I'm not too happy about how my generation is turning out; but, I think we're going down a pretty deep hole and it'll take us too long to dig ourselves out of it.
The problem isn't talking about toxic masculinity, or the concept. The problems are the emphasis on talking about toxic masculinity, the vagueness that people who use the term tend to use, the bolstering of celebration of men who act more feminine, the memes pushing us to normalize men and boys exhibiting more feminine traits, the growing number of fatherless households, the access of young boys to social media, and the education system.
Masculinity, without the "toxic" preface, is being lost in the shuffle. What this is doing, I think, is ironically creating a binary in how we look at men, and young boys are probably drawing this false conclusion -- that men are either big, strong, alphas, who almost crave physical violence, or dudes who wear makeup and dresses and cry.
The word "dangerous" seems deeply important here.
"able or likely to cause harm or injury."
Notice the word "or" rather than "and" in the definition.
There were two men, who we knew for sure, were dangerous at the Greenwood Park Mall on July 17th of last year. One was the manic who came in armed with rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammo with the intent to kill as many people as possible. The other was Eli Dicken, the hero who shot the bad guy from forty yards out with a handgun, and directed people to get behind him.
You can neither be a hero, nor a real villain, if you're not dangerous.
It seems that, nowadays, a lot of people would view the term "Man up!" as toxically masculine. It's not, at least in terms of any context I've seen in the real world.
Men have a job to do during this brief life that we have.
Now, I know that people will start howling the "Gender is a social construct!" bullshit at me; but, it's built out of biological reality. There are no drugs, and there is no surgery that can make me the more valuable reproductive resource. I'm half a foot, to a full foot taller than the last four women I've dated.
There's a reason why a part of the job of men is to do the kind of work that results in us being twelve times more likely to die in the workplace than women. Men are far more likely to fight wars -- you can't fight a war unless you're dangerous. You can't protect the hut from the tiger unless you're dangerous. You can't be Audie Murphy unless you're dangerous.
But, this goes beyond the realms of physical conflict. It's a dog eat dog world. You've gotta be dangerous, to some extent, to your competitors in the market place.
As Jordan Peterson put it, and this is an area where I think he's right, there's no virtue in being a harmless man -- namely lacking the capacity to do harm. If you're incapable of harming people, then there's no virtue in that restraint.
No, men should be dangerous.
What we need to do is teach men how to be in control.
That's the lesson of "Man up!" That's the lesson behind teaching boys to not break down, or ask to be taken out of the game because if a scraped knee. That's the lesson behind encouraging boys and men to be the shoulder to cry on, as opposed to being the person who needs the shoulder. It teaches us to be in control.
The more we coddle men, and feminize men, the more toxic masculinity we're going to see. Younger adults are already statistically having sex less often than my generation. Young men, who are sex deprived, and don't know how to control their emotions, are the bad kind of dangerous.
Isn't that really the elephant in the room? If this is going to be an ongoing narrative, can't we slice through it and define what we're talking about?
Can't we see masculinity as danger that is under control, and toxic masculinity as danger that isn't?
There's virtue in the capability of inflicting harm when needed, and not doing it when it's not -- that's masculinity. There's no virtue in inflicting harm out of sheer anger or frustration -- that's toxic masculinity. There's no virtue in lacking the ability to inflict harm -- that's just Harry Styles.