I feel like “toxic” whatever is a twisting of positive traits into something perverse and destructive.
Tyler Durden from Fight Club is initially portrayed as an idealized “alpha male” and is apparently considered as such in certain circles. All the ways men wish they could be, that’s him. He looks like we want to look, He fucks like we want to fuck, He’s smart, capable, and most importantly, he’s free in all the ways that most men are not. But in the end, he’s ultimately a just manipulative, controlling, sociopathic, narcissistic, nihilistic, anarchist.
The female equivalent toxic role model is probably “Amazing” Amy Dunne from Gone Girl. She resonates with women who are sick of having to be the “cool girl”. She’s hot, brilliant, funny. She pretends to adore her husbands bullshit while somehow maintaining a size 2. She never gets angry and only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner and lets her husband do whatever they want while she masterminds this elaborate scheme to fuck him over. But in the end she’s also just a murderous, controlling, sexually predatory, manipulative psychopath.
To be honest, IMHO being a “real man” is mostly kind of boring and routine. Go to work. Make sure my kids do what they need to do. Try to not piss off my wife
That seems a bit excessive. I heard a discussion of “toxic fandom” and “toxic fans” recently and didn’t think it was an attack on me, even though I strongly identify as a fan. Likewise, “toxic masculinity” is a useful term for me, because it is a reminder that masculinity itself isn’t the problem. I note that folks like Alex Jones love to pretend that criticizing unhealthy versions of masculinity is an attack on masculinity itself, because their whole brand is that their sick version of masculinity is the only right one.* Nothing can prevent me from being masculine - I’m a guy - but folks like Andrew Tate try to convince young men that having sex with women is unmanly. That’s weird and sick - and distinguishing that weirdness from normal masculinity is useful to me.
*This is of course, hilarious to anyone who has been alive for a few decades, since the signifiers for true masculinity keep changing (over long and short time frames). A few years ago, Bud Light allowed a trans woman to let people know she had touched a can of their beer, and emotional outbursts from the Alex Jones of the world (remember when emotional outbursts were unmasculine?) had a conniption. Light beer was their manly drink - because the years of effort it took to convince men that diet beer wasn’t just for women have been memory-holed). The Spartans thought that arrows were a womanly weapon since arrows could be used from a distance - but today gun-owners use a Spartan slogan to defend their ranged weapons.
Who am I supposed to “cry” to about my problems? My kids can always cry to me or my wife. Most women can probably find some man to cry to if they want. Am I supposed to find a bigger man to cry to?
If I am not going to dominate my own life, who is?
I don’t need to be stronger or smarter than women. I’m not going to apologize for it either.
I’m fine not emptying my wallet or throwing my back out lifting heavy shit!
Yeah, short dudes (which by definition, statistically speaking, any dude shorter than me) definitely don’t get a lot of respect. Then again, I’m not going to NOT date Taylor Swift or Maria Sharapova because I’m only 5’10".
Mocked and despised for what? Being awesome? Feel free to make fun of my salmon pants while I taking my 6’ supermodel tech CEO wife on a date to her favorite gay bar in Chelsea.
Part of being a man is being manly enough to not give a crap about what other people think.
You’re not less than an animal, you’re more dangerous than an animal.
Human men kill at least 100x as many people in this country as any other animal. Human men are difficult to chase off, they don’t run away if you raise your arms or bang a stick on the ground.
Human men will demand attention that black bears don’t ask for, and then will get mad if their target doesn’t give it up. Nobody criticizes a person for failing to be “nice” to the nearest feral dog because they wagged their tail.
Potential hyperbole ahead:
Every single woman you know is intimately acquainted with another woman (or many other women) who has been victimized by a man. All of them.
Imagine if every single man you know is intimately acquainted with a man (or many men) who carries the scars of that time they were savaged by a dog. Yeah, you’ll be alone in an elevator, or on a dark street, or a hiking trail with an untethered dog and not worry about it at all, dogs are usually nice, right?
Word. It’s already been mentioned how pink used to be thought of as a more boy-appropriate color than blue, because it was a dilute form of the uber-manly red. I can remember in my own lifetime when long hair, earrings and neck chains on a man were considered shockingly effeminate, whereas now they’re worn by everyone from burly machanics to gym rats and rappers. Once the fashion changes, people are very incentivized to forget that what’s now commonplace used to be taboo.
What got me was how performative all that outrage really was. Did Alex Jones really care? I don’t think he did. Kid Rock had a vidoe of him shooting a bunch of Bud Light cans with an automatic weapon. Not too long after that there were videos of him drinking Bud Light, so I don’t think he really cared either. It seems that a lack of emotional self-control is entirely on brand for MAGA and very unmasculine.
Well duh, that’s what makes conventional behavior norms, right? Everybody gets told that this is the right and proper way for things to be, so conforming to that carries a lot of validation and emotional reassurance.
This is why it’s very hard for humans to determine exactly what human behaviors are “natural” or “innate”, and which are “cultural” or “learned”. Because a whole lot of people get reassurance from following cultural conventions, even if technically they don’t have to.
Nobody here except you is thinking or saying this. The more you reiterate your ridiculously exaggerated interpretation of male violence against women, the more clueless and risible your “arguments” sound.
No, my remark is not proving your point. Your “point” seems to be that whenever women experience fear or express concern about the fact that there’s a nonzero risk of male violence against women, due to a small but not easily identifiable subset of men committing such violence, that’s tantamount to calling all men “demons” and “rape and murder machines”.
That “point” is such an idiotically irrational non sequitur that it’s not capable of proof in any rational discourse whatsoever.
No, my point is that - as this thread demonstrates - people in our culture are nearly incapable of talking about men without talking about how violent and cruel and dangerous they are. The only real difference between the Right and Left is that the Right thinks that men being monsters makes them superior.
There’s been barely any talk about issues like, say, men falling behind in higher education. Why? Because it’s hard to demonize men with talk about that. Instead it’s page after page of why men are violent rapists and women are right to be terrified at so much as seeing one.
As far as most people here are concerned the “Male Inequality Problem” is that men are less than human.
! LOL! Oh yeah, the fact that “our culture” is constantly pumping out studies and opinion pieces and calls to action on that very issue indicates how “incapable” we are of talking about it:
In fact, it’s a telling illustration of how reflexively male-centric our culture’s discourse continues to be: while major institutions and media outlets are devoting huge amounts of resources and attention to discussing a problem experienced by men, large swathes of the public (since I presume you’re by no means the only one to have this wholly mistaken impression) still naively perceive the issue as being grossly neglected.
That’s the kind of catastrophically skewed perception that our baked-in cultural norms of male-centric default viewpoints tend to generate. Oh no, if a problem disproportionately affecting men isn’t being discussed and deplored 24/7, that must mean that society is ignoring and dismissing men as less than human! If women are encouraged to be cautious about male strangers in isolated places because there’s a low but nonzero probability that a strange man might be a predator seeking a victim, that must mean that women regard all men merely as monsters and demons and violent-crime machines!
Every single thing you say about this issue just makes your positions sound more ridiculous and brimful of snowflakey exaggerated grievance. If we didn’t have to spend so much time talking this kind of frenzied overreaction down off the ledge of its imaginary martyrdom, we would have more time to devote to continuing the discussion of issues that actually are problems for men, and how society should set about remedying them.
Do we, though? Why should we[1] give a single fuck about their toxic masculine[2] fee-fees?
Is it the heavily implied argumentum ad baculum[3] that it seems their only real argument? Sorry, perpetual fear[4] is not a basis for running a world.
the rest of us - women and the men not getting triggered by the perfectly understandable man vs bear responses ↩︎
Still gonna keep using it. Because it’s entirely fucking accurate. ↩︎
You said that women are “taught” to fear men. That when women like puzzlegal alter their behavior when they’re alone around men they don’t know, it’s a sign that they’ve been unduly influenced into hating and fearing men, and think men are below animals.
In order for us to talk about educational disparities and other legitimate issues experienced by 50% of the population, certain members of this board need to quit dragging the conversation into the ridiculous territory of how men are being harmed because women react to their personal lived experience of men being abusive towards women.
Is it really experienced by 50% of the population though?
The educational disparities are heavily concentrated in the lower SES group, with boy children of lower SES (and lower education) families having a synergistic double whammy.
My understanding is gender educational disparities among higher SES groups are relatively minimal. (No cite at the ready though.) Most boys of upper SES go to college too. More commonly engineering or programming than the girls. More girls in med school now. But the gender educational disparities in lower SES groups are vast.
If there is a focus to be had hitting on gender disparities in early education in lower SES groups and then into higher grades is the big issue. It is a huge intersectionality item of SES multiplied by gender race and family structure impacts.
I think there is a useful distinction to be made between “I am not a monster, rapist, violent hot-tempered rabid-dog danger, I reject all of that model of how to be a male”, on the one hand, and “Excuse me, but it is insulting to us males to characterize us as monsters, rapists, violent hot-tempered rabid-dog dangers”, on the other hand.
If @Der_Trihs wants to argue that neither the quantitative data studies nor the testimonials of personal experience from women are accurate reflections of how men in the aggregate have behaved, I’d be inclined to dismiss him with another classic eyeroll, but if he’s rejecting it as model for himself and his own coming to terms with being male, there’s a lot more room to see that as constructive and positive.
But overall, you can’t embrace the conventional shrink-wrapped notions of masculinity and male sexuality while getting all resentful when people point out that those notions are very much components of rape and violence.
I cannot deny that the shrink wrapped product you imagine is on the shelf, but I reject the notion that that is the product of “masculinity” most men have purchased. Note, that is not commenting on institutional or even implicit gender bias issues, a different subject than what we each explicitly have as archetypes. It may be the product you have in your head as “masculinity” but you are incorrect to presume what any of the rest of us have in ours.