I’m going to come back to other matters in Inquiry’s post but for the moment I just need to address one part, the part all the way at the bottom, because it’s probably more important than the other stuff in that what I’m pretty tired of is people trying to obscure that men are a problem.
I’m pretty tired of hearing/reading that only males are capable of toxicity and/or fragility. Males have hardly cornered the self-ishness market, and it seems more than a little sexist to keep insisting they have.
Literally no one talking seriously about toxic masculinity argues that only males are capable of toxicity or fragility, and pretty much the only reason anyone ever floats this strawman (does straw float when wet?) is to deflect and misdirect our attention.
Just as there’s no such thing as “reverse racism”, even though this or that individual person of color might be prejudiced against white people, because “racism” is endemic and systemic in both the political and social arenas, so too is “toxic masculinity” engrained and enmeshed into our society overall. The broken ways in which men are taught to view both themselves and the world around them is stunted and dangerous, and regularly explodes into the private and public lives of, well, everyone you know.
Even if there also are problems with the ways in which our society views women or teaches women to be, there’s literally no equivalent “toxic femininity” or whatever else it is Inquiry is trying to invoke here, and in fact many of the ways in which we break women themselves are due to the broken ways in which men live their lives.