Scientists studying orcas—or killer whales, as they are known in the heavy metal community—have learned that whale mothers make a “lifelong sacrifice” for their sons. I read this story while picking up individual guinea pig droppings from the floor with my bare hands, while listening to Enid Blyton’s Winter Stories at teeth-juddering volume, as my son sat on the sofa, in a coat and a pair of pants. Which may explain why the news didn’t exactly shock me.
We are mammals. We give birth to live young, feed them with milk, have warm blood, and—in my case at least—are covered in hair. And so it is perhaps tempting to look at this study, carried out over decades, and find validation in the argument that raising male children is harder than females. Apparently, orcas that birth male pups are less likely to reproduce in the future; they also share their food for longer, “hang out” together for longer, and help hunt for longer than they do with female offspring. And so, you might reason, doesn’t this indicate that boy babies and infants—of any species—demand more energy, more food, and drain their mothers’ bodies more significantly than their female counterparts? After all, if it’s true for those mammals, then why wouldn’t it be true for us?
Except, I’m not quite sure that I agree. Obviously I agree with the study—they are scientists and have done years of research. But I’m not sure I feel particularly familiar with the way that mothers—and it is always mothers—talk about their parenting of boys, as though that relationship were defined by gender. Some of you will no doubt have clicked into the strange world of #boymom and #motherofboys on social media. My goodness, but aren’t there a lot of sports clothes, skateboards, and miniature suits out there? As well as plenty of pseudo philosophical captions about rest and light, while someone sits on a hill or lies on a beach. This is the internet, after all. From my sneaky burrowings into that community, I have found a fair bit of performed masculinity, whether that’s in outfits, woodland settings, or martial arts poses. And that, I think, is more an example of social conditioning than intrinsic mammalian behavior.
Of course, I’ve done more than my fair share of climbing trees and starting fires and kicking balls and hunting for insects in the five years since I became mother to a son. But so has my partner. And so, I like to think, we would have done with a daughter.
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