Thread by @AllyFogg

Have tried 3 times to watch #bbctbq special on 'masculinity in crisis' & gave up every time it was so painful. Got off to the worst start with an exchange on toxic masculinity which inevitably involved people shouting across each other while using entirely different definitions>

It's a phrase I try incredibly hard not to use because it is ALWAYS misunderstood and always generates heat & no light. So here's a thread on what it should mean which may in turn explain why I don't use it. >

Your wiki may vary, but I first encountered 'toxic masculinity' as a phrase in prisons-based research circa 2005. It explained why there were so many men in US prisons who continued to display profoundly self-destructive behaviours even when it was ruining their own lives. >

Attributing their behaviour to TM did not mean that they were committing crimes or harming themselves because they were men. It did not mean that masculinity was inherently toxic. It meant that in their gendered behaviour, these men were their own worst enemies. So, for eg >

Men would prefer to suffer OR inflict severe physical injuries & pick up extra years or decades on their prison sentence rather than 'stand down' in an argument & be perceived as weak or afraid. That is toxic masculinity.

Men would prefer to drink or drug themselves to oblivion, with all the social & health consequences that entails, than to admit that they had a mental health problem or emotional vulnerability to a doctor. That is toxic masculinity.

Right now on the streets of London we have young boys who would literally prefer to be killed - or to kill someone else - than to be laughed at or be thought weak or afraid. That is toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity does not mean that all men are poisonous. It certainly doesn't mean that all women, in contrast, are wonderful. It means that the multifarious & often contradictory pressures to Be A Man in the right way cause us to behave in ways that harm ourselves & others.

And most importantly, that the pressures to Be A Man in the "right" way are primarily not coming from James Bond movies or newspapers or from women. They are coming from deep down in our own personal value systems & beliefs, forged in us since we were toddlers.

Now if we really want to use these insights to make things better for vulnerable men & boys, we need to be a bit more clever about how we apply it. There is nothing inherent or inevitable about toxic masculinity. We are not born with it, we have it drummed if not beaten into us.

Given my way, we wouldn't talk about toxic masculinity, we'd talk about toxic masculinisation. What is it we do to boys to instil this shit?

We spend a lot of time talking about men being brutes. Because far, far too often, men are brutes. We spend far to little time talking about how we brutalise boys - physically, socially, emotionally.

We spend a lot of time talking about men's difficulties in expressing & controlling emotions. Far too little time talking about what we do to stifle emotional expression in boys. Etc etc etc.

Until we come to accept that the way men are is exactly the way we - as a society - choose to make them, then the whole toxic masculinity debate is pretty much worthless, it is just a finger-pointing blame game. It's blaming the patient for being ill, not the disease.