It may be hard for women to understand and it might sound like I’m exaggerating, but as long as I could remember I've felt a deep shame for simply being a man. I’m happy to say I’m mostly recovered from this in the past few years. I found some books specifically addressing this shame that men feel and how to recover from it. It took a while to internalize the idea that I might not be inherently bad, but now I mostly like myself and feel I'm no better or worse than others. I still revert to a shame-filled state from time to time, but on the whole I feel healthy and on the right track.

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It wasn't like that for most of my life. Maybe you’ve heard this sob story before. Apologies if this is redundant.

I really had internalized all the messages of men being shallow, selfish, aggressive, abusive, violent, underhanded, and hateful. Women were described as the opposite - deep, selfless, gentle, caring, and loving.

I was a classic Nice Guy in that I thought I had to seek approval and redemption from the good half of humanity to be able to overcome my toxic nature. I only felt good when I received approval from women. When I didn’t I felt, on top of rejection, the horrible shame returning.

To illustrate how I could be influenced to feel this way, when I type in “healthy masculinity” into Google, the results page is littered with the word “toxic”. So many of the pages describe this healthiness primarily as the absence of toxicity. As purging your inherent badness rather than finding anything positive about yourself and building on that.

Clicking my first result I find that 90% of the page is about male toxicity. Everything traditionally associated with masculinity is bad. There is a tiny portion about what can be healthy about a man - most of the way down the page is the positive definition: “Healthy or positive masculinity is the idea that men can be emotionally expressive, have female friends or mentors, and express their emotions without feeling emasculated.” So it's 1. expressing emotions and 2. having women friends and 3. having women authority figures. Not that these are not good things, but this is the entire definition. Can you imagine this definition in reverse, for women?

I don’t want to belabor the point, but I could share more links from my first page of results that define masculinity almost entirely in terms of toxicity and often the approval of women.

I also searched for "healthy femininity" and I could not find "toxic" or any other words to describe negative traits on the results page. My first result is about the "divine feminine".

This is all to say that I hope it’s understandable how I received and internalized these messages. I brought up the "healthy femininity" results page not to say women don't receive negative messages from somewhere, but to try to explain how men can feel uniquely bad based on mainstream information.

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I don’t know how women feel, but I’ve heard a lot that women struggle with feeling “good enough”. Pretty enough, strong enough, interesting enough, competent enough, etc. They also struggle with depending on the approval of others, maybe especially men in some cases. So women certainly also get negative messages from lots of places that make them feel bad or inadequate.

I have no way to compare my experience or say which is worse. I don't believe there is an answer. I’ve also not felt "good enough" (often not “man enough”) for most of my life. I wonder if women also have felt morally defective or toxic, just for being a woman, on top of the other negative feelings.

As a brief aside before I wrap things up, I believe Red Pill is so attractive to a lot of men because they they already feel perceived as incorrigible monsters so they might as well embrace it and try to pick up women while they’re at it.

Along with my question for women I’d like to include a plea to try to send out some good, hopeful messages about men rather than just join the chorus of negativity. There are unformed boys and young men out there who take the negativity to heart and don’t deserve this burden of shame.

Also consider that piling on more shame will absolutely not discourage men from seeking a solution in the Red Pill. They already have enough of that. Only the hope of a better, positive solution will dissuade them.

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So, my question for women is:

Have you ever felt toxic?

How do you feel about yourself? How have you felt different than a man’s experience that I described above? How have you felt the same?