I don't think it's fair to equate that to "men bad".

Then again, how would a similar "Toxic Blackness" concept fly?

Negative elements of traditional black American culture seem well discussed by the community itself, perhaps to a fault.

> refusing to admit you’re wrong > escalating situations > being overly boastful

The reason why people, mostly men, don’t like that term is because it gets thrown around for pretty much anything at this point to mostly put men down. Spreading your legs and holding the door open for someone is considered toxic masculinity.

Why not just describe it as "being an asshole", or "stubbornness", or "aggressiveness", or "being disagreeable", "being antisocial", etc?

Why limit this only to "masculine" pride? You absolutely see women picking fights to defend their pride.

We just call that behavior "being a Karen" (or "catfights"). Which, being fair, both come with their own misogynistic problems.

trigger warnings for whatever reason

it's a blanket statement, it gets thrown around way too often without apparent reason, that's why

Toxic femininity might not be as visible, but in many ways it's more harmful for society because it hinders collaboration on every level

In general, women do all of this all of the time except the last. So you see the problem.

Teaching boys to epxress masculinity through strength, assertiveness, self-reliance, etc. is totally healthy in moderation. Teaching boys to be violent or domineering isn't, nor is teaching them that showing emotion or asking for help is weakness.

This type of recent linguistic addition really sticks out when people are working so hard to make language humane and inclusive elsewhere, while simultaneously going in the exact opposite direction with male-related neologisms.

And the last part of your own post illustrates that bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.

I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? Everywhere else in English, an adjective limits the scope of the noun it's attached to. "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic, "red car" doesn't imply that cars are inherently red. "Toxic" is probably needlessly sensational though, I'll grant that.

> bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.

I agree with this. To clarify I think part of the frustration/misunderstanding with the term comes from it being applied at the wrong level. It's a descriptor of a social/cultural phenomenon, not a trait of an individual. If a man is being violent, it may or may not have anything to do with toxic masculinity, and invoking toxic masculinity to describe his actions would be inappropriate and needlessly gendered.

It really only makes sense to start talking about toxic masculinity when asking higher level sociological questions like, for example, why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats. It's a term to use when exploring causes, not effects, if that makes any sense.

It's like the difference in terminology between an ER nurse and an epidemiologist. The nurse might just say "flu", because at the level they operate that's the issue at hand. For them to speculate about the origins of the specific strain would be inappropriate. For the epidemiologist, however, these questions are exactly the point, because understanding the details of how an outbreak spreads can help us be more prepared in the future.

I'd frame them in a way that centers on behavior ("domineering", "violent") without gendering them. I think this makes the actual things that are toxic clearer and that lumping them into "masculinity" makes them less clear.

> "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic

Yet you've probably seen at least a few people who take this as a reason to worry about "chemicals" in general, despite that covering literally everything. Things like this just make me think that if we want to avoid harmful associations, we have to simply not pair up the words at all. If someone is being violent, we can complain about that without bringing their identity into the frame.

> why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats

But the term is bad because it does nothing whatsoever to illuminate which things might actually cause that and there are probably many causes it lumps under a single umbrella wrongly.

I've seen stats that indicate one of the bigger causes is untreated psychosis, which has nothing in particular to do with being male, or any other identity that's over-represented in arrest data for that matter.

And to me that just reinforces the idea that the identity shouldn't be used at all when framing the problem. I'm aware of the correlations, but we have to find actual causes and, e.g. get people mental healthcare to fix the behaviors creating toxicity, rather than accepting a framing that centers on someone's very identity as if that's the thing that's problematic.

And I can say "causes" because causal modeling is a thing now. I've been reading the Book of Why lately and it's interesting how much things have advanced even in just the last couple of decades or so.

I have an idea. Maybe it has nothing to do with the syntax of the term in the abstract and all to do with what a large number of people using it actually mean. If the term had no history of abuse, this wouldn't be a problem, exactly as you say. What we see in the actual world though is what people really mean by the term. The people using it are misandrists (evidenced by things like the other terms mentioned in the GP) and so the term has come to be a sort of slur; they just hate men and genuinely believe that masculinity is toxic tout court and they have a very hard time hiding it despite simultaneously spouting off otherwise reasonable theories. In other words, they don't mean what they claim to mean by it and people can detect this, so the term has become tarnished.

toxic masculinity as a descriptor is equally useful when asking higher level sociological questions as female hysteria was in the past when asking higher level sociological questions. Why are women so over-emotional in certain situations. Why were they over-represented in mental institutions. It's was a term they used to exploring causes of those things, and as a by product it was used to justify their conclusions.

It was originally a terminology used by doctors and health experts. It was later used by people and politicians. It was then abandoned by doctors and health experts, and then much later abandoned by people and politicians. It existed for hundreds of years and then abandoned. Neither change how inappropriate and needlessly gendered it was, nor the harm it did.

If I started going on about "toxic femininity" (e.g. gossiping and character assassinating rather than confronting people directly, or favoring groupthink over independent thought), then I'd rightly be called a misogynist for clearly trying to blame women for these negative human behaviors. Femininity is seen as a protected and positive trait, while masculinity is so shunned that even saying we shouldn't bash it is seen as suspicious

This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.

insert meme about selection bias here

There's a whole world out there of fairly normal people who don't play those games. They are not in nightclubs. Try to live an actual life.

I will be the first to say #notAllWomen, but every number is heavily skewed in a direction that promotes toxic masculinity.

I was mostly referring to the general idea tat woman are attracted to dominant, physically strong, confident men (that's for the 'good' traits') but also downright confrontational, insulting, mean and even humiliating with other people.

Since in my opinion women want to avoid being with what they perceive is a "weak" man, they will give a pass to all the bad traits because they see it as 'being a strong dominant man', and if you are nice or just not mean, they will be scared you are being weak

If anyone reads this and decides to learn about it, go ahead. I'm never going to tell someone else not to educate themselves. But don't treat it as an instruction book, and don't treat anyone like shit.

And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.

What women are looking for is someone confident in their ability to defend themselves and others. You don't need to be toxic to show that.

> And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.

Yeah.... well first if you read my message I never said I even WANTED to express bad traits or did it that much beside trying to pick up in bars, nor think it's good. It just works better in the flirting phase, whatever you or I think about.

BTW there's a class of girl where it works particularly well and it's the cliché of the "low self esteem girl"(LSE). It's the kind of girl who thinks / knows she's crazy / stupid and have issues so you can't really NOT be an ass to her because if you treat her as your equal she's going to despise you. ("I suck but he likes me so he must suck too"). I'd recommend running away from these kinda of girls but if you want sex there are a bunch of hot ones among them.

Also I think you should know love and attraction are a lot closer one from the other from what you seem to think...

But once again I'm not particularly interested in having to do that as a man. I'm in a relationship and I explicitly explained to my gf that she should be ambitious, have some fight in her and not take shit from other people or me. I also vaguely explained whole concept of LSE so that she doesn't become one. I have 0 interest in being in a relationship where I can see my gf as someone I respect / vaguely admire. I mean there are women astronauts ffs

Or there may be a lot more to it than you think. Attraction will certainly fade.

Anyway, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions about you, but I'm sure you know there are plenty of guys that look for fulfillment through sex, don't care who they hurt doing it, and it's not a great path.

It's not that bad if you are young. To me the good path is you should fuck at least 20 girls to know what you like / how girls work before settling (and girls should do the same). Then after 40+ girls you get tired of it if you are not a retard. The fact that most young people almost don't fuck at all is a bigger problem than the one who fuck too much ^^ (consensually of course)

You live in a toxic culture, why wouldn't women be also toxic?

In general girls who don't go to nightclub are still going to respond to basically the same 'stimuli' / behavior than club girls. It's just in general they are less conscious of it and don't understand it, and sometime blame themseleves (when they are not just at the edge of depression) for despising their "nice" boyfriend and getting horny for the "toxic" guy.

I saw a meme that summed it up nicely:

“You’re not a gladiator or a spartan warrior who needs war, you’re a middle manager who needs therapy”

Society is one abstraction, reproduction is another, and they don’t always mesh nicely.

Maybe the perfect society for reproduction is one of polyamorous warlord harems or something (this is a hypothetical)

Men optimizing for that status quo would be absolutely lethal in our peaceful monogamous society.

On the male side, prisoners' dilemma. On the female side, tragedy of the commons.

Let me expand on that: “you’re a middle manager who needs therapy” – because we’ve built a society where you can’t fulfill your innate desires.

I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.

You can’t just take a monkey out of the savannah, put it in a cubicle, then say “you need therapy” when it misbehaves.

PS: I’m not saying therapy doesn’t work, just that it feels like we’re using it as a bandaid on a deeper issue. Like, hey, maybe people should lead fulfilling lives instead of using therapy to fit themselves into the box society drew for them.

Not like I’ll ever access it (too masc, heh) but I definitely see therapy as a much more positive way to address your emotions than self destructive or violent behaviour.

Sports and stuff helps too, maybe martial arts are the masculine equivalent to talk therapy.

I don't think that the majority of people need therapy. But I've also never met a manager who acted like they were a Spartan going to war. This may well be one of those social bubble sorting issues, where something that is common in one person's experience is very rare in another person's experience.

It’s that there are a small amount of men in the modern world who need a warrior ethos and the ‘tempering fires of warfare’ and other such cringe imagery employed by those pushing hypermasculine ideology.

The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’ and, like the proverbial middle manager, probably just need someone to tell them they aren’t alone and things will be OK in due course, or whatever a therapist does.

And yet the manufactured adversity industry is booming. Look at all the marathons and triathlons and iron mans and spartan races and ninja warriors and all the other nonsense we’ve invented just to scratch this itch for men and women alike.

Humans _need_ something to fight against. If there’s nothing, they’ll make something up.

I'm curious why you think it's nonsense though. Those activities can be fun, safe and encourage discipline.

I haven't met anyone who was actually competitive about it in terms of wanting to be the fastest or whatever. I suspect it is a minority of the group, who in turn are also a minority of society.

If we are making generalizations about what humans need, I wouldn't consider "fighting against something". Perhaps "being right on the internet" would fit more people.

No one is pushing that, other than those that push that as a strawman.

> The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’

You are so far off the mark that you're crossing over into speculative fiction at this point.

Ever heard of testosterone? Do you know what the effects are?

Okay, sure, it doesn't result in a bloodlust, but it is largely responsible for active aggression. As a society we channel this aggression into sports where it can be safely bled with limited violence.

What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?

Nothing is wrong with therapy. I’m just saying that if your entire diet consists of ice cream and you’re feeling poorly, maybe try eating some veggies. You don’t need a doctor for that.

I think the crucial difference to me is whether people say “You need therapy [to change your life]” (good imo) or “You need therapy [to fit into your life]” (bad imo). And it feels like too many people mean the latter.

I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, GPs are supposed to take care of both your physical health and your mental health.

Feel the need to see a psychologist? You go see your GP, and they create a GP mental health care plan, which entitles you to a certain number of government-subsidised psychologist sessions per a year. At a certain point through those sessions, you need to go back to the GP to get the plan reviewed. The psychologist needs to send your GP status reports on your progress.

Feel the need to see a psychiatrist? You need to go to your GP and get a psychiatry referral, before the psychiatrist will see you. You have to go back to the GP once every 12 months to get the referral renewed. The psychiatrist is supposed to send regular reports back to the GP on your progress.

GPs also commonly prescribe antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, etc. Individuals with more serious mental health needs are referred to psychiatry/psychology (sometimes paediatrics for children/adolescents), also those who need prescriptions GPs can't legally write (mostly psycho-stimulants for ADHD).

All this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. One thing the Australian government is actually concerned about, is people with only mild (or even non-existent) mental health issues consuming mental health resources, causing strain on the availability of those resources for those with more severe mental health issues who really need them, and adding to the burden on the taxpayer – especially when those who seek out professional mental health services for minor issues tend to skew very middle-to-upper class, while many lower class people with serious mental health issues aren't getting enough support.

You don't "go to the doctor from time to time", unless you're in some dysfunctional medical system where doctors can make more money by doing unnecessary work. You go to the doctor when you have a problem. You don't see a doctor regularly unless you've got something wrong with you (including old age, but old age life is not exactly healthy - it just beats the alternative), and if a lot of people in a certain environment are going to the doctor regularly then there's something wrong with that environment.

On the contrary, you should go for regular checkups. Even late-stage capitalist health insurance covers these, because it help detect some problems early, before they become a bigger problem. Generally, this is once a year or so.

Nah. They're popular in America because of the corrupt healthcare-industrial complex, there's no health benefit on average.

(OTOH, if and when you notice something unusual, go to the doctor post-haste, don't wait around hoping it'll clear up or put off mentioning it until your scheduled annual medical).

There's a big difference, though.

Doctors, by and large, diagnose using a body of knowledge acquired from scientific fact backed by intensive peer-reviewed and reproducible studies. They prescribe using a similarly evidence-based foundation of facts.

Therapists (psychologists, not psychiatrists) have no such foundations in science. Much of what they "know" is from non-reproducible studies.

If you need mental health maintenance, there's literally no evidence that going to an actual therapist is any more or less helpful than meditating, religious involvement, sports clubs, homeopathic remedies, diet modification, acupuncture, etc.

I'm not arguing that taking care of one's mental health isn't a good thing, I'm arguing that there's no evidence that therapy with a psychologist is better than the placebo.

You presumably think there's a) an objective thing called "mental health" that can b) be effectively treated by talking to someone called a "therapist". But if either a or b is not correct, then there may be something wrong with going to therapy.

This. Pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, father of character analysis made a similar claim. He was pilloried for suggesting that we should focus on prevention of mental illness over treatment. To do this he said that we should radically reorient our societies so that they meet people's organismic needs. He died in US prison.

The psych establishment now is a tool to rehabilitate workers who have become unproductive, not a way to help humans fulfill their potential. Therapy has been helpful to me, but woefully inadequate. That is by design. It's not about my needs, it's about my employer's needs.

For those curious, the miracle cure was sitting inside a special magic box he claimed would do something with your "orgone energy", which was like that orgasm/organism joke but posited as a real thing his device could help you with.

They burned his books, including "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and his seminal "Character Analysis" in what has been called one of the worst instances of book burning in US history at the time. Looks like the burning times are back, eh?

He was jailed for refusing not to proselytize the Orgone box, but that was really a pretext. Orgone boxes aren't in any way dangerous. He was jailed because his theories and practice were a threat to the status quo.

To be perfectly clear, I'm familiar with multiple political prisoners in the USA and am well aware that the US does imprison people for political reasons. I'm just not convinced that this guy is one of them.

Sometime I wish we had a real, secular, replacement for the church that existed off of donations (with basically everyone donating for cultural reasons) and took care of education, medicine, community building and psychiatric support. One that wasn’t the government, obviously, since that has the monopoly on violence as well.

Is therapy any more effective than that? Or do they just repeat you into submission until you sing the right tune even if you don't believe in it?

I'll say it: it was completely useless, a total waste of time. I wouldn't consider speaking to a therapist about anything ever again.

However -- I did have some breakthroughs with a life coach I found watching youtube vids. It was really helpful for me to go into a therapeutic relationship when I already know I can connect with the coach on a personal level.

That didn't happen to me but I live in a large city where I've come across (many) other dads who seemed to have more flexible schedules as evidenced by said dads showing up for pickup/dropoff and playdates. I'm not sure if there is/was a greater acceptance for fathers taking care of young children more visibly in metropolitan areas.

>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.

Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?

See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s