More Thoughts On Toxic Masculinity

Being mostly just bullet points:

• Gad Saad reminds us that the answer to rhetorical headline questions is always "no" with his essay in Psychology Today, "Is Toxic Masculinity A Valid Concept?" Excerpt:
  

  ... [M]ost of the traits and behaviors that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate! This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity, and no amount of campus brainwashing will ever alter these facts. Let us stop pathologizing masculinity. Instead, let us appreciate the endless ways by which men and women are similar to one another, as well as the important ways in which the two sexes differ.

• An unusual good piece in the NYT from Thomas Edsall on the new APA guidelines, quoting David French, Steven Pinker, Ryan A. McKelley, and a number of others.
• In case you wondered whether Harry's was an alternative, in 2017 they, too, ran with the idiotic "toxic masculinity" trope. (I saw the tweet as recently as a couple days ago, but it's been since deleted. The subsequent deletion of the tweet might just be read as corporate ass-covering, in which case at least they understood what it was they did.
• A closing point: "toxic masculinity" appears to require transmission by some cultural means, and is frequently asserted (as with the Gillette ad) to be either tacitly accepted or actively encouraged. Yet, if this is the case, why isn't there some culture where this is no longer active or has been stamped out? The whole affair looks, as described, to be a sort of conspiracy theory. 
• Update 2019-01-23: Ran into this City Journal piece by Kay S. Hymowitz via Christina Hoff Sommers yesterday but only today got around to reading it. This pulls in the dumb Covington High fracas and ties it back to "toxic masculinity". Money graf:
  

  Now you could argue—and I have—that contemporary American society has not done a great job of taming and channeling juvenile aggression or of developing young men and women into the best they can be, to use the words of the Gillette ad. But “toxic masculinity” goes much farther than that. It evokes a society dedicated to creating and stoking the raw male desire for dominance. I’m hardly the first to point out that males engage in more violence and dominance behavior than females in every known human society, as well as in every primate troop. When the authors of the APA guidelines get to the section on bullying, however, they locate its cause in “constricted notions of masculinity emphasizing aggression, homophobia, and misogyny,” that is, in social teaching.
  
  ... The ad’s writers miss the possibility that “boys will be boys” is not guidance or an excuse; it’s a warning. Far from encouraging boys’ aggression, the American “patriarchy” tries in its own crude way to squelch it, as any decent society must do. That’s why the country is awash with anti-bullying programs and public-service announcements.

• Drifting off to the Covington Catholic fracas: Ross Douthat in the NYT who steals a page from Scott Alexander. Neatly done almost to the end, where he writes himself an excuse note with "Cuck".