“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.”
These were some of the thoughts that kept Ruth Whippman up at night when she was pregnant with her third son and imagined his future. The year was 2017, when the Me Too movement was in full swing and a year into what she described as the “Pussy Grabber” administration of Donald J. Trump — “a time when the news was a rolling horrorshow of male bad behavior.”
Even in the “liberal urban bubble” of Berkeley, it became “increasingly clear that girls were now considered the prize. Boys, while cute and puppy-like, were generally viewed on some level as trouble — feral, hard to control, animalistic,” Whippman writes in her new book, Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.
The cultural shift that was taking place was captured in The New York Times’ pieces with titles like, “Wanting Daughters, Getting Sons” and “It’s a Boy, and It’s Okay to be Disappointed.” On a personal level, when she told friends she was pregnant with another son, she received sympathy rather than a congratulation on her pregnancy. Even Whippman’s letter carrier weighed in.
“I hope for your sake this one is a girl,” the carrier told her, as Whippman sat on the front steps of her home, her energetic boys whizzing around her.
“Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.” Whippman writes.
On the one hand, her liberal tribe “was rejecting my kids,” she writes, in favor of girls and women, while on the right, conservatives peddled “a new brand of wounded, furious manhood, drawn from a combination of superhero fantasies and defensive rage.” If the future, in fact, was female, as the slogans on T-shirts said, what would that mean for her boys?
Boymom seeks to answer that question and explore the many other complexities of raising boys during an unprecedented moment in American history, where male socialization is leaving boys “isolated, emotionally repressed and adrift,” according to Whippman.
Whippman will celebrate the publication of Boymom at Books Inc. on Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m., where she will be in conversation with Oakland author Nathaniel Popper.
Writing in a backyard studio
Whippman, a journalist and cultural critic, discussed her book with Berkeleyside in the backyard studio of her North Berkeley home, where she works. A former BBC documentary director and producer, Whippman has written for The New York Times, Time magazine, New York magazine and The Guardian, among other publications. Fortune has described her as one of the “25 sharpest minds” of the decade.
She wrote her first book, America the Anxious: Why Our Search for Happiness Is Driving Us Crazy and How to Find It for Real (2016) after moving from London to Berkeley in 2011, when her husband, Neil Levine, took a job as a tech industry product manager at a tech start-up.
Like America the Anxious, Boymom is a cultural analysis combined with deep-dive reportage and a feminist lens. Unlike that book, Boymom is part memoir, documenting Whippman’s experiences as a mother raising three sons Solomon, now 13, Zephy, 10 and Abe, 6.
The book’s title is inspired by the boymom hashtag, where mothers of boys vent and brag about raising sons on social media sites like X and TikTok. USA Today defined a boymom on the internet as a negative archetype, the “kind of parent who is perceived as being overly fixated on their male children, often to the detriment of other female children or people in their lives.”
Whippman recognizes the controversy surrounding the term, but still chose it as her book’s title.
“The hashtag online is used in some quite toxic ways to sort of reinforce sexist ideas,” Whippman said. “I’m not embracing the boymom identity as it is online, but want to be in conversation with some of the ideas it raises. In this moment it almost feels as if you’re a mom of only boys you’re almost an object of pity. The boymom hashtag is always slightly in conversation with that.”
The book also has a British counterpart, Boymum, which required additional research. Initially, Whippman worried that the differences would be so great, she would have to write an entirely different book. Instead she discovered more similarities than differences.
“The same basic principles were so similar in terms of this microgeneration of boys who were going through puberty when Me Too happened and have grown up in this really unusual historical movement for the way we talk about men,” she said.
The biggest difference she found was that British men tended to have more lifelong friendships with their male friends — perhaps because American culture promotes a rugged individuality and is more itinerant. “People move around her more, so there’s less ability to stick with your college or school friends,” she said.
Interviewing incels and imbedding with conservative group
As in America the Anxious, Whippman takes a gonzo approach to journalism, in which the journalist becomes a part of the story and uses a first-person perspective. She has imbedded herself at a Utah residential therapy center for young men experiencing “failure to launch” syndrome and a weekend-long gathering of Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a group made up mostly of conservative families and Trump supporters whose sons had been accused of campus sexual assault.
She has also talked to young incels, or involuntary celibates, including one who admits that he has fantasized about being a revenge shooter, inspired by Elliot Ridger’s 2014 UC Santa Barbara shooting spree that killed women who had rejected him and the men they chose to sleep with.
Even in a place like Berkeley, where even elementary-age children are identifying as gender-fluid, non-binary and trans, cis-gendered boys find themselves in what Whippman describes as “a fraught cultural moment,” fueled by the contradictions of the culture wars. The right pushes a fantasy of hyper-masculinized manhood, while the left sometimes sees little boys almost as predators-in-the-making, Whippman writes.
Gaining the trust of her young subjects allowed her to delve into the subjects that they often grapple with, from screens to porn, body image and loneliness. This “crisis of connection” that boys and young men experience carries through and affects every aspect of their lives.
When taken to the extreme, such loneliness and disconnectivity can have disastrous effects, as reflected in the alarming statistics Whippman cites: boys are trailing behind girls in every level of schooling, make up the majority of perpetrators and the victims of violent crimes, and are also more likely to die from suicide at almost four times the rate of their female peers.
Through her research and interviews with experts and about 50 boys and young men from all over the country, including two from Berkeley, Whippman finds again and again that while male privilege provides certain systemic advantages, boys and young men are falling short in their ability to experience the full range of human feeling and connection: by being vulnerable, sharing their feelings and expressing empathy — qualities that have been associated with being female.
Challenging her own convictions
The parts of the book that are the most intriguing are those that challenge Whippman’s left-leaning beliefs. In a chapter titled “Boy Stories: The Scripts of Masculinity,” Whippman describes staying at Iron Gate in Cedar City, Utah, for young men suffering from the failure to launch syndrome.
Iron Gates’ founder and chief therapist Kade Janes exudes a tough-guy persona that, in Whippman’s view, reinforces some of his residents’ negative experiences around hypermasculinity. While Whippman bristles at some of Janes’ strategies and belief that traditional manhood is under attack by feminism and identity politics, she ultimately finds that he also possesses some “real wisdom.”
Parts of the program that seem to be helping Iron Gate residents are not traditionally masculine but “instead drawn directly from the playbook of female cultural norms: relationship building, emotional openness and vulnerability, a sense of community,” Whippman writes. “Decades of research shows us that what promotes healthy adulthood is not emotional stoicism and toughness, and certainly not aggression, but healthy relationships — a sense of connection and belonging.”
The chapter on incels reveals another of Whippman’s dilemmas, which are often echoed in the liberal circles she travels in.
“There’s almost this idea that to even engage with anybody, to even listen to them — is a mark of bad faith. To even empathize with somebody else’s position is already a betrayal of feminism. There’s this self-congratulatory discourse, where it’s like ‘incels are so bad, they’re so misogynistic,’” she said. “Both of those things are true, but it doesn’t advance us any further in understanding how somebody might get to that point.”
She, too, had expected these young men to be “crazy wrecks on the absolute margins.” Instead she found they held complaints similar to those of the other boys she interviewed. At one point when she was working on the book, she dropped pages of her interviews on the floor and had a hard time singling out which were the incels and which were “some regular boy.”
“There was a lot of common ground and that was chilling in a way,” she said.
Her most surprising moment — and a path forward?
It was her weekend with the FACE group — clearly “not my people”— that surprised her the most and challenged her most strongly held convictions.
That chapter describes the effects of a Title IX guidelines put forth by the Obama administration that allow a student to be accused of sexual harassment or violence under a standard based on “the preponderance of the evidence” rather than “clear and convincing evidence.” In some instances that has led to the unusual situation of young men being charged by the university, but having their charges dismissed by a court of law.
Only when Whippman heard from the guest speaker Aya Gruber, an intersectional feminist, was she willing to take the group’s complaints more seriously. Gruber is among a growing group of feminist scholars who are pushing back against the campus anti-rape activist movelement, which they see as a failure of due process and contradiction of the left’s stance against aggressive punishment, police overreach and mass incarceration. In these cases, feminists are in effect “switching sides” and agitating for a more illiberal justice system in an attempt to tackle gendered violence, Whippman writes.
“They’re going to take that megaphone and shout about it and call these guys rapists and say, ‘They should do life in prison.’ And they think that this is a progressive stance,” Gruber tells Whippman after her talk.
Whippman observed that when Gruber used the language of the left to describe the problem she was able to hear it. “We’ve gotten into such a tribal mindset that we can’t even listen to the other side,” she said. “It was so shocking to me, thinking about the culture wars in general and how siloed we are. It’s not just about what the information coming to us is but who’s telling us.”
While she doesn’t want to go back to the old ways that discredited women, she believes “there’s room for both stories.” Ultimately, the experience made her realize that “all of us need to listen more.”
Raising sons in Berkeley
Weaving through the chapters is Whippman’s personal narrative, describing how, as a woman who did not have brothers and had been a quiet, bookish child, she was shocked by the physicality of her sons. She is also a feminist and a daughter of a second-wave feminist who raised her to question inequalities based on gender and refused to accept the old adage that “boys will be boys,” which felt like an excuse for bad behavior.
She and her husband were committed to raising their sons in a gender-neutral environment where playing with the Nerf guns would be balanced with books, movies and experiences that emphasized relationships and emotions. But she was repeatedly overwhelmed by her sons’ raucous physicality and sometimes violent tendencies that surfaced in their play. She was often at a loss.
“They can have their Nerf guns and the battle movies, but I try to inject some critical thinking, to call out the stereotypes when I see them and add in other things, too: books about emotions and relationships, TV shows about middle school friendship dramas, dollhouses, and My Little Pony toys,” she writes. “Some of it takes. Most of it doesn’t.”
While girls were encouraged to break free of limiting stereotypes, with after-school programs and camps that encouraged them to be fearless and brave, Whippman couldn’t find any programs designed to help boys challenge masculine stereotypes.
“Even in the progressive Bay Area, I couldn’t find any empowerment camps to teach boys how to become caregivers or nurses or fashion designers,” she writes. “Encouraging your son to behave more like a girl still felt vaguely emasculating, even irresponsible.”
Nevertheless, Whippman is glad that her children are growing up in a school district where teachers routinely ask children to share their pronouns.
“I feel so lucky to be in Berkeley,” Whippman writes, an emotion she also expressed in an essay for Berkeleyside’s 10th anniversary. “The schools do a great job of talking about gender, respecting everyone’s gender identity and trying to break down stereotypes,” she said.
Her next project: a novel
Although Whippman’s second book is behind her, that doesn’t mean she’s done with the subject matter. She is now working on a novel that covers some of the same themes of gender and motherhood that are found in the nonfiction book.
What also keeps her busy is a Substack site where she writes about culture, psychology and motherhood and offers paid subscribers access to a monthly editing and pitching clinic and interviews with writing experts. Whippman’s first interview was with Peter Catapano, The New York Times’ opinion editor, on what makes a good op-ed.
Next year her eldest, Solomon, will be going to Berkeley High School. Right now she has no idea what to expect in terms of how the school handles gender issues, but has already heard some negative conversations among parents about high school boys. Again, such conversations push up against her deeply held feminist values and concerns of being a boymom.
“These conversations can be coming from a good place — to help girls and women — but sometimes I hear it veering into negative characterizations about young men, which I don’t think is helpful to everyone.”