My Thoughts on Boymom
and the quietly subversive classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman is a pretty bleak accounting of the current state of boys. I can’t put it down. It has me riveted, and down in the dumps.
Whippman is a journalist and mother of three boys exploring the many ways that patriarchy hurts boys as much as (and sometimes more than) it hurts girls. At times provocatively challenging ideas taken as dogma by liberal feminists, it’s a nuanced and insightful piece of cultural criticism. It’s also depressing AF.
But, as I was reading, a certain boy popped into my head. Alexander, the little boy from “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” This book also describes the painful struggle of boyhood, but Alexander gave me a hopeful feeling, as all quietly subversive artworks do.
For me, one of the most interesting sections of Boymom is Whippman’s exploration of children’s literature, and the differences between stories aimed at boys and girls. I’ve been writing about my favorite picture books over on Instagram for some time now. And now that Nino is at an age when he and his friends are very interested in gender, this section grabbed my attention.
According to Whippman’s research, girls’ stories often feature realistic plots centering on friendships and relationships (basically mini versions of adult literary fiction), while stories marketed to boys are more often the stuff of fantastical pulp and rarely (actually never, as she couldn’t find a single one that did) center male-male friendships.
For Whippman it is one piece of the puzzle that ends in a picture where girls are painted as social-relational beings and boys action-driven heroes, harming all genders in the process.
School-age girls are at once praised in our culture as being capable of deep empathy, especially in contrast to boys, while also being seen as petty, cliquish, and “devious”. Whippman sees these seemingly conflicting stereotypes as two sides of the same coin. Girls are more invested in their social relationships than boys. Therefore, they are stung harder by social rejection as they stand to gain more social benefits (deep friendship, love, and intimacy) from inclusion.
Socially, school aged boys are seen as less capable, but also somehow more “noble,” which I thought was such a true and insightful way of putting it. Relationally-speaking, boys are seen as affectionate and simple-minded. But, as the teenage boys she interviews in the book tell her in detail, they also suffer from extreme loneliness and the perception that their male friends are not open to vulnerability.
Like most women I know, my past has been defined by a series of close friendships with girls, some bringing lifelong intimacy and others terrible feelings of rejection and betrayal. For better or worse (but overwhelmingly, for better) it’s impossible for me to imagine childhood without relationships like these. As I read this section on male-male friendships, I kept thinking how horribly sad for boys, if Whippman’s findings are true, that their male-male friendships lack this sense of deep emotional investment and high stakes. How awful for them that no one is even telling them stories about a world where this kind of relationship is possible.
Then I thought about one story I love, one about a boy’s life that treats realistic social-familial dynamics as the high stakes content that they are (though this is a picture book for younger kids, not adolescents or teens, where her point really seems to take root).
In “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” an ~eight year old boy gives us a day in the life as the youngest of three brothers, illustrated in documentary-style pen and ink, from the moment he wakes up with gum in his hair, until he goes to bed, in the rail-road pajamas that he hates. Nothing good happens in between. And yet this book is uplifting and captures some of what Whippman says is missing the stories we tell our boys.
There is a particular page in the book that I now think might be its emotional center. When Alexander’s best friend tells Alexander he’s been demoted to “only his third best friend”. Alexander tells him, “I hope you sit on a tack,” and the next time he gets an ice cream, he hopes it falls off the cone and lands in Australia.
In other words, Alexander is deeply hurt.
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I guess this happened before that splitting off during adolescence that seems to cement boys’ place in society as totally different from girls, with totally different priorities. Because it seems at ~eight years old, Alexander is still very deeply invested in his relationship with his best friend.
In the illustration, Alexander is standing alone across from the trio, Paul and his new best friends, and behind him, boxed out by his own position, two girls share the care-taking duties of a teddy-bear. It looks like they are feeding the bear a pacifier or a bottle or some medicine. Huddled together like a family of three, the girl on the right, (compositionally speaking a privileged place on the page) performs a look of empathetic concern for the bear.
Already the girls are performing “care,” and the boys “noble camaraderie,” and Alexander is left alone, in defiance of those choices. He stands his ground, voicing his completely natural outrage at social isolation, his healthy desire for the special bond implied in the title of Best Friend (as, in my opinion, he well should!).
It is good that Alexander can express his feelings, even if only as anger, and not as sadness, as we see it (obviously) is. It’s good that he hurts all day and expresses rather than represses those feelings. The whole book is good, emotionally and psychologically speaking, in that Alexander continues to verbalize his needs and desires, never tires of it, even as they are continually rejected and thwarted, even from under the covers in his bed as he falls asleep.
But the part of the book that makes it, to me, a beautiful, hopeful story and not a bleak one, are eight words on the final page.
“My mom says some days are like that.”
With those eight words, the image of a bedside or bath-side chat with mom is conjured. And we know in that moment that the connection and intimacy that the rest of the day denied him was, at some point, finally granted. That he has told his mom about the anger, the rejection, and the utter disappointment of the day is, to me, exquisitely touching. That he includes her in his emotional world, that he cared to tell us the story, too, is a sign of hope.
I like to think his mom’s empathetic response, “some days are like that,” was the perfect one and just what he needed to hear. It is completely free of problem-solving attempts or toxic positivity. His attitude, one of defiant emotionality, if he can hold on to it, will serve him well as he ages into our society’s “impossible” construct of masculinity.
I hope he had a different experience as he grew up than the boys interviewed in Boymom. I choose to believe he did.