I went to my GP for fatigue. It’s important to be diligent about your health when you’re vegan. Low iron, low protein, low B12. But my doctor chucked in a new one: “Could be low testosterone.” I smiled because I understood the connotations – of course my dietary requirements would butt heads with my perceived manhood, especially in a culture where straight men don’t like recycling because it’s gay.

The results came back and my testosterone was indeed abnormal: “Too high,” he said, surprised.

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Next set of results: somehow higher. My endocrinologist appointment is booked for September.

How peculiar. I’m not very aggressive, my walls remain unpunched, I cry merely thinking about the finale of Fleabag. My libido? Boringly benchmarked. Strange.

Very strange in a society that squares testosterone as synonymous to manhood and masculinity. And, in doing so, stops very legitimate and talented athletes at performing in their favourite sports.

Our society is obsessed with masculinity. It’s riddled with it.

And as the United States face another slew of mass shootings, much of the commentary wags fingers about all things tangible: video games, white supremacy, plummeting mental health, insultingly easy access to semi-automatic firearms ... yet it’s always the men. It’s the men who terrorise the land, which is admittedly unsurprising when remembering that America is a nation fashioned directly from white male supremacy: colonisation, the mass genocide of its native peoples.

The way we use “toxic masculinity” now creates a binary around an imaginary 'good man' vs 'bad man'

It’s men who commit the most heinous acts (yet we continue to sell women the idea that all they need to do is lean into it all. Very strange.)

We’re no different here in Australia. We’re a settler-colonised state, very much engaged in ongoing colonisation. And while our day-to-day atrocities might live on a less militarised scale – knifings, rape, domestic violence, abuse, wreaking havoc in Bali – we’re as committed to masculinity as all the rest.

In 2019 we finally have a semblance of a language with which to talk about sexual assault and abuse thanks to the global response of the #MeToo movement. We’re finally centring the narratives of victim-survivors and reframing abuse as a men’s issue, in direct result of male violence. Masculinity teaches men about their God-given rights to power, possession and entitlement; to land, to space, to women’s (and other men’s) bodies.

The narratives of #MeToo have granted a growing awareness of gender issues within the mainstream. An idea of “toxic masculinity” has managed to penetrate our Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. Toxic masculinity: aggression, possession, homophobia, emotional frigidity. The ingredients to a perfect hellscape.

What does non-toxic masculinity look like? No clue. Because at every stage and scale of masculinity – the roles, the set of normative behaviours arbitrarily assigned to little kids who are deemed to carry a certain pair of genitals – I see the same understanding around power, possession, aggression, entitlement.

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We understand men as stoic, using the women in their lives as emotional crutches, who are angry and/or misunderstood, who play with balls, eat red meat because red meat is for men, drink beer, wash, rinse, repeat but never help with the laundry because that’s women’s work.

Maybe we’ve got toxic masculinity all wrong: maybe it’s not a type of masculinity at all, but instead its ultimate descriptor.

This caution isn’t new. William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954 – a case study of what happens when you drop a group of young boys on to an island. Left to their own devices, they fall back on their socialisation. The island becomes a site of bullying, aggression, death – a microcosm of the war they seemingly escaped. Golding very much looked to explore that “darkness in man’s heart”.

But the way we use “toxic masculinity” now – as a carceral kneejerk to awful behaviour – really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It creates a binary around an imaginary “good man” vs “bad man” that isn’t altogether useful. Why? Because “bad men” will keep sprouting out from the conditions we set for the socialisation of our children. “Bad men” will keep exploiting their powers in a culture that continues to uphold and revere masculinity as a fundamental norm.

Hercules didn’t defeat the Hydra after chopping off its head – more heads continued to grow. Hercules defeated the Hydra after getting to its heart.

But the broader problem of “toxic masculinity” is that it’s neither intersectional nor does it address the structural issues shaping these men into the monsters we look to lock up. In thinking through Raewyn Connell’s work on “multiple masculinities,” – how masculinity can differ across class, race, sexuality – Michael Salter maintains: “The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well.”

In focusing heavily on individuals, with little attention paid to culture or broader structures, the easiest targets of this “toxicity” are men impacted by other forms of structural inequality (such as poverty and racism). These men are then most likely to fall back on to their masculinity due to the overarching discrimination and marginalisation they already face. For them, masculinity becomes a familiar comfort – to women’s imminent discomfort. They become the “bad men”.

But “good men” are worthy of interrogation, too. While we typically use “good” as a proxy for “non-violent”, we miss the fact that these “good men” are complicit in a culture that harms women (and other men). Our behaviours might not be necessarily “toxic” but we take little to no action in actively challenge the system or our own masculinities – because it continues to reap us enough benefits.

What could positive and healthy manhood look like? Is it just … femininity? Or are “care” and “empathy” maybe just part of the human condition?

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In 2019 we largely understand gender as socially constructed, but sometimes I fear that we forget what that really means – to construct socially means that gender comes into action through our ongoing movement, language and dialogue. It becomes enforced and reinforced through continual ritual, repetition and rehearsal from a very, very young age. The more we practice, the more we cement it as a social norm.

Today we’re far more comfortable in playing with alternatives to the gender binary. We’ve taken the playbooks handed to us as children and scribbled in notes, swapped pages – softening the hardcover borders of our masculine and feminine expression. But what we haven’t really tried is setting the book alight completely. Burning it to the ground.

Seemingly impossible? Sure. We all have such understandably large investments in our gender identities. Baby steps first: Maybe let’s recalibrate our approach to masculinity, because maybe it’s our reverence and obsession with masculinity – to constantly define it, demand it, be it – that’s most toxic of all.

At the end of the day, I’m still tired. But it’s not my iron, not my protein, not my B12.

It’s not my testosterone.

But all the masculinity is certainly exhausting.

• Dejan Jotanovic is a freelance writer based in Melbourne