How to make sure you don’t raise toxic sons
Nobody wants to raise a sex offender,” Ruth Whippman tells me, wryly, as we chat over Zoom. I laugh because it’s so darkly funny – and so true.
Whippman is the author of a new book, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. Her reasons for writing it were straightforward – she’s a mother of three sons herself. “I was heavily pregnant and about to give birth to my third boy right when #MeToo exploded,” she says. “I already had all these pregnancy hormones, and then was amid this complete rolling horror show of bad news about men. And I had a lot of very conflicted feelings.”
As a liberal feminist, she was excited about women reclaiming power and finding their voice. As a mother of boys, she was terrified. “I felt really frightened about the future, kind of defensive and protective of my sons,” she recalls. “The whole conversation about men and boys at the time was so negative.” Whippman wondered what it would be like to grow up as a boy under the shadow of all that negativity; wondered how easily the feeling of being “attacked” for your gender could curdle into anger and even radicalism.
Especially in the US, where she had relocated to from the UK with her family, gender seemed increasingly to be drawn along political. Right-wingers supported the rights of men and boys; left-wingers were for raising up women and girls. Meanwhile, more and more stories were coming out about powerful men using their positions to abuse women, a la , and a backlash against feminism was seeing the rise of persuasive misogynist influencers such as and online forums like .
