We need to talk about Boy Moms

“We can’t put him in that,” were the first words out of my mouth when my then-husband showed me one of the baby items his mother had sent for our son: a onesie printed with the outline of a muffin and the words “Mommy’s Little Stud Muffin” in bright-blue curlicued script. It was 2009, “funny” onesies were a whole thing, and though it was hard to imagine what would make a parent put their infant in a garment that bragged “Hung like a 1st grader” or “I drink at mommy’s snack bar,” someone out there was buying these things. My mother-in-law wasn’t one for raunch; she probably just thought the onesie was silly and cute. It went straight into a donation box anyway.

This memory surfaced the other day when I saw the flurry of Instagram chatter about Jenny Mollen, who recently posted photos of herself wrapped around her 12-year-old son, faces obscured, a tangle of limbs and hair on top of a bed. After reading the caption — “Your eldest son will be the most toxic man you ever date” — I understood why the post was going viral. It was a portrait of suffocation: a warning from a mother already desperate to make sure that no woman on Earth will ever love her son as much as she does, regardless of what that means for him. (Did I mention that the soundtrack for the post was Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “’03 Bonnie & Clyde”?)

As unnerving as this post was, it’s probably not the most questionable thing Mollen has put on her social-media feeds. A proudly attention-seeking, self-obsessed writer, actor and Hollywood wife (until recently, she was married to “American Pie” star Jason Biggs), Mollen specializes in oversharing and blithe chaos: posting boobs on main, filming herself at cosmetic-surgery appointments, and regularly spewing the kind of private details that would have to be waterboarded out of most people. On an internet full of #boymoms who address their newborn sons as “sexy daddy” and admit to making their daughters do all the household chores, Mollen hasn’t stood out as particularly unhinged in expressions of maternal devotion. But even Boy Moms have a line in the sand, and many of them made it clear in the post’s comments that Mollen had crossed it: “This is why people say boy moms are weird.”

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You may already know that a boy mom and a Boy Mom are two very different things. Until I had a son, I did not: My only working image of a boy mom came from my suburban childhood, where a mother of more than two sons was generally recognizable by her breakneck carpooling schedule, feet-scented station wagon, home strewn with hockey sticks and cleats and Brobdingnagian laundry situation. The contemporary Boy Mom probably also has some of those things, but her more distinguishing feature is being both intensely protective of and seemingly in love with her son/s — and, maybe more important, ready to throw down with anyone unfortunate enough to come between them.

My first indirect encounter with a Boy Mom happened via a Facebook post from a mother with an important message for the teen girls of social media. I wish I could recall the exact wording, but the tl;dr was: Stop putting photos of yourselves in bikinis online; they are afflicting my perfect angel sons with lustful thoughts and I’m holding you hussies responsible. My second encounter involved a mother who told me, at a toddler’s birthday party, that her son was the love of her life and she planned to ensure that he became all the things her husband wasn’t (e.g., present, emotionally intelligent, physically affectionate, gift-giving). And once I became aware of the online Boy Mom, I saw them everywhere.

Of course, they’ve always been everywhere. History, literature and pop culture are lousy with Boy Moms — the Bible’s Rebecca, the Roman Empire’s Agrippina, Norma Bates, Gertrude Morel, Sophie Portnoy, Viola Fields and Lucille Bluth. The moms of I-still-can’t-believe-this-happened “MILF Manor,” and the matrons of the equally alarming “I Love a Mama’s Boy.” In most of these, we can see the mother-son dynamic, however frustrating or overbearing or dysfunctional, play out. By contrast, on social media, Boy Moms stand alone, the main characters in what often seem like one-woman romantic tragedies of doomed longing. The lack of a son’s POV makes Boy Mom pining both performative and disturbingly real: Does the son know that his mother’s obsession with him has her lamenting, in front of a camera or typing in a text box, that she already hates her son’s future wife; or worrying about him going off to college and being “framed” for sexual assault; or angrily going off on Girls These Days.

This is what makes Mollen’s reference to dating the toxic man that is her son so disquieting: Why would you tell a 12-year-old boy he’s toxic unless you intend for him to be just that? The May 10 Substack essay that began circulating in the wake of her Instagram post did nothing to dispel that eventuality. Titled “Please. Stay. I Want You. I Need You. Oh god,” it comes right out of the gate with this doozy: “Call me old-fashioned, but I only want my sons to marry women with dead mothers. It’s my only shot at staying relevant, of seeming useful, and of winning by comparison.”

I get what she’s doing here: Part of motherhood is trusting that if you do it right, your child will have no problem leaving the nest. And accepting that joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy are the double helix of parental DNA takes time. But hoping girls lose their mothers for the future soothing of her own ego? That’s nasty work, and difficult to brush off as hyperbole given that pictures of Mollen lying between her son’s legs on a bed with her hands cradling his head are right there. A mother who sees other women as her direct competition isn’t just creepy; she’s dangerous — and the fact that, in this case, the other women are preteen girls makes it even worse. Here’s Mollen later in the piece, describing her son texting with a girl: “[S]he was twelve, but I could already tell my brand of toxic. She was bossing him around and using big words, and he was utterly spun,” she writes. “I complained to Jason that I wanted to intervene before he got hurt and that she wasn’t even hotter than me.”

There are people who saw nothing wrong with Mollen or the photos, as evidenced by comments like, “As someone whose love language is physical touch — THIS IS PERFECT” and “I HOPE my kids will hug me like this at 12!”  Comedian and podcast host Alison Rosen, a friend of Mollen’s, wrote on Threads that “The over-the-top reaction” to the piece “is insane and gross to me . . . It’s about the inevitability of your kids growing up.”

Well, okay: In the absolute broadest possible sense, the photos are about her kids growing up. But people are reacting so strongly not because of how Mollen appears to be dealing with a future inevitability, but because in her right-now behavior, she’s cast her son as her one and only. (After initially deleting the photo caption about dating her son, she returned later to assert “I stand by this!”) If the genders were reversed, we’d have no problem calling it inappropriate, I thought, before remembering the Christian purity-ring ceremonies at which girls attend father-daughter dances and pledge their virginity to dad — just for safekeeping, until they marry and it transfers into the care of their husbands.

As the mother of a boy, a bit of my heart goes out to Mollen: I couldn’t begin to list the number of moments during my kid’s childhood when I’d start to cry picturing his high-school graduation, or saw a toddler with the same toddler mannerisms he had, or watching him sleep (not because I’m creepy, but because he’s a real pill first thing in the morning). But mostly, it makes me wonder if what makes a boy’s mother a Boy Mom is a sense of self that requires the consistent validation of being needed.

Before there was the #boymom, there was the #girldad, a figure who emerged online in the 2010s to uplift fathers who had daughters, realized sexism exists, and made it their mission to be a bulwark against the gender stereotyping and sexualization that awaited their daughters as they grow up. This identity came with its own set of issues and judgments (should men really get a better-late-than-never pass for recognizing how differently the world treats girls only after creating one of them?), but there’s no denying that #girldad culture is a paradigm built on nurturing independence and confidence in girls.

The Boy Mom, on the other hand, embodies the stalest of beliefs — that women become valuable, necessary and complete only in relation to men, and must never cede that status. Mollen, ironically, knows the pattern: In her Substack essay, she recalls that her mother-in-law “fell apart” when she and Biggs announced their engagement. So while I suspect social-media commentators deluging Mollen with threats to call CPS won’t do anything but make her triple down, the best outcome of this sh*tshow is that she realizes setting her son up for embarrassment in the present, and all but ensuring that future partners will never feel like enough, isn’t something to strive for.