Tox Report 78. Boy problems

What if the "crisis in masculinity" can't be solved by mothering harder?

I had two pieces published this week. First, an interview with Candace Owens (yes, that Candace Owens) for the Telegraph, which I might write more about next week. And second — and most importantly — a column for the New Statesman about how the assisted dying bill is putting women at risk. The failure to address coercive control and male violence within so-called “mercy kills” is a huge issue with the proposed law, and not the only one: it should not pass as it currently stands.

It’s kind of chaos with me at the moment thanks to the ongoing building work, and there’s no time this week for a full strength Tox Report. (I know, I know, how are you going to navigate the vicissitudes of culture without me. Well, you’ll probably cope.) Instead, please enjoy this essay about boys and care, inspired by Ruth Whippman’s book Boymom, which I’ve had on ice since last summer.

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The boys are always in trouble. I don’t mean that in “slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails” way — the casual habit of assuming mischief from boys, in a way that disparages the whole gender and simultaneously accommodates its worst excesses. I mean it in a more existential way: as long as masculinity has been under discussion, it has been undergoing some kind of crisis. For its disparagers, it’s “fragile”. For its defenders, it’s “under attack”.

When I had my own son, in the early 2000s, the prophet of the crisis was Steve Biddulph, author of the 1997 book Raising Boys. Boys, said Biddulph, were not rough and tough little things: they were actually the more fragile of the sexes, more prone to infant death, more susceptible to separation anxiety. “If at all possible,” wrote Biddulph, “a boy should stay home with one of his parents until age three.”

All things being equal, that parent could theoretically be the mother or the father. But because things never are equal, this was — intentionally or not — really an injunction against women in the workplace. At a time of considerable anxiety about the rise of the professional woman, it seemed convenient that the solution to boys’ problems just happened to be one that would benefit men by taking many women of childbearing age out of the running for promotions.

I ignored Biddulph and put my son into daycare when he was a baby. We were lucky to find a nursery staffed by genuinely caring carers, who still ask after their former charges on Facebook decades later. He seems to have turned out OK. Perhaps as importantly, so did I: I was 20 when I had him, in the second year of my degree. If I’d taken Biddulph’s advice, I’d have been 25 before I finally graduated. That’s a long time to effectively remain a girl.

But however much I rejected the Biddulph directives for parenting, it was true that the early years of child development offer a stringent education for anyone who believes in the blank slate when it comes to gender. The nursery my son went to was part of the university campus, and the families who used it were mostly students like me or academics. We were largely of the social tribe that believed in gender neutral play and unisex clothes. Boys were encouraged into the home corner, girls were given free range at the construction toys.

Then one day — or at least, this is how I remember it — all the girls started wearing princess dresses, and all the boys discovered that anything they picked up could be a pretend gun. You could take this as evidence that nature will out, or you could take it as evidence that social conditioning is even stronger than nice liberal parents’ self-professed beliefs. It’s both at once, of course. Small children learn fast that “boy” or “girl” is a crucial part of who they should be, and work ferociously to acquire the rules for whichever they are.

Part of those rules used to be that sons had more status than daughters. But when the writer Ruth Whippman was pregnant with her third boy, she found herself an object of pity rather than celebration: “in our liberal urban bubble, it was becoming increasingly clear that girls were now considered the prize. Boys, while cute and puppy-like, were generally viewed on some level as trouble—feral, hard to control, animalistic,” she writes in her book Boymom.

Worse, it was a sentiment than Whippman found herself sharing. “I was truly scared to be a mother of boys… I was frightened both for and of the tiny piece of patriarchy growing inside me.” This feeling was sharpened by the backdrop of #MeToo, and a dominant feminist rhetoric that insisted loudly and fiercely that men were a problem. If men were oppressors and exploiters, boys were oppressors and exploiters in waiting.

Whippman is right to mention her “bubble”: polling shows that, while boy preference in America has declined, it is resilient. What’s perhaps even more remarkable is that this preference persists even though boys seem on many metrics to be struggling. “Boys in America are going through something of a crisis,” writes Whippman (the C word again):

“Academically, they are now trailing behind girls at every level of schooling. They make up the majority of both the perpetrators and, I was surprised to see, the victims of violent crimes. They are significantly more likely than girls to engage in serious antisocial behavior. Mental health issues are reaching epidemic levels for both male and female adolescents, but teenage boys now commit suicide at close to four times the rate of their female peers.”

Still, parents are more likely to save for a male child’s future education and less likely to expect him to perform chores (while paying boys more than girls for the same jobs). In the UK, public space designed for “young people” is in practice widely designed to be more accessible for boys than girls, and there is little reason to think this is different in the US, where Whippman lives. It doesn’t seem to be a lack of material investment in boys that is driving their troubles.

But perhaps, wonders Whippman, it’s affection that boys are being deprived of, rather than money. Echoing Biddulph, she writes: “Understanding the innate traits of boys more as vulnerabilities and sensitivities than any kind of hardwired destructiveness turns the nature-nurture story on its head.” It’s not masculinity that’s fragile, it’s male children themselves, and these little Y chromosome bearers need to be handled with more care.

It’s true that boys and girls are raised differently. According to Cordeia Fine, experiment show that when mothers engage with an unknown baby, regardless of the sex of the infant, they will encourage a baby presented as a boy to be more intrepid, while being more cautious with girls. Mothers also give girls more face-to-face communication and use different emotional language depending on an infant’s sex — and, Fine writes in Delusions of Gender, “in a way that’s consistent with (and sometimes helps to create the truth of) the stereotyped belief that females are the emotion experts.”

“Emotion experts” is an important subtlety. It’s often said that men are afflicted with a demand that they “bottle up” their feelings. Whippman puts it like this: “traditional masculine norms seemed like a prison for boys, pressurizing them into a kind of rigid, aggressive stoicism while cutting them off from their own emotions and those of other people.” But it’s not true that men are “cut off” from their emotions — just look at how often Jordan Peterson, masculinity’s current greatest advocate, bursts into tears. Violence, which is really the unmediated expression of emotion as force, is very much a male specialty.

What is true, though, is that the rearing of boys puts less emphasis on teaching them how to understand and react to their own emotions. Girls are trained to think about feeling in a way that boys are not. It’s a preparation for caring for other people later in life, in line with gendered expectations — but it’s also a preparation for caring for yourself. The socially instilled demand that girls grow up to be more other-focused ironically serves to make them more self-reliant too.

As children grow, those early differences in treatment become self-fulfilling, exaggerated through repetition until in many cases they become the truth. Men are, clearly, not genetically incapable of making their own medical appointments or maintaining their own Christmas card lists. But anyone raised to be the cared-for rather than the carer will find it quite unnatural to switch roles by the time they reach midlife.

Still, gender requires a certain degree of lifelong policing. Writes Whippman: “it can start to feel as though male emotions get dismissed from both sides. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to man up, there is a voice from the left telling him that to voice his problems is to take emotional airtime away from a woman, whose suffering is more valid. These are not morally equivalent, of course, but in practice the impact can be similar.”

I’m curious about Whippman’s certainty that these things are “of course” not morally equivalent. If they are simply slightly modified ways of achieving the same ends, why should one be judged better than the other? Male feelings deserve and need cultural space. What’s curious about Whippman’s book is that, while it argues for such a space, it doesn’t create it: she is writing as a mother, about mothering. Whatever she learns about boys’ inner lives, it is refracted through her own maternal anxieties.

This is the paradox of care. Whippman is only the latest of many to realise that boys need more tenderness, and like those before her, she concludes that it needs to come from an outside source. Between Biddulph and her, we have seen Richard Reeves arguing that feminism has “failed” boys by remaining selfishly focused on women rather than addressing the problem of “male decline”.

Reeves says it most explicitly, but all three implicitly agree that it’s women who need to do more. My position is not that women owe nothing to the males in their purview (particularly not when those males are the women’s own sons). But I do believe that the “more” needed by boys needs to come, ultimately, from the boys themselves. They need the kind of care that can teach them to become carers for themselves, as well as others.

Masculinity is more flexible than we think. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s recent book Father Time is a powerful illustration of how fast gender can change. A few generations ago, a “good dad” indicated a provider who might have only interacted with his children to discipline them. Now, “good dads” are nappy changers and nose wipers as well as breadwinners — not just in Whippman’s “bubble”, but across the social spectrum. A small minority are even the primary carers for their children. That may sound unimpressive, but as Hrdy writes: “Whatever the exact numbers are today, I guarantee that they are unprecedented.”

As a feminist who most often writes about men’s caring activities from a presumption of deficiency (why is it not fifty-fifty?), I found Hrdy’s analysis chastening, as well as encouraging: perhaps the correct response when looking at men’s domestic contribution should be to marvel that fifty-fifty even seems a reasonable expectation, considering what the starting point was.

When Whippman goes out to explore the incel subculture, that darkest corner of masculinity, one of her most surprising discoveries is that the boys she meets there are — for all the faults in their philosophy — intensely interested in looking after each other. I found this fascinating. Yes, the manosphere is seething with grievance and often animated by deepest entitlement (specifically, men’s entitlement to women for sexual and domestic services); but even here, there are glimmers of boys learning to nurture.

Boys have their specific problems, as girls do, but it is wrong to approach boys themselves as a problem, which is what Whippman’s book comes close to doing. Or if they are a problem, Hrdy’s thesis suggests they might already be adapting into their own solution. Boys don’t necessarily need more mothering: they need a kind of mothering (a kind of parenting) that can teach them to be their own carers. Feminism worked for women because women already had the deeply ingrained habit of looking after themselves, and each other. The more men acquire the same facility, the less, perhaps, we will need to talk about masculinity as a crisis.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• A sign of how badly the true crime industrial complex has broken my brain: I’ve been obsessively reading stories about “vegan murder cult” the Zizians and wondering when the podcast is coming. For now, this article is the best one going. (Independent, free.)

• Smart observation about Severance here: it works in a way that, say, Lost didn’t because it is ruthless about resolving extraneous mysteries. It understands the difference between incident and story: the light box example here is incident, and as soon as it’s served the story, it can be resolved. (The Ringer, free.)

• I can’t get enough of the Emilia Perez scandal! And lo, those who build their Oscars campaign on the sand of “representation” shall see the foundations of their Oscars campaign collapse into the sand of “representation”. God The Brutalist must be feeling relieved that its AI issues make it only the second most problematic film on the slate this year. (Hollywood Reporter, free.)

• I wasn’t convinced that Am I Being Unreasonable? needed a second season — the first one told a brilliantly contained, brutally misanthropic story — but I was wrong: Daisy May Cooper is so funny and this show has plenty more sociopathy in the bag. (iPlayer.)

• Bonus content: I chatted about the series (and Nosferatu and Tetris) on Geoff Northcott’s new Friday night Times Radio show (skip to the last half hour for my bit.)