What Happened When a Berkeley Feminist Had Three Sons

Ruth Whippman's attempt to reconcile her ideology with her love for her own sons.

This is a guest post by Sheluyang Peng.

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There’s an old joke that goes “Nobody will win the battle of the sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy.” In feminist writer Ruth Whippman’s new book BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (2024), she doesn’t just fraternize with the “enemy,” she gives birth to three of them. The book opens with her thawing a frozen embryo (which she already knew was male), getting pregnant, and giving birth to her third son, Abe. Whippman’s friends in her ultra-leftist city of Berkeley told her she was crazy for even wanting another son, another possible “rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, nonwiper of kitchen counters.” 

Whippman notes that in her political tribe, men are seen as enforcers of a regressive, patriarchal status quo, whereas women are seen as beacons of progress and hope. When she sees little girls wearing THE FUTURE IS FEMALE t-shirts, she feels a sense of shame as quietly wonders what this meant for her children’s futures. How could she be a good feminist and progressive when she brought three supposed icons of injustice into the world? Whippman thus tries to raise her sons as far away as possible from gender stereotypes, but is thwarted at every turn when her sons end up becoming rambunctious and rowdy, constantly throwing punches and shooting each other with Nerf guns. She dreads the possibility that her own sons may one day engage in “p— grabbing and school shooting.”

In a sense, Whippman should have seen this coming, as her own feminist mother, fearful of perpetuating gender stereotypes, had banned pink clothing, Barbies, and nail polish—only for Whippman to end up loving pink and sparkles, fake nails, and high heels. Yet Whippman feels intense pressure for her boys to not go down the same gender-conforming path, in large part because of the grating tension between her progressive political leanings and her maternal instinct, summed up in one sentence: “While the feminist part of me yelled ‘Smash the patriarchy!’ the mother part of me wanted to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and read it a story.” 

This tension serves as a main point of conflict throughout her book, and she decides to embark on a quest to find out if she can reconcile her seeming conflict of interests. It’s a familiar formula: a left-wing writer visits the spaces of the “enemy” and discovers that the people she thought were undoubtedly evil turned out to be human after all. Throughout the next few chapters, Whippman meets and interviews a variety of young men while reading studies and ethnographies about the unique struggles boys and men go through. She starts out with interviewing male college students that tell her how lonely they are, and she points out that men are simply less likely to have the sort of close, emotionally-open friendships that women often have. She cites Richard Reeves's research on the crumbling educational and employment prospects that young men often suffer from today, noting that girls are now more likely to go to college while boys stay at home playing video games. She listens patiently to a conservative young man talk about how left-wingers often denigrate men and masculinity, a statement which, as the examples from her own life in Berkeley show, is obviously true. She hears about the pressure that young men have to present themselves as masculine, noting that there is no female equivalent to emasculation, as “girl power” is applauded while there is still a stigma on men behaving in a feminine manner. As a 25-year-old man, I was already familiar with all these notions and expectations of masculinity, but it was interesting to watch Whippman discover for the first time what most men already know. Dare I say “lived experience”?

Despite Whippman’s meticulous research, there are times where she comes up short, especially when it comes to interpreting studies. Whippman frequently doesn’t consider that correlation is not causation. She cites a study that shows that boys who play with male-coded toys (guns, action figures, sports cars, etc.) are more likely to hold gender-stereotypical views, but doesn’t consider that this could be because they are more likely to have parents that hold such views that bought them the toys in the first place. She also cites a study that shows that boys who play video games every day are half as likely to have had sex than boys who don't, without considering that it could be the lack of sexual opportunity causing video game addiction rather than the other way around.

One way the main tension of this book reveals itself is shown in the suspicious attitudes she displays towards those with different political opinions than her, as if there was no middle ground between the Manichean dichotomy of evil red-pilled Jordan Peterson conservatism and good intersectional Ruth Bader Ginsburg feminism. She favorably cites the evangelical Christian homeschooler Andy Crouch’s quotes about excessive screen time while also noting that she “relat[ed] uncomfortably” to the fact that she agreed with him, as if it was the worst sin in the world for a feminist in today’s negative world to agree with an evangelical Christian—although this very well may be the reality in her Berkeley bubble. In many moments in this book, she feels like she desperately doesn’t want to agree with the people she has perceived as political enemies—which, considering the extreme levels of political polarization in this country, is an all-too-common phenomenon that will likely only intensify, as today’s young men and women are more polarized than at any other point in American history.

Whippman does, though, make conscious efforts to challenge her preconceptions. She interviews multiple self-professed incels (involuntarily celibate men) and discovers that they are not the dangerous mass shooting-prone misogynists the media makes them out to be, but usually rather heavily-bullied boys who, having sunk to the lowest realm of the male status hierarchy, have decided to embrace their subaltern status. She even makes a surprising discovery: incels are actually more likely to be emotionally open and vulnerable with other men, and thus are closer to her masculine ideal than non-incel men. Incel forums are full of men spilling out their deepest pains, agonies, sob stories, and dark nights of the soul to a male audience, devoid of chest-thumping or “locker-room talk.” This makes a lot of sense, as men often act tough and above-it-all to gain status in male social hierarchies and to attract women, but since incels are shut out of those worlds, they are able to express their inner selves without fear of being seen as a sissy. As one incel poignantly put it, “We don’t really put up a mask to each other. We have nothing to be proud of or macho about. All of us are incels. We are all sad. Nothing to brag about—no muscles, no nothin’. We talk like that all the time to each other—expressing our deepest fears, what we wanted.” 

Indeed, instead of finding the worst examples of “toxic masculinity” possible when it comes to incel communities, Whippman’s entire worldview becomes flipped on its head. And while Whippman is originally hesitant to validate incel claims, such as the claim that women regularly body-shame men—especially short men—she finds that there is in fact a wide repository of social-media posts and videos telling short men to kill themselves, and that anti-short-male bias is socially accepted (as shown in statements like “short man complex”) compared to taboos around commenting on women’s physical features. Again, Whippman would rather not believe this is the case, but reluctantly sees that it is, that boys and men do struggle with their physical perception and get mocked for how they look.

Perhaps the most enlightening chapter is one called “Rape-Con,” in which she attends a conference organized by FACE (Families Advocating for Campus Equality), a gathering of parents (mostly moms) of young men accused (possibly falsely) of campus sexual assault. This convention is where her feminist convictions and left-wing political leanings are held to the ultimate test. The book began with a tale of how #MeToo validated her perception of men as incorrigible sexual predators—and now she was at a conference where the participants actively worked against her ingrained notion. She writes that “As a feminist of the #BelieveWomen school of thought, I feel like a traitor even being here.”

Whippman sees the conference attendees—“petite, put-together white women in their fifties and sixties with coiffed blond bobs and jaunty scarves”—and immediately classifies them as the political enemy, her mind creating an association between their hairstyles with that of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos. She draws a strict political boundary on this issue alone: “If any debate over the last few years has come to sum up the divide between right and left, rape versus false accusation is it . . . This was tribal and we had picked sides: on one side, the entire feminist movement; on the other, Donald Trump and a bunch of frat boys . . . ”

Yet when she hears stories about the accused young men, she begins to fret about her own boys. The following few sentences perfectly sum up the book’s core conflict:

The night before I came here, Abe had had a nightmare and had called out for me from his bed, still half asleep . . . I climbed into bed with him, still able to make things right, just by my presence. He threw a hot little arm around my neck and fell straight back to sleep. 

What would I believe, what I would do, if in fifteen years, he were to call me in tears from a dorm room somewhere to tell me he was being investigated for sexual assault? Would I have the strength to disbelieve him? As a feminist, would I be obliged to? I look around at the group of women gathered at our small table, listening to Diane tell her story, nodding along in recognition. They are all mothers of beloved sons, like me. Politically, these are not my people, but suddenly, I feel an affinity with them. 

“You see a lot of this is about crazy girls,” says Diane, and they lose me again.

This brief episode shows her internal struggle between her partisan loyalties and her loyalty to her own children. She’s a feminist, and thus has beliefs in line with feminists, like automatically believing any allegations made by women against men (though of course, feminism is a broad label, and not all feminists default to this stance). But she’s also a boymom, and now that she has a personal stake in the well-being of men (though curiously absent for much of this book is any discussion of her husband’s involvement in child-rearing), she now has to worry about what happens if one of her own sons was on the receiving end of the #BelieveWomen mantra. But she knows that people who stick up for accused men are seen as “on the right,” and thus considered to be on the “wrong side of history” by her fellow Berkeley denizens. What would the #Resist lady with the Notorious RBG coffee mug at her local indie bookstore think if she questioned this tribal dogma—even if it was lobbed against her own son?

But she then finds an escape hatch when one of the speakers at the event turns out to be an intersectional feminist professor named Aya Gruber. Hearing the phrase “intersectional feminist” awakes a “tribal instinct” in her, “a signal telling me that this is someone I can trust to tell me the truth,” giving her “permission to relax and listen with an open mind.” Gruber is a law professor that advocates against “carceral feminism”: a strain of feminism that desires removing due process and advocates for harsher punishment for men accused of sex crimes. Gruber, through the power of intersectionality, points out that carceral feminism fuels mass incarceration, and that such penalties would disproportionately affect black men. Once Whippman hears that there is a way to defend due process and men’s rights from a social justice perspective, she becomes much more open to the idea. In the end, it was not the concern for her own sons, but rather her need to hold opinions approved by her political tribe, that finally won her over. Now, perhaps, if a struggle session began in Berkeley attacking due process rights, Whippman can one-up the “carceral feminists” by outflanking them on the left with her intersectional feminist take. 

As Whippman’s quest comes to a conclusion, she slowly begins to challenge long-held assumptions she’s had about gender. She goes from believing that gendered behaviors are socially constructed to quoting studies that show that boys’ brains develop slower than girls, although she rejects Richard Reeves’ idea of holding boys back a year before school. Yet she never goes all the way to accepting that some forms of masculinity are good for boys just as some forms of femininity are good for girls. Her message shifts from one in which “the patriarchy” harms women to one where it harms both men and women, with her solution being to restructure boys’ childhoods to be as emotions-oriented as girls’ childhoods. This is leagues better than what she started out with, but then again, considering that she originally imagined her own children as future rapists and school shooters, the bar wasn’t too high to begin with. It is surprising that she could look at her own little boys in the face and think that way in the first place. Had she not had sons, she likely would still hold those views today.

Whippman ends this book not with a celebration of masculinity but a desire to feminize the very concept. It is once again a stark reminder that elite culture (the only reason I found out about this book was reading about it in the New York Times) still treats boys as defective girls, that even while Whippman begins to come around to the idea that some gendered behaviors are biologically hardwired, she still wishes to root out the behaviors innate to boys. It's a far cry from when her own mother banned her from expressing any feminine behavior. As boys and men continue to fall behind in college admissions and the workplace, and as deaths of despair reach epidemic levels among middle-aged men, Whippman’s work does nothing to alleviate these pressing issues. Instead, the book reads as more of an apologia to her Berkeley friends for caring about her sons, letting them know that it is still possible to advocate for boys and men without being one of those Betsy DeVoses.

There is one more scene at the FACE conference that sticks out. Whippman thought she saw a college-aged young man wearing a red baseball cap that said “Make America Great Again.” But upon closer inspection, she notices that it actually says “Made You Look Again.” Indeed, this scene is an apt metaphor for the entire book: she takes a second look at people that she originally wrote off as deplorables for tribal political reasons and she ends up realizing that those people weren’t what she had caricatured them as all along. While Whippman never reaches a conclusion that actually celebrates masculine virtues, she does slowly start to come around, which is perhaps the best one could hope for in Berkeley. Perhaps if more people are willing to do the same, the current battle of sexes can be put to bed for good.

Sheluyang Peng is a graduate student in religious studies. He lives in Brooklyn, though not in the areas that resemble Berkeley.