The Strange History of “Toxic” Masculinity
How a self-help concept dreamed up by New Age therapists and poets turned into a caricature—and sparked a right-wing backlash.
By Daniel Penny
For almost a decade, we’ve been living under a cloud of toxic masculinity. It’s a term that seems to be everywhere, used to describe everything from Ken’s subplot in Barbie to the motives of mass shooters. Certainly, the presidency of Donald Trump has made toxic masculinity an easy catchphrase for op-ed writers and undergraduate essayists, but the term was coined long before Trump–not in the classroom of a women’s studies professor or via Twitter hashtag, but over 40 years ago—by the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement.
Largely forgotten today, the Mythopoets were a hugely influential hippie-adjacent collection of male therapists, activists, writers, and healers led by the poet Robert Bly. From Bly’s books and retreats, ideas about tapping into our primal “Wild Man,” discovering “a male mode of feeling,” and especially reckoning with “toxic” masculinity became part of the American vernacular. But from these New Age–y beginnings, the phrase has taken a long and twisted journey. Contested by conservatives and mocked by trolls, toxic masculinity is now at the center of our culture war. Is it a relic from the Age of Aquarius or a bit of academic jargon? An insult? Or just another signifier floating in the stew of the internet?
Inner Wild Man
What we think of as modern masculinity is a fairly recent invention. Historians argue that traits like physical and emotional toughness and rugged individualism only came into focus in the late 19th century. From Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders and writing addresses to the Boy Scouts about the value of “the strenuous life,” to experts urging parents to toughen up their sissy sons with hard mattresses, Americans love to worry about their manhood. Since the closing of the frontier, public concern about the state of American masculinity has been a constant feature of American life, though it usually errs on the side of arguing men are not being toxic enough.
By the 1980s, American men were (once again) feeling confused about their masculinity. Our military had been humiliated in Vietnam, feminism was bringing women into the workplace and challenging traditional gender roles, and manufacturing jobs were moving overseas. According to Bly, the solution for male malaise lay in the mythic past and getting in touch with one’s inner “Wild Man.” This became the central metaphor of Bly’s 1990 bestseller Iron John: A Book About Men, which argues that the stresses of 9-to-5 jobs and demands of domestic life require men to suppress their inner Wild Man. Either they succeed in caging him and become emasculated “soft males,” or the Wild Man escapes in fits of rage and violence—what the Mythopoets called toxic masculinity.
The actual words appeared in print for the first time in 1990, in an article by Daniel Gross in The New Republic. It’s a skeptical overview of the burgeoning men’s movements of the time, with sketches of bitter fathers in custody battles and male feminists whom Gross calls “man-haters trapped in men’s bodies.” Toward the end, Gross features an interview with one of the leading Mythopoets, Shepherd Bliss, who puts forward this first definition of toxic masculinity.
“I use the medical term, because I believe that like every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote,” he told Gross. To Bliss, toxic masculinity was like an illness set against an ideal “healthy” masculinity. Through cobbled-together “indigenous” rituals, primal screaming, and the use of Jungian archetypes, the Mythopoets and their current-day descendents believe masculinity can be returned to its ancient roots with its unnatural toxicity purged.
From the Mythopoets, toxic masculinity was picked up by sociologists, psychologists, economists, and policy makers. In the mid-1990s, amid the neoliberal gutting of the welfare state, absent fathers became the scapegoat for rising poverty and crime. In his influential 1993 book Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity, psychologist Frank Pittman linked—without much empirical evidence—violence with so-called father hunger.
“All over society, as family life crumbles and fathers desert their sons, the violence rate soars,” he wrote. For Pittman, this absence of the father forces young men to look to their immature peers or the heroes in action movies for masculine role models. “Without a ‘father in residence’ we may go through life striving toward an ideal exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity.”
As the middle-class bonfires of the Mythopoetic movement started to sputter, toxic masculinity shifted from being a term associated with self-help to a label applied to boys and men on the periphery of society. Men in prison, military vets, and working-class men out of a job all became targets for this epithet. In her research, Dr. Carol Harrington, a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, argues that US policymakers embraced the idea that fixing the American family required making poor and Black men into better fathers (and more productive workers) by forcing those who owed child support to get jobs and take relationship skills classes. In the words of the director of one of these programs, called “Thriving Families,” heterosexual marriage would have “a civilizing influence on men.” Failure to comply was blamed on toxic masculinity.
In many cases, the alternative to job programs and relationship classes was prison, where researchers found an even deeper well of toxicity. In a 2005 article called “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prisons,” psychiatrist Dr. Terry Kupers put forward a definition of toxic masculinity based on his experiences treating inmates in California’s prisons. “[It’s] a concentrated expression of a form of masculinity in the outside world,” he told me by Zoom, arguing that the violence and sexual abuse he was seeing in prisons was not separate from the rest of society but instead its logical conclusion. With that premise in mind, he defined toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Though Kupers has evolved in his thinking since then, it was this 2005 definition based on fixed traits that became widely cited, spreading from academia into the feminist blogosphere and beyond.
In the years that followed, toxic masculinity entered popular discourse alongside a renewed interest in feminism. By 2014, Taylor Swift had branded herself a feminist, headlines were declaring that “Feminism Reclaimed Pop,” and Beyoncé was sampling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk and performing at the VMAs with the word FEMINIST in neon lights behind her. We’d had our first Black president, and soon—some hoped—we’d have our first female president in Hillary Clinton.
When Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, liberal commentators were apoplectic. Blue-collar white men without college degrees had overwhelmingly voted for a billionaire who had been caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault—then dismissed it as mere “locker room talk.” One of the most handy explanations for voting against their own economic interests was toxic masculinity. And soon, Trump was joined by a wave of men whose sexual crimes were revealed by #MeToo: Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and many others.
“Toxic masculinity used to be about men being self-reflective and trying to change,” Harrington told me via Zoom. “Whereas in the Trump era, in particular, I think it becomes this term of abuse for these powerful men who we somehow can't get away from.”
Within a year of #MeToo, even major medical groups like the American Psychological Association and consumer brands such as Gillette were embracing the concept of toxic masculinity. In the case of the APA, this meant updating its 2018 handbook on male patients to reflect the growing consensus that men suffer from “masculine gender-role strain” caused by “a disproportionate emphasis on personal achievement and control” and “restrictive emotionality.” A few months later, Gillette dedicated an entire campaign to the fallout of #MeToo. Turning the familiar tag “The best a man can get” into “The Best Men Can Be,” the ad was an elaborate, earnest manifesto that linked shaving with an opposition to sexism and bullying, and to setting positive examples for young boys.
By the time the APA and Gillette were hopping aboard the toxic masculinity train, a conservative backlash was already growing. For every New York Times article headlined “How an Aversion to Masks Stems from Toxic Masculinity,” there was a retort from Fox News, like “'Toxic masculinity' and heroism spring from same aggressive impulses.”
The crux of the conservative takedown is that toxic masculinity is a meaningless term thrown around by rabid feminists that impugns the honor of good guys. In an article for National Review called “The ‘Toxic Masculinity’ Smear,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wrote that it is “wrong to lump all men together, of course” because it is “male soldiers attempting to liberate women from the depravity of ISIS terrorists.” We need good men to defend society from the bad men. But if the left succeeds in “feminizing boys,” Shapiro asks, who will be “the defenders of their families?”
This second point gets at the existential reaction some guys have when they hear the phrase “toxic masculinity.” It’s an intentional misreading of the term, which never claims that all masculinities, or all men, are toxic. But this error in reasoning resonates with many guys, and has been gleefully manipulated to fuel antifeminist and reactionary politics by the loose network of men’s rights and lifestyle figures who make up what’s often called the “manosphere” (think Andrew Tate, the Liver King, and Joe Rogan). In an interview, conservative author and wacky uncle of the Right Jordan Peterson riffs on the inner pain of the young men who come to his talks, lamenting that “all they've heard their whole goddamn life is that there's something toxic and oppressive about our patriarchal society.” This endless blame is untenable for Peterson, who argues that it ultimately leads boys to psychic castration or death. “What the hell are they supposed to derive from that?”
For conservatives, the concept of toxic masculinity knocks down the virtues and ways of life they hold dear: strength, honor, duty, and bravery. Though, of course, these virtues are not the exclusive domain of men. But in the absence of these traditional manly virtues, Shapiro, Peterson, and their many followers are incapable of imagining other kinds of masculine ideals, so they cling even harder to the old ones. This looking backward to how men used to be is practically a national pastime; it’s not just MAGA Republicans who fondly remember the good old days. “I miss a dominant masculinity,” the once-liberal comedian Jerry Seinfeld confessed on a recent appearance on “heterodox thinker” Bari Weiss’s podcast. “I get the toxic thing…. But still, I like a real man.”
Today, toxic masculinity seems to be more an object of mockery than a lens of feminist critique or a tool of Mythopoetic self-reflection. On TikTok, the top videos for toxic masculinity are clips of men denying the term exists or claiming feminists don’t really know what it means. The rhetorical zip of the term has been watered down by the deluge of other toxic fill-in-the-blank phrases: toxic femininity, toxic positivity, toxic bosses, toxic relationships. If everything is toxic, what are we even talking about when we use that word, other than something we don’t like?
Like “woke,” “critical race theory,” or “politically correct” before it, the phrase is susceptible to willful misinterpretation and easily becomes a bogeyman. Yet, we still live in a world where the underlying facts about men and masculinity remain alarming. Compared with women, young men are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness and social disconnection, dropping out of school and the job market, and dying from preventable diseases, drug addiction and overdoses, and suicide. The violence men commit—against intimate partners, children, strangers, and themselves—is undeniable.
For some critics, the concept of toxic masculinity flattens the many layers of a complex social identity, including race, sexuality, class, and age. For this reason, some academics have come to prefer “hegemonic masculinity” or “machismo” or good old-fashioned “patriarchy.”
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And yet, according to social workers and educators on the ground, the divisiveness of toxic masculinity as a phrase can be an asset. “In my experience teaching violence prevention programs over the past decade, the tensions arising from the term’s popularity and infamy are an opportunity,” says Dr. Will McInerney, a researcher at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics. McInerney believes that when handled the right way, the reaction the term provokes can lead to engagement. “It’s an entry-point for men to think more critically about masculinity, the harms associated with some versions of it, and the possibilities of more equitable, less violent alternatives.”
Many people may be hoping the idea of toxic masculinity will just go away once its biggest avatar, former president Trump, shuffles off the stage of public life. But when Trump announced JD Vance as his pick for vice president, he made sure that this culture war wouldn't flame out anytime soon. Vance is 39, about as old as the term “toxic masculinity” itself, and his views are perhaps even more toxic than Trump’s. He has referred to Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats as “childless cat ladies” with no stake in the future of America, argued that women should stay with domestic abusers for the sake of their kids, and said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”—without exception for even rape or incest. Vance’s selection as Trump’s heir apparent is a reminder that the elderly former president is not the only standard-bearer of toxic masculinity in American politics, and that when he’s gone, others will eagerly replace him.
Ultimately, toxic masculinity is a metaphor, not a scientific theory. It encapsulates the idea that there is something poisonous about the way so many men conduct their lives, illustrating the personal and collective toll required to maintain rigid ideas of manliness. It undermines the myth that each man is an island, linking the inner lives of men with the broader social consequences of their behaviors. Most significantly, those aggressive, domineering alpha males we associate with toxic masculinity are still at the center of public life. And as long as they remain there, toxic masculinity will stand at the center of American culture.
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