It’s no secret that I have a lot of, shall we say, reservations (read: phobias, hangups, irrational fears) about long-term, committed relationships. One of the biggest—I mean, maybe not, but it’s up there—is my abject terror of inadvertently settling down with the son of a “Boy Mom.”
If you don’t know what a Boy Mom is, then good for you—stop reading this right now. It’s too late for me, save yourselves! JK, of course you know what a Boy Mom is, because it’s almost impossible to go through life as a human being with internet access in this, the year 2023, and not have stumbled upon one of these Black Mirror-esque embodiments of maternal devotion gone…weird. (For reference, #boymom currently has 24 billion views on TikTok.)
These Boy Moms, as they have dubbed themselves on social media, take an inordinate degree of pride in being mothers to sons that appears—surprise surprise—to be largely rooted in a whole bunch of internalized misogyny. Hallmarks of Boy Mom-ism include being (borderline incestuously?) obsessed with their sons, seemingly ignoring their female children or at least heavily prioritizing their male ones, embracing stereotypical gender roles, and, of course, feeling openly threatened by and/or actively hostile toward their son’s romantic partners—mostly to the tune of “no woman will ever be good enough for my special boy.” They’re basically the modern version of your stereotypical Overly Critical Mother-in-Law. Think SATC’s Bunny MacDougal, but with a TikTok following.
So where do Boy Moms come from? Not to get all, “Surprise! It’s the patriarchy!” on you again, but…surprise, it’s the patriarchy.
“The ‘special’ relationship that fathers feel with their daughters or that mothers feel with their sons is nothing new,” says licensed sex and relationships therapist, Emily Jamea, PhD. “Thanks to social media, though, ‘Boy Mom’ culture has become totally sensationalized.”
To read the rest of the article, you can find it on cosmopolitan.com
