Masculinity Only Became Toxic When It Was No Longer Convenient

Onyx Contributor:  H.T. (@517NightHawk), Podcast:  Lansing Anti-Hero

One of the often mentioned narratives on social media is the idea of fighting “toxic masculinity” and how harmful it can be.  On one hand, I can see some of said argument that part of how men are conditioned in western society is kind of bad as frankly we aren’t raised to have a healthy range of emotions without society ridiculing us as weak or calling us homosexual.  However, there is one part of this issue that isn’t discussed, or at least not discussed with nuance.

As I said before, the often forgotten fact about a great deal of millennials is that we grew up in VERY comfortable environments both socially and economically, and thus many of us grew up believing that because we were able to intellectualize our righteous indignation towards society that we were right.  This applies to the often discussed issue of masculinity as well.  As a mid 20s millennial, I can tell you that the idea of masculinity as far as our generation had conceived it was built during a time when the concept of testing the bounds of sexuality was becoming a bit popular in terms of commercial viability with shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The L Word.  And while there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality or having it necessarily represented in society, the fact is that a lot of us were kinda introduced to the concept of sexuality pretty early compared to prior generations.

This isn’t to say kids should be raised asexually or even have sexuality deemed wrong to them, but let’s keep it 100:  many people my age or slightly below grew up knowing far more about sexuality and what looking “gay” or “straight” looked like, and what’s more, if you look back the lines were at times hard to differentiate.  I can remember so many girls who because no one put them on game about men and their attempts at getting sex, grew up believing that this was the norm; for men to kind of just be these passive individuals who just hung around and didn’t do all the posturing like all the guys that they liked but weren’t into them.  Seriously, I bet you anything that as attractive as any of these women you see on Twitter now may be that are pushing this narrative that masculinity is toxic, a great deal of them weren’t as pretty growing up, but likely had a guy or a few who she considered a friend but likely was crazy about her.

Fact is, the hate about “toxic masculinity” and it being “fragile” comes from years of women who have to come to terms with the fact that all the guys they knew growing up who either weren’t able to be traditionally masculine due to age and parental oversight but became who they are now aren’t the same agendaless ego strokers they knew growing up.  Fact is, this is a narrative pushed by the same people who complain that black men hate “good women” but will complain about “pick mes” online.  In short, just ignore the majority of the women on social media who call masculinity fragile as frankly it’s just women sad that all the guys that used to tell them how pretty they are started going thru their hoe phase and they realized that the guy they fantasized about is actually a shitty human being.