Pace Trump, Tate and their attempt to inculcate an aggressively paranoid male victimhood, the phrase “toxic masculinity” as used by feminists never contained the implication that “all men are toxic”. Toxic females are examples of people who happen to be women not being very nice. Toxic males are the foot soldiers of an omnipresent machine, spurred by and enforcing this norm. Nevertheless, their actions aren’t part of a dominant political system in which their rights to behave like this are enshrined. They may avail themselves of wiles traditionally associated as being feminine (tears, passive aggression, manipulation). In the case of so-called toxic femininity, individual women can be as unpleasant as they like. It is ideologically and materially bulwarked by every law, every custom, even prejudice in which it flourishes. Toxic masculinity is a symptom of a patriarchal society. However, any equivalence here can only be a false one. ![]() ![]() They incited a backlash against the feminists who sought to contain them and they did so by weaponising feminism’s own language against it. Make no mistake, it is the vulva graspers and machete fantasists who have given us the term “toxic femininity”. In one broadcast, Tate bragged about silencing a woman: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck.” Lockdown and its privations penned everyone into an increasingly noxious virtual world in which show-pony misogynists such as the now-imprisoned Andrew Tate could spew their bile to impressionable young men. Case in point: Donald Trump bragging about his tendency to “grab them by the pussy”. Gradually, it was these unreconstructed types themselves that began to be seen as toxic: the men’s men who internalised patriarchal values to the extent that they felt obliged to become power-crazed players, purveyors of misogyny in matters public and private.īy the mid-2010s, it was feminists who began using the designation “toxic masculinity” to critique the ways in which patriarchal culture crippled men into attempting to cripple women. Toxic masculinity in this context was that poor, castrated specimen not embodied by the king, wild man, warrior or any of the other willy-waving “mythopoetic” archetypes founder Robert Bly and his fraternity fetishized. ![]() The phrase “toxic masculinity” has been knocking about for decades, a hangover from those weird, chest-beating Iron John-style men’s movements of the 1980s and 1990s. If your bulls-ometer is alerted by this, it has every right to be. “Toxic femininity,” the Twitter cry has gone up. ![]() This spring, however, it is men’s domestic abuse charity ManKind Initiative that is “monitoring the show closely” after viewers expressed fears for the chaps’ mental health, accusing its glamazons of toying with their emotions, ganging up to humiliate them and tormenting them into extended weeping fits. In the past, Love Island has been condemned by women’s charities for the actions of its steroidal males, with Women’s Aid staging talks with ITV having become concerned by the “misogyny and controlling behaviour” exhibited. Cue the world and his wife hollering: “toxic femininity”. It started with Shaq Muhammed, who for the uninitiated is an airport security officer, crying after being cheated on by Tanya Manhenga, a biomedical science student and influencer. The controversy concerns the fact that, where once it was its male contestants who proved the show’s poisonous and gaslighting element, the female competitors have turned bully. The series, which climaxed on Monday, has provoked a tumult. If you’re not a fan of ITV’s Love Island – and, frankly, even those of us who allow ourselves a summer of love may baulk at consuming the show’s winter season – then you may not have come across the term “toxic femininity”.
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