> we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic
I know "toxic masculinity" is a dumb academic term that never should have become a slogan, but Andrew, Mr. Yang, that's not what it means.
It's like "async functions". Not all functions are async. It's okay if a function is sync. Adjectives modify nouns to make them refer to a specific subset.
It's fine to be masculine. I don't know what it means to be masculine (are monster trucks masculine? I like them anyway), but if it's safe, sane, and consensual, it's fine to be very very masculine and I support boys being masculine.
Functions are either asynchronous or synchronous. There's a dividing line between the two.
Masculine traits are not cleanly divisible like that. Is masculine emotional distance toxic? Maybe so, if it leads to unaddressed problems; or maybe not, if it helps a man to reframe things positively. Is taking control of a group toxic? Yes if it overwhelms or dominates others, and the man doesn't know how to follow; no if it's a willingness to step up only in situations where a leader is necessary. Is mansplaining a thing, and am I doing it? On the one hand, some men are braggarts and instant experts on everything; on the other, everyone needs to explain their own thoughts sometimes, even laymen.
I assume academics are well aware that some gender-coded traits are double-edged swords, but that nuance is lost in public conversations. I don't think I've ever heard a respectable public figure describe toxic femininity, either, though it obviously exists.
Good comment. In addition addition to a very complex dividing line between toxic and healthy, there is the larger problem of creating phrases of the form "toxic X" or "healthy X" where X is an identity. There is no part of our culture where X is allowed to have the value of "blackness" or "gayness" or "femininity". The wording itself reduces the entire issue of problematic human behavior to the mechanical act of decoding a persons identity and then applying stereotypes. In that sense, it very much reminds me of astrology, which asserts that it can say something meaningful about you once you tell your birthday. I say that this astrological assertion is precisely as stupid as the identity-based assertions.
Bonus: here is the actress from the Hanna TV series, describing the father character from the show, the man who sacrificed his life to protect her from extraordinary threat, and Esme Creed-Miles lazily throws out the "toxic masculinity" label. The phrase is just a reflex, at this point, and has no meaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPMdEtzoj-Q&t=433s
> There is no part of our culture where X is allowed to have the value of "blackness" or "gayness" or "femininity".
I don't think this is as true as you claim. While the word toxic isn't used, black culture and to a lesser extent gay culture are often described as toxic or harmful, either to those groups or to society more generally.
This is even more true if you look at, e.g. transness, where an article about how it's contagious was in the NYT this week. And, IME, there's usually agreement that men aren't solely to blame for toxic masculinity, while allusions to these other toxic cultures are usually used to specifically avoid addressing issues that affect those groups.
I overstated that claim. I cannot really claim anything about "all of our culture". I'm speaking purely about my real-world experience, which is informed by social media, mainstream media, the family court part of the criminal "justice" system, corporate speech codes, and specific stories of how university students have utterly destroyed the careers of professors on little or no pretext.
I suspect that the good-hearted members of any community, however that is defined, are generally more against woke/cancel culture than for it, since it dehumanizes everyone. So, yeah, your assertion is totally compatible with this state of affairs.
I apologize, I appear to have just been totally wrong, I think I crossed like three wires and ended up turning a recent article not in the NYT into an NYT oped in my head. My mistake, it wasn't my intention to mislead.
Not to give too much credit to Yang, but I think he's hitting on a point that is more subtle than you're making, perhaps by accident.
I agree with you, masculinity is good, fantastic, worth cherishing. I'm a man, I enjoy my masculinity (whatever that is, yeah), and I enjoy expressing it in mostly positive ways. This sometimes means doing stereotypically feminine things, or acting in "softer" ways, which is fine. Emotional maturity is masculine.
This leads to me sometimes being referred to as a man who is "written by a woman" or an "egg" (a trans person who isn't yet out/hasn't realized it yet). These are obviously jokes, but they're still harmful jokes, because they perpetuate the idea that my good attribute can't be masculine. This shifts from toxic masculinity being a bad subset of masculinity, to masculinity being toxic by exclusion (as nontoxic traits are inherently non-masculine).
That's a really harmful pattern, and one that people shouldn't perpetuate.
> Instead, because academia is not free from biases of its own, a condemning, shaming, loaded term was coined for this side of things.
I don't believe it started with Academia, it was a social term that came into use, I'd probably blame Twitter:
Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization.
People say this, but both them and the people they're saying it to know perfectly well it's total garbage. You neuter it right in your description, even; masculinity is partially about pushing the boundaries of what's safe or sane. If entire classes of developers never said the word 'function' in a context other than async functions, except for when they're explicitly assuring people other contexts totally exist, then 'async functions' would be comparable.
There's a difference between "toxic masculinity" and "asynchronous functions". Asynchronous functions are still functions, but there's nothing masculine about "toxic masculinity".
Toxic masculinity is literally masculine behaviors that end up harming the doer or the people around them — that’s why it’s called toxic. If you think it’s too politically charged then unhealthy masculinity is fine too.
Toxic masculinity is not solely men’s fault. It’s a systematic issue that is perpetuated by everyone.
Unhealthy independence is a good example. From the individual it’s “I don’t need anyone”, refusing help, and not forming connections. The worst manifestation of this is having to literally fight the men in my life to see a doctor for like glaringly obvious issues. It’s infuriating how many guys see it as emasculating. But from society it’s “glad to hear, because we’re not gonna offer you any help”, make you out to be a failure if you dare ask, and all media portrayal is going to make macho lone wolf archetypes seem cool and something you should strive for.
Doing a bit of thread necromancy and nitpicking here, but just want to point out that classical stoicism is not about being a lone wolf. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The idea that men always want sex is routinely described as "toxic masculinity".
Tell me, when I was sexually assaulted by a woman who told me that I should want what she was doing and there was something wrong with me if I didn't, who was being masculine?
I think you're maybe misunderstanding something about "toxic masculinity" here. Because what you're describing is exactly what I'd call a perfect example of toxic masculinity.
The conceptualization that men always want sex is false, but like it is a stereotype that exists. That someone used that stereotype about masculinity to try and justify assault (to you, perhaps to themselves also?) is what makes such stereotypes toxic. No one in a situation needs to be doing a masculinity for toxic masculinity to be present.
> who was being masculine?
I think it becomes clear very quickly that this is not really the question you want to be asking here. The implication here is that actually, it was the person who was assaulting you who was being masculine when they assaulted you, because they violated your consent. That's not a trait we should be associating with masculinity either (and so, to be clear, my answer to this question is something like "neither" or, "its unspecified", as masculinity shouldn't be a thing we choose to associate with sexual assault).
Right, that stereotype, and its use to justify sexual assault, is absolutely toxic. But there's nothing masculine about it, hence my objection to using the phrase "toxic masculinity" to describe it.
I think this is a prescriptive/descriptive thing? Like these are things that have historically been associated with masculinity. That's not good, but we also can't really change that unless we accept that there is a problem.
In this way, "toxic masculinity" is a useful descriptive term for a set of historically masculine-associated traits that are used to justify bad behavior both by and towards men ("boys will be boys", male-disposability, all kinds of sex-adjacent stuff, stereotypically masculine ways to (not) process feelings, attitudes around aggression, etc.).
Like I think a bunch of those are toxic traits, and I think all of them have been historically associated with and perpetuated as a part of what it means to be masculine. None of this does (or should) proscribe what masculinity should be. And also importantly, and what sometimes gets lost, these things being perpetuated aren't solely men's fault, and they certainly aren't any particular man's fault. But, a lot of them are perpetuated in historically/predominantly male spaces, so addressing many of them does predominantly fall onto individual men to speak up about and address when they happen. But it's equally important for role models in media to demonstrate nontoxic traits and that's obviously not just men's responsibility, not can you or I do much about it short of voting with our wallets.
The problem is that that term "toxic masculinity" is commonly understood as masculinity being toxic. People should stop using that term.
If you say you are "visiting the famous Golden Gate Bridge", people will understand that you are visiting the Golden Gate Bridge, and that you said it is famous. Nobody will think you meant there are many Golden Gate Bridges, but you are only visiting the famous one.
Sophisticated ideology or ideas when spread to the masses suffer an oversimplification effect. What was once used to describe toxic behaviors that men can have once disseminated into the public transform into masculinity = toxic. This spreads as a meme and turns into a form of bigotry. The author is trying to fight against the public meaning it's transformed into.
It's much like dealing with hackers who take umbrage with it's public definition meaning computer criminal, vs. the more sophisticated it thing it really means, and simultaneously being in denial about the transformation that happened many decades ago.
I know "toxic masculinity" is a dumb academic term that never should have become a slogan, but Andrew, Mr. Yang, that's not what it means.
It's like "async functions". Not all functions are async. It's okay if a function is sync. Adjectives modify nouns to make them refer to a specific subset.
It's fine to be masculine. I don't know what it means to be masculine (are monster trucks masculine? I like them anyway), but if it's safe, sane, and consensual, it's fine to be very very masculine and I support boys being masculine.