In BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, British author Ruth Whippman offers readers a window into her mothering journey. This is a beautifully written, often thought-provoking, and disarmingly vulnerable book that begins with a mom of three boys whose illusions about motherhood fell away when her older two sons began in their preschool and early elementary years to fight “constantly and brutally” with one another. Whippman puts forth a unique perspective on the limitations and possibilities of boyhood that departs from both the totality of her feminist priors and the embrace of any more conservative ones.
All of the ways in which boys and men are falling behind today—both relative to girls and relative to who we want them to be, academically, professionally, and personally—worry Whippman.
As a self-identified feminist, she worries about male entitlement and the ways that assumptions about heterosexual masculinity (that “boys will be boys,” that “boys are like dogs,” that the measure of adult masculinity is its stoicism, so on) hurts and delimits women. As a mother of sons, she worries about how these same assumptions—which she believes to be predominantly socially constructed, not biologically or evolutionarily based—hurt and delimit boys. Trusting that what has been socially constructed can be socially destructed (as she contends that our norms of femininity have been over the past several decades), Whippman wants to expand the horizons of boys and men to include the same complexities of personality, vocation, and interpersonal interaction that we now offer women.
For Whippman, raising sons after #MeToo, in a culture that has so recently “crowbarred the Overton window out of the men’s locker room and reinstalled it in the gender studies department,” raises all kinds of seemingly irreconcilable concerns. For example: “Did my feminist principles require me to condemn the entire gender that included my own children?” And: “When they begged me for Nerf guns, was this a sign of an emergent desire to shoot up a high school?”
Ultimately, Whippman contends that our expectations of boys—emotional dysregulation, tendency toward violent play, inability to sit still, interest in superhero tales rather than relationship stories, and so forth—make society worse.
Not just for girls, but also for boys.
“[Is] there a way,” Whippman wonders, to “offer real empathy to boys, give them a more expansive story about their own possibilities, without betraying any feminist principles?”
My answer: yes and no.
Yes, it is possible—and necessary, in my view as in Whippman’s—to offer real empathy to boys, rather than treating them merely as future embodiments of a patriarchy that needs smashing. But no, it is not possible to do this without betraying Whippman’s feminist principles.
Why? Because these feminist principles are arrant nonsense.
Like Whippman, I am a boymom. I have four sons (ages nine years to six months) and I worry about many of the same dispiriting male trends that Whippman does.
Reading through her book, I felt a rising frustration about the ways in which feminism obfuscates reality and many women’s capacity to contend with it. My frustration deepened into enervation as I realized the full extent to which an obviously intelligent, curious, loving woman like Whippman has had the wool pulled over her eyes by this fairy tale we now call feminism.
No more “prince charming;” now we have “gender essentialism.” And one is as much a figment of the female imagination as the other.
Referencing last summer’s “Barbie” movie, which “sounded like it could be quoting from a gender studies textbook,” Whippman observes that, “norms and expectations for girls have been transformed in a generation.” Now, she self-deprecatingly reflects, “I want to channel my own annoyingness in service of challenging stereotypes for boys, too.”
There are two major problems with Whippman’s conclusion that I want to address in turn: First, the assumptions, values, and expectations endorsed by the mainstream feminism to which Barbie and Whippman both subscribe have not actually transformed female lives for the better. Second, there is little reason to think that the further cultural elevation of prototypically “female” proclivities over prototypically “male” ones would do any better by men.
Women today are less happy, both relative to women of earlier generations and relative to men, than in any prior generation. Anxiety among young women is through the roof; finding romantic partnership is dispiritingly difficult; and fewer children are being birthed than women say we want. No, I am not a trad-wife. But, no, I also do not think that women’s unhappiness is mostly reflective of men’s unwillingness to contend with our increased visibility in society.
On the contrary, I believe that girls today are suffering from a broad lack of cultural inculcation in those virtues commonly associated with masculinity—but, really, inextricable from functional American adulthood.
Feminism’s failure to develop in today’s American woman the “full reliance on her own strength” at which French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville marveled when he visited the young American republic in the eighteenth century makes women weak. When women are weak, a proclivity toward neuroticism can stoke in some the anxiety that results in wondering—absent all evidence and predicated on an ideology that is grounded in none—whether one’s son wanting a Nerf gun means he’s a future serial killer.
Meanwhile boys, like girls, are not suffering from a superabundance of traditional masculinity, but from a lack of purposeful direction for the aggression that comes as naturally to many of them as agreeableness does to many women.
In other words, to draw out the “boys are like dogs” boymom refrain that Whippman deplores: The problem is not that boys need to be less like dogs or more like girls. It is that they need to be better trained dogs, confident in sufficient love and subject to sufficient authority to result in their channeling the unique qualities with which they have been gifted toward professional, familial, and civic ends. These will vary depending on both what kinds of dogs they are (of course, not all boys are the same) and how well they are reared.
My firstborn is like, say, a beagle: Fun-loving and intending to be obedient, but with attention easily pulled away from what he’s supposed to be doing by his singular focus on following his own nose. At this moment, growing taller and leaner by the day as tweendom approaches, he’s drawn as if by scent to hyper-competitive playing and arguing about sports, and to teaching himself decimals in order to better understand baseball statistics. A typical boy type who is (albeit slowly) developing the executive function to ground his cognitive abilities and ambitions. So, a boy that would perhaps enervate—but would not scare—a mother in thrall to the feminist fairy tale.
But if my second born were a dog, he would be a German Shepherd: An observant, executive personality; physically imposing, towering over other kids his age and outweighing his big brother; and naturally defiant, always seeking to be in charge. When he was two and three, his need for physical activity knew no end. Even now, he needs to be tired in order to be good; he does not tire easily. And often, when he was little, he would not be good even if he was tired: When told to do something he did not want to do, his temper would flare, and he would scream and kick, sometimes for an hour.
My husband and I gave him—all of them, for that matter—plenty of room and time to run and play. Our older son, never the instigator, nonetheless responded to his little brother’s aggression with his own (usually disproportionate force involving the use of toys as weapons). Equally important, we gave the German Shepherd zero quarter when he threw tantrums, demanding from him the same obedience that we would inculcate in an actual German Sheperd puppy if we had one. Because we understood that, in a sense, we did. And untrained German Shepherds are both unpleasant and dangerous.
Nature is brutal and made less so by civilization, not the other way around. So, society really needs people who are like well-trained German Shepherds. Very few of those people will be female, and that’s okay. But all of their mothers will be.
So, women should understand that contra feminism, the goal is not to eradicate, deny, or snuff out boys’ natural aggression. It is to help them learn to harness mindless physicality into a drive toward the service of some broader goal.
Now going on eight, my second born is fiercely protective of his younger brothers and, yes, of girls; he is also tender, trustworthy, emotionally fluent beyond his years, and a capable and quiet leader. He and his big brother both have a long way to go, and no doubt we will all make many mistakes along the way, both with them and with the three-year-old and baby that follow. But it does feel like we got a head start in our recognition that, yes indeed, boys will be boys. In fact, they will be boys in perpetuity if we let a rudderless peer culture form the norms and preferences of masculinity rather than aiming at something higher.
The goal, of course, is for rowdy boys to become steady-handed men.
For my husband and I, the expectation and acceptance of our sons’ boisterousness—along with our demand that they learn immediately how to control it on command—was not in conflict with, but constitutive of, the emotional regulation, vulnerability, and capacity for intimacy that Whippman and I both want for our boys.
After all, well-trained dogs are the cuddly ones. But they will still fight, both for fun and not, in the right circumstances. These two things are mutually reinforcing, not at odds.
Like Whippman, I read my boys girl stories when I can. Recently, I read them Little Women. Like his mother, the one with the temper identified with his fellow second-born, protagonist Jo, whose aggressiveness and disagreeableness puts her decidedly at one extreme of the girls’ bell curve for personality. (Graphed onto a boys’ bell curve, of course, she would be closer to the middle).
My sons and I talked about how Jo learned to use the same intensity that powered her childhood anger to fuel her adulthood ambition and fulfill its responsibilities.
See, I’m delighted with my boys’ learning lessons about virtue from girls and girl stories. As long as they’re the right lessons—which, for boys and girls alike, are antithetical to today’s feminist principles.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a regular opinion contributor at The Hill. Her writing about books, culture, and education has appeared in USA Today, Law and Liberty, Deseret News, and The Washington Examiner.
