As the culture wars rage and masculinity is being 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, Whippman’s 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.
Combining memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught cultural moment. Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures that boys now face and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift.
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 oblivious 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?