“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? … Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur." —Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

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Growing up, there was a time in which I had a strong aversion to the color pink. Self-conscious about the impending arrival of “womanhood” in my then-near future, I began avoiding anything I associated with femininity—I was painfully aware of how many classmates were beginning to wear makeup, dresses gave me a particularly high level of discomfort, and I hated having long hair so much that I begged my way into getting a (badly styled) pixie cut (Reader, it did not end up making me look as cool as any fourteen-year-old would have hoped). But as specific as it may sound, I know my experience is far from unique. Around the world, girls grow up hearing warnings about what awaits them in womanhood, and many, like I did, grow up resenting their designated “place” in a patriarchal society. What’s worse, the discouragement or denigration doesn’t always come from men—some women are unfortunately also guilty of upholding and enforcing the gender roles and misogynistic talking points that further divide us. And the worst part? Some of them enjoy it.

Picture the modern woman and superficial TikTok trends may come to mind: she’s a girlboss, she’s just a girl, she’s a girl’s girl, she’s a mean girl, girl math, girl dinner, she’s cutesy, she’s demure and mindful, she’s doing clean girl makeup or no-makeup makeup, she’s mythical, she’s a mess, she’s got fox or rabbit or deer or siren energy—she’s three Barbies in a trenchcoat, an amalgamation of ideas of womanhood. For the most part, these trends are seemingly harmless and inoffensive, silly at best and infantilizing at worst; after all, there’s no one single way to be a woman. But amid all these hashtags and hijinks, I’ve been particularly interested in the family-oriented, male-centered women gaining traction, namely the mommy influencer “boy mom” varieties.

“Boy mom” as we are using it here does not simply refer to a woman who is a mother to male-identifying children. The boy moms we’re talking about are overly invested in their sons: giving them preferential treatment, coddling and defending them from accountability, displaying favoritism over children of the opposite sex, and more. There have been some infamous viral examples as of late, including mommy influencers like mom-of-four Anna Saccone Joly (who gained traction for a TikTok about how having a son just “hits different,” though thankfully she seems to have moved past that content style now) and Avery Woods, who, in a since-deleted video, talked about how her young son “has [her] heart and [her] soul” while being dismissive of her daughter in the same breath, saying: “I am obsessed with [my daughter]... but my whole life I always wanted to be a boy mom—I remember when I was pregnant with him I was so ecstatic because I was such a tomboy growing up.” But aside from specific content creators, boy moms as a collective have also originated some questionable trends—among them, thousands melodramatically clinging to their sons and lip-synching to lyrics from romantically-themed jealousy songs like Taylor Swift’s “Enchanted” (“Please don’t be in love with someone else/Please don’t have somebody waiting on you”) and Olivia Rodrigo’s “happier” (“Oh, I hope you’re happy/But not like how you were with me”). Many viewers were quick to point out the absurdity of the content, joking about Sigmund Freud and voicing their opinions and concerns about mothers labeling themselves as their son’s first kiss and first love—and unfortunately, the comments comparing this behavior to a borderline incestuous relationship are not too far off. 

The term “emotional incest” describes an unhealthy family dynamic in which a parent is heavily reliant on their child, even going so far as to turn to them for emotional comfort, or grooming them into the role of a surrogate partner. This isn’t to say the abusive aspect of emotional incest has to have a sexual or physical component. Still, this dynamic only serves to create enmeshment and complications for the affected children well into adulthood. While mothers who develop this dynamic with a male child often do not have their emotional needs met by their romantic partner, pinning this responsibility on their sons can add another layer of sexualization and toxicity to the already complicated dynamic. The posts with captions and voiceovers like “When God gives you a son, it’s because you deserve to know what true love is” certainly don’t help at all (ew). This level of closeness is of course not the child’s fault, but could have some connection to the child’s gender: while emotional incest affects families of all types, this specific mother-son enmeshment within a cishet nuclear family likely stems from the male parent’s negligence or abuse, and by extension, the maternal figure seeking out connection with the closest male they feel entitled to—after all, these are the same women who prioritize and pore over their inattentive husbands and their spoiled sons to an alarming degree.

So, how does it all come together? What these female archetypes all have in common is their androcentrism, which is the centering or domination and emphasis of masculine interests, as per Merriam-Webster. Women who center men also tend to suffer from internalized misogyny, competing with other women and putting them down to uplift themselves (think pick-me girls, tradwife influencers, and the like). But moms recording themselves with their young boys in the kitchen glaring at hypothetical future daughter-in-laws and judging their cooking skills, writing “Born to be your lover, forced to be your mother” captions, talking about how much more they love their sons over their daughters? That’s a level of internalization that is not only incredibly damaging to themselves but to their children, who will learn from their androcentric example. 

It’s especially telling to see this content style gain traction within our current political climate, in which reproductive rights are continuously suppressed and a known sexual abuser was elected for his second presidential term—perplexing liberal organizers who purport that the women who supported Trump voted against their own best interests. But I’d argue that these voting statistics are not surprising or accidental; in fact, these women’s electoral decisions are rooted in the misguided belief of acquiring self-preservation. Joan Walsh writes for The Nation about Democratic candidate Harris’ loss, especially her failure to secure the votes of undereducated and religiously inclined white women: “Harris overwhelmingly won college-educated white women… Conversely, Trump won an overwhelming 83 percent of white evangelical Protestant women voters, according to the Public Religion Research Institute… ‘In both 2020 and 2024, the presence of white evangelical women voters, eight in 10 of whom support Trump, are the critical mass pushing white women over the top into majority territory for Trump,’ Robert Jones, PRRI’s director, tells me. In other words, evangelical white women broke for Trump, and various other subsets of white women voted for Harris—but not by a wide enough margin to swing the overall demographic toward her” (Walsh 2024, The Nation). 

Historically and globally, women are less likely to hold positions of power, and while female politicians have reached nominations and the opportunity for candidacy in the United States within the last ten years, the country just doesn’t seem ready to have a female President, given the most recent presidential election. Yes, women generally voted for Harris, but a considerable number of them voted for Trump despite the latter’s extensive sexist history—and despite his administration’s enthusiasm to introduce regressive legislation and ideas under the guise of “protecting” women.

Trump’s repositioning into the Presidency was followed by the appointing of a Cabinet of pro-life, pro-natalist personalities vocal about the importance of preserving the traditional nuclear family—people like JD Vance and Elon Musk, who push back against “anti-children ideology” and child-free Americans. This isn’t a coincidence either; in a developed nation faced with declining birth rates that worries for its economic growth, the push for wanting “more babies” is perfectly aligned with the increasing hatred toward immigrants, the fetishistic interest in the Great Replacement Theory, and the conservative fight against a “woke gender ideology” that seeks to, in their eyes, harm women and their “God-given purpose” to birth and raise children. Birthing bodies are a valuable asset for nationalistic movements (the most famous nationalistic movement being Nazi Germany), and it’s clear that these politicians seek to keep America safe from the “threat” of displacement and obsolescence. As Yvonne Lindgren elaborates in her research: “Nationalist movements have historically linked protection of nation and national culture with the protection and glorification of motherhood. For example, in 1933 in Nazi Germany, Paula Siber, the acting head of the Association of German Women, articulated the role and duty of white mothers in the Nazi regime: ‘To be a woman means to be a mother… the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.’ [Doesn’t that sound familiar?] Under this narrative, women are called upon to protect and build nationhood through their childbearing role and to inculcate national identity by imparting the culture and values of the nation in its citizens. Thus, women's role in nationalism requires both child-bearing and child-rearing, and restriction on abortion is directly linked to preservation of the nation. Motherhood and traditional family stand as the bulwark that forges national identity and protects a nation from outsiders.” Now, would I say that all these mommy influencers are secretly creating propaganda to sway social media users into conservatism and nationalistic movements? Absolutely not, but it’s arguable that many of these self-appointed family women endorse a lifestyle that is increasingly unattainable for the average American, and with many of these mothers also displaying clear favoritism to the men in their lives, they are further contributing to the normalization of sexism and misogyny. This is arguably one of the biggest dangers of androcentrism in American culture—pitting women against each other and centering men who benefit from this system of subjugation and inequality will only ensure that women’s voices continue to be silenced.

The enforcement of gender preferences and roles in a patriarchal society may not be new, but this relatively recent push to make light of the content pushed by these male-centered mothers is a disservice to the value of parenthood and child-rearing and what being a woman actually means—and it’s not just about motherhood. While it’s imperative to remember that these women are also victims of misogynistic institutions and ideologies, their compliance and enforcement of sexist beliefs and gender favoritism is not something that should be encouraged or celebrated.