The Impact of Toxic Masculinity

By: Vaibhava Rajesh

Toxic masculinity is a form of harmful gender roles and negatively impacts young boys and society as a whole.

Oftentimes in society, gender roles play a part in how someone is viewed, treated, or expectations that they have. In society’s eyes, women are expected to take care of all aspects of her life whether it’s medically, school, family, or personal problems. For men, they are expected to be more academically and career driven, but have more leverage since people often think “they’ll come around eventually.”

With the expectations society sets for genders and the gender roles, it leads up to many social and emotional expectations. For instance, parents will often tell their sons “boys don’t cry” or “that’s too girly.” Oftentimes boys grow up with comments and remarks like this which are commonly known as toxic masculinity. There are many different forms of toxic masculinity which not only affect men psychologically, but cause serious issues in society as a whole.

An example of a form of toxic masculinity is degrading men when they express interest in something considered “feminine.” For example, a parent could refuse to buy a purple t-shirt since “purple is a girl color.” This comment may not seem harmful, but continuous remarks like this can be damaging over a long period of time.

A main destructive form of toxic masculinity is the lack of acceptance when showing certain emotion. As boys grow up, adults around them often don’t allow boys to cry, as it’s considered “feminine.” Boys instead resort to other forms of emotion to show instead of expressing sadness. Instead of sadness, aggression and anger are emotions that are normalized for boys. The American Psychology association states “Primary gender role socialization aims to uphold patriarchal codes by requiring men to achieve dominant and aggressive behaviors”

This means that because of the gender norms set by society, men recieve more dominant and aggressive behavior when dealing with certain situations or handling conflict. As the American Psychology association states, “Aggression can result when a man experiences stress deriving from self-perceived failure to live up to masculine expectations.” This could be asserting dominance physically or verbally to conform to the expectations of dominance. Not only is this harmful psychologically, creating unhealthy coping mechanisms for issues, but it also affects society as a whole.

The buildup of trauma from toxic masculinity or toxic social gender norms can lead to domestic violence in order to keep up the value of “dominance” in future relationships. For example, an annual report by the VPC (2017), uses research and data to look at the effects of intimate partner violence perpetrated by men on women in the U.S. 1,686 murders included female victims and male perpetrators and 93 percent of the victims were murdered by a male they knew.

A lot of the time, toxic aggression and behaviors are excused and suspicious behavior is passed off as “boys will be boys” rather than calling boys out for their actions.

What can we do as a society to prevent toxic masculinity and unreasonable gender norms? One thing we can do is acknowledge boys’ feelings regardless, and try to help them cope through it rather than judging based on their gender. We can be more open to people wearing more “feminine” colors and having interest in “feminine” things. Having an open mind to things helps the people around us, but also allows us to learn about people in new ways.

Toxic masculinity plays a big role in toxic gender norms in society. It is beyond important that we as a society must do better in order to prevent psychological, social, and societal issues stemming from gender. Regardless of gender, we need to keep in mind that we are all human and shouldn’t be separated or treated differently merely based on something as simple as whether you are a male or female.

Sources:

https://www.apa.org/pi/about/newsletter/2018/09/harmful-masculinity