When Adolescence arrived on Netflix last month, the four-part series was streamed nearly 25 million times in just four days and sparked a global conversation about the dark side of social media and the lives of teenage boys.
But what is it really like to be a teenage boy in 2025? “I think maybe young men are getting a bad rap,” says Jamie Carrick, a 20-year-old youth worker with The Soar Foundation.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, Carrick says that the majority of young men he works with in schools across Ireland, are open to discussing the challenges they face or what they are seeing online but are often not given the “time or space” to do so.
So in today’s episode, we are doing just that: three teenagers and Soar facilitator Carrick came into The Women’s Podcast studio to discuss the issues they face on and offline. Transition year students Chester Ryan, Dylan O’Malley and Daneilla Tetteh joined Róisín Ingle to discuss what they wish adults would understand about them and whether they think Netflix’s Adolescence reflects their lives in any real way.
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“Adults definitely think that everything we see, we’re gonna believe,” says Chester Ryan, a 16 year-old student from Dublin. “We obviously scroll past, if we don’t think it’s true or whatever”.
Although the dangerous messaging from toxic masculinity influencers featured heavily in the Netflix show, this particular set of teenagers say it isn’t something that overly affects them. For them, viral misogynist Andrew Tate is old news.
“I haven’t heard his name in a while. Like I know when he got a lot of attention, like two years ago, three years ago, we got a talk from a teacher …about what he did that we might not know about,” Ryan says.
The talk was enough to quash any interest this young man might have once had in Tate. “Because he is so big on social media, [people] thought, oh, maybe this is a cool guy, we should copy what he’s doing, but after the talk, we definitely realised, oh, he’s so different to what we knew. What he’s done is completely wrong”.
And what influence, if any, does someone like Conor McGregor have on this set of young people? 16-year-old Dylan O’Malley says he was once a fan, but not anymore. “I would’ve loved watching McGregor fight, but now that he’s retired and he’s gone into more political stuff…even with the recent case against Nikita Hand… I wouldn’t really be a big fan of him anymore …things that he’s been saying are a bit obscene”.
For 17 year-old Daniella Tetteh, it’s not quite as straightforward. She thinks that although the young men in her class might not be quoting masculinity influencers directly or following them online, misogynistic language can easily creep into the classroom.
“You do hear comments that are worrying at times. Like it can be passive … alot of dismissive language is being used,” she says.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
