Teach boys that strength can be a virtue.
“The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”
It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.
As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.
(…)
Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.
(…)
These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.
Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.
(…)
We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?
The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.
(…)
What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?”
