Reimagining boyhood with Ruth Whippman

A Q&A on what it means to raise boys in a culture of impossible masculinity

Sep 06, 2024

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Purchase the book: BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity

Ruth Whippman is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic, and the author of America the Anxious (2016) and Boymom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (2024). She’s also raising three sons in America.

Your new book is called "BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity." What made you decide to write it?

I have three boys and the third was born right as the #Metoo movement was exploding. It was a year into the Trump presidency and the news just seemed to be a rolling horror show of bad men- not just sexual violence but also incels, school shootings, misogyny, and also lower level bad male behavior like not taking on a fair share of the housework or childcare. In the book I had this line about what it was like being heavily pregnant and imagining the task ahead of me raising three boys which said:

“My pregnant brain churned out a ticker tape of bad outcomes for my unborn boy. Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. It suddenly felt like a hopeless task trying to raise good sons.”

I was full of fear and conflicted feelings and felt very motivated to dig into all of it- the personal and the political. What is going wrong with the way we are raising boys on a systemic level? What are our blindspots? What is it like to be a young boy growing up in the shadow of this whole conversation and how can we do better? So the book is a mix of memoir about my own parenting journey trying to reconcile all this and reporting about boyhood in contemporary America.

For the book, you talked with incels, young men in therapy, boys accused of sexual assault, psychologists, and more. What are some of the most important things you learned during these conversations?

One of the big themes that really surprised me is how lonely this generation of boys is. Many of them are genuinely isolated- and this is something that is showing up in the data- boys are retreating from real world socializing and replacing it with virtual life- in video games and on Discord etc, something I unpack in the book. But even the boys who had lots of friends and were going out a lot felt that these friendships were somehow superficial- that expectations of masculinity meant that they found it really hard to be emotionally open with their friends or to talk with them about anything significant or personal or vulnerable. They craved deeper connections but didn’t have the social permission or the skills to find them. In the book I look at how we basically socialize boys away from connection and intimacy in a million subtle ways right from babyhood both in the things we teach them about how to be in the world and the things we fail to teach them. So much of this was totally invisible to me before.

What is the intersection between these beliefs and behaviors and gun violence, including homicides and suicides, in America?

One of the reasons that I used the phrase “impossible masculinity” in the subtitle of the book, is that boys are fed a vision of masculinity that is literally impossible for any real human with flaws and vulnerabilities to achieve, Right from the beginning we give boys this “superhero myth”—that manhood means being not just tough and powerful but superhuman- physically and emotionally invulnerable. These hero narratives are so ubiquitous in boy culture- everything from Wolverine to Zelda to the Paw Patrol, where male characters use their special powers to save the day in a blaze of glory, and women and girls are side characters or prizes that men acquire as rewards for their great deeds, and can kind of become an organizing principle for boys’ inner lives. But they end up giving boys a strangely contradictory combination of entitlement and inadequacy. Boys feel entitled to specialness and glory and to women’s bodies, but also a deep sense of shame about failing to live up to that impossible ideal.

One of the most interesting things I learned about in my research was that it’s not masculinity itself that makes men violent, but the shame of not feeling masculine enough—something researchers call “masculine discrepancy stress.”

You can see this same blend of entitlement and inadequacy in a lot of the manifestos written by mass shooters. These young men are tormented by a sense of entitlement around glory and heroism and their own failure to meet this impossible standard. A mass shooting is a horrific and twisted way to reclaim lost masculinity.

These messages around heroic manhood, coupled with easy access to guns and little to no mental health support, have contributed to many of the major tragedies we have seen around youth and gun violence.

Similarly with suicide—young men are now dying by suicide at the rate of nearly four times their female peers and are significantly less likely to seek help for mental health problems. It is a shocking tragedy that in this country it is far easier for young men to gain access to a gun than a therapist.

For parents raising young boys, what are your suggestions for helping to raise them with a healthy sense of self while ensuring that they have empathy and don't turn into, as you say, "privileged assholes?"

One of the things that really surprised me in the research was the sense of “under nurture” for boys in our culture. We tend to masculinize boys right from babyhood- we roughhouse and wrestle with them rather than giving them the kind of emotional nurture that we give to girls- we even use subtly different vocabularies with them with fewer emotion based words and less feelings talk and we tend to discipline them more harshly.

But actually we learn to care for others by being cared for ourselves- so I think the most important thing is to give boys real emotional nurture. We can’t punish boys into being good citizens- we need to empathize with them and listen to them and to prioritize connection.

We also need to expose boys to a better model for how to see themselves as fully relational and connected beings—both in real life and in the kinds of cultural narratives they consume.

With older boys I think we need to assume the best and get them onside in building a better future. Most boys that I talked to were really receptive to the principles of feminism as long as they didn’t feel that we were shaming them as being inherently harmful or toxic but that we are on their side and believe that they are good people trying to help build a better future.

Is it too late to have these conversations if our sons are teens or in college?

It’s never too late. The boys I spoke to were crying out to be heard and very ready to talk. They were also surprisingly reflective and emotionally articulate. We just need to make sure we are listening.