What is “Toxic Masculinity” and Why Does it Matter?

Origins

Toxic masculinity emerged within the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s, coined by Shepherd Bliss. Bliss confirmed to me in a 2019 email that he coined the term to characterize his father’s militarized, authoritarian masculinity. In a 1990 interview, Bliss told Daniel Gross: “I use a medical term because I believe that like every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote” (Gross 1990, 14). During the 1990s and early 2000s, toxic masculinity spread from men’s movements to wider self-help, academic, and policy literature. This literature posited that emotionally distant father-son relationships produced “toxically” masculine men. In Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1993), family therapist Frank Pittman argues that men who lack adequate fathering pursue unrealistic cultural images of masculinity and feel a constant need to prove their manhood. Pittman’s regular column on men’s issues in New Women Magazine may have helped popularize the term. Family therapist Steve Biddulph (1997) similarly argued that boys need a strong bond with a father figure/male mentor to avoid becoming toxically masculine men. Boys need the right kind of masculinity, the idea goes, and mothers can’t give this to them.

These psychologists posited toxic masculinity as culturally normative but curable through engaging men with fatherhood, positing an essentialist notion of masculine emotional development. Turn-of-the-century policy discourse picked up on this prescription. For example, the founder of the U.S. National Fatherhood Initiative, Don Eberly (1999a, 1999b), cited Pittman on fathering as an antidote to toxic masculinity in both his 1999 testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on youth culture and violence (called to discuss the Columbine school massacre) and in his edited book, Renewing the Sacred Vocation of Fathering (Eberly 1999a). Eberly suggested that emotionally absent fathers contributed to young men’s violence and was likely a factor in the Columbine shootings: “Young men badly need to see mature masculinity modeled (sic) out. Well-seasoned masculinity fundamentally transforms the aggression of young males by capturing their masculine energy and directing it toward socially constructive pursuits” (Eberly 1999b). For Eberly, if young men turn to violence, they probably grew up with single mothers or at least had emotionally absent fathers.

The prescription of engaged fatherhood as an antidote to toxic masculinity harmonized with 21st-century recommendations for heteronormative family life in an era of neoliberal globalization. Toxic masculinity provided a discourse for diagnosing men’s problems in the face of the gendered fall-out from deindustrialization, during which well-paid jobs in “masculine” occupational sectors disappeared while feminized service sector occupations expanded. Influential organizations, such as the OECD, recommended increasing household incomes in such conditions by drawing mothers into paid work, while promoting shared parenting (OECD 2007). There were calls for welfare systems to include fathers when offering family services. An Irish family policy article argued for engaging men with fatherhood so that “their wildness is tamed to the extent that they can adjust to the discipline of domestic routines and remain with their children and partners and in their families (as opposed to prison, for instance)” (Ferguson and Hogan 2004, 8). Similarly, Jennifer Randles’ (2013, 869) research on the U.S. “Thriving Families” program for low-income, mostly minority, parents found it promoted heterosexual marriage and engaged fatherhood as, in the words of the program’s executive director, “a civilizing influence on men.”

The label toxic masculinity tended to be applied to marginalized men. Terry Kupers’ research on men in prisons argued “toxic masculinity involves the need to aggressively compete and dominate others and encompasses the most problematic proclivities in men.…Toxic masculinity also includes a strong measure of the male proclivities that lead to resistance in psychotherapy” (Kupers 2005, 713–714). Similarly, Deevia Bhana’s (2005, 206) study of Black South African schoolboys linked their violence with both toxic masculinity and poverty, describing them as valuing “an oppositional street masculinity…associated with a flashily dressed black male street thug frequently a member of a gang and armed with a knife or weapon.”

Used in the aforementioned ways, toxic masculinity provided a framework that essentialized marginalized men as aggressive and criminal, discursively packaged in a way that it was presented as concern for men’s well-being. The idea of toxic masculinity harmonized with conservative political agendas concerned with the social control of low-income, under-employed men, and with patriarchal family values. Reliance on toxic masculinity, thus, did not reject the gender hierarchy or a binary gender order as anti-feminists often assume. Instead, therapeutic discourses on toxic masculinity typically invoked notions of “natural” male dispositions.

Nevertheless, critics of those like Eberly who, for example, linked school shootings to toxic masculinity imagined the label as part of a feminist project motivated by misandry. Christina Hoff Sommers (2003) complained that “gender equality experts” in government wanted to socialize boys away from “toxic masculinity” out of misguided rejection of differences in the character, interests, and abilities of men and women. Likewise, an article on family therapy argued that the phrase had become “part and parcel of the scholarly and popular clinical literature” that represented a “deficit perspective” toward men (Dollahite, Marks, and Olsonm 2002, 262). From this perspective, talk of toxic masculinity indicates a feminist anti-male bias even though proponents of the term were often conservatives seeking to “reform” marginalized men and stabilize patriarchal heterosexual family norms.

Feminism and Toxic Masculinity

Feminists have adopted toxic masculinity as shorthand for characterizing homophobic and misogynist speech and violence by men. Since 2016, a notable number of media stories used “toxic masculinity” in discussions of U.S. President Trump and the #MeToo movement to describe the poor behavior of powerful white elite men in contrast to its earlier applications to marginalized men. Indeed, feminist scholars have adopted toxic masculinity as a useful frame for responding to resurgent masculinist right-wing politics. For instance, anti-feminism’s long history has been reinvigorated within what media studies scholars label “networked misogyny,” defined as “an especially virulent strain of violence and hostility towards women in online environments” sometimes linked with off-line violence; toxic masculinity sums-up this strain (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016, 171).

According to my count, feminist scholars’ use of toxic masculinity increased as the term became more publicly popular. Academic databases show that, since 2016, scholars across disciplines have used the term. Surprisingly, more than half of the top 60 returns provide no definition: the term is used descriptively, without theorization or operationalization. Many linked toxic masculinity with other disparaging labels. An analysis of the TV show Game of Thrones (Askey 2018, 50), for example, notes in its abstract that the show reflects “western misogyny, hetero- and cissexism, and toxic masculinity.” Those who provided a definition most often mentioned violence, domination, aggression, misogyny, and homophobia.

Few scholars discuss how to conceptualize toxic masculinity in relation to feminist theories of masculinity. Bryant Sculos (2017) describes Kupers’ (2005) article as providing one “of the most prominent scholarly usages of the concept.” My survey of feminist articles published since 2016 confirmed the popularity of Kupers’ (2005) use as a subset (Parent, Gobble, and Rochlen 2019) of hegemonic masculinity surfacing in specific contexts, such as prisons or imagined national threats. Thus, the toxic/healthy therapeutic understanding of masculinity carried into feminist scholarship via citation.

As an alternative, I suggest analyzing condemnations of certain forms of masculinity for their political effects. James Messerschmidt (2010) and Betül Ekşi (2017) have both shown how male elites can bolster their power by condemning toxically masculine men. Messerschmidt shows how Presidents Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. depicted themselves as “masculine heroes” rescuing “feminized victims” from the “toxically masculine villain,” Saadam Hussein. Ekşi (2017) shows how branches of the Turkish National Police disparaged other branches as toxically masculine, situating their own violence as “restrained.” However, neither of the Bushes nor the Turkish Police use the term “toxic masculinity”; rather, Messerschmidt and Ekşi apply it as shorthand. Nevertheless, their approach of analyzing what condemnation of other men’s masculinities achieves politically seems promising.

Thus, we might analyze the politics behind condemnations of toxic masculinity. Recent theorizations of inclusive masculinities suggest shifts away from homophobia and misogyny especially among white, masculine elites. While Eric Anderson (2009) hails such shifts as indicating a weakening of gender hierarchies, others have argued that normative masculine disavowal of homophobia and sexism can disguise ongoing gender inequalities (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). By distancing themselves from such “toxic” elements of masculinity, men may represent heterosexual masculine privilege as a thing of the past even as it continues to structure institutions.

Conclusion

Following Raewyn Connell’s (1995) discussion of masculine hegemony as a field of discursive positions and practices, we can see how disavowal of toxic masculinity can serve the interests of already privileged men. Feminist applications of the term to the likes of Trump and Weinstein depart from a conservative focus on marginalized men’s “toxic masculinity.” However, such condemnation still individualizes the problem to the character traits of specific men. Condemnation of toxic masculinity allows men to position themselves as against misogyny, homophobia and violence, while simultaneously acknowledging masculinity as implicated in such problems. Sexual violence and harassment can then be discussed as features of “backward” and “mentally unwell” men. Thus, the institutional and structural privileges men accrue (what Connell terms the “patriarchal dividend”) are systematically obscured. Toxic masculinity carries inflections of postfeminist relegation of patriarchy to the past and individualizes sexism as a question of personal attitudes. Feminist scholars should thus be wary of using toxic masculinity as an analytic category.

Toxic masculinity continues to appear in media and scholarship. I’ve caught myself using it as a shorthand: I understand that its appeal lies in its ability to summon a recognizable character type. However, I take care not to use the term as a scholarly concept. In 2019, for the first time, the term appeared in some of my students’ essays, although I do not use it in my teaching. I noticed that students who didn’t use it gave fuller analyses of masculinity and different forms of violence. Possibly, the term has spread into feminist scholarship to an extent that it should be addressed in the classroom. Indeed, explaining why it is not a useful concept could highlight the value of less individualized approaches to gender and power.