A Mother’s Role in Raising Men Who Hate Women

When we think about misogynists, we usually think about the men who hate women, the statistics, the data, the women who have been harmed, and the fathers who failed their sons. That was what made me write the first part of this article, A Father’s Role in Raising Men Who Hate Women.

But there is one very important piece of the conversation that we often overlook: the mother’s role.

Mothers are often deeply involved in their children’s formative years, and in many families, they spend considerably more time providing day-to-day care than fathers do. When a marriage falls apart, many children also frequently remain primarily with their mothers. When a woman has a child outside marriage, she is likewise most often the parent with whom the child spends most of their childhood. None of this means fathers are unimportant or that mothers are responsible for everything their sons eventually become. It simply means that mothers can have an enormous influence on how boys first learn to understand women, relationships, authority, love and gender.

A mother can therefore play an extremely important role in shaping a boy into a man who respects the women in his life. But she can also, sometimes without intending to, reinforce ideas that eventually contribute to misogyny.

1. The Golden Child Syndrome

I call this the Golden Child Syndrome, particularly when it happens in families where a boy is born after one or more girls.

In cultures where having a male child carries significant social value, women who have daughters first can face enormous pressure to continue having children until they produce a son. The boy can therefore grow up in a family atmosphere where everyone already considers his gender an achievement. His sisters were children, but his arrival can unconsciously feel like the moment the family finally got what it was supposed to have.

And that is where some mothers can begin treating their only son as the ultimate child, sometimes at the expense of the daughters who came before him.

When a boy repeatedly receives special treatment because he is male, he can begin to internalize the idea that being male comes with a higher position in the family.

His sisters may be expected to serve him. He may be given more freedom than they are. His opinions may be taken more seriously. He may be excused from responsibilities that are automatically assigned to his sisters. Eventually, the boy may not even recognize these privileges as privileges. They simply become his understanding of how families are supposed to work.

This can become particularly dangerous when he grows into a world where women do not automatically treat him the way his mother and sisters did.

The woman who refuses to serve him may seem disrespectful. The woman who disagrees with him may seem disrespectful. The woman who expects him to contribute equally may seem demanding. The woman who refuses to treat him as special may appear arrogant.

He may never consciously think, “Women are beneath me.” Instead, he may simply feel that women are behaving incorrectly whenever they refuse to give him the special treatment he became accustomed to receiving, and this is where the problem goes beyond the individual family.

In societies where women’s status is often tied to their relationships with men, women can sometimes become participants in the same hierarchy that disadvantages them. A mother may unconsciously reinforce the idea that her son is more important because he is male, while simultaneously teaching her daughters that their value comes from how well they serve or accommodate men.

2. The Bias Against Women

In a heavily patriarchal world, women can internalize bias against other women. This is one of the most uncomfortable parts of discussing misogyny because we sometimes act as though every woman automatically understands sexism simply because she is a woman. She often does not.

A woman can experience sexism and still believe sexist things about other women. She can be mistreated by men and still teach her sons that women are manipulative. She can complain about how society treats women while warning her sons never to trust women. She can demand respect for herself while telling her sons that other women are not worth respecting.

I did not fully understand how serious this could be until I read a woman’s comment years ago in which she said she was not raising her two sons to be a fool for any woman and that she would always teach them to stand their ground.

There is nothing wrong with teaching boys to have boundaries. Boys should absolutely learn how to recognize manipulation, protect themselves from exploitation and leave unhealthy relationships. The problem begins when the lesson changes from “do not allow yourself to be mistreated” to “women are people you need to protect yourself from.”

Imagine growing up hearing repeatedly that women are dangerous, dramatic, manipulative, disloyal or only interested in what they can get from men. Imagine hearing these things from the person you trust most.

What happens when that boy eventually encounters a woman who disagrees with him? What happens when a woman rejects him? What happens when his girlfriend earns more money than he does? What happens when his wife refuses to do something simply because he expects her to?

If he has been conditioned to view women as potential adversaries, ordinary disagreements can easily become evidence that his mother was right about women. And there is another fascinating part of this dynamic: the mother herself can become the exception.

“My mother is different.”

“My mother would never do that.”

“My mother sacrificed everything for me.”

“My mother is not like other women.”

This is why some misogynistic men can adore their mothers while simultaneously holding deeply contemptuous views about women. Their mothers have been placed outside the category of women they distrust. She is not evidence that women deserve respect. She is the exception who deserves respect because she is their mother. Other women still have to prove themselves.

This can create an extraordinarily distorted understanding of women. The mother becomes almost sacred while other women remain suspicious. A son can worship his mother and still believe his girlfriend is manipulative, his wife is demanding, female colleagues are incompetent and women who reject him are arrogant. That is why mothers need to be careful about the stories they tell their sons about women.

Teach him to have boundaries, yes. Teach him not to be exploited, absolutely. Teach him that some people are manipulative, because some people are. But teach him that some people are manipulative, not that women are.

A woman is not automatically trustworthy because she is a woman, but she is also not automatically suspicious because she is one.

3. The Good Mother Syndrome

A lot of mothers have gone through an enormous amount of pain in their personal lives. They have experienced gender discrimination, difficult marriages, infidelity, financial hardship, emotional abuse, unequal domestic responsibilities and countless other forms of gendered suffering.

Yet many of them become extraordinarily good at hiding how deeply these experiences affect them from their sons. They cry privately, hurt privately, struggle privately, then they come out of the bedroom smiling and continue taking care of everyone.

Their sons may grow up seeing their mothers as almost superhuman. She endured everything. She kept the family together. She cooked, cleaned, worked, raised the children, forgave, kept smiling, and never seemed to break. Then those boys become men and say, “I want a woman like my mother.”

That statement can mean something completely healthy. A man may simply mean that he wants a loving, hardworking, nurturing woman. There is nothing inherently wrong with admiring those qualities in your mother but sometimes, there is something else behind it.

Sometimes what a man has learned from his mother’s life is not simply that women are loving. He has learned that good women endure. His mother may have been deeply unhappy in her marriage, but he never saw her cry. She may have been repeatedly disrespected by his father, but she continued functioning. She may have wanted to leave but stayed because of the children. She may have been exhausted by carrying most of the household responsibilities, but she continued doing them without complaint.

If all he remembers is her endurance, he may grow up believing that endurance is what makes a woman good. Then he enters a relationship and treats his partner in ways his mother tolerated, only to become genuinely shocked when the woman refuses to tolerate them.

This is where hiding women’s suffering from boys can have unintended consequences. A boy needs to understand that his mother’s strength does not mean she was never hurt. Her ability to survive something does not mean the thing was acceptable. Her decision to remain in a marriage does not automatically mean she was happy there.

There is nothing wrong with protecting children from the intimate details of a difficult marriage but there is a difference between protecting a child and teaching him, unintentionally, that women do not have limits.

A mother should not have to expose every wound to her son but boys should grow up understanding that women have feelings, boundaries, exhaustion and breaking points too. They should learn that a woman being capable of enduring something does not give anyone permission to make her endure it.

4. Never Having the Conversation

A lot of mothers have never sat down with their sons to have the important conversation about respecting women and treating them as fully human. They may never have thought it was necessary. After all, why would you need to explain to your son that women deserve respect?

But the assumption that children will simply figure these things out by themselves is becoming increasingly dangerous.

A boy can know that his mother loves him and still have absolutely no understanding of women’s history, the discrimination women have faced, or why certain behaviours toward women are harmful.

He may know that his mother is a woman, but that does not automatically mean he understands women as a social group or understands the historical inequalities that have shaped relationships between men and women.

And today, boys are not growing up in an information vacuum. If mothers do not have these conversations with their sons, someone else will.

School will teach them some things. Their friends will teach them other things. Social media will teach them something else. Internet influencers will happily provide an explanation for why women behave the way they do. Sometimes those explanations will be thoughtful and useful. Sometimes they will be completely poisonous.

A boy who has never had a meaningful conversation with his parents about gender can stumble onto a video telling him that women are naturally manipulative, that feminism destroyed relationships, that women only want money or that a man’s greatest responsibility is to make sure a woman never has power over him.

And because nobody has given him another framework for understanding women, he may take it hook, line and sinker. This is why “respect women” is not enough.

Mothers need to talk to their sons about consent, bodily autonomy, rejection, emotional responsibility, domestic labour, equality and the fact that women are not extensions of men’s desires.

They need to explain that a woman saying no is not an insult. A woman disagreeing with him is not automatically disrespectful. A woman earning more money is not an attack on his masculinity. A woman choosing a different life from the one he thinks she should choose does not make her immoral.

Most importantly, he needs to understand that women do not have to be his mother, sister, daughter or wife before he considers them worthy of dignity. They are human beings first.

5. “Boys Will Always Be Boys”

Finally, there is the age-old phrase: “Boys will always be boys.”

Interestingly, some of the mothers who say this have experienced misogyny themselves. They know what it feels like to have their voices dismissed, their boundaries ignored or their behaviour controlled because they are women.

Yet when their sons display some of the same traits they were punished for displaying as girls, those traits can suddenly become acceptable. A mother may shut down boldness, audacity or outspoken behaviour in her daughter because she believes a girl should be respectful and well-behaved, while encouraging those same traits in her son because she wants him to be confident and assertive.

The girl is told she has an attitude. The boy is told he has confidence. The girl is told not to be too loud. The boy is told to speak up. The girl is expected to control her anger. The boy’s aggression is dismissed as part of being male. Eventually, the problem becomes even more serious when the boy starts expressing misogynistic views.

He makes a sexist joke and everyone laughs. He insults girls and his mother says he is just being playful. He becomes casually aggressive toward women and everyone dismisses it as normal male behaviour. He says something deeply disrespectful about women and nobody challenges him because “boys will always be boys.”

But boys grow into men.

The behaviours we repeatedly excuse in childhood do not necessarily disappear simply because someone turns eighteen. Sometimes they become more deeply embedded. A boy who learns that aggression earns him attention can carry that behaviour into adulthood. A boy who learns that insulting women is funny can become a man who humiliates women without seeing anything wrong with it. A boy who learns that his mother will laugh off his disrespect may eventually assume other women should laugh too.

This is why misogyny needs to be confronted while it is still small.

A mother should be able to tell her son, “That was disrespectful.” She should be able to say, “You were wrong.” She should be able to say, “You cannot speak to her that way.” She should be able to say, “Being angry does not give you permission to insult or intimidate someone.”

That is not raising a weak boy. That is raising a boy who understands that his masculinity does not exempt him from basic human decency.

Mothers are often some of the closest people to men. Men love their mothers, adore their mothers and, in some cultures, hold motherhood in an almost sacred position. The influence mothers can have over their children, particularly during their formative years, is therefore enormous.

Ignoring that influence when we discuss misogyny is not only incomplete. It can become a form of pretence.

But mothers are not responsible for the existence of misogyny. They are not to blame for every misogynistic belief their sons develop, and they cannot control every influence their children encounter. Fathers, peers, schools, communities, religion, media, social platforms and individual choices all matter.

However, mothers can refuse to make sons more important than daughters simply because they are male. They can stop teaching boys that women are inherently suspicious. They can let their sons understand that their mothers are human beings with feelings and limits, rather than superhuman women whose suffering should become the standard for every woman. They can have the conversations that society often avoids. And they can stop excusing misogyny as harmless boyhood behaviour.

We constantly hear boys say, “My mom said I can’t marry you.”

“My mom said that’s not good for me.”

“My mom said women like you are trouble.”

“My mom said this and that.”

But what if we started hearing something different?

“My mom said I can’t talk to women with disrespect.”

“My mom said women are full human beings and deserve the same dignity I do.”

“My mom said a woman saying no does not make her disrespectful.”

“My mom said I should never treat a woman badly and then blame her for how I behaved.”

“My mom said being a man does not make me more valuable than a woman.”

That would be a very different inheritance. And honestly? That is where the conversation needs to begin.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.