Ruth Whippman

Ruth Whippman:

If you are denigrating a man being like, oh, you're an emotional idiot, you're not good at dating, you're not good at relationships, we need to look at the reason for that. There's a systemic cause. It's like they are losing out from that. This is a system that is hurting them as much as it's hurting women. It's suppressing their emotions. So in a way we can call it privilege, but in a way it's like the opposite of privilege. It's a specific kind of oppression.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today's guest is Ruth Whippman. She's the author of BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. It's a revealing account of the challenges facing modern boys that's both rigorously researched and deeply personal. She's the mother of three boys and her work cuts to the heart of a contradiction. We criticize men for their emotional limitations, yet we've built a culture that leaves them no other clear path. In our conversation, Ruth shows how girls are offered the tools for self-expression, while boys often shamed for not being masculine enough. And they grow up feeling isolated, angry, and often pulled towards more troubling new paths. Her book provides an urgent exploration of these issues, and I hope this discussion takes a timely step towards addressing them.

Ruth Whippman:

I think there is something in us that strives for happiness. I think there is something natural that we all hold, which is this kind of hope that we will be happy. And it's really hard to know how much of that is cultural and how much of that is innate and all the rest of it. So when I was writing my first book, America the Anxious, we'd just moved from the UK to the US. And I noticed that there was this huge cultural focus on happiness, this idea that happiness was this kind of goal that you could strive for. And I think that what ended up happening is that it becomes... Happiness becomes this very sort of individual project, this idea that the more you focus on optimizing the self, the happier you will become. But that actually is in contradiction to all of the research and everything we know about what actually produces happiness, which is community, relationships and focus on other people. So it's kind of becomes counterproductive, I think.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Given the mountains of research that say that, why do you think... I'll just stick with Americans for the time being? Why do you think they overlook that as a source of happiness?

Ruth Whippman:

I think there's this idea about individuals striving that if we strive as individuals, we can succeed. There's something that primed in American culture for that kind of individualism. Sometimes that very individualistic culture can be very isolating for people. And now we live in a world which is so heavily dominated by devices, by tech, by phones, et cetera, that it's easy to become extremely isolated.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Building on this idea of cultural influences and social systemic priorities, I'm thinking of your work on raising three boys today. And I'm wondering how you see gender influencing what we prioritize as a society.

Ruth Whippman:

I am a mom of three boys, so obviously I'm a woman. I was socialized as a girl and then I found myself with these three boys and I was really surprised by some things in male culture. These are general trends, but in general, when we socialize girls, we prioritize relationships and emotions and social interaction, things like friendship, things like cooperation. And when we socialize boys, we tend to prioritize things like being tough, being strong, competition, winning. We frame social interaction for boys and men as more of a kind of competitive oppositional thing. I noticed it a lot in terms of the books and stories and TV shows. Say my boys will get fed through all the algorithms and all the libraries and all of the branding compared with our neighbors who have three girls. All of the girls' books seem to be about friendship, about relationship dilemmas, about meeting other people's needs, about being in community, those kinds of stories. And pretty much every story that my boys get fed tends to be a battle.

There's a winner, there's a loser, there's a hero, there's a villain, a glorious hero, and somebody gets killed. That is what the interaction consists of. So I think these end up promoting really quite different values to men and women about what's important, what human interaction should look like.

Ted Roosevelt V:

In your telling of that, it sounds like the unlock for you to recognize that the different lessons based on the genders was really when you became a mother and when you had three boys.

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah.

Ted Roosevelt V:

The contrast became particularly stark to you.

Ruth Whippman:

I think that's absolutely right because I think I just wasn't really immersed in the culture of boyhood. I remember this one moment, which was... I was in the bookstore with my three boys who were really quite little at the time. They were causing havoc. And I saw this magazine, we were in the kids section and I saw this magazine that was very, very heavily coded towards girls, young girls. It had a pink sparkly cover and this friendship bracelet giveaway and all these stories about friendship. Anyway, so I opened the magazine and I looked inside and the first story was this story about this girl who had been invited to two birthday parties that were happening at the same time. And she was really stressed that she was going to let down or disappoint one of the friends by not going to her party.

So she concocts this whole ruse where she's going to run between the two parties, pretend to be at both. And as I was reading this, firstly I was thinking, "Oh, my God, I relate to this so much, this kind of emotional labor that's involved in all of this." And I was also thinking, my boys will never see a story like this with a boy character. They will never be asked to track what other people are feeling in that way or prioritize friendships in that way or do that relational work. In a way, it's burdensome for the girls involved and maybe they're thinking about it too much and there's too much of that burden on women. But then I was thinking, "Actually, my boys are really losing out." But these are essential skills of human connection, of friendship, of thinking about somebody else's needs and they're not learning that in the same way as a girl of the same age.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Do you have thoughts about why that is? Why do we have these different lessons for the genders?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, it's a really, really good question and I think it's complex. I think there's lots of things. I think that probably if I talk to somebody in book publishing or in movie making, whatever, they probably just say, "Well, boys don't want that. Boys aren't interested in that stuff. They just want adventure stories and if we produce something like that, it won't sell." But I actually disagree with that. I don't think that's true. I think partly they've just never had it. So it becomes self-perpetuating. So they don't really know how to write that kind of story in a way that feels true and authentic and appeals to boys. I think we have this idea that relationships and nurturing and empathy are feminine coded traits. And we have this idea that winning and succeeding and fighting and toughness are masculine coded traits and that we just keep telling that same story over and over.

And I think there's another piece to it, which is that in our society generally, we tend to devalue things that are associated with girls and women. It's a sexist society. So things that women like generally don't have as much cultural value as things that men like. And so therefore when we try to introduce girls to traditionally boy things, it feels like empowerment or a promotion. Whereas when we try to introduce boys to more feminine coded things, it feels like a bit of an embarrassment.

A lot of it is to do with industrialization and the kinds of work that we expected men and women to take on specialization or the rest of it. It's to do with power. I think it's to do with physical strength. This idea that being like a girl or like a woman is somehow embarrassing or emasculating and it's a setup. So all of the things that are so essential for a psychologically healthy life are somehow gay or girly. And actually it's really to the detriment of men. And I think we just shower them in shame and it's a really, really hard thing to let go of.

Ted Roosevelt V:

There's no question that being a parent is an eye-opening experience in a lot of ways. And I did read about you trying to have approach parenthood in a more gender-neutral way initially. And we did the same thing where I was like, we don't care. Everything's going to be yellow, it's all going to be chill. And then we have a boy and two girls and there was a distinction. I mean, I'm not saying there's always a distinction, but there did seem to be something that was causing them to pick lanes.

Ruth Whippman:

For sure. I mean, I interviewed this woman, Juliet Williams, who's a professor at UCLA in gender studies, and she said to me, this thing which rang really true, which is, "Parenting turns everybody into a gender essentialist." Because yet we're all fake. We're all like, oh, this doesn't matter. I ain't going to do it differently. And it's not just us, it's the world as well that's socializing them in certain ways. And there's elements of nature and it all interacts with each other, but gender's a powerful thing. It means a lot to people. And I think we shouldn't deny that, there is so much research about the way that people parent boys and girls differently in subconscious ways that they don't even know they're doing it. But we teach boys in so many little ways to suppress their emotions, even the parents who are not saying. And I think probably nowadays it's hard to imagine many liberal parents being like, "Man up you sissy." I don't think many people-

Ted Roosevelt V:

But that is a message. That is a message that they're hearing from other sources now.

Ruth Whippman:

Right. And they're probably hearing it from us in more subtle ways that we are just not really aware of. And I think it's really true. I interviewed all kinds of boys across America, different backgrounds, different political opinions, different geographic locations, and they all said the same thing about this. And they said, "We were allowed to be angry and we were allowed to be happy. And everything else was very complicated to access." And people were not comfortable with sadness. They were not comfortable with emotional expression in more complex ways from them as boys.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Do you know the movie Meet the Parents? Do you remember that movie with Ben Stiller?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, I've seen it a long time.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I hadn't seen it in a long time, but as I bring movies up for my kids now, I'm like, "Oh, this is a funny movie. You guys might enjoy it." And I realized that the sort of butt of the joke throughout the movie was that the Ben Stiller character is a male nurse. And that so ridiculous a premise that everybody can laugh at Ben Stiller, the male nurse because he's not a doctor. And that was a hugely successful movie that nobody-

Ruth Whippman:

And nobody questions it, it just... Oh, God, that's-

Ted Roosevelt V:

And nobody questions it.

Ruth Whippman:

... fascinating. Well, you know what I was thinking as related thing, I took my kids to see the Inside Out movies. I don't know if you saw this.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Yeah, sure.

Ruth Whippman:

And so Inside Out 1, there's Inside Out 2 and then there's a bunch of shorts and there's these deeply complex stories about a girl's emotions and her relationship with her mother. And her mother has complex emotions and they track each other's emotions. She tracks her friend's emotions, and every single time a male character appears on the screen, he's like this emotional idiot. And you go into the dad's head, all the emotions of their feet up and they're drinking beer and watching the game and they're like, Ugh. And it's like mocking him. But you're just like, what are we saying here to these young kids? We're saying everybody has a complex emotional life apart from you, and this came out last year, we just give it a total pass.

And I think had there been a sexist stereotype like that about girls in a contemporary Disney or Pixar movie, we'd be like, no way. We're not standing for that, but we just don't have the way to call it out for boys. And I see having three boys just like what an impact this is having on them, what an impact it's having on boys in general. And I think they feel extremely mocked, demeaned, ridiculed. I think it's making them turn away from feminism and all the good principles of it. And I think hate speech and bullying is hate speech and bullying no matter who it's targeted at. And this idea that because they're a privileged group doesn't apply.

And I think this also becomes really complex if you are denigrating a man being like, oh, you're an emotional idiot, you're not good at dating, you're not good at relationships, we need to look at the reason for that. There's a systemic cause. It's like they are losing out from that. This is a system that is hurting them as much as it's hurting women, it's suppressing their emotions. So in a way we can call it privilege, but in a way it's like the opposite of privilege. It's a kind of specific oppression. So it's really complicated.

Ted Roosevelt V:

You spent some time with the extreme end of this incels, and I'm really curious what you learned in those conversations. What did you go in expecting if you did have expectations and what did you come out with?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, it was really a fascinating experience. So I don't know if your listeners know what incels are, but it stands for involuntary celibate. And they tend to be these very lonely guys who can't get women who can't have sex, socially isolated and who congregate in these online forums. And there is a lot of extremely misogynistic and hate-filled content in these forums. There's the absolute worst, the dregs of hate speech directed at everybody, and there's also violence. So this character that we have in our mind of this lonely, awkward young guy is also is a lot of school shooters. A lot of mass shooters are associated with this movement. So the thing that was actually really shocking to me was that alongside all this extremely toxic with a capital T, horrific content was also this really vulnerable and emotionally supportive space. So these guys, they're very lonely and they use these spaces in a way that I've never seen young men interact with each other anywhere else. So they were actually all talking about their feelings. They were all talking about their mental health, they were all supporting one another.

Ted Roosevelt V:

That's so interesting.

Ruth Whippman:

Which was fascinating. Because I'd been looking for a place where men felt permission to do that and I was like... The last place I expected to find it was on an incel forum. They believe in this hierarchy of masculinity, but they believe that they've just given up in ever achieving it themselves. Which is very different from the rest of the manosphere, which is all about you too can become an alpha male if you take these protein whatevers and eat only meat and whatever.

So they have given up, but there's something about giving up on this project of being the most masculine, being an alpha male, being tough, being strong, and they're like, we're never going to succeed, so we might as well just be emotional with each other. It was really freeing for them. They saw it as a real source of emotional support and connection that they could get nowhere else in their life, which is worrying. For those of us with sons we're like, if we don't want them to go and find belonging and connection in an incel forum, then we need to find a way for them to have it somewhere else.

Ted Roosevelt V:

What's so interesting is that they still believe in the hierarchy of alpha males because it's a little bit of the cage. That's the cage that puts them in this place to some degree.

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah. It's so sad because they have these toxic opinions, but then you scratch the surface, you talk to them for five minutes, give them a empathetic ear, and the opinions melt away, honestly. And what you hear is just this utter wellspring of pain and trauma and loss. A lot of them are people who've come from traumatic upbringings. They've often been really bullied, very, very bullied.

And in a weird way, it mirrors a lot of feminist discourse around masculinity, which also believes that there are hierarchies of masculinity with their alpha males and they're like hegemonic masculinity. So they're using different terms. The incels call them Chads and the masculinity feminist scholars call them hegemonic, whatever. But it's the same idea that some men are extremely successful in this system and they reap all the rewards of it and other less masculine, less successful men are disadvantaged as a result. And so the easiest thing is to look to whoever's below them on that hierarchy, which is women and hate them. And I think what ends up happening, especially in the culture wars, is that we all respond to everyone at face value.

So somebody saying, "I hate women and feminists are the worst." And then someone comes in to defend why women are not the worst, and it's just like we're actually talking to each other at the wrong level. Historically, we've given so much outside importance to men's opinions and very little importance to their feelings. And so it's really understandable that they're going to code those feelings as opinions. All those feelings are going to come out in these toxic opinions because that's how we validate men. We listen to their opinions, we give them importance. And so I just feel like so many of these incels are feeling like they would love to leave this and get some help elsewhere, but they feel like nobody's listening, that everybody is just against them. If we could just find a way to offer help and empathy rather than shame and blame, it might be a more effective strategy.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Where do you get pushback from?

Ruth Whippman:

I get pushback, I think to main types. I get it from the right and I get it from the left. So actually I've been really surprised-

Ted Roosevelt V:

Both sides.

Ruth Whippman:

Both sides, right, right. What I would say is fundamentally I have had so much more support than pushback, which has been really lovely. And I've had support from men. I've had so many men be like, "I've read this book," which I thought they would never do, because it's called BoyMom, say, they felt really seen, they felt really validated. I've had support from women, et cetera, et cetera. But where the pushback comes from, so I think there's... I had this bunch of right-wing trolls who are like, you only say this because you are an ugly, disgusting feminist who can't get a real man, and you just need to-

Ted Roosevelt V:

Super helpful.

Ruth Whippman:

Super helpful. That whole side of things, which almost in a way it's horrible and it's frightening, but it's easier to dismiss. And then I get some pushback from the left, being like girls and women are struggling so much in our current moment. Why are we diverting resources to thinking about boys and men? You're not a good feminist somehow if you're not joining in and the bashing of men and boys. It's like a false equivalence that you're promoting.

Ted Roosevelt V:

How do you respond to that? I mean, forget the vile comments because those aren't worth responding to, but how do you respond to the more nuanced comments?

Ruth Whippman:

Firstly, I think we need to let go of this zero-sum thinking. We can care about more than one thing at once. We can care about both women and girls and men and boys. But I think that it's actually these two things are related. Helping men and boys is helping women and girls. Dealing with these toxic behaviors and the root causes of them and the pain and the unhealthy models and the rigid norms and everything that are driving these behaviors will ultimately make a generation of healthier, more emotionally attuned man who will then become better partners and brothers and bosses and workers and whatever to the women in their lives.

Having a generation of healthier men is beneficial for everybody. And so these things are not in competition with each other and they shouldn't be. We're all part of this system together. And so much work of feminism has promoted that we. Know that patriarchy harms men and women. There's a great tradition of feminist thought, and I think it's only recently in our online echo chambers that we've started to see it quite as much of a competition as we have. And so I think it's about challenging the system rather than the people in it.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I wonder if you feel like there are traits and virtues associated with the genders that get lost as we dismantle the gender structure that we have in place that are virtuous and good.

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, I think this is a really complicated thing. And weirdly, every time I talk about this, this is the thing that gets me the most pushback. Yes, of course there are things associated with masculinity that are extremely positive. Courage, strength, self-sacrifice, bravery, et cetera, et cetera. And even things like ambition or agency, all of those things are wonderful qualities and hugely important. I don't think they're associated just with men. I don't think just men hold those. And similarly with femininity, empathy, nurturing, caregiving, et cetera, et cetera. All humans need all of these things. We all need to be courageous and strong and brave and whatever when it [inaudible 00:21:22]. And we all need to be empathetic and nurturing and in touch with our emotions. And so I don't think we should be giving these universal human qualities a gender.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So that's an excellent setup for the next question, which is we've identified the problem. What can we do here? I mean, what are the steps forward?

Ruth Whippman:

Depending on whether you're talking from a policy standpoint or in our parenting or in our own homes, but I think one, to start from a standpoint of empathy and listening and understanding rather than blame and shame and ridicule. I think we need to look at the way that we socialize boys and really how we are failing them as a society. There's a mass emotional neglect of young boys at some level in the sense that we're not providing them with the same opportunities to feel their feelings, to express their feelings. We are not giving their feelings the same value. We are under-nurturing them in that specific way. In the book BoyMom, I talk about boyhood is like a weird mix of indulgence and neglect.

So there is this sense that boys do get indulged and their bad behavior gets indulged and all the rest of it, but their emotions get neglected. So we need to look at both sides of that. And there are multiple ways to do that in terms of validating boys' feelings, correcting for that, talking to them about their emotions, showing them content with boys in emotional and relational roles like books, movies, TV shows. And yeah, at a policy level, in the same way that we funded so many programs to get girls interested in STEM subjects or close the gap in math or whatever, I think we need to see these relational things as important and fund initiatives that will help boys in these domains.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Ruth, I'm curious what you would say to somebody who heard your response about leading with empathy, which I totally agree with, but that is a very hard thing to ask of people in the face of all the toxic messaging that they're spewing out. Why is it on the listener to the toxic stuff to lead with empathy?

Ruth Whippman:

It's a really, really good question, and this is I think a tricky one. So look, I am not saying that a survivor of sexual assault, for example, should be leading with empathy towards [inaudible 00:23:42]. This is not the point. There are certain people who can lead this and certain people who can't lead this and certain people who've been harmed. But I think at a policy level, I think we need to see this. I think we should all be talking more in terms of a systemic failure that is harming everybody and we're all trapped in our rotten system together, which is causing some toxic things. It's causing harm to men, it's causing harm to women and people of all genders rather than saying, this is like men, bad, women, good. I think it's about a kind of intellectual reframe on it. And I think part of being progressive is to look at systemic roots of problems rather than to blame individual people for those circumstances. And I think we need to do that as much with men and boys as we do with any other group.

This generation has had a really unique and extremely difficult experience of coming of age in the shadow of this whole conversation about toxic masculinity. They're moving very sharply to the right. They're resentful, they're angry, they're failing to launch, they're doing poorly at school, etc, etc. And this is a combination of factors that's leading to this. So yes, I think it's getting better and it's getting worse. I think this generation had the worst of it, maybe. I'm hoping they didn't get so much of newer, let's listen to men's problems, let's work on this. Let's find ways for them to be more emotionally healthy. They had all the old problems and then they got all the new problems as well.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I totally agree. And in my own experience, when I spent some time working on expanding my emotional range, one of the experiences I had was like, well, if I become more in touch with my emotions, I had this fear that I was going to lose my resilience. And in reality, the inverse happened. The expansion of the emotional actually made me much more resilient that I was actually quite fragile because it triggered into anger so quickly or it triggered into more toxic responses.

Ruth Whippman:

It's so true. I think that's such an important framing. And I think we see this in the way that people understand violence or domestic violence or things like school shootings. It's not masculinity that makes men violent. It's this shame about not feeling masculine enough, that they're not living up to this ideal of this extremely invincible, bulletproof, tough man. And the shame makes them do these violent things to compensate. And actually, if we give people access to a healthier, emotional range, then it does build resilience in kids and in adults too.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I do have one final question, which is the one we ask everybody, which is a little bit of a non sequitur, but I actually think is deeply rooted in the conversation. And that is what makes a good citizen?

Ruth Whippman:

Oh, that's so fascinating. I think curiosity, openness, empathy, community building, and the willingness to engage with opposing arguments in a respectful way.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Wonderful lessons. Absolutely agree. Ruth, thank you very much. I really appreciated this conversation.

Ruth Whippman:

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's been such a pleasure.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Ruth, this is such an important conversation, and I really appreciate the work you're doing and the time you took to speak with me today. It's such a critical moment in time, and I think just having these conversations helps begin to give our boys the support they need, which ultimately I think serves everyone. So thank you again.

Listeners, I urge you all, women and men, mothers and fathers alike to pick up a copy of BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. And if you haven't yet, please also check out my interview with Tony Porter. It's a further exploration into masculinity, the socialization of men and boys, and the strength found in vulnerability. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the future of storytelling and charts and leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming library at trlibrary.com.