Who decided that being the lone wolf uber stoic was a bad thing in the first place and therefore deserves the toxic appellation?

I’m sure in certain environments such an approach to life is the optimal strategy.

Similarly with “men need to share emotions” but perfectly legitimate emotions associated with masculinity (like anger) are toxic.

Who came up with this stuff and why?

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.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...

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.

Right, the term "toxic masculinity" exists because of stereotypes about behaviours being masculine.

It's the perfect self-describing terminology -- the very phrase is an example of the toxicity it describes!