Boy Mom Says Her Son’s ‘Future Girlfriend’ Can’t Take Away The Fact That She Was His First Kiss
She was just making a joke, but very few people found it funny.
Zanuck / Getty Images / Canva Pro It doesn't seem to matter how much controversy there is around the whole "boy mom" culture online; there will never be a shortage of boy moms willing to go on social media and say the most "boy mom" stuff imaginable.
A new "boy mom" uproar was recently sparked on TikTok when a mom made a joke about her son that made lots of people's skin crawl and struck many as a quintessential example of the toxic boy mom problem.
A boy mom says she's her son's first kiss, no matter what his future first girlfriend says.
Um… yeah, that's a bit… uh… wow. Where to begin? Let's just stick with the reactions the mom, named Shelby, got to her since-deleted video, which ranged from gasps to slack-jawed staring to even people saying the cops should be called.
Obviously, calling the cops is taking this far too literally — we can assume this mom is just joking around in the ways boy moms do, right? But that's the problem with boy-mom culture and a lot of parenting culture in general. These trends tend to, even if unintentionally, sexualize little kids in ways that should really not be the status quo.
Putting little boys in t-shirts that say "hide your daughters" or saying little girls are "going to have to beat them off with a stick" and all the other ways people apply inherently adult contexts onto children is an extremely weird thing to do — especially in a cultural moment when we are having national moral panics about child trafficking and passing laws that say LGBTQ+ people are "grooming" children if they simply exist in the same room as a child.
I digress, but the point is, this stuff is weird. And that's before we even get into the aspect of competition that is part of the whole "boy mom" culture, in which moms like Shelby assume, decades ahead of time, that they will be locking horns with their future daughters-in-law over who gets to be the #1 woman in their sons' lives. It's WEIRD.
And in Shelby's case it definitely did not sit well with others on TikTok.
Many people were appalled and grossed out by the boy mom's video, and she got tons of blowback.
"This is actually [expletive] gross," TikToker Taleah said in a response to Shelby's video. "Like, I literally almost threw up."
She went on to excoriate Shelby for her responses to criticism in the comments of the now-deleted video.
"The fact that you're in the comments talking about how 'some moms are just so obsessed with their sons, but I'm not that type of mom,'" Taleah said before adding, "You're the type of mom who would wear white to the wedding."
She went on to express many people's problem with toxic boy-mom culture: That it almost seems like a practice run for eventually becoming the most overbearing, toxic mother-in-law to their sons' future wives as possible. "I pray that your son is real little right now so that you can change your ways before he gets grown," Taleah said.
She, like many others, also couldn't help but be reminded of a certain Greek myth most of us had to read in school. "All I can think of is reading 'Oedipus' in high school and being disturbed," she said of the story of the titular man who was both his mom's son and husband.
The story is also the namesake of psychology's "Oedipus complex," in which a child has such a strong attachment to one parent it creates a rivalry with the other.
The boy mom herself was furious by the response to her video, which she says included accusations of abuse.
After deleting the original video, Shelby then posted an impassioned defense of herself and her video that she said "has gone viral for the wrong reasons." She was furious that people were accusing her of essentially having a romantic relationship with her son.
My son is about to turn two," she explained, "and he comes up to me all the time and gives me hugs and kisses. And when I said first kiss, I did not mean first kiss romantically, that he will have with his future girlfriend or significant other someday."
But of course, that's precisely what the joke she made in her video is predicated on — competing with her son's future lovers for his affection. She seemed unable to understand that her critics were actually angry about the culture mentioned above, jokingly sexualizing kids and the way it plays itself out later in kids' adult relationships. It's a link even mental health professionals have said is very real.
Still, Shelby said she has received shocking and vile accusations of abuse and messages from viewers threatening to call child protective services on her because of her video. That is, of course, egregious.
It was obviously a joke — an unseemly one she admitted was a poor choice, but a joke all the same.
The "toxic boy mom" culture Shelby and other "boy moms" engage in when posting things like this should absolutely be interrogated, but it's possible to do so without leveling dangerous and vile accusations.
Hopefully, everyone involved can learn something from this and think before they post next time.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.