Gender Roles are not just boxes that women must fit into. While most often when you hear the phrase gender roles, it will be a feminist speaking about them, giving them the freshly painted sheen of the women’s movement, this is because it’s the feminists that invented the term. You’ll often hear conservatives or anti-feminists talking about them, but they tend to call them things like “family values” or “traditional marriage.” So both sides of that particular equation are aware that they exist, they just don’t agree on what they come from and what they mean. Conservatives believe they’re biological and good. Feminists (not liberals — many liberals can be and are in fact anti-feminist) believe they’re social, and bad.

I say this so that you understand that “toxic masculinity” to a feminist is “being a real man” to conservatives.

Often, when realizing or being told that, many will assume that this means that feminists are calling men toxic. After all, if being a real man is toxic masculinity, that must mean that feminists think men are evil, bad, wrong, or otherwise toxic, just like the name implies. So I’m going to start this discussion with gay sex. Everything I’ve just said? Put it aside for a second, we’ll come back to it, retrack your head to gay sex. I’ll wait.

Ready?

Okay. In Roman times (you know this) it was not uncommon for men to engage in romance, physical affection, sexuality and even sex with each other. You know this, you call it gay sex. The romans had lots of gay sex. Except it wasn’t gay. At the time it was not considered homosexual, and it had no effect on your status as a man, or the assumption that you would marry a woman, or anything else. It was perfectly normal behavior. But they did recognize homosexuality, and they did think it was a bad thing. They just defined homosexuality differently than we do. Homosexuality was being the submissive partner — doing it “in the butt” was gay — if it was your butt. You could go out and have ultra manly anal gay sex with anything that moved and as long as you stayed on the penis side of that particular fence, you were still a man, you were still considered heterosexual, and there was nothing wrong with you (minus, perhaps, a certain lack of decorum).

This fascinating dichotomy is still alive and well, today, in prisons. Even if both men are willing and into it, even if the “bottom” isn’t willing and was raped, the man on the penis side is a heterosexual, perfectly normal (in the circumstances) and still manly man, the man on the other side is gay (a “punk”, a “bitch”).

Now, let’s put aside, for the moment, the unfortunate implications inherant in the dichotomy. I want to go back to the idea of gender roles as boxes. All that bromantic love was acceptable because at the time, men’s boxes were much, much larger than women’s. A line graph:

Even in a more modern age, physical affection between men was still perfectly normal. Don’t take my word for it, ask some men:

So, what the hell happened? When did sitting on your buddy’s lap become gay? Well, a bit of it, certainly, is when homosexuality became a thing you were, rather than something you did. But feminists hold that there’s more to it. Why? Because there are other things men used to be able to do, that they can’t anymore. Heels were first a man’s shoe. Then women started wearing them, and men stopped. Many fashions were originally acceptable for men — ruffles, lace, embroidery, satin and brocades, feathers and brilliant colors. The color pink (blame Nazis for the pink thing, they used it to denote homosexuals).

Then those pesky feminists noticed they were in a box (a small box, cramped and dark and musty) and started pushing. And men, certainly, pushed back, but there was rising tide there that just wasn’t being held back. As much as we tried to convince women to stop working after telling them they had to to support the various war efforts, it was too late. Women figured out that they liked working. The jig was up, and we broke out of our box and started running willy nilly all over the line graph:

And yes, we were, in fact, yelling ‘woo hoo!’ the entire time.

No one mentioned that men were also in a box. I can’t even tell you that anyone knew. It’s only been relatively recently, as that box started shrinking, that people (yes, a lot of them feminists) pointed at it and said hey now, look there, that’s a man box.

And that box is shrinking, closing in on the ultra-masculine side of the scale. The freedom of movement within that scale is constricting for men as every year, more and more women “invade” and “take over.” Women are taking over university, now, and they call it a war on men, as if the women were going out and kidnapping dorm rooms and shooting male students. But you know, being well-read and book-smart, and scholarly used to be a manly thing. Real men used to be well read, educated, and able to speak intelligently on all kinds of subjects. Now? Not really a requirement. In fact, it’s kinda … a little sissy, you know? Kinda elitist and ivory tower and not what Real Men do. Real Men work the land, yeah.

Someone keeps moving the goal posts of what it means to be a man. It’s getting harder and harder to be a real man, and though we don’t much talk about it all out in the open, it’s zeroing in on the traditionally masculine areas that women aren’t actually interested in doing — the hyper-masculine traits as it were. Tough and stoic and violent. You can’t sit in your buddy’s lap for a nice comforting cuddle and be a real man, anymore. Hell, even cuddling with women is a little suspicious and effeminate. It’s hurting men, in very real, very measurable ways.

Men do not go to the doctor for preventative care as much as women do — and they are dying, younger, of more preventable diseases. But real men are tough — they don’t go to the doctor for a sniffle, hell, a Real Man wouldn’t go for a bloody gash — he’d stitch it up himself with baling wire and disinfect it with pure grain alcohol or moonshine, made in his shed. Yeah. Manly! You laugh because I just made it absurd and ridiculous, but somehow, men still aren’t managing to get in for physical exams when we know they’re likely to die of a heart attack, and that should also be ridiculous, but isn’t.

Men are committing suicide — but real men don’t talk about their feelings or go to therapists. Hell, real men don’t have feelings.

Men are the largest single demographic in homelessness, but real men don’t ask for help and don’t accept hand outs.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Today’s concept of masculinity, of what you have to be to be a man, is leaving men hurt, isolated, destitute and dead. It is toxic — not just to the women on the receiving end of their “aggressive male sexuality” or “physical power” but to the men themselves, and any bystanders who happen to be nearby when they break and go rogue and start shooting people.

You know, if I were stuck trying to live in the teenyist, tinyist corner of femininity that we can shove me into my entire life, I’d be in very real danger of breaking and going rogue and shooting people, too. I know that about myself. I know that it’s a good, good thing for me, my loved ones, and society as a whole that I am allowed to not be hyper-feminine and still be a woman. My sense of self is not tied to an idealized, impossible gender role.

And the problem is that this toxic masculinity — this idea of a real man — is integral to their very concept of self. They can’t not be men, and their only concept of man is the one society feeds them, so us trying to change toxic masculinity is an attack on something they do not believe they can change. It’s seen as a neutering, a castration, it’s emasculating, quite literally. Why? Because gender roles are “biological and good.” Remember? Masculinity came prepackaged with the penis, they are one unit, and any critical eye at one is a real and present danger to the other.

One of the most frustrating claims from the men’s right, is that feminists never help men. Let’s set aside, for now, that there are whole lot of black men, gay men, transgender men, and poor men that feminists have helped, because some of those people were women, too. And here is where the breaking point is. Feminists have come up with this term toxic masculinity to describe the harm that traditional male gender roles (Patriarchy hurts men too, yo) is doing to men, but any mention of it seen as an attack on men, because they’re still considered the same thing. Feminists are trying to help, it’s just seen as an attack. And until that changes, there’s really not a whole lot we can do.