeah, absolutely. My feeling about it is: Having seen it, it’s very beautifully shot. I don’t know anything about filmmaking so I may be wrong when I say this, but it feels as though [each episode] was shot in one long take. It doesn’t have these jump cuts where you switch from one scene to another and that makes it feel very immersive. And I think that technique might be part of what’s confusing Keir Starmer when several times he’s described it as a documentary. I don’t excuse his confusion. He’s the prime minister, so he ought to get his shit together, and be a bit more thoughtful and well-informed when he’s commenting on things, especially something that is potentially as emotive and explosive as this. But nevertheless, I think that that impression that has clearly entered his head somehow that it’s a documentary maybe partly comes from just that filming technique and also the extraordinary talent of the actors involved. The father, Stephen Graham …

WC: Stephen Graham, yeah, he’s the writer as well.

II: I have seen him in other things and he has the classic feel of a Shakespearean-trained BBC actor. It’s an absolute joy to watch him at work. I mean, all the actors in it were tremendous and especially the young boy was just incredible. The actor I believe was fourteen when he was filming the series. He plays a thirteen-year-old and he was only one year older himself. He’s just turned fifteen now. And that was his first time ever acting for TV, I believe. He’s just completely extraordinary. I did speech and drama at age 14, I got a distinction in my grade eight, which is the highest grade. And there is absolutely no way that I could have given any kind of TV performance that was even one percent as convincing as that. I just declaimed Shakespeare in a hammy voice and things like that. So I’m very struck by partly how skilled the production was and also just how powerful stories are. And I think part of the problem here is the Stalin thing, which is “one death is a tragedy and a million deaths are a statistic.” Many people are caught up in the one story, in the tragedy, whereas you are going to talk statistics for us and bring us a bit more back down to earth from this suspension of disbelief that’s happened.

WC: Yeah, so just a couple of things to pick up on what you said. Yes, I totally agree with the extraordinary acting that was on show from everyone involved, but particularly Owen Cooper, the young actor whose first role it was. I [agree with you] when you say what a plausible depiction he gave of an angry young teenager. I think it’s the plausibility of that anger. He’s very typical of an angry young teen in his scene with the psychiatrist. And that is probably relatable to anyone who’s worked in schools in the UK. You recognise this antagonistic young boy who oscillates between extreme anger, a little bit of insecurity, smugness, adversarialness. He’s just completely natural of how they actually behave when they’re confronted with an authority figure. They try and create rapport with you and then they push you away. It was very typical of the anger of young men I found. So that might have been easy enough for him to tap into because that bit is prototypical. It is interesting—and I don’t want to get him in too much trouble here—but Stephen Graham, one thing that isn’t really talked about much is he very recently got in trouble himself for a little bit of toxic masculinity. He actually got arrested, I think, for attacking a referee or verbally abusing a referee at a soccer game. There’s interviews where he discusses that. So that’s interesting that he has a trajectory to create a show about ostensibly toxic masculinity.

But yeah, so in terms of statistics, in terms of incel violence alone, there has been a handful of attacks and 59 people around the world are estimated to have lost their lives in instances of ideologically motivated incel violence. Now that is very, very small in comparison to almost any other extremist group.