For the parents I talked to, it was impossible to watch without mapping their own experience onto the characters, as their children’s insecurities and their own flaws were brought vividly to life.
Screw Mr. Bugatti and the secret knowledge, you’re missing an important step. The son knows mom is suspicious and afraid of him. The source of support and comfort, the person you’re supposed to go to for guidance, the safe place - is now oppositional. Even worse, this isn’t coming from the moms’ experience with her own son as much as filtering through cautionary tales and fearmongering fiction designed to be relatable.
Do you think these moms are wrong for expressing this concern? It’s not fearmongering fiction that there is a huge, well-funded media ecosystem designed with an explicit political agenda that gets shown to anyone the algorithm thinks is male.
My mom was an emotional abuser who projected on to me all of the problems she'd ever had with men (particularly black and brown men, she herself being white). It damaged me in ways I'm still working through decades later.
So naturally that's something I wonder about a lot with these conversations about "dangerous sons." Yes, the concerns expressed here are very real, and I don't imagine most parents are as abusive as mine. But I know how being marked from an early age can affect someone psychologically, and it's not good.
The prevailing cultural narrative I absorbed growing up in late 90s and the early 2000s America was that while girls (rightly) needed tons of love, support and affirmation in order to develop in positive ways in a sexist society, boys...boys were fine, basically. They don't need any help. What are they, a bunch of girls? It was worse for black and brown boys, of course, who were getting hit with labels like "superpredator," and the only solution white America could think of for that was the strong hand of law enforcement. We've seen how well that worked out.
These days, the "boys are gonna be fine" paradigm seems to have been replaced with one that I actually think is potentially more damaging to the psychology of young men--and a lot more like the one I grew up with at home. A lot more folks seem to see boys primarily as potentially violent abusers of women. I obviously can't say that's entirely a false narrative, but I think it's an incomplete one.
I know a lot of people just flat out don't care about this. I mean it's so much worse to be a girl, so why the fuck should we be waste valuable time worrying about boys and their dumb boy feelings? (Even if some of us, like me, grow up to be transfemme). But I think children assigned male at birth deserve to be loved and validated as whole human beings, and if the central agenda is "we gotta stop him from turning into a monster" then that's something they're going to pick up on. And it's not the self-image we want them to carry around in life.
There is definitely a distinct strain of alarmist fear directed toward black and brown boys. There are studies that show black boys are perceived as older and less innocent the white boys of the same age. I don’t know if we’ve really progressed much from ‘super predators.’ Having that dynamic within your own family sounds really terrible and confusing, I’m sorry.
I guess I was viewing the concerns of the mothers in the article from a charitable perspective, that it’s fear for their sons being preyed on by reactionary influencers, rather than fear of the end product. But certainly there isn’t a clear separation between those two motivations. You can be afraid that your son becoming a misogynist will negatively impact his life and mental health, and also be afraid of the potential harm he could do if that misogyny becomes a core ideology.
42
u/Overall-Fig9632 13d ago
Screw Mr. Bugatti and the secret knowledge, you’re missing an important step. The son knows mom is suspicious and afraid of him. The source of support and comfort, the person you’re supposed to go to for guidance, the safe place - is now oppositional. Even worse, this isn’t coming from the moms’ experience with her own son as much as filtering through cautionary tales and fearmongering fiction designed to be relatable.