annieb123's Review of BoyMom

by Ruth Whippman

Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment.

“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. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.”

As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been 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, her 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.

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 privileged 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?

Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.

With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

BoyMom is a frank and engaging look at raising kids (especially boys) in an age of impossible, quite often toxic, polarized masculinity written by Ruth Whippman. Released 4th June 2024 by Penguin Random House on their Rodale Harmony imprint, it's 320 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.

The author writes well and accessibly about gender politics, masculinity (what it -is-, what it -means-, what the systems are which hold it in place, and what (if anything) we should -do- about it), raising boys, and she actually gives reasoned and practical planning and coping techniques for raising responsible humans for the next generations of humanity.

One thing is unquestionably certain, it's not easy to live in a society which is seismically split along gender lines with utterly toxic damaging behavior all around. She writes through the lens of her own experiences, raising three sons in Republican era USA, post-Weinstein, #metoo, and a p*ssy grabbing president. It's easy to get bogged down, indeed nearly impossible not to get bogged down and overwhelmed.

She is very good at splitting the issues into understandable chunks: fundamental gender inequality, education, sexual assault, toxic masculinity/influencers, INCELs, structural legal responsibility and fairness (at educational/work institutions, especially where there's alcohol or unclear consent).

The author manages to be sympathetic and very upfront about her own biases, and tries (and mostly succeeds) in being fair and balanced.

It's a thorny problem, and one that doesn't have a "magic wand" solution. Despite the title, this is an important book for everyone.

Five stars. Thought provoking and sobering.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

BoyMom

by Ruth Whippman

Reviewed by annieb123 on Jun 16, 2024

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