The Culture War Comes for Boy Moms
It's the old nature versus nurture.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about dads and moms and boys lately. In our house, it was Mother’s Day, then K’s bday, then Father’s Day, and soon Justin’s bday.
Yesterday I hosted an IG Live with Ruth Whippman to chat about her new book, BOY MOM: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. In her reporting for BOY MOM, Whippman spoke to experts who point out that there are very early sex differences in neuroanatomy and nervous system development. She also cites studies showing that parents respond differently to boys versus girls, for example, research finding that even at a very young age, parents are unconsciously more verbal and responsive to girl babies than to boy babies. Whippman caveats these findings with the acknowledgement that one can pretty much find studies and experts on “both sides” of the aisle when it comes to the nature versus nurture debate. Through her reporting for BOY MOM, Whippman, who lives in the Berkeley “bubble” and considers herself to raising her boys in a conscious, gender neutral fashion, comes to realize that she has unknowingly internalized gender stereotypes.
Whippman posits that boys need more of a specific type of attention and care than they are currently receiving, even in the most egalitarian homes. She advocates for parents of boys to converse more with their son’s internal worlds — their feelings and thoughts.
Whippman points out that patriarchy is not only terrible for women and girls, it ultimately works against boys and men too. It keeps them closed off, lonely, and isolated. I agree with her. Boys need to be taught that it’s okay to talk about their feelings and to want strong relationships. If they were taught these things, they may grow into different types of men.
Resolving Nature versus Nurture is Not Enough
Nature vs. Nurture is a question I contend with nearly daily in my clinical practice as a perinatal psychiatrist. For those who are not familiar with the terminology, perinatal psychiatrists treat patients suffering from perinatal depression and anxiety and other reproductive psychiatry conditions.
At least once a week I have a patient who is asking me some version of “Do I feel like this because of the genetics I was born with, or because of the fact that my brain was bathed in a dump truck of estrogen during pregnancy, or because I haven’t slept for more than 3 hours in a row for 6 months?” OR “Do I feel like this because my parents were jerks, or because my partner is a jerk, or because I don’t have any paid parental leave and so I spend all my time worried about how I’m going to afford childcare?”
My answer is usually an infuriating — Yes. All of that.
A critique of Whippman’s argument — like the one Jessica Winter wrote last month for the New Yorker — is that the research on sex differences in brain anatomy and nervous system development is overblown, and that by emphasizing these biological difference, we give permission for Boy Moms to infantilize their sons. This infantilization, in addition to a misogynist culture, is what leads to under-functioning men and hyper-functioning women at best, and, at worst, Brock Turner-esque tragedies.
Winter writes: in the realm of “BoyMom,” you can squint hard enough at pretty much anybody—a sexual-assault survivor, a trans teen, a baby in a “GIRL POWER” onesie—and they might start to look like your opponent in a zero-sum, us-or-them game: What do I get? How might I be harmed? What does this mean for my boys?”
In Winter’s opinion, giving air to the concerns of “Boy Moms” is akin to saying “All Lives Matter.”
Yet, to me, Winter’s eye-roll reaction feels like part of the problem. In her dismissal, isn’t she also participating in the same zero-sum rhetoric that she rails against?
I say this as a “Boy Mom” myself and as a perinatal psychiatrist. A couple years ago I had a patient say that when she found out that she was carrying a male fetus, her mind flashed on the possibility of terminating the pregnancy (she felt profound guilt about this fleeting reaction). My patient was not a silly woman who had been duped into gender war propaganda. She was a well-educated woman who was facing the enormous responsibility to raise her son in a better manner than the one in which her brothers were raised. And, she worried what the cost would be to the girls and women of the next generation if she failed at this task.
To me this does not sound like “All Lives Matter.” This sounds like a parent who is terrified of messing up and who desperately wants to right the wrongs of past generations.
Let’s come back to the postpartum depression example. Nature and nurture are deeply and infuriatingly intertwined. For example, the entire field of epigenetics looks at the ways in which environment, including stress, impacts which genes are translated. Nurture quite literally impacts nature.
I am of the opinion that on a population level, at least in my field of medicine, it’s most productive to consider nature and nurture as equal players.
What does this mean, in real life? I can’t speak for the development of the brains of boys but I explain what it looks like in terms of maternal mental health.
The fact that your hormones are wacky impacts your ability to sleep and how much sleep you are getting impacts your ability to emotionally regulate enough for you to have a coherent conversation with your partner about finances and childcare and not freak out at your mom when she asks you why you aren't breastfeeding exclusively. This doesn’t mean that paid parental leave isn’t linked to better mental health outcomes (it is). It also doesn’t mean that if you come off your SSRI during pregnancy you are not at higher risk of developing postpartum depression (you are).
To me, the nature versus nurture debate is simplistic. But, that said, it does make good conversation at scientific conferences, at certain types of dinner parties, and maybe on a medical board licensing examinations.
In real life clinical practice, I care about both nature and nurture a lot. And, I evaluate my level of concern for each based on the severity of the biological risk factors and the circumstances and context of the individual patient in front of me.
Nobody wins when it’s a gender war.
Yet, human beings aren’t known for their acumen in tolerating nuance and uncertainty. We survived as a species due to our ability to distinguish threats.
Tolerating complexity becomes even more difficult when the world is chaotic and polarized. Wars, whether abstract like culture or gender wars — or literal like the multiple conflicts happening around the globe, generally develop because of one of two situations — changes in power dynamics or existential threat. This is true in a family system, a workplace system, a country or a global civilization. In the US, we have been dealing with both of those circumstances for some time now (rising autocracy, the climate crisis).
When humans feel unsafe, we become hyper-vigilant toward threats. As a defense mechanism, we seek to immediately categorize whether people and situations are safe or unsafe. It’s a set up for black and white thinking — or, in psychodynamic terms — splitting.
Critics of my writing sometimes ask why I don’t point the finger more at men. Like, if men did more at home, then women wouldn’t feel so burdened. But, when we frame these issues as a gender war, we miss an opportunity for real progress. The problem is the entire system — patriarchy, colonialism, toxic capitalism all steal from both genders. Talking about the mental health of boys and men does not diminish the conversation on the mental health of girls and women. When we see it as a competition we all lose.
To me, the crux of BOY MOM is to help mothers (and, all parents) of boys feel validated and to provide language for envisioning a path forward that is much more substantive than the pithy #BOYMOM hashtag. Wanting your son to feel the full breadth of the human experience and taking seriously the responsibility of helping putting more good into the world than bad feels like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
xo, Pooja
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“Wanting your son to feel the full breadth of the human experience and taking seriously the responsibility of helping putting more good into the world than bad feels like a pretty reasonable goal to me.”
Beautifully stated.
God, there’s such a relief in the way you slow down and dissect all these pithy hot takes and bring nuance and clarity. Parenting often feels to me like walking through a dense forest in the dark while it’s raining carrying only a flashlight. These finger-pointing stances can be so painful. Not that there aren’t rightful conversations to be had about responsibility and accountability - and we can have them in such a different way.