To illustrate that, look at a much less-inspected form of gender toxicity: toxic femininity. It exists and is just as pernicious as toxic masculinity in how it affects all people regardless of gender.

Toxic femininity is in evidence when a woman won’t let herself eat anything but a salad while on a date lest the person across the table realize she is an omnivorous being who sometimes tears her teeth into flesh. It’s in evidence when every sweater in a woman’s closet is thinner and frailer than any in a man’s possession and when a parent insists on piercing the ears of a moments-old girl baby to ensure she looks ornamented and sufficiently “pretty.”

Like toxic masculinity, toxic femininity comprises countless idiosyncratic rules and manipulative insecurities. Each victim of it may have their own warped understanding of what the rules entail. Perhaps makeup is required. Perhaps having a lengthy and complicated nightly facial care routine is essential. For some women, drinking brown booze and eating meat is unacceptable; for others, there is a charming, winking way to consume “manly” food that is somehow the height of alluring femininity. And then there are many who think the requirements of femininity are all about love, parenting, giving, and being of service.

The exact rules don’t matter so much as their rigidity and the insecurity they inspire. In fact, toxic femininity is most pernicious when the rules are a bit confusing or impossible to fully follow—like when a woman is forever scrambling to be acceptable, to look the way ladies are meant to look, and to behave in a manner both alluring and undemanding. The more desperate a woman is to follow the ever-shifting, contradictory rules, the easier she is to control and exploit.

Toxic femininity is not the same thing as simple “sexism,” but sexism and toxic femininity are certainly partners in crime. Sexism says that a woman is too frail or docile to play a contact sport; toxic femininity says that you don’t want to play football anyway, sweetie, you would look horrible and sweaty in the helmet and pads. Sexism is focused on robbing women of status and rights; toxic femininity is about defining womanhood so shallowly that a woman feels de-gendered by basic human acts or neutral preferences. Both factors lead to women being compressed into impossibly tight, uncomfortable shapes. One is the carrot and the other is the stick.

I am not a woman, but I have been told many times in my life that I needed to work harder to be one. My Girl Scout leader, Mrs. Henning, was forever telling me that the curled-up, gargoyleish way I sat in a chair was unacceptable and unfeminine and forced me to sit “normally,” with my legs together and my feet on the ground. I resented her every day that she corrected me, came to dread going to Girl Scout meetings, and never understood why my basic comfort was inherently ungirly and also inappropriate.

I received a lot of toxic-femininity-based advice as a child and teen.

Years later, I had a high school sociology teacher who aimed to illustrate the perniciousness of gender roles to the class by turning to a girl, Sarah Fischer, and snapping, “Sit like a lady!” We all watched as Sarah Fischer’s legs automatically slammed together and then crossed over one another in a frantic, unthinking bid to make herself small. The teacher was smug and thought she had taught us something about how implicit gender roles could be. But most of us spent the remainder of the day focused on where our legs were and if we were sitting in a suitably feminine way.

I received a lot of toxic-femininity-based advice as a child and teen. I was told that not wanting to have children made me unacceptably unfeminine. Classmates said that my voice was unsuitably low and, worse, that I used it in a masculine way: I sang like a boy, and I declared things with flat confidence. I didn’t care about makeup throughout my middle school and high school years until some particularly vicious acne started to rear its head and I embraced powders and creams as a way to cover it up. I didn’t carry a purse.

People worked very hard to remedy these things for me. Friends gave me late-night makeovers that made me cry, parents and grandparents gifted me with handbags and bottles of beige stuff, peers looked deep into my purple under-eye circles and asked me why I had them. They were all trying to help, dispensing practical advice for how to win in a system that ought to have been dismantled rather than gamed.

It was all toxic femininity. It was a cultural disease. It was nobody’s fault. And everyone around me suffered from it too.