LAST UPDATE | 10 hrs ago

MY LATE DEAR mother, Colette Redmond, was born in Dublin in 1919, the year that the first female MP, Nancy (Viscountess) Astor, entered the Westminster Parliament (then the seat of power in Ireland and Britain), and the year after (some, privileged) women first won the vote.

Inevitably, in that turbulent era, she was well acquainted with hardship (her mother had started life in a tenement in Gardiner Street) and conflict, especially in the Civil and Great Wars, and she became the archetypal ‘independent’ woman with robust opinions. She was also a formidable activist in the realm of unmarried mothers (as she herself had been in the 1950s) but, curiously, the only true grievance I ever heard her utter was in relation to the opportunities afforded to girls.

Like all the mothers I knew as a boy, I remember her indignation at the ‘unfairness’ with which women were treated in Ireland, from obligatory resignation from the civil service if they got married, to the men-only golf clubs, and she routinely rehearsed the mantra that it was a ‘man’s world’. Mind you, she loved the company of men, and much of the stuff that she – and her girlfriends – came out with was the banter to be expected in the eternal Battle of the Sexes.

While my mother was an impassioned believer in fairness, I can’t help but think that she’d be astonished and concerned at how far the pendulum has swung the other way now and how ‘gendered’ roles are reversed.

I think she’d have been anxious about her grandson, in a world in which — according to countless online and mainstream media articles — men are ‘lost and confused’, and a ‘crisis’ is engulfing modern masculinity. And I’m sure she’d have been profoundly exercised by the recent widely acclaimed Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, in which a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, is arrested and eventually found guilty of the murder of a girl in his class at school, Katie.

Adolescence has been a huge hit for Netflix. It has opened the conversation on children's exposure to toxic online content. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The ‘thesis’ of Adolescence is that a much-loved son is driven to stab his classmate to death by a poisonous mixture online — and then offline — of cyberbullying, ‘incel culture’ and weaponised ‘misogyny’. It has been described as ‘a masterclass in televisual storytelling’ and ‘a searing viewing experience that scars’, and it is a brilliant portrayal of teenage male emotional immaturity.

But I’m not convinced that it addresses the real driver of intensifying male rage, which is the now-widespread perception that boys’ hopes, dreams and feelings are increasingly the object of scorn, and the very essence of their being —........

© TheJournal