Teenager dissects Netflix drama with worried parents

“It’s just weird to talk about your sexual feelings to your parents,” says 15-year-old Ben*.

His parents, Sophie and Martin, two professionals in their 40s, nod understandingly. They are discussing the kinds of “big issues” Ben’s social media usage throws up, and for Ben their conversations about sex and pornography are “the worst”.

The family – minus Ben’s little sister, who is too young to join the discussion – are gathered in their living room to dissect the smash-hit Netflix drama Adolescence, which they watched the previous evening.

The series follows the story of 13-year-old protagonist Jamie, who is accused of murdering a female peer after being exposed to misogynistic online material and subjected to cyberbullying.

Both of Ben’s parents are concerned their own son’s behaviour is being impacted by the material he is exposed to, and Ben, who is worried himself, is trying to set limits on his own phone use.

Given their concerns, and how they overlap with the themes of Adolescence, the family agreed to watch the programme together and allowed BBC News to sit in on their discussion, which ranged from the relevance of Andrew Tate to whether boys and girls can be friends.

Ben is sitting on the sofa in the living room scrolling on his phone before the conversation begins.

The parents take their seats looking relaxed despite the difficult subjects they are about to discuss. Photos of loved ones line the bookshelves in the family’s living room, and a piano stands against the wall.

Sophie and Martin have worked hard to create a “very open” household, Sophie says, where “all topics are on the table”. While watching the programme, Sophie made a list of things to talk about with Ben.

A confident and outspoken teenage boy, Ben is well-liked by fellow pupils at his single-sex state secondary school. But the qualities that make him popular with his peers often land him in trouble with his teachers, who give him detentions or send him to isolation for making what his mother describes as “inappropriate comments”.

In the show, Jamie and his peers use language associated with the “manosphere” – websites and online forums promoting misogyny and opposition to feminism – and incel culture. Incels, short for involuntary celibate, are men who blame women because they are unable to find a sexual partner. It is an ideology that has been linked to terror attacks and killings in recent years.

Perhaps surprisingly, “incel” wasn’t a familiar term to Ben, and his dad Martin had to explain it as they watched the programme.

“People just call each other ‘virgins’. I’ve not heard ‘incel’ before,” Ben tells his parents. He suggests the term might have “dropped off” social media for young people in recent years, reflecting the pace at which the conversation moves online.

Ben tells his parents there are elements of the show he recognises, including its depiction of the fights and cyberbullying at school. But he thinks it is only a “rough picture” of what it’s like to be a teenager today, and that it was principally made for “an adult who isn’t online”.

For example, it neglects to show the good side of social media alongside its dangers, he says, and some details – including the secret emoji codes one character claims children use – ring false.

It is for this reason that Martin, who says he enjoyed the tense drama, also feels the show is playing on every parent’s “worst nightmare” about their child’s phone use, meaning it sometimes favours theatrics over realism in an attempt to “shock” adults into action.

Andrew Tate, an influencer and central figure of the shadowy online world of the manosphere, is mentioned by name in the drama and has been the cause of much concern among parents and teachers. But Ben says that while Andrew Tate was “popular” at his school about two years ago, he is now “old news”.

Ben has noticed the way Tate combines health and wellbeing with politics. “Some of his things, like ‘exercise for an hour a day’ – fair enough, that’s correct. But then he combines it with far-right ideas, like ‘the man should go out and work and the wife should stay at home’,” Ben says.

Both parents agree that Tate is not to blame for misogyny. As far as they’re concerned, he is symptomatic of “a bigger social problem”.

This problem is represented starkly in the bleak picture Adolescence paints of male-female friendships in the social media age. Protagonist Jamie doesn’t have any female friends, and appears to view relations with the opposite sex through a lens of dominance and manipulation.

Sophie is concerned that interactions between boys and girls are distant and impersonal in Ben’s peer group. She says Ben doesn’t have many opportunities to mix with girls his age.

And she worries her son is getting most of his information about how to interact with girls from social media. “It’s really twisted,” she says. “They don’t know how to behave around each other.”

She asks her son a question: “If you don’t know how to talk to girls when you’re feeling awkward, if you’re like, ‘Eurgh, I don’t know how to dress’, where do you go for help?”

“Online,” Ben says.

“So it goes full circle,” says his mum. “That’s where they get information.”

Ben isn’t embarrassed that he’s “used ChatGPT for like two years” to get this sort of advice. “Or TikTok,” he adds.

Sophie says Ben learned most about friendship with the opposite sex during a visit to a cousin’s house, who attends a mixed school and has female friends.

She recalls Ben’s cousin reprimanding him after Ben asked whether the cousin was attracted to a female friend.

“I don’t remember him getting annoyed with me like that, but okay,” Ben says.

They debate their varying recollections of events until they land on a version on which they can agree: “His cousin was like, ‘No, that’s my friend. I don’t think of them in that way,'” Sophie says.

“That was really eye-opening for him,” she says. Turning to Ben, she recalls: “You came back from it, and you were like, ‘It’s much better [at my cousin’s], girls and boys are friends.'”

In the Netflix drama, it is revealed that Jamie’s victim Katie had been subjected to misogynistic bullying after a male classmate shared intimate images of her without her consent.

Jamie’s discussion of this incident with a child psychologist, played by Erin Doherty, is pivotal to the programme’s acclaimed third episode.

Ben has seen this kind of abuse of trust among his peers too. “There’s a guy near here, and [a picture of] his genitals got leaked on a massive group chat with loads of people,” he says. “That was a big thing on TikTok.”

The series kicks off with an episode in which police question Jamie about the sexualised images of adult women he has shared on his Instagram page, hinting at the ease with which young teenagers can access pornography.

This feels familiar to Ben, who thinks porn is the “biggest issue” among his peer group. He knows boys who are “addicted” to it: “They rely on it. There are people in my year who’ll have such a bad day unless they watch it.”

Ben squirms a little while talking about pornography, staring at the wall or fiddling with his phone.

He seems more comfortable talking about the other forms of concerning content young people come across online.

He estimates that “one in 10” videos he watches on his phone contain distressing material, including scenes of extreme violence. And Ben’s parents are under no illusions that their son is “safe” just because he is upstairs on his computer – unlike Jamie’s parents in the show.

For Martin and Sophie, the solution lies in giving children better opportunities to “participate” in society and build their self-esteem.

They say they are also keen for their son to have “wide range” of male role models to learn from. Ben, who has paused to check his phone several times in the course of their discussion, re-engages with the conversation.

He is animated in his praise for his sports coaches, whose “really strong morals” he admires.

The parents nod, evidently pleased by his enthusiasm. They say they pack their son’s life with activities in an attempt to get him off his phone. But this is expensive, they say, and puts poorer students at a disadvantage.

Sophie says of the show’s main character, Jamie: “He doesn’t have sport. He doesn’t feel good about himself. His dad looks away when he fails”.

Adolescence shows that children with limited opportunities to build their self-esteem are more “vulnerable” to the predatory messages of misogynistic influencers, Sophie says.

Both parents agree tech companies, the government, schools and families all have a responsibility to offer young people a convincing alternative to the siren call of the manosphere.

They insist parents can’t do it alone. As Sophie says: “It’s a tsunami and someone’s given me an umbrella.”

Ben thinks what happens online is too often dismissed by adults as being irrelevant to the real world. He thinks this is a mistake: social media should be treated “like real life – because it is real life”, he says.

*All names in this article have been changed.