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In late 2017, pregnant with her third son, Ruth Whippman felt the first inkling of fear about being a mother of boys. It was the beginning of #MeToo, and “everywhere I turned there were bad men,” she writes in BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. A self-proclaimed feminist, the British journalist continues, “this moment in history would be one of the most clarifying, exhilarating times of my life. But as a mother of boys, it would twist my stomach into a knot of fear and hypocrisy, a tangle of competing envies and hopes and contradictions that would take a long time to fully unravel.”
BoyMom, Whippman’s memoir-slash-reported analysis, brings readers along for that unraveling; probing all that’s wrong with what society tells us (and boys themselves) about masculinity and examining the ways we’re raising the next generation of men. SheKnows talked to Whippman about patriarchy, the loneliness of boys, and the importance of raising ’emotionally and psychologically healthy’ young men.
SheKnows: We’re hearing so much about boys and young men being in crisis right now. How do we help them without compromising the gains made for girls and women?
Ruth Whippman: I really believe that advocating for boys and men is advocating for girls and women. These are not in competition with each other. They’re absolutely aligned for two reasons: The first is that everybody benefits from having emotionally and psychologically healthy men and boys in the world. Whether that’s as brothers, husbands, partners, [or] just people in their lives, we all benefit if all of us are lifted up.
But also, this idea that these two things are in competition — actually, we’re all trapped in the same system together. The system of patriarchy, which has been harmful for women and girls, is also harmful for men and boys. The same things that keep women and girls locked in a box, that keep them oppressed with stereotypes, also do the equivalent for boys and men. So if we smash this system, if we work against this system, we’re helping and benefiting everybody.
SK: You write that for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways. As parents of boys, how do we grapple with the fact that patriarchy does harm them, as you say, and yet they still benefit from it?
RW: That’s the really complex thing. The way that I describe it in BoyMom is that the way we socialize boys brings about this mix of indulgence and neglect, and entitlement and inadequacy. We haven’t done a good job of holding boys accountable and expecting the same things that we expect from girls. There have been ways in which we kind of let boys and men off the hook … you know, we sort of encourage boys to think that they’re special and important, and these kinds of heroes and the main characters.
So in that way, we indulge boys, but in another way, we’ve neglected them emotionally. We don’t tend to their emotional needs in the same way that we tend to girls. There’s all this research that shows that we don’t listen to boys’ feelings in the same way that we listen to girls’ feelings. We don’t engage them in emotional conversations in the same way that we do with girls. Even from earliest babyhood, we handle them in a different way. We jiggle them and wrestle with them and handle them really physically, but we don’t give them the same level of caretaking — that more nurturing touch. So in some ways boys benefit from this system, and we don’t hold them accountable in the same way, but in other ways, they’re really losing out.
SK: One critique I’ve read is that this feels like yet more emotional labor for moms — to get boys on the side of feminism and fix the damage of patriarchy. What’s your response to that?
RW: That critique, which is like, it’s the job of women to fix men in general, is valid. I don’t think it is women’s job to produce more emotionally healthy men, in general. But I think once we’re talking about parenting our own children, we’re parenting them anyway. It is emotional labor. If we can think about how to do that in a healthier, more engaged way, that’s going to lead to more emotionally healthy boys and men, I think that that’s a really important thing for any parent to do with any child.
It’s not on this generation of mothers to fix every harm that patriarchy has ever done. But if we’re going to be thinking about this stuff and parenting our kids anyway, it’s better that we do it in a healthier way and look at our blind spots and look at all the ways that we’ve been going wrong. And every mom that I know wants to do this work.
SK: You wrote while the left is trying to push back against the more damaging expectations of masculinity, much of America is doubling down. How do we deal with the fact that trying to raise emotionally healthy boys is now somehow something that people disagree on?
RW: I think that anything to do with boys and men, or with gender in general, has become incredibly politicized in this moment. And this is what I’ve always struggled with as both a feminist and a mom of boys, this idea that the cause of boys and men has been sort of co-opted as a right-wing cause. It’s been subtly coded that if you care about boys and men and their future, somehow you’re doing the work of the right, and that progressive people focus on girls and women. And I think this is just such a false binary. If the progressive left wants to have a better outcome for boys and men, we need to be able to have that conversation in progressive spaces.
SK: What have you found to be the most helpful way to do that?
RW: The most important thing for me in this project has been listening. I interviewed around 50 boys and young men as research for the book. And I think it’s very easy to go into this with these preconceptions about what boys are feeling, what they should be feeling, what they’re talking about, what they need, and to impose this agenda onto them. But what I found when I listened to them was that all these themes were coming up, which were things that hadn’t really considered. So we need to listen to the actual people involved.
These are children that we’re talking about, and we have to remember that. And I think framing an entire gender as inherently harmful is a really psychologically unhealthy way to approach trying to fix a problem. We need a more positive narrative to help boys feel like there’s something inspirational, something to gain from this project, rather than only something to lose.
SK: Let’s talk about loneliness. You wrote in the New York Times that you have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to “a perfect storm for loneliness.” Can you elaborate?
RW: I think what makes this particular moment in boyhood different from any other moment are two things really; two very major seismic shifts have happened within the last decade that have affected this generation of boys profoundly. One of them is the exponential rise of the digital space. They have all these options for avoiding real life via digital spaces.
The other major social change is the #MeToo movement and the wider conversation around toxic masculinity that really exploded around 2017. The boys that were going through puberty [then] are now of voting age. So they’ve had their entire adolescence in the shadow of this wider conversation about systemic injustice, systemic male harm, and so-called toxic masculinity. And that’s a really unusual moment in history for what it means to be a boy.
Boys still have all of the old pressures of masculinity, and we haven’t really interrogated them in a very profound way. So all of the things that we tell boys — to man up, to be tough, to not express their emotions, to never show weakness, to be invulnerable — those can be very harmful psychologically for boys, and they can really get in the way of forming deep connections.
SK: What can we do as parents to help our boys with their loneliness?
RW: Right from the beginning, we kind of socialize boys away from connection and away from intimacy. There’s research that shows that we don’t engage boys in emotional conversations as much as girls. We handle them differently. We engage with them in a different way. Things that get marketed to boys tend to be about fighting and combat, rather than cooperation, communication, relation, or learning. And so it’s there’s a real lack of role models for boys to see themselves in those kinds of roles in any complex way.
What we can do as parents is to engage with boys in more emotional ways, to see them as emotionally complex and in need of emotionally complex nurturing. Boys are every bit as emotionally complex as girls are, and we should engage with them in that way.
When they’re older, I think it’s about listening to their feelings and engaging them in emotional conversations. People quite often say to me, ‘Oh, you know, I tell my boys that we want to talk about feelings, and they’re like, Oh, I don’t want to do that.’ But I think it’s because it comes up in this unnatural way. It’s almost like punishment, right? You need to talk about feelings so you can be a better person. But it’s also about just listening to their feelings and being generous in the way that we engage with them.
SK: In the book you cite Dr. Niobe Way’s belief that teen boys are suffering from “a crisis of connection.” At SXSW on our stage, Scott Galloway talked about how problematic it is that boys and young men lack male mentors. What role do you think mentors can and need to play in boys’ lives?
RW: I think I two things: One is that absolutely, dads and other men need to step up into these roles. Many men are doing great work in this field, and I feel very grateful to them. Also, I think we need to support dads, because they know this stuff. We need to give boys these kinds of role models — in real life, in art, in the kinds of stories they consume.
But I also want to acknowledge that boys should be seeing that they can also learn from women, that it’s not just men who can offer this stuff.
SK: As the mom of boys, what have you learned from writing this book that concerns you? And what has been reassuring?
RW: I think the whole conversation is concerning. There are concerning things happening with men and boys out there in this world, in this moment, and we know that. I think we’re sort of overrun by the fear. So I want to concentrate on the positive side of things. I believe cultural change is possible. I think that we have seen so much cultural change in terms of how we approach girls and women … we’ve done so much to counteract stereotypes for girls. This is not to say that that work is done. It is not done. But I believe that we can still do that work for boys. We’re starting to have these conversations. I’m hearing them all over the place. I believe that we’ve already changed.
When I spoke to boys, the thing that was most hopeful for me was that they were so reflective, and they were so articulate, and they were so thoughtful and so brilliant. And so I feel very hopeful that the raw materials are there. We just need to allow the best of them to come out.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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