I’ve dated and been in relationships of varying degrees with plenty of women. There was an inflection point in my life where I figured out some crucial aspects of inter-gender dynamics, found myself on the other side of the buyer-seller dynamic, and luxuriated in my newfound agency. Being able to meet and date like this has afforded me an opportunity to learn more about women, both the good and the bad. This is an essay on the bad.

Human beings generally have a significant amount of diversity, subject to constraints. You rarely find a human with three arms, for example. Within the constraints, you can observe an endless variety of humanity, especially when it comes to behavior. This is one of the reasons that humans have been so successful as a species. Humans are, as a species, supremely adaptable as a direct entailment of this built in propensity for intraspecies variety.

What this means in practice is that you can often find corner cases, tail ends of the normal distribution, where general rules about human beings don’t apply. You can almost always find some percentage of the extant population that doesn't conform to any proposed specification, especially when it comes to behavior.

So, yeah, you can easily point to other individuals or yourself and say that my conclusions are invalid. Good for you. I find that kind of “argument” to be incredibly tedious.

A key component of toxic femininity is that women insist that it doesn’t actually exist.

There’s a book by Robin DiAngelo called White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. This is a fascinating book, and it really opened up my eyes, as a white person, to some improvements I could make in myself and how I think about racism. I have to admit, when I first started reading it, I did feel called out. I did not like that feeling. I did not like having to critically examine myself, my beliefs and behaviors. She was right, though.

Feminine fragility is a major component of toxic femininity. The insistence that women are not toxic, can’t be toxic, and then it’s actually men that are the exclusive source of all feminine woes, that is, itself, incredibly toxic.

If you Google “toxic femininity”, the very first search result defines toxic femininity thusly: “Toxic femininity is a form of internalized misogyny which involves restricting yourself to stereotypically ‘feminine’ behaviors in order to appeal to men.”

Amazing. Even how feminists define toxic femininity itself is an example of true toxic femininity; the abject refusal to actually introspect and make meaningful change. Women are perfect, and it’s men that are the problem.

Of course, as I described in the first part of this paper, there are exceptions. There are women that are capable of taking responsibility for their situation. There are women that are interested in self improvement and work hard and make good decisions to optimize outcomes. There are women that genuinely work to make themselves succeed in a complex world, and, when they fail, own those failures and endeavor not to repeat the same mistakes. There are women that go to therapy and use it as a tool for self knowledge instead of a place to vent and feel coddled.

What I have noticed, however, is that these women are the exceptions, and not the rule. Far from it. Women often exhibit toxic femininity, and to pretend otherwise is, itself, an example of toxic femininity.