‘They’ve never heard the word masculinity without the word toxic’
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/most-boys-never-heard-word-31816076
by DarkSkiesGreyWaters
‘They’ve never heard the word masculinity without the word toxic’
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/most-boys-never-heard-word-31816076
by DarkSkiesGreyWaters
28 comments
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The article was a sad read and was written by someone who lacks empathy and came across quite childish.
All that aside, part of me believes these kids do not have present father figures. A strong father figure would help them understand their worth outside of providing because there’s more to life that what you can do to serve others.
IMO all this bollocks about “what it means to be a man” is screwing up boys way more than anything else. Ten years olds for example are no where near mature enough to understand this and will just perceive themselves as victims. Which is probably the intention.
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True – feels like there is a collective, cultural punishment of young men today. They’re being punished for a historic patriarchy they never created, never benefited from, and that does not exist in the same way as it did a generation ago.
God I love articles about masculinity written by women.
Why can’t we just have toxic behaviour instead of making it a masculine or feminine thing?
Reminds me of old gender roles which I thought we were meant to be getting away from.
If you’re a POS you’re a POS.
Then teach them positive masculinity.
All this generation hears is “Toxic masculinity”
I think this sounds like a fantastic project. This bit, though:
“Mike said one of the biggest complaints the group hear from teenage boys is that everybody talks about them, but nobody talks with them. “Their voice they feel is not heard, they feel like they’re all lumped in together,” he continued. “You know, teenage boys in this homogenous mass that are all potential threats and troublemakers and misogynists. It really frustrates them.””
Is just just sad as fuck. And should be worrying, because – at least in my experience – people will live down to your worst expectations of them on a “might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb” basis.
One thing that jumped out at me is that I think this project could include a few sessions with girls. And the girls should be listening first, commenting later; I say this because of the part where the boys are explaining what they think girls expect of them. These boys have obviously absorbed some unreconstructed ideas about masculinity, but so do girls, and it would be helpful for *them* to unlearn it, too.
Schools are playing a big role in this. My younger sister goes to a girls school, and before she’s even hit her teenage years or had anything approaching a relationship she’s spouting off anti-man nonsense that’s been drilled into her by older women.
The men in her life have always just supported her and shown her kindness and affection. Yet a young girls mind is now being warped before she even hits puberty into thinking anything to do with ‘men’ or being ‘masculine’ is toxic and naturally always inferior to the female perspective.
Modern feminism is a joke. We’re churning out hateful little confused kids because of a demographic of spiteful middle aged women that grew up on a diet of gossip magazines & manufactured drama. These people end up bitter and alone & then naturally prescribe all of their issues to the opposite sex instead of taking accountability for their own sad life.
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I wish there was half as much discussion about positive masculinity as there was backlash against the term toxic masculinity. We might actually start making some progress then. Especially when it can be basically be boiled down to “do no harm”.
I think you’ve got to empathise, regardless of what bile they’re consuming, with the perspective of these boys for their age.
Girls outperform boys at pretty much every metric in school now, yet so much discussion and assistance is afforded to girls in an effort to “level the field”.
So much hostile rhetoric i.e Not all men, Male Tears, Toxic Masculinity etc. predates a lot of the male mainstream influencers like Tate and frankly is probably partially the cause. As a 27 year old, I can differentiate the nuance in a “Not all Men” comment but to a kid, in seeing people mock someone who protests not all men are misogynists, rapists etc., you can see how it would sit funny with them.
The Author’s first concern is the boy bringing up not wanting to date a woman earning more than him. Data shows, by and large, women prefer men who earn more or equal to them i.e Marrying up. There’s plenty of other similar examples, we’re not as divorced from traditional gender roles as we’d like to think. These kids aren’t dumb, they know this.
Honestly, I don’t think this is a bad idea in combatting rising misogyny.
> Some of the answers are less virtuous. As the room warms to him and slowly becomes more open, one young man admits he wouldn’t like to be with a woman who earns more money than him.
What is wrong with these kids? Life would be sweet if my wife earned more than me.
Idk I’ve seen positive masculinity talked about.
Positive human qualities are pretty much the same across the gender lines. How to make those relevant to your sense of masculinity is something for men to discuss because idk. I dont really understand how men’s sense of masculinity really functions because I can’t really say I’ve ever really given much thought to my own femininity.
I honestly believe that centering your self of self around how other people perceive your gender expression is pretty unhealthy.
From the article
>Some of the answers are less virtuous. As the room warms to him and slowly becomes more open, one young man admits he wouldn’t like to be with a woman who earns more money than him.
This just feels like a never ending cycle. It’s “toxic” for men to not want to be in a relationship with a woman who earns more than them, but plenty of women (in real life) actually only want to be with men who are more successful than them. So who’s actually perpetuating this toxicity?
From my personal opinion on the situation, both genders are to blame to different levels.
Men are happy to parrot the stuff about ‘suicide been the highest killer of men’ or ‘people only buy flowers for a man when they die’ but the men are the ones mocking other men when they try to be more emotional and open, the same men are fully capable of checking on their friends and family and been supportive.
Women complain about toxic masculinity and the issue they face from it, but it isn’t men buying tickets to go see Chris Brown, women are often the primary carer for children so they could easily teach their sons what real masculinity is but they just as often fall back on the stereotypes of a cold unfeeling provider. You see women decaying masculinity but providing little in the way of what they actually want. Hell go on any male mental health sub and you’ll see dozens of stories of men opening up to their partners and been mocked for it.
Hell in general we talk way to much about what is bad and how bad toxic masculinity is without ever talking about what it is we want instead. We tell boys not to cry and they can be who they are…then we mock and belittle them for it.
Too many women out there with enormous chips on their shoulders.
Boys haven’t changed, and will not change. They keep demonising their natural instincts and biology to such an extent as to encourage loathing, both self and external.
Get your shit together and sort out your priorities. You’re 10, Jojo. Start acting like it.
Oh my god don’t read the article. It’s bad, so cliched lol.
[Anyone remember that “man flu” thing](https://share.google/uhbIpwgl6dlN0A0q8) where someone did studies to show men do actually get impacted more by flu than women, thus it’s actually a horrid thing to mock? Not to mention men being more at risk with COVID and the like.
Imagine a medical situation where you mock women like that and it going for decades without criticism, lol.
After reading the article, this seems like a very good project that I would be happy to see implemented in other places. And it seems to be working, the number of exclusions has decreased since this was implemented.
It’s always good to give people a voice, a place to talk about their concerns, and a place to reassess what they believe in without fear of being judged.
Honestly I for one am *fed up* of these social science and/or psychology terms being lifted out of a specific original working context and becoming pop culture buzzwords twisted from out of that context to create pointless arguments!
**Toxic** masculinity *was only ever* an adjective applied to SOME behaviours, NOT saying that ALL masculinity in ANY way is or must be toxic.
Just like talking about ‘abusive men’ meaning wife beaters or rapists **does not** suggest that ALL men fall into that category! Or abusive women for that matter! Has everyone just forgotten how to use language???
I’ve got a rotten egg in the fridge. Am I saying that ALL EGGS are rotten?!
How is this any different than all of the other attempts to force men to conform to what we think they ought to be, rather than examining what they actually are, and developing strategies accordingly.
> This is a space to talk freely and without judgement about what it is to be a man in 2025
> What Phil does is gently push back on unhelpful rhetoric and models of masculinity
These two statements highlight the inherent contradiction in this premise.
It’s a space to talk without judgement, but Phil gets to judge what constitues an “unhelpful model of masculinity”?
Which, surprise surprise, happens to align with the modern (and distinctly female-led) interpretation of what constitues “an unhelpful model of masculinity”.
Making “Phil the ex firefighter” the arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not – particularly as he is just the acceptably attired proxy/trojan horse for the “toxic masculinity” brigade – doesn’t change the fact that the original premise is flawed.
Time and again with all these gender/race/sexuality grifts, we run into the problem that, the initial premise that the whole house of cards is built upon is flawed, and is a failure to properly conceptualise the problem.
We start with the assumption that X problem can be entirely explained by Y cause (lets just use “oppression” as a catch all for Y, for the sake of argument) and what follows is; “**given that Y is the cause**, we should do ABC.”
Well, the problem is that Y is a ludicrous oversimplification of an extremely complex and multifaceted issue. Y is based on any number of unsubstantiated, politically motivated and ill-conceived notions and assertions (you cant even measure so-called toxic masculinity, you cant even provide a definition that would allow us to categorise behaviour into toxic and non-toxic, the whole concept is pure, unadulterated bullshit) and so, what follows are solutions that fail to address the fundamental problems because they’re aimed at removing some mythical bogeyman rather than really looking in any meaningful way at the issues we’re experiencing.
There are multiple, perfectly natural developmental behaviours that boys engage in that have been labelled as “toxic masculinity” – rough and tumble play for example: all small children **require** rough and tumble play as part of their development. Boys on average need to engage in this type of play more. Rough and tumble play is necessary to develop things like empathy, emotional regulation etc. However there has been a push (mostly from women) to stop this type of behaviour and suppress it as “toxic” and “encouraging violence” in fact, what is happening is they are depriving children (disproportionately boys) from learning about the boundaries of their bodies, the boundaries of others, about emotional regulation and self-control etc. So, in the long run you are creating LESS healthy males with a GREATER propensity for inappropriate use of force.
It’s funny because schools are one of the prime culprits for this type of stupidity (because they have SO much time with children and ao much power over their development) the whole way the education system is set up is to the detriment of boys (hence why they are failing at an alarming rate compared to girls).
Another example of this is that on average boys exhibit higher levels of motor activity- fidgeting, restlessness and spontaneous movement – than girls. School is set up in a way that means you have to sit still and quiet for hours at a time – inevitably we see that kids (disproportionately boys) are then labelled as disruptive and problematic and penalised and alienated as a consequence.
“Hey, lets get masculine Phil to tell the boys how to think and behave in the way we want them to, because they’ll be more likely to eat a shit sandwich from him”
This is just the same BS as ever, but wrapped up in a “man” suit.
This sounds like a great initiative being helmed by someone who represents a good role model to young men.
As a man it took me a long time to understand and work through my feelings of shame from failing to live up to patriarchal standards, but once I had that in perspective I found myself more at peace.
I would have benefitted from this sort of space as a young teenager.
People like to fantasize that gender roles don’t exist.
Good on this guy for setting up a place where boys can talk about the expectations that are rightly or wrongly placed on them.
Probably because the word “masculinity” doesn’t really appear anywhere else, whilst thats a phrase used to describe very current personalities.
The last 15 years of discourse has done irreparable harm to the assabiyyah of the UK, we’ll be dealing with the consequences for generations.
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