496. Raising Boys in the Age of Gender Politics with Ruth Whippman

Raising boys in post-MeToo times is beyond challenging. So how do moms balance societal pressures with the desire to raise happy, healthy, and emotionally intelligent boys?

Ruth Whippman is a journalist and author of the books, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity and America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks. In BoyMom, she weaves personal anecdotes with data and reporting to capture the complexities of raising emotionally healthy boys in today’s world. 

Ruth and Greg discuss the cultural expectations and modern pressures around parenting, the problem with labeling traits either feminine or masculine, the nurturing gap for boys, and why patriarchy harms men just as much as women. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• G.I. Joe
• Incel
• Jordan Peterson
• We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity’ by Ruth Whippman [New York Times]

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Profile on LinkedIn

Her Work:

• BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity
• America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks

Episode Quotes:

Can we just allow everyone to be fully human without gendered traits?

39:02: I think there's all these attempts to rehabilitate masculinity and redefine it. And it's just like, can we just give it a rest and just allow everybody to be fully human? Stop assigning a gender to human traits and values. Every human needs power, agency, strength, and courage, and every human needs nurturing and relationships and care, those feminine-coded virtues. Why are we splitting them up? And when we try to say, oh, well, actually, caregiving is masculine, what are we even doing there? I mean, at what point does it just become meaningless? And we should just give up on those things altogether. At what point is it just reinforcing this idea that it's so important to be masculine that we come up with any kind of logical hack to make it work, to preserve it?

Are boys missing out on feminine-coded values that impact well-being?

08:24: Before you can encourage boys to take on those more feminine-coded attributes, you have to truly believe that those attributes have value. But I do believe that boys are genuinely missing out. I do believe that those feminine-coded values have huge worth and are hugely important for our psychological well-being and for living a happy, healthy life. And so I feel like this project of realizing that boys and men are losing out in this system is a really big part of what we need to do here.

Should we stop reinforcing masculinity as the be-all and end-all?

40:38: We should stop trying to push this positive masculinity framework. And it's not because I think it's great if people present as masculine; if they naturally like to embody all those virtues, if they come, if that's who they want to be, great. There's nothing wrong with masculinity per se. It's just that when we keep reinforcing it as the be-all and end-all of how a boy or man should be.

Understanding the invisible cultural baggage around gender

04:09: I think with kids, there's this sort of superficial idea that you can just choose whatever gender you are, but there's so much invisible cultural baggage going on in the lives of kids and adults with what we're all doing in terms of gender, all the invisible things and baggage that we bring to this project. [04:44] We're operating with this idea that we have this huge amount of control over all of these things. And both culturally and biologically, and in all kinds of different ways, we have far less control than we think we do.