I would never claim “just” however I would say for an area that dovetails well with studies in micro-aggressions, context, bias, and the importance and nuance of words they are shockingly bad at naming things. Maybe you’re right maybe they dont dislike men but they tend to name shared social ills after men an awful lot...

> shockingly bad at naming things

As we all know, naming things is one of the two hardest things.

LOL! However, in that discipline I feel it is the only thing?

It's such a confusing misnomer that the majority of both proponents and opponents of it wildly misuse it all the time.

Just call it something like "toxic gender roles" or "toxic gender expectations" and you short circuit the entire debate.

I don't believe that it would actually short circuit the debate, since there is a contingent of people who insist on maximally misunderstanding work in this space.

But regardless, the name does derive from some historical reasoning. For many decades feminist theory used to consider the feminine to be aberrant and the masculine to be the cultural norm and a pure good, only investigating the ways in which femininity trapped and harmed people. "Toxic masculinity" was a re-evaluation of these assumptions, identifying ways that masculinity, like femininity could trap and harm people. The term was positioned against the assumptions of the time and "toxic masculinity" expresses this position much better than "toxic gender roles" since it was explicitly about changing how feminism thought about masculinity.

That is no longer especially significant to the term, but inertia exists.