Musing on ‘Toxic Masculinity’: The Question of Anger, Shame and Strength in Male Social Conditioning Andrew Follow Jan 4 · 11 min read

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Toxic masculinity is a term that is bandied around quite frequently now.

While not an academic term, it has its meaning. Advocates describe toxic masculinity as a form of masculinity that values strength, aggression, competitiveness, insensitivity and violence. Toxic masculinity posits maleness and femaleness as polar opposites and insists that both men and women must act in accordance to the gender scripts they’re given culturally and socially. In these circles, toxic masculinity is seen as a cultural blight, the root cause of male suicide, domestic abuse, homophobia, misogyny, street harassment and male depression. Advocates argue that deconstructing toxic masculinity is a central way to end issues affecting men and women. Others see the term as an attack, a means of shaming men for refusing to act in accordance with how feminists want them to: it’s argued as a way to demonize all men for the actions of a ‘bad’ few.

An important feature of masculinity research over the last few decades, influenced by the works of scholars like Raewyn Connell, is that there is not a singular, all-encompassing form of masculinity but numerous interacting kinds. Through these interweaving masculinities, a hegemony is created where some forms are held down by other more dominating ones. Queer masculinities, for example, are primary targets for denigration, and men who fail to conform to ‘traditional’ notions of manhood can be shamed through comparisons to homosexual men.

It is true that there exists a gender script that celebrates toughness in men and shames them for their weaknesses. A script that distinctly separates maleness from femaleness, and attacks the lack of appropriate manliness in a man by degrading him as either a woman or a homosexual. It’s hard to not see some of these elements appearing in many heterosexual men’s behaviour. Examples of male friendship or affection is commonly prefaced or followed with a ‘no homo’ type comment. Men are sometimes encouraged to ‘take no shit’ from anyone by enacting various degrees of confrontational and aggressive responses. Walking away from a conflict can be seen as cowardice — or, more misogynistically, ‘being a pussy’. Discussing feelings is seen as a ‘wimpy’, thing to do. When women make decisions in relationships, the man can be called ‘whipped’ or emasculated. And most of us will have either bottled up something emotionally out of shame, or fear of judgement. “No one should see a man cry!” we might’ve told ourselves. In this sense, the primary mode masculine respectability is often framed as being emotionally stolid, rational, dominant and in control of the situation. Aggression is preferable to passiveness.

When it comes to everyday reality, these behaviours tend to exist on a spectrum within individuals, rather than being a base-level norm for all men. Some may have deeper psychological causes for allying with certain traits outlined by the toxic masculinity theory beyond just social conditioning. Many violent men will have been conditioned through abusive childhoods and unsafe hometowns to see violence as their outlet for suffering, stress and anguish, even survival. Within the journalist and blog worlds, many writings on toxic masculinity often assert that anger is the ‘only’ acceptable male emotion. Rather, I think, there are two components here: anger is more acceptable for men to express than frailty and sadness. Anger is enlivening; sadness defeating; anger is a spur to action whereas despair is wallowing in hopeless inaction. The second is that many men’s emotions are acceptable — provided they are expressed in the correct way to the correct group of men. It’s not necessarily the emotions, but the ways in which they’re expressed that become policed. Shouting someone down in anger — “Now you damn well listen to me, boy!”- may be seen as a dominant, in-control response, whereas crying and pointing an accusatory finger about how this person has ‘hurt you’ is less palatable behaviour for many men. One appears as a powerful front, the other appears more histrionic, even ‘womanly’. Shouting, “I’m having a fucking good time!” is a more masculine way of expressing happiness than speaking with warm affection: “I’m having a good time, I love hanging out with you guys!” might be met with a homophobic insult from some men. One is aggressive, vague. One is gregarious and daintily said.

Complicating things further is that many of the traits associated with toxic masculinity can be beneficial when practised in moderation. Anger can be a useful emotion in developing boundaries when responding to mistreatment or exploitation: being angry when you’ve been wronged, mistreated or belittled teaches you not to tolerate that behaviour again. To my amusement, I’ve seen some advocates suggest that any display of male anger is toxic, and I have seen discussions on whether men should not “sound angry” or “frown” when upset — a position that seems impossible to me. Assertiveness can be extremely useful as a skill in many professional and personal situations. Many women are undermined by society’s unwillingness to encourage assertiveness in them. Self-reliance is extremely useful in taking care of oneself, solving immediate problems that arise and taking the initiative. On top of this, muddying the waters further, it is not hard to find women who behave in ‘toxically masculine’ ways either and who encourage the behaviour in men they know or raise. Which raises the question as to whether the behaviour is derived from the cultural conditions of gender, or if there are gendered variances in how we interpret the same behaviour when perpetrated by a man or a woman. Many psychologists report to seeing women in high-stress situations as ‘histrionic’ or ‘hysterical’ whereas men are seen as ‘aggressive’ and ‘antisocial’. This can perhaps explain some discrepancies in diagnoses for men and women in regards to such complex mental health issues like psychopathy, depression, and borderline personality disorder amongst others.

Culturally, the impossible masculine standard is one of cool rationality. A man who never panics, never frets, never responds without charm and assurance regardless of how stressful the circumstances may be. An action hero figure, in essence. No real (in the existing sense, not the value sense) man can live up to such an expectation. We all have strengths and weaknesses, we will all experience situations that we can handle with grace and those that turn us inside-out with dread and worry.

The toxicity of masculinity is often experienced less through the perspectives of the proponents for it themselves and rather the marginalized: men who do not conform to ‘traditional’ expectations of masculinity; men who have less typically ‘male’ interests (such as not caring much for sports, heavy drinking, liking poetry or romantic movies, or not being into one-night stands), gay men, and, of course, women. These groups tend to receive a barrage of shaming for their failure to conform to ‘appropriate’ masculinity. The more effeminate the gay man, the more likely he is to be viewed with disdain. In highly traditionalist circles, men behave in one way and women another. As these men are intended as the primary ‘breadwinners’ and women the ‘natural caretakers’ a sharp and unequal divide is drawn: man as an interactive, propulsive player, and woman as a passive figure. Men act, women follow. But I wonder how common such ideas are with men today in the Western hemisphere, and why some are entranced by such outdated (and unscientific) reasoning.

A few years back, when I snooped through some Pick-Up-Artist and Red Pill communities, I got a sense that these men were desperate to escape their ‘unmanly’ pasts. They had frequently been trodden on, belittled, humiliated, dateless. They were previous ‘Nice Guy’ types: forever alone, never getting any dates, and bullied by their peers. They felt afflicted with low self-worth, passivity, constant rejection, and insecurity. The seduction community offered them an easy way to the top, seemingly: one where they could learn to be successful as well as dominant over women and other men alike. A life where people would shower them with admiration or sit and look on them with intense jealousy as they saw how masculine and dominant they were. In reality, most of these men had traded in one misbegotten lifestyle (codependent passiveness) for another (controlling narcissism).

One of the common ‘themes’ in many of their responses that I noted was they were often looking down on therapy and emotional expressionism. They saw it as a womanly activity, a passive one, indirect, slow and pointless. They often seemed to tell themselves, We’re the alpha males, the strong ‘natural’ leader men. We took action and got laid! Unlike those betas trying to embrace their sensitive sides like big girls! Something about it struck me as rather sad; they were chasing a distraction, following paths of superficial validation. They bought into a form of masculine identity that sold them a power fantasy that would, I imagine, one day come crashing down when it turned back to emptiness and dissatisfaction. When you see all women as manipulative and whorish, all men as competition, and the world as a superficial game — how long until you become rotten and rage-filled? Of course, ‘the Red Pill’ is far from a universally accepted perspective of manhood. It is most likely to inspire anger or befuddlement in most men who come across its extremity. Those attracted to it are often vulnerably impressionable men, or the already deeply embittered. It does however take the common gender expression to its limit: the idea of the gender binary, that men and women are two distinctly different groups who must behave in separate ways that cannot be merged or overlapped. Men must be masculine; women must be feminine. And under this paradigm, women usually get the short-stick in regard to the assortment of gender-appropriate traits.

With this in mind, perhaps an important component of toxic masculinity is the notion of the ‘masculine superior’ that things deemed manly have an innate superiority to things deemed womanly. Crying and talking about feelings is highly therapeutic and helpful, yet the perceived ‘inaction’ of it pushes many men away. Opening up is seen as a ‘waste of time’ to avoid solving problems; the expectation of assertiveness is always lingering in such judgements. Men act, women talk. In some ways, for many men, emotional vulnerability is uncharted waters: it produces anxiety, fear, and trudges up unacceptable emotional states: shame, weakness, sadness,anger, inadequacy, trauma. Action, continued and undeterred, might create a continual distraction from such things. For some reason, it never quite occurs to many that these things can be balanced as a marriage.

When I was a teenager, having received a seemingly endless stream of emasculating abuse, I developed some misogynistic sensibilities and outlooks. One of which was, primarily, that I didn’t want women liking the same things I did. I felt, on some emotive level, it lessened it and opened it up to mockery. At the same time, my interests were never traditionally feminine things such as dancing, but rather dinosaurs and fantasy, books and guitars. Perhaps the insults were just a default; once upon a time everything was called ‘gay’ to establish it as lesser. Masculinity and femininity might be internalised as barometers of quality as well as behavioural expectations. “This is for boys!” and “This is for girls!” separates many things into simplistic categories that ought not to overlap. I was saw a woman tell her daughter, who wanted a Batman shirt, “That’s for boys, you’re a girl. Find girl’s shirt.” It seems none of us can really escape this enforced binary in how we should talk, act, think, feel and what we ‘should’ like.

“Can you believe it, Chad? The women want to do man-things!” (Image Credit: Unsplash.com)

Men and women are, in fact, not particularly different on the whole. Masculinities vary from culture to culture, place to place, group to group. Still, some collectives of men see conservatism as a calling; a return to an idealised period of when life was glorious, women were loyal, and men were the “strong, silent” type. Emotions are shameful for men: the Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper fantasies say so! Such men fear to lose the conception of masculinity as they know it or have come to depend on it.They develop ‘toxically masculine traits’ perhaps to compensate for their feared deficiencies. Perhaps rageful aggression, even violence, is a means of dealing with feelings of shame and hurt so excruciating they don’t know how to examine them with words. They develop hyper-masculine fronts to fend away the gnawing doubts they have about themselves. The man who wants a physical fight over a perceived insult or disrespect, for example, has been raised in a culture of men who need to dominate others to ‘teach them’ a lesson. “Break a boy’s jaw and he won’t talk shit to you again!” a man once told me, growing up.

But I think there is a factor within all this is that there are many forms of ‘masculinity’ and these various forms can have differing degrees of interaction with the ‘toxically masculine’ traits. A man can be very focused on self-reliance, to the point of harming himself by refuting all attempts to help him, yet abhor violence and sexual harassment. A man can be emotionally closed off, eating his feelings and hiding from them, yet never think of saying something homophobic or having affairs. A man may not be the hyper-dominating type but instead extremely passive and simmering with resentment; the entire world uses him as its doormat until one day he explodes in a display of colourful abusive rage. Such situations lead me to ponder how many toxic masculine traits are men responding to feelings of shame, repression, and humiliation born out of their past. A man who felt abused and walked over may come to respond with a kind of hyperdominance, trying to remain on top and in control, even hurting others, out of genuine terror that “If I’m not on top, they’ll be stomping all over me!”

In a world where masculinity is often individualistically defined, where research has shown it can subject to change over time, and that different groups, cultures and classes have varying ideas of what is and isn’t masculine, ‘toxic masculinity’ remains a somewhat peculiar concept. Its net is cast broadly, and many men will reject some of its propositions whilst endorsing others. Some of its attributes are a matter of intensity rather than being out-right harmful on their own, and can even be very effective when practised in moderation. Too often in these debates it seems as though ‘toxic masculinity’ is a placeholder term, something attributed to any misbehaviour in men or any unlikeable attitude or outlook that a man may have. Frequently, it is often forgotten that many men who live lives with violence or hold repressive outlooks have often been formed through brutalisation, shaming and invalidation by trusted family members, by friends and peers, and by the overarching cultural training and reinforcement of their background, often from the earliest and most vulnerable of ages.