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this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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This post right here is exactly why 'toxic masculinity' is a fucking shit term that should never be used.
The intended meaning of the phrase was never 'men, who are toxic', or even 'men who are toxic', even though that's the straight-line interpretation of it.
What it's supposed to mean is 'overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic'.
Given that that's a fucking mouthful and the short form is horribly misleading, I always go with "gender policing" instead.
Stop telling people how to do their gender, and a vast number of social problems will evaporate. It also places the blame on the actual cause of the problem, and expands to cover mandatory-performative-femininity as well, which is also a shit thing to subject people to.
Huh, I always thought this was obvious but I can see how people can take it as "men who are toxic" since feminism is flattened down in some people's minds to mean "women who want to dominate men" like wtf.
Also, thanks for introducing me to "gender policing"!
You know, gender studies is arts-faculty - people who devote their careers to parsing the subtlest nuances from the gauziest wisps of meaning.
Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.
I'm just a little bit cynical about this.
I don't think anyone actually believes that-- it seems like you see it from bad faith actors online/in the manosphere. No one thinks someone who hates "big trucks" hates all trucks, or "crowded places" hates everywhere, or more to the point, that someone who wants to cut "toxic people" out of their life is going to never see another human. Yet somehow applying an adjective to "masculinity" makes it really easy to be misunderstood?
If the argument is that they should've come up with a phrase that's less vulnerable to corruption by bad faith actors I might buy it, but I'm willing to bet that even something as specific as "overly performative aspects of how men express their masculinity because they squash their feelings and thus become dangerous to people around them, especially women" would still magically be "misunderstood" on the internet and reduced to "feminists say all men bad".
"Big" is not a negative adjective. "Truck" is not (mostly) an identity or demographic group. You'd have to make up some term like maybe "murder trucks" to get close to an analogy. Would you not suppose that someone who advocated against "murder trucks" thought trucks were bad?
"Crowded" - maybe mildly negative. "Places" - not an identity or demographic.
"Toxic" - Ok. "People" - This hardly seems like an identity or demographic. Maybe if martians start talking about "toxic humans" we'd have an analogy.
And that whole last paragraph is just a straw man.
Let's consider some real analogies.
"Poisonous Hinduism" "Virulent Femininity" "Malignant Jewishness" "Destructive Liberalism" "Pestilent Blackness" "Dangerous Queerness"
I literally just looked up synonyms for toxic and picked random identity groups. Could you imagine trying to make any of these phrases academic terms?
That's a good point, but (most) of your chosen identity aspects aren't widely known for being accountable for negative things like violence. How about something like "dangerous republicanism" or "genocidal zionism"? Maybe if exaggerated (or even say, toxic) masculinity wasn't being weaponized so much these days to lead young men toward alt right fascism it wouldn't come up in academic settings.
I think the core problem here is just a matter of rhetoric.
Like, I agree with you, and usually when an argument like this pops up, I spend most of my time making fun of the alpha male in the chat for their willful refusal to read above a 6th grade level. And it is willful, just to underline that part.
But the truth is really that it doesn't matter how correct you are. You can argue until you're blue in the face about how defensible "Toxic Masculinity" as a term really is, and you'd be right too, but that doesn't really change the fact that you are arguing about it.
You know the adage about arguing with an idiot: they'll beat you with experience.
As much as it does irk me a little bit to admit, "gender policing" is better (I think) because it's much more difficult to assail (something I think you acknowledge is worth it), and it doesn't spell out men in particular. It's really hard to have the inevitable "yes, femininity can be toxic too, jesus christ" argument when it's never even brought up.
Arguing online hardly ever changes minds, but I like to make sure that at least some voice is given to the opposition when things like this come up, just so bystanders are aware that there are opposing voices. I've already seen lemmy threads where women say there are many of the same problems here as were on reddit despite the smaller communities, so I'd hate to stand by while discussion like this goes unchallenged.
Oh, for sure. Public opposition is really important. I didn't mean to imply you shouldn't.
Like I said or implied maybe (I forget), I get really annoyed by the anti-intellectualism displayed by people who simply refuse to understand what toxic masculinity is. "But it sounds mean" should really only work as an excuse until it's explained to them, but that's never how it goes because they don't actually care. And in those cases, you're really arguing in front of an audience more than you are with them.
irony for me is that anyone i knew in genders studies or who was a militant feminist or whatever... always always always dated the most toxic violent gender stereotype dudes.
Thank you. It boggles my mind how people seem so oblivious to this problematic phrasing and how unnecessarily divisive it is. I wish these words could be plastered across the internet.
With the best will in the world, I think you're still conflating the symptom with the disease.
Gender-policing is abusive, and abused people often behave in problematic and indeed shitty ways. While of course there are no excuses for shitty behaviour, it's also incredibly shit to turn around and frame that behaviour in terms of the criteria by which they were picked out for abuse in the first place.
For intance (to get into properly uncomfortable territory), it's fair to say that systemic racism drives poverty and disadvantage, which in turn can drive all kinds of antisocial behaviour and societal problems. But imagine for one second some sociologist coming up with the concept of 'toxic Africanity' (or equivalent) to describe it. They would get fucking dragged, and rightly so.
It's not about being 'probably one of the good ones'. It's about looking at a bunch horrible maladaptive coping strategies, and asking what the hell it is we're expecting people to cope with, and why we put up with that.
Really? I've never once felt personally attacked as a cis man when I've heard the phrase "toxic masculinity." I know when I've been a tool as someone will have probably told me or I feel disappointed in myself after the fact. I'm also a queer guy and on the spectrum so I've never really given a fuck about behaving "masculine."
Strangely enough, me neither - in fact, the first time I heard that term I knew exactly what it referred to. My problem with it is that it doesn't go far enough.