I’ve been thinking lately about the term toxic masculinity™. You can’t escape it, especially if you follow popular culture commentary. A 13-year-old boy with anger issues stabs a girl in Adolescence, a British-made-for-Netflix drama: toxic masculinity! A Black Mirror astronaut, driven mad by extreme isolation and the murder of his wife and two children, bludgeons the wife and child of his co-pilot: toxic masculinity!
What a sad and reductive epithet. All nuance is boiled down to a culturally determined expression of maleness, because, of course, we’re told that masculinity itself is a culture construct, not anything real, and our culture has created a toxic masculinity.
Oh no, some people will say. Don’t you get it, professor? Toxic is an adjective. It’s only one kind of masculinity. Yeah, right.
That argument might hold if our culture advanced any notion of positive or authentic masculinity. But I see little evidence of that, though, ironically, it was just such a notion that gave rise to the term in question.
During the 1980s and 90s, there arose something called the Men’s Movement, a mythopoeic discourse inspired by Robert Bly’s short book, Iron John, and expressed in an organization known then as the New Warrior Training. I participated in that movement. I can’t say I had much of a voice in it, but I put in my time beating drums and running naked in the woods.1
One of the movement’s leaders, Shepherd Bliss, reportedly coined the term toxic masculinity to describe a subset of authentic or true masculinity. It was masculinity gone wrong, and the toxiciticity was largely understood to be more internal than external. In other words, the man was poisoning himself. He needed to discover deep masculinity, true masculinity. He needed to heal.
But the idea of deep, true masculinity has been all but forgotten. And the men of the New Warrior Training, renamed the Mankind Project, a neutered rebranding if you ask me,2 barely register in the broader culture.
Today, we seem to only have two spokespersons for masculinity: Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Peterson shares with Bly a Jungian perspective on the deep masculine and has done some fine work in this area, and helped many young men develop a more authentic masculinity. But his center-right conservatism made him unpalatable to anyone, male or female, on the Left. And his tepid Christianity left suspicious many on the right. Plus, he’s kind of verbose.
Tate, on the other hand, has riz—at least if you are a 14-year-old boy feeling put upon by all the girl power rhetoric in popular culture and the classroom. He has become the poster child of toxic masculinity and even earns a mention in Adolescence.
But Tate’s not toxically masculine. He’s just an A-hole. His abuse of women and financial exploitation of men is not an expression of real masculine strength or any form of masculinity our culture seeks to imprint on men. It’s an expression of his own troubled psyche, his own poisoned soul.
Bliss’s original use of the term may have been useful when it was understood as a subset of a healthy masculinity, not as a synonym for Western masculinity. But as with many things, popular commentary indifferent to its original intention, has denuded and distorted its meaning, rendering it useless for anything other than a shorthand slap at men themselves— and a way of avoiding any deeper thinking about what motivates individual men to do terrible things.
Do I have a suggestion for a substitute term? I’ve already mentioned one. A-hole. There are probably more nuanced and sophisticated versions of that. Damaged individual. Psychically wounded person. None of them is gendered.
Or maybe we can just resist the urge to slap a label on things?
I wrote this this morning while walking my dog, Patrick. It’s the first of what I am calling “Summer Dispatches” (or maybe “Dog Dispatches?”), briefer, less polished pieces that will occasionally land between my longer, deeper posts.
Patrick would also like to add his two cents: he says it’s perfectly fine to keep a found ball from your human and not the least bit toxic.
Apologies for that image. . . .
Originally named “Wild Man Weekend,” make of that what you will.
"But Tate’s not toxically masculine. He’s just an A-hole."
Yep. There are A-holes and jerks on the left and the right, both male and female.
On the other hand, there are strong and kind people in the same places.
I was thinking about this yesterday. I was reading an academic, feminist book about p*rn*graphy which did speak about "toxic masculinity," but which failed to define what was toxic about it and what a non-toxic masculinity would look like (beyond not involving p*rn, which I would agree with). I was left with the impression than anything other than the most feminised, violence-free, competition-free male personality would be seen as "toxic."
(The author also describes letting her nephews and nieces, aged eight to thirteen, watch the James Bond film "Casino Royale" and her being shocked by the violence, without saying why on earth she thought it was a good idea to let an eight-year-old watch such an adult film. I certainly wouldn't.)