The Only Kind Of Masculinity Is "Toxic"

So now comes Gillette with a stupid ad decrying "toxic masculinity" and yammering at men, instead of, you know, selling razors. The video itself has just short of 500,000 dislikes, and 167,000 likes, suggesting the reaction is, among those who care to register an opinion, strongly negative. If this is a reaction to the increasingly unshaven millennial generation, it's hard to see how alienating your existing customer base is exactly going to help your sales.

The business of labeling all masculinity "toxic" is one that the American Psychological Association lately has taken on. Andrew Sullivan is on it:

At the very start of the document, for example, this “traditional masculinity ideology” (TMI) is deemed the reason why men commit 90 percent of murders (and always have in every culture and every moment in history). That’s an extraordinary claim, and presumably requires urgent intervention. If a terrorist group, defined as adhering to an ideology, were to kill more than 15,000 Americans a year (the total number of murders committed by men in the U.S. in 2017), we would surely respond with a deep sense of urgency.

What is TMI? The definition varies throughout the document, as it flings various slurs at half the human race. Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is. Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve” things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable with violence. As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.

The APA's sordid diatribe-posing-as-therapeutic "reminded me of the way psychologists used to treat gay men: as pathological, dangerous, and in need of reparative and conversion therapy". He's not the only one to make that leap:

All of this, from the new @APA guidelines, is of course ideological codswallop. Pure grievance studies pseudoscience. It would be hilarious if they weren't serious about it.

But the last sentence is particularly disturbing. It's the progressive equivalent of conversion therapy. pic.twitter.com/PvLnpv26NU

— Yeyo (@RealYeyoZa) January 13, 2019

It would be nice if we didn't have this institutionalized misandry. We'll be fighting it a good long while, it appears.