Can Parents of Boys Break the Masculinity Trap?

An excerpt from Ruth Whippman's new book BOYMOM: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity

BOYMOM: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity
by Ruth Whippman (follow her on Substack!)

Early last month, I read one of those op/eds that you immediately share with all of your friends: This one by Ruth Whippman in the New York Times about why boys are so lonely and so often emotionally disconnected (I also wrote about Whippman’s arguments here). I was struck, reading a few other reviews of Whippman’s book, by some of her smaller but to me very telling observations. One keep bouncing around in my head: The way adults all call little boys “buddy” and little girls “sweetheart,” which is such a teeny-tiny thing it’s easy to write it off, but the truth is that big gender inequities are built on piles of teeny-tiny things. Reading that small observation I realized that I do this — not just to humans, but in how I talk to my male cat versus my female one. And they’re cats! Who are both fixed! If I’m a professional feminist who is unconsciously treating my damn cats differently based on their sex, what hope is there for parents who vaguely want gender equality but are also living in a world where differential treatment of boys and girls is pervasive enough to be nearly invisible?

Yes, this is a silly example. But it’s stayed stubbornly put in my brain for exactly that reason: There are zero stakes here, and zero reason to talk to little boys differently from how we talk to little girls, and even those of us who believe we don’t fall into these traps have perhaps just been in them for so long that we don’t even see all the ways in which we’re penned in.

So I am thrilled to share this excerpt from Whippman’s new book BOYMOM: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, which is out now. I hope you enjoy!

xx Jill

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My fantasy that all boys might one day be freed from the masculinity trap altogether, is a long way off for 22 year-old Spencer, a regular at the weekly men’s therapy group at Iron Gate. Spencer’s mom Wendy is a big believer in masculinity. She believes that traditional manly values are “under attack” in modern culture, and Spencer agrees. His mom is the one that introduced him to a lot of the masculinity content he consumes online, including YouTuber Casey Zander and his “masculine behavioral therapy.”  

It’s not just the stuff his mom sends him. Spencer seeks out a lot of masculinity content himself, reads books about the topic, listens to podcasts. Coming across as masculine is very important to him. He believes that feminism, at least how it is “currently defined” is “not raising women up, but putting men down below.”  These views are unpopular with his classmates and teachers at the nearby university where Spencer is a student. He wrote a paper recently about why the world should be seeing masculine values in a more positive light, and he got a bad grade. He believes that the grade was unfair, especially given that a female student wrote a paper about Barbie from a feminist perspective and was universally praised.

Spencer was initially reluctant to come to the Men’s Group at the center. “In my mind, l when I hear ‘support group,’ it sounds weak” he tells me. “But really, if I humble myself, this is pretty much a support group. But it's strong. Right? Like I've just come to realize support groups can be strong when they're done the right way.”

While Spencer and I are talking, the theme of weakness and strength comes up several times. He seems to evaluate his every thought and action on the basis of whether it is strong or weak- at school, in his relationship, about whether to open up and share his feelings in couples therapy, even about whether he should be allowed to masturbate (masturbation is weak apparently, according to YouTuber Casey Zander and Spencer’s mom.)

“What does being weak mean to you?” I ask him.  

“When I'm weak, it makes me feel less of a man.”

“So you feel like being a man is really important to you?”

“Oh, it is. It’s extremely important,” he replies.

“What values would you associate with being a man?” I ask.

“Strength,” he replies, instantly.

Stuck inside this circular logic, it seems that before Spencer can accept any quality or trait in himself, or take any action he first needs it to be officially validated as strong or masculine. Almost anything can qualify, as long as it is branded that way. 

When sharing his emotions and being vulnerable is sold to him as a manly virtue, for example Spencer is able to accept it. He needs to understand himself as masculine in order to understand himself as worthy. Masculinity is, in his view, the key marker of value.  

But all this doesn’t quite seem to be making Spencer feel strong and powerful.  If anything, the basic terms seem to be leaving him ever more nervous and insecure, unable to trust his own choices or preferences without external validation. I realize that so many of the boys that I have talked to seem, at least to some extent, to be trapped in this same oppressive paradigm. Spencer suddenly seems achingly fragile, and I feel a stab of protectiveness towards him.  

He starts telling me about one of his favorite masculinity books, the bestselling Wild at Heart, by Christian author John Elderedge, that has sold well over a million copies. In the book Elderedge pinpoints what he sees as the “three basic desires of the ‘masculine heart,’” all of which Spencer identifies with strongly.  These are: 

A battle to fight.

An adventure to live.

A beauty to rescue.  

I wince particularly hard at “a beauty to rescue.” The idea that a woman is not a full human in her own right but a kind of narrative macguffin in some dude’s overblown hero fantasy makes me feel mildly enraged. In the actual book, Elderedge answers this critique by tying himself in knots convincing the reader that the ‘beauty’ in question might not necessarily be a woman, but could also be allure found in say nature or poetry or art (it is unclear how the rescuing part fits into this.) Somehow placing women as one item on this bucket-list of ‘beautiful experiences to be enjoyed by men on their journeys of spiritual growth’ only seems to make the sexism worse, not better.

On the face of it the whole thing sounds ludicrous. Do grown men really still think this way? But the more I mentally run through the stories that my boys and their peers actually consume - the books and movies and TV shows and video games they read and watch and play- the more I realize that Elderedge’s hokey sexism might not actually be the fringe ramblings of a relatively obscure Christian author, but an efficient description of the basic foundation of the male narrative universe.  

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Glory-seeking heroes have dominated boys’ fictional worlds since humans started telling stories. In this classic storytelling pattern, the superheroes and fantasy warriors and video game avatars tend to be one individual man, working alone, often with some kind of superhuman power or at the very least hypermasculine strength and abilities, who slays the villain, saves the day in a blaze of glory and usually ends up ‘getting the girl’ as a result. Women are generally side characters, essentially objects that men either rescue or acquire as prizes for their bravery and heroism.    

The hero’s journey is the basis for the majority of Hollywood movies. Marvel superhero epics alone dominate the modern cinematic landscape, drawing in close to a third of all box office revenue for all movies in a given year. Hero narratives in various forms are also the foundation of a significant number of video games that are beloved of boys, and the majority of the books and TV shows marketed towards them- from Harry Potter to Percy Jackson to Spiderman to the Paw Patrol. As such, the hero’s journey has become, in some crucial way, an organizing principle for men’s inner lives. 

So compelling is the idea of the hero’s journey to the male psyche that research by the US Defense Department found that ISIS recruiters had studied this narrative formula and replicated it in recruitment videos to target adolescent boys, who they saw as particularly susceptible to this kind of heroic fantasy.

At their best, these narratives can provide enticing imaginative worlds and valuable lessons about morality and bravery and self-sacrifice. Clearly the vast majority of young boys consume them and go on to live happy, productive lives.   But there are invisible harms to this impossible vision of manhood, and boys can easily internalize damaging expectations from them about masculinity and their own place in the world. 

Boys are socialized to see themselves as the hero on his journey, and the main character in any story, and to see everyone else, and especially women, as side characters or narrative foils. As such, boys subtly absorb the idea that women and girls are not quite actual people with their own true agency or interiority, but more abstractions that exist to further the narrative of men.  

Stories in which men and boys star as glory-studded main characters send strong messages to boys about their own specialness and centrality to the world, about what is owed to them simply by virtue of being male- the level of adulation they can expect as their birthright. 

But this sense of specialness and superiority comes at a price. Taken together, the messages about individual glory contained in these stories can end up breeding an odd combination in boys of both entitlement and inadequacy.

Masculinity’s basic story creates impossibly punishing  expectations for boys of what a man should be- hypermasculine, physically and emotionally bulletproof, ideally superhuman. Actual boys and men, with human flaws and vulnerabilities will always fall short. Failure is built into the project. So many of the boys I had talked to, had all in their own ways, fallen prey to this framing, internalizing a low-level shame at their inability to live up to the impossible demands of the masculine ideal.

It’s a message that has always troubled Joel Christensen, a Professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. His work focuses on the ways in which the stories we are exposed to shape our sense of self. Christensen has a particular interest in hero stories and their impact on the male psyche and the construction of masculinity.

“The narratives we hear from a young age shape what we think is possible in the world and what we think is true for ourselves,” Christensen tells me. “And so for me it's a simple question. How do we socialize men and women differently? How do we tell them different stories to give them basic scripts about how to behave in the world?”

Through the friendship and relationship narratives we give them, girls absorb the idea that they are part of a relational system, a community that everyone contributes to and draws from, while boys are socialized to think they need to be unique and special.  

Christensen writes about the ancient Greek concept of kleos, a kind of fame and glory or “eternal renown” that a hero earned through his great deeds. This was the basic reward system for the classical hero, his motivating drive. And at some level that hunger for specialness and glory has endured as a kind of baseline expectation in the modern male psyche.

“I think it's about innate ability. You believe that you're innately better and good,” Christensen explains. 

With this in the background, it makes sense that men might avoid the boring tasks of adulthood. If you are shooting for eternal renown, doing the laundry or studying for your social studies test might well feel a little beneath you. The kind of quiet diligence and cooperation modeled to girls can easily read as emasculating when compared to the sensational one-off glorious feats of the hero.  

But in most situations that life throws at us, quiet diligence is more important to success than splashy acts or inherent specialness. It’s not innate genius or superpowers or once- in-a-lifetime feats of bravery that get you into college, or employment or out of your childhood bedroom, but mostly tedious, incremental drudge-work. It’s perhaps not surprising that boys are spending so much time playing video games- they provide the only arenas in which boys can play out their hero fantasies and expectations of glory, away from the tedious tasks of the real world.  

The pressure to be masculine might have helped boys launch into adulthood when it was an economic requirement - when men were the sole breadwinners, and had to provide economically for a family. But now with women working, and less urgency for men to step up economically, masculinity has been stripped of the only part of the story that really ever promoted adulthood. Without the breadwinning, what’s left is just destructive scraps- a grab-bag of childish vanities and impossible pressures.

When boys and men fail to meet the impossible expectations of heroic manhood, it can lead to a deep sense of inadequacy, according to psychologist Matt Englar Carlson.

“Shame is the core emotion for men,” he tells me. “The way a lot of males experience depression is through externalization. So there's an internal experience that you're not going to see, which is usually one of extreme shame.  Men are pretty aware when they don’t meet gender expectations. Then there’s a shame cycle that occurs, that remains internal.”

In its most extreme manifestation, this pervasive sense of shame and inadequacy is reflected in the psychological profiles of the high-school shooter or misogynistic incel. Manifestos written by these young men show just how deeply these young men are tortured by the gap between their internalized entitlement to glory and heroism, and the crushing reality of being an unspectacular adolescent boy, ignored and rejected by the women that he has been led to believe are his birthright.

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You can pick up a copy of BOYMOM now from wherever books are sold (we always recommend your favorite local bookstore). You can also follow Ruth Whippman on Substack and Instagram.