REVIEW: BoyMom, by Ruth Whippman

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, Ruth Whippman (Harmony, 2024).

Years ago, I spent a morning as the assistant teacher in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom. It was mostly a matter of handing out papers, sharpening pencils, and reminding little boys that circle time was not the moment to practice their “moves” on each other, but at the end of three hours I was exhausted and came home to gaze shell-shocked at my placid, sleeping firstborn son. Of course I knew intellectually that boys and girls are different, and my daughters weren’t exactly sedate, but I hadn’t been around five-year-old boys since I was five. I had forgotten. And I couldn’t quite believe my sessile infant was going to become one of them.

Well, obviously he did, and in the event it wasn’t more shocking than my girls’ equally profound transformation from infants into busy little people — it just involved more hitting things with sticks and running headfirst into walls, on purpose, bellowing FULL SPEED! And now I have more than one son, and…well, you’re never really prepared for whatever bright new person turns up in your family, with his or her own temperament and a novel set of strengths and flaws and idiosyncracies, but I at least have a better idea of the options. But boys are weird for moms, especially for moms who grew up without close male relatives, and the weirdest part is that they’ll one day be men. However fond we may be of men (some of my best friends…), they exist on the far side of an unbridgeable epistemic chasm — and it’s more than a little off-putting when you realize that gulf will one day yawn open between you and this tiny person who spent nine months growing inside you.

BoyMom was pitched to me as being about that weirdness, and in a sense it is. It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read. But it’s the worst book I’ve ever finished.

I almost didn’t finish it. The first time I picked it up, I hit the opening section, entitled “#MeToo Baby,” and read in growing incredulity as Whippman described her 2017: enormously pregnant and banished from her bedroom because her husband was fed up with her insomniac doom-scrolling, she spent hours obsessing over a “ticker-tape of bad outcomes” for her unborn third son —“rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, nonwiper of kitchen counters.” It’s an undeniably incredible list, made more incredible by context — though frankly, who can blame a woman whose husband exiles his pregnant wife to an uncomfortable guest room, instead of going himself, for having a low opinion of the opposite sex? — but I figured that if I wanted to read deranged anti-male rants I could visit literally any mom forum on the entire internet and set the book aside.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the book, and talking about it: “hey sweetie, do you remember that lady who thinks we should abolish masculinity because boys don’t want to read the The Baby-Sitters Club?” I do not recommend this as a conversational gambit, however, because my husband finally told me I should just read the rest of the book and write a review, and in the Psmith household we believe in male headship, so here we are.

Ruth Whippman obviously loves her three sons the way every mother I know loves her children: powerfully, viscerally, with a healthy dose of exasperation. But she doesn’t like men very much, and she thinks it would be nice if her sons didn’t grow up to be them.

It’s hard to unpick exactly what her objection to men is, because it’s so tied up in a set of broader political commitments that are as much about tribalism as principle. She’s a liberal feminist raising children in Berkeley, California, “where…I am more comfortable buying my boys a princess dress than a Nerf gun,” and her allegiance in the culture war seeps through everywhere. Those brief journalistic touches that writers provide to give you a sense of their subject in a word or two, for instance, are all deeply and unnecessarily political: her chapter on a visit to Utah opens with standing in line for a truck-stop burger behind a “giant, mildly threatening looking man with a January 6 insurrection-style beard” who’s looking at his phone “as if he’s merely on standby, checking Reddit and awaiting orders to storm the Capital.” (The bearded man doesn’t actually do anything besides wait; he’s pure set-dressing, meant to remind us that some men are very very bad and that we can tell who they are because they display the wrong class markers.)¹

Sometimes Whippman seems aware of this — in the “fevered, absolutist climate of #MeToo,” she writes, men became an enemy who “symbolized the status quo, injustice and harm,” and as a mother of sons that felt like “[m]y tribe rejecting my kids” — but she’s mostly interested in establishing her feminist bona fides for the reader. She’s jealous of her friends with daughters who can dress them as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween and buy them The Future Is Female t-shirts. Like every mother, she wants the best for her children, but she’s ashamed of wanting it because her children are future white men, and her tribe says you’re not supposed to want good things for white men:

The last thing I wanted was to align myself emotionally with the men’s rights activists, the right-wing “boys are the real victims,” #HimToo apologists. Was there a way to square this and offer real empathy to boys, give them a more expansive story about their own possibilities, without betraying any feminist principles?

BoyMom is Ruth Whippman’s answer to this question. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Her objection to men qua men is the familiar “baggage of inequality—of the pay gap and double standards and the distribution of household chores and mansplaining and rape culture and the fights for bodily autonomy and trans rights.” We all know this story, right? Men as a class have done bad things to women as a class. The signal accomplishment of the feminist movement over the last century has been the gradual emancipation of women, first from legal subordination and then from societal expectations that they should be kind and beautiful and nurturing (rather than brave and strong and accomplished). Now, in our enlightened Current Year, girls and women have been freed from the prison of gender roles and are finally permitted to flourish simply as human beings. Hooray!

But her objection to men as an end-point for her sons is slightly different: she wants this same emancipation for them. She wants to see them liberated from “rigid, aggressive stoicism” and permitted to access “the full range of human feeling and connection,” freed to be “empathetic and relational” just like girls are now encouraged to be fearless and powerful. She’s arguing for a feminism that emancipates men from their gender just as the earlier versions did women.

There are two problems with her plan. The first is that the “you can do anything” message aimed at girls has never really meant “anything”: it means “anything boys do.” Girls are encouraged to become engineers and computer programmers, Whippman points out, but “[e]ven in the progressive Bay Area, I couldn’t find any empowerment camps designed to teach boys how to become caregivers or nurses or fashion designers.” But as a mother of daughters, I’m here to tell you that no one has those camps for girls, either!² The push to empower girls is based not on the idea that what girls already are is good, but on the belief that the things that are bad about girls — the things that make girls weak and silly and slightly embarrassing, prone to tear up after fights with their friends and try desperately to please the people around them — are fixable. It takes for granted that women are defective men; it just assumes that the defects are inflicted rather than inborn.

At one point, Whippman almost rejects this model. Raised by a dogmatic second-waver who taught her to say that pink is “the color of our oppression,” she later muses that her mother’s value system “certainly reinforced the idea that masculine is aspirational, feminine is lesser” and “failed to recognize what is good and important and admirable about girl socialization.” But then she tries to do the same thing to her sons — except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards and in heels.

When you get right down to it, Whippman just doesn’t think men can possibly be happy this way. After all, she argues, she grew up with and loved “people-driven” girl stories like this:

[A young girl] was invited to two birthday parties that are scheduled for the same time. Scared to disappoint either friend, she comes up with an elaborate plan to shuttle unnoticed between the parties, joining in the games at one before racing off to arrive just in time for the same games at the other, then repeating this sprint for cake at each house and so on, exhausting herself in the process. This is a tale of high-intensity emotional labor, and, as a mother of three and a woman in the world, I relate to it strongly—if not the actual scenario itself, then at least the compulsive people-pleasing impulses driving the narrative.

Her sons, by contrast, are never exposed to sagas like that because boy stories “contain[] very little emotional complexity. There is no interiority or social negotiation. No friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in relationship with other humans.”

This is a wild claim to make in a world that includes Robin Hood³ and Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn (let alone Kim and Lord of the Rings and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels and the Song of Roland and The Three Musketeers and I am forcibly cutting myself off at this point). There are so many “boy stories” just as full of complicated emotions and internal conflict as Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, and substantially more than whatever mass-market schlock fills the shelves at your local library! I don’t know, maybe I’m just over here womaning differently than Ruth Whippman, what with my tragic gender-nonconforming preference for conversations about topics of shared interest and fiction involving swords and/or exploding helicopters, but I would read the tragically awful late Animorphs books a dozen times before I would pick up a single volume of The Baby-Sitters Club or Sweet Valley High — and I still spend most of my time making a beautiful and nurturing home for my husband and children, and enjoying it tremendously.⁴

But it goes beyond books: Whippman is deeply concerned that boys and men aren’t having vulnerable, emotionally open relationships with one another, because the male relationships she sees involve “relentless conversations about baseball or rare vinyl collections or which obscure actor was in which movie, filling the spaces and ruling out the emasculating possibility of going any deeper.” Now, my extensive anthropological fieldwork⁵ indicates that “relentless conversations” about factoids that interest all parties is in fact the preferred mode for male friendship, in much the same way that my female friends and I tend to talk about people and feelings, and in no way precludes the occasional discussion of death, disease, divorce, and the other serious issues that arise in people’s lives. One might just as easily criticize women for friendships full of “endless rehashings of emotions that accomplish nothing, filling the spaces and ruling out the unladylike possibility of bonding over how weather conditions affected various WW2 aircraft.” But that would be obviously silly: no one seriously thinks that women secretly want to have emotional lives more like men, so it’s not clear why we’d assume it holds the other way around.

To be fair, Whippman does interview a number of teenage boys who describe a deep and abiding loneliness, and some of them think it’s because their friends are insufficiently emotionally available. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that they credit their female therapists for helping them figure out that this is the problem.) Lonely boys shouldn’t surprise us, though: if the modal boy prefers to go out and do things his friends, and the modal girl prefers to sit around and talk with hers, then the enclosure of the teenager would inevitably hit male friendships harder. It’s the “owned space” problem all over again, and video games are an even worse substitute for juvenile adventure than social media is for juvenile chitchat.

There’s good news, though! Whippman finds a group of men who do have deep, intimate relationships where they bare their very souls to one another.

The bad news is, it’s incels.

The deeper problem with Whippman’s answer — more foundational than any objections to the surprisingly Helen Andrews-y “Sex A is good, Sex B is bad, society would be better if Sex B acted more like Sex A” take — is that eradicating gender is a terrible idea.

It’s also impossible, assuming you think that there are some biological differences between the sexes. And even self-described intersectional feminist Ruth Whippman thinks that; she mostly talks about the differences that make boys more emotionally and physically delicate that girls, more in need of maternal nurturing, but she concedes that there are “genuine differences in self-control and behavior and executive function” in childhood, and even more in adulthood. So, if there are differences, then culture is inevitably going to reflect them: culture accretes around physical reality like an oyster building up layers of nacre around an irritant, rendering the bare facts into something nobler than they began — or into something baser.

Men’s greater physical strength is simply a fact of life everywhere, across all human societies, but it doesn’t always play out the same way. In some times and places, like among the aboriginal Tasmanians, it develops into a system where men use violence (or at least the threat thereof) to force their wives to do all the difficult or dangerous jobs while the men themselves laze around, occasionally hunting if they feels like it. In others, it becomes grounds for advocating the honorable protection of the weak. (In yet others, like the upper-middle class laptop-job enclave Whippman inhabits, it’s becoming irrelevant except as a hobby or bogeyman.) The same is true of all the other biological sex differences, from the obvious effects due to reproductive roles (I have become something of a connoisseur of stories of women who start taking testosterone for whatever reason and then go “oh, so that’s why men are like that”) to the pan-primate male fascination with wheeled vehicles.⁶ Exactly how culture accretes around fact, how we build gender around sex, isn’t always easy to predict — Western society went from the medieval “women are far more lustful than men” to the Victorian “women do not experience sexual desire” without anyone putting SSRIs in the water supply — but however it winds up happening, it does happen. Yeah, yeah, gender is a social construct, but so are the Gregorian calendar, private property, and the United States of America. Socially constructed doesn’t mean “not real.”

So, what happens if we take seriously the idea that we should do for our sons what feminism has already done for our daughters? What would it do for them as future men?

Another way to put this question is to ask what it’s done for girls. And here the right analogy matters tremendously, because the equivalent of man in this sense isn’t woman, it’s lady. Becoming a woman is just something that happens to you, sometimes in the middle of algebra class'; becoming a man is a social transformation as much as it is a physical one. Nobody would ever express disapproval by saying “she’s no woman,” but you can absolutely say “she’s no lady” in the same way you’d say “he’s no man.” (Not that we do, at least about ladies — the term is thoroughly deprecated in my circles — but most people would still know what we meant if we did, whereas “she’s no woman” comes off as as TERF who doesn’t want to misgender.) The various strands of the feminist movement have, for better or for worse, been pretty successful at convincing people that women shouldn’t aspire to be ladies, but they haven’t replaced it with something better. They’re either so frightened of buying into stereotypes about the gentle, nurturing “Angel of the House” — or so divorced from history that they think safe, collaborative, empathetic consensus-building will solve everything — that they’re not honest about what women are like: what we’re good at, what we’re not. Culture should form and channel the inchoate material of your self into something that plays to and dignifies what’s best about you; tearing down those walls lets the raw material surge across the landscape, following the path of least resistance. It can still work out well if you’re lucky, but all too often it doesn’t.

It would be worse for men. The inescapable physical substrate of femininity, the capacity for pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding, means there’s an obvious there there regardless of what culture layers on top. There’s no equivalent for men, leaving masculinity much more provisional than femininity, much easier to step outside. There’s no real culturally-available image of someone who’s physically adult but not really a man except for accusations of extended adolescence (not a man yet).⁷ And it’s not just us. In his excellent Children of Ash and Elm, Neil Price discusses the female-only⁸ practice of seiðr and drops this fascinating bit on Viking conceptions of gender:

Women could, on occasion, take on the social roles of men, in addition to their own specific and important power domains. However, women could not acceptably look like men or try to symbolically be them… For men, there was no such blurring of borders, and it was not condoned for a man to take on any aspect of women’s lives and duties. Interestingly, it is the man’s gender that is limited and intensive, while the gender of women was to a degree unlimited and extensive. At the same time, demonstrative masculinity was a keystone of sociopolitical foundations.

Biological maleness is so much less definitive, so much less determinative of life-course, that it needs a bulwark of cultural symbolism to give it meaning and direction. But here’s the thing Whippman never says: all that symbolic demonstrative masculinity is great. In societies that offer them inspiration and sea room, men do things like manipulate their way into positions of power in Mughal India and build an empire and wrap some duct tape around the exposed bone on their hands to finish the job — not to mention building the subsea fiberoptic cable network and walking out into a blizzard saying “I may be some time.” And I guess also some b2b SaaS.

I personally have absolutely no desire to do any of these things (and frankly most men will never find themselves in a position to do them even if they want to) but it’s these images of heroic conquest — of the self, of nature, of Asia — and self-sacrifice in extremis that lend their reflected glow to the quiet everyday building and work and struggle that make up most of our lives. I opened with a snide remark about Whippman’s husband making his pregnant wife take the lousy guest room when she was keeping him awake, but no, really, that’s exactly what these cultural ideals are there to prevent. (Or entrench, if you’re an aboriginal Tasmanian.) Whippman thinks that boys only value “competing over relating, winning over connecting, fighting over cooperating” because that’s what we’ve taught them; I’d argue rather that those preferences show up so consistently across times and places that they limn the possibility space for us.

Whippman is afraid her sons will be sad and embarrassed if they fail to reach some unattainable standard of masculine excellence. I’m afraid that my sons will be empty if they don’t try.

1. I would tell you here that I’d find a book doing the Team Red version of this equally annoying, but I can’t imagine picking one up in the first place.

2. Okay, this isn’t actually true, I know people whose teenage daughters run “let’s cook and clean and have fun learning how to keep house together!” camps for little girls, but that’s evidence of my seceded little ghetto. The community center that hosts “Girls in STEM” programs would never do such a thing.

3. Maid Marian is a surprisingly late addition to the story; I highly recommend Howard Pyle’s version, and failing that the ST:tNG episode.

4. Mostly. Probably more than you like your job, anyway.

5. I have talked to men.

6. You have to wonder what other deep-seated preferences have lurked in our psyches through the millions of years of our evolutionary history, unexpressed until a technological breakthrough suddenly made them a tangible option. And whether the shocking expansion of both R1 Y-chromosome haplogroups owes something to the unleashed vril of male primates now able to satisfy the archaic *kʷékʷlos drive for the first time…

7. This isn’t universally true; berdache and hijra are arguably examples of this.

8. Except for Odin. I’m not sure what it says about a people when their head deity is notable for gender subversion, but I’m inclined to see it as a kind of countersignaling.