A few months ago, I shared my reflections on reluctantly becoming a mom to a brood of boys. I got more responses to that essay than almost any prior, highlighting to me just how hungry we are as a culture to finally address boyhood.
As I said in that essay, I had just finished reading Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom, the book that whalloped me over the head with it’s personal resonance and astute cultural analysis. By the time I had finished, I had decided that both I needed to be friends with Ruth (we’d have plenty of time to chat as our boys played video games) and I needed to ask her some follow-up questions.
Fortunately for me, Ruth was gracious enough to take time from her extremely busy publication schedule to talk about the raising boys in our current crisis of masculinity. I have such deep gratitude for her time and her insights.
Ashley: You talk early in the book about being raised to push back against gender essentialism (this idea that gender is biologically determined), but then having your lived experience challenge your rejection of that. At this point in your parenting journey and after having written this book, where would you say you are in wrestling with the question of nature vs. nurture?
Ruth: Yes! I definitely went into parenting with the belief that gender was all socialized and boys only behave “badly” because we let them and hold girls to a higher standard. Then I had three boys and was absolutely blindsided by how physical and wild and stereotypically “boyish” they were. I felt that I was spending my whole time attempting to socialize them out of that behavior rather than into it.
After digging into the whole body of research on nature versus nature in gender I am pretty convinced (as are most people I believe who are really looking at this research in good faith) that it is a combination of both and we will never fully know in what proportions and how exactly nature and nurture affect each other. I think there are elements of gendered behavior that are rooted in nature- but the more important question is what do we do about it. Often we use the whole “boys will be boys” story as a rationale to just kind of give up- after all they are “just wired that way, there’s nothing we can do” when actually we should be using it as a reason to do more. Boys need more support with things like emotional and relational learning and we tend to give them less. I was also surprised to see that if anything boys are more naturally emotionally sensitive and vulnerable than girls, not less. Socialization is the only part of the nature nurture debate that we have any control over, so that is where our efforts should lie.
Ashley: One of the things that I’m struck by and that I think lends such depth and power to your analysis of what’s happening with boys was your willingness to engage with people who, at least on the surface, had such disparate views from you on things like masculinity and traditionalism. What was it like for you to engage with these individuals, and how do you personally find an ability to stay open to new ideas or your mind being changed?
Ruth: I think we have reached a point in our culture where we have become so shut down, and so unwilling to empathize with anyone else or listen to anyone else’s point of view. I find this really sad and deeply unproductive. It was really important to me in reporting this book to try to engage generously with a wide range of people – even people with views that I find really abhorrent- like the incels- as well as people I just kind of disagree with (like the masculinity guy who ran the therapy center in Utah.) I actually found by just engaging openly with them, it challenged and deepened my own thinking. My background is in documentary filmmaking – I worked for the BBC in London as a director and producer for many years, and would often spend months following and filming different groups, often with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives from my own. The aim was not to judge or argue, but rather to try and truly see and understand a very different kind of human. It was good training for me, and taught me a lot about empathy and complexity. Real people and complex ideas rarely fit nearly into the boxes we put them in.
Ashley: What are some of the most significant gifts you’ve experienced in raising your sons? Are any of those gifts related to their genders?
Ruth: Probably like any parent the biggest gift has just been the chance to get to know them and watch them grow and change and become the full hilarious, kind people that they are. That has little to do with gender. I guess when it comes to the gender part- at the risk of sounding like one of those Republican men who only realize that women are actually people when they have daughters- having boys really forced me to look at our culture in a different way, to challenge my preconceptions- about gender, and feminism and privilege and to develop a more nuanced and empathetic perspective. If I had had three girls, say, I would probably never have thought about any of this stuff much and I am very glad I did.
Ashley: As a psychologist working with individuals struggling in their romantic relationships and sometimes with couples struggling, your book really forced me to reckon more deeply with how the work that we are doing in therapy to help many men “catch up” on emotional languaging and openness to intimacy is really profound. It’s not a small gap, but often a wide gulf. It really expanded my empathy, honestly. What did your work on this book show you about what it might take to help create a more emotionally available generation of men?
Ruth: I love the way you mention empathy here. I think that there is an impulse (understandably) in feminist culture to punish or shame men for this gap, and I truly relate to the frustration and anger that women have around this. But when I really looked into the ways we are socializing boys, the limiting messages we give them and all the subtle and not so subtle ways we don’t just fail to teach them these skills, but actively give them the message that things like intimacy and emotionality and vulnerability are off limits to them. I realized that shaming adult men for this gap is unfair and counterproductive. We can do better and we must.
Ashley: You described in the book your effort to not fall into panic and to decipher how much of your parenting anxiety is warranted vs. culturally prescribed. Based on where your sons are developmentally, what are your own biggest priorities in raising them as good humans? What as parents of boys is worth worrying about right now?
Ruth: This is a tricky question- if “worth worrying about” means- “is it important?” then I believe that all of it is- helping boys become empathetic, curious, well adjusted, well loved adults. But at the same time I think we need to stop driving ourselves crazy over every detail and to show ourselves some compassion too. Pretty much every mother I know is doing her best- more than her best! generally executing some kind of superhuman feat every single day. So I also think we should stop beating ourselves up so much, and realize that we probably don’t have as much control as we think we do, and as long as we are able to listen to our kids, give them love, and empathy and connect with them as much as we can, while still thinking critically about these issues and how they show up in the culture, then hopefully we can feel good about the job that we are doing.
Picking up a copy of Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom is not a decision you will regret. Whether you are raising boys or just find yourself living in a culture with boys and men, you will think about boys and gender socialization in new and profound ways.
