4 ms·

I see this as a side effect of the ideals toxic masculinity puts forth. I was under that for a long time and I'm still learning through therapy how to express m

I see this as a side effect of the ideals toxic masculinity puts forth. I was under that for a long time and I'm still learning through therapy how to express myself properly, because it was simply drilled into me that men don't express feelings besides rage, that anything else you feel is "weakness," that it's important to remain stoic and focused in all situations, etc. I mean yeah it makes you really valuable in certain situations but it also makes your daily life hell.

EGreg 7y ago
I disagree with the idea of toxic masculinity because, as presented, it seems to have been abused (or, in hacker parlance, overloaded). Can you name a few uniquely or predominantly masculine traits which would NOT be called toxic masculinity by someone prominent?
- stefco_ 7y ago
  Not GP, but: I think it's a useful phrase, though it's often overloaded/misapplied/used vaguely. Some (generally recognized as) non-toxic stereotypically masculine traits include having confidence, a can-do attitude, being protective, trying to be helpful, being intellectual, being silly, leading people towards common goals. Even anger in moderation is not inherently toxic (we all feel it). These things can all be terrible in excess, of course, so I think sometimes people fairly call an excess of these things toxic (even if the trait itself is great in moderation). It's also bad if you are only allowed to embody a specific set of traits and behaviors; clearly men should not be limited to these traits (though the societal pressures to conform to traits like these are strong and are often what are referred to as "toxic masculinity" in reasonable discourse). Likewise, women should clearly be seen as equally capable of possessing these stereotypically masculine traits. I think a lot of the use of "toxic masculinity" is in reference to the fact that men are often strongly discouraged, explicitly and implicitly, from doing things that are seen as non-masculine. This causes behavior that's harmful to oneself and others, like taking out all your emotions as anger, or feeling like violence is the most powerful and respected way to make an impact. In more benign forms, it can come from an excess of an otherwise good trait, like going from confident to cocky. Many people will use the term vaguely/badly, but I think the usage I just described is useful. I think the most important point is that "toxic masculinity" (in its useful and precise form) is very different from saying "men are toxic". It's closer to "men face toxic pressure due to people's gender expectations that cause them to suffer and sometimes hurt others as well". It's about the societal pressure to conform to a narrow and inadequate spectrum of behaviors. It's like men are expected to span a 3D emotional space with only 1 emotional "basis vector" since the other 2 are effeminate. The 1 basis vector is not itself "toxic"; it's the denial of the other 2 vectors.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Wow! This is such an awesome comment! I know some non hacker news people in the gender/feminism community who asked me to copy/send your comment to them via email.
  - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
    Toxic masculinity does discuss a facet of our society that should absolutely be discussed, but I think part of the issue with the term is that its phrasing is unproductively antagonistic. It's like talking about neurotic femininity or violent blacks. While there is something real and interesting to be to discussed about those real social issues, the phrasing frames the conversation in an unhelpful and mildly accusatory manner that is not conducive to a productive conversation.
    - stefco_ 7y ago
      I know what you mean, and I agree that the term's construction can easily lend itself to unproductive and divisive rhetoric, though I think it's a bit more complicated. I do think "toxic masculinity" is very different from a phrase like "violent blacks" because it specifies a behavioral trait/set of cultural mores (masculinity) over which people have a significant degree of control versus an intrinsic trait (like maleness or blackness) over which people have no control whatsoever. There's also not much of a history of men being violently repressed or disenfranchised purely for being men, so the potential antagonistic aspects of a phrase like "toxic masculinity" are not instantly amplified by association/context in the same way as your other examples. Also, "toxic" is not tied to a specific harmful stereotype; this leaves one open to dissect which aspects of stereotypical masculinity are toxic, rather than concluding a priori that men are "violent" or "neurotic" like in the other two examples. I think "toxic feminity" could similarly, in good faith, be used constructively in ways that "neurotic femininity" cannot. That said, the fact that a good number of people use "toxic masculinity" in a vague and unproductively confrontational way has given it a bad connotation to many; this sort of usage is certainly enabled by the brevity of the term. I think a lot of people (I suspect the majority) don't make the distinctions I made in my previous comment, and it undermines their efforts to use the term or concept of "toxic masculinity" in a truly helpful way. I've seen many examples of this: right-aligned people trying to discredit feminists as misandrist; feminists unempathetically erasing these distinctions; angry people in Twitter comment sections complaining about toxic masculinity; people who actually know better lazily using it as jargon on public forums where it can be misinterpreted (I'm sometimes guilty of this); and so on. The term is also problematic in its omitted connotations; one of these omitted connotations is the interconnectedness of traditional feminine gender roles with toxic masculine traits. Many people ignore how these roles interact with and reinforce each other. For example, where I live (NYC), it's unclear what type of masculinity is desirable to straight women. Most straight women I know are having a hard time finding guys they want to date because they've been trained to be attracted to some traits of toxic masculinity. But since they live in NYC in 2019, they also have learned recently to be wary of those same traits. Most of them are aware of this weird cognitive dissonance, but they can't figure out how to resolve it. Many of the straight men I know genuinely want to avoid toxic stereotypical behavior, and they're concerned about things like coming on strong/harassing women, but because many of the women they want to date still expect men to do more of the pursuing, it's ambiguous how precisely they should behave to make their dates feel desired but not cornered. There are many less benign examples; I've seen plenty of women who mock boys and men for being too emotional, too prissy, too pretty, or too physically weak. It's not just men who define manhood in an overly-restrictive way. And these same women have to deal with the negative aspects of feminine gender conditioning. It's a cyclical thing, and I think the only healthy way I've seen to deal with it is to think of everybody as both perpetrator and victim. You can use "toxic masculinity" as a shorthand for the component of this approach related to masculine stereotypes, or you can use it in a divisive way that is unhelpful. The fundamental issue is that "toxic masculinity" is non-technical jargon; it has a highly compressed meaning, but without a technical framework to limit its interpretation, it's also prone to heavy semantic drift through vagueness, malice, laziness, or stupidity. I think that someone choosing an alternative to "toxic masculinity" will have to deal with jargon's fundamental tradeoff between brevity and specificity. I won't be surprised if such an improved term (or at least and attempt at such) comes about at some point, as often happens with non-technical jargon, but picking such a term effectively is a deep problem rooted in the weakness and strength of natural language's inherent vagueness.
- phry 7y ago
  literally all of them? toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    > toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society. Yeah, almost like its masculinity, but toxic?
  - EGreg 7y ago
    To me it seems as simplistic as speaking about female hysteria (which was the case in the medical profession for centuries, ever since the Greeks). Thinking in terms of “female traits” that are taken to an extreme. That kind of thinking itself says women should be afraid to give in too much into “their nature”, because it’s just a societal construct where they are encouraged to be, say, irrational, catty, moody, whatever. (They have to question who they act and “be more logical like men” — a social conservative like Jesse Peterson would still advocate that today.) (And frankly I believe that ADD is the new Hysteria, but for kids.) Does that sound like a productive way to conduct public discourse and discuss issues among adults? Some companies have experimented with it in a big way. Here is the Result: https://onenewsnow.com/business/2019/08/02/gillette-cut-by-8b-loss-after-toxic-masculinity-ad https://onenewsnow.com/business/2019/08/02/gillette-cut-by-8...
    - LordDragonfang 7y ago
      The concept "toxic masculinity" is just the opposite of "female hysteria", actually. Hysteria historically was basically always been used as a crutch by the medical profession as "there's something wrong with this woman due to their inherent female-ness". Literally, "women are crazy because they have uteruses". Contrast with toxic masculinity, which focuses on external, societal pressures which force/encourage men to behave in ways that are harmful to themselves and others, rejecting the idea that men are "just like that". (As for ADD being the hysteria being the new hysteria, I can totally see the resemblance) Also, the website for your source is run by a fundamentalist, anti-LGBT hate group [1], so you might want to consider picking a different one. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Family_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Family_Association
- coldtea 7y ago
  I disagree with any fad phrase (emerged in a year or so and suddenly used by everyone, the media, etc) to explain deep rooted human psychology, society, etc. It just leads to a fashionable, shallow, understanding of any subject it concerns. And just as it come into existence, it will go out of fashion in a decade or so. We have had such terms in every decade, from all sides of the political spectrum. I'd avoid all such fad/mass-enforced framings...
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    Disagreeing with anything you deem a "fad phrase" has literally zero more intellectual rigor than those who follow them. You're using the same metric just backwards.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      It's abouut as rigorously defined as most things in psychology and about as easy to replicate in a lab as most things in psychology. It labels repression of emotions as a bad thing, but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don't - and then turn around and find a half dozen studies showing the opposite. Its main value is as a political tool to try to change people's behavior you disagree with, simply because you don't like it. When it stops being useful, it will be dropped for the next fad.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - robust 7y ago
        > but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don't Could you share an example of such a study?
      - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
        > It labels repression of emotions as a bad thing, but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don' Genuinely interested in these studies, I didn't know they existed. Can you provide a reference?
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  The phrase doesn't mean that masculinity itself toxic. It means that our culture's expectations for men hurt them and others. For example, the masculine ideal we hold men to is an expectation of stoic emotionlessness and self-sufficiency. As a result, many men feel a pressure to push through emotional difficulties, and feel a deep shame when they have trouble doing so. Some might even feel a deeper shame for seeking out help when they can't do it on their own, so they avoid involving loved ones and professionals that could help them. Men commit suicide nearly 4x as much as women do. Toxic expectations for masculine traits permeate throughout society, too. A lack of sensitivity and tenderness is one such expectation, along with aggressive sexual promiscuity. This might lead some to view men as questionable caregivers, especially to children. Some men feel a pressure to avoid careers involving children, like teaching, which robs children of positive male role models. One can even argue that it robs children of fathers when courts prefer giving custody of children to their mothers.
zamber 7y ago
How well is your therapy going? I thought about going because I see the same patterns in myself. The main drawback is that I strongly autoregulate and eventually something triggers me and I get coldly furious. I cut some long-lasting friendships due to this and I'm keeping everyone at a distance. I would agree that it's connected to masculine cultural tropes. The toxic behavior stemming from it is IMO is a derivate of the mental mess it fuels.

EGreg 7y ago

I disagree with the idea of toxic masculinity because, as presented, it seems to have been abused (or, in hacker parlance, overloaded). Can you name a few uniquely or predominantly masculine traits which would NOT be called toxic masculinity by someone prominent?

stefco_ 7y ago
Not GP, but: I think it's a useful phrase, though it's often overloaded/misapplied/used vaguely. Some (generally recognized as) non-toxic stereotypically masculine traits include having confidence, a can-do attitude, being protective, trying to be helpful, being intellectual, being silly, leading people towards common goals. Even anger in moderation is not inherently toxic (we all feel it). These things can all be terrible in excess, of course, so I think sometimes people fairly call an excess of these things toxic (even if the trait itself is great in moderation). It's also bad if you are only allowed to embody a specific set of traits and behaviors; clearly men should not be limited to these traits (though the societal pressures to conform to traits like these are strong and are often what are referred to as "toxic masculinity" in reasonable discourse). Likewise, women should clearly be seen as equally capable of possessing these stereotypically masculine traits. I think a lot of the use of "toxic masculinity" is in reference to the fact that men are often strongly discouraged, explicitly and implicitly, from doing things that are seen as non-masculine. This causes behavior that's harmful to oneself and others, like taking out all your emotions as anger, or feeling like violence is the most powerful and respected way to make an impact. In more benign forms, it can come from an excess of an otherwise good trait, like going from confident to cocky. Many people will use the term vaguely/badly, but I think the usage I just described is useful. I think the most important point is that "toxic masculinity" (in its useful and precise form) is very different from saying "men are toxic". It's closer to "men face toxic pressure due to people's gender expectations that cause them to suffer and sometimes hurt others as well". It's about the societal pressure to conform to a narrow and inadequate spectrum of behaviors. It's like men are expected to span a 3D emotional space with only 1 emotional "basis vector" since the other 2 are effeminate. The 1 basis vector is not itself "toxic"; it's the denial of the other 2 vectors.
- mettamage 7y ago
  Wow! This is such an awesome comment! I know some non hacker news people in the gender/feminism community who asked me to copy/send your comment to them via email.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  Toxic masculinity does discuss a facet of our society that should absolutely be discussed, but I think part of the issue with the term is that its phrasing is unproductively antagonistic. It's like talking about neurotic femininity or violent blacks. While there is something real and interesting to be to discussed about those real social issues, the phrasing frames the conversation in an unhelpful and mildly accusatory manner that is not conducive to a productive conversation.
  - stefco_ 7y ago
    I know what you mean, and I agree that the term's construction can easily lend itself to unproductive and divisive rhetoric, though I think it's a bit more complicated. I do think "toxic masculinity" is very different from a phrase like "violent blacks" because it specifies a behavioral trait/set of cultural mores (masculinity) over which people have a significant degree of control versus an intrinsic trait (like maleness or blackness) over which people have no control whatsoever. There's also not much of a history of men being violently repressed or disenfranchised purely for being men, so the potential antagonistic aspects of a phrase like "toxic masculinity" are not instantly amplified by association/context in the same way as your other examples. Also, "toxic" is not tied to a specific harmful stereotype; this leaves one open to dissect which aspects of stereotypical masculinity are toxic, rather than concluding a priori that men are "violent" or "neurotic" like in the other two examples. I think "toxic feminity" could similarly, in good faith, be used constructively in ways that "neurotic femininity" cannot. That said, the fact that a good number of people use "toxic masculinity" in a vague and unproductively confrontational way has given it a bad connotation to many; this sort of usage is certainly enabled by the brevity of the term. I think a lot of people (I suspect the majority) don't make the distinctions I made in my previous comment, and it undermines their efforts to use the term or concept of "toxic masculinity" in a truly helpful way. I've seen many examples of this: right-aligned people trying to discredit feminists as misandrist; feminists unempathetically erasing these distinctions; angry people in Twitter comment sections complaining about toxic masculinity; people who actually know better lazily using it as jargon on public forums where it can be misinterpreted (I'm sometimes guilty of this); and so on. The term is also problematic in its omitted connotations; one of these omitted connotations is the interconnectedness of traditional feminine gender roles with toxic masculine traits. Many people ignore how these roles interact with and reinforce each other. For example, where I live (NYC), it's unclear what type of masculinity is desirable to straight women. Most straight women I know are having a hard time finding guys they want to date because they've been trained to be attracted to some traits of toxic masculinity. But since they live in NYC in 2019, they also have learned recently to be wary of those same traits. Most of them are aware of this weird cognitive dissonance, but they can't figure out how to resolve it. Many of the straight men I know genuinely want to avoid toxic stereotypical behavior, and they're concerned about things like coming on strong/harassing women, but because many of the women they want to date still expect men to do more of the pursuing, it's ambiguous how precisely they should behave to make their dates feel desired but not cornered. There are many less benign examples; I've seen plenty of women who mock boys and men for being too emotional, too prissy, too pretty, or too physically weak. It's not just men who define manhood in an overly-restrictive way. And these same women have to deal with the negative aspects of feminine gender conditioning. It's a cyclical thing, and I think the only healthy way I've seen to deal with it is to think of everybody as both perpetrator and victim. You can use "toxic masculinity" as a shorthand for the component of this approach related to masculine stereotypes, or you can use it in a divisive way that is unhelpful. The fundamental issue is that "toxic masculinity" is non-technical jargon; it has a highly compressed meaning, but without a technical framework to limit its interpretation, it's also prone to heavy semantic drift through vagueness, malice, laziness, or stupidity. I think that someone choosing an alternative to "toxic masculinity" will have to deal with jargon's fundamental tradeoff between brevity and specificity. I won't be surprised if such an improved term (or at least and attempt at such) comes about at some point, as often happens with non-technical jargon, but picking such a term effectively is a deep problem rooted in the weakness and strength of natural language's inherent vagueness.
phry 7y ago
literally all of them? toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  > toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society. Yeah, almost like its masculinity, but toxic?
- EGreg 7y ago
  To me it seems as simplistic as speaking about female hysteria (which was the case in the medical profession for centuries, ever since the Greeks). Thinking in terms of “female traits” that are taken to an extreme. That kind of thinking itself says women should be afraid to give in too much into “their nature”, because it’s just a societal construct where they are encouraged to be, say, irrational, catty, moody, whatever. (They have to question who they act and “be more logical like men” — a social conservative like Jesse Peterson would still advocate that today.) (And frankly I believe that ADD is the new Hysteria, but for kids.) Does that sound like a productive way to conduct public discourse and discuss issues among adults? Some companies have experimented with it in a big way. Here is the Result: https://onenewsnow.com/business/2019/08/02/gillette-cut-by-8b-loss-after-toxic-masculinity-ad https://onenewsnow.com/business/2019/08/02/gillette-cut-by-8...
  - LordDragonfang 7y ago
    The concept "toxic masculinity" is just the opposite of "female hysteria", actually. Hysteria historically was basically always been used as a crutch by the medical profession as "there's something wrong with this woman due to their inherent female-ness". Literally, "women are crazy because they have uteruses". Contrast with toxic masculinity, which focuses on external, societal pressures which force/encourage men to behave in ways that are harmful to themselves and others, rejecting the idea that men are "just like that". (As for ADD being the hysteria being the new hysteria, I can totally see the resemblance) Also, the website for your source is run by a fundamentalist, anti-LGBT hate group [1], so you might want to consider picking a different one. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Family_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Family_Association
coldtea 7y ago
I disagree with any fad phrase (emerged in a year or so and suddenly used by everyone, the media, etc) to explain deep rooted human psychology, society, etc. It just leads to a fashionable, shallow, understanding of any subject it concerns. And just as it come into existence, it will go out of fashion in a decade or so. We have had such terms in every decade, from all sides of the political spectrum. I'd avoid all such fad/mass-enforced framings...
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Disagreeing with anything you deem a "fad phrase" has literally zero more intellectual rigor than those who follow them. You're using the same metric just backwards.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    It's abouut as rigorously defined as most things in psychology and about as easy to replicate in a lab as most things in psychology. It labels repression of emotions as a bad thing, but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don't - and then turn around and find a half dozen studies showing the opposite. Its main value is as a political tool to try to change people's behavior you disagree with, simply because you don't like it. When it stops being useful, it will be dropped for the next fad.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - robust 7y ago
      > but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don't Could you share an example of such a study?
    - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
      > It labels repression of emotions as a bad thing, but you can find a half dozen studies showing people who ignore traumatic events have a faster and healthier recovery than those that don' Genuinely interested in these studies, I didn't know they existed. Can you provide a reference?
fucking_tragedy 7y ago
The phrase doesn't mean that masculinity itself toxic. It means that our culture's expectations for men hurt them and others. For example, the masculine ideal we hold men to is an expectation of stoic emotionlessness and self-sufficiency. As a result, many men feel a pressure to push through emotional difficulties, and feel a deep shame when they have trouble doing so. Some might even feel a deeper shame for seeking out help when they can't do it on their own, so they avoid involving loved ones and professionals that could help them. Men commit suicide nearly 4x as much as women do. Toxic expectations for masculine traits permeate throughout society, too. A lack of sensitivity and tenderness is one such expectation, along with aggressive sexual promiscuity. This might lead some to view men as questionable caregivers, especially to children. Some men feel a pressure to avoid careers involving children, like teaching, which robs children of positive male role models. One can even argue that it robs children of fathers when courts prefer giving custody of children to their mothers.

zamber 7y ago

How well is your therapy going? I thought about going because I see the same patterns in myself. The main drawback is that I strongly autoregulate and eventually something triggers me and I get coldly furious. I cut some long-lasting friendships due to this and I'm keeping everyone at a distance. I would agree that it's connected to masculine cultural tropes. The toxic behavior stemming from it is IMO is a derivate of the mental mess it fuels.