Who is #Boymom?

On psychoanalytic villains, gender essentialism and my feminist identity crisis.

Photo by yang miao on Unsplash

My new book wasn’t always going to be called BOYMOM.  It started life as RAZING RAISING THE PATRIARCHY (complete with strikethrough on the first RAZING) which demands an awful lot  from a casual bookstore browser, inevitably needing some excruciating explanatory monologue whenever anyone asked me what I was working on: “RAZING, no no, RAZING with a Z, like, tearing down-, like what we want to do with the PATRIARCHY- but then that crossed out and then another RAISING, but the second one with a S!  like raising KIDS-geddit? No? No? Anyone?”  As Ogden Nash put it: “Here’s a good rule of thumb/ too clever is dumb.”  

While the RAZING/ RAISING nonsense was torturous, many of the other title suggestions leaned in the other direction- of oversimplification.  They tended to be variations on a kind of  “10 SIMPLE STEPS TO RAISE THE FEMINIST SON OF YOUR DREAMS”  theme, laying claim to a level of parenting mastery that felt like laughable hubris.

Parenthood and gender are both topics that inspire a fair amount of unwarranted moral certainty, something that  always surprises me given the extent to which my lived experience of both feels so chaotic and conflicted.  Maybe the bland rigidity of the parenting books and furious dogmatism of the online gender discussions are just a psychological defense against this chaos. Maybe other people are just better psychically (and practically) organized than I am.  Either way, when I started writing the book, I was keen not to ignore the inner conflicts and political contradictions, but to lean into them - to write through the antsy defensiveness and ambivalence and occasional terror of being a feminist mother to boys in this deeply fraught cultural moment.

BOYMOM spoke to me as a title because it manages to captures many of those conflicted sensibilities, both personal and political. The word itself is a masterclass in efficiency. Those six letters contain an entire story arc, with its own inciting incident (woman gives birth to a baby fundamentally unlike her), its own tension and conflict, its own potential resolution.  BOYMOM is a  three-act structure hiding in a hashtag.

So perhaps its not surprising that the Boymom conceit has captured peoples’ imaginations online. My book unwittingly lands in the middle of a social media sensation.  “#Boymom” the internet character- winemom’s cousin, suburban enabler of toxic masculinity - has gone viral. According to the New York Times, who framed the phenomenon in an article entitled Is this Motherly Love or Something Toxic? the Boymom hashtag has racked up over 31 billion views on Tiktok, and over 18 million posts on Instagram. (Although in my darker moments of marketing self-loathing, I worry that at least 10 million of these have probably been me posting about my book.)

To her online critics- of which there are many- #Boymom is both a political villain and a psychoanalytic one.  She coddles her boys to the point of emasculation.  Her love is faintly sexualized.  She’s a raving gender essentialist who traffics in reductive stereotypes.  Some iterations of her are vaguely unhinged, bordering on Oedipal, holding forth that boys are better than girls, and reassuring herself that even when her son finds a girlfriend, she will always be his first love, his first kiss. Paradoxically, through all the performative rapture, she can also come off as faintly disappointed, her besotted musings hitting a false note of defensive overcompensation.  As a mother of multiple sons and no daughters, #Boymom is either explicitly or implicitly in conversation with a culture in which girls- with their cute clothes and shopping trips and lifelong mother-daughter bonds - are considered the real prize, and sometimes she protests just a smidge too much, her narrative taking on a vague consolation prize flavor.

#Boymom’s conception of gender is fixed and traditional, cis and heteronormative. The “boy” in the boymom worldview is a rowdy little scamp,  wild, uncontrollable, but also at heart, uncomplicated and loving (with the vaguely misogynistic subtext “unlike those scheming, devious witches, girls.”) The whole description feels slightly subhuman- more ‘cute naughty pet’ than fully realized human relationship.  The “mom” in the conceit is an indulgently baffled, doting servant, gamely navigating the mud and the noise and the fart jokes and the grocery bills.  “That’s just the way they’re wired,” shrugs #Boymom, before heading off to wash the sports jerseys and clean the pee stains off the toilet.  #Boymom may have her hands full but she is never truly overwhelmed or depressed or internally conflicted, and she is certainly not politicized. #Boymom is conservative at heart, hard at work maintaining the social order, good-naturedly bested by Y chromosomes.

All of this is, of course, a new version of an old story, and one that is only a tick away from something darker.  “Boys will be boys” has always been the get-out-of-jail card that we use to excuse and enable male bad behavior, from toddler hitting to campus  rape. “That’s just how boys are,” shrugs #Boymom, as she watches her sons run riot in the library or bash each other with Tonka Trucks, or haze their fraternity brothers until someone asphyxiates.    

Feminist moms with sons generally don’t self-identify as #boymoms.  When #Boymom posts a video of her gender reveal on Instagram, Feminist Mom comments, “This is really just a genital reveal.  Gender is a construct.” The pairing is enough to make you hate everyone.  

I have three sons and no daughters, which places me in the #boymom ‘at risk’ category, but I’ve never embraced the identity. My pushback is probably as much aesthetic as political. I’m a British Gen Xer, emotionally stunted by snobbery and irony, so #Boymom’s ‘Live Laugh Love’ sign sensibility rankles.  But my lived experience is closer to hers than I would like to admit.  I recognize the defensive envy, the psychological doubling down.  Most of all, I recognize the boys.  Although intellectually and tribally I am aligned with Feminist Mom,  to my secret horror, my sons have always hewed closer to Boymom’s. 

My boys are complex and wonderful humans who are getting easier now, and more legible to me, but for years they were chaos agents, and often impossible to control.  Their wild physicality shocked me.  They had little interest in discussing human drama or motivations, my own preoccupations, preferring fart jokes and Nerf guns and wrestling.  When I think about myself as a child, or look at the way same-aged girls behave and talk,  I sometimes find it hard to believe we are the same species.  Unlike #Boymom, I don’t always find the differences charming - but often alienating and exhausting.   As a result it can sometimes feel as though I have walked into my own ideological trap.  My feminist identity hinges on being able to push back against the likes of #Boymom, but my sons are strangely uninterested in propping up my political credentials with their own personalities.  “Boys will be boys” is sexist garbage, but after a long day of breaking up wrestling matches, it can sometimes also feel like self-compassion. “Maybe that’s just the way they’re wired”, I shrug, heading off to wash the sports jerseys and clean the pee stains off the toilet. 

This is why the whole “it’s just a genital reveal” posture doesn’t ever quite ring emotionally true to me.  As feminists, we can’t both claim that our gender is the very source of our oppression-that it has a profound impact on our lives and prospects, our rights and identity and the expectations others place on us; and yet at the same time maintain that it is also a totally incidental and socially meaningless detail. That is either dishonest or incoherent. 

I’ve spent a fair amount of time digging into the science of sex differences when researching my book, a branch of science that is full of inconsistencies and contradictions.  People of good faith can mine the existing gender research for evidence that hardwired sex differences exist and find plenty. They can also mine the same studies for proof that those differences are largely inconsequential or socialized and find that too.  But in a way all of this is a bit of a red herring. Whether or not the differences are socialized or innate, imagined or projected, of course the gender of our children matters, in the same way that our own gender matters.  Even if the differences in behavior are a cultural construct,  culture is the medium through which we live our lives.   Our gender is coded into every story we live, with male children fast- tracked into one cultural system and female children into another, and there can be a high price for straying from those tracks . We can’t fight this if we pretend it’s not true. 

Gender and culture are infinitely complex and often contradictory.  But that doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and give up.  We urgently need to address the way we raise boys, the stereotypes we lay on them, and the ways we box them in.  We socialize male children in all kinds of visible and invisible ways that harm them and teach them to harm others. Much of this is subtle and hard to spot.  I am hugely hopeful that we can change these patterns  in important and meaningful ways.  But I also believe we can only do this from a starting point of honesty about the incongruities and mess of it all, about how challenging this kind of change really is, and of compassion for those in the thick of actually doing it.

I don’t have the answers.  But in BOYMOM, I wanted to embrace those complexities rather than deny them, to take an honest look at my own assumptions and those of others and to see them for what they are.  In the same way that I never wanted to create a book-length listicle of 10 Hilarious Things Only #Boymoms Can Relate To, I also know that there are no 10 Easy Ways to Raise a Feminist Son.  Gender is messy, motherhood is messy.  Our blindspots are many and our control is limited.  We all live in the constant swill of best intentions and worst selves; we all sway in the wind. It is only if we really look at ourselves honestly that we can really see any of this for what it is and start the long, slow work of pushing back.

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