When he was a small toddler, Japhs used to do a thing we called the rolling pin, where he’d use his whole body to barrel over you—exactly like being attacked by a small kitchen implement. It was very funny. Later, when we started to play charades and Scout would be a bunny, an egg, a tree, Japhs would do it as a recurring bit: every single turn, he’d drop and start doing the rolling pin, a joke that gives a perfect inverted parabola of funny. Starts out funny, gets repetitive, becomes funny again with every deployment (see also).
As he has become bigger, he still loves to throw himself on me, hang from my neck, barrel over me without warning. When I hear about a Bad Man, I sometimes picture this cute rolling pin grown into a full-sized bludgeon, wonder if I’m the tourist playing with the bull on the beach right before being gored. Like: I want him to be one of the Good Ones. When Japhs jumps onto my back, the stars of his hands pinced around my windpipe, there is something white hot in the moment between me saying “I need you to get off” and “I SAID GET OFF” the second time. The line between his needs and my autonomy is muddy, as
explores in her very savvy book, Touched Out. He is a boy and I am his mum, and while I don’t identify as a “boymom,” there is something to be said about that relationship.If Oedipus’ mother was the first boymom, the archetypal boymom is Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. The picture of James sitting with his mother framed by the window is the main thing in the book, for me at least. All he wants is to take a boat ride out to the island. His mother wants it for him too, but his father has to shit on the idea.
This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of his, she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine tomorrow, this odious little man went and rubbed it in all over again.
“Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow,” she said, smoothing his hair.
Mrs. Ramsay is all kind seas and gentle wind, while the male figures like Mr. Ramsay and (“odious”) Charles Tansley are boorish, cruel, disaffected, the hard place the boy must graduate to.
The extremely Terrence Malick-y shots of Jessica Chastain, the mother in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, offer the same binary of mothers and fathers; it’s almost painful how much the boys love their mother, how soft boys are against the sharp edges of manhood, how much love a boy needs—buckets that need to be filled and refilled after being boisterously kicked over.
In Japhy’s U7 baseball league, there are kid pitchers and strikeouts and losses. The boys walk up to the plate, their mellow little bodies clad in a ginormous helmet and clutching a heavy metal bat. The boys, who dream of hitting a homer or a “dinger,” often can’t get the timing right. They spin around and swing at air and are struck out, and at that point they might cry. Sometimes, they’ll angrily throw a helmet or a bat. It’s on the dads to catch those moments. “It breaks my heart when I have to tell them they’re out,” the coach told me this week—worse since sometimes he is throwing the pitches that strike them out—“but that’s the game.” He’ll pat the low helmets, lead the disappointed kid back into the dugout. If a kid manages to get on-base or almost makes a play in the field, he will make a big deal out of it. It feels incredibly high-stakes, this game on a miniature diamond littered with small disappointments and fleeting highs. You want the boys to make it home so badly, but during the game you’re on the far side of the fence. Sometimes, they bat in their teammates and pile on at home plate. Sometimes, they throw a helmet.
Gender is both a bullshit invention and an inescapable framework for understanding your kids and your parenting. Japhy came out into the world waggling a bat over his shoulder with his front foot lifted. There is something boyish there, even if that’s reductive—even if I imagine I treat both my kids the same. I find this easier to understand in literature than I do in practice.
The gender stew is complex, and author
takes it on in her new book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, which looks at the high rates of male loneliness, the outbursts of entitlement, and searches for a cause. She finds evidence that we underestimate the emotional needs of young boys, and of course that patriarchal systems worsen how boys fare socially as they approach adulthood. I find her incredibly ambitious for taking this on—Ruth covers a lot of ground in the book and there are some really moving passages amongst the science. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the book, so, Ruth: a warm welcome to KAFKA’S!KAFKA’S BABY: Let's start with your best "boymom" word associations (some of mine: tennis balls in toilet, penis swords, Paw Patrol):
Ruth Whippman: Suburban enabler of toxic masculinity; uncomfortably relatable!
The crux of your book is that in society's view, at some point boys go from being moldable (if disruptive) children to, potentially, toxic/incel/maladjusted men. Let's start with boys: some of the stereotypes feel real, so where do our own biases come into it?
I grew up with a version of feminism that says that gender is all socialized, and that boys only behave badly because we let them and we hold girls to a higher standard. So I went into parenting fairly smugly, thinking that I could raise these perfect feminist sons who would never be those children who hit or wreak havoc in a restaurant and that I would never fall into the whole “boys will be boys” trap. But then I was pretty blindsided by how physical and rambunctious my boys actually were in real life. I felt like I’d walked into my own trap—if boys only behave badly because we let them, then the chaos unfolding in my own home must be my fault. I really tortured myself with it.
When I looked into the science of sex differences, I saw that there were, of course, some differences on a group level—that boys do tend to be more physically active and “rough and tumble” than girls. But the most striking difference that I found in the neuroscience research is that baby boys are more sensitive and vulnerable than girls. Sadly, because of our stories about masculinity, we don’t really nourish this part of them, or allow them to be emotionally complex humans and instead tend to project all kinds of more “masculine” qualities onto them right from birth (people tend to see baby boys as sturdier, tougher and angrier than baby girls for example and handle them more roughly). But these narratives about gender end up short-changing boys in all kinds of ways.
You spend a chapter at a residential facility for juvenile offenders in Utah, and it's an interesting look at how what they say (sometimes alarming stuff—see also) doesn't necessarily map onto what they feel. Can you talk about that?
There were some minor offenders at this residential facility, but all kinds of other boys and young men too dealing with various mental health challenges as well as a general “failure to launch” phenomenon, whereby increasing numbers of young men are still living with their parents and not attending college or finding jobs or partners or other typical markers of adulthood. The center was run by a man who was very invested in the idea of traditional masculinity—he was politically conservative, and he kept telling me that his goal was to restore a more old-school vision of manhood to these boys when men were these tough provider protector types—like a lot of conservatives, he framed the problem with men and boys as a problem of too little masculinity.
But when I actually spent time there, it seemed like what he was really offering these young men was the almost the opposite: a chance for more emotional intimacy, connection, and vulnerability—values which are, if anything, conventionally more associated with women. It was almost as if he had to keep branding these things as masculine in order to allow himself and the young guys in his care to embrace them. This center was doing really good and admirable work, but it seemed a shame that he needed to keep framing everything he was doing as masculinity in order to give it value. I would much rather see us break free of that paradigm altogether.
I appreciate that the book is not prescriptive, and this is my favorite line: "If we are not even able to see our own sons as relational and vulnerable, then how will they ever be able to incorporate that into their own sense of self?" Where do we go wrong with boys?
We project masculine qualities onto boys right from birth and have a really hard time seeing them as vulnerable in the same way we see girls as vulnerable. Research has shown that when baby boys cry, adults are more likely to see them as “angry,” while they see crying baby girls as sad or distressed. We handle infant boys more roughly, and generally see them as tougher and sturdier.
As they grow up, adults don’t engage with boys about their emotions as much, or talk about their feelings in the same way that we do with girls. We have a hard time seeing boys and young men as vulnerable even though they are actually more likely to be victims of violent crimes than young women are.
When they are little, there is this whole narrative of “boys are like dogs”; that they are these simple creatures that just need food and exercise to wear them out, and not really full, emotionally complex humans. When they become teenagers, we continue to see them in this flat way. In the cultural imagination teenage boys are these monosyllabic sex-mad monsters who only want “one thing” and don’t get to be fully relational and integrated humans with complex interiority. And if we don’t see them that way, we can’t expect them to see themselves that way. Right now, young men are struggling to form deep connections, and in many ways it’s not surprising.
We project a lot of our most misogynistic stories onto the mother-son relationship.
What did you learn about the mother-son dyad?
This is a great question. We project a lot of our most misogynistic stories onto the mother-son relationship. On the mom side, their love for their son gets positioned as almost Oedipal, and for boys the relationship is somehow emasculating. But actually, of course, the research doesn’t bear this out at all. One of the most salient findings of the Harvard Grant Study—this 85-year-old, ongoing longitudinal study that has tracked a group of men throughout their lives—is that the warmth and closeness of a man’s relationship to his mother is actually one of the biggest markers of health throughout a man’s life, and one of the biggest predictors of success in marriage, material success, and emotional health. So we see the mother-son relationship as something to be suspicious of, but in reality it is instrumental to mental and emotional wellness.
On the "mom" and gender essentialism of it all ... I noticed that the Brookings Institute's Of Boys and Men guru just got $20 million from Melinda Gates to fix ... this. $20 million! The data show that boys are more alienated than girls: is this something a man thinktank can solve?
There is this view that I have heard a lot, and usually from men, that there is something so momentous and unknowable about boyhood, that women couldn’t possibly really understand it and it can only properly be handled by fathers and other males. But when I started interviewing boys for this book and began learning more about their lives and their needs, I began to really believe that throwing more masculinity at the problem isn’t the solution. Men have a lot to learn from women’s cultural norms—it is a well-studied phenomenon that men are lonelier than women and less adept at relational and emotional work, and I think it is really to their detriment. Our sexist culture feels as though women and girls don’t have anything to offer or teach men and boys. But as we look at ways to stop this growing alienation among boys and young men, I think that everyone needs to be involved—men, women, and gender-expansive folks—as it is going to take a lot of perspectives and a lot of empathy to do this work. So it’s not that I think that men can’t handle this work, but more that I think that bringing women in could really add a lot to the mix.
The book is written as hybrid memoir/reportage, which is a format a lot of motherhood books use, but not one that the David Brookses or Malcolm Gladwells or Jonathan Haidts of the world feel they need to use (exception: Ross Douthat). Why is the personal necessary, or why did you do it this way?
Somehow we have fallen into this belief that the addition of personal narrative trivializes a book and makes it less important—probably because this is a way that women often write. Books written by men get positioned as “big think” books, whereas books by women writers tend to get sidelined as memoir or self-help.
I find it somewhat depressing that we have accepted the idea that adding personal experience into the mix means losing gravitas, because really the addition of actual human experience does not detract from the complexity or weight of the thinking but adds to it. In my case, testing all my various theories about gender and masculinity and parenting against my own lived experience gave me the chance to see firsthand how the rote narratives we are fed are often complicated by the actual people involved—i.e., real humans don’t always conform to our theoretical preconceptions, and parenting theories don’t always work with actual kids. This really gave depth and nuance to my thinking in a way that would have been hard if I had only been dealing in theoretical abstractions. You can’t get away with lazy or pat thinking. When men expound on social issues or calling for extreme solutions to complex human problems. I’m always wondering, Who is actually watching your kids right now? Are you the one actually carrying these ideas out in the real world?
As an aside, my friend Elissa Strauss, who has a brilliant book out about parenting and caregiving called When You Care, which includes a combination of big-picture thinking and personal experience, took this photo in Amsterdam airport (but it really could be any airport.) Where are the books by women? They are probably on some special “woman’s shelf” somewhere at the back near the kitchen.
Boymom (“Boymum”) is out now! If you’re in a bookstore, grab a copy, and feel free to move some others to the middle of the Big Ideas section.
Goodies
🐛Really loving Today on Trail so far! Here’s a goodie from
about crying on a mountain from pride for his son.🐛 Plug: I have a new piece on LitHub about the ethics of writing about your kids (WHY SHOULDN’T I!) and critiques therein, feat.
(whose beaut, super-funny novel SANDWICH is out next week!!!!!) and . <3🐛 Atmos looks at the link between climate change denialism and the manosphere
🐛 just discovered
and her newsletter HOME, which is apparently the biggest thing in the UK, and I can see why! I love to read good commentary on recipes I will probably never make.🐛 This poem by David Duchovny …
"So I went into parenting fairly smugly, thinking that I could raise these perfect feminist sons who would never be those children who hit or wreak havoc in a restaurant and that I would never fall into the whole “boys will be boys” trap. But then I was pretty blindsided by how physical and rambunctious my boys actually were in real life. " oh my god I felt this down to my toes
This is such a thoughtful interview. Immediately adding Boymom to my reading list! Thank you!