kimberlysteele | Toxic Masculinity

Despite the protests of toxic feminists, we are not currently living in an era of toxic masculinity. Males have been rendered impotent in almost every aspect, up to and including their dwindling sperm counts. Those of us who are of a certain age have memories of the toxic masculine era under our belts, which used to come attached to garters and remained unseen except in the bedroom.

Toxic masculinity reached its peak in the early 1990s, just as I was finishing my undergraduate degree at a middle-of-the-road musical college in Chicago, Illinois. Woke wasn't a thing. My first encounter with a wokester happened at the end of my undergrad time. A young man who was a fellow student shamed me for using the acronym BFE while casually conversing about a faraway place. For those not in the know, BFE stands for Butt-F**king Egypt. Having no previous encounters of the sort, I simply apologized and moved on. In hindsight, I now know that what I witnessed with the ritual shaming was the birth of Woke as a religion, and of course I witnessed it in the heart of Chicago, Illinois, the exact sort of urban center where it plies its trade.

For a short time, the push towards political correctness, self-policing one's speech to avoid hurtful stereotypes, and inclusiveness was nowhere near as bitter and Stalinist as it would eventually become. Woke had a honeymoon phase that I perceived as lasting from approximately 1990 to 2005 or so.

Back in Time

Once upon a time, I was a twelve year old with serious suicidal ideations. I have the gift/curse of being able to remember that time very well. The average school day began with me springing awake as my alarm clock blasted the Chicago radio station B96. The station played Top 40 hits: George Michael, Madonna. Despite his voice being on the radio ALL THE TIME, I had no idea George Michael was gay and neither did any of my family or friends. In between the songs, the DJ prank called random people and had somewhat racy conversations with his co-hosts. The rest of my morning was the hell of trying to make myself look presentable with my glasses, braces, gigantic hair, and cystic acne. There was often no time to eat, so I would slap together some Skippy peanut butter with a piece of toasted Wonder bread, wash it down my maw with Minute Maid orange juice, and go to school with peanut butter on my face. At 7 in the morning, my best friend stopped by (on foot) so we could walk to school together. Though it was kind of her to do so, I had no appreciation of it because I was jealous of her good looks, comparatively clear skin, and advanced ability to adjust to junior high school. She was normal, I was not. No matter how hard I tried, I could not overcome the environment of junior high. From day one, I had difficulty opening my locker, trouble making it to class on time, chronic fatigue, depression, and severe anxiety. To put the cherry on top of the cake, I began menstruating at 12 and suffered excruciating cramps. Though I should have used the opportunity to stay home, I was too much of a fool to do so for fear of missing out. I believed I was supposed to be having a good time and a good life, so I often convinced myself I was doing just that despite being suicidal.

The milieu was the toxic masculine 1980s. It was a man's world, baby, and we all knew it. The 80s were a time when gay men actually did get beaten to death in America for being gay -- Stephen King did not make that up whole cloth when he wrote a scene in IT where a gay man gets beaten to death by a group of straight thugs. No wonder George Michael was not out and proud except perhaps in his small circle of friends, agents, and recording executives. Popular media constantly threw it in our faces that a woman's value was based on her looks. Even the shoulder-padded, stiff-haired, business-suited career broad was stereotyped with a Patrick Nagle wet dream of a face and a Robert Palmer back-up dancer's body. My brother had a poster on his bedroom wall of Heather Thomas yanking her bikini up her scrawny hips with a thumb's up gesture. Some guys still had Farrah Fawcett or Kim Basinger on their walls. It hardly mattered. The message of the 80s pinup was simple and directed not at the boys wanking it with surreptitiously borrowed Almay hand lotion -- no, it was aimed squarely at the girls. The 80s pinups told us THIS IS WHAT PERFECT LOOKS LIKE AND THIS IS WHO YOU MUST BE. Of course we could not hope to measure up. Before there was Instagram, there was Photoshop, and because getting a photograph into mass market print was extremely difficult, Photoshopped images were often as convincing as the real thing. At least the young girls today have the benefit of seeing the Instagram hottie revealed in all of her fat-bulging, saggy, giant-nosed, fakery-exposed glory. Back then, Photoshop was the domain of professionals. I did not realize that every photo in every magazine of every woman was airbrushed, nipped, and tucked. No wonder I was so violently dysmorphic and so schizophrenic over what I saw in the mirror. I overvalued and undervalued my looks at every opportunity.

Toxic Monotheism

Spirituality is supposed to be a place you can turn when your life sucks as mine did in the 1980s, but the worst examples of toxic masculinity came directly from so-called religious leaders. At the very bottom, there were the materialistic church moms who meant well, but who worked without any true notion of the God they were extensibly working for. In the middle were the neighborhood pastors, comfortably numb, upper-middle class doofuses who had lucked into having their own church. Every weekend, they lectured about life as if they knew anything about what it is to truly live. Bland, timid suburbanites must invent reasons to lecture other bland, timid suburbanites, and the kept pastors scored symphonies of pablum in order to preserve their cushy, relatively risk-free work and housing situations. At the top were the televangelists, cruising around in their luxury jets and filling stadia with the tacky, the desperate, and the easily suckered. Also the apex was the Pope, and none dared question his pedophile-abetting habits until Sinead O'Connor sacrificed her career on Saturday Night Live one evening in 1992. Suffice to say that God did not seem to be anywhere near a Christian church or a Jewish temple, and to this day seems to avoid those places as far as I am concerned.

The Glory Versus the Actual Work

Outside the church, the same sorts of working astral pyramids dominated in the workaday world, with a huge army of women populating insurance offices, mortgage lenders, telecommunications centers, and retail floors. Every owner, media mogul, top producer, high level executive, leader, CEO, president, top lawyer, superintendent, et m. was male, yet the success of his organization was heavily dependent on an army of working women taken out of their homes in order to bust heavies 9 to 5 just as men had done in the career sector from pre-WWII years. Under the guise of female equality, women were expected to make a living while simultaneously making a clean, nurturing home and raising sane, disciplined children. Anyone who has even witnessed such circumstances knows that making top dollar in a white collar job while successfully raising children is impossible; there simply are not enough hours in the day. The bottom line was that a mass of women did most or all of the work, but the top of the pyramid was always male. Beta male managers were the appointed eunuchs watching over the harem of compliant females. The TL;DR is that women did all the work and men got all of the glory. Kind of like pregnancy, and it is no wonder abortions were so difficult to attain back then. A girl or woman who cannot abort a fetus for any reason is in a convenient position: she is trapped. She is the captive of a man's pleasure, and her life does not matter, especially not over the life of a human who is new to this planet. At her core, she will always be a slut who wanted it even if she was nine years old and raped by her uncle. It's a man's world, honey, and if you don't like it, kill yourself. I almost did several times.

Women Do It Better (Depending on What It Is)

The stereotype of men not being able to handle pregnancy is the quiet way in which women whisper among themselves that men are not capable of handling long term commitments where one must follow through such as carrying a child and then raising that child until she or he is an adult. The saying goes that if men could get pregnant, suddenly all birth control would be free and abortion would be safe and legal. I don't know to what degree I believe in that saying, but I highly doubt abortion would be anywhere near as stigmatized if both sexes could manage pregnancy with equal success.

The hard facts are that men do certain things better than women and women do certain things better than men. Of course there is no hard rule for this: I would not want to live in a world where Amelia Earhart never flew a plane by virtue of her being female or where men were shamed for being homemakers because it is largely a female occupation. When we look at the world of sports, men dominate because they are larger, more muscular, faster, and tougher than women. When we look at decorating, for the most part men don't have the knack that women seem to naturally possess. Women can see more colors than men (this is just science, yo) and women have more of an intuitive grasp of the flow of etheric energy within space. For this reason, my male-dominant, male-designed junior high school was a boxy, ugly prison. If school had been an elegant, comfortable, lovely space, maybe the energy there would not have been so unrelentingly, poisonously septic.

The Trouble with Wanting to be the Best

Men have a desire to be the best, and this is a seriously problematic way of seeing life. There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve, but when you have a pathological drive to beat out the competition in order to sit at the top of a powerful pyramid, this mode of thinking is a collective disaster. The corporate harem model of the workaday world with a man and his crowd of beta dudes administering armies of women can only elevate so many males. Just like any form of feudalism, the more kings forced to share limited resources such as labor and land, the more war will be had with king against king.

As a child, I was extremely preoccupied with adult thoughts and worries about how I would make a living one day. I was consumed with visions of being a responsible adult long before it was appropriate to think about such things. At age 9, I began teaching myself to type on a manual typewriter. By age 15, I could type 80-100 words a minute with perfect accuracy. I fantasized that I would be a well-paid secretary, dictating and taking calls and memos by day and returning to my pretty apartment in the downtown area of a quaint suburb via train at night to my cats and my books. Sadly, this vision never materialized as cost of living made it impossible. Little did I know that what I was actually good at (aside from typing) was teaching music, which is at best a bohemian existence unless you are one of the few willing to make an influencer presence out of yourself, which at this time I am not. Humans being what they are, I had a dual fantasy at the time of being a top singer/performer, and this was a far more destructive dream. No matter what, I was determined to be THE BEST at whatever my career was to be, and being a team player or just a participant held no interest. School bored me because I was seldom THE BEST and in fact, I won awards so rarely in school, I grew to hate it by the fourth grade.

It is the nature of women to cooperate, congregate, patch together, and manipulate. It is the nature of men to discover, conquer, and dominate. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these two natures. There is no labeling them as good or evil either. They are what they are.

Men have more of a need to be seen as experts as women, to "mansplain" without bothering to find out if the woman has more expertise on the subject. Women have less of a tendency to tie up their egos in being experts in any particular field. This is why until relatively recently men dominated the world of celebrity cooking. Aside from Julia Child, masters of cuisine where almost all males despite women being saddled with most of the cooking (outside of Army mess halls) for the last six thousand years. The fashion world is similar. Despite the fact that women have and always have made most of the clothing, men get the glory. Top female designers weren't much of a thing even during the halcyon days of Coco Chanel -- she was a tiny minority in a sea of male names such as Balenciaga and Fortuny.

The current debacle of trans rights has to do with men who are jealous of women and who insist they can become better at womanhood than actual women, as if anyone would actually want to do that. Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, rose to fame by outcompeting every female on her team. Among males, she only placed as number 16 or 17 in any given competition, despite being 6'1" and not suffering a monthly period. Lia had such a compulsive need to be THE BEST at swimming, she was willing to place herself in a kiddie pool of sorts to do it rather than being forced to lose among her fellow biological males. It is unsurprising to see female-to-male transexuals sinking into the wallpaper for the most part -- male to female has always been a far more vocal and attention-hungry segment of the trans population. For this reason, there is no burgeoning population of trans machine welders, Navy captains, and lumberjacks seeking the media's spotlights.

Males are the ones who need to be experts: they want to be the consulted, not the ones seeking consultation. For whether the male is a declared male or female, he needs to be Top Dog. This is the formula. To be feminine, quiet, unassuming, cooperative, and receptive means that the attention will not come and that you cannot seed the world with your influence.

Speaking of Influencers

Career influencers are essentially masculine by nature, even the ones who are mothers of eight and who make a living showing off their phases in home decor. They spermatically attempt to scatter themselves all over the world, seeking out receptive egg fields where they can plant their flags. In our current world where making an honest living is more difficult than ever before, the lure of influencing to fill one's coffers with cash and goodies is extremely tempting. Influencing makes it much easier to declare oneself an expert, even if it is only at looking pretty, while seeding the world with one's own self-manufactured celebrity. In spite of all I have just said, I have no problem with influencers; in fact, I follow many of them and support a limited few because they are often experts just as promised.

Back to the Future

In the 1990s, the tide started shifting towards toxic femininity, a subject to which I plan on devoting a full essay in the near future. The 1990s were far more tolerant of gay people and even somewhat kinder towards ugly, geeky 12 year old girls with braces, glasses, and unfortunate skin and hair. We began to see drugstore makeup shades in darker colors than Pasty White Girl. School bullies who formerly skated for beating up anyone who did not toe the Biff Tannen party line of BE LIKE ME OR ELSE actually started getting in trouble. The baby was not to go out with the bathwater until 2005 or so when internet censorship began getting out of hand and LGBT+ rights spiraled into a battle to install a neo-Marxist, Borg hive mind.

I have no advice to give in this case -- these are just my observations of dealing with toxic masculinity from the front lines of being a woman. This essay may become more than one as I may have more observations as time goes by.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

methylethyl

Oh, the ruching on that bikini... (looks away, embarrassed)

As for the rest... (shrugs). I've seen the toxic masculinity, but it's relatively easy to avoid, these days. The toxic femininity though. Ugh. That's the tribe-consolidating, resource-securing, noncomplier-excluding side of things, and I'm always on the receiving end of the "excluder" process.

I'm seriously glad that I live in an age where you don't have to starve just because the other women in the tribe have rejected you, and where it's not taboo to socialize with men you aren't related to... and I'm dismayed that the feminine "you must follow these 10,000 unwritten, unspoken rules or be shunned forever" way of doing things is gaining the upper hand. I guess the in-between stage couldn't really last.

From:

kimberlysteele

Yes, she may have been laughing then but it appears mighty Saturn always has the last laugh where ephemeral human beauty is concerned.

Actually, the toxic masculine harem model is still alive and well in most American corporations. Not much has changed. The top of the pyramid is still almost uniformly a man. In 2022, 8.8% of Fortune 500 CEOs were women, which means 91.2 percent were men.

I too am glad I don't have to answer to the girl tribe's exclusion -- I hope Coviditarianism was the frothy peak of that sort of shunning in our era. Much of why I founded Speakeasy Illinois was to show the mean girls that we outcasts are perfectly happy to do our own thing with our own people. Nothing strikes fear into them as much as not being needed.

Edited Date: 2023-01-23 10:43 pm (UTC)

From:

methylethyl

Yeah, I'm glad I was never attracted to the whole corporate-career thing. My sister was into that-- got all the way up to "director" of somethingorother in a tech startup. Missed out on her kid's entire childhood (and so did her VP-of-company husband). Whatever she was getting paid, it wasn't worth it. A salary just means they own ALL your time, instead of having to pay you for each hour you give them.

People getting hung up on "women are being paid unequally" are asking all the wrong questions.

One of the nice things about reaching middle age is that not only have I learned that no amount of studying the tribe's rules will allow me to fit in... but also that it wouldn't win me anything I actually want. The prize for sending all the correct semaphore and buttering all the right buns is... an eternity of ever-more-frantic semaphoring and buttering. Like, oh... if you do everything right, the prize is... being admired by venal people, a spot on the PTA, the HOA, and the charity board, and invitations to tedious social gatherings. All of which would make me a nervous wreck if I somehow miraculously stumbled into them. Perhaps that's sour grapes. I don't think it is, though. Just the perspective of age.

So it seems I lucked out :) Because when you're 17 it feels like death to be excluded by anybody at all. But after forty it's like... Oh. Actually if I just go about my business without trying to please anybody, decent people who tolerate that *will find me*. And then I get to hang out with the fun weirdos-- and for bonus points, I rarely have to deal with the sort of people who will score me on the price of my shoes. The key to the good life is being excluded by the *right* people ;)

Toxic Masculinity

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