Netflix’s Adolescence has taken the world by storm, offering a searing portrayal of a now-familiar narrative: a young boy radicalised online by misogynistic content who ultimately commits violence against a girl in his class for rejecting him. But while Adolescence explores how boys can become radicalised online, many girls of the same age have been consuming similarly harmful content. 

When I was 13, the same age as the show’s protagonist Jamie, the social media website Tumblr was at the height of its popularity, with over 100 million blog posts coming out every four months. Sandwiched between GIFs of Gerard Way and fanfiction, I learnt what feminism was, became familiar with queer culture, and discovered the power of protest. But anyone familiar with the internet in the 2010s knows Tumblr was also flooded with graphic depictions of self-harm, pro-ana blogs, and so much porn. I have often joked that anyone online at that time should receive a state-funded I survived Tumblr in 2014 t-shirt. While none of this content was explicitly framed as misogyny, it contributed to normalising violence against female bodies.

We know how online misogynistic content radicalises young men: it teaches them to hate women and then they translate that hatred into real-world violence. Thankfully, Adolescence has made the UK government finally take notice of what is happening behind the closed doors of boys’ bedrooms. But what’s missing from the ongoing discourse is how young girls also absorb misogynistic content, and how seemingly innocuous private online experiences ultimately shape their public attitudes, behaviours, and desires.

Dr Catherine Tebaldi is an anthropologist and researcher. “Men do [commit] more violent acts, but women serve a really important role. By combining beauty and a perceived sexual availability with right-wing rhetoric, they are expert propagandists,” she says. “They can normalise the message as soft, feminine, caring for the (white) family.” This maternal and homesteading image of femininity has re-emerged recently in the resurgence of the “tradwife” – the ultra-feminine, homemaking woman who romanticises the submission and domesticity of 1950s Americana. But hidden beneath the kitschy aesthetic are the same patriarchal gender roles being repackaged and circulated by young women themselves. Many tradwife influencers explicitly endorse and encourage anti-feminist and white nationalist views under the guise of a rustic ‘barefoot and pregnant’ way of life. This radicalisation is quiet, aestheticised – and deeply effective.

Dr Tracy Llanera, an Associate Professor of Philosophy researching women in the far-right, tells me that this vein of female radicalisation is so difficult to challenge as it is often framed using a bioessentialist language which makes virtues out of care, motherhood, femininity, and Christian duty. As a result, many of the women involved in far-right misogyny and radicalisation don’t see their actions as violent. Unlike their male counterparts, whose radicalisation is often driven by rage or aggression, Llanera explains: “They can argue ‘but I’m not hurting anyone, my choice will not involve violence’”.

But ideology can be violent too. “There is a disconnect between the prospects of violence that one comes to expect in other extremist movements – where women come to expect physical violence – and the experiences of women joining the far-right,” Llanera continues. But women have long had active roles in the violence of far-right radicalisation. From the KKK’s women’s auxiliary, to the pro-life movement, and the rise of TERF ideology, women have played a central role in sustaining politics that result in violence. Case in point: Trump’s 2024 election, where white women voted for him in near-equal numbers to white men. Yet mainstream discussions of violent far-right radicalisation still focus overwhelmingly on men, failing to recognise the women who work to uphold these structures.

Women are growing up in this hyper-capitalist hellscape and our entire society is set up for them to fail

The radicalisation of women extends into their private, personal lives too. The online choke-me-daddy ‘sex positivity’ of the last decade, while attempting to encourage bodily autonomy, has arguably been incredibly harmful for young women, normalising violence during sex and conditioning both men and women to see it as desirable. Billie Eilish recently opened up about the impact early exposure to internet porn had on her sexuality: “I was watching abusive porn, to be honest, when I was like 14… It got to the point where I couldn’t watch anything else. Unless it was violent, I didn’t think it was attractive.” While it’s worth caveating that some women do enjoy rough sex, there are also countless young women like Eilish who have been socialised to accept sexual violence without considering whether it’s something they innately desire.

Female radicalisation is happening at an alarming rate, and we need to talk about it in conjunction with how we talk about the radicalisation of boys. But the solution to this crisis is not to curb women’s autonomy – either on or offline. “There’s always been this effort to prevent women from being in online spaces,” journalist Taylor Lorenz tells me. While boys are being radicalised every day, there has never been a call to get them off the internet; meanwhile, Lorenz says, people like Jonathan Haidt infantilise young women, suggesting they – not boys – should be kept offline because they’re “too neurotic” and vulnerable to handle harmful algorithms, arguing they are a danger to themselves. “The internet is liberating for women [...] it’s a crucial lifeline for them,” Lorenz continues. “Young girls see a much wider variety of body types and feminist thought on the internet today than they ever could in the past, and that’s what really scares people.”

Because while the internet may be a conduit to radicalisation, it isn’t the root cause. “We live under a patriarchy,” Lorenz argues. “Women are growing up in this hyper-capitalist hellscape and our entire society is set up for them to fail [...] If more of their offline lives were equal, then they wouldn’t be buying into these [misogynistic] fantasies.” This is true regardless of gender – in order to stop young people being radicalised, we need to break the systems which radicalise them. We need to build a world where our material conditions don’t turn us towards oppressive alternatives, where submission isn’t sold as survival – a world that gives feminism something real to hope for.