ICYMI - Beware The Boy Mom
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by writer Stephanie McNeal to discuss the internet phenomenon of “boy moms.” As an internet culture expert, and recent mother of a boy herself, Stephanie helps break down the reaction to a recent viral post from actress Jenny Mollen, who has publicly compared her sons to “toxic exes” and is already mourning losing them to their eventual marriages. But she is far from the only example of this trope on social media, and the more mothers fall into this trap, the more they legitimize a problematic dynamic.
This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, and Kate Lindsay.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture. |
| 0:21.3 | And today, we are joined by writer Stephanie McNeil. Welcome, Stephanie. |
| 0:25.6 | Hi, thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:27.7 | Stephanie is a long time culture, but also internet culture reporter. |
| 0:33.3 | She wrote the book, Swipe Up for More, Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influen influencers. And she is also the writer behind the newsletter side chat. We were just saying off mic how this is like our first time interacting, but we've been orbiting, I feel like, the same space for such a long time. I know. I feel like I've definitely liked posts of yours, which means we're already friends. So it's all good. Yeah, and vice versa. Exactly. BFFs. |
| 1:02.0 | Well, I must know, since this is the question we ask all first time guests, what is your |
| 1:06.9 | earliest internet memory? So this is some lore if you're ready for it. But I'm ready. |
| 1:12.7 | I don't know what was going on. But my parents were pretty young and my dad was very, |
| 1:18.5 | my dad was very like up on internet trends. When I was like seven or eight, we had like a full internet |
| 1:23.2 | PC, which was not the norm. I don't think at the time. And I was really obsessed with Beanie Babies. |
| 1:29.5 | Oh my gosh. Like I was a big collector and I would go and get wine with like all my allowance, |
| 1:35.5 | blah, blah, blah. So I think I was, yeah, I think it was like seven or eight and I somehow stumbled |
| 1:39.9 | onto a Beanie Baby forum, which I've never met another human who had interacted in this |
| 1:47.0 | forum. And I think they were mostly adults and me. But I was a very proud and dedicated poster. |
| 1:58.0 | I would write about all of my different beanie babies I found. I think there was like a little |
| 2:05.1 | bit of a fan fiction element as well. I was going to ask like what what is there and this is, |
| 2:11.0 | I don't mean this in any way, destructable to the beanie babies because I personally every time I would |
| 2:16.7 | get a $5 allowance and I would always |
| 2:19.1 | use that for a Beanie baby. So like I'm an ally. What is there to talk about though in a forum? |
| 2:26.5 | You know, a lot of that has been lost to Internet history. I played around with doing, I think I was doing something where I was trying to |
| 2:36.1 | explain, you know, my early internet history. And I, a couple of years ago, and I went on the |
| 2:42.4 | way back machine and tried to find the actual forum and could not find it. And I tried really hard. |
... |
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