Suzanne Venker on the well-aired notion that males are suffering from “toxic masculinity”, and must be “cured” by being more like females:
“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.
That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.
“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”
This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:
Women are graduating from college at higher levels. the male suicide rate is four times that of women, men have a harder time moving out of their parents’ homes than women. There are so many statistics that are telling us that men are struggling. Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men, but when there is a shooting we don’t talk about men’s mental health.
Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.
How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?
Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.
