Reimagining Boyhood

"We have always used the 'boys will be boys' logic as a rationale to do less parenting, but we should see it as a reason to do more."

The vast majority of my friends’ kids are boys. It’s total happenstance, but it means that I’ve spent a lot of time hearing them talk about Minecraft and bashing things (and each other)….but also patiently building magnatile towers and reading books. I love hanging out with these boys. I also can’t imagine figuring out how to parent them in a way that equips them to resist toxic masculinity. You try and teach your kids not to be assholes, and part of how you do that is by leading by example. But what about all the other examples out there? There’s just so much to consider, so little means of control, so many hours of Mr. Beast.

One of the coping strategies for all of this uncertainty is to lean fully into the identity of a #boymom, branding yourself and your parenting style in a way that digs deep into stereotypical understandings of how boys “are.” I’ve had several readers email me asking me to unpack this phenomenon — and then a galley for Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom landing in my inbox. Whippman, the mother of three boys, goes deep into the complexities of raising boys today, how stereotypes about “boys will be boys” limit the ways boys can actually be, and explores the ways the structures of patriarchy at once empower and deeply harm men and boys. It’s a personal book, but also a surprising one — one that forced me to spend more time with some of my pre-existing ideas about socialization and gender. I think these answers — and the book itself — will do the same for you.

You can find Ruth Whippman’s Substack here and buy BoyMom here.

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I want to start with the epigraph for your book, which comes from bells hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody: 

“Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.”

Patriarchy will not heal them. And yet, I think that’s exactly where we direct a lot of boys and young men who are struggling: into the heart of the beast. Can we use this quote as a way into the foundation of the book?

When I decided to use the bell hooks quote, I was partly doing so to remind people that there is a proud and strong feminist tradition of recognizing that patriarchy harms men and boys as well as women. In recent years — especially in super-online, white feminist communities — it’s something we have almost forgotten. Somehow caring about boys and men has become subtly coded as a right wing cause, or even a betrayal of feminism. I almost felt as though I needed to give people on the left permission to care.

Masculine norms keep men emotionally repressed and make it hard for them to access intimate connection. Boys and men are lonely and depressed and dying by suicide at nearly four times the rate of their female peers. Since #Metoo, we have focused heavily on how patriarchy only benefits men at women’s expense, and this narrative has almost been weaponized to silence and shame boys. This is not to say that the anger directed toward men is not righteous or legitimate — it is — but if we want to get boys and men onside to the feminist cause, we need to acknowledge their pain too.

Many boys are getting drawn into this idea coming from the right that feminism is the enemy and the cause of all their problems.  But in some ways the feminist movement is playing into the hands of this narrative.  As feminists we should be selling “smashing the patriarchy” as a liberation to boys but instead we are almost selling it to them as a punishment. Which in a way is the same basic framing of the masculinity influencers that feminism is only going to make their lives worse, not better. In the book, I explore lots of complicated, and conflicted feelings and ideas about what it’s like to be a feminist and a mother of boys in this fraught cultural moment, but where I landed was very much we are all on the same side here: patriarchy harms all of us, and we shouldn’t act as though we are enemies.

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As I read through the book, the thought kept returning to me: how many of these problems with “how boys are” and “who boys grow up to be” are rooted in gender essentialism in the first place? How do gender norms — and our desire to grasp towards gendered ways of explaining behavior — create architectures of excuse (boys will be boys) but also of vulnerability and lack that can only be filled by performative masculinity? 

I really tortured myself with this dilemma when my sons were younger.  My mom was a second-wave feminist in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I grew up with a version of feminism that said gender was all socialized, so we socialize girls to be docile and compliant and let boys get away with bad behavior with the whole “boys will be boys” thing.  So when I had my boys I was absolutely convinced that I would never fall into that trap; I would hold them to a higher standard. I was truly blindsided by how physical and wild and rambunctious and often “badly behaved” they were. I felt as though I’d walked into my own ideological trap: that if boys only behaved like this because we let them, then this must all be my fault.

It’s a complicated area, but what struck me most when I dug into the science of sex differences (which is quite a sketchy area of science that people tend to co-opt to prove their own political agendas of all kinds) was that actually boys are more sensitive and emotionally vulnerable than girls on average.  At birth, their brains are more immature and vulnerable to disruption than baby girls’ brains and so they need more nurture and engagement with emotions than girls do on average. But because we project masculine qualities onto boys, we tend to see them as tougher and angrier and less in need of nurture and protection, and treat them differently as a result. Parents tend to handle boys more roughly, and to spend less time talking to them, especially about emotions. We have always used the “boys will be boys” logic as a rationale to do less parenting, but we should see it as a reason to do more. That boys need more of this type of care and receive less of it can lead to all kinds of problems down the line.

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I’m teeing us up to talk about something that I find irksome and I know a lot of readers do as well: GIRL MOM and BOY MOM branding. The title of your book plays around with this, but I’m hoping you can walk us through your thoughts on why this branding has become so popular and even thinking about parenting as a self-brand.

I think there is a tendency more generally in this generation to see our kids as an extension of ourselves. We have become more intensive as parents, we want our kids to be our best friends and a reflection of our values. Online, where everyone is performing identities and converting themselves into brands; children can easily get co-opted into this. 

I think the Boymom trope is both particularly compelling and particularly irksome to people because it manages to pack in so many sexist tropes on both the boy side and the mom side — it really speaks to our deepest misogynistic stories. On the mom side of the equation, there is still this persistent idea that closeness between a mother and son is a little Oedipal- perverted or sexualized for her and pathetic and emasculating for him. And on the boy side, the ‘boy’ in the BoyMom conceit is this essentialized little scamp who loves mud and farts and pees all over the bathroom but is essentially uncomplicated and loving (with the subtext being, ‘unlike those scheming, devious girls’). BoyMom is a cousin of winemom, this suburban enabler of toxic masculinity, chasing after her rambunctious crew and good-naturedly cleaning the toilet and picking up the dirty sports jerseys. I’ve always pushed back against the identity, but I also recognize myself (and my boys) in it too.

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I often ask this question when I’m talking to authors whose ideas could be lifted, decontextualized, and wielded as a weapon to prove the exact opposite point they’re arguing for. What’s the bad faith reading of your book? And why is it wrong?

I appreciate this question, as I think this book is easy to weaponize from both the left and the right.  The bad faith reading from the right is something along the lines of “you are trying to turn boys into girls and I feel sorry for your poor sons” which really is just the price of writing about feminism publicly. I am concerned that voices from the right might weaponize elements of this book to promote some kind of “men are the real victims” agenda or minimize the very real problems that women and girls and gender expansive people face and I will push back hard against this if it happens.

Harder to dismiss is the bad faith read from the left: that by centering the needs of boys and men, I am betraying the feminist project in some way. I made some controversial choices in the book. For instance, rather than simply condemning some of the more toxic corners of the so-called “manosphere” — like incels, or boys accused of sexual assault — I chose to engage and try to understand how they got there in the first place.  There is a strain of feminism that suggests that to engage in this way is engaging in what philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy.”  The argument is that by interviewing incels (which I do) and listening to their feelings or humanizing them, I am giving them a platform for misogynistic views and or “siding with them” over the women that they harm. I have seen similar responses to other attempts to do this sort of work.

But I believe that thinking is flawed.  If we want to understand why so many boys and men are turning to these types of groups (and making meaningful changes) then we need to dig into these boys’ psychological realities and the social forces driving them.  Simply condemning them over and over doesn’t really get us any further. 

I spent time on incel message boards and platforms, which are some of the most toxic spaces imaginable. I talked directly and in depth with the boys and young men themselves, and feature two of these interviews in detail in the book. My aim was to try to move beyond taking their opinions at face value and trying to really understand what is going on for them emotionally that led them to these beliefs. I actually ended up finding these conversations incredibly productive, and was surprised to see that much of what they were telling me about deep feelings of loneliness, lack of connection, the pressures of not living up to punishing masculinity norms and deep feelings of being unheard were actually surprisingly similar to what other more “regular” boys were also telling me.

Similarly, I attended a conference for boys accused of campus sexual assault.  This experience seriously challenged some of my preconceptions about how to balance the notion of #believewomen with the need for due process.  This stuff is complex and I would encourage anyone who is interested to read the book itself, as there is more space there to really dig into those complexities.  But after talking to boys and their families about the experiences of how the Title IX system works in adjudicating sexual assault accusations on campus, as well as interviewing legal experts at the sharp end of this work, I became convinced that there is a real miscarriage of justice happening in many of these cases, and we are just starting to see its effects. It would have been much easier to ignore these complexities, but I feel that that is not really furthering the conversation in any meaningful way or actually helping survivors of sexual violence.

I have found that when people actually read the book, and follow along as I struggle with all these complexities and questions in the text itself, they are much more open to this than when they just hear about what it contains without reading.

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Your own story of parenting three boys weaves through every chapter of the book — including your ongoing struggle to deal with their difficulties self-regulating and a diagnosis of mild autism for all three sons (and of ADHD for two of your sons). The diagnoses allowed you to reframe some behaviors (and your own feelings of failure as a parent), but you also feel some ambivalence about the diagnoses themselves. Ultimately, you want your sons to decide how the diagnosis will or will not be meaningful or useful to them. 

I read these passages — and the rest of the book — against the backdrop of so many women I know (in real life but also in the larger Culture Study community) who’ve arrived at late-in-life ADHD and autism diagnoses. Their brains have always worked differently; they just worked differently in a way that they were conditioned to understand as “inappropriate” for girls. This just makes me think about how much of our privileging of neurotypicality is related to gender norm policing, and how little space it allows for different ways of being, full stop. How have you come to think about these ideas over the course of writing this book and parenting your kids? 

This was always in mind for me. So many of the narratives around neurodiversity — especially ADHD and autism — match up to the narratives we have around boys in general. Boys are wild, boys can’t sit still, boys just don’t have deep friendships. When I was looking at my own sons’ challenges it really made it hard to know whether I was somehow pathologizing boyhood and imposing the value-system of a 40-something woman onto small boys,  or whether there was something more significant going on. I really went back and forth on it through the entire process. (I think this overlap with these gendered tropes contributes both to the overdiagnosis of boys and the underdiagnosis of neurodiversity in girls.)

I think these diagnoses can be extremely useful to people in terms of self-knowledge and identity and as a way to access support, but with my own kids, I have been afraid of overinvesting in them, making too much of them, and/or limiting them with the labeling. I have tried to hold the diagnoses relatively lightly and let the boys make their own choices around them when they are older: if they find them useful as a way to understand themselves or their experience in the world they are available to them but if they would prefer not to identify that way that is fine too. In fact, we recently had them all reassessed, because so much of the diagnostic process was done during the pandemic and the autism assessments in particular were carried out entirely over Zoom, which especially for a three year old does not feel entirely trustworthy. After this reevaluation, two of my kids no longer meet the criteria for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and we are still waiting to find out about third.  The ADHD diagnoses still stand though. 

I think that at the margins of these things, where my sons exist, there are a lot of different factors that can influence whether or not you actually receive the diagnosis or not. I would like to be able to see these labels more as information about how a person’s brain works and their strengths and challenges, rather than a definitive and restrictive label that will overdetermine who they will become. ●

You can find Ruth Whippman’s Substack here and buy BoyMom here.

Note: I’ve now closed comments to try and keep this one of the good places on the internet; I’m grateful to all who contributed.

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