The toxic concept of toxic masculinity

Anyone who has passed through an education in the past decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one of the many charming phrases that our age has come up with to pathologise ordinary people. Brewing for some decades, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ was brought into the mainstream in the last ten years by fourth-wave feminists intent on portraying half of our species as ‘problematic’, to use another of the delightful watchwords of our era.

The simple assertion of the ‘toxic masculinity’ crowd is that specifically male behaviours are a problem. The most extreme aspects of male misbehaviour are portrayed as though they are routine. So young feminists insist that we live in a ‘rape culture’, in which men are alleged to be allowed to rape with impunity. Likewise, male-on-female domestic violence is portrayed as a kind of pandemic. And the answer to all these things is essentially to feminise men – to tell specifically young heterosexual men that they must curb their masculinity and subdue many of their most natural instincts. In every direction their path is cut off. For instance, men who come to the rescue of women are dismissed as ‘white knighting’, as though even the wish to help a woman is proof of ‘toxic masculinity’.

Of course, the concept itself is toxic – quite as much so as if our age decided to talk about women in a similar way. There’s no reason why ‘toxic femininity’ couldn’t be made as popular a concept as its opposite number. There are certainly plenty of grounds for talking about such things. For if men are, for example, more prone to physical violence then the data also shows that women are more prone to subtler methods of undermining opponents, such as reputational destruction. There are behaviours that are more male and behaviours that are more female, and the fact that some members of each sex are quite capable of one or other, or both, does not negate that fact.