Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis,
and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and
heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in
our fraught political moment.
“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. Trying to raise good sons suddenly
felt like a hopeless task.”
As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from
all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman
finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a
dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often
dismiss boys as little more than entitled
predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile her home life feels like a
daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over
nurture.
With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by
suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman
asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self
without turning them into privileged assholes? How can we find a
feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them
with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won’t cooperate with
our plans?
Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now
face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are
leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and
adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months
interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of
sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young
men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other
experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex,
consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens,
friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple
certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.
With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy
answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a
healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own
lives.