And OP is exactly right, and this is what feminists meant when they said, almost 40 years ago, "men need feminism too." Specifically, what men needed for ourselves was what the consciousness-raising movement of second-wave feminism was largely about: examining feminine gender roles of our society, both the mandatory performances they had to do, and the banned actions they couldn't do, and still be considered feminine, and weed out, refuse to go along with, the ones that were actually hurting them and/or the people around them.
Easiest example: mandatory makeup standards for women, from the '40s through the late '60s, included lead-based makeup and once women refused to wear it, the makeup companies were forced to reformulate less poisonous makeup. Some things they just refused to go back to, to this day. The reason you don't hear the term "toxic femininity" as often now is that they spent a decade, maybe decade and a half debating and then throwing out a lot of that, in small groups of friends and neighbors.
And when they suggested that toxic masculinity was hurting men, and the people around us, what we got instead was what I call "Fire in the John." Y'know, Iron John, Fire in the Belly, and The Game. We told each other that the problem with toxic masculinity wasn't that some of the societal standards for masculine performance were hurting us, hurting our families, hurting our friends. It was that we weren't doing them hard enough, that we needed to double down on all of those standards but even more so or else everybody would lose respect for us.
"Deaths of despair," much?
And now Hollywood and the advertising industry have figured out how to sell really self-abusive diet pills, anorexia, and all the horrors of '60s and '70s women's diet culture to young men. So it remains to seen: will men actually do something like the old consciousness-raising circles and support each other in boycotting the most poisonous of this bullshit? Or at least another generation of "Fire in the John" doubling down?
I'm a sick, weak, tired old man. I doubt I'll live to see the answer. But the insecurity industry is a fraud, guys; stop being so fucking gullible.
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