Masculinity

First, it is bad for women. It shapes sexist and patriarchal behaviors, including abusive or violent treatment of women. Toxic masculinity thus contributes to gender inequalities that disadvantage women and privilege men.

Second, toxic masculinity is bad for men and boys themselves. Narrow stereotypical norms constrain men’s physical and emotional health and their relations with women, other men, and children.

Origins of the term

The term first emerged within the mythopoetic (New Age) men’s movement of the 1980s.

The movement focused on men’s healing, using male-only workshops, wilderness retreats and rites of passage to rescue what it saw as essentially masculine qualities and archetypes (the king, the warrior, the wildman, and so on) from what it dubbed “toxic” masculinity.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the term spread to other self-help circles and into academic work (for example, on men’s mental health). Some US conservatives began applying the term to low-income, under-employed, marginalized men, prescribing solutions like restoring male-dominated families and family values.

“Toxic masculinity” was virtually non-existent in academic writing – including feminist scholarship – up until 2015 or so, other than in a handful of texts on men’s health and wellbeing.

But as it spread in popular culture, feminist scholars and commentators adopted the term, typically as a shorthand for misogynist talk and actions. Though the term is now associated with a feminist critique of the sexist norms of manhood, that’s not where it started.

It is virtually absent from the scholarship on men and masculinities that developed rapidly from the mid-1970s, though its use in that area has increased in the last decade. This scholarship has, however, long made the claim that culturally influential constructions of manhood exist and that they are tied to men’s domination of women.