Essay

Men and Masculinities

2021, Vol. 24(2) 345-352
ª The Author(s) 2020
What is “Toxic Article reuse guidelines:
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Masculinity” and Why DOI: 10.1177/1097184X20943254
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Does it Matter?

Carol Harrington1

Abstract
Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to
therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists
began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity.
Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some
feminist scholars use the concept, it is often left under-defined. I argue that talk of
toxic masculinity provides an intriguing window into gender politics in any given
context. However, feminists should not adopt toxic masculinity as an analytical
concept. I consider the term’s origins, history, and usage, arguing that it appears in
individualizing discourses that have historically targeted marginalized men. Thus,
accusations of toxic masculinity often work to maintain gender hierarchies and
individualize responsibility for gender inequalities to certain bad men.

Keywords
feminism, hegemonic masculinity, Men’s rights, toxic masculinity, postfeminism

I’ve been teaching and studying gender-based violence since around the year 2000.
For most of that time I rarely encountered the term “toxic masculinity,” despite
relying on the concept of masculinity in my research and teaching. In my under-
graduate course, “Reflecting on Violence,” I introduce students to the concept of

1
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Corresponding Author:
Carol Harrington, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600,
Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]
346 Men and Masculinities 24(2)

masculinity and teach them that gender-based violence is historically and culturally
specific, involving both structural and situational power relations. However toxic
masculinity is not part of the sociological or feminist theories I have drawn on to
analyze gender-based violence.
This changed in 2018 when during a discussion of mass rampage shootings in my
“Violence” class, one student commented that the weekly reading’s analysis of mass
shooters described “toxic masculinity,” although it did not use the phrase. I was
struck by the confidence with which the student referenced the term as a concept
anyone would know. On my way home that day, I tuned into a radio interview with
Clementine Ford discussing toxic masculinity as the theme of her book Boys Will be
Boys. I wondered where this term had come from and why everyone was suddenly
talking about it.
I searched academic databases to learn more about toxic masculinity. My
searches confirmed that the term had suddenly exploded into popular feminist usage:
Between 1990 and 2015, texts referring to toxic masculinity never numbered above
20 a year. Academic texts made up the largest proportion of returns until 2014; after
2017, returns numbered in the thousands, mostly non-academic. Nevertheless, toxic
masculinity increasingly appeared in academic texts after 2016.
The term took off as part of what some scholars have called a new “feminist
moment,” intensifying after 2014 (e.g. Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer 2017,
885) with Beyoncé’s MTV Video Music Awards performance in front of a giant,
glowing sign reading, “FEMINIST.” This performance prompted Jessica Valenti
(2014) to write that today’s “zeitgeist is irrefutably feminist: its name literally in
bright lights.” Critics argue that this newly popularized feminism conflates political
resistance with women’s individual defiance and achievement, but distracts us from
making structural changes (Gill 2016). Rosalind Gill (2016) argues that popular
feminist media articulates a post-feminist sensibility: a neo-liberal relegation of
gender inequality to the past.
Toxic masculinity appears as a key term within this newly “post-feminist”
popular feminist vernacular, treating sexism as a character flaw of some men. The
term has shaped conversations about Trumpism and the #MeToo movement (Petty-
john et al. 2019). It appears in feminist scholarship on issues such as sexual harass-
ment (McGinley 2018) and mass shootings (Blair 2016). Indeed, toxic masculinity
has become a framework for popular and scholarly understandings of the gender
factor in social problems. However, scholars who use the concept frequently fail to
define it or integrate it within broader theorization of masculinity. I surveyed 60
scholarly articles published since 2016 mentioning toxic masculinity. More than half
of those did not define it, relying on it to signal disapproval. The book Toxic Geek
Masculinity (Salter and Blodgett 2017), for instance, uses the term frequently with-
out definition.
This essay suggests that feminists should treat talk of “toxic masculinity” as a
window into contemporary gender politics but not adopt the term as an analytical
concept. I argue, in agreement with Andrea Waling (2019), that the term depends on
Harrington 347

an individualizing toxic/healthy binary that serves to reproduce gender hierarchies.

Here, I do not define the concept, but rather articulate how it has been understood
and used since it first appeared. I trace the term’s origins in late 20th-century men’s
movements and its adoption by, often conservative, policy-makers, therapists, and
others engaged in working with troubled/troubling men. I argue that the therapeutic
concerns of such actors produced an individualizing discourse that sought to reform
marginalized men labelled as “toxic,” because of violence, lack of engagement in
family life, and employment. I then unpack feminists’ scholarly adoption of the
term, highlighting the lack of conceptual clarity. Finally, I discuss feminist research
that analyses how condemnation of toxic masculinity by elite men can bolster gender
hegemony. I conclude that feminists should critically analyze the meanings attrib-
uted to toxic masculinity but not assume those meanings are stable, well-
conceptualized, or even feminist.

Origins
Toxic masculinity emerged within the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s,
coined by Shepherd Bliss. Bliss confirmed to me in a 2019 email that he coined the
term to characterize his father’s militarized, authoritarian masculinity. In a 1990
interview, Bliss told Daniel Gross: “I use a medical term because I believe that like
every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote” (Gross 1990, 14). During the
1990s and early 2000s, toxic masculinity spread from men’s movements to wider
self-help, academic, and policy literature. This literature posited that emotionally
distant father-son relationships produced “toxically” masculine men. In Man
Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1993), family therapist
Frank Pittman argues that men who lack adequate fathering pursue unrealistic cul-
tural images of masculinity and feel a constant need to prove their manhood. Pitt-
man’s regular column on men’s issues in New Women Magazine may have helped
popularize the term. Family therapist Steve Biddulph (1997) similarly argued that
boys need a strong bond with a father figure/male mentor to avoid becoming toxi-
cally masculine men. Boys need the right kind of masculinity, the idea goes, and
mothers can’t give this to them.
These psychologists posited toxic masculinity as culturally normative but curable
through engaging men with fatherhood, positing an essentialist notion of masculine
emotional development. Turn-of-the-century policy discourse picked up on this
prescription. For example, the founder of the U.S. National Fatherhood Initiative,
Don Eberly (1999a, 1999b), cited Pittman on fathering as an antidote to toxic
masculinity in both his 1999 testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on
youth culture and violence (called to discuss the Columbine school massacre) and in
his edited book, Renewing the Sacred Vocation of Fathering (Eberly 1999a). Eberly
suggested that emotionally absent fathers contributed to young men’s violence and
was likely a factor in the Columbine shootings: “Young men badly need to see
mature masculinity modeled (sic) out. Well-seasoned masculinity fundamentally
348 Men and Masculinities 24(2)

transforms the aggression of young males by capturing their masculine energy and
directing it toward socially constructive pursuits” (Eberly 1999b). For Eberly, if
young men turn to violence, they probably grew up with single mothers or at least
had emotionally absent fathers.
The prescription of engaged fatherhood as an antidote to toxic masculinity har-
monized with 21st-century recommendations for heteronormative family life in an
era of neoliberal globalization. Toxic masculinity provided a discourse for diagnos-
ing men’s problems in the face of the gendered fall-out from deindustrialization,
during which well-paid jobs in “masculine” occupational sectors disappeared while
feminized service sector occupations expanded. Influential organizations, such as
the OECD, recommended increasing household incomes in such conditions by
drawing mothers into paid work, while promoting shared parenting (OECD 2007).
There were calls for welfare systems to include fathers when offering family ser-
vices. An Irish family policy article argued for engaging men with fatherhood so that
“their wildness is tamed to the extent that they can adjust to the discipline of
domestic routines and remain with their children and partners and in their families
(as opposed to prison, for instance)” (Ferguson and Hogan 2004, 8). Similarly,
Jennifer Randles’ (2013, 869) research on the U.S. “Thriving Families” program
for low-income, mostly minority, parents found it promoted heterosexual marriage
and engaged fatherhood as, in the words of the program’s executive director, “a
civilizing influence on men.”
The label toxic masculinity tended to be applied to marginalized men. Terry
Kupers’ research on men in prisons argued “toxic masculinity involves the need
to aggressively compete and dominate others and encompasses the most problematic
proclivities in men. . . . Toxic masculinity also includes a strong measure of the male
proclivities that lead to resistance in psychotherapy” (Kupers 2005, 713–714). Simi-
larly, Deevia Bhana’s (2005, 206) study of Black South African schoolboys linked
their violence with both toxic masculinity and poverty, describing them as valuing
“an oppositional street masculinity . . . associated with a flashily dressed black male
street thug frequently a member of a gang and armed with a knife or weapon.”
Used in the aforementioned ways, toxic masculinity provided a framework that
essentialized marginalized men as aggressive and criminal, discursively packaged in
a way that it was presented as concern for men’s well-being. The idea of toxic
masculinity harmonized with conservative political agendas concerned with the
social control of low-income, under-employed men, and with patriarchal family
values. Reliance on toxic masculinity, thus, did not reject the gender hierarchy or
a binary gender order as anti-feminists often assume. Instead, therapeutic discourses
on toxic masculinity typically invoked notions of “natural” male dispositions.
Nevertheless, critics of those like Eberly who, for example, linked school shoot-
ings to toxic masculinity imagined the label as part of a feminist project motivated
by misandry. Christina Hoff Sommers (2003) complained that “gender equality
experts” in government wanted to socialize boys away from “toxic masculinity” out
of misguided rejection of differences in the character, interests, and abilities of men
Harrington 349

and women. Likewise, an article on family therapy argued that the phrase had
become “part and parcel of the scholarly and popular clinical literature” that repre-
sented a “deficit perspective” toward men (Dollahite, Marks, and Olsonm 2002,
262). From this perspective, talk of toxic masculinity indicates a feminist anti-
male bias even though proponents of the term were often conservatives seeking to
“reform” marginalized men and stabilize patriarchal heterosexual family norms.

Feminism and Toxic Masculinity

Feminists have adopted toxic masculinity as shorthand for characterizing homopho-
bic and misogynist speech and violence by men. Since 2016, a notable number of
media stories used “toxic masculinity” in discussions of U.S. President Trump and
the #MeToo movement to describe the poor behavior of powerful white elite men in
contrast to its earlier applications to marginalized men. Indeed, feminist scholars
have adopted toxic masculinity as a useful frame for responding to resurgent mas-
culinist right-wing politics. For instance, anti-feminism’s long history has been
reinvigorated within what media studies scholars label “networked misogyny,”
defined as “an especially virulent strain of violence and hostility towards women
in online environments” sometimes linked with off-line violence; toxic masculinity
sums-up this strain (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016, 171).
According to my count, feminist scholars’ use of toxic masculinity increased as
the term became more publicly popular. Academic databases show that, since 2016,
scholars across disciplines have used the term. Surprisingly, more than half of the
top 60 returns provide no definition: the term is used descriptively, without theoriza-
tion or operationalization. Many linked toxic masculinity with other disparaging
labels. An analysis of the TV show Game of Thrones (Askey 2018, 50), for example,
notes in its abstract that the show reflects “western misogyny, hetero- and cissexism,
and toxic masculinity.” Those who provided a definition most often mentioned
violence, domination, aggression, misogyny, and homophobia.
Few scholars discuss how to conceptualize toxic masculinity in relation to fem-
inist theories of masculinity. Bryant Sculos (2017) describes Kupers’ (2005) article
as providing one “of the most prominent scholarly usages of the concept.” My
survey of feminist articles published since 2016 confirmed the popularity of Kupers’
(2005) use as a subset (Parent, Gobble, and Rochlen 2019) of hegemonic masculinity
surfacing in specific contexts, such as prisons or imagined national threats. Thus, the
toxic/healthy therapeutic understanding of masculinity carried into feminist scholar-
ship via citation.
As an alternative, I suggest analyzing condemnations of certain forms of mascu-
linity for their political effects. James Messerschmidt (2010) and Betül Ekşi (2017)
have both shown how male elites can bolster their power by condemning toxically
masculine men. Messerschmidt shows how Presidents Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.
depicted themselves as “masculine heroes” rescuing “feminized victims” from the
“toxically masculine villain,” Saadam Hussein. Ekşi (2017) shows how branches of
350 Men and Masculinities 24(2)

the Turkish National Police disparaged other branches as toxically masculine, situ-
ating their own violence as “restrained.” However, neither of the Bushes nor the
Turkish Police use the term “toxic masculinity”; rather, Messerschmidt and Ekşi
apply it as shorthand. Nevertheless, their approach of analyzing what condemnation
of other men’s masculinities achieves politically seems promising.
Thus, we might analyze the politics behind condemnations of toxic masculinity.
Recent theorizations of inclusive masculinities suggest shifts away from homopho-
bia and misogyny especially among white, masculine elites. While Eric Anderson
(2009) hails such shifts as indicating a weakening of gender hierarchies, others have
argued that normative masculine disavowal of homophobia and sexism can disguise
ongoing gender inequalities (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). By distancing themselves
from such “toxic” elements of masculinity, men may represent heterosexual mascu-
line privilege as a thing of the past even as it continues to structure institutions.

Conclusion
Following Raewyn Connell’s (1995) discussion of masculine hegemony as a field of
discursive positions and practices, we can see how disavowal of toxic masculinity
can serve the interests of already privileged men. Feminist applications of the term to
the likes of Trump and Weinstein depart from a conservative focus on marginalized
men’s “toxic masculinity.” However, such condemnation still individualizes the
problem to the character traits of specific men. Condemnation of toxic masculinity
allows men to position themselves as against misogyny, homophobia and violence,
while simultaneously acknowledging masculinity as implicated in such problems.
Sexual violence and harassment can then be discussed as features of “backward” and
“mentally unwell” men. Thus, the institutional and structural privileges men accrue
(what Connell terms the “patriarchal dividend”) are systematically obscured. Toxic
masculinity carries inflections of postfeminist relegation of patriarchy to the past and
individualizes sexism as a question of personal attitudes. Feminist scholars should
thus be wary of using toxic masculinity as an analytic category.
Toxic masculinity continues to appear in media and scholarship. I’ve caught
myself using it as a shorthand: I understand that its appeal lies in its ability to
summon a recognizable character type. However, I take care not to use the term
as a scholarly concept. In 2019, for the first time, the term appeared in some of my
students’ essays, although I do not use it in my teaching. I noticed that students who
didn’t use it gave fuller analyses of masculinity and different forms of violence.
Possibly, the term has spread into feminist scholarship to an extent that it should be
addressed in the classroom. Indeed, explaining why it is not a useful concept could
highlight the value of less individualized approaches to gender and power.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Harrington 351

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

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