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This is a very, very rough start of a paper on the following topic that Dr. Von has just recently begun

Toxic Masculinity: It’s Not a Good Time to Be a Male

C. W. Von Bergen, ____________, and _________

Southeastern Oklahoma State University

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Abstract

There has been an incessant ideological attack on all things male over the last several decades

emanating from feminism that has permeated American culture that has resulted in US society

becoming increasingly unsympathetic to men. The most recent illustration of this climate

involves the specious term, “toxic masculinity,” adopted by social justice warriors which seeks

to pathologize maleness and to endorse a cultural shift associating manhood with negative

characteristics including excessive risk-taking, doltishness, violence and sexual aggression,

selfishness, avoidance of the appearance of weakness, and uncaring to one more feminine

characterized by nurturing, sensitivity, non-violence, and caring. Such a depiction of masculinity

is harmful and may lead to increased discrimination and marginalization of males. It is suggested

that in discussions of gender equity, it may be beneficial to encourage an appreciation of the

endless ways in which men and women are similar to one another, as well as the important ways

in which the two sexes differ. It may be wise to remember that complementarities, rather than

competition between genders, is a healthy cultural attitude to promote and Americans must not

allow the partisans of women’s advocacy groups to write the rules.  

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Toxic Masculinity: It’s Not a Good Time to Be a Male

The figure below indicates numerous dimensions of organizational diversity. This non-

exhaustive exhibit can also be conceptualized as areas where prejudice and discrimination can,

and often does, occur. One dimension, gender, is presented and is often interpreted as

discrimination, prejudice, and marginalization directed toward women. However, recently there

appears to be pathologizing of manhood and discrimination and diminishment of males in

contemporary American culture which has resulted in the emergence of what is referred to as

toxic masculinity (Saad, 2018).

Figure 1. Various dimensions of diversity (Gardenswartz & Rowe, 2008, p. 33).

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That men are in disrepute is not accidental. Such a damaging cultural change was

predicted by feminist author Christina Hoff Sommers in her book titled The War Against Boys:

How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2000a).

Consider the following areas: #MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101

A growing number of colleges and universities are force-feeding young men the radical feminist nonsense that “masculinity” is at the root of everything bad.

Students at Gettysburg College, a private Lutheran school overlooking the famous battlefield, who “identify as male” are required to watch a simplistic, distorted documentary on the aggressiveness of manhood and sit for a lecture by “campus leaders” about the harmful effects of “toxic masculinity.” The film, called “The Mask You Live In” by feminist provocateur Jennifer Siebel Newsom, teaches that the “three most destructive words” a boy can hear growing up are “be a man.”

And not just at Gettysburg College. Many schools across the country — including Dartmouth, Duke, the University of North Carolina, Claremont and Vanderbilt — have set out to “purge” male students of toxic masculinity. This dread disease is blamed for sexual violence, “body shaming,” domestic violence and the “hyper-masculinized sporting culture,” even massacres of small children.

A class at Dartmouth, according to The College Fix, an online news site that closely follows the news on the campus, identifies toxic masculinity as having encouraged the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub last summer in Orlando, Fla. Male students at Duke and the University of North Carolina are encouraged to immerse themselves in studies of “violent masculinity,” and to discuss “healthier masculinity” and something called “gender fluidity.” Duke wants its male students to reflect on patriarchy, male privilege, rape culture, pornography, machismo and “the language of dominance.”

APA Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men A new 36-page report from the American Psychological Association spotlights the organization’s first official warning against what some call toxic masculinity. the key takeaway is that traditional masculinity is harmful and socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage.

The document, titled “APA Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” was featured in the January issue of its magazine, Monitor on Psychology. Its aim

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is to help providers with male patients “despite social forces that can harm mental health.”

Developed by several experts between 2005-2018, the guidelines are aspirational “statements that suggest or recommend specific professional behavior, endeavor, or conduct for psychologists” and differ from standards, which are considered “mandatory and may be accompanied by an enforcement mechanism,” according to the report.

One of its primary guidelines warns against the “masculinity ideology.”

Traditional masculinity, as the APA defines it, refers to masculinity cognitions “that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” These behaviors are often influenced by social, cultural and contextual norms, whether that’s socialization by friends, imitating parent behavior or adopting media portrayals.

Researchers say conforming to such traditional masculinity may limit males’ psychological development, negatively influence mental health and result in gender role conflict, all of which have been addressed in previous research. For example, studies have shown boys are disproportionately more likely to have learning difficulties and behavior problems in school — and men, overrepresented in prisons, are more likely than women to commit violent crimes or be a victim of violent crime.

The ideology has been linked to physical health problems as well, including cardiovascular issues, substance abuse and early mortality, not to mention general quality-of-life issues. A groundbreaking World Health Organization study in 2017 found exposure to rigid gender norms can be established in children by age 10 or 11 and increases boys’ chance of depression and suicide. Overall, males are four times more likely to die from suicide than females.

Still, many men do not seek help when they need it and if they do, they have a hard time finding gender-sensitive treatment.

“When trying to understand the complex role of masculinity in the lives of diverse boys and men, it is critical to acknowledge that gender is a non-binary construct that is distinct from, although interrelated to, sexual orientation,” researchers note. “Historically, traditional masculinity comes with a heteronormative assumption, which “may ostracize some gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals from an inherent sense of male identity (APA, 2015), leading to feeling pressured to adopt dominant masculine roles to reduce feelings of minority stress.” According to the APA, something they term “traditional masculinity” is shown to limit “males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, resulting in gender role strain and gender role conflict, and negatively influence mental and physical health.”

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Essentially, the APA’s guidelines tell psychologists in this country to approach boys and men through a preconceived gender stereotype and a single lens that presumes that masculinity, i.e. natural manhood, is a disorder that needs to be manipulated and changed.

The guidelines linked “constricted notions of masculinity” to aggression, homophobia and misogyny, saying such notions “may influence boys to direct a great deal of their energy into disruptive behaviors such as bullying, homosexual taunting, and sexual harassment rather than healthy academic and extracurricular activities.”

Gillette’s Toxic Masculinity Ad Isn’t the Problem; Toxic Masculinity Is the Problem Procter & Gamble launched a Gillette ad campaign demonizing men as ogres and bullies. In this lecture disguised as an ad, guilt-ridden actors gaze ruefully at their reflections in the mirror—not because they’ve neglected their hygiene, but simply because they’re men. Various scenarios of boys being boors and males being monsters flash across the screen before woke interlocutors show how “real” men behave in nonaggressive, conciliatory and apologetic ways.

At home and at work, in the boardroom, on the playground, and even while barbecuing in the backyard, Gillette sees nothing but testosterone-driven trouble. Message: Y chromosomes are toxic. The “best a man can get” can no longer be attained without first renouncing oppressive manliness. It appears that self-improvement must begin with self-flagellation.

The Real Problem with “Toxic Masculinity”

Teaching the Cause of Rape Culture: Toxic Masculinity, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Spring 2017, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p177-179.

How cultural change occurs: extreme reactions initially but then retreats to less radical positions? Is this true? References?

Hawaiian Senator (among other Democrats) at Brett Kavanaugh Congressional hearing intimated that accusations of sexual impropriety should be taken at face value and the presumption of innocence and due process should be rejected because allegations of wrongdoing when addressing sexual assault should be believed and the alleged perpetrator should be presumed guilty until proved innocent.

Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono did not hold back on September 17, 2018 in her condemnation of the handling of professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of a decades-old sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, telling men to “shut up and step up” (Cummings, 2018) and that he was guilty until proved innocent, thereby ignoring that the presumption of innocence—“a core tenet of American law.”

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The senator seemed to suggest that sexual assault allegations should be accepted as true “merely for having been made” and that the burden is on the accused to prove their innocence. Such a belief “turns American justice and due process upside down” (USA News, 2018).

How consideration of biology? Males and females are biologically different and evolution has over the millennia selected certain traits associated with males and other traits associated with females.

Homes without fathers. As the phenomenon of fatherlessness has increased, so has violence. As far back as 1965 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to the social dangers of raising boys without benefit of a paternal presence. He wrote in a 1965 study for the Labor Department, “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos.”

The sociologist David Blankenhorn, in Fatherless America (1995), wrote, “Despite the difficulty of proving causation in the social sciences, the weight of evidence increasingly supports the conclusion that fatherlessness is a primary generator of violence among young men.” William Galston, a former domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton Administration who is now at the University of Maryland, and his colleague Elaine Kamarck, now at Harvard, concur. Commenting on the relationship between crime and one-parent families, they wrote in a 1990 institute report, “The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.”

According to Carol Gilligan, Harvard University’s first professor of gender studies and an early champion of the women’s movement and thought leader (named one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential People in 1996) Gilligan’s views are attractive to many of those who believe that boys could profit by being more sensitive and empathetic. She calls for a fundamental change in child rearing that would keep boys in a more sensitive relationship with their feminine side. We need to free young men from a destructive culture of manhood that “impedes their capacity to feel their own and other people’s hurt, to know their own and other’s sadness,” she writes. Since the pathology, as she has diagnosed it, is presumably universal, the cure must be radical. We must change the very nature of childhood: we must find ways to keep boys bonded to their mothers. We must undercut the system of socialization that is so “essential to the perpetuation of patriarchal societies” (Gilligan, 1996, p. 258). NOT SURE OF THIS CITATION

But anyone thinking to enlist in Gilligan’s project of getting boys in touch with their inner nurturer would do well to note that her central thesis—that boys are being

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imprisoned by conventional ideas of masculinity—is not a scientific hypothesis. Nor, it seems, does Gilligan regard it in this light, for she presents no data to support it. It is, in fact, an extravagant piece of speculation of the kind that would not be taken seriously in most professional departments of psychology. Nevertheless, these early views continue (Hoff Sommers, 2000b).

“More children will go to sleep tonight in a fatherless home than ever in the nation’s history,” TIME declared in a cover story on fatherhood that hit newsstands for Father’s Day 1993, amid increased public awareness of this situation. “Talk to the experts in crime, drug abuse, depression, school failure, and they can point to some study somewhere blaming those problems on the disappearance of fathers from the American family. But talk to the fathers who do stay with their families, and the story grows more complicated. What they are hearing, from their bosses, from institutions, from the culture around them, even from their own wives, very often comes down to a devastating message: We don’t really trust men to be parents, and we don’t really need them to be.”

The idea that fathers get the message that they’re not needed — especially now that social media has increased the platforms by which ideas about good parenting can be offered — is still an issue. For example, a study that recently appeared in The Journal of Child and Family Studies suggests that such as “maternal gate-closing,” the idea that mothers still know the most about childcare, could be overwhelming fathers and negatively affecting their confidence in their own ability to parent.

Overcorrection of cultural shifts ?; https://quotefancy.com/quote/1276979/Jeffrey-Kluger-When-our-culture-shifts-it-tends-to-overcorrect-throwing-out-everything; Pathologizing Childhood, Cultural Ails And Shaming Top Year’s Most Popular Pediatric Stories

Ideology, not medical reality, and activism have infected much of modern (America) parenting these days. From misguided, often well-intended activism surrounding how to feed an infant, mom-shaming and vaccines, cultural divides are more polarized than ever and don’t need to be. Building resilience, focusing on raising independent, well-adjusted adults and appreciating the bigger picture have taken a back seat to intensive, overscheduled and fear-driven parenting. Responses to attempting to shift the pendulum from such extremes have been to use extremes, like legislation to allow kids to participate in independent activities to formal prescriptions by pediatricians to increase play time.

Feminizing Black Men: An Assault on Black Manhood ; somewhat controversial comments by Nation of Islam leader, Rev. Louis Farrakhan

o Men Wanted: The Feminized Campus versus Decent Masculinity o The Feminization of Men Meets with Only False   Resistance o The Feminization of Everything Fails Our Boys

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Men’s rights movement ; https://www.avoiceformen.com/

The Red Pill (a documentary film) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mB13NV7rY0; a faculty colleague mentioned this to me; he uses it in his ethics class; I need to review it.

Media’s depiction of males as well as TV ; The Depressing Depiction of Men in the Media; Hollywood has started writing and producing content which depicts men as ridiculous and as people who should not be taken seriously. The characterizations of men in the media over the past two decades portray men as weak and incompetent. Interestingly enough, it’s men who are behind the scenes doing this, not women. Hollywood is a notorious “boys club.”

Television executives are equally as culpable in contributing to the debasement of men. The most glaring example is ABC’s newest show, Man Up.  I’ve seen two full-episodes and I am disgusted ABC actually put this show on the air. ABC’s Man Up portrays men as infantile, incapable, uncultured, weak, pathetic, and flat out moronic (I could go on, but I’ll stop here). Don’t the executives at ABC realize this show is damaging to men? Do the writers not care they are depicting men as buffoons? Why not just put the male actors in clown suits and call it a day?

I’m tired of Hollywood trying to sell me on the concept of “loveable idiots”, and I am disheartened by the ubiquitous content that tears men down. I love filling my life with laughter, however why are my current content choices trying to get me to laugh at a reduced version of men? Why is Hollywood trying to get me to focus on the broken-down, allegorical version of who they think my husband is?

Misandry : the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys. [1][2]

[3] ”Misandrous” or “misandrist” can be used as adjectival forms of the word.[4] Misandry can manifest itself in numerous ways, including sexual discrimination, denigration of men, violence against men, and sexual objectification of men.[3]

Sociologist Allan G. Johnson argues in The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy that accusations of man-hating have been used to put down feminists and to shift attention onto men, reinforcing a male-centered culture.[39] Johnson asserts that culture offers no comparable anti-male ideology to misogyny and that “people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people” and that “[given the] reality of women’s oppression, male privilege, and men’s enforcement of both, it’s hardly surprising that every woman should have moments where she resents or even hates ‘men’”.

Marc A. Ouellette argues in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities that “misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny”; in his view, assuming a parallel between misogyny and misandry overly simplifies relations of gender and power.[26]

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Anthropologist David D. Gilmore also argues that misogyny is a “near-universal phenomenon” and that there is no male equivalent to misogyny,[40] further defending manifestations of perceived misandry as not “hatred of men’s traditional male role” and a “culture of machismo”. He argues that misandry is “different from the intensely ad feminam aspect of misogyny that targets women no matter what they believe or do”.[40]

See https://attractionlab.com/sub-topic/masculine-vs-feminine-traits/; get better reference on traits of men and women

Summary and Conclusion

Discussions of diversity and multiculturalism often address gender/sex prejudice and

discrimination. The overwhelmingly communicated perspective when conservations of gender

surface today are that males are the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender

justice for females and that the scales are tipped against them (Parker & Funk, 2017). This has

led to men being diminished personally and a climate of disapproval that men now face that

seems to be captured by the pernicious term toxic masculinity.

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Not all men are Harvey Weinsteins, Les Moonves’, R. Kellys, or Bill Cosbys. The vast

majority of them are good, wonderful partners in women’s lives. Whether these women be their

mothers, sisters, best friends, lovers, wives or daughters, American men and their masculinity

has made Western civilization possible through its nurturing, protection and development.

The condemnation of masculinity as naturally awful and violent misses another important

point through more gender stereotyping: The horrible behavior of some women. The female of

the species, while their style may be different, likewise engages in sexual harassment,

denigration, sexual assault, battery, murder and general mayhem. As women gain more power in

society, the romantic view of what they are capable of will dissipate.

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References

American Psychological Association, Boys and Men Guidelines Group (2018). APA Guidelines

for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. Retrieved from

https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf

Cummings, W. (2018, September 19). Sen. Mazie Hirono to men: ‘Just shut up and step up.’

USA Today. Retrieved from

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/09/19/mazie-hirono-

condemns-treatment-christine-blasey-ford/1355441002/

Gardenswartz, L., & Rowe, A. (2008). Diverse teams at work: Capitalizing on the power of

diversity. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Griffin, A. (2019). Gillette’s New Ad Tells Men that Toxic Masculinity is Their Problem to

Solve. Retrieved from https://qz.com/quartzy/1524279/gillette-says-cleaning-up-toxic-

masculinity-is-a-mans-job/

Hoff Sommers, C. (2000a). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our

young men. New York: Touchstone.

Hoff Sommers, C. (2000b). The War Against Boys. The Atlantic. Retrieved from

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against-boys/304659/

Parker, K., & Funk, C. (2017). Gender Discrimination Comes in Many Forms for Today’s

Working Women. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/12/14/gender-discrimination-comes-in-many-forms-for-todays-working-

women/

Saad, G. (2018). Is Toxic Masculinity a Valid Concept? On the Dangers of Pathologizing

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Manhood. Psychology Today. Retrieved from

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-consumericus/201803/is-toxic-

masculinity-valid-concept

USA News. (2018, September 24). Guilty Until Proven Innocent? Dem Senator Won’t Say

Kavanaugh Should Have ‘Presumption of Innocence. Retrieved from

https://www.rt.com/usa/439229-hirono-kavanaugh-presumed-guilty/