BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity

BoyMom

By Ruth Whippman

New York: Harmony, 2024. 290 pages. Nonfiction

 

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. 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. 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 jerks? 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? 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.

Do you ever read a book and think it was written especially for you? As a mother of boys, this book piqued my interest right away. How do you raise boys into men that are capable of emotional connection and are able to avoid the loneliness that seems to plague todays men? The author uses her own experience of raising 3 young boys to fuel her deep dive research. Because of the biographical details, the book almost feels like a conversation despite its presentation of research and statistics. Raising boys in today's culture is a complex issue and it was refreshing to read the research all the while the author is open about her viewpoints being challenged and states that there are no easy answers. 

How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family

By Sonora Jha

Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2021. 265 Pages. Nonfiction.

This book is both an incredibly moving mother-son love story told in personal essays, and a parenting manual with concrete advice and actionable takeaways for feminists of all stripes hoping to dismantle toxic masculinity, one sweet boy at a time 

A Better Man: a (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son

By Michael Ian Black 

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020. 291 pages. Nonfiction

 

Michael Ian Black takes a poignant look at manhood, written in the form of a heartfelt letter to his teenage son before he leaves for college. Black offers a radical plea for rethinking masculinity and teaching young men to give and receive love.

JK