Photo: CONCEPTUAL IMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Modern boyhood is a recipe for loneliness, says a US-based author.
Boys, caught up in a world which talks about toxic masculinity, feel people have decided that they're harmful before they even get started - a psychologically unhealthy way to grow up, Ruth Whippman says.
In her new book, Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, she talks to experts and looks at the latest science to help her understand where we are going wrong with raising boys and how we can do better.
Even as babies, boys have different emotional needs than girls, she told RNZ's Jesse Mulligan.
"Boys, right from babyhood, their brains are more sensitive and more emotionally vulnerable than baby girls' brains on average, at birth they're more immature.
"A baby boy is born with his right brain, the emotional centre, about a month to six weeks behind a baby girl's brain in development. And that's in the part that forms attachments, that deals with calming down emotionally and emotional self-regulation."
Consequently, boys need more nurturing at this age than a girl, she said, and yet traditional views of boyhood pull against this notion.
"We try to kind of toughen them up. We see them as tougher and steadier. There's all these studies that show when people see a baby boy cry, they think of him as being angry and when a baby girl cries, they think of her as being sad or distressed.
"And I think we project those qualities onto boys all the way through childhood, that they're tough, they're steady, they don't need that extra support and complex emotional nurturing."
Even in the progressive circles she moves in, she is surprised at some of the stereotyping she hears about boys, she said.
"They'll quite often say things like 'Oh, boys will be boys' or 'boys are like dogs', I hear that one a lot. All they need is exercise, just wear them out, give them food and water, whereas girls are like these complex, emotional creatures."
Modern boyhood is a lonely place
The language that surrounds girlhood is expansive, in contrast to the way we talk about boys, she said.
"Girls can do anything, the sky's the limit, the future is female, it's very inspirational. Whereas with boys, it's that's just what they're like, we just have to work around it. It's quite limiting and I think that's a real shame. There are so many ways that we can give boys a more expansive way to be human."
Ruth Whippman Photo: Supplied
She spent time in the "toxic manosphere" talking to boys and men, and found while often deeply misogynistic much of the discourse is an exaggerated version of what we see in mainstream culture.
"There's sort of superhero myth that you've got to be tough, you got to be strong, you got to be powerful, invulnerable, this alpha male.
"That's absolutely mainstream in the culture, these people take it to this whole new level, this idea that you have to be this kind of masculine ideal. And I think a lot of boys feel a lot of shame around that."
She talked to many boys from all walks of life and found a profound loneliness.
"That was really sad and surprising, this was a theme that came up over and over, and some of them were really quite genuinely isolated. And there's all this data that supports that the boys and men are becoming increasingly isolated."
One in four men under 30 has no close friends at all now, she said.
"Boys are spending more time on screens, more time alone, less time socialising with peers, both more than they did in the past, and in comparison with girls."
But there was another dimension to the loneliness, she said.
"These boys did have friends, a lot of them, and people to hang out with, but they really felt like they couldn't get past that surface banter. They were always expected to perform this masculinity be tough, make jokes, but never to be sort of intimate or to reveal anything personal."
Some boys will then seek connection in toxic online spaces, she said.
"And this is what these incels, and all these people in the manosphere, were expressing to me, it was just they were searching desperately for belonging for connection. And so, if they're not finding it in the real world, they might look for it in those kinds of spaces. And that's a tragedy."
Parents and the wider culture should be communicating to boys that they are full emotional beings, she said.
"That it's okay to be emotional people, and also that they have to take responsibility for other people's emotions in a way that girls have always been socialised to do.
"This idea of emotional labour that girls and women very naturally in the culture are encouraged to track other people's emotions to think about what other people are feeling and the impact of themselves on others. And we don't really ask that of boys in the same way."