There is no toxic masculinity, only toxic people. The term toxic masculinity serves no purpose other than to denigrate a class of people that share masculine characteristics. It's ironic that I most often see the concept pushed by people that claim to be against sexism.
> The term "toxic masculinity" does not imply "masculinity = toxic".
It totally does, this is why those two words are used in that expression. The plan is to skew the meaning of masculinity by making the colloquation widely used enough, until it's automatically associated with toxicity even when that word is not present.
> People refer to toxic masculinity, a set of problematic behaviors some men exhibit as part of attempting to appear "manly" that includes traits such as: homophobia, glorifying unhealthy habits (e.g., drinking like a man, don't cry like a woman, mental health issues depicted as "weakness", etc.) They're not referring to masculinity, itself, as being toxic.
Yes, toxic masculinity ? masculinity. Broadly speaking, toxic masculinity has to do with behaviors that are deleterious to the one behaving that way, others, or both. Nobody is going to claim for example that a man’s efforts to be a warm, supportive father who strives to be his family’s rock (a pretty traditional male archetype) are toxic.
>The reality is, proponents of the idea of "toxic masculinity" provide almost no examples of "healthy masculinity" (or "toxic femininity").
Almost any article you read about toxic masculinity and in every discussion where it comes up, proponents take pains to point out, often in laborious detail, and to futile effect, that the term isn't meant to assign toxicity to all masculine behaviors. One shouldn't need to provide a list of "non-toxic" masculine behaviors as well as a list of "toxic feminine" behaviors in order for the concept to be understood as presented.
The people using toxic masculinity in mainstream conversation to mean "all masculinity is toxic" are, primarily, its opponents, not its proponents.
This is not what toxic masculinity means. It's not saying masculinity is toxic, toxic is a qualifier not a description. It's used to talk about those attitudes which are ascribed by some people to be super masculine, but actually are just unhealthy (like hyper aggression, or the idea, ironically, that men shouldn't ask for help or complain about anything)
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.
Well, toxic masculinity isn't really a thing I recognize.
There is masculinity but claiming it's toxic is an absurd form of shaming which rests on the assumption that there are masculine traits which are objectively toxic.
> When people use the phrase "toxic masculinity", they don't mean "masculinity (which is toxic, by the way)": they mean " the parts of masculinity that are toxic".
This is technically defensible, just as "the patriarchy" is technically an abstract term.
But keep saying "masculinity" always prepended with "toxic" and "toxic" swiftly becomes an adjective, not a subcategory, just as the patriarchy becomes an active global conspiracy it's okay to get people fired for in the fight against it.
> Except "toxic masculinity" is a simple phrase that clearly and unambiguously describes a subset of masculinity as having the trait of toxicity
No, it absolutely comes across as trying to describe all masculinity and people who say that it's clearly only describing a subset of masculinity always come across like they are trying to rationalize away how it sounds.
> “toxic masculinity” is a political dog-whistle, not a legitimate psychological concept.
This is misleading at best. Toxic masculinity has been written about in great detail and at great length in academia (in gender/women's studies literature) for going on 30 years.
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