Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
Toxic masculinity is the reason for that as well. Being the victim is seen as being less masculine, which is seen as worthy of ridicule.
Toxic masculinity hurts everyone.
When men do bad things: “this is toxic masculinity”
When women do bad things: “this is also toxic masculinity”
When men don’t get the support they need. Or are ridiculed for feeling emotions other than anger. And don’t feel they can cry without being judged.
Women can absolutely be abusers. That’s called shitty people and has nothing to do with masculinity, toxic or otherwise.
Most men cry in front of a woman exactly once.
That’s not toxic masculinity. It’s toxic femininity and NO ONE is addressing it in a systemic way.
In feminist theory “masculinity” and “femininity” don’t mean “what men do” and “what women do” but value systems floating through society affecting people.
So in that sense yes woman can exhibit toxic masculinity, if they reinforce those shitty norms. Likewise men can exhibit toxic femininity… say, comparatively harmless example, by discouraging a tomboy from skating.
It’s just one of those gazillions of instances where feminist terminology sucks absolutely donkeyballs because you need to read theory to understand it, which practically noone who calls themselves a feminist actually does, it’s all vibes and signals very little analysis they abuse those terms just like the rest of the population. The rest of the population at least has an excuse, they’re using the dictionary definition.
In this particular instance, “toxic (male) gender norm” would be much better.
I mean, to get a little meta here, but if feminist theory essentially says “bad things are (toxic) masculinity, good things are femininity (feminism)” that betrays a deeper problem about the attitudes of feminist theorists, doesn’t it? Sure, it’s a terminology problem, but it’s also a problem that those are the terms.
Calling something women do a “toxic male gender norm” is just as problematic.
It’s called feminist studies - they’ll never say the thing they’re studying is or can be toxic. It’s always the masculine that’s bad, because the very subject name demands it.
I’ve talked to academic feminists about this and their reaction was pretty much “there were good reasons to chose those terms, doing it this way makes sense in the overall theoretical framework, it’s an academic term and not for general use, academic terms always get misunderstood that’s not a thing limited to feminism”. When asked whether, as an academic subject having its own political movement, and being, in the wider sense, sociologists, they shouldn’t at least study the societal implications of their terminology: Crickets.
And I can’t really blame them. The ones I talked with about this definitely have their heart in the right place, acknowledged all the issues but truth be told if one of them goes against those established terms which are oh so useful equivocations for many a catty bitch they’ll get skinned alive by exactly those catty bitches.