Netflix’s show Adolescence has been on everyone’s lips over the past couple of weeks, raising vital awareness of the misogynistic nature of social media, and how easily boys and young men can be drawn into a dark underworld of ‘incel’ culture while their parents and teachers can remain totally unaware.
However, for all its hard-hitting truths, Adolescence has created yet another conversation about misogyny that ignores girls.
Where are the female characters?
Co-created by the writer Jack Thorne and the actor Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini, this is a show conceived solely by men and offering no space for a female perspective.
The girl at the heart of this story, as is so often the case in what children study at school (An Inspector Calls, Of Mice and Men), is dead and has no voice. She is the victim, and yet her story gets no airtime.
How can it be right that in 2025, we are still producing stories like this, that are universally praised and now being offered to schools to watch for free as part of their RSE curriculum on ‘tackling misogyny’ – when girls and women are invisible and only male experience matters?
Victims with voices
Rebecca Jade Hammond’s hard-hitting play Hot Chicks premiered at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre last month, and tells the story of two teenage girls from Swansea, Ruby and Kyla, who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
They have been failed by their parental figures, see no value in school, and live their lives on Instagram and TikTok, dreaming of being social media stars so they can make ‘dollar’ and go to Las Vegas. They are an easy target for Sian, a drug-runner in her thirties, who grooms the girls by plying them with designer clothes and free food until they agree to do a drop off for her.
They are enticed by the promise of making unimaginable amounts of money for their Vegas fund with no real knowledge of what they are getting into, and they soon find themselves trapped in a nightmare from which they can’t escape.
The tragic consequences of the girls’ involvement in this world are swift and stark, and yet while they are, as in Adolescence, victims – in Hammond’s play, they are given powerful voices through which to tell their own story.
Including female stories in the curriculum
If we are going to encourage schools to show students Adolescence and build curricula around it, then Hot Chicks should be mandatory to teach alongside it.
Girls are just as vulnerable as boys to grooming, both online and in the real world, and by solely focusing on male experiences of this, we are failing in our duty of care as educators to all our students.
There is another side to this, too; by placing Adolescence on a pedestal and enforcing it as core curriculum content, we send the message that only boys’ experiences and voices matter, and women are passive, silent victims.
Using Adolescence on its own as part of a discussion of misogyny and grooming in PSHE continues the depressing pattern throughout the school curriculum in which girls’ experiences and voices are ignored. The irony of Adolescence is that it demonstrates the horror of the consequences of misogyny on girls while reinforcing the message that they don’t matter through not giving them a voice.
Redressing the balance with Adolescence and Hot Chicks
We have to redress the balance. There is nothing wrong with raising awareness of misogyny and male violence in schools through Adolescence. But we must give students the opportunity to see the issues it raises from a female as well as male perspective.
In any conversation about misogyny, girls must be included, and they need to be given a voice – not just as victims, but as active agents whose experiences are just as worth hearing about as boys’.
Rebecca Jade Hammond’s play Hot Chicks is published by Methuen.
