The Faulty Logic Of "Boys Will Be Boys"

Modern women struggle to effectively parent sugar-laden, off-task boys as their husband barks about "being a provider," and this is a problem that needs to be increasingly acknowledged.

About a year ago, I was talking with this woman at my church. She was mid-30s and on the dating scene, looking for someone to spend some time with and maybe get that beautiful slice of the pie known as “motherhood” from. She told me that almost every guy she matched with and went on a few dates with was horrible and dysfunctional and couldn’t hold a conversation, which tracks with much of my experience of trying to make male friends over the age of about 32.

She told me that it infuriated her because Boomer women she knew would always coo “Boys are so much easier to raise!” (which, come to think of it, I have heard Boomer women say) and she wanted to scream in their face: “You raised the worst generation of men we’ve ever seen.”

I always found that funny.

Well, there’s a lot to the whole “boy mom” narrative, not the least of which is the Freudian aspect, whereby you have a derp husband that doesn’t do much, and then you get Baby James, and Baby James is cute and does whatever you want and follows you around, and maybe James kinda sorta replaces your husband, and then when Baby James is older and more strapping and an athlete, maybe once in a while you jump into his arms after a game and some people in the bleachers think “Hmmm…” That’s the toxic side of the boy mom coin, which absolutely does exist, although we tend not to discuss it openly.

There’s the other toxic play of boy moms, where they over-baby boys and turn them into “simps” or whatever the term of the day is.

Point being: it’s hard to be a boy mom. There is a lot of criticism and backlash towards it right now, and moms often don’t do themselves any favors on The Gram as regards their boy-mom-dom.

Here’s a good post about all of it, from

Anne Helen Petersen

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This is an interview with Ruth Whippman, who is the author of a book on Boy Moms. She frames up the terms early in the discussion:

Masculine norms keep men emotionally repressed and make it hard for them to access intimate connection. Boys and men are lonely and depressed and dying by suicide at nearly four times the rate of their female peers. Since #Metoo, we have focused heavily on how patriarchy only benefits men at women’s expense, and this narrative has almost been weaponized to silence and shame boys. This is not to say that the anger directed toward men is not righteous or legitimate — it is — but if we want to get boys and men onside to the feminist cause, we need to acknowledge their pain too.

Many boys are getting drawn into this idea coming from the right that feminism is the enemy and the cause of all their problems. But in some ways the feminist movement is playing into the hands of this narrative. As feminists we should be selling “smashing the patriarchy” as a liberation to boys but instead we are almost selling it to them as a punishment. Which in a way is the same basic framing of the masculinity influencers that feminism is only going to make their lives worse, not better. In the book, I explore lots of complicated, and conflicted feelings and ideas about what it’s like to be a feminist and a mother of boys in this fraught cultural moment, but where I landed was very much we are all on the same side here: patriarchy harms all of us, and we shouldn’t act as though we are enemies.

OK. On these two paragraphs, I agree with the first — men are often emotionally stunted and society wants them to be that way because it fits a masculine ideal that’s supposedly evolving — but the second is weird and gets into a lot of cross-stitching with feminism and how bad the patriarchy is. The patriarchy isn’t bad on face, and when you say that, you just empower guys like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson to make more money on YouTube. Parts of the patriarchy are very bad, but no children would exist without some sperm, so right there men are doing something. Believe me, I think about that shit every day since I can’t really do it for anyone I’ve been with.

This paragraph, however, is interesting:

It’s a complicated area, but what struck me most when I dug into the science of sex differences (which is quite a sketchy area of science that people tend to co-opt to prove their own political agendas of all kinds) was that actually boys are more sensitive and emotionally vulnerable than girls on average. At birth, their brains are more immature and vulnerable to disruption than baby girls’ brains and so they need more nurture and engagement with emotions than girls do on average. But because we project masculine qualities onto boys, we tend to see them as tougher and angrier and less in need of nurture and protection, and treat them differently as a result. Parents tend to handle boys more roughly, and to spend less time talking to them, especially about emotions. We have always used the “boys will be boys” logic as a rationale to do less parenting, but we should see it as a reason to do more. That boys need more of this type of care and receive less of it can lead to all kinds of problems down the line.

Out of all that, I’d staple this to your mirror: “We have always used the “boys will be boys” logic as a rationale to do less parenting, but we should see it as a reason to do more.”

Phrased another way: maybe a lot of our problems are because we ceased to parent well.

I’d say young boys are pretty emotional, because being a young boy is weird: you grew as a human inside your mom, so theoretically that should be your closest relationship. But once you’re Earth-side, most of society is telling you that being close with your mom would in some way make you lesser, and that’s confusing. Plus, as you grow and learn things and have different interactions with people, sometimes things get emotional and you get sad or scared. Scared little boys is a very real concept, but at almost every turn, you get told by teachers and relatives and other parents and your own that “boys don’t behave that way,” and it can lead to weird emotional regulation to the point that you’re 39 and sitting at a bar at 12:30 p.m. angrily texting people. Oh wait, that’s just me. Got it.

Here’s what I would worry about on the “mom” side: modern parenting is very hard, and there’s an especially performative element to it. Because kids are nice to have these days as opposed to need to have, i.e. we don’t work on farms anymore, a lot of people have kids to keep up with their friends or please their parents, who want to be grandparents. As such, the kid becomes the destination, as opposed to a part of the journey. Once you have the kid, for so many women, they are an Instagram prop for a while. That makes me tremendously sad, but it’s so common in modernity. Look at the “Beige Mom” narrative, if nothing else.

And while we’ve had lots of societal fights about this recently, men and women are different. Women assume most of the domestic labor and “raising of kids,” mostly because men hide behind “I’m making money / I’m a provider / I’m a family guy” as an excuse to do the bare minimum and get away with it. It’s a beautiful narrative to watch unfold, and it unfolds in 82% of households, best I can see.

Well, a woman/mom has never been a five year-old boy. You’d hope the dad would assume more responsibility on some seminal boy moments, but I’m not sure the dad always does. (Some are great and do this, of course.) A woman who is performatively mothering cannot contextually raise a boy, because she doesn’t understand what the boy is going through and needs — and it’s harder to make a boy into an Instagram prop anyway. You can over-baby the boy, or have the boy replace your husband (both mentioned above), or you can tell the boy to “be a man” (which has no meaning at age five), or you can try to make the boy into a girl and make him cute for Letterboard Season, but it’s very hard for a biological woman who is in her hormonal “this is my baby-making era” to correctly parent a boy. And again, we come back to the problem of: what are men doing in these relationships?

Look at the whole trend line of boys going MAGA recently. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. We tend to attribute it to #MeToo and third-wave feminism and how boys think they can’t approach girls without getting “hash-tagged,” so they just retreat into 4Chan. That’s part of it, and so is porn and other stuff, but I’d argue one reason young men go MAGA is because their dad was a derp who outsourced the actual raising of the boy to the mom, and the mom wasn’t sure what she was doing, so the boys go MAGA because the far-right has some strong, masculine-style figures online, even Joe Rogan. Boys need that, and they’re not getting it at home. They’re getting performative motherhood, because there’s a generalized decline of fatherhood.

I understand parenting is hard and challenging for people, and I understand that even those with the best of intentions fuck up and that’s why therapists have nice houses as they take your money to entangle all these webs later in life.

But I think a lot of our current societal problems start right here: parenting is a destination for people these days, not so much a journey, and dads check out and hide behind “I AM THE PROVIDER!” and boys cannot be raised solely by women because the context isn’t there. For every “my single mom got me into Harvard” story, we have 1,271 stories of boys raised by single moms who became a scourge on society.

I just think we need to be more upfront about this stuff if we’re going to “solve” any of it. You?