Debating the existence of toxic masculinity/femininity

OB1Shinobi wrote:

Manu wrote: I suppose that is what many who dislike the “toxic masculinity” terminology fear... the rules being set not based on reason but based on what is fashionable, to calm the angry Facebook and Twitter mobs demanding their gender-neutral safe space.

I view the term “toxic masculinity” as a culture-weapon. It isnt as much a question of whether it ostensibly points to real phenomena, as much as what is the true intent behind coining the term and what will be the actual impact it has on our cultural cohesion- is toxic masculinity an idea that enhances understanding and promotes cooperation in an already fragmented and multi-faceted society or is it a gigantic god damn wrench in the works? Does it result in real insight into what it means to be human or does it just give us a new way to vent hostility towards one another?

The term may be accurate enough if you have the intellectual discipline to narrow it down to a very specific (and relatively miniscule) set of behaviors and motives, (even then i wonder if it is the most accurate possible term to describe those motive and behaviors) but the real-world impact of the idea is simply that men are assholes..... and i believe that was the point all along. Got to defeat that evil patriarchy, dontcha know.

In as much as “toxic masculinity” is used as a culture weapon to justify tribalism which is inherently violent towards any group of people, whether it be grouped by race, age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, political party, etc. I completely agree with you that it should be fully rejected.

What is actually creating problems in society is not too much masculinity it’s a lack of masculinity. Single parent families where the mother is the care giver is higher than it ever has been. Over 50 percent of black families and 30 percent of white families are this way. Over 75 percent of teachers are female. It seems more likely that incidents of abuse are the result of a lack of male guidance of these young boys by male examples. Boys without a strong male presence to teach them responsibility and decency are forced to figure it out for themselves during those formative years of dealing with hormones they can barely understand. That is the major problem in societies today.

When these SJWs merge masculinity with toxic masculinity it rips away the ability to maintain traditional roles of masculinity such as being a gentleman, taking responsibility, providing and containing emotions to the extent that those emotions don’t take control of them. It is a self-defeating idea and it’s just stupid. 70 percent of male prison inmates, gang members, high school dropouts, suicides and addicts grew up in a single parent home. These ideas are sobering and really speak to the fact that instead of demonizing men as toxic we should be crying out in anguish for these men who are being stripped of their ability to be men by these disgusting terms and situations.

If this continues these SJWs will eventually realize that have shot themselves in the foot because it is actually men that are the only wall of protection for them from the wolves and the cold.

Can I assume those stats are from the USA?

Thought it does get cold here, I've never seen a wolf.

Taken at face value, all that rhetoric leaves me feeling buoyed with confidence that this issue has nothing to do with my country or my people, which is nice (gives me more time to antagonise vegans)

(I don't mean to sound entirely flippant- I think it is a serious problem if schools, employers, local community leaders are generating their "content" based on information that might not be entirely relevant. I'd hate for Seamus O'Seamus (obviously an irish lad, growing up in Dublin, diddly-dee potatoes) to be given a lecture of what it is to be a man.....because his priest read up on USA prison statistics.....

Loudzoo wrote: Gosh - plenty to unpick here!

Masculine and Feminine character traits are defined by society, but they are not arbitrary. Our biological sex is correlated to certain personality traits and from these - certain gender norms have emerged.

I wanted to emphasize that last point: gender norms EMERGED. They arent something the Patriarchy has imposed upon the masses. No one drafted or created them. They are just there. Its the cultural recognition of averages, not some tyrannical ploy to dominate or disenfranchise people.

Saying that norms exist is not to say that people who defy the norms are not natural or are less worthy or capable or deserving. The statistical mean (average) has statistical deviations built into its very structure, thats just how statistics work. Thats how averages work, its how norms work. Its always a spectrum and theres always people at the ends of the spectrum. Some people would like to use averages/norms as a club to beat other over the head for being different. That doesnt mean we should deny the existence or validity of averages/norms, it means we need to improve the general understanding what they really signify.

To a great extent the current 'culture wars' are about who has the power to define the gender norms.

Yes, thats exactly right. But this takes a new shade of meaning when you understand that averages (norms) are not something anyone has the right to define. Averages EMERGE when we review the data... no one has the right to say “i want the average (norm) to be such and such so thats what its going to be”. Its one thing to advocate on behalf of those who dont fit with the average, but an entity thats battling for the power to define the average is battling for the power to lie - and to have society accept the lie.

As a society freeing itself from the bondage of a dogmatic culture....

It would be useful if we had some scale by which to measure the dogmatism of all the worlds cultures, maybe from least to most, so that we could all compare our own to others. Id certainly not expect America to be at the very top of the list, but id bet we’d be in the top 15-20. I assume the UK would also score relatively high. With countries like Saudi Arabia (for example) being significantly lower.

it becomes possible to recognise more gender fluidity. Perhaps the gender stereotypes are not as fixed as they have been perceived to be in the past?

My opinion: the culture war is tearing us apart. In America we are fortunate to have the “melting pot” concept as part of our national identity, though we seem to be slipping away from it, lately. What we need are some genuinely uniting concepts to rally behind. Ideas that can unite people of all groups instead of pittig us against each other. Toxic masculinity isnt such an idea, lol, obviously.

I agree with OB1's additions to the definitions - but the key is here that they are average differences - they do not necessarily apply to a given individual. In a population of 7 billion + that means you end up with a small percentage, but large number, of people who do not fit gender norms. Also there is a massive overlap between the dominant character traits of people with differing biological sex.

Yes. Unfortnately, most people dont understand statistics and misinterpret the meaning and significance of averages. Averages arent rules, we dont have to obey them- they are observations... numerical values that indicate tendencies. The truth about “the average” is that its often a number that doesn't actually apply to anyone. In a real way, we not only dont have to be average, we CANT. If you measure the height of ten random people and calculate the average, its very likely that not one of those people is that exact height. And height is a simple thing to calculate. Of course, this changes with sample size. Ten people is a small sample size- ten thousand people will give a more accurate average and theres bound to be some who are that exact number. The irony is they would actually be a numeric minority for being exactly average, lol.

Having said all of that, its not clear that labeling certain character traits as masculine or feminine is particularly helpful anymore.

I wont presume to know what girls need but i very much believe that boys need a healthy masculine ideal to which they may aspire. A positive idea of what a good man is and how they can be or become one.

Perhaps it would be easier to say that men, women, and people who define themselves as something else, can all be assholes! No group has the monopoly on that . . .

Agreed!

I had a bit of a thought here...

Call it a shower thought, 'cause I was in the shower.

so I'm going to try to play it out, while I have my coffee.


Now we know three things about me, I enjoy showers and coffee, and I have (through whatever means) access to hot running water, coffee, cups, and I guess the internet.


This is great data. 100% of the people writing this post are successful and resourceful individuals (and they smell nice)

How many of us deal with aggregate data on a day to day basis? as in actually as part of our primary occupation or as an unusually passionate hobby?

Aggregate data is shit. and, more often than not, leads to wild and useless conclusions. It's great for putting on presentations to convince bosses that your department needs more funding, or that a project is working (Mr Prime Minister, money raised from Speeding Tickets is up 6000% this year, we calculate this to mean that the roads are 6000% safer than last year! (huzzah, round of applause).

I deal with...30 or 40 people a week. And it is usually the same 30 or 40 people, and I could continue to function from now until retirement without knowing a damn thing about anyone outside those people.

I don't need to know what the other seven-something billion people in the world do or like or think. I don't need to know about their behaviours or beliefs or habits or anything. It's just not relevant to my daily function.

Maybe I've got a small world, maybe everyone else deals with one hundred people week. That still leaves....oh, seven-something billion people that realistically don't matter.


It seems it would be silly of me to have any thoughts, or make any decisions based on mish-mash data from those seven billion people that I can't really observe or verify in my (say) one hundred live humans that affect my life.


To butcher the point further -


I have dogs.

100% of dogs I know eat carrots.

I can read all the online articles I like, as far as my day-to-day decision making goes - Dogs like Carrots, and there is nothing particularly beneficial to me (or those dogs) for me to entertain other possibilities.

where were we? oh right, wild trans-nation trans-gender trans-generation spanning statements on this or that.

Go get a pen (or a pencil) and write down every A, B C thing you know (male, female, tall, left handed, smoker, I don't really care) and then write down what you know about them.

That's the useful data you should be using to inform your decisions and beliefs, not a news article from some place, some time, where some one did something because reasons.

You can't even begin to usefully apply that to your life.



(The extrapolation from this is that people who are heavily involved in some of these big ideas, are often missing the forest for the trees, and get so hung up on data they can't properly interrogate or understand, but feel a need to react to, eventually the idea gets a bit of momentum to it, and people jump on board....

I watch it happen weekly (if not daily) within my department, and it's distressing enough trying to untangle those messes and bring everyone down to a more practical reality. I can't imagine trying to talk down hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of people who have latched onto an idea without much consideration of what contributed to the conclusions....

Manu wrote: In as much as “toxic masculinity” is used as a culture weapon to justify tribalism......I completely agree with you that it should be fully rejected.

Consider the fact that the people who created the term have submitted no female equivalent into the discussion. “Toxic femininity” is a term which developed later, either by mens groups or just by general internet culture as a response to the use of the term “toxic masculinity”. According to the ideology, there can be no toxic femininity: its mens fault when men are abusive, but its also mens fault when women are abusive.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Toxic_femininity

Heres where things become tricky; there are any number of people (yourself included) who are willing to defend the idea of toxic masculinity on the grounds that the phrase points to something that is real. A few years of dialogue with you i feel pretty confident that youre not out there stirring up the hate cauldron like the witches in Macbeth, lol. And id say the same for most everyone else who i recall posting in this thread (though i admit that in 12 pages i may be missing someone lol) so what does that suggest? That even good people can accept an idea that was meant to cause trouble. The idea has to have a minimum degree of reasonableness or defensibility or else it wont ever become accepted enough to cause the trouble it was meant to cause.
We live in some weird times, man. Weird times.

The idea has to have a minimum degree of reasonableness or defensibility or else it wont ever become accepted enough to cause the trouble it was meant to cause.

No it doesn't, people are stupid, and bored, and like to cover those things by reacting to things in case it makes them look intelligent and active.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjQ-t7yITOo

The idea has to have a minimum degree of reasonableness or defensibility or else it wont ever become accepted enough to cause the trouble it was meant to cause. Unless we’re talking about the government, of course. In which case, the dumber the idea, the more theyll love it.

What do you think, fixed? Better, at least, lol.

I like picking on the government as much as (possibly more than) the next person, but it's a disease of any organisation.

As soon as you start having committees you stop doing deep assessment of the information, and start leaping to conclusions and policies and devising plans to enact......and often forget to go back and re-assess as you go along, or if you do "re-assess" (because "re-assess" is part of the six-step process on the PDF you downloaded on how to run an organisation) you re-assess against a point in the timeline that was already corrupted by earlier assumptions or acts and not the original datum.

Good news everyone: in light of recent insights gleaned about the nature of organizational structure, the committee has agreed to add a seventh point to our Corporate Leadership PDF. We will have another efficiency review in six weeks to reassess our methodlogies. Meeting adjourned.
If you need me, I’ll be at the bar.

So I did what I said and I said what I meant - I believe....useless traits that people in certain gender roles have picked up exist.

I said that, now I guess I have to try to back up why I said it, I sure as heck can't remember why I said it at the time.

First of all, of the people I could think of to write down, they all think they are smarter than me. Presumably at least a few of them are right, It is unlikely they all are. I don't think this is a gendered thing, this particular belief appears to be simply human in nature. I also can't really prove that it is unhelpful or detrimental to our activities and function as a group - other than internally, where everyone is telling themselves "if only everyone listened to me, everything would be better"

Across the board is that everyone believes their woes are caused by someone else. Again, I can't pin this to a gender, this is just a human bias methinks.

I've jotted down here that, among the males I know, big-noting their physical strength or speed and the "difficulty" of their job roles and family life, is pretty common.

I'm still not sure if this is damaging, but it seems to point to a trend that Men need to be Physically Good (and the ones that are clearly injured are sure to remind anyone who asks, or doesn't, that they "used to be an adventurer......" )
Maybe this is damaging? The heaviest thing I need to lift is a coffee cup, so why the hell do I work out 5 times a week? is this actually good for me? or do I get anxious if I'm not meeting an arbitrary physical standard for masculinity? why do all the others do it? (In all the names I wrote down - only 1 female had this trait. She's not the only one that was interested in being fit, but the only one that it seemed important that everyone else knew she was into it.... If it pleases the court, I can ask them directly why they think it is important to see if that sheds any light on the origin of the belief)

the other part is challenges - apparently it is important that Men have challenges - could be a hard job, a difficult boss, pets, family, debt - whatever it is, they are quick to let it be known they are Facing Challenges. Is this damaging? Are men hurting themselves or others to ensure that they are seen to be facing hardship? Is this a Masculine or a Culture thing? Maybe people just don't like people who have easy lives, so they all make up how hard it is for them. - Some of the females do have challenges listed against them, but they seem (to me) to be slightly different in nature, the emphasis is on People who are "Blocking" their success, the males seem to have vaguer challenges like "raising a family" or "paying off a home" rather than "Bruce got a promotion instead of me".

Status/Name dropping also seemed a pretty big deal - I've noted that many of the men I know want it to be known they are, or were important somewhere, and that they know important people. Now as far as I'm concerned, people are just sausages being kept warm until my dogs run out of kangaroo, but apparently some people are Premium sausages, and it is important to be one of those people, or be on first name terms with them. Is it damaging? Again, probably internally, everyone is trying to justify their existence, and if you've got nothing going for you personally, maybe you can scrape by on knowing someone who does, and telling everyone about it. I can't guess what the external dangers of this are. I guess if you have convinced yourself that you are Important, but no one else recognises this you might be more inclined to distress and acting out to remind them - whether this is through passive-agressive parking techniques in shopping centres (try opening your door NOW!) or outright violence to establish your dominance....I can't prove that. I don't have any of that written down here, so it's not data I can use.

There's a few other things I've noted down here, that I'm not sure help or hinder the specific discussion, but point to different attitudes (possibly) in how males and females interact with the world. How they ask for favours, how they pass on good/bad news.

And it's not exclusive....I've got at least one female (possibly two) that mostly have a similar story to majority of the males, and at least one male than writes up similar to the females.


How much of my notes are coloured by my own perceptions is likely impossible for me to determine myself, and how much of my notes are coloured by my ability to gather the information based on how all these individuals interact with me is again, probably impossible for me to determine myself.


I'm not really reaching a conclusion with any of this, I was trying to see if I could find an answer to the question looking at my own backyard.