There is a horrible, and I mean horrible, YouTube channel called “Man Talk,” which is essentially just an incel guy running TikTok clips of women saying stupid stuff and then he (the host) goes 1954 suburbia on it all. I watch it sometimes to see how the Red Pill Movement is faring. Short answer: not good. Here is a recent-ish video. You can hopefully ignore the thumbnail on said video:
Although, admittedly, there are some women who like it “too big to fit.” I mean, that’s true, we’re just not supposed to say it out loud.
OK, onto the real point.
In that video, in the first TikTok clip that gets used, the woman is making a point I couldn’t even really follow, but she does say something that is relevant:
“In terms of man as a partner, either a man was babied by his mom or he wasn’t, and that has a lot of impact on him later in life.”
OK. Lot to unpack there, but I can try quickly.
How your mom treats you is not everything: Because, well, you still grow up and live life and have experiences and date people and move away and all that. (Hopefully.) You can overcome a poor mom and you can get fucked up after a great mom. Both things are possible, and how your mom treated you isn’t everything, although on both your worst and best days as a guy, it can feel like everything, sure. So it’s a little bit much to say “Guys are one way or the other because of this thing,” because guys are certain ways for multiple reasons, but it’s an interesting premise to start from.
Boy mom toxicity: This is such a recurring theme in “overanalysis of males” that I’ve written about it once. I know a ton of current boy moms. With the exception of maybe two of them off the top of my head, none are toxic. Most of these women have young kids. Maybe they will read “toxic” when the boy is 16. I can’t speak to that yet. I do think boys get “over-babied,” which seems ironic, as men are supposedly the “stronger” sex. It seems like moms let young girls be more resilient and snowplow young boys more, but this may be a misguided anecdote.
Modeling relationships: As for the comment that started this thinking, personally I believe you have some specific roles in a two-parent household. Fathers should model what treating a woman looks like, and mothers should underscore how a woman should be treated. That feels semantic, but I think it makes sense. Your mom should underscore the how, and your dad should be something you can look at and say “OK, that seems like the right approach.” If your dad slaps the shit out of your mom, and you see that, then you go off and do it, that’s the bad version of what I’m saying. But if your mom just gets railroaded on big topics and nit-picks on small topics and it’s death by a thousand cuts, that’s bad too.
Within that, as for the babying of boys, I mean, yes, I think it does impact males when they start dating and having sex and all that. If your mom did everything for you up to a certain age, which I am probably guilty of too, you are probably looking for a partner who will do everything for you. Sadly, this is very normalized by men these days, as you probably saw in a handful of Mother’s Day posts two days ago: “Our family would collapse without Lindsay.” Men normalize the language of “Without a woman, I’d collapse.” I have been divorced and while it’s hard, I can tell you neither gender really “collapses” without the other. That’s more just a thing we say. People are resilient and can survive a lot.
But if your mom was snowplow on you and babied you, you’re probably a little less resilient when you enter a long-term relationship — and expect the woman to do things like make you sandwiches or whatever. That doesn’t fly as much in 2024, so I can see where this narrative is coming from.
I also think it needs to be stated that when a woman has a bunch of consecutive bad dating experiences, i.e. a lot of “pump and dump” type situations, she tends to vent online, because I guess that’s what we do these days. When a woman vents online, the single-easiest target is “the mothers of the generation that is currently in the dating pool,” because that is a nameless, faceless mass of women who you can blame for your own faulty decision-making around sleeping with Trevor before the time was truly right. That needs to be said too.
I have not actively “dated” since 2008 and then briefly in 2017, but I can tell you very briefly what’s seemingly going on out there, which is men going further to the right (red pill) and women going further to the left (bleeding heart), and thus people can’t talk. Dating apps are cesspools and people don’t meet in-person as much because we over-rely on smartphones.
As such, we get less real dating and intimacy and more TikTok rants. Cue the panic about the fertility rate.
I personally don’t think the issue is “moms babied their boys,” although I do think a lot of modern moms view children as accessories or Pokemon to collect (“I’ll never get my girl!”), and that can create a kind of ass-backwards absentee parenting style that warps boys as they enter the dating and reproduction scene.
Personally I think I was babied as a boy, and I’m sure that did fuck me up in some ways, but I think what fucked me up more as a partner along the way was drinking and proclivity to anger, neither of which I associate with being “babied.”
Your take?