SYNOPSIS
What book are we doing?
BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, by Ruth Whippman
Why are we doing it?
During Men’s Health Month, explore how a mom takes a planner’s approach to understanding how to raise healthy sons in a complex world.
How can we use it?
To remind us to check our biases.
To consider men’s health in a broader context.
To help us imagine our audience as both different from us, and someone we love.
“What are my biases?” One of my mentors began projects with this self-reflection and encouraged us all do the same. BoyMom is a case study in the value and difficulty of checking our biases continually.
Ruth Whippman, a feminist author who identifies liberals as her “natural clan.” lives in a “liberal urban bubble” where it’s socially acceptable for a mail carrier to say to an expectant mother, “I hope, for your sake, this one is a girl,” and for her friends, aware that she’s expecting a boy, to ask, “Why go through all of that just for another boy?” In her world, girls are considered the prize and boys are trouble.
Her story begins in 2017 when, she says, “It was hard not to start to see men as the enemy.” But Ruth also had an important assignment at home: she was the mother of two young sons, with a third on the way, and was determined to raise each of her three boys to be a good man. When she refers to them as “the loves of my life,” it’s clearly not out of begrudging motherly obligation. You can feel the deep care and affection for her boys in her writing. She wants nothing but good for her sons and for them to be a force for good in the world. And yet . . . “My tribe was rejecting my kids.”
Ruth sees her three future-men sons as sweet, infinite-potential rays of hope. She also recognizes her bias: “Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters.” This tension makes for a compelling exploration. Whippman does the difficult work of having open conversations with people who she and her clan consider the enemy: leaders and members of a right-leaning return-to-masculinity program, young men who identify as incels, and members of an advocacy group for students accused of on-campus sexual assault. This can’t be easy, but she approaches them with empathy, curiosity, compassion, and a sincere desire to understand.
While her approach is commendable, it’s not perfect. Whippman periodically allows her bias to emerge unchecked. For example, she compares a knotty-pine wall to the colour of Donald Trump’s skin and celebrates Greta Thunberg for encouraging Andrew Tate to reach out at SmallDickEnergy@getalife.com. Both Trump and Tate have provided an endless catalogue of bad behaviours that warrant criticism. By choosing comments about their bodies rather than behaviours, Whippman misses several opportunities: to call out truly harmful actions, to remind us that body shaming is not acceptable, and to end the narrative that anyone’s value as a human correlates with the size of their genitals.
If we consider these comments as elements of a book that’s been read, re-read, edited, and reviewed by a team of publishing-house staff before being released to the public, then they can seem hypocritical, unproductive, or even damaging to the cause. Considering the book as a more linear, real-time exploration, though, makes it feel true to life. Whippman doesn’t eliminate her biases. But she tries to be aware of them. While, like any of us, she slips sometimes, she has the discipline to keep coming back to, “What are my biases? . . . What are my biases? . . . ”
Even equipped with self-awareness, the idea of a self-described feminist having open and productive conversations with seemingly extreme misogynists sounds like a difficult task. Whippman uses another question very effectively to overcome this challenge: “What if this was my boy?” In doing so, she discovers that some of her preconceived conclusions aren’t as clear and simple as they’d seemed. She sees the humans behind the one-line descriptors and labels and reveals to herself and readers the complexity within them. It opens the door for her to uncover a fascinating and productive insight: “At some deep level in the system, men get everything. Except the thing that’s most worth having – human intimacy.” In publishing BoyMom at the beginning of Men’s Health Month, Ruth Whippman provides a starting point to improve health and well-being not only for men and boys, but for everyone.
In most projects, planners are asked to solve problems and understand a target audience they’re not a member of. It’s tempting to ignore that and to imagine ourselves as the audience. To free ourselves to see the world through someone else’s lived experience instead of our own, we can ask, “What are our biases?” To bring compassion and deep care for our audience and their best interests, we can ask a variation on Whippman’s “What if this was my boy?” – “What if this was someone I love?”
