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Thought provoking essay by one of my favorite The Atlantic authors:
By Caitlin Flanagan
AUGUST 30, 2023
The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”
It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.
As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.
Over the past several years, The New York Times has located signs of the brave fight against toxic masculinity in the television series Ted Lasso, in a production of the 19th-century opera Der Freischütz, and in a collage made in less than an hour. “White Lotus Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All,” wrote a disappointed Michelle Goldberg, as though someone had snatched away her bag of Good & Plenties.
Notably, however, the Times has not referred to toxic masculinity in its coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders. Nor does the term appear in an article headlined “Professor Charged in Scheme to Lure Women to New York and Rape Them,” nor in one about the abduction of a 13-year-old in which the suspect has been charged with kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for criminal and sexual purposes.
Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.
(There were also, of course, women who responded to the catastrophe, three of whom were killed—two police officers and an EMT: Kathy Mazza, Moira Smith, and Yamel Merino.)
A year ago, at a drag show in Colorado Springs, a man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. A second man, Richard Fierro, was at the club with his wife, his daughter, and a few friends. When the shots roared into that enclosed space, Fierro ran toward the gunfire and pulled the killer to the floor. When Fierro found that the man was carrying a second gun, a pistol, he seized it, and pounded the man’s head with it over and over again, screaming, “I’m going to ****ing kill you.”
Fierro is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t know exactly what I did,” he told The New York Times. “I just went into combat mode.” He told CNN simply, “My family was in there. My little girl was in there.”
These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.
Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.
There are questions that must be answered. For instance, aren’t women capable of heroic acts? Of course, and mere examples don’t suffice to tell the tale, but here are several: Heather Penney was one of the two fighter pilots sent screaming through the air on 9/11, on orders to find and take down the fourth hijacked aircraft. The only successful end to that mission would be suicide: There was no time to load the jets with missiles, so if they found the missing plane, they would have to fly straight into it. “There was no second-guessing,” she told a reporter on the 20th anniversary. “And there was no tears.” Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star for combat valor, for her swift action during a 2005 firefight in Iraq.
But the heroism that marks most women’s lives is the endless effort to protect themselves—and very often, their children—from male threat or violence. It is in spite of this deep, perpetual vulnerability that the world goes on, that women go out alone with men they don’t know well, that they bear their children, and—on nothing more than trust—sleep at night beside them. The number of women who have risked everything—and in many cases lost their lives—in self-defense is without end, and the number who haven’t thought twice about throwing themselves between their children and great threat is all you need to know about female courage and sacrifice.
We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?
The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.
I’ve talked about this topic before, and almost instantly someone interrupts to report in outraged tones the monstrous action of some man who has been in the news. “Is he heroic?” they will ask.
Patiently I will explain that obviously he isn’t. There is a very simple test for whether or not something constituted an act of heroic masculinity, and here it is: Ask yourself if it was heroic.
In certain parts of the country, including Los Angeles, where I live, the strength and bravery of girls are specifically championed. The message is that it’s great to be a girl, and that girlhood itself is part of what makes each girl so powerful. On the soccer field I’ve often heard parents cheer “Girls rule!” after a winning goal.
IN PRAISE OF HEROIC MASCULINITY
Teach boys that strength can be a virtue.By Caitlin Flanagan
AUGUST 30, 2023
The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”
It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.
As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.
Over the past several years, The New York Times has located signs of the brave fight against toxic masculinity in the television series Ted Lasso, in a production of the 19th-century opera Der Freischütz, and in a collage made in less than an hour. “White Lotus Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All,” wrote a disappointed Michelle Goldberg, as though someone had snatched away her bag of Good & Plenties.
Notably, however, the Times has not referred to toxic masculinity in its coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders. Nor does the term appear in an article headlined “Professor Charged in Scheme to Lure Women to New York and Rape Them,” nor in one about the abduction of a 13-year-old in which the suspect has been charged with kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for criminal and sexual purposes.
Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.
(There were also, of course, women who responded to the catastrophe, three of whom were killed—two police officers and an EMT: Kathy Mazza, Moira Smith, and Yamel Merino.)
A year ago, at a drag show in Colorado Springs, a man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. A second man, Richard Fierro, was at the club with his wife, his daughter, and a few friends. When the shots roared into that enclosed space, Fierro ran toward the gunfire and pulled the killer to the floor. When Fierro found that the man was carrying a second gun, a pistol, he seized it, and pounded the man’s head with it over and over again, screaming, “I’m going to ****ing kill you.”
Fierro is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t know exactly what I did,” he told The New York Times. “I just went into combat mode.” He told CNN simply, “My family was in there. My little girl was in there.”
These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.
Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.
There are questions that must be answered. For instance, aren’t women capable of heroic acts? Of course, and mere examples don’t suffice to tell the tale, but here are several: Heather Penney was one of the two fighter pilots sent screaming through the air on 9/11, on orders to find and take down the fourth hijacked aircraft. The only successful end to that mission would be suicide: There was no time to load the jets with missiles, so if they found the missing plane, they would have to fly straight into it. “There was no second-guessing,” she told a reporter on the 20th anniversary. “And there was no tears.” Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star for combat valor, for her swift action during a 2005 firefight in Iraq.
But the heroism that marks most women’s lives is the endless effort to protect themselves—and very often, their children—from male threat or violence. It is in spite of this deep, perpetual vulnerability that the world goes on, that women go out alone with men they don’t know well, that they bear their children, and—on nothing more than trust—sleep at night beside them. The number of women who have risked everything—and in many cases lost their lives—in self-defense is without end, and the number who haven’t thought twice about throwing themselves between their children and great threat is all you need to know about female courage and sacrifice.
We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?
The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.
I’ve talked about this topic before, and almost instantly someone interrupts to report in outraged tones the monstrous action of some man who has been in the news. “Is he heroic?” they will ask.
Patiently I will explain that obviously he isn’t. There is a very simple test for whether or not something constituted an act of heroic masculinity, and here it is: Ask yourself if it was heroic.
In certain parts of the country, including Los Angeles, where I live, the strength and bravery of girls are specifically championed. The message is that it’s great to be a girl, and that girlhood itself is part of what makes each girl so powerful. On the soccer field I’ve often heard parents cheer “Girls rule!” after a winning goal.
