What is Toxic Masculinity?
Is There a Standard for Being a Jerk?
Toxic men are in the news again. Again. In fact, it is clear that they will always be in the news, because men are so often doing things men shouldn’t do. But still, this term toxic seems to have meaning beyond a simple notion of sin. Toxic males are a special kind of bad. What is a toxic male and might it help to answer this question using an Old World/New World lens?
For nearly three years during my 20s I lived in a mud hut in Mali, West Africa. In that hut I often sat alone because as an American I’d grown up valuing books. I’d grown up enjoying sitting and reading, often alone. Like Descartes way back at the beginning of the Light People Revolution, I enjoyed being in my mind. But now I wasn’t in America, and sitting alone was taboo, even if reading a book. I knew it was taboo because kids were often sent to sit with me, and stare at me while I read. At first they’d just walk into my house and watch quietly. When that got distracting and I got the words together to tell them as much, they’d simply go outside, get on each other’s shoulders, and watch me through one of my little mud hut windows.
Eventually their voyeurism got under my skin and I decided to head over to their family compound and complain a little, first to their mothers. Their mothers yelled at them without so much as looking up from their cooking, and the next day I was spied on again. My next trip was to their fathers, and one father in particular. His name was Bakari. I told Bakari, in very broken Bambara, that I’d really appreciate it if his kid and his spy buddies would knock it off. Bakari told me I should just tell them myself. When I told him I already had, Bakari called his son over and with an open hand hit him hard on the back of his neck. I cringed a little.
Madou didn’t come around the next day. He didn’t come around the day after that, either. But then, on the third day, he was back. I tried to survive his stares but after an hour I failed. Complaining one more time to his father, I was told, gruffly, “Just smack him with a tree twig.” I told Bakari that wasn’t my thing and he told me, “Well, okay,” and gave me a look that I translated as, “Good luck with that.”
Sure enough, the kids were back the next day. And the day after that. And then sometime during that week or during that month, with them staring at me and me telling them sternly to leave, back and forth, I simply broke. I chased them, fast and hard and angrily, like a fool. As I ran I could hear a voice in my head, “You should probably go home.”
I didn’t.
I chased them right into Bakari’s compound, right into where Bakari was taking tea, and right into a dead end for Madou and his friends. This time Bakari wasn’t so calm. “What is this?” he shouted. I told him I was sick and tired of Madou and the boys not respecting me. I tumbled through some bad Bambara and watched as the grown ups tried to understand me. Finally, Bakari looked at his son and said, “Go get me a branch from the foot of the baobab.” Madou cried all the way out and back from the Baobab tree, eventually handing a gnarly stick to his father as we all awaited the moment of reckoning.
And then Bakari handed me the switch. In front of everyone. He just stuck it out there in front of my face, one hand offering me the branch, the other clasping his son’s skinny arm. With time at a total standstill (I can still see Madou’s uvula hanging in the back of his throat, mouth agape, voice like a firetruck), I took that switch and with a flourish let Madou have it. I just let it rip on Madou, a kid I loved, and still do. Not a few times did I Iet that stick fly, and boy did Madou cry. I hit him again, and maybe even again, and then I stopped because I was emptied of whatever ugly thing was in me. I was tired and empty but all around me the adults were impressed. Bakari was impressed. His wife smiled. The chief, Dugutiki Moro, once he heard about it all, he too was impressed. When I was done Madou ran for cover and did not return to my house for many, many days. In fact, he did not return until I invited him. For the final year of my time in Mali it was like this. Madou would join me by asking my permission or receiving my invitation.
I had acquired something. I was known differently to Madou now, for better or worse.
And here’s the question, the one this article started with: Was I being a toxic male?
What if I told you that Bakari, the father who handed me the whipping stick, would also walk hand in hand with me, like boyfriend and boyfriend, wherever we went? He did. Most men did, it’s part of the culture. And what if I told you that Bakari would often take time to make sure his wives could go and visit their families, taking over their chores from time to time, doing what was considered “women’s work,” and not just once in a blue moon?
Toxic masculinity?
No, really. Try and answer it right now in your head. Was Bakari’s action, and mine for that matter, planting a toxic masculinity into the mind and soul of this ten year old boy? Were we passing that down, older generation to younger, man to boy, father to son?
Here’s another story. It’s from East Africa. It comes from a dissertation from a Meru man; that’s a Kenyan ethnic group that dominates the plains near Mount Kenya within the Nyambene Mountain Range. His name is Jacob Kanake and he tells of his own passage into manhood in the Meru circumcision tradition.
All the boys are escorted into the circumcision field by warriors from our extended families. Everyone is singing and dancing hero songs. In their right hands, each boy carries a thin green ritual shrub with a few leaves and a young bud, called a muthanguru. The green bud is fragile and can break easily and requires great care until the surgery is complete. We boys were meant to undergo the surgery holding the shrub in our hands. If we showed any sign of fear, the fragile shrub’s bud would be removed by one of the elders, cut off, with the missing bud taken to one of our sisters or mothers waiting at a distance. That would doom us, it would mean we had been afraid. Afterward, however, if we successfully completed the ordeal, made it through without showing fear, our mothers and sisters could jump for joy and run proudly up and down the field thundering adulations and singing themselves hoarse. Every boy longed to hear their family chant the great song;
Do not fear he is coming back to us wearing a Lion’s mane!
Kanake then adds a most intriguing footnote about what can happen in contemporary Kenya of today.
Today, in our communities, where the culture is deteriorating, these older warriors sometimes beat the initiates, inflicting fresh wounds on their young bodies. Besides being inappropriate, the wounds are another possible way of spreading infection. Parents, elders, and provincial leaders detest and condemn this inhumane way of instilling discipline. It is important that we work hard to eliminate these inappropriate physical beatings. Our Meru families deserve a ritual without the beatings in order to launch their children into proper manhood.
What is this? The guy who got his private parts cut off without anesthesia is upset that he would also get a beating? One act of violence seems a lot different than the other. One act of courage seems honorable, while the other seems, can we say, toxic?
And that makes me think that maybe toxic masculinity is just for Light People. The term is something very relative perhaps, a placeholder for modern people in the throws of fashioning a new type of goodness meant for reason-worshiping people. If that is true, however, Light People declarations about human rights seem anything but universal. And if universality starts to fall apart, does that mean that a good old fashioned wife beating in West Africa is okay for West Africans? A beating is okay in Bamako just not in Boston? How can we figure this out?
Let’s hear from some Light People of the 21st century as they try to define toxic masculinity. Perhaps this will help us figure out what toxic masculinity is all about.
According to psychologist Terry Kupers, a PHD from UCLA, “Toxic masculinity involves the need to aggressively compete and dominate others. Toxic masculinity is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.”
Was I fostering domination when I took that branch from Madou’s father and beat him with it? Sure seems like it. Were those elders being toxic when they made those boys suffer some serious fear during the Meru circumcision? Are African men just super toxic according to these super smart PHD people from Los Angeles? This is intense!
What about this Toxic Man definition from an article in Psychology Today. It is written by Ronald Levant, a PHD from the University of Akron and past President of the American Psychological Association.
We must consider the difficult truth that men and boys are encouraged [by] society to be self-sufficient, stoic, strong, dominant, tough, and unemotional, while avoiding conduct that is stereotypically feminine, such as empathy, and nurturance… This type of encouragement can promote the constriction of emotions and lead to aggression and violence.
Uh oh, I don’t think that this Light Person Ronald Levant would like Mr. Kanake’s circumcision story. At all. The whole point of Mr. Kanake’s Kenyan coming of age odyssey was the very acquisition of self sufficiency, stoicism, strength, toughness and the wherewithal to constrict your emotions.
Here’s another interesting Light Person analysis of toxic masculinity that I think we should investigate. It’s from a 2019 article in the Feminist Current by a man named Robert Jensen. Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas. He is the author of a popular book entitled, The End of Patriarchy.
We should renounce the way men are trained to use threats and aggression to resolve disputes, and instead foster collaboration. But if we start to list the qualities of healthy masculinity — such as caring, compassion, and connection, or using our strength and determination to protect and nurture rather than control — we realize that all of those positive traits are not unique to men. Women are just as capable of the same behaviors.
Do you feel the clawing love of equality in this quote? “We realize that all of the positive traits are not unique to men.” Can you feel Jensen’s uneasiness in listing “male traits”?
If you keep reading these types of articles and books you quickly see that for many Light People the goal is to dissolve differences between men and women. The goal is to create equality so as to create a better world. Masculinity would be less toxic if there was no such thing as maleness. It is why so many folks who think this way also want to destroy what they call “patriarchy,” what Jensen describes as a pathology. For Jensen the illness is masculinity.
In the Old World, this abolition of maleness and femaleness is just not possible. To destroy these categories is to destroy the very blueprint of existence. It is to enter into an abyss of meaning where all things are constructed for the benefit of the constructor. It is the opposite of the phrase your mom used to use when you were being bad: “You know son, the world doesn’t revolve around you!”
And that reminds me of a book by CS Lewis called the Abolition of Man. That book probably describes the Old World view on toxic masculinity in the most succinct terms possible.
Lewis argues that there is a template for living. A way of being. It overrides all “ideas,” and it supersedes all “systems” and all “theories.” In fact, all of our human systems and ideologies must align with this template or they will end up creating dysfunction, disease and death. That template Lewis calls the Tao. It can be found in every human interaction, and at its core, it is the operating system through which all human beings achieve health and by which all human beings find meaning. It is The Way by which we know what is good. Using it we can find out what is toxic in males, females, monkeys and margarine.
So what does this template called the Tao say about toxic masculinity?
It says a man should be beneficent and not kill another man.
It says that a man should hope for and cherish all new life, human, animal and plant.
It says that men should love and protect their kinfolk.
It says that a man should honor his mother and his father like one honors the earth and the sun.
It says that a man should honor the marriage of others.
It says that a man should not lie and should not deceive.
It says that a good man seeks justice for his neighbors.
It says that a man should have mercy on those who suffer.
It says that a man that sacrifices himself for others becomes fully a man.
Not doing these things makes a man toxic. But guess what? Not doing these things makes a woman toxic too. In that way, men and women are equal because both are subject to the Tao. Let’s reiterate that. Men and women are equal because both are equally subject to the Tao.
Equality for Lewis, and for most Old World cultures, was not in how one lived, according to roles of power and equality, it was in the way both man and woman were subject to the Law of God. Think of it like a game of twister, that game with the dots on the floor. We must align ourselves to the right way of being or we become twisted. We become toxic.
And guess what? We will become twisted. We will become sideways and sick. It’s inevitable. It’s called death. However, it seems we must die as men and as women. In fact, part of CS Lewis’ message is to remind us that men and women are essential parts that make up the whole. Neither can be whole if either fails to embrace reality. For Lewis and his idea of the Tao, men and women work together to create a unity in Christ. They live and work together on this earth in order to become fully human, or in other words, they commune in order to fully align with the Tao. To become healthy, each must serve the other.
Where does Lewis get all of this from? His point in the Abolition of Man is that these eternal truths are clear both in the human heart and in man’s narrative about himself. They are eternal but revealed in history to the hearts of man(kind), You can see it if you look carefully, silently, and with reverence for the sacred. You can know when you contemplate the Creator, but doing so is a thing in and of itself. Most call it prayer.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a very, very Old World way of knowing.
Toxic Masculinity. How should we understand this term in the end? The key is to realize that 21st century Light People ground their understanding of men and masculinity on the twin notions of power and equality. Old Worlders, people from before the Enlightenment, draw their conclusions about masculinity using the twin notions of divinity and divine manifestation (the created order). This is not a value statement, as if pre-Enlightenment people are better people. It is simply a statement about epistemology, and one I think you can call true.
When New Worlders say toxic men, they mean men that advance inequality. When Old Worlders say toxic men, they mean men that advance disorder. That disorder only has meaning because it is juxtaposed to the laws of the Creator. In the case of the stick and my young pal Madou, my actions were sanctioned by the village because they returned proper order to my relationship with Madou. My actions were just, despite the inequality they fostered.
Old World people, a very broad category to be sure, honor things heavenly, eternal, divine, above, beyond. Old World people honor gods. For Old World Christians that God is the Triune God, the Creator of all things, the standard for all things, the God revealed in Christ and offered to the world in Christ’s body, the Church. Therein lies the measuring stick for this thing we call toxic masculinity.
Parts of this article have me thinking in a way that sounds like some sort of fell-Chiasm. I've heard it said, supposing that machines can never really mimic human intelligence and emotion, that instead what needs to happen to blur the line and eliminate the uncanny valley, is to usher humans into being more robotic - something like that. So it seems the same with these gender conversations: a woman can never be a man, so we will make men more like women and, vice versa. So, as per the Jensen quote and more from you, sure, "maleness" is being snuffed out, but is "femaleness" really filling that void? I would argue no, not at all. Instead it seems that many categories (human/artifice, "white"/non, male/female, jew/greek) are instead being cooked and blended in the melting pot into one horrific chimera that has no mouth and must scream - call it, an alchemical Rebis. And, this happening, it is strangely pseudo-Christian in that, regarding my allusion, it seems as though this dissolution of multiplicity is good, rather than a unification of disparateness, in Christ. Like the chiasm of roles in a married couple, or a guy who prays more than once a week.
Amen, brother! Amen, amen!