BoyMom

Description

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, BoyMomcharts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.“BoyMom is funny, heartrending, and revelatory. Ruth Whippman manages to deliver both an important contribution to the feminist literature and an emotive page-turner. . . . A must-read.”—Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play

“Provocative and probing . . . Ruth Whippman investigates the changing orthodoxies of American manhood. She discovers loneliness and failed good intentions but also a longing for connection and moments of grace. Whippman shows us that we ought to think harder about who we want our boys to become.”—Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé

“Weaving her moving journey as a mother to three sons through a remarkably lucid review of child development and masculinity literatures, Whippman offers a powerful critique of our contemporary model for raising boys.”—Michael Reichert, author of How to Raise a Boy

“This book challenged and educated me, gave me hope while refusing easy answers. . . . A necessary addition to the canon of motherhood books.”—Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out

“This evocative and deeply reported account shines a light through the darkness of societal rules that limit boys from connecting with their full humanity, and offers a road map for how to work together for liberation. I loved it.”—Devorah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public

“BoyMom is a revelation. So relatable, funny, and engaging—full of eye-opening insights that will transform my parenting.”—Melinda Wenner Moyer, author of How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes

“Whippman is a gifted writer: funny, smart, vulnerable, and wise.  This wonderful and timely book provides much-needed insight for anyone with a stake in the future of boys and men.”—Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of EstrangementRuth Whippman is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic living in the United States. A former BBC documentary director and producer, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, New York magazine, The Guardian, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Fortune described her as one of the “25 sharpest minds” of the decade. She is the author of the book America the Anxious, which was a New York Post Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row pick. She lives in California with her husband and three sons.US

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