Manosphere creep: Emotional and hermeneutic labour in Netflix’s Adolescence

This short article examines the depiction of emotional and hermeneutic labour in the Netflix series Adolescence , which has sparked widespread cultural discourse around youth, masculinity and the mainstreaming of manosphere ideologies – what I term ‘manosphere creep’. These forms of labour are disproportionately performed by women across paid, ‘professional’ domains and unpaid, ‘private’ contexts. The analysis foregrounds not only the emotionally depleting nature of this labour in the series but also the exploitative dynamics it reveals, particularly within heterosexual and gendered relationships, where men often benefit from women’s labour without acknowledgement or reciprocity. Adolescence is valuable for the way it makes these gendered inequalities visible. Yet, it is remarkable how little cultural commentary has unpacked these glaring depictions. By tracing these patterns in Adolescence , the article addresses a gap in media analyses regarding the gendered allocation of emotional and hermeneutic labour in popular media texts. It further posits that this unequal distribution constitutes a pressing feminist issue that warrants deeper cultural and theoretical engagement.