[Lim Woong] On growing up as a boy

I recently finished watching the Netflix series "Adolescence." It was not an easy watch — a visceral piece of television that leaves you not with the satisfaction of a mystery solved, but with the hollow ache of a tragedy that raises more questions than it answers.

The plot opens with a dawn raid on the home of a plumber, his wife and their two kids. The son, Jamie, is arrested for the murder of a female classmate, but he looks like a naive teen: He wets himself in terror as the police burst in.

I felt the show wasn't a "whodunnit," it was actually a "whydunnit" with an unfinished ending. But adult viewers also get a stark dose of the online ecosystem for boys — the "manosphere," the "boy code," and the "incel" rhetoric — that took hold in this young boy's mind, transforming his insecurities into murderous rage.

Watching Jamie’s life unravel on screen had me flash back to my own boyhood. I remembered the bullies, the desperate need for validation, and the quiet fear of being seen as "weak" or "feminine." Even now, well into adulthood, those echoes of adolescent vulnerability linger. We carry the ghosts of the boys we once were. But viewing this tragedy through my professional lens as an educator, I realized that the boyhood I knew has shifted tectonically. The challenges I faced were physical and “just happened”; today's boys have to confront what is lethal, pervasive and often invisible to the adults who love them.

In my teacher education courses, we often rely on clichés about adolescent boys: They're "obnoxious" and prone to acting out. We treat their growth as a linear path needing tough love. This outdated framework may fail to capture the profound crisis unfolding in today’s school and home environments.

We’re witnessing unprecedented anomalies in boys’ development across countries. In Korea, this shows up in the dark underbelly of communities like FMKorea or Arca Live — spaces that often start as gaming or meme forums, then quietly turn younger users into “misfits”. When boys feel that what they’re taught in school sounds like polished ideals, but what they see online feels like “the real world,” they drift toward communities that package resentment as realism and cynicism as intelligence.

In the West, as "Adolescence" illustrates, it manifests in the radicalization of the “incel” movement — a subculture of self-proclaimed “involuntary celibates” who blame women and society for their romantic failures, fostering deep misogyny and entitlement. These aren’t just “boys being boys.” These are boys being methodically broken and reshaped by digital systems that stunt emotional growth, erode real-world social skills and replace face-to-face bonds with addictive, shallow online validation. Algorithms reward outrage, fetch extreme material, and short-circuit the trial-and-error learning of puberty only to amplify isolation and grievance.

The digital environment is particularly toxic for boys in three ways. First, boys, hungry for belonging, are funneled into echo chambers where anger is reframed as strength. YouTube's recommendation engine often doesn't distinguish between a healthy workout video and a "man box" tutorial that teaches boys that women are objects to be conquered.

Second, in the series, Jamie is mocked for being a virgin at 13. The digital world catapults boys into adult sexual expectations before puberty ends. They're shamed for not being "alphas" in a filtered world of perfection, breeding intense self-loathing.

Third, online interactions strip away human cues, turning cruelty into a game and trolling into a sport. Boys learn to sever their actions from the emotional harm they cause. Social media presents a hyper-masculine ideal — rich, muscular, dominant — that is impossible for a 13-year-old to achieve. When their reality (homework, acne, awkwardness) fails to match this, they retreat further into the screen, where they can feel powerful.

So, how do we guide a boy toward healthy manhood in this minefield? I honestly don’t know. There is actually a scene in the final episode of "Adolescence" that connects with my frustrations. It is not the violence, but the aftermath. Eddie, Jamie’s father (played by the magnificent Stephen Graham), lies in his son’s empty bed, clutching a teddy bear, and weeps. It is a primal release of confusion, blinding anger and crushing guilt. He is asking the silent question: Where did we go wrong? That confusion on the father’s face is the reality of the human condition.

Today, I ask the same question myself, only to realize that it is the messiness of life that no AI model can solve or fabricate. We grow by colliding with the world, by failing, by feeling pain, and by being held through by our loved ones — parents, siblings, and family and friends. We mature into adults not by avoiding these struggles, but by surviving them. Our sons will figure it out soon, but some won’t. And as "Adolescence" warns us, the cost of that failure is a tragedy we cannot afford.

Lim Woong

Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.