Toxic Masculinity

literallyschmiteraly · 2013-04-10T14:34:20+00:00

One thing these articles all somehow ignore is the fact that the majority of boys are being raised by women, very many of them single women, and probably a significan number of them self-declared feminists. So if boys actually WERE being raised to rape (which they aren't - at all) it would be more women's fault than anyone else's.

CrossHook · 2013-04-10T14:21:17+00:00

Toxic Femininity - when women invade male spaces and demand they become female spaces

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2013-04-10T15:37:50+00:00

Or, as former NFL quarterback and newly-minted feminist Don McPherson recently put it, "We don't raise boys to be men. We raise them not to be women, or gay men." This starts in childhood for many boys, who are taught young that they’ll be punished for doing anything “girly,” from playing with dolls to crying, or even preferring to read over “rough housing” outside.

I suspect that if anyone were to complain that we don't raise girls to be women anymore that would not go over as well.

baskandpurr · 2013-04-10T13:24:05+00:00

I can't get past the title of this article. I wasn't raised to rape, I don't rape, I never will rape. The author of this piece of shit can go fuck themselves.

PowerWisdomCourage · 2013-04-10T14:13:16+00:00

So it's another woman telling men the proper way to be men through masculinity shaming? I'd wager she was also one of the people so against people without vaginas making any law that was even tangentially connected with vaginas.

blueoak9 · 2013-04-10T16:55:37+00:00

Getting rid of toxic masculinity is going to deal with the "epidemic of rape"?

So how does that affect all the women who rape, both men and other women?

And why not get rid of toxic femininity - helplessness, dependency, hypoagency, gynonormativity? Wouldn't that help at least as much? Or is toxic femininity too sacred to these people? If a woman is not responsible for her own safety, why should anyone else be?

Oh, and "epidemic of rape"? The incidence of rape has been decreasing steadily for more than a decade. So she's just ignoring reality to indulge in her toxic femininity.

jolly_mcfats · 2013-04-10T18:57:50+00:00

Something ugly happened in stuebenville. And an entire community participated. Those parties were not male-only events. Threats from the community at the rape victim did not all come from men.

Something was toxic at stubenville, but it wasn't masculinity. It was a culture that refused to hold its golden children to any accountability. This tendency to turn a blind eye to reprehensible behavior by the "in-crowd" can be found in most high schools, and then in more subtle forms later in life. Stubenville was only an extreme case of a tendency readily visible throughout society, and it has nothing to do with "toxic masculinity".

Feminists concerned with agency should be demanding that the culpability of the girls present at those parties, and who issued threats to the victim after the fact, be fully acknowledged.

HoundDogs · 2013-04-10T22:01:17+00:00

Why do they need made up terms for everything? Toxic Masculinity, patriarchy, rape culture, etc. Why can't they just look at a demonstrable behavior and say "This needs to change because it affects the culture negatively, in this DEMONSTRABLE way."

Why do we need all the ideological buzz words to beat men over the head with?

StandsInRefuse · 2013-04-10T15:27:26+00:00

Adolf Hitler; obviously a product of toxic vegetarianism who never challenged his views on diet and nutritional value.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2013-04-10T16:51:26+00:00

To be completely fair, toxic masculinity does exist (we complain about it all the time on /r/MR!), and it deserves to be extensively criticized. Traditional masculinity is not our friend. And the actions of the Steubenville rapists are inexcuseable.

But the article just reeks of Radical Second Wave Rape Culture theory... which ironically enough excuses the rapists by saying "it wasn't their fault, they were brainwashed by the patriarchy to rape women!"

Yes, there are some attitudes and cultural tropes and biases which can (even unwittingly) facilitate/enable rape within our culture. That's reasonable. However, there are plenty of attitudes, cultural tropes and biases which work in the opposite direction; from the laws against rape to the universal acknowledgment of rape as an heinous crime to traditional chivalry's "real men don't aggress against women" attitudes.

The Steubenville rapists are not just mindless products of patriarchial rape culture. They knew what they were doing, chose to do it, and are fully morally responsible.

Boys are not 'raised to rape' and they don't need to be "told not to rape" any more than they already are. The rape of women is not "caused" by culture - it may in some cases be made more likely by some cultural factors, true, but it isn't "caused." Are women's rapes of men "caused" by culture?

Oh, I forgot, this article is based on Radical Second Wave Rape Culture, which doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that women can rape men. Because rape is a male weapon which male culture legitimizes as a tool of patriarchial terrorism to keep women down. So no, there is no rape female-on-male-rape to even consider!

Goddamn, articles like this actually make it harder to get rid of toxic masculinity, because they end up framing criticisms of traditional masculinity as acquiescing to the kind/s of feminists that write awful articles like this one.

paracog · 2013-04-10T21:35:51+00:00

The world is never going to be as safe as your bedroom, ladies. If you want to play in it, you need to smarten the fuck up. It's a hard ass world, and men have gone to great lengths to make you safer in it. If you don't want men placing limits on you for your safety, you are not going to be any safer than men out in the world. Deal with it.

DerickBurton · 2013-04-11T02:24:16+00:00

Articles like this make me feel less empathetic.

Rattatoskk · 2013-04-11T09:46:06+00:00

Derp. Yup, It's masculinity that's the problem. If only them thar boys would play with more dolls, we could avoid this problem.

I had to hold my dinner in reading this article. "Toxic Masculinity". Right, just like "Toxic Assets", "Toxic Waste",.. Hell. The only thing positive that ever started with "Toxic", is the Toxic Avenger.

There was a town of nuckledraggers out there in the booneys. They acted like primitive screwheads. That's what life is for some people. But that's got nothing to do with male culture. It's a way of life for people who don't respect those around them.

If these kids took a shovel to one of their friends as a prank, or drank them to death, they'd be talking the same way. And the girls would join in.

Some people are just assholes. Smearing men at large makes this author one of them.

Title	Toxic Masculinity
Author	Sasha_
Upvotes	12
Comments	19
Date	April 10, 2013 1:15 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/mensrights/comments/1c26ta/toxic-masculinity/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/toxic-masculinity.1610208 https://theredarchive.com/post/1610208

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