-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email “It really did feel like, ‘My tribe is abandoning my kids,’” recalls author Ruth Whippman. There she was, pregnant with her third son, already facing sympathetic reactions that gave her the sense that “girls were more of the prized gender,” and then the #MeToo movement broke. “Then the conversation exploded.
” And, as she recalls, “It felt like this weird set of culture war divisions had co-opted my own children into this politicized narrative, which was really hard.” So Whippman, author of “America the Anxious” channeled her complicated feelings into “Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity,” a supremely levelheaded examination of how we got here — and how we can guide our boys away from the abyss that’s harming all of us across the gender spectrum, in different ways. It’s a frank look at the rising rates of depression and loneliness in men, the academic gaps between boys and girls, and how our contemporary American culture both privileges and sabotages males from before they’re even born.
She makes the case that raising a healthier, more emotionally intelligent population of boys is possible — and that we all have a stake in making it happen. As a mother of girls, I was excited to read Whippman’s deeply researched yet intensely personal account of American boyhood, and even moreso to talk with her recently about why why boys today feel "so isolated," and why masculinity i.