New Generation Proud to Be "Momma's Boys": Will Wives of the Future Inherit Mother's Boys Instead of Grown Men?

Photo: Mother and Son Fall in Love

It's a simple schoolyard insult.

For eons, people — often men — hurled "mama's boy" at each other as an emasculating put-down. To be called the son of a mother suggested an essential unmanliness. "Mama's boys" were comically inept, even pathological, in movies and television shows ranging from the pathetic Buster Bluth in Arrested Development to The Waterboy's Bobby Boucher to Norman Bates in Psycho.

Looking way, way back, Beowulf's Grendel could even be called the mother of literary mama's boys.

But a new generation of men seems to be rejecting the toxic masculinity inherent in the phrase and radically reinventing it.

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Mama's Boys