While heavily pregnant with her third son and glugging Pepto-Bismol, Ruth Whippman scrolls through Twitter and reads with mounting horror the stories of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse that are appearing with the #MeToo hashtag. As the movement gains significant traction, providing a platform for survivors to share their stories, she finds herself anxious and conflicted. With two young sons already and another on the way, she has so many questions that none of the dozens of parenting books on her bookshelf go anywhere to answering. For example: how she should raise her sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into privileged assholes? And, how can she find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy?
In BoyMom, Whippman dives into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment, and analyzes the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face while raising her own three sons in Berkeley. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault, crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, 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.
Come and hear Ruth Whippman in conversation with Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult.
About the Speakers
Ruth Whippman is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic living in Berkeley, California. A former BBC documentary director and producer, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, New York magazine, The Guardian, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Fortune described her as one of the “25 sharpest minds” of the decade. Whippman is the author of America the Anxious, which was a New York Post Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Paperback Row pick.
Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, and activism. She is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult which gave rise to a popular TED Talk. Julie holds degrees from Stanford, Harvard Law, and California College of the Arts. She currently serves on several nonprofit boards and is a member of the Palo Alto City Council.
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