I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.

I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”

A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..

But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama, being overly emotional, gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….

