Only a woman with solid feminist bona fides can makethis argument in the modern US. The high-tech economy has leveled the playing field between men and women. This is a great development. But the argument ignores, as does the Democratic party in general, a larger reality: blue-collar men. White-collar men are now indoctrinated in high school and college how to behave around women. But blue-collar men are not. And there are more of them than white-collar Ivy Leaguers. Give the video a watch. It’s refreshing.
On a similar note, about American culture in general, this woman makes a very trenchant critique about us: “A culture that believes in nothing and tolerates everything is doomed.”
Oakchair
White collar men are indoctrinated in high school and college now how to behave around women. But blue collar men are not.
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We’re all indoctrinated in more ways than we can imagine.
Women are indoctrinated to slather their bodies with expensive cancer causing chemicals, wear uncomfortable shoes, put on dysfunctional long nails, paint their nails and hair with toxic fumes, and spend hundreds-thousands on beauty products. If advertising was honest the adds for all these products would be: “Forget equality lets get hot for the patriarchy!”
Many of these wealthy highly educated women demanding poor uneducated men overcome their conditioning need to take a good hard look in the mirror. You want men to put effort to address sexism? You first because lecturing people while you’re a walking billboard for a shallow sexist society isn’t helping.
Hiero
“Toxic masculinity” perfectly encapsulates the stupid slop I have to hear from insecure losers and dealing with psychos who can’t be bothered to conform to basic levels of civilized interactions – it’s not just uppity bitches that don’t care for it. Hardly a gratuitous insult. Living masculinity as a tough, hardy, physical risk-taker who brings home the meat doesn’t require any of that (an example set by my own father, not some PMC annual training) – bolting this poor behavior and character trait set onto masculinity as an inherent component is a far more gratuitous insult than a perfectly descriptive phrase of bad male behavior.
I’ll also submit that Paglia’s lecture is full of unnuanced anecdotal hot takes about societal roles of men and women that are hyperbolic enough to be hilarious, which is fine, I can appreciate this. But she clearly has never met women like my mother, who was the furthest thing from tittering around a hearth.
Next time I have to don tyvek with a female colleague on a site this lecture is inevitably going to be the first thing to pop into my head. I admit I guess I just don’t know what the fuck she is talking about.
Ian Welsh
The toughest men I knew seemed like pussycats 99% of the time. One Uncle (the only man I knew who wasn’t scared of my father) I only saw sound dangerous twice. Scary as hell, and absolutely calm even as he explained the consequences of someone continuing their unacceptable behaviour.
The rest of the time he was a merry raconteur and an absolute gentleman in the best mid-twentieth century sense of the word. I would have trusted him with any woman and any child and known they would come to no harm from him or while he was around.
That’s the only masculinity worth having.
Hiero
I’ll temper my first reply by agreeing 1000% that blue collar voters (men and women) aren’t going to respond to bougie shaming of toxic masculinity (or any kind of bougie shaming). The fix for this bad strategy (imho) isn’t to reactively shame the concept and lean into some generalized concept of trad gender roles as a model to which to return (mmga?), but probably a better result all around would come from attempting to address the issues of precarity and insecurity among the blue collar population that are probably creating the conditions for toxic masculinity to thrive.
Soredemos
Oof, sorry, but Paglia is goofy contrarian. That’s been her entire career gimmick. I’m not sure she has ‘feminist bona fides’ either; most feminists don’t seem to like her much.
(Now, admittedly, I don’t pay much attention to any flavor of liberal feminism anymore. If you’re not going to found your analysis in the basic issue of labor, like a Kollontaian Marxist feminist, then youre doomed to have at best an incomplete view that ultimately goes nowhere.)
Last I heard of Paglia was when she did some interview thing with Jordan Peterson and they just verbally dribbled at each other for an hour.
Paglia is, among other things, relentlessly pretentious. So her verdict of what constitutes worth in a civilization is stuff that might end up in a museum or as a great monument. Since she can’t comprehend the core issue of labor and that women were predominantly excluded from the higher culture she values for much of history, her view of civilization is that men created it. In reality it wasn’t men alone working the fields and digging the ditches that civilization depends on, and once women started being admitted to those other levels in greater numbers they competed neck and neck with men.)
As a man, I find ‘toxic masculinity’ often very loosely defined and basically worthless as any kid of analytical tool (I don’t pay attention to claims of things like supposed ‘manspreading’ either. Even if actually real, do we seriously have nothing else to talk about of importance? The brunch crowd lives very sheltered, privileged lives if these are the issues they focus on). But it’s evocative of some core concept that has plenty of merit, I think. I’ve seen a lot of destructive and self-destructive behavior done in the name of proving manhood. I’m not sure I’ve seen a feminine equivalent.
Over time I’ve found neither masculinity nor femininity to be actually useful categories for dividing up attitudes or behaviors. Get a hundred men to define manliness and you get a hundred different answers. At best it seems to just be a way to section off virtues and claim them as a masculine domain, and then anything left over is ‘effeminate’, which is interchangeable with bad.
As far as I can tell ‘positive masculinity’ is just a bunch of attributes I would expect as a baseline for any reasonably functioning adult, of either sex.
Throughout my career I’ve worked predominantly with women coworkers amd bosses. Any notions that women need to be grateful to men, who supposedly create everything, just sort of naturally falls away over time as it’s self-evidently absurd.
Oakchair
a better result all around would come from attempting to address the issues of precarity and insecurity…creating the conditions for toxic masculinity to thrive.
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Ah, but that would entail the rich and privileged losing some wealth and privledge. They oppose that and have the money and social control to abort any attempts while they’re the womb.
someofparts
Camille Paglia has solid feminist bona fides?
You guys are literally mansplaining feminism to me?
I am embarrassed for you. This is a sexist clown show.
Imagining that Paglia has feminist bona fides is ignorance on steroids.
someofparts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katha_Pollitt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269147-dirtbag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_DiFranco
Feminism, much like the Arab resistance, is not as dead as you think it is.
StewartM
Soredemos
Oof, sorry, but Paglia is goofy contrarian.
Coming out of lurk mode for a post, but you nailed it. Except she’s even abandoned some of her better positions of yore to become even more mainstream and rightwing. I personally doubt her stories about the kids not knowing who Moses was or Hitler, to be honest, especially the former given that still 70 % of the country is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, and kids in their households should know who Moses was, right?
As the US totters on the edge of Christofascism, saying that the secular humanists are the problem and that our problem is too much tolerance is just being willfully blind. As for “believing in something”, the first place to start is our large fraction of people who cite “moral values” as their ticket for disbelieving things that are objectively true, or in believing things that can’t be true. Say, for the Genesis flood story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6apFLhUjYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdkY3yxXmqg
As for “toxic masculinity”, it seems about defending whatever that is with working class males is akin to defending their racism and ethnocentrism, which they also very often have. I miss the days when we had “leftists” who told us that we were a ‘sick society’ because then you start questioning yourself and your values you are more likely to change than when you continue mindless cheerleading for ‘Merica’ that we too-often get now, from our “leftists” too.
Ian, I tell people I only recall my dad spanking me once, and a very perfunctory spanking at that He was a drill sargent in the reserves, and was used to terrifying 20-year old recruits with his voice, and he used the same voice on us kids! Heck, he even terrorized customers at the family business with the same voice! But hit us kids? No.
And for tough guys, remember mean drunk John Wayne made movies, while ‘timid’ guys like Tom Landry, George McGovern, Jimmy Stewart, and Clark Gable flew actual combat missions. I remember as a boy talking to WWII combat veterans at my family’s business, and while I got some stories, they were often mum about it–didn’t want to say much.
someofparts
Paglia is a shabby opportunist who has made nice bank telling sexist young libertarian dudes what they want to hear.
and another actual feminist –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Valenti
someofparts
Well, glancing at comments, it looks like the people at this website are having a reasonable, normal, interesting conversation. I’m in better company than I realized.
My apologies to you one and all for the extent of my rant here.
Joe
These comments almost made me try to suffer through a video despite my inability to retain information from one.
Posting videos and saying “look what this person says!” is lazy. It’s not spreading anything, information or otherwise, and doesn’t add to any sort of positive discourse.
It is intellectually lazy. Do better Sean, we come here to read thoughtful analysis, not to be told what to search for on YouTube.
Hiero
If one ever encounters real ‘manspreading’, they will probably find themself at risk of their own toxic reaction to this bullshit behavior. But I would rank it somewhere just worse than being an atrociously stinky swine that’s too lazy (but thinks it “manly”) to enter public spaces without deodorant, but not as bad as masturbating in public. Big city problems. There are definitely larger issues on which to focus.
Simply put, toxic masculinity is any unhealthy or impolite behavior for which attempts are made to reframe as healthy and fine and acceptable and possibly even desirable through characterizing it as being inherently masculine. Even simpler, using one’s status as a man to license shitty behavior. It’s not complicated or confusing. It extends to behavior that can be totally private and internal but leads to outbursts that affect others. There arguably is no gender restriction on engaging in or perpetuating it. Yes, “unhealthy” and “impolite” are subjective which leads to a range of meaning influenced by culture (there is nuance), but not nearly enough to erode the term into uselessness (as is becoming the case with “antisemitic”). This would be the layman’s definition while standing on grass – certainly there’s untold amounts of navel gazing analysis written on it over the years (to both develop further and tear it down). Like most social precepts, it can be reduced down pretty well to “don’t be a fucking dick”, or for the oppressed males “don’t be an asshole”, or for the sensitive aristo-bougie types “don’t be a jerk”. That concludes my mansplaining session.
mago
Where to begin? I’ve been dealing with the feminismo death trap since the 80’s at least. Maybe the 70’s. I used to argue that it’s a human problem, not a man vs woman problem, but that was lead balloon stuff and I dropped it (so to speak) long ago. It’s a stupid and diversionary game.
You want to get down to it, matriarchy has ruled throughout history. I realized that and argued for it since I was eighteen years old.
This manly man shit is just that. There’s a thing called authentic presence, and you either have it or you don’t no matter your gender.
I have no idea who this Paglia person is and don’t care. Sounds like another person who’s a legend in her own mind.
Maybe it’s time to focus on primordial verities and leave the rest behind.
Purple Library Guy
If someone had mentioned the term “toxic masculinity” to me when I was seven, I would have instinctively understood exactly what they meant. You know, when I was finished escaping from the group of little bastards who were chasing me at recess hoping to beat me up if they caught me.
I’m just saying, sure it’s an insult, but it’s far from gratuitous.
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I remember some of those WWII combat vets as well and some of them were beating the crap out of their wives on a weekly basis. They spoke softly and carried a big stick — a big stick they used to beat the stew out of their wives. That’s pretty toxic if you ask me.
I watched a 51-year-old female comedian last night on YouTube. For fear of being excoriated for linking to a YouTube video, I’ll just tell you about it.
She quipped at one point at how great it would have been to have been a 50s housewife. All you had to do was dress nicely and make three meals a day for the family and keep the house tidy and of course, and most importantly, avoid getting a beating. She then said, “yes, let’s make America great again.”
I laughed out loud. Bing Crosby, adored by most everyone, was never impolite. He was as polite and as charming as one can possibly be and yet at home behind closed doors he was a monster.
As for Blue Collar, well, those days are nearly gone and Blue Collar will in short order be assigned to the historical dustbin like so much else will be with AI on the march.
For those who can be bothered, here’s a song that pines for the good ol’ days of toxic masculinity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ha70e2lwE
Purple Library Guy
To get a bit more substantive . . .
So, most violent crime is committed by young men, like in their teens to 20s. This is true around the world. But, most young men do not commit violent crimes, and the rate varies WILDLY, like relatively peaceful European societies, or Japan, can have well under 10% the rate of, say, the United States. So the specifics of the society have a big impact.
There is a fairly strong correlation between rates of violent crime and inequality. But it’s only fairly strong–there are clearly other factors at play. In specific, the US has rates of violent crime even higher than one would expect based on its high inequality level.
What seems to drive most violence is injured pride, humiliation, shame, indignity. There is more of that going around, and the stakes of it are higher, where there is more inequality. But there seems to be signficant room for cultural impact. If I had to guess, if you have a culture that glorifies war and violence and which at the same time encourages a dog-eat-dog, hypercompetitive mentality, that is going to both further up the stakes when it comes to humiliation, is going to encourage the “winners” to humiliate the losers, and is going to lower the barriers against resort to violence.
So yeah, US culture, its imperialism that requires militarism and arrogant triumphalism, its ideology of hypercapitalism and its pretence of meritocracy, are incubators for masculinity to get violent. And while most of what gets called “toxic masculinity” doesn’t ascend to the level of violent crime, it’s basically the rest of the iceberg where things like murder are the tip. America encourages the kind of masculinity that involves a whole pecking order of assholes being assholes to assholes, and getting violent about how frustrated they are by not being at the top of it. THAT’s what “toxic masculinity” is.
StewartM
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I remember some of those WWII combat vets as well and some of them were beating the crap out of their wives on a weekly basis.
Statistically, that’s certainly true, and moreover it runs across cultures. Training males to become killers makes them much more likely to use violence against their wives and children.
However, that generalization isn’t usually applicable to individual cases. I don’t see any evidence that any of the people I mentioned were domestic abusers. Jimmy Stewart’s tour of duty flying bombers was so stressful it left him so gaunt that even his parents didn’t recognize him at first when he returned stateside.
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/jimmy-stewart-ww2-mission-air-force/
My did was a veteran too, and he never hit us kids and (in my opinion) suffered a lot of abuse from my mom without retaliating physically or even much verbally. The man who terrified 20-year olds with his voice as drill sargent just took it from mom. I won’t say more.
Mark Level
Thanks to Sorodemos, someofparts, and others. I won’t read or listen to Paglia. I’d as soon read or listen to Matt Walsh, Jerry Seinfeld on Palestine, or Ben Shapiro.
A “feminist”? I dunno what Paglia is beyond an attention hog who might’ve been relevant for a few months 3 decades or more ago . . . I shared on here earlier that a friend of mine, who grew up with Lefty Quaker Pacifist parents, in the early 21st century went insane, starting out “Alt-Right” and soon devolving to full on Nazi kitsch, a fascination with the spirituality of “Count Julius Evola”, a fascist who was permanently crippled when an Allied bomb hit him outside German HQ where he was torturing or murdering people, among other things.
Before my buddy went down that path he first praised Paglia to me. I knew her well, I knew her shtick, I laughed in his face and moved on to another topic of conversation. But it was a gateway drug to more serious insanity.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. Baste your brain with Paglia, Evola, or Ben Shapiro and I hope you have a parent alive so you can live in that basement and survive while you shit-post all day.
Mark Level
Thank you to Mago for the usual pithy wisdom. And yes, the more successful cultures are almost always matriarchies. There is one I passed thru in Mexico lo many years ago.
The old cliche that “men and women are different” is both true and not true, as some things are. Every relationship, in my experience, is different. When you’re first “in love” I will accept the argument that evidently one of the ancients made, that you are basically insane.
When I was 58 (2nd Saturn return), I started seeing a woman who was 19 and a half years younger, turned 39 right after we started going out, she was finalizing her divorce. I got that oxycontin hit hard, I lost weight without even trying to, a sparkle in my eye and bounce in my step. I could sleep only a few hours and not wake up feeling miserable and out-of-sorts. (Something I could not even do when I was young!) For a couple months it was wonderful, she was so generous and loving, as was I.
Then it turned into beyond dating, “a relationship.” She changed utterly, and not in a good way. I had lots of relationships when younger, but when we broke up within another month, I realized it was the only time I had ever loved a woman completely unselfishly. So I was grateful for that.
Passion only goes so far. Real love requires Understanding, which is difficult for most people– perhaps especially, in a shallow, “young” culture like the Murican one. Or maybe not, maybe it’s screwed up everywhere.
Perusing her Wikipedia page I see that “Foreign Policy” and “Prospect” named her one of America’s Top 100 Intellectuals. When bloodless ghouls praise you, that says a lot.
She praises a Gilles DeLeuze book on Masochism, which is interesting at least. I’m sure she knows Sylvia Plath’s “Every woman loves a Fascist,” in the poem “Daddy.” She claims to be transgender but “hasn’t transitioned”!!
I’m not going to kink-shame, but she seems as confused and inconsistent as anyone out there. I’ve known schizophrenics who when, at a certain level are momentarily brilliant and have a global perspective. To me, she’d be about as good a source of advice as those people, if she weren’t so narcisistically arrogant & entitled.
She denies Climate Change. She must be brilliant!
I expect her Transgender self is Norman Mailer? Another brilliant iconoclast & contrarian whose reputation fell sharply over time.
different clue
I also remember hearing of and from Paglia decades ago in the past. She may have had interesting things to say at one time but she seems to have hardened her act into a schtick. I can’t know in detail what is in the video without watching it but life is short and time is shorter and so I will never know what in specific detail is in this video.
Perhaps “toxic masculinity” is close to something called “machismo”. Perhaps we could rename it ” machismolinity” or “machisculinity”. And it does make me wonder whether there is also such a thing as “toxic femininity” and if so, what it would be like.
Would it involve feminasty man-haters accusing men of this, that and the other; and womansplaining about why men are Evil? Would Valerie Solanas be an example of toxic femininity from the semi-recent past?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Solanas
About posting a link to a you tube video being the lazy way out of doing intellectual analysis . . . ohhh . . . I don’t know about that . . .
If I see a really good video which explains or describes something really well, better than I could, I will go ahead and link to it without trying to reprise the whole thing myself in print. I would just type a short comment about why I think it is worth linking to. For example, here is a short video illustrating the Bernoulli Principle. How could I possibly write a bunch of words about it as informative as the video itself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP6oqIic4lo
Separately, here is Ran Prieur’s latest observation, about the Zohran Mamdani primary victory in NYC and about the DemParty leaderships’ reaction to it . . .
” June 27. I don’t usually write about politics on Friday, but here’s a cool article on Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Logo. He’s the outsider who just beat Andrew Cuomo in the primary for mayor of NYC, and his signs have unusual colors and a font inspired by bodega signs. I assume Cuomo’s signs are completely conventional, because if you’re going to step outside of completely conventional, it’s going to look bad unless you have creativity, which is hard to define, and harder to capture the more you’re inside a hidebound control structure.
“Now Cuomo is staying in the race. I hate the Democratic party so much. Even though I disagree with the Republicans on every contested issue, at least they’re having fun. The Democrat establishment would rather throw America to fascists, than allow their own voters to become excited. If America is an abusive household, the Democratic party is the enabling mother, a fucking wet blanket that says everything is fine. Burn it to the ground. ”
The stakes for mere American survival were too high in 2024 to vote for Burning It To The Ground in that particular election. But the Democrats lost that election and now it is too late to matter. The Democrats will not run on fixing what Gilead MAGA 2025 broke, or restoring the missing taxes on the upper class, or the demaganazification of American government and society, or anything else. They will run on preserving all the destruction achieved but not making it worse. And that will not be a sure winner.
There may be Democrats worth voting for ( Crockett, AOC, Mamdani, etc.) and Democrats worth not voting for ( Pelosi, Schumer, etc.) But as a general overall Party, the DemParty offers nothing to vote for or even about for the next few elections at least. So the choices would either be conquest and decontamination if possible, and if not, abandonment and burndown-permission.
An opening exists and will grow for new party attempts like a Social Democrat Party or a Blue States Survival Party or other new efforts.
mago
Thanks for the compliment señor ML. It’s amazing that I also had a 39 year old girlfriend when I was doing that 58 year old Saturn return cycle.
It was a down and out phase in beach town Costa Rica, and I’d hit the shoals hard. She was German and had her local game down. I had big hopes and expectations, which were quickly dashed after we cohabited.
German women, man. Hey, I’ve known a few in different countries and lived with one or two, so you could call me experienced or something else.
I’ll just say this, no matter personal experiences, I love and celebrate authentic women no matter where they’re from or what language they speak or whatever their appearance.
Toxicity is not gender specific. Toxic men, toxic women, get thee gone and let the devil take the hindmost.
Forest
Pretty disappointed to see stuff like this here. 2 minute search on Camille Paglia shows a problematic history.
Maybe the term toxic masculinity isn’t the best to get men engaging with feminism but anyone worth their salt knows the damage toxic masculinity does to men.