As the culture wars rage and masculinity is being politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared.
While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, Whippman’s feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile, her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture.
Combining memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught cultural moment. Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures that boys now face and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift.
With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into oblivious assholes? How can we find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won’t cooperate with our plans?
Feminist gonzo-style, Whippman reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault, crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, interviews incels and talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship, and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.
With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and more fulfilling story about their own lives.
America the anxious
How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
New York Post Best Book of 2016
One of Newsweek’s Nine Books to Change the Way You Think in 2016
Sunday Times Best Summer Read
Greater Good Science Center Favorite Book of 2016
A Daily Mail ‘Must Read’
In America the Anxious, Ruth Whippman embarks on an uproarious pilgrimage to explore the American happiness machine, tackling both the ridiculous and the sublime.
In doing so she uncovers the darker forces in the mix and the damaging narratives we tell about human wellbeing.When British journalist Ruth Whippman moved to the United States, she found herself increasingly perplexed by the American obsession with one topic above all others: happiness. The subject came up everywhere: at the playground swings, at the meat counter in the supermarket and even- legs in stirrups- at the gynecologist.
The omnipresence of these happiness conversations (trading tips, humble-bragging successes, offering unsolicited advice) wouldn’t let her go, and so Ruth did some digging. What she found was a paradox. Despite the fact that Americans spend more time and money in search of happiness than anyone else on earth,
research shows that the United States is one of the least contented, most anxious countries in the developed world. Stoked by a multi-billion dollar “happiness industrial complex” intent on selling the promise of bliss, American appeared to be driving itself crazy in pursuit of contentment.
Ruth set out to get to the bottom of this contradiction, embarking on an uproarious pilgrimage to investigate how this national obsession infiltrates all areas of life, from religion to parenting, the workplace to social media. She nearly falls apart psychologically while attending a controversial self-help course that promises total transformation, where she is told that all her problems are all her own fault. She visits a strange “happiness city” in the Nevada desert and explores why it has one of the highest suicide rates in America; delves into the darker truths behind the influential “positive psychology” movement and ventures to Utah to spend time with the Mormons, officially America’s happiest people.
Hilarious and insightful, Ruth’s discoveries are startling and unexpected from start to finish.