Came across this piece in my travels and thought it could use some attention. I like how the author takes the time to identify the phenomenon of "toxic femininity" in its many forms. After all, if feminists have been so good at the ways masculinity can be toxic (and in fact I agree; for some men, their idea of 'masculinity' is toxic to them and others), then why isn't anyone doing the same for women? Can there be no toxicity in women's pursuit of or general ideations around femininity? Heck, yeah! Excerpt:
'Toxic femininity is not a personal trait of individuals. It is an aspect of a gender role, and since gender roles are a matrix of customs, expectations and policing, they are social rather than individual. That is what it means to say gender is constructed, if always on a pretty fixed base of biological sex for the huge majority of us, and this is where the construction takes place. (Gender identities are different; they inhere in individuals.)
I have drawn up a preliminary list of types and aspects of toxic femininity. They come from things I have picked up in the femmisphere in posts and comments, from things I have seen in the men’s side of the gendersphere and some come from personal experience. I wanted to list and name them so that people can use this in their own discussions and would have something to refer back to. The list is preliminary and suggestions on additions are gratefully accepted.
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Damseling is the female end of White Knighting – one cannot exist without the other. It is a celebration of helplessness and dependence on someone else’s protection. This is really nothing other than a feudal relationship. Depending on someone else for protection is a form of vassalage.
Examples include -
Victim Cred – For the most part we have a moral structure that stigmatizes victimizers and tries to validate victims. It doesn’t always play out that way in practice, but even in practice if a victim brings a complaint against the person who victimized him – oops, there’s counter-example right there – but anyway, for the most part the reaction from the rest of us will not be to stigmatize the crime victim as a loser, but rather the perpetrator. This feature of our moral code works against the operation of the law of the jungle, and it makes our type of society possible. So far so good. But of course it has a down side. It grants victims a moral claim, a form of moral superiority over those they identify as having wronged them, and this can incentivize victimology, the weaponization of victimhood.
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Gynonormativity is not in of itself a bad thing. There are situations where what is generally considered a female way of doing something is the appropriate way, regardless of who is doing it. Teaching young children – primary grades surely, but even the older elementary grades sometimes – is one obvious example. Some kinds of anthropological fieldwork obviously call for gynonormative approaches. In other areas it’s neutral. In some it’s not suitable.
These are examples of bad gynonormativity:
The Golden Uterus: GU is a distortion of the motherhood role into a tool for subjugating others to the mother’s will. It can even be used as a form of power to use in a rape. James Landrith recounts how his (pregnant!) rapist used her unborn child as a human shield against him to keep him from defending himself.
The Moral Guardian – The Moral Guardian is now almost exclusively a female role, (Although until recently you saw men doing it to. It still exists in communities on the Religious Right.)
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Female Approval: “Man up!” “Get a pair!”The Real Man discourse and the whole concept of what makes a man a good man usually come down to one thing: How useful is he to women. That’s the measure of how good and masculine a man is.The measure of what made a woman a good women used to be the mirror image of this. Thank God feminism eroded that away to nothing. Now it’s time to do the same with this.
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The Flag-Waving Civilian Hyper-Patriot: Never served a day in her life, but she is ready to hound any man in sight to “man up” and go lay down his life for her. This chicken hawk is a real moral guardian of patriotic values. See also White Feather Society.
- “Boys will Be Boys” – Listen around and you will see how general the meme is that men are eternal boys and that women are long-suffering adults picking up after them. It comes out in teachers saying that girls mature faster than boys – by the gender-biased standards of teachers. It comes out in 20-something women presuming to lecture men their age on manners and mature behavior. It comes out in TV commercials and programming showing men as helpless, clumsy and incapable, but always with some superior woman coming to the rescue, or more often just looking on clucking her tongue.'
