A few weeks ago I was reading The Woman Destroyed for the Hot Literati book club and we had a wonderful discussion about boy moms. In the first of three short stories, Beauvoir perfectly encapsulates the inner workings of a boy mom, before the term boy mom was even coined. (note: my copy of the book is stored away for the summer so this is all from memory). Our main character in the first novel is a woman in her sixties with an adult son. The protagonist hates her son’s wife, purely because she feels as if her son isn’t “hers” anymore. (I believe that’s almost an exact quote.) After the discussion, I went on with my life, not thinking about the ominous boy mom. I have no brothers, so there’s no skin in the game for me. But then, I opened TikTok.
I hate to call a woman crazy, but that’s what it is – pure craziness. These self-proclaimed boy moms talk about how they're not going to like their sons’ spouses, how boys are “easier” than girls, etc, etc. It’s misogyny in a different form than I’ve seen before. I truly believe that if you told these women that they were being misogynistic, they would disagree. I think they believe that their bond with their son is just inherently different. They may believe women deserve rights, but do they believe their daughters-in-law do?
Again, I clicked not interested on these TikTok and moved on with my day. I have no son, is this really my fight? Then I picked up an Agatha Christie novel – Death on the Nile. In it, Christie has a mother character have a rather strange view of her son having female friends. Here’s a quote to demonstrate exactly what I mean: “It was some other feeling hard to define – perhaps an unacknowledged jealousy in the unfeigned pleasure Time always seemed to take in Joanna’s society. He and his mother were such perfect companions that the sight of him absorbed and interested in another woman always startled Mrs. Allerton slightly.”
What the hell?
Now, I’m not accusing Christie of being a boy mom, I don’t even know if she had children, but boy can she write one. That passage from the novel essentially states that Mrs. Allerton is jealous that her son finds pleasure in speaking to other women. Not men, only women.
After having these three separate experiences, I knew what my next blog would be about.
Now, I think it’s too easy to simply say that women are always jealous of other women, no matter their age. I think boy moms stem from a more sinister problem – horrible husbands.
In The Woman Destroyed, our protagonist feels very much disconnected from her husband. She feels he is letting himself grow old, while she is fighting it. The love isn’t there like it used to be. In the Christie novel, I don’t know where Mr. Allerton is (I either skipped that part or haven’t gotten there yet), but he seems either physically absent or emotionally absent. Therefore, I think that mothers turn to their sons as a pseudo-husband. They’re not getting their emotional needs met by their husbands, so they turn to their sons.
This seems like a fairly obvious conclusion, but then I started thinking about daughters in general. Why do we not see mothers cling to their daughters as they cling to their sons? Now this is where the jealousy comes in.
These women see themselves in their daughters. They see what they could have been – and they’re disappointed in what they became. Stuck in a loveless marriage with a couple of children and no hope for a better future. So they push their daughters away out of anger and jealousy.
“I am all you could have been, and you are what I could be.”
In my opinion, boy moms exist because we allow men to be shit husbands. The sons suffer from suffocation from their mothers, and their daughters suffer from isolation. I truly believe that if husbands were meeting the emotional needs of their wives, these mothers wouldn’t turn to their sons to fill the holes in their hearts. They would have appropriate mother-son AND mother-daughter relationships.
Now, this is all a hypothesis. I’m no psychologist, so I could be way off – but I have a feeling I’m not. If you disagree or agree or something in between I would love to hear what you have to say! We need to figure this shit out!
We need to do away with the boy mom.
1000% agree