“Toxic masculinity” is, we learn, the topic of novelist Tim Winton’s latest work. The guy hasn’t only written a book about it, but embarked on a national tour that promises some sort of audio-visual antidote to this much-feared poison. Didn’t see it myself, as I (a) had something on that night and (b) sincerely doubt that Winton meaningfully explores a popular concept that few have bothered to define. As a phrase, “toxic masculinity” is currently everywhere, even The Australian.
As a useful means of assessing gender in the present, it strikes me as slightly less instructive than Married at First Sight.
What the eff is “toxic masculinity”? We can currently see it identified all over the shop, but never analysed. I have read no serious attempt to describe this thing, apparently a contagion, as a true disorder. It’s more a collection of symptoms seen in the person of Donald Trump and even named as the source for death of persons and the planet. It’s less a recognised disease than a “syndrome”, really. None of which stops anyone from diagnosing this Irritable Gender Syndrome and prescribing “better education” as a cure.
There have been critiques of the term — one first used in the 1980s by theorists of that decade’s softer, gentler men’s movement. But, these are generally of a knee-jerk, anti-feminist sort. They dismiss the concept as though it were a powerful feminist concept. In my view, “toxic masculinity” is not a true concept, and not truly feminist at all.
There are, of course, many feminists who use the term. They use it passionately, publicly and, presumably, with sincere hope that their diagnosis will rid the world of delimiting gender norms. Now, being a fairly blokey woman, I’m all for an end to such rot. But, I fail to see how one unties the straitjacket of gender by sewing a new one.
Now, leave aside your views about the naturalness of gender here, and just try to help the rest of the class share its frustration. You may continue to believe that ladies are predisposed to the soft touch of velour, that men are inclined to drive trucks by evolution, etc, and still see “toxic masculinity” as hostile to the aims of a feminism that seeks freedom from the gender that is imposed by the social.
The thing is, you either want socially constructed categories of masculinity and femininity, or you don’t. If you go about defining one of these categories as “toxic”, you necessarily define its benign opposite. The hope for a non-toxic masculinity is entirely dependent on a belief in a masculinity that will always exist outside the social realm.
So, which is it? Are the categories “masculine” and “feminine” ascribed by society, ergo, themselves, in one feminist understanding, always “toxic”? Or, are they, as popular articles of the type suggest, a case of nature turned sour? Seemingly, it’s both. There is both a toxic way to be a man and a “non-toxic” way. The non-toxic way is natural, I guess, and the toxic way is synthesised.
You can’t have your feminism and cannibalise it, too. If you believe that gender norms are both harmful and socially created, you don’t get to go about teaching folks about the great, new gender norms you’ve invented. If you believe that gender norms can be healthy and are best guided by nature, which Ms Magazine appears to in this recent piece on Donald Trump and explosions construed as semen, then, frankly, you’re Jordan Peterson.
Now, I’m not claiming it’s impossible to synthesise an understanding of gender as the product of biological difference and of society. There are feminist scholars who have done so, and their ideas, for mine, are the most fearless where the origin or the future of gender is concerned. But, few who talk about “toxic masculinity” do so from that psychoanalytic standpoint. Honestly, the whole thing seems unhelpful and confused.
Look. Is this “toxic masculinity” a system that is socially imposed, or is it a thing that individual bad dudes catch? And, if a woman behaves in this “toxic” way — say, like, when she’s US Secretary of State and openly says that the death of half a million Iraqi children was “worth it” — was she infected by maleness, coerced by the toxic masculinity of others, or somehow alienated from a “natural” femininity, that is, in essence, nurturing and life-giving and all that palaver?
None of this is to counter the claim that acts of violence in the West have been overwhelmingly enacted by men. It is to suggest that the attribution of a gender to widespread, systemic violence may be a bit bloody thick. Violence may have been, and may still be, required of a man in work, in war or in the maintenance of an identity that none of the people currently talking about “toxic masculinity” can identify as either socially or naturally acquired. But to say that it is natural, or a perversion of the natural, or a historical misstep with an actual gender just seems to me to be very close to the evolutionary stupidity of a Peterson or a Dawkins.
I have little to say about the natural or the desirable man or woman. I would say that the desirable human does not permit their consciousness to become a landfill where pointless ideas refuse to degrade. “Toxic masculinity” is a pointless, even a harmful, idea. And so is the idea of the civilising, or somehow more “natural” woman.
Get your thinking sorted, people, before resuscitating all this state-of-nature rot. It’s not the 18th century and all this spiritual malarkey about “natural” law, or non-toxic being, is the business of Enlightenment twits. Sort it out before banging on again about poison men, corrective women or a list of rules for our gendered redemption.
I do not know enough about gender theory, but it troubles me in trying to understand how some men act (as a guy myself). All sorts of lines are crossed in a way that women seldom consider let alone act upon. I’m not suggesting that men are devils and women angels, but men do indeed have a capability that can border on terrorism. I read the news sometimes and wish to reside upon a lone mountaintop.
Meanwhile a woman walked into YouTube’s headquarters and murdered people.
#rollseyes
I broadly agree, Helen. The ‘masculinity’ being described here is typically just a euphemism for aggression of one kind or another. If aggression is psychosocially damaging and not merely disagreeable or offensive, then that’s a product of threat, not gender — meaning, it should be a concern whoever’s doing it, and whatever the pretext.
I’m not too fond of the term ‘toxic’ either, because unless you can demonstrate actual harm, it’s just a form of demonisation. In pharmacology, toxicity is defined by a substance in a minimum dangerous dose — which begs the question, ‘how much aggression is toxic’? Or even worse, ‘how much masculinity is?’ I have never seen anyone answer that satisfactorily, or even honestly.
That said, I do believe aggression can be harmful (especially, threats from the powerful can be effective to intimidate and coerce.) I agree that such threat can come from men toward women. However, such aggression is not always from men — consider cyberbullying, for example. We gain nothing by misdiagnosing the issue, and I agree that nobody has a priori license to prescribe how a particular gender should behave.
I have no idea what’s in Winton’s book and presently have no plans to read it, but as is often the case, the politicisation of the language discussing it seems to have privileged weak critical thought.
Good call!
AT Last! A first-that-I’ve-seen mention of the intended egalitarian outcome of gender equality! I’m over 60 now & have been waiting a long time (walking-wounded feminist male) to read something like this. Nailed it Raze!!
If Donald was not incurring “flack” Hillary would have been incurring flack. The election of President in 2016 was a rather polarised affair; very few media organisations were endorsing Trump – the N.Y Times tipped him as “in with a chance” but most (e.g. The Guardian and Oz’s ABC) were in outright denial of the possibility that Trump could win. Such being the case I suggest that Donald, least of all, is not surprised by a (global) vendetta against him.
Well : isn’t it convenient to have a label; in this case “toxic masculinity” (T.M.) but as the article examines – what does the phrase actually mean; social preconceptions aside. Does T.M. mean merely being a dick in a social setting or a domestic setting? Yet one of the references in the article (viz. Psychology Today) invites us to consider “heart throb?” James Bond as an instance of T.M; one might presume upon Bond’s instance that the martini be shaken and not stirred!
The above aside I find myself challenged by this observation “If you believe that gender norms can be healthy and are best guided by nature, which Ms Magazine appears to in this recent piece on Donald Trump[frankly I disagree but we’ll leave it to one side – my ed.] and explosions construed as semen, then, frankly, you’re Jordan Peterson.” is a case of Je ne comprends pas or “please explain”.
Frankly the article, quoted, – in typical fashion nowadays – does NOT examine the other side; viz., the career (in the word’s widest sense) of Hillary as Secretary of State (vis a vis anything). Some might recall that her decisions were less than rational.
The statement “None of this is to counter the claim that acts of violence in the West have been overwhelmingly enacted by men” is clear because men have been the (global) decision makers but consider the decisions (that have been documented in senior texts on Management) between male and female CEOs. The decisions of the latter are no more ruthless (and depending upon the author and source material) more ruthless.
However, at this point : “But to say that it is natural, or a perversion of the natural, or a historical misstep with an actual gender just seems to me to be very close to the evolutionary stupidity of a Peterson or a Dawkins” I admit defeat or at least utter incomprehension.
Kyle wrote:
Kyle, Helen’s great on political history, but shaky on the history and philosophy of science, and seems broadly ignorant of the critical contributions of the Enlightenment toward empiricism and epistemology. (And to all-but accuse Dawkins of nature-worship means she’s been getting digests of his thought third-hand.)
Helen seems to have taken high school science, mashed it with Marxist political economics, boiled it in the watery, populist antiscientific stock afflicting postmodern-trained communicators, and distilled it into something she finds sufficiently tasty, yet which I believe lacks protein in the foundations of its materialism, and (I suspect) key B-group vitamins in its moral philosophy.
I believe Helen doesn’t know for example that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a term coined by Darwin (who strongly resisted using it before finally relenting), that empiricism may be implied by yet does not entail Deism, or that rational empiricism isn’t the ‘scientism’ certain Christian evangelists have accused it of.
I could argue endlessly about the bigotry and ignorance with which she colours evolution in particular and science and math in general, and complain that she too readily misunderstands and dismisses rational antitheists like Dawkins. (There are valid grounds to argue with them if you want, but straw-man attacks aren’t among them.)
Rather than encouraging her to invoke less science, I could also encourage her to read more about it, because I think science would probably help clarify and support her arguments more than the rhetorical devices she sometimes over-reaches for.
But I try to avoid all that while ever it’s not central to the thesis. Ultimately, I enjoy Helen’s perspectives, respect her critical thought and pragmatism, and more often than not get a grin from her manner of argument. I just wish she weren’t allergic to science.
You have been reading the articles of Helen rather longer than I and your comments have enabled a recovery from my attack of vertigo. I am indebted to your first three paragraphs having such an effect.
As to Helen’s culinary delights may I suggest, in all humility, Herbert Spencer (who did coin the phrase) for dessert. In fact Galbraith pointed out in a number of articles from the 50s, onwards, that a MAN could not be considered truly educated until he had read Spencer.
Just a bit about gender, evolution and uh, Aristophanes, because it has come up under Helen’s laudable attack on loaded language in gender politics, and I’ve been reluctantly critical of some of her context, so I may as well advance an alternative position for consideration.
Evolutionary biologists are very interested in the evolutionary underpinnings of morality for pretty much the same reason psychologists and sociologists are: as a species, we’re able to reconfigure our morality in much the way we reconfigure societies. That’s unusual, and whatever questions it raises in moral philosophy, it also raises a bunch of scientific questions about methods, stability, efficacy and human welfare. But this conversation has some history, so it’s worth seeing where it has come from…
There was a time in the Enlightenment when all the cool kids were Deists — guys like Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and (probably) George Washington. With what they knew at the time, they believed in a divinely-prescribed, perfect natural order that pretty much ran itself. Mere observation, they held, could open the bonnet on how the universe operated, and since it was divinely designed, the ‘how’ would also suggest ‘why’ in much the sense that the practical uses of a spanner convey the toolmaker’s intentions.
And it’s not a big step from Deism to a form of idealism about nature that in more recent times is called the Naturalistic Fallacy — a version of David Hume’s ‘is-ought’ problem in which one believes that if you can find the ‘pure’ form of nature, then that’s the way things morally ought to be. Applied to human sexes then, there ought to be a ‘pure’ kind of masculinity and femininity that defines a perfect pairing of male and female. (I should point out that nobody needed Deism to make that argument — any patriarchy or other crony lobby group can do it, and it had been done since the Bronze Age; it’s just that the Deists thought there was a scientific basis for it.)
But the Naturalistic Fallacy didn’t last much past Darwin. Darwin wasn’t the first to consider evolutionary processes, but was key in bringing it all together: Nature is advancing by serial mistake, he realised, eradicating problems or just reacting to environmental change, and gradually adapting more effectively. Others called it ‘survival of the fittest’ as a sort of Four Word Slogan, but Darwin knew that wasn’t quite right: it was the unfortunate being exterminated, which also happened to include many of the weak. The point being: there’s no Plan to nature, just a lot of tragedy. (That realisation cost him his Christian faith, and he remained agnostic forever after.) Certainly by the early 20th century, naturalistic idealism was being listed as a fallacy both scientifically and ethically, and so it remains today.
Which means that anyone who invokes some notion of ‘true’ or ‘good’ masculinity or femininity is a century out of date on ethics and about 150 years behind on science. With evolution having killed off more than 98% of all species ever to populate our planet, and key foundations of human moral adaptations to be found in various other species, I know of no serious evolutionary biologist (Dawkins or anyone else) who’s a nature-worshipper, or who’d argue perfect design, or take any such argument seriously. (Which means Helen’s right about the intellectual vacuity of the word ‘toxic’. It’s rubbish unless you can define some ideal it poisons.)
Moreover, anyone who argues innate morality — that is, morality based on some kind of revelation (either your inner voice perhaps, or wisdom received from antiquity) is also flying in the face of 300 years of Enlightenment that pointed out how hopelessly helpless revelation is as a source of knowledge compared to observation and experiment (not to mention, modern psychology telling us where we get most of our convictions from.)
The consequence?
All moral conversations — including anything to do with gender morality — are continuing, open discussions. They’ve been documented since at least the time of Greek playwright Aristophanes, and the only way we can deconflict our competing interests and selective ignorance is to ask more questions, study more, listen with more compassion and question what we think we know of our intentions, methods and impacts.
Helen got all that right in her analysis, while getting pretty much all the history of evolutionary science wrong, misrepresenting Dawkins in both his intentions and beliefs, and getting the history of the Enlightenment only partly right. I think she was right for the right reasons, but added some polemic context for flavour that was unresearched and at best only partly correct.
I suppose the lesson here is when fellow citizens are being selfishly, oxymoronically stupid there’s no end of evidence revealing that — even if some rebuttals may be partially wrong. 🙂
Excellent assessment Ruv; really first class and such OUGHT to be the standard for Crikey. I did enjoy reading this item.
A few very minor points follow for the purpose of ensuring that many of the points that you
made are not confined to examples provided
> There was a time in the Enlightenment when all the cool kids were Deists
In England too; particularly among the educated. consider Galsworthy and Trollop; the latter
writing fiction and fiction where some of the characters are all too obvious. Trollop also
visited Oz/NZ in the 1870s.
Wallace deserves as much space as you have devoted to Darwin; not a point that influences your thesis other than that if Darwin did consider himself an agnostic it would have had to have been post 1870 when Huxley (Darwin’s chief champion of Evolution by natural selection) got round to”inventing” the word.
“I know of no serious evolutionary biologist (Dawkins or anyone else) who’s a nature-worshipper, or who’d argue perfect design, or take any such argument seriously”
That is the point where I lost my block! I literally exclaimed WTF in an office environment. Let’s take it a stage further Ruv. The challenge is to “identify ONE person in the world who would concede that there is anything teleological about evolution”; of course we’re assuming that the person has half a clue as the the principles of evolution.
Indeed there is NOTHING teleological about evolution. Other than natural selection evolution does NOT have a direction. Moreover evolution is very short term. If a facility is not required or needed the facility is lost in fairly short order.
“I suppose the lesson here is … snip”. I wonder if the lesson is that there are brigades of (feminists?) who think that slapping labels on particular behaviours will illustrate a trend where females are “right” and males are “wrong”. Such a model admits to no shades of grey which is just the desired result of the proponents. The last thing that we want is analysis.
As for Helen, for whom I have a very high regard, perhaps she might be persuaded to “tee off” with a driver and NOT a putter. She might loose a few readers by the road side but the longer term will yield results.
Kyle wrote:
> Wallace deserves as much space as you have devoted to Darwin
He does! For space I only alluded to him (and their forebears) by pointing out that Darwin wasn’t the first to think about evolutionary processes (and as I believe you know, Darwin just got lucky and spotted geographical boundaries as a key factor — and was seriously ‘big picture’ smart enough to make sense of it. :D)
> if Darwin did consider himself an agnostic it would have had to have been post 1870
He did eventually consider himself agnostic and I can find some references if you’re interested. I don’t know of any reliable source putting a date to his deconversion, but it was noted that he no longer went to sermons after a while, and took long walks in the church grounds. I don’t know that it ties to the reception of *The Origin of Species* so much as his understanding of its implications — but I don’t know that it didn’t either. Regardless, digesting the personal implications of his theory seemed very hard on him emotionally and physically, and perhaps that’s understandable: people still say ‘survival of the fittest’ like evolution is manifest destiny. Humans are still coming to terms with the moral and metaphysical implications of evolution as we presently understand it, and our world is a lot less religious than it was.
> The challenge is to “identify ONE person in the world who would concede that there is anything teleological about evolution”
You can find them, but you have to dig into the Evangelical shills in the US passing themselves off as active research scientists. But otherwise: agreed. In fairness, this is in no sense a problem with Helen’s article. For some reason, the same pomo-benighted society that has converted all facts into opinions and politicised observation by co-opting its language and telling calumnies about the observers, nevertheless also believes in the naturalistic fallacy a century debunked. (I’d say ‘go figure’ if I could fathom how far one would actually have to go for that to make sense.) But Helen’s onto it too, and the fact that she’s seen through it while being no great scholar of science gives me more heart than I’ve had for a while. (We can’t make her eat her broccoli, but if she’s growing her own Brussels sprouts, I’ll not do more than grumble occasionally.)
> I wonder if the lesson is that there are brigades of (feminists?) who think that slapping labels on particular behaviours will illustrate a trend where females are “right” and males are “wrong”
Any form of self-righteous idiocy gets more mileage if you can co-opt the language of discourse first. It looks like a simple failing of critical thought until you see how much such failings benefit the influence of their loudest champions. It’s not confined to one political viewpoint either: you can see it everywhere that influence matters more than accountability, and the popular press either capitalises on it, or lets it slide.
This is why I didn’t want to chew on Helen for only getting the science half-right. As they often are, her critical intuitions were exemplary — all the more so since she’s missing key facts — and to me that counts far more.
In the last survey I saw 71% of females in Australia agree with the present treatment of asylum seekers or think their treatment should be tougher, but women are more kind (but only with those who they identify with) or seemly pose no threat to them. When the asylum seeker women was found to have been raped, not given adequate access to medical treatment or counseling, there were no street marches for her.
Aggression is found in every living thing on the planet from plants to insect to mammals all striving to secure as much resources to ensure there survival and gene pool. At what point in human evolution (please someone tell me) where aggression is no longer required, that utopian place where we all share nicely.
Toxic masculinity is a miss-characterized form of right wing behaviour best described by George Lakoff of Don’t Think Of An Elephant fame. Those that think that the poor and disenfranchised deserve their lot due to their lack of following the rules, the best proponent of this is a female by the name of Pauline H.