Keywords

Alternatives to Toxicity

Toxic masculinity is no good for anyone, but the concept of toxic masculinity can be quite useful. Sometimes a new idea is developed, or an old idea is reworked in a new way, and with it we find ourselves better able to understand some meaningful part of the world and how we experience it. In this way we strengthen our hermeneutical resources. The concept of spacetime was like this for our understanding of relativistic physics in the early twentieth century (Fine 1978, 333); the concept of sexual harassment was like this for our understanding of sexual discrimination and oppression in the late twentieth century (Fricker 2007, 149); the concept of climate legacy may play a similar role for our understanding of climate change and intergenerational justice in the twenty-first century (Fredericks 2021).

What then is especially illuminating about the idea of toxic masculinity? In part it is the layered connotations of toxicity: not just that masculinity is bad, but more than this, that this masculinity in question is bad for men and those around them. Toxic masculinity poisons us. We do not have to be reminded that it is harmful for men as well as women and other people: that is baked into the concept. Nor is the central message that masculinity is actually bad for men rather than for women, some apparent refutation of core feminist principles. Toxic masculinity hurts everyone it touches (Marcotte 2017; Sculos 2017).

Another thing this idea captures is that men themselves need not be inherently toxic even as the toxicity is closely linked to how men are men. “The term thus does not mean that there is something fundamentally wrong about being male,” Michael Flood (2018) explains. “But there is something fundamentally wrong with some particular versions of how to be a man.” As Terry Kupers puts it in “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” among the first scholarly uses of the concept, “Toxic masculinity is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence” (2005, 714). On the one hand we have the hopeful suggestion that the problem is not men but rather how we perform masculinity. On the other hand this hopeful suggestion raises a challenging (although not necessarily hopeless) follow-up question, what makes us men if not for our masculinity?

Contrary to conservative critics’ reading of the concept of toxic masculinity as an attack on manhood itself, Kupers does not take masculinity to be entirely, irredeemably toxic (Kupers 2005; Salter 2019). As Sam de Boise (2019) observes, “the term ‘toxic masculinity’ potentially increases receptivity to the notion that there are harmful and non-harmful forms of masculinity, as well as operating as an analytic tool allowing masculinity scholars to talk in normative terms of what masculinity should be rather than simply describing what it appears to be.” Like rainy days, rotten fruit, and blood diamonds, the grammatical structure itself invites (though does not guarantee) the inference that there are other, better kinds of masculinity to be had. “Toxic masculinity” draws our attention to its poisonous manifestations in ourselves and in others and calls us to find something nontoxic instead.

Just as toxic masculinity invites critical scrutiny, the concept of toxic masculinity is not without its critics either. One concern raised is that the language of toxicity positions men as victims who are passively infected, rather than highlighting their agency in actively reproducing masculinity (Waling 2019, 368). Here I think that those who find the concept of toxic masculinity useful should take the criticism, and gratefully so. Whatever else it is, we should recognize toxic masculinity as something men individually and collectively participate in—not inevitably, but not just passively either. If toxic masculinity is a putrid smog, it is something we create as much as something we take in. A related concern is that talk of toxic masculinity individualizes what should be theorized in social structural terms (de Boise 2019). One way to put this is that “treating sexism as a character flaw of some men” (Harrington 2021) thus neatly isolates responsibility for gender inequities and injustices to a subset of clearly bad men—not us, of course. It also potentially obscures a crucial insight of Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) characterization of masculinities as configurations of practices, not just individual attitudes or expectations. Here again I share these critics’ concerns, even if I am more optimistic that our understanding of toxic masculinity can and should include a structural analysis rather than reducing it to the deviant behaviors of a few safely ostracized men. Furthermore, as Salter (2019) warns, people who oppose toxic masculinity must resist seeing it in universal or ahistorical terms: we cannot assume that “the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well.”

Another criticism of the concept of toxic masculinity builds on the aforementioned idea that its formulation suggests the potential for—but does not much specify the substance of—a contrasting nontoxic counterpart. “It is quite clear what we mean by a ‘toxic masculinity,’” Andrea Waling (2019, 368) writes; “there is less consensus as to what we might mean by a ‘healthy masculinity’ despite more pressing needs to encourage it amongst men and boys.” What does healthy, nontoxic masculinity look like? Waling is quite right to see little agreement on the matter, and right as well that the concept of toxic masculinity does not answer the question for us. The popular and scholarly literatures are filled not only with diagnoses of the trouble with men today, but also prescriptions of what men can—and should—be instead. These normative visions take many forms. For some it is loving or mindful masculinity (hooks 2004a; Plank 2019); for others, wild manhood and heroic virtue (Bly 1990; Keen 1992). For still others, the desire to separate some sort of healthy manhood from toxic masculinity is itself a mistake—better to refuse to be a man entirely and salvage one’s nongendered humanity instead (Stoltenberg 2013; Cooper 2018). Perhaps any claim to masculinity is inevitably a cruel optimism, “cruel precisely because we believe and we continue to believe that it is attainable even though we continually fail” (Allan 2018, 182). If not masculinity itself, perhaps worthwhile traits or virtues traditionally associated with masculinity can still be incorporated into an ideal of androgyny (Warren 1982; Sterba 1996). For those suspicious of traditional gender roles and acutely aware of how toxic masculinity can harm people across gender identities, androgyny can present an attractive alternative.

If there is nontoxic masculinity to be had, perhaps we can find it in feminist values and practices. At first the very idea of feminist masculinity might seem like a contradiction in terms, something akin to a square circle or George Carlin’s old jokes about jumbo shrimp and military intelligence. “Doesn’t one negate the other?” the skeptic asks. On this reading we can be feminist or masculine but not both. Maybe it’s more like what Gandhi apocryphally said when asked what he thought of Western civilization—that it would be a good idea (Shapiro 2006, 299). My own view is that we can indeed make sense of feminist masculinity, not just hypothetically but in actual practice, such that men as men have distinctive and constructive contributions to make to feminism. In feminist allyship we can find an open-ended model for ways of being men, of masculinities predicated on recognizing and actively responding to rather than passively accepting or ignoring the diverse array of privileges, expectations, and experiences that are distinctive of men under patriarchy.

What’s to Come

There is much more to be said about all of this, of course. But for now, in the rest of this chapter, let me begin by outlining the philosophical investigation of masculinity to come and making plain the theoretical and methodological priorities that will guide us along the way.

In Chap. 2 we go back to the origins of Western feminist political philosophy, with particular attention to Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill, to see what sort of critical and constructive visions for men and masculinity we can find there. In the years since publication of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Taylor’s “The Enfranchisement of Women” (1851), and Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), liberal political philosophy has been a fertile ground for feminism. These texts in particular offer powerful criticisms of traditional constructions of femininity and masculinity under systems of sexual inequality, as well as positive visions for women and men as part of their distinctive defenses of sexual equality. The harmful effects of patriarchy on the moral and intellectual characters of both women and men are central to their liberal-feminist analyses. Wollstonecraft’s diagnosis is insufficiently rational masculinity all around, and her recommendation is the social promotion and personal development of rational thinking, bodily vigor, and independence for men as well as women, boys as well as girls. Taylor and Mill meanwhile also value rationality but seek to complement it with emotional development, and more generally promote overall human excellence for women and men through reunification of good human properties that have been artificially divided into masculine and feminine. These two feminist responses to patriarchy are not logically exhaustive, but between them, presage many of the scholarly and popular alternatives to toxic masculinity still proposed today.

From here we move on to Chap. 3 to consider the appeal and limitations of feminist androgyny (Warren 1982) as a viable alternative to masculinity and John Stoltenberg’s (1989, 1993) emphatic repudiation of manhood and masculinity on radical feminist grounds. We trace how feminist ideals of androgyny and rejections of masculinity recur in one form or another throughout many popular and scholarly accounts of men and manhood. Androgyny need not make us anatomically, socially, or psychologically identical of course, nor will it necessarily license all ungendered human actions. The idea is that femininity and masculinity lose meaning as socially loaded categories; genital and genetic sex differences would become no more socially significant than are height or eye color and social roles, divisions of labor, and personalities would not be indexed to presumed sex differences. Mary Anne Warren and James Sterba are each sympathetic to a sort of feminist moral androgyny, where so-called masculine and feminine virtues are distributed and exhibited among human beings regardless of gender. Stoltenberg meanwhile advocates what he describes as a “double vision” for men of conscience: to be mindful of the present reality of our place as men in a sex-class system while also recognizing “the truth of the possibility of a future without it” (1989, 197).

If we must choose between feminism and masculinity, many men will pick the latter. And yet the resistance to discarding manhood and masculinity comes not only from conservative men and mythopoetic men, but also from writers such as bell hooks and Michael Kimmel who attempt to reclaim masculinity as not only compatible with but grounded in feminist commitments. In Chap. 4 we turn then to feminist reclamations of masculinity. In We Real Cool (2004b) and The Will to Change (2004a), among other texts, hooks envisions feminist masculinity as a positive alternative to patriarchal masculinity. In Manhood in America (1996), Kimmel offers democratic manhood in contrast to traditional masculinity and androgyny; in Guyland (2008) he urges young men to move away from immature, unjust masculinity to a deeper masculinity of just guys. There is much to admire in these and other attempts to reclaim feminist masculinity; much of what they identify as constituting better, more mindful masculinity are indeed good human qualities. As a viable guide for men and their allies, however, these accounts fall short, sometimes converging with androgyny, sometimes reinforcing traditional patriarchal masculinity, at other times obscuring if not denying some people’s lived experiences and identities. hooks in particular articulates an evocative vision of loving feminist masculinity, yet a central mystery remains: how can love, courage, or justice be meaningfully constitutive of feminist masculinity without thereby assuming that masculinity is whatever male people are and do?

My goal in Chap. 5 then is to offer a conception of feminist masculinity in terms of allyship practices: one that aligns with hooks’ vision for loving masculinity as a kind of partnership, does so while capably differentiating it from feminist androgyny and patriarchal masculinity, and avoids the vices of arrogance, passivity, and self-glorification that critics see plaguing ally culture today. Here I find that Linda Alcoff’s (2006) work on white anti-racism provides at least two insights that extend fruitfully to the question of feminist masculinity. The first is that socially privileged identity and group membership are not easily avowed; the second is that allyship against oppression itself can be constitutive of anti-racist whiteness, through our sustained contributions to justice and an abiding sense of how such contributions fit into anti-racist white histories and communities. In a similar spirit, I propose that feminist allyship practices can ground and give meaning to nontoxic ways of being men. Much like a feminist ideal of androgyny, feminist allyship masculinity seeks to upend masculinity as a received social category, but it diverges from feminist androgyny in emphasizing men’s distinctive yet non-essentialist contributions.

Feminist allyship on this account builds upon a simultaneous recognition of difference and commonality, such that allies come together in coalition (Reagon 1983) from different locations to work for a shared end. The relational approach to allyship (Sullivan-Clarke 2020) that I advocate here diverges a bit from allyship as frequently taken up in contemporary sociological and popular discussions, where allies are by definition non-beneficiary participants in social justice movements (Myers 2008) or members of dominant groups working with members of oppressed groups (Brown and Ostrove 2013). A relational approach enables a more flexible and intersectional understanding of allyship; it underlines the importance of accountability and the risks that come with prioritizing self-ascribed or institutionally commodified “ally” labels over reparative and constructive allyship practices.

The difference-in-common dimension of feminist allyship so understood is not an impediment to but a collective resource for collaboration across gender and other social differences. In contrast to both traditional patriarchal masculinity and mythopoetic masculinity, building around feminist allyship makes for a decidedly and deliberately nonideal form of masculinity. It is not rooted in gender essentialist or ahistorical claims about men’s true nature; rather, the aftermath of historical and ongoing systems of gender oppression is where allyship masculinity is made meaningful. What feminist allyship enables are critically reflective and substantively feminist ways that men can be—not forever and always, but for what Alison Jaggar (2019) calls “the unjust meantime.”

Chapter 6 further explores the intersectional potential and challenges for allyship masculinities in social context, in the unjust meantime. What does it mean for feminist allyship masculinities to be open to all men, not in spite of but because of the diversity of social locations and experiences among us? Can we recognize that men can be targets of intersectional gender oppression without implying that men generally experience gender-based oppression, and without denying that men (individually and collectively, pervasively and systematically) receive gender-based privileges and entitlements? Investigating these questions takes us in both epistemological and ethical directions. The epistemological challenges confronted include issues of active ignorance, epistemic injustice, and situated knowledge. What does it mean to achieve a feminist standpoint (Wylie 2012; Toole 2021)? How can we begin thought from lived experiences different from our own (Harding 1990; Narayan 2003)? And how can epistemic humility—which need not imply epistemic deference—be integrated into relations of accountability between allies? The need for accountability raises not just epistemic but also ethical challenges. We conclude by discussing several potential pitfalls and ethical dilemmas for feminist allyship, including the glass escalator (Williams 1992), the pedestal effect (Messner et al. 2015, 138), and the master’s tools (Lorde 1984, 110). Putting male privilege to work toward feminist ends is often like wielding a double-edged sword; it is better still when we work together to beat that sword into ploughshares.

Guiding Priorities

What we seek in a worthwhile model of masculinity is in large part a function of our intended uses. My own approach is informed by a few principal theoretical and methodological priorities:

Normativity. Our model should enable cogent criticism of patriarchal norms of masculinity and also underwrite alternative norms of masculinity grounded in feminist commitments. Following Raewyn Connell’s taxonomy, normative conceptions of masculinity involve social configurations and expectations of how men should be (Connell 2005, 70), where these gendered configurations and expectations might be imposed upon us by our communities, institutional structures, and even ourselves. To characterize something as toxic masculinity, after all, is not only to describe but also to evaluate it. Despite their significant differences, each of the alternatives to toxic masculinity discussed in the coming chapters is similar in at least this respect, that they offer answers to the question of how men should be. Sometimes their normative analysis is positive, sometimes it is negative, but even those accounts that actively reject masculinity are not neutral about it. In such cases there is still an evaluation made: that what we ought to do is to repudiate masculinity and refuse to be men.

In focusing on normative masculinity, I certainly do not mean to devalue ethnographic or other empirical studies of men and masculinities but rather to take inspiration from Connell’s (2000, 14) observation that while descriptive sociological research has indeed produced fruitful results for masculinity studies, social-scientific methodologies do not exhaust the scope of worthwhile study. I also mean to take up Larry May’s (1998, 149) call for philosophical work on masculinity to offer not only criticism but also positive visions of what men can be.

Differentiation. Unlike with a feminist ideal of androgyny that would evacuate the category of masculinity, a normative model of feminist masculinity must identify key features that effectively differentiate masculinity from non-masculinity. Such features need not be understood as essential properties, nor as necessary and sufficient conditions, but they cannot be both constitutive of masculinity and indistinguishably applicable to those who are not masculine. All men are born and die, for example, which means that all those who embody masculinity are born and will die. Yet to say that mortality is constitutive of masculinity would fail to identify anything distinctive about it, given that people who are not masculine (however we understand that) of course are born and will die too. (Some might respond that mortality is indeed constitutive of masculinity in the sense that men are more accepting, or aware, or in denial about their mortality than other people are. But to whatever extent these claims hold true, it would not be mortality itself but rather our distinctive attitudes toward it that would differentiate masculinity from non-masculinity so understood.)

Differentiation will prove to be a surprisingly difficult challenge for feminist masculinities as compared to traditional patriarchal masculinity, which presumes and reifies all sorts of essentialist ideas about the duality of men and women that feminists quite reasonably reject. The challenge is to find constitutive properties that are somehow meaningfully feminist and normatively masculine in substance.

To clarify, when I discuss expectations (or obligations or feminist contributions) of men as men I mean in virtue of the fact that they are men, or because they are men. It is just a specification of the reference class as opposed to (say) men’s obligations as brothers, or friends, or human beings. By analogy, Joe Biden’s responsibilities as US President might overlap with but are not identical to his responsibilities as a husband or as an American citizen. In discussing normative masculinity in terms of the social configurations and expectations of how men as men should be, I mean things that apply to them because they are men rather than women or gender non-binary people. The phrasing here is not meant to be a roundabout reference to men born as men, men assigned male at birth, or anything like that.

Intersectionality and Non-Androcentricity. Our model should allow for multiple instantiations of feminist masculinity given variations among men across race, class, sexuality, and other such categories of social identity. An intersectional feminist approach to masculinity (Crenshaw 1989; Mutua 2012; Taiwo 2018) should not presume that only those men who are allowed to pursue or interested in meeting white, middle-class, cisgender, or heteronormative expectations can be real or good men, any more than intersectional feminism should presumptively center the experiences or expectations of straight, white, cisgender middle-class women. For these reasons it will be good to consider a plurality of feminist masculinities and challenge both explicit and tacit ways in which some men’s distinct experiences of privilege, oppression, or allyship are taken to stand in for men generally.

Our model also should not treat masculinity as some unmarked norm from which oppositional consequences for women, girls, or femininity then automatically follow. It should not take men’s masculinity as the central, default, or most significant case with immediate implications for all other gender categories. Men and boys are not the only people who perform masculinity, after all (Halberstam 1998, 276). Whatever else it does for us, our model should not only accommodate intersectional feminist masculinities but also not rule out intersectional female masculinities and genderqueer masculinities. In the search for viable alternatives to toxic masculinity, we must not erase heterogeneous experiences of masculinity, deny non-binary gender identities, or otherwise recapitulate the very toxicities we mean to remedy and replace.