Don't Ever Call Me a #BoyMom, but BOYMOM is a Revelatory Book

Nomination for Entry Into The Feminist Canon No. 3 "Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity" by Ruth Whippman

Happy Fall, readers!

The pre-election culture warring has hit a fever pitch, so it felt like a good time to read another nomination for entry to the feminist canon. (Evergreen disclaimer: No, I am in no way in charge of the “feminist canon.” Nor is, really, anyone. I just like to read and write and think about gender, join me!) The author of Boymom, Ruth Whippman, wrote a lovely Op-Ed last week on the topic of “positive masculinity,” which brought her squarely into the sights of the Right Wing Trolls of social media, which is never fun, and she responded beautifully, which is really just one more good reason to check out her work.

Below the book review you’ll find some places I’ll be in the coming months — back on the road! New York, I’m so looking forward to doing my first few events out East just in time for NYC Marathon weekend. More info below.

As always: I do encourage you to feel free to share your own thoughts on the texts or topics in the comments. Conversation is encouraged. Thanks for joining me on this journey.

Love,

Maggie

---

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today.

Let boys be human.

Nomination for Entry to the Feminist Canon No. 3

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman

Here’s an unpopular opinion for you: I truly truly hate the convention of being a #boymom or #girldad. I hate it. I understand the sentiment and I don’t think people are trying to be weird and sexist when they use these terms but ultimately they are gender essentialism to the core. Think about what it’s really pointing out: That parents must proudly display that we are capable of interacting lovingly with our children even when they are *gasp* not the same gender as ourselves?! Truly strange.

So when I first heard Ruth Whippman describe her book BOYMOM, I was skeptical that it was going to be for me. But when she went on to read an excerpt about being pregnant with her third child, and the disappointment others would express when she told them she was having “another boy,” my curiosity was piqued. I’m intimately familiar with the sentiment that to have a boy child, especially as a feminist woman in this world, is to be universally disappointed, that I must be “trying for a girl.” (Ew, also, that is not how anything works!) I’ve heard it often as the parent of two boys, and I experienced it as a child, too, in an inverse way. When people found out I was the only girl in my family of five children. “Don’t you wish you had a sister?” these well-meaning people would ask, and I would only ever feel confused. I had four siblings already, there were quite enough of us, thank you very much. Why would it matter if one of them was a sister? I feel the same way about my own two children, who are as different as two kids can be, regardless of gender.

Ultimately, BOYMOM was a book for me, because the crux of it addresses this strangeness head-on. Perhaps you, too, have noticed that as feminism has become more widely accepted in the mainstream and so many have finally allowed women and girls to define themselves as multifaceted, strong, smart, diverse beings who can do anything, (not to mention becoming largely more accepting and encouraging of trans and nonbinary youth), the question of whether boys can also be encouraged to “do whatever girls can do,” has been harder for many to grasp. The epidemics of male loneliness, suicide, and gender-based violence are proof that something isn’t going right with our ideas of this side of the gender coin as we move toward more equity in a still very binary world.

As many of us have been busy trying to redefine what it means to be a girl today — moving the Math Genius t-shirts from the boys’ to the girls’ sections at Target, and generally telling girls they can be astronauts and CEOs when they grow up — we’ve often ignored the need to also repair the harms the patriarchy has done to men and future men. While some believe that masculinity must be saved, or “detoxed,” Whippman argues that masculinity itself has left boys and men today confused, angry, and alone.

I’ll admit that I was often uncomfortable reading this book. Whippman uses her journalistic chops to take the reader to many places I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near: an in-patient rehabilitation center in Utah focused on “healthy masculinity,” a convention advocating for boys accused of campus sexual assault, Discord channels filled with incels, and support groups for young boys addicted to video games. These are largely people I don’t want to sympathize with. I often don’t even want to think about them. As a parent, I want to pretend they don’t exist so that I don’t have to live in constant fear that my children might become one of them. I know I’m not alone. There is always a social media uproar at the mere suggestion of listening to those “on the other side.” And I get that. The racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic patriarchy has held the microphone for far too long. That’s true. And feminism is about lifting up marginalized voices, right? But as I read the chapters of Whippman’s book, I found myself softening my stance on this idea. Because the entire concept that men and boys shouldn’t be listened to or cared for because of their gender is the opposite of what feminism promotes. Right?

One of the most intense reactions I had was while reading the chapter where Whippman attends the convention for FACE (Families Advocating for Campus Equality), AKA the families of boys accused of campus sexual assault. I felt no desire to hear from the Trump supporting young men and their parents defending their 20-something frat boy sons from being kicked out of school for sexual assault. I believe women. I teach my (young) children constantly about consent and keeping our hands to ourselves. My repulsion was immediate. This is not a demographic I want to hear from.

But I was glad that I did. Especially reading about how an intersectional feminist law professor, Aya Gruber, attended the same conference to discuss her work that analyzes what she calls “carceral feminism,” or the movement especially on college campuses to lean towards swift authoritarian punishment against accusations of sexual assault. As Whippman explains, the feminist movement’s response to sexual assault on college campuses in recent years has largely focused on holding universities accountable for not keeping female students safe through Title IX complaints. Sexual assault is notoriously difficult to prosecute on a criminal level because cases often lack physical evidence, witnesses and reliable testimonies. Before, this often resulted in accused male offenders being protected by university systems and receiving no recourse when the police systems didn’t take cases on or dismissed them quickly. But through Title IX offices, the result has been largely the opposite: when a student is accused of assault, there is little to no recourse for the accused, and they are often kicked out of school after a brief and sometimes questionable internal hearing. While Whippman (and I, the reader) remained skeptical of believing the young men and their families at this conference exactly at their word, some did garner sympathy for, at the very least, the seemingly arbitrary process of adjudication they experienced.

Whippman accurately summarizes the complexity of the current state of campus assault when it comes to gender, that in some sense, an assumption of guilt for any male accused of assault can reinforce the idea that the stereotype the gender binary depends on reigns above all: That boys have some innate predatory nature while girls are innately in need of protecting. Whippman agrees with Gruber’s assessment that the response to immediately indict anyone accused of unwanted sexual behavior as a rapist who should be locked up forever with no recourse is actually not progressive at all. Furthermore, she notes, as the language and concepts of consent and assault are shifting rapidly in our culture, young people are having to navigate their own early sexual experiences (an already murky time for many) in a particularly fraught environment.

Whippman writes: “…this topic is confusing even for top legal scholars to navigate. It occurs to me how impossible it must feel for teenage boys, who, since birth, have generally received miserably inadequate training in the subtleties of human social and emotional dynamics. They are told on the one hand, that they need to be masculine and domineering and confident, and on the other, that if they overstep by the tiniest smidge, they will ruin someone’s life.”

The concept hits an emotional chord because it works in concert with the rest of the book, describing the epidemic of loneliness teenage boys today are suffering and how that relates to this shift in our ideas about girls and women expanding in our current gender ideology while boys are often continued to be boxed in by old definitions of masculinity. For instance, we often treat baby and toddler and adolescent boys vastly differently than how we treat girls, (yes, still). Many parents assume that their girl children are more emotionally mature, more verbal, better students, while their boy children are more physically advanced, less attuned to socializing, more stoic and less emotional, and will take longer to do things like read, be ready for school, or even potty train. The number of times I’ve heard blanket statements from well-meaning progressive parents that boys shouldn’t start Kindergarten until a year after girls is mind-boggling to me. (In fact, none of these traits are inherently due to gender or sex). And treating young boys this way, as though they are deficient innately in social and emotional skills, does nothing to help boys learn the skills all of us need to actually make friends, develop close, intimate relationships, and see themselves as lovable and desired and unique human beings in and of themselves.

Ultimately, I appreciated the discomfort BOY MOM made me feel. It is so easy today to see polarizing topics as black and white, even when we know everything is more complicated. The difficulty of writing about the moment we’re currently living through regarding gender is one I recognize intimately. I felt so often while writing my book about women and athleticism, sport and physical strength, that what I was trying to show was in some ways, undefinable. The reason women runners were so interesting to me as a subject, especially those who began running when the world told them they were incapable of doing so, was because they were a physical example of showing that the little boxes of gender we want to sort the world into for convenience sake (or the patriarchy’s sake) are totally inaccurate.

Whippman brings a similar lens to BOY MOM, from the other side, inviting a reader to see boys in our society as humans that are far more complex than many have allowed them to be. Gender is not easy to define — despite what we’ve been led to believe. It is far more than a blue or a pink confetti cannon. Women have been pushing back for generations against gender stereotype, proving through destroying the stereotypes and labels associated with “traditional femininity” that women and girls are humans above all else, that we don’t have to wear dresses, or pink frills, that we can encompass all kinds of human complexity. But whether we want to admit it or not, society is often far more uncomfortable with men and boys stepping outside the box of “masculinity.” I’ve seen first hand that boys with long hair, painted nails, or a penchant for physical expressions of affection are often ridiculed by their friends, family, and peers, behavior we wouldn’t tolerate for girls who play sports or prefer pants and eschew makeup, for instance. We finally are telling girls they can be astronauts or basketball players, but we rarely tell boys they should strive to be nurses or daycare teachers.

And as we sit in this current moment, when society is finally pushing back on the easy definitions set out by the patriarchy over the past several centuries, books like Whippman’s should make us uncomfortable. We must sit with that discomfort. Our future depends on it.

---

Upcoming Events, Appearances, Etc.

• Oct. 30, 6:30 PM | In-Conversation with Melissa Ludtke and her incredible new book LOCKER ROOM TALK: A WOMAN’S STRUGGLE TO GET INSIDE at Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Bainbridge Island, WA

• Nov. 1, 5:00 - 6:00 PM | NYC Marathon Expo, Javits Center, Books sold by Posman Books

• Nov. 2, 12:00 - 1:00 PM | NYC Marathon Expo, Javits Center, Books sold by Posman Books

• Nov. 2, 6:00 - 7:30 PM | Lofty Pigeon Books, Brooklyn, NY, In-conversation with Michael Waters (THE OTHER OLYMPIANS)

---

Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens

You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads.