Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Culture?
I had no idea I’d be stepping on a landmine when posting my article on toxic masculinity.
Should’ve known better.
Not even the sharpest knife can cut the air nowadays. Things are so charged and combustible that the slightest spark ignites a conflagration. That’s the reason my appeal to adults to mind their language in front of children was misconstrued as a gag order on women.
Nothing could be farther from my intention.
My argument was that deprecating an entire gender — instead of a behavior — could make boys feel like there is something fundamentally defective in their makeup. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Burdening them with shame before they even begin to figure out what it means to be a man, I warned, is irresponsible and dangerous.
This is not the first time.
Three years ago, a mother who’d lost a son at the hands of terrorists confronted President Obama, demanding he explain why he refused to use the term “Islamic Terrorist.”
The President responded:
“There is no doubt, and I’ve said [this] repeatedly, where we see terrorist organizations like al Qaeda or ISIL… they have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam [as] an excuse for barbarism and death.”
“These are people who’ve killed children, killed Muslims, taken sex slaves… there’s no religious rationale that would justify the things they do. But what I’ve been careful when I describe these issues is to make sure that we don’t lump these murderers into the billion Muslims that exist around the world who are peaceful, who are responsible, who, in this country, are fellow troops and police officers and firefighters, teachers, neighbors and friends.”
Obama then compared it to a Christian murderer who claims religion for his actions.
“If you had an organization that was going around killing and blowing people up and said, ‘We’re on the vanguard of Christianity…’ as a Christian, I’m not going to let them claim my religion and say, ‘you’re killing for Christ.’ I would say, that’s ridiculous. That’s not what my religion stands for. Call these folks what they are, which is killers and terrorists.”
At one point, Obama said “that the danger of a president or people [getting] loose with language [is] it starts dividing us up as Americans.”
The growing divide between genders is what I am trying to bridge, and, like Obama, I refuse to allow cads like Harvey Weinstein or Trump, for example, to act as standard bearers for true manhood.
But nowadays, Americans seem to prefer a good fight over solving problems. Controversy sells. Compromise sucks. How else to explain that my article languished in obscurity until the fight broke out? Only two people had read it before the confrontation. A few days after, over two hundred had rushed to the bleachers to witness the skirmish.
Digging trenches makes us salivate. Building bridges makes us yawn. Just consider the binary approach to some the nation’s most serious issues:
Pro-life vs Pro-choice.
Pro-gun vs Anti-gun.
Pro-drug legalization vs War on drugs.
Open borders vs ‘Build the Wall!’
These are trenches. Red lines in the sand. My way or the highway! Black or White. Thus locked in a Manichean battle, problems remain gridlocked and people keep suffering.
Americans seem also bent on focusing on the effects of a problem rather than its root causes. Saying “toxic masculinity” is equivalent to me saying “pedophilic Catholicism” or “radical Islam.” They serve no other purpose than to obfuscate and divide.
What makes a man toxic? A priest a pedophile or a Muslim a terrorist? Hard questions, surely, but essential if we want to get to the root of a problem.
I’ve said it before: America doesn’t have a “drug problem” or “gun problem,” but one of despair. The country doesn’t have an “immigration problem” but an opportunity to assist and profit from the development of the countries south of the border. An opportunity to lead, rather than cower and entrench behind walls.
The extremes to which many young women go to in order to conform to an external ideal of beauty to attract and seduce men doesn’t mean femininity is toxic. The fact that some men can’t keep their hands off women, their zippers zipped, or don’t understand the word “No” doesn’t mean masculinity is toxic.
So who’s to blame? What influences these behaviors?
It’s the prevailing culture, I propose, that should be on the witness stand.
Take movies, for instance.
In 2008, Marvel Studios released ‘Iron Man,’ starring Robert Downey Jr. as genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist Tony Stark, who is also an alcoholic, egotistical, vain, and often condescending. A flawed, complex and interesting character, surely, but I question whether a boy of, say, thirteen, has the capacity to reconcile the contradictions while his senses are pummeled by all the explosions and mayhem.
“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday. Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Ironman, exploit women, flaunt bling, and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.” — Sharon Lamb, PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts.
Iron Man earned close to $600 million at the box office.
No compare that to Netflix’s 2019 release of ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ based on the real-life story of 13 year-old William Kamkwamba who saved his family and village from starvation by building a windmill.
Crickets… right?
Chances are you probably haven’t even heard of the movie, or William’s story, for that matter.
The culprit here is not Marvel Studios. It’s us. It’s our culture’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite to see problems ‘resolved’ through conflict and violence. That’s where the toxicity lies.
Just like William’s story, my article languished in obscurity until the punches started flying. And that, I argue, is the real venom that now courses through the nation’s veins.