Having plasticity in societal expectations does not change the characteristics of 'typical male behavior' in those societies. All it does is require us to further abstract what constitutes 'male behavior'.
Studies on the effects of testosterone mainly show that it encourages men to display behaviors that gain them social status. In a violent society, this would be violence. In a peaceful society, this would be shows of benevolence. Either way, pursuing status-ful behavior is undoubtedly associated with testosterone. Violence, surprisingly, is not associated at all.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/testostero...
The conclusion is still the same. In a violent society individuals will defend their social status with violence. In a peaceful society status will be defended through benevolence. A individual seeking to stay at the top of a social ladder will undoubtedly have hormone secretion increased as a matter of biological effect.
Maybe this is why men don't feel like speaking up so often. If you can't fully conceptualise every concept thought up by feminist sociologists then your just not "on our level" and "so triggered".
The concept that masculinity can have negative effects while not itself being negative isn't something that should take a great deal of effort to comprehend. There are entire male created social complexes like "gentlemanly behavior" and "chivalry" built around the pretense that inherent male traits have both positive and negative aspects.
The problem here is not that "feminist sociologists" are talking down to men and making them quail in fear -- men have no problems whatsoever speaking their mind in regards to criticising women or feminism. The problem is that men who oppose feminism often don't even bother to approach its concepts on their own terms at all. The feminism they oppose mostly doesn't even exist, or at best they're attacking the fringe and not the mainstream.
If you have a problem with the concept of toxic masculinity, for example, all I and the "feminist sociological agenda" (or whatever) ask is that you bother to find out what the term actually refers to. Cribbing from Wikipedia:
stereotypically masculine gender roles that restrict the kinds of emotions
allowable for boys and men to express, including social expectations that
men seek to be dominant (the "alpha male") and limit their emotional range
primarily to expressions of anger.
If we talk about toxic Muslims, we could define it to only be about terrorists or other narrow defined subgroup of criminals, but if you use those words then the meaning being expressed is a generalization that invoke a expression of racisms and hate. Lumping together all Muslims, only to then say "technically, I only meant this small subgroup" don't work. Does not work for racism, and it does not work for sexism either. The term toxic masculinity will always seem like veiled hatred against men, and no amount of "wait, I only mean ..." will change that.
> men have no problems whatsoever speaking their mind in regards to criticising women or feminism
You haven't spent much time in democratic party meetings then.
> The problem is that men who oppose feminism often don't even bother to approach its concepts on their own terms at all.
And at which point do the "real feminists" stop and agree that it's just a fringe group of feminists that have an axe to grind against men?
> ...that's not an attack on men, masculinity in general or on any healthy masculine traits.
Um, it is?
Just look at the framing, claiming that TM "restricts" males. Why is the assumption always that freedom to express is always what people need and will always be a positive outcome?
Humans need structure in life, some more than others. When you try to deconstruct every social norm around a culture you will have a large amount of men who will find themselves lost in a landscape that is actively discouraging them from fitting within the beaten path laid before them.
Maybe the reason men are killing themselves isn't because they don't cry more to their mates but because they are thrown into this modern world that is actively trying to push them towards transcendence of the human condition.
Yes, but what traits society allows men to express while still being considered "proper men" differs depending on culture, and mediates whatever biological imperatives might exist. Ancient cultures considered sex between men to be a perfectly reasonable thing for a masculine man to do, since the concepts of "hetero" and "homo" sexuality didn't really exist at the time. Men in Elizabethan times were far more free to express emotions than now - consider that many of Shakespeare's sonnets, including the famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...") were addressed to a man.
>Yet you do not even consider the possibility that humans are hard wired towards certain average behaviors, that men are almost certainly predisposed towards agression, that females may very well be attracted to dominance (hell, it's all over our culture if you look with an open mind).
Also, innate predisposition doesn't justify all expressions of those dispositions. One may say that men are predisposed towards physical aggression due to their increased musculature relative to women and testosterone, but that doesn't mean every act of violence is healthy. Females may be attracted to dominance, but that doesn't mean all means of dominating women are justifiable.
We may be apes, but that doesn't mean we get to rape any female we find attractive and murder the offspring of rival males because, you know, we're trying to have a civilization here.
>You deny the pain and loneliness that unnatractive men experience daily because of factors beyond their control - height, build, facial structure, social difficulty.
Plenty of unattractive, facially asymmetrical and socially awkward men are able to meet with women, date, have sex, all over the world, every day. Believe me, if women didn't have low standards in that regard, our species would probably have died out long ago.
>Pride, agression, drives for achievement and competition, these natural, "toxic" masculine traits BUILT the modern world.
You see... I literally said that wasn't what "toxic masculinity" meant and that people automatically confuse the term for an attack on masculinity itself... you literally quoted the part of my comment where I said that and then you went and did exactly that.
At least try to approach this on an intellectual level and not be so triggered by feminist jargon.