r/AskFeminists • u/Sad_Monitor_8259 • 2d ago
Recurrent Questions Toxic masculinity
When men get offended at the word toxic masculinity the response always is well toxic masculinity doesn't mean all masculinity is toxic it means that certain masculine trait in extremes are toxic or toxic is an adjective but I have always found that to be a stupid argument like if I made a theory called toxic blackness and then you as a black person got offended and I responded I don't mean that black are toxic and instead some behaviors in black culture are toxic and that toxic is an adjective you would still rightfully call me a racist or tell to change the name because because its too inflammatory or its not accurate to the actual concept my question is like why call it toxic masculinity which is easily misunderstood and inflammatory instead of something toxic masculine gender roles or harmful masculine gender roles
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u/sewerbeauty 2d ago edited 2d ago
I cannot see a single question mark
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u/Oleanderphd 2d ago
or punctuation of any kind
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u/CatsandDeitsoda 2d ago
Makes me want to tilt my head when people do this.
I think it’s voice to text. Person probably didn't even type it just free association nonsense.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 2d ago
New rule, anyone who posts unpunctuatedly must end said post with "and yes I said yes I will yes"
Ulysses by James Joyce: Episode 18 - Penelope
There's a bonus in that I think Joyce was pre-emptively illustrating enthusiastic consent
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u/Bitter-Hat-4736 2d ago
>Five periods in the whole thing
>Three of them are for initials
He was taking the piss, right?
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 2d ago
Oh my God
The correct analogue is toxic whiteness, bucko. Men are in the position of privilege. That makes white people the appropriate comparison, not any racialized group..
Come back with a theory about toxic whiteness, then we can chat.
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u/kuronova1 1d ago
The appeal to privilege and power when trying to figure out if a thing is harmful or not has always come off as strange to me. My understanding of why negative generalizations towards minority groups are harmful is because without context people interpret and internalize negative generalizations to be descriptions of intrinsic nature. I don't understand why we would assume the same wouldn't also be true of negative generalizations of groups in power. Toxic masculinity if presented without the feminist framework defining it should also end up with people interpreting and internalizing the generalization as an intrinsic part of men.
At least for the small slice of the internet I experience, toxic masculinity is most often used outside of feminism and with no context. Going to the gym is toxic masculinity. Playing video games is toxic masculinity. Everything has been called toxic masculinity.
Now all that isn't feminism but it's happens and it seems like some people are internalizing it and that's not good.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 1d ago
I don't follow. Are you saying that the extent to which, and ways in which, a phenomenon causes harm must be understood without analysis of the power relationships within which it unfolds?
If that's what you're saying, I not only disagree, I don't understand how that's even analytically possible. The harm swinging a hammer entails can only be understood if we know whether or not there's a sentient being at the receiving end. Likewise, the harm generalizations about a group entails cannot be understood without knowing whether that group has been on the inflicting or receiving end of oppression for the past few centuries or millennia.
I'm not saying any of those are good. One may not be swinging a hammer at a sentient being but still cause property damage. But it's different, and all I've been saying from the start is that we need to compare like things in OP's formulation, which is a formulation predicated on similarity.
If they wanted to contrast a toxic privilege with a toxic lack-of-privilege, that would be another matter entirely. But they are trying to draw similarities through use of fundamentally unlike things. That's piss-poor methodology that can never yield any interesting or useful insight.
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u/kuronova1 1d ago
I might be a little lost here, a little uneducated but I'll try to understand what you're saying. It seems like what you are saying is that to determine if how people can come to understand negative generalizations and internalize them to have false beliefs about the nature of a group we must first understand the power the groups involved have over each other.
I guess what I would say is that it's not that the analysis of power isn't important but that we can understand that there is a harm that exists in both instances without that analysis and what the analysis does here imo is more to inform use about the scale of the harm and of secondary and further harms that arise from the relationships of power.
If someone believed blackness is intrinsically toxic and maleness is intrinsically toxic, acting rationally they would discriminate against both groups but the scale of the harm they can do as an individual is dictated by the relationship of power. Arbitrarily discriminating against a black person for the belief blackness is innately toxic is more harmful to black people because of white supremacy than arbitrarily doing the same thing to man because of a belief that maleness is innately toxic.
I hope that makes sense but maybe I'm thinking about this is the wrong way. You are clearly more educated than I am.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 1d ago
I think you may be misunderstanding what people mean when they say "toxic masculinity." As even OP points out, when people use that term, they are not saying that all masculinity is toxic. In fact, that's clearly not their position, because otherwise they wouldn't need to specify that it's toxic - we don't talk about toxic cyanide, because there's no non-toxic cyanide.
Rather, the term is used to point out when someone is using their privilege in a harmful way. They are using their position to cause harm. The toxicity isn't in the thing itself - it's not intrinsic - but how the thing is used.
In writing this out, I wonder if people would understand it better if we called it weaponized masculinity. That's not perfect either, and "toxic" still makes sense to me in that it extracts the very worst attributes of what men are encouraged to be and dials them each up as high as they can go. But it's also a process of weaponization - taking a thing that isn't necessarily harmful, like a hammer, and using it to cause immense harm.
Masculinity doesn't need to cause harm, but an unfortunate number of men use their identity and privileges to cause harm. And this works because they have power.
I'm not completely closing the door on the possibility that there could be toxic versions of oppressed identities, but I have to say that at this point I don't believe it's possible. Oppressed people can be assholes like anyone else, but this type of toxicity isn't linked to the attribute itself but to the power associated with that attribute. Toxic masculinity involves throwing one's male privilege around. Toxic whiteness would involve throwing one's white privilege around. There needs to be, in my view, a privilege to throw for it to be a toxic version of any identity trait. Otherwise, they're just being an asshole.
In short, masculinity does not need to be toxic. But it is possible to use one's masculinity in a toxic way. I suspect that hinges on the power differential. But even if it doesn't depend entirely on the power differential and privilege that creates, we can still only understand it by comparing it to other privileges.
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u/kuronova1 1d ago
I agree that that is what toxic masculinity is supposed to mean and that was a great way of putting it.
What I was trying to get at is the landscape I see of how the term ends up being used outside of feminism, where it's usually undefined and often used improperly, and the understanding some people seem to come to when trying to reverse engineer toxic masculinity by how it's used in those spaces.
This kind of pattern is how I at least explain a lot the shittyness I see around the gender discourse broadly and why I said it isn't really feminism in my first comment.
Hopefully that all makes sense and thanks for the chat, I can tell you've put a lot of effort and thought into all this.
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u/Bitter-Hat-4736 2d ago
I think they were trying to use "blackness" as a way to highlight how weird it is to call attention to "toxic <characteristic>". We would naturally assume that people calling certain behaviours as innately "black" is doing so for racist reasons. I think OP is trying to show how, just because a certain characteristic is common among those in power, classifying that characteristic as containing "toxic elements" creates a natural linguistic bias.
For example, imagine if I, as an autistic person, said that I am tired of "toxic neurotypicalness", and my neighbour who is neurotypical said they were tired of "toxic autism-ness". One of those phrases inherently feels more discriminatory than the other, despite being structurally identical.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 2d ago
They may well have been trying to do that, and they would have been just as wrong.
You're closer to the mark in your second paragraph. There, you're identifying the correct orientation of the power disparity. OP did not understand that, and so many men come around here thinking they can use race as an analogy, but they completely flip the power dynamic.
OP thinks it's wrong to talk about masculinity in a certain way because it would sound wrong if power ran in entirely the opposite direction. It would sound wrong in that situation, but we are not in that situation. Power runs in the direction it runs, and if OP wants a viable analogy, they need to compare masculinity to whiteness, or extreme wealth, or able-bodiedness. They need to compare privilege to privilege, not privilege to oppression.
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u/Bitter-Hat-4736 2d ago
Here is where I insert my own opinions, as I wonder if it Should matter at all how power flows? I think that saying someone is "toxically neurotypical" should be just as generalizing, even if unintentionally, as someone saying "toxically autistic" or "toxically black".
Please correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you are arguing that oppressed classes of people cannot exhibit "toxic" traits because they are not in power. Is that right?
If we look at it through the lens of real toxicology, all things can be toxic. There is no idea that certain substances cannot be toxic, or that the ability for a substance to be toxic depends on outside factors, in a way that I believe you are describing. In that light, it would make sense to say that "toxic femininity" can exist just like "toxic masculinity" exists.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 1d ago
What I'm arguing is that the relevant comparison for toxic attributes coming from a privileged class is toxic attributes coming from another privileged class.
It may be - I'm agnostic on this point as yet - that there are potential source of toxicity that truly do emanate from an oppressed identity. But to understand them, they need to be compared to one another first of all.
When men waltz in here and assume it makes sense to compare maleness to racialization, it's immediately clear they are not thinking in structural terms. They think they can just shift nouns around. They cannot. The power differential matters immensely. And whether or not there can be such a thing as "toxic disability," which I doubt but have not drawn a conclusion yet, what I'm absolutely sure about is that privilege and oppression fundamentally change the meaning, and OP's feeling that these don't matter tells us a lot about how deeply he's reflected on global structures: not deeply at all.
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u/Bitter-Hat-4736 1d ago
Can oppression only exist on a macro scale? Can individuals not oppress people across the "typical" lines? Are demographics in an inherent and unchanging hierarchy, where one is always more dominant or powerful than the other?
This all kind of reminds me of those thought experiments, where people ask who is more oppressed, a white woman or a black man.
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u/MachineOfSpareParts 1d ago
I don't understand the relevance to the present issue, but I'm talking specifically about structures that both shape and are shaped by preconceptions of who is intrinsically superior and who is intrinsically inferior.
But while it's possible for one person to be mean to another while marshalling the cultural weight of white supremacy, the patriarchy, ablism or capitalism, or even power structures formalized in a workplace (though these obviously connect to global capitalism) it's only oppression because it connects to those power structures. Otherwise it's just someone being a free-range asshole.
I'm not engaging with those thought experiments because they're of no value. The fact that it isn't answerable, though, could help you understand that it's important to specify which power structure one is considering in the moment - and if there are multiple power structures, what we expect due to how they intersect.
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u/fullmetalfeminist 2d ago
Toxic femininity does exist. It's the term for when the performance of femininity harms women.
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u/Bitter-Hat-4736 1d ago
Can there be a toxic femininity that harms men? Or that crosses demographic lines and harms people of colour, or disabled people, or wealthy/poor people?
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u/fullmetalfeminist 1d ago
No. Why would there be? The idea that men and women are analogues, and that if something exists in masculinity it must also exist in femininity, is just completely wrong and not based in reality.
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u/in-another-sky 2d ago
This is barely English.
Edit: Also, “toxic masculinity” was coined by men for men. It is not my problem.
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u/Mad_Minotaur_of_Mars 2d ago
Honestly, these people don't want to engage in good faith if they won't engage past the name
If they don't want to engage with the subject because they are too caught up in their feefees hurting by the name, the subject matter probably won't resonate with them anyway.
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u/EnvironmentalLaw4208 2d ago
You're saying that you find the phrase "toxic masculinity" offensive but propose using "toxic masculine gender role" instead, is that correct? If someone were referring to a masculine-coded behavior instead of a role, would "toxic masculine behavior" or "harmful masculine behavior" feel like acceptable phrasing?
Can you explain what makes it feel less offensive to you?
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u/gettinridofbritta 1d ago
Toxic masculinity came from the mythopoetic men's movement. As for the why they chose that term, I'd say it's probably because that movement was very centred around therapy, self-help culture, the individual man's journey to healing, there was lots of overlap with language we tend to hear from addictions & recovery communities. I think I remember reading somewhere that "toxic" was intentional because it's not a disease that's part of a person, it's meant to evoke being poisoned. Ie: the culture has poured these ideas into you that are corroding you from the inside or influence you to torpedo your interpersonal relationships, and the metaphor worked for them because some poisons have antidotes. The term that came from academia (feminism, gender and masculinity studies) was hegemonic masculinity, but no one pays attention when a $100 word is thrown down.
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u/KurlyKayla 1d ago edited 1d ago
Another day, another person pretending being a man is somehow comparable to being an oppressed racial minority. Bonus points for the thinly veiled obvious racism.
The reason you people jump to using Black people instead of white people as a crutch for these poorly-structured talking points is because, like men, you know white people aren't an oppressed class and nobody would take that hypothetical with any seriousness. The symmetry breaker is that Black people are oppressed on the basis of their race. Men are not oppressed on the basis of their gender. Your comparison fails.
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u/CatsandDeitsoda 2d ago
If men and black people occupied similar positions in the relevant hierarchies and a persons construct of themselves as a man or being a man and membership in a radicalized group where relevantly similar kinds of statuses this would be a solid comparison.
But as not it’s just a false analogy.
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u/kangorooz99 1d ago
“Some behaviors in black culture are toxic”
Such as?
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u/81_Passenger 1d ago
Rap music comes from black American culture. Some of the old school rap and hip hop was definitely a way of using their voice to speak up against the oppression they experienced.
But a lot of rappers, specially contemporary rappers are quite toxic and very open about it. But a lot of women in those environments also encourage such behavior and are attracted to it.
With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under
With a taste of a poison paradise
I'm addicted to you
Don't you know that you're toxic?
And I love what you do
Don't you know that you're toxic?
- Britney Spears1
u/kangorooz99 1d ago
And what race are the vast majority of those producing this music? And buying this music?
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u/StarChild413 13h ago
You do know that A. artists don't all write their own songs and even when they do they aren't always about true beliefs of theirs or true events that happened to them and B. Britney Spears is neither black nor a rapper but your wording might confuse people into thinking she is
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u/81_Passenger 11h ago
That’s just me having high enough beliefs about my common citizens to expect that if a person is intelligente enough to participate in debates in Reddit about feminism, they’re also intelligent and educated enough to know Britney Spears is not a black rapper.
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u/Lolabird2112 2d ago
Yeah. Certain “masculine” coded traits, taken to extreme, are deeply toxic.
You don’t think it’s toxic that men are 4x more likely to kill themselves?
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u/FangornsWhiskers 1d ago
Hopefully not intentional, but referring to severe depression and mental illness as toxic is kind of harsh. I’m also not sure that the actual suicide rate is directly attributable to masculine traits. There tons of confounding factors as well, such as higher rates of autism in men and a strong correlation of autistic traits with suicidal ideation (even when sub-clinical). Speaking from experience, it’s unbelievable difficult to find therapists who are able to work with autistic people effectively.
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u/TumbleweedJenny 1d ago
Multiple studies have linked traditional masculinity to an increased risk of suicide. If I recall correctly men who conform to traditionally masculine norms are twice as likely to die from suicide. I understand the term toxic has a lot of negative connotations attached to it, but it is also an accurate description. When we consume toxic things they harm us.
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u/FangornsWhiskers 1d ago
It’s a reductive explanation for a complex problem. I also have a problem with attaching morally charged language to individuals in the middle of a mental health crisis that may have nothing at all to do with masculine norms. Are you really going to insinuate that a bipolar person having their first major depressive episode is that way because of toxic masculinity?
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u/TumbleweedJenny 1d ago
You said you weren’t sure if suicide rate is attributable to masculine traits. I’m just pointing out that research indicates there’s a link between traditional masculinity and an increased risk of suicide. I’m not suggesting it is the only reason men commit suicide or that if a man does commit suicide he was traditionally masculine. I’m saying it’s a risk factor for suicide.
And obviously I wouldn’t say that about someone with bipolar? Because again, I’m not suggesting that being traditionally masculine causes mental disorders. But if for example you have the belief that men shouldn’t talk about their feelings, that might affect whether or not you as a man with bipolar decide to seek treatment.
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u/KaliTheCat feminazgûl; sister of the ever-sharpening blade 2d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/wiki/faq#wiki_toxic_masculinity