we have an epidemic of "uncared" boys

a compassionate conversation about the nuances of saving boys and men.

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Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

Boys are more emotional, but they get less nurturing.

That’s the conclusion I came to after reading Ruth Whippman’s new book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. In it, she makes an effective case for the idea that boys are actually the emotional gender, and that male socialization has destined them to a life of maladaptive hardship. As a journalist and mother of three boys, Ruth asks daring questions that challenge the mainstream feminist discourse that views men and women as the same, instead of acknowledging their innate differences. I enjoyed reading her book so much, and given that Ruth is already part of our vibrant community, it felt so obvious that we needed to have a conversation about her book. I hope you enjoy our discussion!

LP: You start the book by explaining how becoming a mother to three boys challenged some of the more popular parts of feminist discourse about men and boys. What were you seeing in your own sons, that seemed to contradict some of the most mainstream feminist ideas about masculinity?

RW: I grew up with a version of feminism that said basically- gender differences are all socialized.  Boys only behave badly because we let them- ie the whole “boys will be boys” narrative- we socialize girls to be good and polite and well-behaved, while we let boys get away with anything.  I was determined to do better and to raise these empathetic, thoughtful, well-behaved feminist sons, and I thought it would be easy!

Then when I had three boys I was totally blindsided by how wild and physical they were and how badly behaved they seemed in comparison to friends' daughters!   As I wrote in the book— I felt as though I had walked into my own ideological trap.  If boys only behave badly because we parent them badly, then my own boys’ behavior must be my fault.  I kind of drove myself crazy with it. I dug into the whole nature/ nurture thing in the book and it turns out— it’s complicated!

LP: Can you share more about why that’s complicated? You write about how boys get raised differently than girls, even though most parents would never think that they would treat their kid differently based on their gender. And a lot of this is totally unconscious. Can you offer some examples of where there’s a difference, and how parents can be the change they want to see in the world?

RW: Yes, so much of this is unconscious.  A big part of it is that we tend to project “masculine” qualities onto boys right from babyhood and treat them differently as a result.  We tend to have a hard time seeing boys as vulnerable and in need of nurture. There are studies that show for example that when a boy is upset his mother is more likely to see him as “angry” but when a girl shows similar behavior (crying etc) mothers interpret it as sadness.  Parents handle baby boys more roughly than girls and talk to girls more and spend more time discussing their daughters’ feelings than their sons. Research shows we even use subtly different vocabularies with boys and girls, using more emotion-focused words with girls and more competition and winning type language with sons.  And then when you look at popular culture- girls get all these role models for how to care and nurture, and show up and be a friend and do emotional labor and boys barely get any of that- all their stories are about battles and fighting and winning.  They get the message that human relationships are basically competitive and combative rather than cooperative.

I’ve lost track of the number of times men have explained to me that boys “need” more roughhousing and wrestling type play.  But sometimes it seems that all anyone wants to do with a boy is wrestle him. What boys are desperately crying out for is more emotional nurture.  Men are in a loneliness crisis and this is where it starts. 

LP: All of that data about parenting is quite extraordinary. I also found your discussion of the preference for girls in western culture to be fascinating. You cite a poll that shows that mothers are more likely to experience postpartum depression if they give birth to a baby boy, but that the trend is reversed in countries like India where male babies are preferred. Why do you think we so afraid to have boys? If we didn’t live in a world that socializes them so incorrectly, would the same fear be there?

RW: It’s such a turnaround.  I grew up in the UK and it seemed like every other history lesson we had at school was about some king chopping his wife’s head off for not producing a son.  But when I told people I was pregnant with a third boy, they would look at me almost as an object of pity or as if I was about to go off to war or something. I think part of it is how close people expect to be to their children when they are grown up- it’s socially acceptable for an adult woman to be best friends with her mom but for an adult man to say the same makes him sound weirdly suspect.  And we don’t have good cultural models for healthy mother-son relationships.    

Also, in the post- #Metoo era with all the wider conversations about toxic masculinity and male violence and harm, people are seeing boys as a more scary prospect.  I know that I felt very fearful and conflicted about giving birth to another son right when #Metoo was going wild.  But I do feel very hopeful that we can use this moment to change the ways we raise boys, so the next generation can do better.

LP: I often get dismissed when I talk about the power and reach of male influencers like Andrew Tate, so I love that in your book you cite a poll that says that 8 in 10 British boys have consumed his content and that they more likely to have heard about him than the Prime Minister. Why are boys falling down these rabbit holes and how can we create a generation of boys who are sensitive to gender inequality without creating a backlash to it?

RW: The reach of these masculinity influencers is pretty staggering and it’s shocking how much appeal they have to adolescent boys.

In many ways, their appeal works in a similar way to how diet culture preys on girls and women. Girls are sold this myth that their value rests in their looks and especially in being hot and having a perfect body, and therefore anyone who is selling them the promise that they can achieve this ideal will have an outsized influence on them, even though the ideal itself is the real problem.

With boys, the message is that their worth lies in meeting this ideal of masculinity- that they must be physically tough and emotionally invulnerable and never show their weakness or feelings.  It’s an impossible ideal and so real human flaws and vulnerabilities will always make boys feel vaguely inadequate.  Andrew Tate and similar influencers play on these insecurities, telling boys—  follow me and I can help you be an alpha male! He’s selling boys this promise that they can win in this system which is essentially unwinnable, and feeding them more of the same thing that was the problem in the first place.

To tackle this I think we really need to challenge the underlying premise, and stop selling boys this impossible myth in the first place.  Otherwise they will just keep finding new Andrew Tates.

I think that the feminist movement in general has not done a great job of bringing boys in and articulating the message that patriarchy harms them too, and that we are all trapped in the same system together, and no one is benefitting from it.  There has been a tendency in feminist circles to either demonize or ridicule men and boys. But we should find a way to sell “smashing the patriarchy” to boys as a liberation, not a punishment!  

LP: When I interviewed a former gang member in For the Love of Men, I was shocked because he described falling into a gang, the way someone would describe falling in love. This scary and violent community actually offered him a lot of nurturing at first. When you interviewed incels for your book, you also found that they weren’t seeking domination and revenge, as much as they were seeking love. What does this tell us about how to solve an issue like incels?

RW: It was a really surprising paradox. Incel spaces are in many ways some of the most toxic and horrifying corners of the internet imaginable.  It’s full-on misogyny, racism, violent fantasies — you name it.  But at the same time they are also weirdly emotional spaces too.  The young guys on the incel message boards are surprisingly open and vulnerable with each other and often really quite tender and brotherly and supportive in a way that men are often not able to be in other places. This was a real shock to me.  Incels are different from a lot of the manosphere in the sense that most masculinity spaces are about selling a kind of false promise that anyone can become an alpha male with the right effort, whereas the incels have just basically given up— they believe in this hierarchy of masculinity but have basically given up any hope of ever climbing it themselves. Oddly this resignation can actually be freeing for them, and lets them throw off some of the more restrictive masculine norms and be quite emotional and sensitive. (The flipside is also true-  these feelings of shame and emasculation can also become deeply destructive and lead to these guys trying to somehow “reclaim” their masculinity with acts of violence like mass shootings.)

A few of the incels I spoke to told me that they felt like incel spaces were the first communities in which they felt like they truly belonged and could be themselves. So if we don’t want boys to go looking for a sense of belonging and connection in the manosphere then we urgently need to help them find it elsewhere.

LP: I found your chapter about false rape accusations the most interesting and also challenging. You poke holes in the feminist ideals of affirmative consent and cite the racial dynamics of many of these cases. You seem to highlight this contradiction that there’s been so much progress, but that it has come at the cost of definitions of sexual assault perhaps being “too expansive” and that drunk sex is considered rape. We live in this interesting time where there is more accountability in the court of public opinion, but most rapists still will never spend a day in jail. Can we really worry that #MeToo went too far when Bill Cosby is free, when Harvey Weinstein has been un-convicted (despite still being incarcerated) and a proven abuser like Donald Trump could win the presidency again?

RW: This was one of the hardest parts of the book to write.  I had similarly conflicted feelings to the ones you are describing all the way through the process of reporting and writing it, and felt almost tortured by all the contradictions. 

I think the issue of how we balance tackling sexual violence with the need for due process is deeply complex and in a way hard to get into too deeply here in a couple of paragraphs.  I would would urge anyone who is interested to read the actual book where there is more space for depth and nuance.  But one thing that I do believe is that as a society we need to draw a distinction between how we deal with powerful adult men like Weinstein, and how we deal with adolescent boys who are still essentially children, learning and navigating their emerging sexuality.  We don’t give boys good education in relationships and reading social cues, and then we throw them out there into an incredibly fraught sexual landscape.  

And when we throw out the protections of due process in the name of targeting the Weinsteins of this world then it’s usually the Weinstein-types that get off scot free and the more marginalized people in our society who pay the price-  typically boys of color.

LP: Your discussion about porn was really fascinating. You cite research showing that porn doesn’t make men more likely to objectify women than watching sports or love island. In fact, you argue that it doesn’t make them change the way they view women, as much as it changes the way they view themselves, in the sense that it makes them more insecure about their bodies and sexual performance. If we didn’t focus so much on men’s usage of porn, what could we focus on instead that could actually help men?

RW: I think there is a tendency to talk about porn as if it exists in isolation and is somehow uniquely responsible for the culture of objectifying women and misogyny, But I think in many ways porn is a symptom of that culture not the cause.  We see the same story- that women are these objects that exist in service of male desire —everywhere in the culture. There is also this idea floating around that porn somehow is totally aligned with male desire- that boys love it and benefit from it and women hate it and are harmed by it. But when I talked to real teenagers I found a much more complex picture- lots of girls and women use and enjoy porn for themselves and lots of men have really complicated feelings about it.  

I think rather than focus on porn, we would do better to look at the wider culture of masculinity and the impact it has on both men and women.

LP: What bold prescription do you have to solve our masculinity crisis?

RW: Empathy and connection.  Both in our wider politics and in our homes.  I’d like to see the left listening to boys and trying to bring them in, rather than shaming or punishing them. And in our homes I think we also need to connect with our boys on a much more emotional level.  Men and boys are not the enemy.  We are all trapped in the same system together.  

LP: What’s the last thing that gave you hope?

RW: Just talking to so many boys from so many backgrounds and seeing how articulate and sweet and thoughtful they all were, and how much they just wanted to talk and be heard. They just talked and talked as if it was the first time anyone had really listened to them. Boys aren’t either these grunting monosyllabic lumps or predators-in-waiting.  We just need to have a little faith in them.

Wow thanks Ruth! If you loved our conversation, you will love her book even more! I can’t stress how much of a page-turner this book is. Very few books take in, and treat both the male and female perspective as equally valuable and important, so I highly recommend it! You can buy it wherever you buy books or by supporting your local indie bookstore. She also has a very relatable substack called I BLAME SOCIETY that I can’t rave enough about too.

Toodles!

x

Liz-

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