Seven Features of Toxic Masculinity
And more importantly, more effective ways to talk with men that go beyond "Be less toxic."
Happy Tuesday! For the next two weeks, we’ll be promoting our episodes with Zach Wagner, author of the book Non-Toxic Masculinity. Our episode with Zach Wagner will be released tomorrow, and our weekly newsletter will come out Thursday. For the next two weeks, Relationship 101 articles will discuss issues pertaining to men and relationships.
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In spring of 2019, Julia and I drove from Boston to Northampton to attend a conference about gender and sexuality. In the morning, a gay Black psychologist, talked about the importance of intersectionality as professionals, a topic that most therapists were conceptually familiar with, even though it wasn’t part of the common professional vernacular at the time. (I have a theory that the death of George Floyd in 2020 was the event that catapulted conversations about race and intersectionality into the psychotherapy profession, so that now, you get negative feedback as a presenter if you don’t talk about race and intersectionality.)
In the afternoon, a trans male psychologist spoke about gender. His presentation started quite simply. He asked the audience to yell out adjectives that are descriptors of women.
Kind. Strong. Brave. Gentle. The presenter wrote these and other varied descriptors onto a dry erase board.
He asked the audience to yell out adjectives that described men.
A woman behind my left shoulder yelled out, “Toxic!”
A few people agreed vociferously amongst a growing murmur from the room. I’m fairly sure that I uttered “Oh shit” a little too loudly.
I don’t remember explicitly how the presenter responded, but this experience exposes a huge problem in the world of psychology, sociology, and culture studies.
We, as a profession, talk about men really poorly, when in fact, as a culture:
We teach our boys to be competitive leaders.
We tell our boys to squelch their emotions, to “toughen up”.
We diagnose our especially playful, active, and creative boys with ADHD, prioritizing focus and control over the messiness of innovation. (The highest ratio that I’ve seen, from the Cleveland Clinic, is for every 1 girl diagnosed with ADHD, 16 boys receive the diagnosis.)
Boys and adult men use homophobic language to police the sexuality of other boys, an underreported practice of “locker room talk”.
We push boys into capitalistic economic and militaristic systems, both of which favors and feeds those who are the most competitive and most persistent.
And then we act surprised that boys are much more likely to be perpetrators of violent crime, including female partners and other men.
Let’s get this out of the way. There are a fair number of men that adopt toxic behavior. The American political media is focused on the outcome of the behavior of one such man. And that’s before we get to the Andrew Tates, Ncel members, and myriad of men who use money and physical power to escape accountability for the relational and societal harm they may cause.
But we rely on opaque, hackneyed terminology like “toxic masculinity” or “the patriarchy” to point out bad behavior.
As we’ve stated before on Relationship 101, utilization of diagnostic language without explaining what the hell you’re talking about shuts down the conversation and invites the emotion of shame, which ultimately reinforces the negative behaviors that we’re trying to reduce.
Some of the best research about toxic masculinity was published in 2010 by Dr. Ronald Levant, professor of psychology at the University of Akron. Levant and his colleagues evaluated this from the perspective of how rigidly or broadly a man enacted the stereotypical gender norms that they learned as children and adolescents, what they refer to as hegemonic masculinity. They developed an assessment called the Male Role Norms Inventory, which evaluates for the presence of seven features of hegemonic masculinity. (The parenthetical statements are assessment items from the Male Role Norms Inventory.)
Restrictive emotionality. (A man should never get his feelings hurt. Men should not be too quick to tell others that they care about them.)
Self-reliance through mechanical skills. (Men should have home improvement skills. Men should be able to fix most things around the house.)
Negativity toward sexual minorities. (Gays should never kiss in public. Gay bars should be shut down.)
Avoidance of femininity. (Boys should play with action figures, not dolls. Men should watch football games instead of soap operas.)
Hyper-importance on sexuality. (A man should always be ready for sex. A man should not turn down sex.)
Toughness. (When the going gets tough, men should get tough. I think a young man should be physically tough, even if he isn’t big.)
Dominance. (Men should be the leader in any group. A man should always be the boos.)
Levant and his colleagues suggest that men who believe these narratives are more likely to behave in violent, hyper-competitive, and other socially harmful ways.
There’s an assumption then, that if we teach men to do these toxic things less, we teach them to be safer, more collaborative, and ultimately, better men.
Perhaps that’s true conceptually. However, deconstruction is only part of the healing process. Getting someone to stop doing something doesn’t actually lead to sustainable change. The relearning process is much messier. I want to offer three practices that might help usher a shift into more effective conversations and embodiments of masculinity:
1) Intimate Relationships with Other Men
There’s been quite the kerfuffle in Exvangelical land over the Stronger Men’s Conference last Thursday and Friday in Springfield, MO. Mark Driscoll, Tim Timberlake, pastor at Celebration Church in Jacksonville Florida, and Jabin Chavez, pastor at City Light Church in Las Vegas, were the keynote speakers.
It was…something. Here’s the promo video.
When we say Evangelical communities teach you to be successful in relationships by performing gender, this is what we’re talking about.
All of the men in the video are in isolation.
The weightlifter doing deadlifts? By himself.
The boxer? By himself.
Even the B-rolls that show a collective of men depict them all facing the stage, presumably to watch some sort of monster truck or tank push the limits of the amount of decibels that one’s ears can handle.
The only time that a man is actively engaging with another man is where some guy is kicking the crap out of some other guy.
Journalist Rick Pidcock was brave enough to attend and report on the event. He writes in Baptist News:
“As all of the explosions, punching, chair smashing, tank riding and sword swallowing are happening, one cannot help but be reminded of Ken’s experience with patriarchy in last year’s Barbie movie.
“Why didn’t Barbie tell me about patriarchy,” Ken asks, “which to my understanding is where men on horses run everything?” Later, Ken suggests that “everything, basically everything exists to expand and elevate the presence of men.” And his favorite song is “I wanna push you around.”
On one hand, the Kens of Kendomland are just like each other. They have the same name, play with the same toys and say the same things. But on the other hand, their passion for ascending up the mountain of patriarchy leads to the big fight as they turn against one another.”
As I mentioned last week, intimacy is not a euphemism for sexual experience; rather, it involves:
The mutual disclosure of personal information, thoughts, and feelings.
The perception of partner responsiveness as understanding, caring, and validating.
The men that we work with in individual and relational therapy are desperate for this kind of connection with other men.
2) The expectation of a slower on-ramp for emotional intimacy and disclosure.
Every day in couples therapy, I see men actively deconstruct and resist these limiting messages around masculinity. However, when men struggle to access the emotional qualities needed to succeed in many forms of psychotherapy, skills that they were punished for practicing by many family, educational, and peer systems in their collective American childhood, I often see them get punished for it by their partners (especially in opposite sex relationships), which ignites the limiting myth that men are successful when they know how to do things.
I encourage folks to think about emotional disclosure very similarly to how we think about sexuality. An emotional disclosure experience is a unique, separate interaction that some folks can transition quite easily into, and others need a lot of preparation for. Couples therapy can be a unique way to establish realistic expectations about what’s needed for both partners to effectively move into an emotionally intimate experience, much like sex. And then, also like sex, to determine what relationship dynamics best help both partners hold the intimate experience and transition into whatever happens next.
Not surprisingly, in a lot of heterosexual couples I work with (though by no means all of them), women have a more complex transition into a sexual experience, while men have a more complex transition into an emotionally intimate experience.
In relationships between men, that on-ramp often includes an additional organizing activity—a sporting event or athletic endeavor. I invite men to take the risk of asking curious questions, to get to know other men.
Like with sex, the slower and more intentional that transition can happen, the higher likelihood of a quality intimate experience.
3) Hugs!
Julia and I went to see our hometown team, FC Utrecht, play yesterday. Utrecht won with a goal in the second minute of stoppage time. The place went bananas.
Julia slyly noted, “Look at all of these men being given permission to hug themselves!”
She makes a fair point. What if sports weren’t the only socially sanctioned space for men to engage in non-sexual physical contact?
Journalist Y.L. Wolfe summarizes a starting place in her amazingly titled article “Men are suffering from Hug Starvation: If we’re going to talk about epidemics among men, this one needs to make headlines”. Wolfe writes:
“Men (Wolfe identifies as a gender curious woman), you are going to have to do the same uncomfortable, scary work we have to do in our everyday life to get out of this one. You’re going to have to be brave enough to have uncomfortable conversations with your male friends about this. And to face the even bigger discomfort of practicing hugging one another.
You’re going to have to face the inevitable criticism that will come your way. You’re going to have to do some major deconstructing of the sexist and homophobic ideologies that have shaped your worldview and behavior.”
If you’d like additional help creating and maintaining healthy relationships, relationship therapy could be a great place to start.
We typically think of relational therapy as those between folks in a long-term committed, sexual relationship. In the next decade, we would love to see relational therapy evolve to include relationships between coworkers, siblings, and friends, including therapy between two male friends.
Reach out to us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com for more information about our coaching services.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia