Is Toxic Masculinity on the Rise in America?

The following is an excerpt from my new book, just released,?Macho Men: How Toxic Masculinity Harms Us All And What To Do About It.

“As a culture, we perceive men not as sacred or sensitive, but as things to be hurt, repeatedly and violently, to test their mettle. Manhood is a prize awarded to the most scarred."--Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The National Survey of Adolescents titled?“The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents”?conducted in 2018 by PLAN International and PerryUndem Research reported the following:

• According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, thirty-five percent of boys in the survey say that society most values strength and toughness in boys.
• Only two percent of the boys surveyed say honesty and morality and eight percent say ambition or leadership.
• Seventy-two percent of boys in the survey say they personally feel pressure from parents, friends, teachers, or society to be physically strong.
• Forty-four percent of older boys (14 to 19) feel pressure to be “willing to punch someone if provoked.” About one in three younger boys feels the same (35 percent).
• One-third of boys (34 percent) think society expects them to be strong, tough, “be a man,” and “suck it up” when they feel sad or scared.
• ?Another third (33 percent) says society expects them to hide or suppress their feelings.
• When they feel angry, a plurality of boys says society expects them to be aggressive or violent (41 percent), followed by doing nothing, keeping quiet, and “suck it up / be a man” (35 percent).
• ?Eighty-two percent of boys have heard someone tell a boy he was “acting like a girl.” They interpret this behavior as emotional, crying, sensitive, weak, gay, and feminine.
• Six in ten boys (62 percent) hear boys making sexual comments or sexual jokes about girls at least once a week. One-third of boys 14 to 19 (36 percent) say they hear these comments daily.
• One in three boys (34 percent) says that several times a week or more they hear male characters in TV or movies who make sexual comments and sexual jokes about women characters.
• Close to half of boys ages 14 to 19 (47 percent) has heard their dad or other male family members make sexual jokes or sexual comments about women.
• The strongest factors correlated with thinking it is okay to ask a girl for sexy or naked pictures are exposure to online porn, having friends who have asked girls for pictures, and having a dad who has made sexual comments and sexual jokes about women.
• ?Among boys, having a father who makes sexual comments and sexual jokes about women is correlated with several feelings and behaviors:?Feeling it is okay to ask a girl for a naked or sexy picture;?feeling pressure to join in when other boys talk about girls in a sexual way;fFeeling pressure to hide sad or anxious feelings;?feeling pressure to control and dominate others.
• Most boys also say they hear boys making sexual comments or sexual jokes about girls at least once a week. Sixty-two percent of boys hear comments at least once a week, with 30% saying at least once a day. Twenty-two percent of younger boys say they hear sexual jokes and sexual comments about girls every day.

In a recent research study by Denera Exner-Cortens and colleagues published in the?Journal of Adolescent Health?the authors report “that over one in three Canadian youth who had dated experienced and/or used ‘adolescent dating violence (ADV) in the past 12 months.”

Toxic masculinity today is what the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” or “bro culture,” which exists in athletics, fraternity houses, Wall Street and Silicon Valley as well as Hollywood and the military.

This bro culture preaches about honor, strength, pride, and integrity, and at the same time, it teaches young men to treat any male who is not “on the team” as the enemy. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is established through misogynist language and homophobia.?Sexual conquests and bragging about them is a crucial aspect of toxic masculinity.

Between WWI and WWII masculinity went through a significant change in America. The Victorian ideal of masculinity was one in which men were valued for inner characteristics of honesty, self-control, self-sacrifice.

But during the Depression, men lost their status, and a focus on men’s physical strength reflected in factory work and physical fitness regimes like muscle building became a way of defining masculinity. Men became more arrogant and superficial because they no longer concentrated on developing their character but simply expected to win the attention and success with his personality and appearance. Magazines at this era both reflected the changes. At the same time, they contributed to these changes by alluring men with purchasable goods that helped with re-masculinization.

Toxic masculinity has been on the rise and culminated in the Presidency of Donald Trump, who has given explicit permission for the millions of angry white men to readily embrace misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and violence, clothed in the language, physical appearance, and behavior of hegemonic masculinity.

For much of recent history Americans have used terms like “macho,” “red-blooded” or “machismo” to describe the kind of masculinity that men were expected exhibit and to aspire to.

The razor company?Gillette recently promoted an advertisement?titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” The advertisement challenges viewers (mostly men) to confront #MeToo and?issues of “toxic masculinity” that manifest in bullying and catcalling. The Gillette advertisement suggests that men abandon the “boys will be boys” mentality and instead not participate in or tolerate in others misogynistic attitudes and behavior.

The ad was enormously popular, having been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube and 40 million times on Twitter. But the ad also brought a backlash from a lot of men, including?calls to boycott?Gillette.

The Gillette ad appeared just after the American Psychological Association released, for the first time,?guidelines?for psychologists working with boys and men who are socialized to conform to “traditional masculinity ideology” — which it says can hinder them from exploring what it means to be male. The APA states in its guidelines that?“traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful,”?and?“causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.”

The APA guidelines say that traditional masculinity has been defined by?“stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression.”?It goes on to say that traditional masculinity?is found in men’s resilience in the face of adversity and insistence on?“looking tough”?despite mental suffering, and in their tendency to handle emotional strain with anger.

The concept of “traditional masculinity ideology,” as the report calls it, is the norm for maleness held by large segments of the population that involves “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence” and is linked to “homophobia, bullying and sexual harassment.”

The APA blames this kind of masculinity for the fact that 90 percent of homicides in the US are committed by men, and for the fact that men are over three times more likely to die from suicide than women.

Macho Men?presents the problem of toxic masculinity or hegemonic masculinity and its damaging effect on the male identity and American society at large. Toxic masculinity and its characteristics and behaviors are detailed, along with an examination of the contexts of boyhood, the relationship with women, politics, sports, the military, and business. Finally, I examine what is known as “positive masculinity” and suggestions are made for what steps can be taken to address the problem of toxic masculinity.