In practice, the term is never used this way. It's used as a cudgel.

Why do undesirable or desirable behaviours need a sex/gender label at all? Asshole behaviour isn't gender-specific. Maybe people should just focus on criticizing specific undesirable behaviours, and praising specific desirable behaviours.

Toxic masculinity doesn’t mean men are poisonous.

It means men are being poisoned.

I still think this is where the framing quietly breaks down.

What you’re describing is not “masculinity” being toxic, but a particular sales pitch that smuggles bad norms under the masculinity label. Historically, this is exactly how language like “that’s so gay” operated. People didn’t mean “homosexual” in any literal sense. They meant weak, unserious, emotionally incontinent, indulgent. If pressed, the defense was always the same: I’m not talking about gay people, I’m talking about the stereotype society wrongly attaches to them.

The move is familiar because it works rhetorically. You get to criticize a behavior while outsourcing the moral weight to an identity category. The identity absorbs the stain, even if everyone insists that’s not what they meant.

We’ve seen this pattern over and over: “Real men don’t cry.” “Be a man” meaning suppress emotion, not develop discipline. “That’s gay” meaning fragile or contemptible. “Masculine energy” marketed as dominance without responsibility. “Feminine energy” marketed as intuition without accountability.

In every case, the failure isn’t gendered. It’s human. But the label does the work of making it feel natural to aim the critique at a group rather than the behavior itself.

This is why the analogy matters. Society eventually realized that using “gay” as a stand-in for negative traits was lazy at best and corrosive at worst, even when people swore they weren’t talking about actual gay people. The word still carried the freight.

I’m just applying the same standard here, as a proud champion of masculinity and part-time custodian of its reputation.

If the problem is emotional suppression, call it emotional suppression. If the problem is social pressure to perform invulnerability, call that out. If the problem is dominance without accountability, say so plainly.

Masculinity, like femininity, is a broad distribution of traits, not a slogan. Strength and restraint. Risk-taking and responsibility. Stoicism and emotional regulation. The pathologies show up when any of those lose balance, not because they’re “masculine.”

We spent decades correctly arguing that femininity itself wasn’t the problem, only the caricatures imposed on it. I’m simply extending that courtesy to masculinity, which seems overdue.

As a non-toxic, extremely moral male biological specimen and self-appointed advocate for masculine dignity, I’m fully in favor of men crying, feeling, and communicating. I just don’t think masculinity needs to be rhetorically sacrificed to achieve that outcome.

If anything, masculinity should be defended, rehabilitated, and held to a higher standard, not permanently prefixed with an asterisk.