I don’t have one. A boy, that is. And under these circumstances, reading Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity—a soul-searching new book about raising three little guys at a time of toxic masculinity/Trump/#MeToo/school shootings/incels/the manosphere and so on—should have been a revelation. Whippman interviews boys, visits support groups for teenagers, talks to researchers, and even goes online to find some incels willing to chat with her. As a writer, she’s funny, open to learning new things, and self-aware. So why does this book still feel so futile?
Like other “Boys Are in Trouble” books of the past few decades, BoyMom rehearses familiar statistics about lagging academic achievement, ADHD diagnoses, and suicide rates. But the most vivid parts are personal. Whippman describes living with two little boys knocked off their emotional axes by the arrival of another baby, then by a pandemic. She’s great at invoking the tremendous, mind-altering experience of being a full-grown adult living in a house with three needy mini-tornadoes who don’t sleep. In one passage, she is up late at night, Googling “Why is parenting so hard?” and finding every structural explanation offered online to be incomplete. “The social expectations of motherhood are indeed punishing,” she thinks. “But the really hard part is the kids.”
Even a GirlMom like me knows that the physical and mental stress of being a parent to little children—being the target of a headbutt or a stray punch or an overstimulated bite; hearing all those loud noises; weathering the annoyance of being begged again for the same damn thing—is real. (Those companies that sell parent earplugs aren’t in business for fun.) Whippman may have pegged her book to all those newsy, familiar nouns I mentioned up top, but you get the sense in the sections on life with three boys that it’s these daily batterings, and the way they challenge her ideas about gender, that are the true engine of her interest in the topic.
The moments when Whippman finds herself honestly confused over her findings are far stronger than yet another look at the old saw that patriarchy hurts men too. In her interviews with incels, Whippman discovers that her subjects have had experiences while connecting with one another where they can feel emotionally vulnerable in a unique and valuable way, even though they first met in a milieu dedicated to misogyny. Whippman points out that more of boys’ social lives, as compared to girls’, have shifted online—a fact not often highlighted in the recently resurgent debates over kids and smartphones. She describes with poignancy what a trial it can be to host a screen-free playdate when the boys involved end up “wandering around aimlessly, asking repeatedly when they can next play video games.” (The day after I finished this section, I asked a BoyMom friend of mine whether this rang true to her. “Oh, yes,” she said. “We are always exchanging tips on how to slightly throttle the Wi-Fi during playdates so they have to do something other than game.”)
So many of the concerns throughout this book—loneliness, suicidality, alienation—seem as if they could bring readers of BoyMom together with the many conservative defenders of “boys’ rights.” But they won’t, for a couple of reasons. One is simple bad faith. On the right, “Boys are disadvantaged at school and in culture, and it’s liberals’ fault” is an idea with a lot of power to politically motivate parents of boys who have right-leaning inclinations already—and there’s a correspondingly strong disinclination to accept that liberal parents of boys might have any overlapping goals or sentiments.
Writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton covered some of the same ground as BoyMom in the Cut earlier this year, in a very funny essay that starts with her discovery of an anonymously sketched “dick ’n’ balls” some boy in her house had traced in the grease on the top of her range. The deft back-and-forth in that piece between Jezer-Morton’s dismay at her boys’ increasing proximity to the manosphere and her feeling that the liberal status quo wasn’t offering much for the boys’ sense of self didn’t register at all, even with readers like the Times’ Ross Douthat, who should know better. Jezer-Morton literally wrote the lines “We progressive parents of white sons could ease up” and “No one should get canceled at the dinner table,” and proceeded to be called “the worst person in the world” by a prominent pundit online for her troubles. The heated weeklong dustup after Jezer-Morton’s piece shows how hyperpolitical support for “boyhood” has become. The idea that progressive parents are so brainwashed that they hate their own sons has quite a lot of heat in 2024. It’s a partisan weapon that’s hard to resist.
Like a lot of mainstream parenting books, BoyMom is written for people already on board with the goals of feminism, however you’d define that. Whippman writes of the Trump era: “Although obviously there were still countless individual conservative women and progressive men, as a political class, females started to represent change and hope, while males symbolized the status quo, injustice and harm.” This may have seemed true to people with social-justice interests who opposed Trump, but it certainly didn’t to Trump supporters. And, I’d argue, it’s not even true anymore for liberals, given the salience of such political stars as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace, whose very existence should put the whole “Women represent change and hope!” thing permanently 6 feet under. Appeals to conventional wisdom like that one make BoyMom seem a little bit dated and specific to its liberal coastal environs.
There is one major substantive difference between the liberal worriers about contemporary boyhood and the conservative ones. The liberals, like Whippman, think that what we should do is open boys up to a fuller range of human emotional experience—teach them about relationships, resist assuming that they aren’t soft, somewhere inside. The conservatives want everyone to reembrace “boyish” energy. Boys are lonely not because their culture stifles their emotions; they’re lonely because parents, teachers, and workplaces don’t celebrate their strengths. If these boy defenders ever get hold of the section of BoyMom that questions the public’s constant use of buddy when referring to boys, a practice Whippman argues is almost as detrimental as the use of sweetheart for girls (“a buddy is a peer, someone to grab a beer with; a sweetheart is a cherished darling in need of love and nurture”), they are going to have a field day.
Ultimately, this is why the book felt futile to me—not because it’s not well executed, not because it’s not written in a spirit of deep urgency, not because it doesn’t occasionally surprise readers with its findings. BoyMom simply doesn’t break through the party line. It’s possible, sometimes, to use the mutual experience of raising kids as a bridge across political divides. How many times since the birth of my child have I found myself chatting with a fellow parent very different from me, someone I would never have spoken with otherwise? Many! But online, everything related to parenting has become a fight, and the trenches have long ago been dug. “Boyhood” is a slogan now. I’m not sure that’s great for anyone.
