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‘Toxic masculinity’: what does it mean, where did it come from – and is the term useful or harmful?

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It’s hard to avoid encountering the term “toxic masculinity” these days.

It has been linked to Australian soldiers’ war crimes in Afghanistan, the Morrison government’s low credibility with women in the lead-up to this year’s election – and further afield, the rise of Donald Trump and the Capitol riots .

It is regularly applied to pop-culture characters as diverse as the hypersensitive dinosaur nerd Ross Gellar from Friends, the alcoholic adulterer Don Draper in Mad Men, and the violent, repressed Nate in Euphoria , who regularly tells his girlfriend, “If anyone ever tried to hurt you, I’d kill them.”

The term “ toxic masculinity ” was obscure in the 1990s and early 2000s. But since around 2015, it has become pervasive in discussions of men and gender.

So what does it mean?

“Masculinity” refers to the roles, behaviours and attributes seen as appropriate for boys and men in a given society. In short, masculinity refers to society’s expectations of males.

In many societies, boys and men are expected to be strong, active, aggressive, tough, daring, heterosexual, emotionally inexpressive and dominant. This is enforced by socialisation, media, peers, and a host of other influences. And it plays out in the behaviour of many boys and men .

Read more: Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about it

The term “toxic masculinity” points to a particular version of masculinity that is unhealthy for the men and boys who conform to it, and harmful for those around them.

The phrase emphasises the worst aspects of stereotypically masculine attributes. Toxic masculinity is represented by qualities such as violence, dominance, emotional illiteracy, sexual entitlement, and hostility to femininity.

This version of masculinity is seen as “toxic” for two reasons.

First, it is bad for women. It shapes sexist and patriarchal behaviours, including abusive or violent treatment of women. Toxic masculinity thus contributes to gender inequalities that disadvantage women and privilege men.

Second, toxic masculinity is bad for men and boys themselves. Narrow stereotypical norms constrain men’s physical and emotional health and their relations with women, other men, and children.

Read more: Sherlock Holmes and the case of toxic masculinity: what is behind the detective's appeal?

Origins of the term

The term first emerged within the mythopoetic (New Age) men’s movement of the 1980s.

The movement focused on men’s healing, using male-only workshops, wilderness retreats and rites of passage to rescue what it saw as essentially masculine qualities and archetypes (the king, the warrior, the wildman, and so on) from what it dubbed “toxic” masculinity.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the term spread to other self-help circles and into academic work (for example, on men’s mental health ). Some US conservatives began applying the term to low-income, under-employed, marginalised men, prescribing solutions like restoring male-dominated families and family values.

“Toxic masculinity” was virtually non-existent in academic writing – including feminist scholarship – up until 2015 or so, other than in a handful of texts on men’s health and wellbeing.

But as it spread in popular culture, feminist scholars and commentators adopted the term, typically as a shorthand for misogynist talk and actions. Though the term is now associated with a feminist critique of the sexist norms of manhood, that’s not where it started.

It is virtually absent from the scholarship on men and masculinities that developed rapidly from the mid-1970s, though its use in that area has increased in the last decade. This scholarship has, however, long made the claim that culturally influential constructions of manhood exist, and that they are tied to men’s domination of women.

Merits and risks

Understood properly, the term “toxic masculinity” has some merits. It recognises that the problem is a social one, emphasising how boys and men are socialised and how their lives are organised. It steers us away from biologically essentialist or determinist perspectives that suggest the bad behaviour of men is inevitable: “boys will be boys”.

“Toxic masculinity” highlights a specific form of masculinity and a specific set of social expectations that are unhealthy or dangerous. It points (rightly) to the fact that stereotypical masculine norms shape men’s health, as well as their treatment of other people.

The term has helped to popularise feminist critiques of rigid gender norms and inequalities. It is more accessible than scholarly terms (such as hegemonic masculinity ). This has the potential to allow its use in educating boys and men, in similar ways to the concept of the “ Man Box ” (a term describing a rigid set of compulsory masculine qualities that confine men and boys) and other teaching tools on masculinity .

By emphasising the harm done to both men and women, the term has the potential to prompt less defensiveness among men than more overtly political terms such as “patriarchal” or “sexist” masculinity.

Read more: Perpetrators of family violence sometimes use threats of suicide to control their partner

Toxic risks

“Toxic masculinity” also carries some potential risks. It is too readily misheard as a suggestion that “all men are toxic”. It can make men feel blamed and attacked – the last thing we need if we want to invite men and boys to critically reflect on masculinity and gender. Persuasive public messaging aimed at men may be more effective if it avoids the language of “masculinity” altogether.

Whether it uses the term “toxic masculinity” or not, any criticism of the ugly things some men do, or of dominant norms of manhood, will provoke defensive and hostile reactions among some men. Criticisms of sexism and unequal gender relations often provoke a backlash , in the form of predictable expressions of anti-feminist sentiments.

The term might also draw attention to male disadvantage and neglect male privilege. Dominant gender norms may be “toxic” for men, but they also provide a range of unearned privileges (workplace expectations of leadership, freedom from unpaid care work, prioritising of their sexual needs over women’s) and inform some men’s harmful behaviour towards women .

“Toxic masculinity” can be used in generalising and simplistic ways. Decades of scholarship have established that constructions of masculinity are diverse, intersecting with other forms of social difference.

The term may cement the assumption that the only way to involve men in progress towards gender equality is by fostering a “ healthy ” or “ positive ” masculinity. Yes, we need to redefine norms of manhood . But we also need to encourage men to invest less in gendered identities and boundaries, stop policing manhood , and embrace ethical identities less defined by gender.

Whatever language we use, we need ways to name the influential social norms associated with manhood, critique the harmful attitudes and behaviours some men adopt, and foster healthier lives for men and boys.

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How Toxic Is Masculinity?

By Zoë Heller

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “ The End of Men ,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.

The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Cheerful slogans about the femaleness of the future have receded; the word “patriarchy,” formerly the preserve of women’s-studies professors, has entered the common culture. Last year, in an article about women’s exodus from their jobs during the pandemic, Rosin recanted her previous thesis and apologized for its “tragic naïveté.” “It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning,” she wrote. “American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.”

Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course. (Tucker Carlson appropriated the title of Rosin’s book for a documentary, advertised this past spring, about plummeting sperm counts.) But feminist patience for “twilight of the penis” stories has run out. “All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of patriarchy,” Pauline Harmange wrote in her 2020 screed, “I Hate Men.” More recently, the British journalist Laurie Penny, in her “ Sexual Revolution ” (Bloomsbury), notes the systemic underpinnings of such snivels: “The assumption that oozes from every open pore of straight patriarchal culture is that women are expected to tolerate pain, fear and frustration—but male pain, by contrast, is intolerable.” Penny is careful to distinguish hatred of masculinity from hatred of men, but she nonetheless defines the fundamental political struggle of our time as a contest between feminism and white heterosexual male supremacy. In “ Daddy Issues ” (Verso), Katherine Angel calls for #MeToo-era feminists to turn their attention to long-overlooked paternal delinquencies. If the patriarchy is to be defeated, she argues, women’s reluctance to criticize their male parents must be interrogated and overcome. Even the “modern, civilized father” must be “kept on the hook,” she recommends, and daughters must reckon with their “desire for retribution, revenge and punishment.”

The combative tone taken by these writers is hardly a surprise. One might argue that a movement currently scrambling to defend some vestige of women’s reproductive rights can be forgiven for not being especially solicitous of men’s sperm counts. One might argue that it isn’t feminism’s job to worry about how men are doing—any more than it’s the job of hens to fret about the condition of foxes. But two recent books claim otherwise. “ A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice ” (Allen Lane), by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and “ What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents ” (Allen Lane), by Nina Power, a British columnist with a background in philosophy, both contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism. Although their diagnoses of the problem are almost diametrically opposed, both authors make the case for a more generous and humane feminist discourse, capable of recognizing the suffering of men as well as of women. Hens, they acknowledge, have legitimate cause for resentment, but foxes have feelings, too.

Jablonka’s dense, copiously researched book, which became a surprise best-seller in France when it was published there, in 2019, takes an ambitious, key-to-all-mythologies approach to its subject. Jablonka, who is a professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, begins in the Upper Paleolithic, examining its mysterious, corpulent “Venus” figurines, and moves suavely across the millennia all the way to the successive waves of modern feminism. He has an eye for striking, often grim, details—under the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a daughter might be killed as punishment for a murder committed by her father—and relishes drawing parallels across eras. From ancient times to the present day, it seems, the central totems of masculinity—weapons, locomotive vehicles, and meat (particularly rare meat)—have remained remarkably consistent. Likewise, from the fall of Rome to the Weimar Republic, men have consistently attributed political disaster and cultural decline to the corrupting influence of feminine values.

Jablonka’s thesis about how patriarchy arose is a fairly standard one. Paleolithic societies already had a sexual division of labor—Spanish cave paintings from as early as 10,000 B.C. show male archers hunting and women gathering honey—but it was relatively benign. In the Neolithic era, with the advent of agriculture and the move away from nomadic existence, birth rates increased and women became confined to the domestic sphere, while men started to own land. From then on, each new development, be it metal weapons, the rise of the state, or even the birth of writing, further entrenched the power of men and the subjugation of women.

Until now, that is. “Patriarchy has declined,” according to Jablonka, but men remain caught in “pathologies of the masculine,” trying to live up to a symbolic role that doesn’t reflect their reduced dominance. The result is an “almost tragic” level of alienation, he writes, and feminists, instead of mocking or dismissing male anguish—thereby leaving men vulnerable to the revanchist fantasies of Tucker Carlson and his ilk—should recognize this moment as a crucial recruitment opportunity. Now is the time to convince men that their “obligatory model of virility” has immiserated them far more than it has empowered them. “The masculinity of domination pays, but it comes at a high cost: an insecure ego, puerile vanity, disinterest in reading and the life of the mind, atrophied inner life, the narrowing of social opportunities . . . and to top it all, a diminished life expectancy.”

Feminism has been slow to empathize and collaborate with men, Jablonka claims, because too many in the movement remain wedded to a “Manichean world view” of male oppressors and female victims. Some feminists are unreconstructed leftist types, who reject any evidence of women’s progress as “mystification designed to hide the persistence of male domination.” Others are duped by a “pro-women romanticism” into believing that women are innately nicer and more progressive than men. Jablonka rejects this sort of essentialist thinking, which he says provides a spurious biological rationale for traditional gender roles. If women are naturally kinder and more nurturing than men, and if men are “intrinsically imbued with a culture of rape,” why bother trying to change the status quo? Testosterone and other androgens may “have something to do with” a male propensity for aggression, he concedes, but “human beings are hostage neither to their biology nor their gender.” Men’s history of brutish behavior is the product of patriarchal culture, and only by insisting on “the fundamental identity” between men and women can feminism realize its proper aim—a “redistribution of gender,” in which “new masculinities” abound and the selection of any given way of being a man becomes “a lifestyle choice.”

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To claim that masculinity is a patriarchal “construct,” however, is not so much an explanation as the postponement of an explanation. Who or what created the patriarchy? Evolutionary biologists maintain that our earliest male ancestors had an evolutionary incentive to maximize the spread of their genes by violently competing for, and monopolizing access to, women. Jablonka is eager to avoid such biological imperatives, but in doing so he reaches for a kind of just-so story that renders much of the history he has laid out beside the point. Patriarchy, he speculates, was motivated by simple resentment of women’s wombs. “Deprived of the power that women have, men reserved all the others for themselves,” he writes. “This was the revenge of the males: their biological inferiority led to their social hegemony.”

Thus it is that successive patriarchal élites have spent the past several millennia shoring up their illegitimate rule, by defining manliness as a set of superior qualities denied to women. Not that Jablonka thinks there is only one, eternal masculine style; rather, all models of masculinity since antiquity have been mechanisms for asserting and imposing patriarchal power. The extroversion and swagger of the toreador look very different from the gallantry of the Victorian gentleman, which is, in turn, quite distinct from the laconic glamour of the cowboy, but they are all equally culpable expressions of the masculine-superiority complex.

Jablonka’s desire to trace all the world’s hierarchies, injustices, and conflicts back to one prehistoric fit of reproductive jealousy leads to a good deal of muddle as things proceed. One of his more bizarre—and ahistorical—claims is that the masculine hegemony has deemed four masculine types inferior: “the Jew,” “the loser,” “the Black,” and “the homosexual.” It is, of course, impossible to explain the historical oppression of poor people, Black people, gays, and Jews entirely in terms of gender politics, and, in trying to do so, Jablonka has to make any number of ludicrous assertions, including that white men enslaved Black men in part because they considered them “feminine” and “non-virile.” The book’s cocky bid for comprehensiveness proves to be its undoing.

In keeping with his anti-essentialist view of the sexes, Jablonka maintains that women are, deep down, no less capable of greed and racism and warlike behavior than men, but this view is somewhat at odds with his central contention—that a world without patriarchal masculinity would be an infinitely more just and peaceable place. In an apparent attempt to square this contradiction, he expresses the vague hope that powerful women of the future will avoid some of the worst practices of powerful men of the past, and that gender justice might be “translated into the principle of an equality of positions, reducing inequalities between the various socio-economic statuses.”

According to Nina Power’s “What Do Men Want?,” such inattention to questions of class inequality is a typical weakness of modern gender politics. Her short but slightly meandering work of cultural criticism takes aim at several strands of contemporary feminist doctrine and lays out, with varying degrees of coherence, how she thinks a “graceful playfulness” between men and women might be restored. Power finds terms like “the patriarchy” and “male privilege” nebulous, and believes they obscure more than they reveal when applied to poor and working-class men. Liberal feminism, she argues, has proved all too compatible with the interests of corporate capitalism, precisely because it is more interested in how people “identify” than in who owns the means of production.

Power’s main interest, however, is not in persuading feminism to be more intersectional in its critique of men. “I increasingly think that we need to think less in terms of structures,” she writes, “and much more in terms of mutual respect.” She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference. Where Jablonka wants to help men escape the “obligatory model of virility” that has given them a bad name, Power asks us to consider what might be worth retaining from that model. In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars. (Even in Jablonka’s gender-fluid future, he acknowledges, men will do the heavy, dirty, “thankless” work. To insist on a literal-minded gender parity would be “absurd,” he says.) If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”

Power’s book, being of the “pendulum’s swung too far” variety, is rather too quick to declare all the meaningful equalities already won, all the necessary reforms of male manners accomplished. “Male behavior has shifted radically,” she writes. “What man would today flirt with a female co-worker?”—which is the kind of facetious remark that only a person who has mistaken her bien-pensant bubble for the world could make. Nevertheless, the “graceful playfulness” that she hopes can be preserved between the sexes, and even some of the more benign aspects of old-school masculinity, are probably more widely shared than is generally acknowledged. Jablonka argues rather unconvincingly that women read romantic fiction because it sweetens the pill of their subordination and helps them accept the “inevitability of masculine power.” But romantic fiction isn’t produced by the Commission for the Continuation of the Patriarchy. It sells because it speaks to a persistent female attraction to the benignly dominant male. Whether that attraction has its roots in nature or in culture, one has only to read Joan Didion describing her girlhood dreams of John Wayne, or listen to Amy Winehouse singing “You should be stronger than me,” or overhear contemporary teens mocking “soft bois” on social media to know that it is there.

Some years ago, the conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, in his book “Manliness,” defined protection as a defining task of masculinity. “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him,” he wrote. For Jablonka, such a role is inextricable from patriarchy: “Polite gestures of protection partake of a benevolent sexism that complements hostile sexism.” Power suggests that the charming, sexy aspects of masculinity—violent, sure, but still “compatible with the flourishing of others”—can be brought out only as needed, allowing men and women to live on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time. Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?” ♦

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Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence pp 1–10 Cite as

Toxic Masculinity

• Gill Harrop 2  
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• First Online: 27 October 2023

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Aggressive masculinity ; Chauvinism ; Laddishness ; Machismo ; Machoness ; Manliness

Attitudes and behaviors associated with maleness and masculinity, which have a negative impact on men, and place cultural pressure on them to behave in a certain way.

Cultural and behavioral norms set clear expectations for how men and women should behave (Morin, 2020 ). The expectations related to masculinity and “manliness” are often characterized by strength, domination, and aggression. In addition, there is an expectation that men should be seen as tough, and actively avoid showing any emotion. As a result, men can feel under extreme pressure to behave in this way in order to be seen as a “real man,” resulting in behaviors which can be harmful to both individual men and society as a whole. This extreme pressure to act in a “masculine” way is termed toxic masculinity. Kupers ( 2005 , p. 71) described toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially regressive (masculine) traits that...

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Harrop, G. (2023). Toxic Masculinity. In: Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85493-5_1653-1

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What We Mean When We Say, “Toxic Masculinity”

“Toxic masculinity” is tricky. It’s a phrase that—misunderstood—can seem wildly insulting, even bigoted. Recently, after tweeting about toxic masculinity and its relationship to violence, I ended up the topic of discussion on a major nightly news show and the recipient of the online harassment that regularly follows such discussions these days. Because the term requires careful contextualization and provokes such strong reactions, our impulse may be to avoid discussing it with our classes. As educators, however, it is our responsibility not to hide from difficult topics or concepts, but to clarify them. 

This article is the first in a three-part series on toxic masculinity. Find parts two and three here:

• Part Two | Say No to “Boys Will Be Boys”
• Part Three | Toxic Masculinity Is Bad For Everyone: Why Teachers Must Disrupt Gender Norms Every Day

Before we can engage students in conversations about “masculinity” or “femininity,” toxic or otherwise, we should begin with a few key ideas about gender. Researchers have shown that there is very little difference between the brains of men and women. While gender identity is a deeply held feeling of being male, female or another gender, people of different genders often act differently, not because of biological characteristics  but because of rigid societal norms created around femininity and masculinity. Laying this groundwork requires effort, but in an age when breaking news alerts make us want to look away from our phones, the term “toxic masculinity” provides a useful tool for engaging with students, families and anyone else trying to make sense of the onslaught of news. 

The phrase is derived from studies that focus on violent behavior perpetrated by men, and—this is key—is designed to describe not masculinity itself , but a form of gendered behavior that results when expectations of “what it means to be a man” go wrong. The Good Men Project defines it this way:

Toxic masculinity is a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly “feminine” traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as “man” can be taken away.

Discussing toxic masculinity is not saying men are bad or evil, and the term is NOT an assertion that men are naturally violent. In fact, this conversation was started by men. ( Jackson Katz’s TED Talk on the subject is a useful starting point.) It was also inspired by a feminist movement that had done much to unpack what might be called “toxic femininity” (think eating disorders that seek to control one’s eating and environment). After the good work feminism did to try to find better ways to teach girls about their options, men began to take notice and apply those same gender-construct theories to their own experience. 

I find myself talking more about this dangerous brand of masculinity now because I see all the hand-wringing done in the media and in classrooms after each mass shooting or killing. I saw it happening during the month of October 2017, which was bookended by the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the terror attack in New York . And on November 5, a shooter walked into a church in Texas and massacred people worshipping there . We talked and talked. 

I hear participants on one side of the debate talk about mental illness while the other side talks about gun control. In addition to conversations about mental illness and gun control, though, we need to consider a third angle regarding the mass killings of the past month: Is there a gendered component that we should be talking about? Why it is most often men perpetrating these acts of violence? 

After decades of study, I deeply believe that men are not naturally violent. But in a culture that equates masculinity with physical power, some men and boys will invariably feel like they are failing at “being a man.” For these particular men and boys, toxic masculinity has created a vacuum in their lives that can be filled through violence: through the abuse of women and of children in their care, through affiliation with the so-called “ alt-right ” or ISIS, through gun violence or any other promise of restored agency that those parties wrongly equate with manhood. 

The stakes of this conversation couldn’t be higher. When we talk about toxic masculinity, we do so not to insult or to injure. If we can talk with students as they are forming their ideas about gender, we can perhaps spare them from thinking that there is only one way to be a man—or any other gendered identity, for that matter—and give them the space to express their gender in ways that feel authentic and safe for themselves. When we talk about toxic masculinity, we are doing so out of love for the boys and men in all of our lives. 

Clemens is the associate professor of non-Western literatures and director of Women's and Gender Studies at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.

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Is it actually helpful to talk about toxic masculinity, research suggests that men are changing their behavior in positive ways, including around emotions..

There seem to be as many interpretations of what “ toxic masculinity ” means as there are uses of the term.

Some believe it’s a way to criticize what they see as specific negative behavior and attitudes often associated with men. Others, such as broadcaster Piers Morgan, claim that media interest in toxic masculinity is part of a “ woke culture ” that aims to emasculate men. Others believe toxic masculinity is a fundamental part of manhood .

My research into working-class young men in south Wales shows how masculinity is changing. Some men remain hostile to the notion of toxic masculinity and see the term as a vehicle for shaming men. And some are caught in a conflict between changing ideas of masculinity and traditional, unhealthy expressions of manhood. This is further complicated by the term itself.

In its simplest sense, toxic masculinity refers to an overemphasis or exaggerated expression of characteristics commonly associated with masculinity. These include traits such as competition, self-reliance, and being stoic, which produce behaviors such as risk taking, fear of showing weakness, and an inability to discuss emotions. These have negative implications for both men and women.

For example, a rejection of weakness and vulnerability may prevent some men from discussing issues such as mental health. Similarly, an inability to express emotion may expose itself through frustration, anger, and acts of physical violence.

But masculine traits such as being stoic can equally be valuable in some circumstances, such as emergencies and making lifesaving decisions. In essence, masculinity is complex and diverse, and can be expressed in multiple ways.

More than one type of masculinity

However, masculinity that involves courage, toughness, and physical strength has historically been held in high regard by society.

Masculinity is socially, historically, culturally, and individually determined, and subject to change. It can be influenced by a person’s status, power, place, social class, and ethnicity. So, a person’s differing circumstances establish or enable different expressions of masculinity.

For example, traditionally high rates of manual employment in heavy industries and family relationships helped establish the gender roles of the male breadwinner and female homemaker. This reinforced masculine traits such as toughness and stoicism in men.

In recent decades, though, the way people in Western countries work has changed a lot. Manual jobs have decreased while service sector work has increased. These alterations have contributed to the increase in the number of women working, and their wages have became an important part of household incomes.

Movements like #MeToo and brands like Gillette and its “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” advert have led to further examination of masculinity. They have challenged negative expressions of masculinity, encouraging men to change their behavior and instead adopt a more positive version of masculinity.

Against this backdrop, we urgently need to reassess what the current research tells us about men and masculinity.

Men are changing

Some studies suggest that men are changing their behavior as society and the economy change. For example, studies of white, middle-class men who attend university have found that they are more likely to express their emotions verbally and physically.

But critics of that idea say that such young men can transgress typical notions of masculinity because of their higher social status.

A new wave of qualitative research has shown that some working-class young men are changing their behavior. They are more open about their emotions, admit to feeling vulnerable, and have more egalitarian views on housework. However, they still sometimes use sexist and homophobic language.

My recent study is part of a growing criticism of how masculinity is defined and talked about. I carried out my research at a youth center and focused on a group of working-class young men aged between 12 and 21. I talked to the young men about their school experiences and work ambitions, and looked at their behavior.

The study was based in the Gwent valleys, a former coal mining community. It is a place known for its traditional ideas of masculinity, such as being strong and tough. But also I found that these young men showed softer sides of masculinity, such as empathy, compassion, and sensitivity.

These changes and softer sides of masculinity coexisted with behaviors often linked with negative expressions of masculinity, such as violence and crime. I describe this as “ amalgamated masculinities .”

My findings strengthen the idea that positive changes in masculinity are happening socially.

Changing the narrative

We must be aware of the harm caused by exaggerated masculine traits, but language like “toxic masculinity” can be unhelpful. We should focus on promoting the benefits of positive expressions of manhood, such as emotional openness and empathy.

We should also do more work to try to understand why positive changes in masculinity are happening. Once we understand this, we can think about how to encourage these positive changes to make them more common in society. This could help to make masculinity better for everyone.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

About the Author

Richard Gater

Richard Gater, Ph.D. , is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data, Cardiff University. His research interests include social class, education, employment, and masculinities.

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What Is Toxic Masculinity?

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

Akeem Marsh, MD, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has dedicated his career to working with medically underserved communities.

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• Glorification of Unhealthy Habits

Mental Health Stigma

Race, ethnicity, and gender, helping behavior.

• The APA's Guidelines

Toxic masculinity refers to the notion that some people’s idea of “manliness” perpetuates domination, homophobia , and aggression. Toxic masculinity involves cultural pressures for men to behave in a certain way. And it’s likely this affects all boys and men in some fashion.

This idea that men need to act tough and avoid showing all emotions can be harmful to their mental health and can have serious consequences for society, which is how it became known as “toxic masculinity.”

Toxic masculinity isn’t just about behaving like a man. Instead, it involves the extreme pressure some men may feel to act in a way that is actually harmful.

There are many definitions of “toxic masculinity” that appear in research as well as pop culture. Some researchers have come to agree that toxic masculinity has three core components:

• Toughness: This is the notion that men should be physically strong, emotionally callous, and behaviorally aggressive.
• Antifeminity: This involves the idea that men should reject anything that is considered to be feminine, such as showing emotion or accepting help.
• Power: This is the assumption that men must work toward obtaining power and status (social and financial) so they can gain the respect of others.

Glorification of Unhealthy Habits 

Toxic masculinity glorifies unhealthy habits. It’s the notion that “self-care is for women” and men should treat their bodies like machines by skimping on sleep, working out even when they’re injured, and pushing themselves to their physical limits. 

In addition to pushing themselves hard physically, toxic masculinity discourages men from seeing doctors. 

A 2011 study found that men who held the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate beliefs about masculinity to get preventative health care. Seeing a physician for an annual physical, for example, runs contrary to some men’s beliefs about toughness.

In addition to avoiding preventative treatment, toxic masculinity also encourages unhealthy behaviors.

A 2007 study found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to engage in risky behaviors, such as heavy drinking , using tobacco, and avoiding vegetables. In addition, they were more likely to view such risky choices as being “normal.”

Toxic masculinity also discourages men from getting mental health treatment. Depression , anxiety, substance use issues, and mental health problems may be viewed as weaknesses.

A 2015 study found that men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity held more of a negative attitude about seeking mental health services compared to those with more flexible gender attitudes.

Toxic masculinity may also stress that it’s inappropriate for men to talk about their feelings. Avoiding conversations about problems or emotions may increase feelings of isolation and loneliness . 

It may also reduce men’s willingness to reach out and get help when they’re experiencing a mental health issue.

A man’s race and ethnicity may play a role in how he views masculinity as well as how others perceive him.                                                

A 2013 study found that among white college students, Asian-American men are viewed as less manly than white or Black American men.

The masculine requirement to remain stoic and be a good provider can lead to “John Henryism” in African-American men. This term is used to describe men who use high effort as a way to cope with problems and they continue to do so in the face of chronic stress and discrimination. A 2016 study linked “John Henryism” to an increased risk of hypertension and depression.

Boys of all races and ethnic backgrounds who don’t act “masculine enough” may be subjected to harassment at school.

The 2015 National School Climate Survey found that 85% of LGBTQ+ students reported being verbally harassed at school over their gender expression or sexual orientation.

Gender non-conforming students reported worse treatment than the kids who conform to traditional gender norms while also identifying as LGBTQ+.

Men who view themselves as more masculine are less likely to engage in what researchers call “helping behavior.” That means they are not likely to intervene when they witness bullying or when they see someone being assaulted.

A 2019 study found that toxic masculinity can prevent men from consoling a victim, calling for help, and standing up to the perpetrator. Men who endorsed the belief that men should be strong and aggressive were more likely to perceive negative social consequences associated with intervening as an active bystander.

In instances of sexual assault, for example, men who identified the most with masculine behaviors were less likely to stop the assault. The study found that men wouldn't intervene in any conflict if they thought their reputation as being traditionally masculine might be compromised.

Toxic Masculinity Examples

Unfortunately, there can be toxic masculinity in relationships, schools, and workplaces. Here are some everyday examples:

• When a boy in school doesn't act in traditionally masculine ways, and he is bullied by the boys in his class for being "too feminine"
• When a boy cries and his father tells him to "toughen up" or that "men don't cry"
• When a man calls women "sluts" or "whores" for having sex outside of monogamous relationships
• When a man tells his partner what they can and cannot wear, and who they are and are not allowed to spend time with
• The violence against trans women that occurs every year by men who are threatened by a perceived violation of gender norms
• When men criticize other men for being attracted to, or in relationships with, trans women
• When a man is afraid to be emotionally vulnerable with his partner for fear of seeming "weak"
• When a man who is struggling with his mental health doesn't want to see a therapist because he should "man up" or "power through it"

The APA's Guidelines

Over the years, the American Psychological Association (APA) began to recognize that societal pressures placed on men can have drastic consequences for individuals as well as society.

Members of the APA created new guidelines for psychological practices that treat boys and men to help address some of the problems associated with toxic masculinity.

Drawing on more than 40 years of research, they suggest that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful. They also report that socializing boys to suppress their emotions creates damage, both inwardly and outwardly.

Researchers found that when they stripped away stereotypes and cultural expectations, there weren’t many differences in the basic behaviors between men and women. Time diary studies (studies that have participants log diary entries of their activities) showed that men enjoy caring for children just as much as women.

Differences in emotional displays between boys and girls are relatively small and not always in a stereotypical fashion. For example, a 2013 study found that adolescent boys actually display fewer externalizing emotions such as anger, than adolescent girls.

The new APA guidelines were created to help psychologists support men in breaking free of masculinity rules that do more harm than good.

A Word From Verywell

If you feel like you’re experiencing the negative effects of toxic masculinity, reach out to someone. A mental health professional can help you recognize how it’s affecting your life and help you break free from the unhealthy patterns that may be keeping you stuck.

The more people learn about toxic masculinity and the more people get help for it, the more likely we are to see changes on a bigger level as society may put less pressure on men to act a certain way.

E.H. Thompson, J.H. Pleck. The structure of male role norms . American Behavioral Scientist. 1986; 29: 531-543. doi.org/ 10.1177/000276486029005003

Springer KW, Mouzon DM. "Macho men" and preventive health care: implications for older men in different social classes . J Health Soc Behav. 2011;52(2):212-227. doi:10.1177/0022146510393972

Mahalik JR, Burns SM, Syzdek M. Masculinity and perceived normative health behaviors as predictors of men's health behaviors . Soc Sci Med. 2007;64(11):2201-2209. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.02.035

Yousaf, O., Popat, A., & Hunter, M. S. An investigation of masculinity attitudes, gender, and attitudes toward psychological help-seeking . Psychology of Men & Masculinity. 2015;16(2), 234–237. doi:10.1037/a0036241

Wong, Y. J., Horn, A. J., Chen, S. Perceived masculinity: The potential influence of race, racial essentialist beliefs, and stereotypes . Psychology of Men & Masculinity . 2013;14(4), 452–464. doi:10.1037/a0030100

Hudson DL, Neighbors HW, Geronimus AT, Jackson JS. Racial Discrimination, John Henryism, and Depression Among African Americans . J Black Psychol. 2016;42(3):221-243. doi:10.1177/0095798414567757

2015 National Climate Survey. GLSEN.  https://www.glsen.org/research/2015-national-school-climate-s

Ingram, K. et al. Longitudinal associations between features of toxic masculinity and bystander willingness to intervene in bullying among middle school boys . Journal of School Psychology. December 2019; 77: 139-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2019.10.007

Thepsourinthone J, Dune T, Liamputtong P, Arora A. The relationship between masculinity and internalized homophobia amongst Australian gay men .  Int J Environ Res Public Health . 2020;17(15):5475. doi:10.3390/ijerph17155475

West K, Borras-Guevara ML. When cisgender, heterosexual men feel attracted to transgender women: Sexuality-norm violations lead to compensatory anti-gay prejudice . Journal of Homosexuality . 2021:1-19. doi:10.1080/00918369.2021.1938467

Sagar-Ouriaghli I, Godfrey E, Bridge L, et al. Improving mental health service utilization among men: A systematic review and synthesis of behavior change techniques within interventions targeting help-seeking .  Am J Mens Health . 2019;13(3):1557988319857009. doi:10.1177/1557988319857009

American Psychological Association.  APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys .

Connelly, R. & Kimmel, J. If you're happy and you know it: How do mothers and fathers in the US really feel about caring for their children? Feminist Economics . 2015; 21:1, 1-34, doi: 10.1080/13545701.2014.970210

Chaplin TM, Aldao A. Gender differences in emotion expression in children: a meta-analytic review . Psychol Bull. 2013;139(4):735-765. doi:10.1037/a0030737

By Amy Morin, LCSW Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

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Article Contents

Part one: from ‘man’ question to toxic ‘masculinity’: a genealogy, part two: ‘toxic’ masculinity as the promise of patriarchy: the edl.

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Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed

This article is part of a special section of the November 2019 issue of International Affairs on ‘“Well, what is the feminist perspective on international affairs?”: theory/practice’, guest-edited by Helen M. Kinsella and Laura J. Shepherd. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500057/1]. Due to ethical considerations, the wider data from which this article is drawn is not publicly available.

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Elizabeth Pearson, Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed, International Affairs , Volume 95, Issue 6, November 2019, Pages 1251–1270, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz177

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It is more than 20 years since Marysia Zalewski and feminist scholars posed ‘the man question’ in International Relations, repositioning the gaze from female subjectivities to a problematization of the subjecthood of man. The field of masculinity studies has developed this initial question to a deep interrogation of the relationship between maleness and violence. Yet public and policy discourse often reduce the complexity of masculinities within extremism to issues of crisis and toxicity. Governments have prioritized the prevention of extremism, particularly violent Islamism, and in so doing have produced as ‘risk’ particular racialized and marginalized men. This article asks, what are the effects of the toxic masculinity discourse in understanding the British radical right? It argues that current understandings of extremism neglect the central aim of Zalewski's ‘man’ question to destabilize the field and deconstruct patriarchy. They instead position Islamophobia—which is institutionalized in state discourse—as the responsibility of particular ‘extreme’ and ‘toxic’ groups. In particular, the article outlines two ways in which ‘toxic masculinity’ is an inadequate concept to describe activism in the anti-Islam(ist) movement the English Defence League (EDL). First, the term ‘toxic masculinity’ occludes the continuities of EDL masculinities with wider patriarchal norms; second, it neglects the role of women as significant actors in the movement. Using an ethnographic and empathetic approach to this case-study, the article explores how Zalewski's theoretical position offers a route to analysis of the ways in which masculinities and patriarchy entwine in producing power and violence; and to a discussion of masculinities that need not equate manhood with threat.

There are a hundred or so men, perhaps a couple of dozen women, and a lot of flags and banners. The marchers are flanked on all sides by more men, high-vis-clad police. Many sit on huge, powerful horses. The animals stomp in frustration, heads straining, breath clouding the air. I step back. The marchers are on the move now and chanting. ‘Muhammad is a paedo, Muhammad is a paedo!’ ‘Allah! Allah! Who the fuck is Allah!’ I catch sight of my respondent, who nods with a slight smile. Is this acknowledgement? Pride, ownership, display? He told me he wouldn't want his kids at an event like this. But he looks as though he is having fun. Afterwards I catch up with the organizer, Ian Crossland, then national spokesman for the English Defence League. You're speaking out against the sexual exploitation of local girls, I say. Protesting grooming gangs. Wouldn't your message be more powerful without the offensive signs, the anti-Muslim rhetoric? The thing is, he says, the lads are angry, their blood is up, and this is how we express ourselves. Field research notes, English Defence League (EDL) demonstration, Telford, 5 November 2016

What expression of masculinity is apparent here? How was I to understand this encounter, one moment in a wider research project to explore the function of gender in the contentious field of UK ‘extremism’? 1 In particular, how could this semi-ethnographic project engage a feminist analysis to understand the EDL, an anti-Islam(ist) movement, composed largely of men, in which an opposition to western feminism is an active driver in participation? Actors involved in protest against Islam and Islamism are increasingly designated in both media discourse and UK government policy as ‘extreme’, which is to say, opposing values of democracy, the rule of law and diversity of faith. 2 The EDL is a largely homosocial movement, 3 and the men involved are also increasingly framed through a prism of ‘toxic masculinity’. This research explores ground firmly within what Zalewski and Stern have termed ‘the gender industry’, in which gender scholars are expected to produce ‘effective knowledge’ to influence policy, in this case, to counter extremism. 4

My work began, therefore, with Zalewski, and her ‘“man” question’. It is the question Zalewski first posed some 20 years ago as an invitation to ‘question the unquestionable’ and ‘problematize the subjecthood of man’. 5 Following feminist scholarship, this constituted an attempt to reposition the focus of study from female subjectivities, with the aim of raising the prominence of gender in International Relations (IR). 6 It was about understanding not ‘women’, but power relations. This article considers the lessons Zalewski's question offers for understanding contemporary extremism—in particular, gender in the radical right. It charts, however, not what Zalewski imagined, an interrogation of masculinities, a making visible of gender in all its manifestations, but what she predicted: the reinstitution of existing masculinisms and the essentialization of masculinity in sex. 7

Through exploration of the function of gender in the EDL, this article argues that current understandings of extremism demonstrate a neglect of Zalewski's ‘man’ question in favour of questions of particular ‘masculinities’, toxic or crisis. Simplistic accounts of masculinities increasingly ‘fill the gaps’ in both understandings of extreme groups and policy to counter them (‘countering violent extremism’ or CVE). This article proceeds in two parts. First, it suggests the promise of Zalewski's approach as a disruption of the essentialisms of ‘toxic masculinity’, outlining the genealogy of the term and briefly discussing its homogenizing effects in countering extremism. Second, through analysis of ‘close-up’ research with EDL activists, I explore two possible ways to enact instead the promise of the man question: one is to disrupt the idea of ‘toxicity’ as distinct from patriarchy, and recognize EDL masculinities as belonging to a repertoire of wider social norms; another is to disrupt the necessary link between men's bodies and masculinities. This piece reflects on Zalewski's relevance to the field of masculinities and the possibilities for deconstructing extremism, in order to emphasize her prescience. In each problematic encounter with gender and its effects in this field, Zalewski has thought there before.

Extremism is a sensitive issue, and I am aware of the risk of reproducing unpalatable and racist discourses, even as I seek to problematize them. Parpart and Zalewski note of their feminist interrogation of masculinity that ‘interrupting this stability while at the same time invoking its terms … is … tricky’. 8 I make no claims to have succeeded in this aim in my discussion of the radical right. In particular, I use the term ‘extremism’, yet criticize its application to specific groups. I also include transcript material representative of the politics of the movement researched, and therefore likely offensive to many. These transcripts represent views which homogenize Islam and Muslims, and fail to recognize the diversity of Muslim experiences. I include this difficult ethnographic material for two reasons. First, researchers of the far and radical right, including Blee and Pilkington, emphasize the need for ‘close-up’ research with these often ‘distasteful’, ‘repugnant’ or ‘dangerous’ groups. 9 This is particularly important, given that much work distances itself from the people involved, either through the adoption of pathologizing theoretical frameworks or through the use of online material, such as posts on social media. 10 Indeed, the actions of the EDL are frequently collapsed into single explanatory factors, racism or toxicity. Instead I adopted an empathetic approach as part of an ethnographic methodology, which asserts the necessity of recognizing the legitimacy of the participant viewpoint, even where the view itself crosses the cordon sanitaire of acceptability.

Second, it is important that ethnographic research is evidenced through the inclusion of authentic voices from these mainly white working-class research participants. This inclusion is not gratuitous. The broader demographic of working-class British voices, whether they are white or people from ethnic minority groups, 11 is infrequently represented in academic literature, and often misrepresented in the mainstream. 12 In the contemporary UK context, both Bailey and Pilkington emphasize the need to avoid a normative approach which either homogenizes or condemns the experiences of those who hold ‘radical’ political positions. 13 Views of those in ‘extreme’ but ‘marginalized’ groups (some might argue, self-marginalized) are frequently judged against a white middle-class liberalism and regarded as exceptional, rather than as a manifestation of wider social discourse. Too often they are analysed only in order to be condemned—indeed, not to condemn can risk academic censure. 14 I do not share the views of interviewees whose words I reproduce here. They all knew this. But I did listen, and this piece is about them. There are many victims of their views. Documentation of the impacts of EDL racism is vitally important. 15 This piece, however, is focused on EDL activists, following the methods of other authors investigating the far and radical right, 16 and indeed moving away from the criminological norm of attempting to understand racial or religious hate crime through a ‘victimological perspective’, rather than engaging with the processes through which hate or racism is engendered. 17

My own position clearly features in this reflexive research, although there is not the space here for a comprehensive account. The fact that I am a white middle-class woman academic who used to work for the BBC and who, for instance, voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, was a source first of suspicion, mistrust or abuse, and then—for those who engaged—of light-hearted mockery. I challenged participants on their views and they challenged me on mine. Following Nayak, 18 I aimed to go beyond the ‘tropes of masculinity’ associated with these working-class actors. So, as Zalewski entreats us to question the unquestionable, 19 here I seek to confront the unconfrontable. I do so for two reasons: in order to further existing knowledge at a time of social precariousness, and to ask, using Zalewski's man question as a guide: what work does gender do in structuring anti-Islam(ist) masculinities?

It is more than 20 years since Zalewski and feminist scholars posed the ‘man question’ in IR, repositioning the attention from female subjectivities to the problematization of men. At the centre of this question was the rendering of women's visibility within politics and IR. The ‘woman’ question had not succeeded in moving women from the margins of IR. Now, it was hoped, ‘another approach’ would produce a different result. This was not about relegating feminism or women within gendered methodologies; the man question was squarely targeted at destabilizing IR as a masculinist field, asserting the significance of gendered relations, of gender as power. The question drew attention to patriarchy and to gendered practices; it emphasized structural inequalities, but also women's subjectivities. In essence, it considered questions of agency and identity as enmeshed in those of structure, and it constituted a means of challenging the inertia of a field which had failed to see women adequately or engage with the question of gender as a core endeavour. 20

The prescience of Zalewski's man question and the reframing of the gender perspective that it embodied soon became apparent. In 2001, the events of 9/11 catalysed what some insisted was a ‘new age’ of global terrorism. 21 Ten years after first asking the question, Parpart and Zalewski therefore re-posed the man question as imperative to understanding the increased ‘virility’ of the post-9/11 age. Its relevance was greater than ever. Masculinities—and, in particular, masculinisms—still structured IR. 22 For Eisenstein, 9/11 and the US response in the ‘war on terror’ were evidence of a ‘manly moment’. 23 The United States had mobilized gendered and racialized narratives instrumentalizing women's rights to justify military action in Afghanistan. 24 The evident effects of 9/11 in the international system meant that other national counterterrorism responses across the globe replicated these gendered logics. 25 In the UK, a state counter-extremism programme called the ‘Prevent’ strategy was launched in 2006–2007 to counter (Islamist) radicalization. This reproduced assertions familiar from the ‘war on terror’ of Muslim men as a suspect and risky community. 26 Brown notes that Prevent's maternalist engagement of Muslim women as mothers complemented the transactional paternalism of state projects aimed at protecting society from Muslim ‘others’. Also, deradicalization programming acted to emasculate particular (Muslim) men, and radicalization was framed as a relegated and dangerous masculinity. 27 Although much discussion of masculinity has focused on socio-structural factors and the discursive production of masculinities, Amar has observed that racialized discussions of ‘toxic’ masculinity linked to (Islamist) extremism have enabled the deliberate neglect of the structural conditions producing particular identities and behaviours. 28 In their re-posing of the man question, Parpart and Zalewski noted that gendered relations still structured the global order in ways that enabled both structural and martial violence, which they recognized as ‘toxic’. 29

Another ten years on, ‘toxicity’ has a fresh resonance for a new age of populism, informed by the events of 9/11. A Google search of the terms ‘far right’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ apparently yields thousands of results, and headlines such as ‘How the far right feeds on male insecurity’. A discourse of toxic masculinity applied to Muslim men during the ‘war on terror’ is increasingly used to locate responsibility for Islamophobia-as-extremism with a new ‘subordinate’ man, and is instituted in policy. A growing literature explores the idea of reciprocity to suggest an equivalence in the gender norms and drivers of the two movements, though so far there is little evidence for this. 30 British politicians and analysts have repeatedly linked a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and toxicity to ‘extremist’ violence. 31 From 2011, when Prevent began to engage with the far right, the strategy drew parallels between those actively supporting extreme right and Islamist ideologies, through an invocation of the hallmarks of subordinate and toxic males, ignoring those men not described by this characterization. In both movements, Prevent states, actors were ‘usually male, poorly educated (although there are some cases of high-achieving individuals) and often unemployed’. 32 Policy-makers typified extremism as a problem of the ‘low-achieving’, effectively discounting explanations of male violence that did not feature educational, familial or economic dysfunction. The effect is the ‘toxification’ of masculinities in communities understood as ‘extreme’.

At the same time, policy began to characterize anti-Islam sentiment as ‘extremism’. 33 Yet, Baroness Warsi noted that Islamophobia was becoming increasingly accepted in public discourse, 34 and distinctions between state security policies, Islamophobic discourse and discussion of multiculturalism were blurred. Nonetheless, rather than focusing on the ubiquity of societal Islamophobia, or its role in paternalist state security policies, the idea of toxicity is employed to exceptionalize particular masculinities, not to interrogate broader manifestations of Islamophobia or the exclusionary effects of patriarchy per se .

The pernicious effects of the term ‘toxic masculinity’ can be traced to its genesis within the psychological literature on masculinities, 35 part of the broader literature of critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM). Kupers suggests toxic masculinity is ‘the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence’. 36 This definition is clearly linked to men's bodies, and is embedded in notions of male deviance, violence and marginalization. Toxicity is centrally related to three foundational concepts introduced by the influential masculinities scholar Raewyn Connell: hegemonic masculinity, itself formulated in relation to two other expressions of the masculine, as subordinate and marginalized. 37 Authors have studied men and masculinity since the 1950s; 38 however, it is Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity that has been most formative in understanding how particular masculinities dominate, and what masculinity means. 39 CSMM has relied on Butler's formulation of gender as performative and socially constructed. 40 Connell approaches masculinity through a socio-structural lens, 41 suggesting it is ‘a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experiences, personality and culture’. 42 More recently, the plurality of masculinities has been acknowledged. Masculinities are relational, constructed in opposition to femininities, and enacted according to a hierarchy, in which certain masculinities are preferable to others. 43

The study of ‘subordinate masculinities’ has often been preoccupied with ‘problem men’, and has been formative in work on (male) crime and violence. 44 Kimmel, who has written extensively on politically radical masculinities, notes that ‘all masculinities are not created equal’. 45 Within the extremism discourse, ‘toxic’ men are often the most marginalized, or subordinate, in terms of class or race, or both. 46 However, the discourse has frequently failed to understand the complexities of the relationship between subordination, context and power. There are four key reasons for this, found in critiques of Connell's initial conceptualization. 47 First, initial work on masculinities failed to take adequate account of intersectional issues of class, race or identities beyond the global North. 48 It also occluded differences of sexuality and how these act to produce masculinities and femininities. 49 Second, among the difficulties Flood identifies in Connell's use of the term masculinity is slippage between ‘cultural/moral leadership’ (a description of what constitutes dominant manhood) and ‘empirical reference specifically to actual groups of men’. 50 The latter observation matters in discussion of ‘subordinate’ masculinity, often associated with groups of particular men. Third, Beasley suggests women are too absent from Connell's accounts of masculinity, which fails to recognize women's roles in either constituting masculinity or embodying it. 51

Finally, Connell's structural approach ‘lets men off the hook’, Beasley suggests, by relegating male agency or identity in its account. 52 In particular, for Connell, widespread violence—such as waves of Islamist resistance—has ‘crisis tendencies’. 53 Here there is a risk of eliding the specificities of the local. In fact, a ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been repeatedly invoked for more than a hundred years, and in a variety of global contexts. 54 It is problematic because it universalizes gender experiences, portraying men in crisis, Asher suggests, as a ‘homogeneous mass … posited in relation to equally theoretical self-assured females’. 55 Yet it is within the contemporary ‘crisis’ discourse that toxic masculinity has become a vessel for particular forms of crisis, including extremism. There can be no ‘crisis’ of masculinity without a norm from which the crisis deviates; 56 toxicity has become co-opted into extremism discourse as a rhetorical device. CSMM authors have linked masculinity in crisis to the macro-effects of globalization, suggesting that this is an explanatory factor across a spectrum of extremist ideologies. Authors have cited ‘crisis’ alongside ‘protest’ masculinities and emasculation as drivers in such groups, a common factor being a reassertion of male power in the face of changing gender norms. 57 Extremism discourses are constructed on the basis of such assertions and this is recognized by some as problematic. In their work on the EDL, Treadwell and Garland note that the structural emphasis of Connell's early work fails to engage with men's subjectivities. They suggest that socio-structural approaches risk pathologizing marginalized or subordinate men. Rather than relying on toxicity to explain broad structural issues for subordinate men, they advocate the approach favoured by Hood-Williams, ‘namely one which considers the psychological character of masculinity, in so far as masculinity is a kind of identity it must refer us to a study of the interior life of the person’. 58 However, it is Zalewski's man question which, with its fundamental and relentless task of destabilizing and problematizing patriarchy, offers a path forward in the understanding and deconstructing of extremism.

The exceptionalism of particular men read as both extreme and toxic, and their framing as such in policy initiatives, does nothing to disrupt existing gendered relations, as Zalewski and Stern predicted. Rather, this exceptionalism enables discourses of ‘masculinity’ framing counter-extremism responses to amplify pre-existing power differentials, and shift the focus from patriarchy to the problem of particular men. 59 As Stern and Zalewski forewarned, ‘Masculinity tends also to become a (gender) “thing” which we have learned, understood, imported, conveyed, tried to change; more inflections of paradox. “Gender” becomes reduced to either “women”, “men”, or “femininity”, “masculinity”; and crucially we lose sight of the productive power involved.’ 60 Current discussion leaves little room to see how masculinity is not simply a property of men's bodies (it is also about women), with particular men responsible for extremist masculinities; nor does it acknowledge the ways in which toxicity is produced, not in particular men because of who and what they are, but through a matrix of gendered relations produced in space and productive of that space.

This section draws on interviews carried out with EDL activists between 2016 and 2018, with the aims of further problematizing the ‘toxicity’ approach and outlining two possible paths along which to follow the ‘man’ question in research in this field. 61 The first is to outline the ways in which EDL masculinities are part of wider social norms. The second is to disrupt the necessary link between men's bodies and masculinities, considering women's presence in the movement. In this section I explore the material ways in which race, gender and class intersect in local spaces to produce particular masculinities. This exploration suggests that the concept of toxic masculinity is inadequate to describe the gender practices of those involved in anti-Islam(ist) protest, and I advocate instead a return to the fundamentals of Zalewski's man question to elucidate the complexity of masculinities in this scene.

Continuities: race, class and local masculinities

The EDL emerged in 2009 in Luton as an explicitly working-class street protest movement with a ‘single-issue’ focus: to oppose ‘global Islamification’. 62 In particular, it was a response to poppy-burning protests by the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary and other Al-Muhajiroun activists. 63 Some authors regard the EDL and other radical right groups with an anti-Islam(ist) agenda as simply fascism repackaged. 64 Feldman, for example, describes the EDL as ‘old wine in new bottles’, the ‘old racism’ of skin colour replaced with the ‘new cultural racism’ of faith. 65 Gattinara also suggests that assertions of cultural ‘incompatibility’ merely represent a narrative turning-point from assertions of racial inferiority. 66 Other authors suggest that the task of categorizing the EDL is more complex, 67 given its inclusivity towards women, Jewish people, Sikhs and gay people, all of whom are framed as (fellow) ‘marginalized’ groups in need of particular protection from Islam. 68 The EDL is also increasingly understood as part of a new wave of right-wing populism in Europe and the Americas focused on anti-immigration policies, particularly countering Islam. 69

Women have constituted perhaps 30 per cent of activists. 70 Busher, an ethnographer of the movement, notes that masculinity matters in the EDL, yet can often be reduced to pathologizing accounts, depicting men as ‘angry, white, damaged and vulnerable … seeking to protect their social status and reassert their compromised masculinity’. 71 There is a ‘kernel of truth’ to this, he admits. Toxicity as a pathologizing account neglects the ways in which care in EDL masculinities conforms with feminist scholars' accounts of the linkages between nationalism, patriarchy and citizenship. For EDL activists, as for nationalists, male honour and national identity are located in the female body; there is an expectation that—white working-class—British women will be protected by the British state, as a form of covenant. Participants regarded this covenant as eroded. They saw themselves as ‘second-class citizens’ within a hierarchy of multiculturalism. In an inversion of Coomaraswamy's suggestion that ‘during war [women's] purity is deliberately assaulted precisely because it strikes at the core of ethnic identity’, 72 participants reproduce cases of the mass sexual exploitation of ‘their’ women in ‘grooming’ cases as evidence of a culture war against them. 73

EDL masculinities were produced in the intersections of gender with race, poverty and class. Research participants described how violence that fell outside the accepted norms and racialized expectations of their community—participants suggested that fights should be ‘fair’, one-on-one for instance—could prove productive of new racialized masculinities. A racialized notion of the ‘fair fight’ featured in the account by ‘Daniel’ of confrontation with a group of (what he said were) Muslim men. ‘Daniel’ described a relationship of spatial proximity with, but existential distance from Muslim neighbours. This relationship was characterized by the permanent possibility of male violence, a broader feature of his environment. He is in his twenties, an EDL activist and a veteran of Iraq, but it was in his home town, he said, that he experienced his worst injury:

I was attacked by ten Muslims. [Q: What happened?] They were fiddling with my neighbours' van and I … went out and chased them. They called me a white bastard, and … I confronted them—I had a pipe in my hand. [Q: A pipe?] I thought I needed a weapon, because they all had weapons. They ran into the shop on [X] street, hiding behind the counter, calling me a white bastard. They said, ‘It's our town, we will do what we want.’ So, they stabbed me in the back. 74

‘Daniel’ told me only one of his attackers was arrested and jailed. For ‘Daniel’, this experience had a number of consequences: it destroyed his trust in state institutions to protect him, and reconfigured his relationship with the state (for which he had worked on active military service); it prompted him to attend EDL demonstrations; it constituted a new racialized identity through an insulting label (‘white bastard’). This confrontation with his race as ‘other’ was significant for ‘Daniel’ to his masculine identity. As Boesten notes, ‘Gender … and sexuality … help define and naturalize the hierarchies based on race and class.’ 75 Expectations of privilege are central to white identity. For Frankenberg, ‘white people and people of color live racially structured lives … White people are “raced”, just as men are “gendered”.’ 76 James suggests that while ethnic minority identities are frequently constructed around shared practices and experiences, positive representations of a shared culture, as well as disadvantage, white identity is ‘grounded in a sense of entitlement and victimhood relative to people of color’. 77 Gear Rich suggests that many white people experience racial identity as part of their everyday lived experience. 78 Indeed, a key theme in the narratives of white participants in this research is that they are specifically marginalized as the ‘white working class’. They argue, in effect, that their race is visible to them as something to be overcome, but is invisible to privileged whites. These participants constitute what James names the ‘marginal whites’, who do not experience ‘full’ white privilege, owing to their class or immigrant heritage. 79 For ‘Daniel’, the confrontation described above produced a racialized and violent masculinity as—for him—an appropriate response to what he perceived as the injustice of Muslim violence in his area, and the institutional failure to address this. ‘Daniel’ now regards retaliatory violence as one necessary aspect of competition for ‘ownership’ of the town that he feels should uncontestably be his. In order to defend it, he suffered an injury that he suggested was worse than anything he encountered in Iraq. His ‘own community’ is experienced as a war zone, a site of conflict and contested identity.

‘Daniel’ also used wider discourses on race, Islam and multiculturalism to frame his perception of a hierarchy of race, in which he believed he was a second-class citizen. The discourse of the death of multiculturalism mattered to participants. They echoed a sentiment expressed by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, in a 2011 Munich conference speech, namely that multiculturalism had been responsible for a loss of British values and the emergence of (Islamist) radicalization. 80 This shared nationalism meant research participants deeply resented state suggestions that the EDL was ‘extremist’ in the same way as groups such as Al-Muhajiroun, who support the introduction of shari'a law into the UK. Hewitt has written of the ‘white backlash’ to British multiculturalism as a ‘socially disparate set of responses to equalities discourses’. 81 EDL supporters I talked to endorsed the ‘British values’ originally articulated by Cameron (patriotism, the Union flag). Yet they perceived the state to have supported long-term change that had destroyed their communities, and supported a Muslim ‘other’ they regard as a gendered threat. Participants, for instance, frequently mobilized around issues such as the sexual exploitation of English women by Muslim men, terror attacks, female genital mutilation—but only in Muslim communities—or opposition to the niqab and burka. They resented what they regarded as censorship on these issues, citing the lack of censorship for others they admire for their outspoken and often racist views on Islam, including politicians and celebrities such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Katie Hopkins. Participants perceived a double standard under which censorship was applied to them for reasons of class, not opinion.

EDL masculinities were therefore not isolated. In particular, aggressive hyper-masculinities were produced in space as part of a particular repertoire of behaviours, both continuous and contiguous with a broader community. ‘Darren’, a long-term activist with both EDL and the Infidels, 82 now in his forties, told me:

When you're growing up … you walk over them, before they walk over you. You become a face—a face who is known on the street, or you become a target. You have to become someone that people think, don't fuck with him, that's Darren … Then that reputation spreads and keeps you out of trouble for life. 83

When I asked other men about their life growing up before the EDL, they too described a constant potential for violence and the need to avoid victimization. Size was an indicator of strength, with perceived hyper-masculinity fixed in physicality and bodily presence. 84 Tommy Robinson, whose birth name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is one of the EDL's founders. He is a particularly divisive figure, banned from social media in 2019 for breaching hate-speech rules and, at the time of writing, in jail for contempt of court. 85 Robinson told me it was important to project size to avoid confrontation, never walking with the gaze cast down, or slouching, for instance. Any inability to avoid victimization entailed emasculation.

Hyper-masculinity was, however, only one of a range of masculinities for men in the EDL, and being an activist involved multiple masculine performances, some in contrast with the discourse of toxic masculinities as fostering domination, devaluing women and expressing homophobia outlined by Kupers. 86 Male participants also emphasized the ways in which they believed their activism represented a social good, helping the (non-Muslim) homeless, or raising money for veterans or for (non-Muslim) victims of sexual exploitation. While the perhaps disenfranchised section of the white working class attending demonstrations is part of a demographic recently termed the ‘left behind’, 87 the caring masculinities they expressed were again enabled through the reproduction of broader social norms. EDL demonstration culture and practice consciously reproduces behaviours common to the homosociality of the football stand, for instance chanting, singing and flag-waving, which enable group bonding. 88 Participants discussed the shared ‘buzz’ this created. 89 While Dunning suggests football culture tends to ‘stress ability to fight, “hardness” and ability to “hold one's ale” as marks of being a “man”’, 90 this is not just about toxic or hyper-masculinities. The football stand is an important affective resource as one of the few spaces in which men can actively show emotions including love, sadness, anger, grief and care, and the EDL consciously reproduced this. 91

These insights from the field are indicative of a particularly masculinized white working-class tradition, which participants believe was under threat from liberal elites, ‘Islam’ and the state. Yet participants also drew on state norms about the pernicious effects of multiculturalism, tied to the risk of Islam(ist) violence and toxic Muslim masculinities, to frame their perceptions.

Women, masculinities and EDL patriarchy

While men active in the EDL express and claim both apparently feminine ‘caring’ masculinities and more aggressive forms of activism, women's activism disrupts both assumptions of the applicability of ‘toxic masculinity’ to the EDL, and, following Zalewski, can be understood to disrupt norms of patriarchy and manhood within the EDL. Women also adopted masculine roles and practices. 92 As Pilkington notes, men's numerical dominance at events does not mean that the EDL does not appeal to women; nor does it necessarily equate to a lack of space in the movement for them. 93 If the EDL is a mainly male expression of grievance through toxic masculinity, how can one account for the presence of women at their demonstrations in any way? Connell herself suggests that ‘focusing only on the activities of men occludes the practices of women in the construction of gender among men’. 94 Research on masculinities and violent groups in other contexts has also demonstrated their possibilities for forms of female status gain and emancipation, although patriarchy is often quickly reconstituted post-conflict. 95

In my research, women, like men, described how they evolved a confrontational, sometimes aggressive physicality during their formative years and in response to the masculinism of their social environment. Tommy Robinson's former personal assistant Hel Gower, for instance, told me she is a controversial figure in the movement, widely known as blunt and confrontational, an approach she suggested was shaped by the ‘rough and ready’ East End where she grew up. She, like ‘Darren’ (cited above), mythologized a working-class past, its values and physical terrain. ‘Georgey’, a seasoned EDL activist in her thirties, sought out confrontation with others both online and off, even once challenging the Al-Muhajiroun leader Anjem Choudary while he was preaching in the street. She saw this encounter as an emasculation of Choudary, based on her assumption that it is especially humiliating for Muslim men to be publicly confronted by women.

Handrahan suggests that women's peace movements draw on ‘shared experiences that women have as women, mothers and wives subjected to violence’ and perhaps therefore reduce the ‘significance of ethnicity’ through strengthened gender identity. 96 The women here do the opposite; their active appropriation of masculine norms, constructed through particular forms of race and class, draws further boundaries of faith, class and ethnicity between women. For instance, women's masculine performances were aimed at liberal elites. ‘Georgey’, who is in her thirties and works in child care, sees two tiers of feminists. She opposed the liberal feminism of women she suggested were ‘stupid cows … more worried about tits in a tabloid than girls getting their clits cut off’ to those like herself who reject the title ‘feminist’ entirely, yet mobilize on protecting women from the perceived abuses of Islam. Both male and female EDL participants believed a liberal feminism had failed to defend women from Muslim men, and prioritized Islam (read as monolithic and sexually regressive) above the rights of the working class (read as sexually progressive). Participants homogenized what was understood by both ‘Islam’ and ‘working class’, ignoring aspects of each that challenged their activism.

If the term toxic masculinity does not enable us to see women's activism in the EDL, it also blinds us to EDL misogyny and how EDL patriarchy functions in ways consistent with wider society. Female participation in any masculine power structure represents a form of transgression. 97 In the EDL the male–female gender divide was accompanied by an additional binary which categorized women in classed language, despite their sharing class identities. Misogyny can emotionally mediate social class, 98 particularly disgust for working-class women. 99 Skeggs notes that this demographic, ‘the excessive, unhealthy, publicly immoral white working-class woman … epitomizes the zeitgeist of the moment’, an obsession with denigrating the working class. 100 Mainstream depictions of the working class are replete with classed abuse: ‘chav’ women are over-sexed and over-fertile; 101 ‘underclass’ women's sexual behaviour is juxtaposed with middle-class sexual norms. 102 The EDL, as a patriarchal movement sharing norms with wider society, enables this classed misogyny to be reproduced within the very communities that are often the object of it.

Masculine performances for women within this homosocial and patriarchal space are therefore not risk-free, particularly when women express an independent sexuality and, essentially, contest EDL patriarchy. 103 Women can encounter censure for adopting the various masculinities enabling their participation at protest. In the early days of the EDL, male leaders wanted to exclude women. Robinson remembered: ‘When we were first going to Bradford … for us, the men, we were thinking—this is the battleground, like. We're going to come under huge attack. So, we tried saying women weren't allowed to go [laughs]—fucking hell, they went nuts, man.’ 104 Women did succeed in attending demonstrations, despite some EDL leadership opposition, and protested against the then Prime Minister David Cameron's labelling of the EDL as ‘sick’. 105 Although men were not wanted, they marched behind the women, apparently in order to protect them. Hel Gower suggested this act was representative of a misogyny within the movement as a whole. The masculine norms of the group, while claiming to protect and serve women, in fact relegated female agency as a form of what Scrinzi labels ‘gender antagonism’. 106 This describes how the broad domination of masculine cultures necessitates the marginalization of women, who must struggle to find their place within systems that do not favour their participation, except in symbolic ways. The consequence is the division of a movement on gender lines.

Participants who had attended EDL demonstrations for some years distinguished between types of women, as well as between men and women. They referenced ‘coupling up’ as a feature of protest away-days, describing its effects within the group. Both male and female participants applied the movement's highly masculinized group norms to the sexual activity of the women in the movement. Many understood female bodies at events in binary terms: those who were honourable and those who were not. The EDL Angels were a sub-group Gower was initially involved in organizing, in order to give women a voice to campaign on issues important to them, such as child sex exploitation and grooming. Gower shared the view of others in the EDL on the Angels, who used classed language: ‘Rough as fucking shit, is what most people described them as.’ 107 Similar gendered and classed judgements regarding sexuality were expressed by both men and women participants who had regularly attended EDL demonstrations:

To me the Angels seem to be there just to find a man … I don't know why they think they have to do it, I really don't … it's—going through them, it is literally going through them. [‘Jane’, 50s] 108 People was there just to sleep with anyone … some of them [Angels] had a bad reputation … some of the broads were just out for the dick. Some was old. You wouldn't actually believe it. There was one woman, she was 50 years old and she … done a good 70%. Easy! She was disgusting. [Q: Do you think the guys were equally disgusting?] They was disgusting. Just for the demos. Just for sex in hotels, things like that. [‘Iain’, 19] 109 Female by birth, but you wouldn't say they were ladies, put it that way … They call themselves EDL Angels … They're like Anchor butter, they spread their legs like slappers. The men go through them. I wouldn't. I despise them all, they are filth-bags. [‘Darren’, 40s] 110

Women are active participants in the EDL and, as noted above, frequently ‘do’ the same masculinities as the men. However, both male and female participants judged and censured particular EDL women, according to a classed misogyny apparent in mainstream discourse. This involved a certain hypocrisy. A conversation with 19-year-old ‘Iain’ was symptomatic. He told me: ‘A woman should stay at home and cook and clean, that's the way I've been brought up. The man should work.’ I suggested he criticized Islam because he believed it advocated precisely this approach to men and women, to which he replied: ‘[But] I would not make a woman stand in the kitchen and cook. You wouldn't make them. A Muslim would make them.’ 111 Participants criticized a (monolithic) Islam for a traditionalist approach to gender; yet they also expressed a belief in the importance of ‘traditional’ gender roles as a legacy of ‘English’ culture. This was one of the inconsistencies in their gendered ‘ideology’.

These complexities of masculinity, who can embody masculinities and the risks of this embodiment, are occluded by CVE repertoires and media discourses that can only associate masculinity in extremist movements with ‘toxic’ men. Returning to the Telford demonstration with which I began this article, the then EDL spokesman Crossland can be seen to invoke the right to self-expression in terms familiar to a marginalized male working-class demographic, and consistent with the culture and behaviour of his particular community. He demands the right to have the men's masculinity, their flag-waving and offensive chants, their activism against Islam(ism), understood as political expression, however stigmatized, and therefore not to be dismissed in terms which depoliticize particular men, such as ‘toxic masculinity’. 112 This is not to imply that working-class culture is homogeneous. Clearly, many white working-class people strongly oppose the views of the EDL. Nor is it to judge such demonstration as reasonable; it is, rather, to contextualize it. What is clear is that EDL protest uses and activates masculinities already familiar to protesters from a wider context; activism mobilizes not just hyper-masculinity but other more caring masculinities that cannot easily be read as ‘toxic’. Furthermore, there is continuity between EDL masculine identities and wider—patriarchal—norms dating from well before the emergence of the counter-jihad scene. The EDL is a microcosm of sections of wider British society.

Narratives of toxicity which readily fit into pre-existing hierarchies of both class and race occlude both the range of masculine performances in the EDL and their continuities with wider patriarchy. Indeed, not just masculinity in an extreme group such as the EDL, but also ‘traditional’ white working-class masculinity is often talked of as ‘toxic’ or ‘in crisis’ or ‘subordinate’. 113 To those who are not working class, working-class culture is often regarded as ‘a hurdle that needs to be overcome’. 114 From the inside, however, aggressive masculine behaviours, rituals and practices that appear threatening to—or indeed threaten—others feel positive . I began this piece with a question: what expression of masculinity did I witness at the anti-Islam(ist) demonstration by the EDL? If the answer is ‘toxicity’, where is the boundary between those aspects of masculine performance that are designated toxic, and those that constitute patriarchy, society-wide?

The piece has explored the relevance of Zalewski's man question as a route into this conundrum, and into an analysis of the ways in which masculinities, patriarchy, race and class entwine in producing power and casual violence; and to a discussion of masculinity that need not equate manhood itself with threat or toxicity. It has focused on a particular radical right movement, the EDL, to show how masculinities are revealed, and the material conditions in which they come into being, revealing the inadequacy of the toxic masculinity label to describe this activism. It has suggested that Zalewski offers a path not just for theoreticians of IR, but for researchers and policy-makers, for whom she provides the stepping stones required to circumvent the pitfalls of binary gendered thinking. In particular, her work cautions that while masculinity is attached to the bodies and practices of men, it is not something that exclusively belongs to men. 115 It is possible to see masculinities in the practices of women; and it is possible to recognize that many of the so-called toxic practices of the extreme fringes are present in society more widely. Just as extremists are in reality not separate from society, 116 toxic masculinity is not separate from patriarchy or social gender norms. 117 Nor is it an adequate term to describe what may not always be ideological, but is certainly political, action from ‘underclass’ men, given its delegitimizing effects. However, when particular men are regarded as the problem, the issue becomes not one of patriarchy, or society, but of agency in specific groups, and the responsibility for ‘fixing’ patriarchy is pushed onto them.

In the introduction to her 1998 book The ‘man’ question in International Relations , Zalewski explained why it was necessary to ask this question to ensure that men engaged with their own male power, and why men's hegemony should be problematized. 118 There was little optimism in Zalewski's shift in the focus of feminist study from women to men. Twenty years on, the lack of optimism seems warranted. The contemporary focus is on particular masculinities. Instead of seeing women as ‘a problem to be solved’, the question is now not of ‘man’, but of particular categories of men. 119 Governments have focused on extremism, first violent Islamism and now the radical right, and in so doing have produced as embodying ‘risk’ particular racialized and marginalized men, framed through the prism of ‘toxicity’. The onus is not on men to question their power, but on particular men to question their problematic use of violence. Extremism is constructed as discourse, divorced from wider society through a move to associate particular men with uniquely ‘toxic’ behaviours. Masculinity (singular) is not explored as a feature of gendered relations but essentialized in sex. The relational property of masculinity is mobilized, not to further understanding of extremist violence, but to differentiate good from bad men; to rely on particular men to mitigate the failures and violences of patriarchy as a whole. As Zalewski and others have emphasized, patriarchal power is resilient, and its intransigence is evident in counter-extremism policy and the discourses enabling its enactment. 120

In the UK and beyond, the interest of counter-extremism policy-makers in a gendered approach offers possibilities, but at the same time acts to reduce them. Contemporary interest in masculinity as a factor in extremism and right-wing populism is important; but at the moment, the effects of broader discourse and of policy do little more than reify both essentialized approaches to masculinity and existing power imbalances between men. For those of us working in contemporary applications of feminist IR, Zalewski has been a canary in the mineshaft. She and Stern foresaw these issues, and warned of them. Zalewski's theorizing applied to the ‘extreme’ context destabilizes not just what manhood means, but any discourse of extremism constructed on the concept of toxic masculinity. Her work on the nature of gender, power and masculinity never loses sight of the relations between men and women. It shows the way and warns of the pitfalls of approaches that overemphasize questions of masculinities at the expense of seeing the power relations consequent on male hegemony and patriarchy. It is on these we should focus to understand violence, conflict and the production of extremism.

The wider research project also engaged with British Islamists, such as Anjem Choudhary and others networked to him. In this piece I focus only on one particular radical right movement, the EDL.

HM Government, Counter-Extremism Strategy , policy paper, 19 Oct. 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counter-extremism-strategy .

Jamie Bartlett and Mark Littler, Inside the EDL (London: Demos, 2011), p. 5, https://www.demos.co.uk/files/Inside_the_edl_WEB.pdf ; Hilary Pilkington, ‘“EDL angels stand beside their men … not behind them”: the politics of gender and sexuality in an anti-Islam(ist) movement’, Gender and Education 29: 2, 2017, pp. 238–57. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 7 Aug. 2019.)

Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation’, Review of International Studies 35: 3, 2009, p. 615.

Marysia Zalewski, ‘Introduction’, in Marysia Zalewski and Jane L. Parpart, eds, The ‘man’ question in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 1997), pp. 8, 12.

Zalewski, ‘Introduction’; Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Introduction: rethinking the man question’, in Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, Rethinking the man question: sex, gender and violence in International Relations (London and New York: Zed, 2008).

Stern and Zalewski, ‘Feminist fatigue(s)’.

Parpart and Zalewski, ‘Introduction: rethinking the man question’, p. 2.

Kathleen M. Blee, ‘Ethnographies of the far right’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36: 2, 2007, pp. 119–28; Hilary Pilkington, Loud and proud: passion and politics in the English Defence League (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Johanna Esseveld and Ron Eyerman, ‘Which side are you on? Reflections on methodological issues in the study of “distasteful” social movements’, in Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman, eds, Studying collective action (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 217–18, cited in Pilkington, Loud and proud , p. 13.

Pilkington, Loud and proud , p. 13.

See guidance on the appropriate terms from the UK Government style guide: https://guide.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/a-z .

Bev Skeggs, ‘The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation’, Sociology 39: 5, 2005, pp. 965–82; Pilkington, Loud and proud ; Owen Jones, Chavs: the demonization of the working class (London: Verso, 2012); Selina Todd, The people: the rise and fall of the working class, 1910–2010 (London: John Murray, 2014).

Gavin Bailey, ‘Extremism, community and stigma: researching the far right and radical Islam in their context’, in Kalwant Bhopal and Ross Deuchar, eds, Researching marginalized groups (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 22–4; Pilkington, Loud and proud , p. 1.

Konrad Kellen, ‘Ideology and rebellion: terrorism in West Germany’, in Walter Reich and Walter Laqueur, eds, Origins of terrorism: psychologies, ideologies, theologies, states of mind , new edn (Washington DC, Baltimore and London: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998), pp. 43–59, at p. 47.

See e.g. the work of the TellMAMA Team, ‘TellMAMA: about us’, 2018, https://tellmamauk.org/about-us/ .

See e.g. Pilkington, Loud and proud ; Pete Simi, ‘Why study white supremacist terror? A research note’, Deviant Behavior 31: 3, 2010, pp. 251–73; Mark Hamm, ‘Apocalyptic violence: the seduction of terrorist subcultures’, Theoretical Criminology 8: 3, 2004, pp. 323–39; Blee, ‘Ethnographies of the far right’; Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, ‘“White men are this nation”: right-wing militias and the restoration of rural American masculinity’, Rural Sociology 65: 582–604, 2000; Bailey, ‘Extremism, community and stigma’; Joel Busher, The making of anti-Muslim protest: grassroots activism in the English Defence League (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). My work on Islamist extremism adopts a parallel methodology, focusing on actors rather than victims, and engaging with participants' accounts of their pathways into ‘extreme’ groups through field research.

Benjamin Bowling and Coretta Phillips, Racism, crime and justice (Harlow: Pearson, 2002), cited in James Treadwell and Jon Garland, ‘Masculinity, marginalization and violence: a case study of the English Defence League’, British Journal of Criminology 51: 4, 2011, pp. 621–2.

See Anoop Nayak, ‘Displaced masculinities: chavs, youth and class in the post-industrial city’, Sociology 40: 5, 2006, pp. 813–31.

Zalewski, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.

Zalewski, ‘Introduction’.

Bruce Hoffman, Inside terrorism , 2nd rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Peter Neumann, Old and new terrorism (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009).

Kathy E. Ferguson, ‘Interpretation and genealogy in feminism’, Signs 16: 2, 1991, pp. 322–39; Parpart and Zalewski, ‘Introduction: rethinking the man question’, p. 2.

Zillah Eisenstein, Against empire: feminisms, racism and the West (London: Zed, 2004), p. 161.

Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, ‘Monster, terrorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots’, Social Text 20: 3, 2002, pp. 117–48; Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Veiled references: constructions of gender in the Bush administration discourse on the attacks on Afghanistan post-9/11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8: 1, 2006, pp. 19–41.

Katherine E. Brown, ‘Gender and counter-radicalization: women and emerging counter-terror measures’, in Jayne Huckerby and Margaret L. Satterthwaite, eds, Gender, national security and counter-terrorism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013).

Naaz Rashid, ‘Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK's “war on terror”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37: 4, 2014, pp. 589–604; Brown, ‘Gender and counter-radicalization’.

Brown, ‘Gender and counter-radicalization’, p. 48.

Paul Amar, ‘Middle East masculinity studies: discourses of “men in crisis”, industries of gender in revolution’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 7: 3, 2011, p. 36.

Parpart and Zalewski, ‘Introduction: rethinking the man question’, pp. 3–4.

See for instance Julia Ebner, The rage: the vicious circle of Islamist and far-right extremism (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2017), p. 10, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rage-Vicious-Islamist-Far-Right-Extremism-ebook/dp/B0746HD6R6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1527613467&sr=8-2&keywords=the+rage ; Ashley A. Mattheis and Charlie Winter, ‘“The greatness of her position”: comparing identitarian and jihadi discourses on women’ (International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 2019); Matthew Feldman, ‘From radical-right Islamophobia to “cumulative extremism”’ (Faith Matters, 2012), http://www.safecampuscommunities.ac.uk/uploads/files/2016/08/faith_matters_islamophobia_report_requires_upload.pdf ; and Gavin Bailey, ‘Widening extremism: definitions in the era of “cumulative extremism”’, (22nd International Conference of Europeanists, Ces, 2015), https://ces.confex.com/ces/2015/webprogram/Paper9553.html on expanding definitions.

See e.g. Diane Abbott, ‘Britain's crisis of masculinity’, Demos twentieth birthday lecture (London, 2013); David Lammy, ‘Islamists, gangs, the EDL—all target alienated young men’, Guardian , 24 May 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/24/islamists-gangs-edl-target-young-men ; Joan Smith, Home grown: how domestic violence turns men into terrorists (London: riverrun, 2019); Joan Smith, ‘How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism’, UnHerd , 16 May 2019, https://unherd.com/2019/05/how-toxic-masculinity-is-tied-to-terrorism/ .

Home Office, ‘Prevent strategy’ (Norwich: Home Office, 2011), p. 21, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf . This is a depiction of violence that is not broadly evidenced in the literature.

Chris Allen, ‘Why Theresa May is wrong to suggest that Islamophobia is a form of extremism’, HuffPost UK , 20 June 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-chris-allen/islamophobia_b_17214242.html ; Alan Travis, ‘May says Islamophobia is a form of extremism, marking shift in rhetoric’, Guardian , 19 June 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/19/may-says-islamophobia-form-extremism-marking-shift-rhetoric .

David Batty, ‘Lady Warsi claims Islamophobia is now socially acceptable in Britain’, Guardian , 20 Jan. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/20/lady-warsi-islamophobia-muslims-prejudice ; Matthew Weaver, ‘Lady Warsi: ministers fuelling Muslim radicalisation’, Guardian , 16 June 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/16/lady-warsi-ministers-fuelling-muslim-radicalisation ; Sayeeda Warsi, The enemy within: a tale of Muslim Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

Syed Haider, ‘The shooting in Orlando, terrorism or toxic masculinity (or both?)’, Men and Masculinities 19: 5, 2016, pp. 555–65.

Terry A. Kupers, ‘Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison’, Journal of Clinical Psychology 61: 6, 2005, p. 714.

R. W. Connell, ‘The social organization of masculinity’, in Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, eds, The masculinities reader (Oxford: Polity, 2001), pp. 38–41; Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and power: society, the person and sexual politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).

Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, ‘The sociology of masculinity’, in Whitehead and Barrett, eds, The masculinities reader , p. 15; Chris Beasley, Gender and sexuality: critical theories, critical thinkers (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), p. 179.

Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Victoria Foster, Michael Kimmel and Christine Skelton, ‘What about the boys?’, in Wayne Martino and Bob Meyenn, eds, What about the boys? An overview of debates (London: McGraw-Hill Education UK, 2001).

Judith Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity , new edn (New York: Routledge, 2006); Judith Butler, ‘Your behavior creates your gender’, Big Think , 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc .

R. W. Connell, ‘Encounters with structure’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 17: 1, 2004, pp. 10–27.

Connell, Masculinities , p. 71.

Connell, Gender and power .

James W. Messerschmidt, Masculinities and crime: critique and reconceptualization of theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993).

Michael Kimmel, ‘Integrating men into the curriculum’, Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 4: 1, 1997, pp. 181–96.

Amar, ‘Middle East masculinity studies’.

Raewyn W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society 19: 6, 2005, pp. 829–59; Rachel Jewkes, Robert Morrell, Jeff Hearn, Emma Lundqvist, David Blackbeard, Graham Lindegger, Michael Quayle, Yandisa Sikweyiya and Lucas Gottzén, ‘Hegemonic masculinity: combining theory and practice in gender interventions’, Culture, Health and Sexuality 17: sup2, 2015, pp. 112–27; Christine Beasley, ‘Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world’, Men and Masculinities 11: 1, 2008, pp. 86–103; Beasley, Gender and sexuality .

Jewkes et al., ‘Hegemonic masculinity’.

Jack Halberstam, Female masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Beasley, Gender and sexuality ; Gayle S. Rubin, ‘Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality’, in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

Michael Flood, ‘Between men and masculinity: an assessment of the term “masculinity” in recent scholarship on men’ in Sharyn Pearce and Vivienne Muller, eds, Manning the next millennium: studies in masculinities (Perth, Australia: Black Swan, 2002), cited in Beasley, ‘Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world’, p. 88.

Beasley, ‘Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world’; Beasley, Gender and sexuality .

Beasley, Gender and sexuality , p. 229.

Connell, ‘The social organization of masculinity’, p. 45.

Judith A. Allen, ‘Men interminably in crisis? Historians on masculinity, sexual boundaries, and manhood’, Radical History Review 82: 1, 2002, pp. 191–207; Francis Dupuis-Déri, ‘The bogus “crisis” of masculinity’, The Conversation , n.d., http://theconversation.com/the-bogus-crisis-of-masculinity-96558 ; Rebecca Asher, Man up: boys, men and breaking the male rules (New York: Harvill Secker, 2016); John MacInnes, ‘The crisis of masculinity and the politics of identity’, in Whitehead and Barrett, The masculinities reader , pp. 1–29; Whitehead and Barrett, ‘The sociology of masculinity’.

Asher, Man up , p. 113.

Mary Louise Roberts, ‘Beyond “crisis” in understanding gender transformation’, Gender and History 28: 2, 2016, pp. 358–66.

Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Globalization and its mal(e)contents: the gendered moral and political economy of terrorism’, International Sociology 18: 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 603–20; Raewyn W. Connell, ‘Globalisation, imperialism and masculinities’, in Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff R. Hearn and Robert W. Connell, eds, Handbook of studies on men and masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), pp. 71–89; Raewyn Connell, ‘Masculinity research and global society’, in Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Marcia Texler Segal and Lin Tan, Analyzing gender, intersectionality, and multiple inequalities: global, transnational and local contexts , ‘Advances in gender research’, vol. 15 (Bingley: Emerald Group, 2011), pp. 51–72; Kimmel and Ferber, ‘“White men are this nation”’; Michael Kimmel, Healing from hate: how young men get into—and out of—violent extremism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Michael Kimmel, Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era , rev. edn (New York: Bold Type, 2017).

Treadwell and Garland, ‘Masculinity, marginalization and violence’, p. 624; John Hood-Williams, ‘Gender, masculinities and crime: from structures to psyches’, Theoretical Criminology 5: 37–60, 2001, pp. 39–40.

Marysia Zalewski, Feminist International Relations: exquisite corpse (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 92–9.

Stern and Zalewski, ‘Feminist fatigue(s)’, p. 619.

Pseudonyms are used except for leadership figures who consented to being identified.

Pilkington, Loud and proud , pp. 37–8.

Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, A neo-nationalist network—the English Defence League and Europe's counter-jihad movement (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 2013).

See Donald Holbrook and Max Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in Donald Holbrook, Max Taylor and P. M. Currie, eds, Extreme right wing political violence and terrorism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 2; John Meadowcroft and Elizabeth A. Morrow, ‘Violence, self-worth, solidarity and stigma: how a dissident, far-right group solves the collective action problem’, Political Studies 65: 2, 2017, pp. 373–90.

Feldman, From radical-right Islamophobia to ‘cumulative extremism’ , pp. 1, 10.

Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Research overview of far right narratives (Radicalisation Awareness Network Publication, 2016), p. 3.

See Bartlett and Littler, Inside the EDL ; Pilkington, Loud and proud ; Busher, The making of anti-Muslim protest .

While I saw a small number of activists from ethnic minority groups at protests, I did not succeed in interviewing them.

Ulrike M. Vieten and Scott Poynting, ‘Contemporary far-right racist populism in Europe’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 37: 6, 2016, pp. 533–40; Anoosh Chakelian, ‘Populist fascism is coming to the UK: who is fighting against it?’, New Statesman , 9 Aug. 2018, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/08/populist-fascism-coming-uk-who-fighting-against-it ; Bartlett and Littler, Inside the EDL ; Busher, The making of anti-Muslim protest ; Pilkington, Loud and proud .

Nigel Copsey, The English Defence League: challenging our country and our values of social inclusion, fairness and equality (London: Faith Matters, Nov. 2010), p. 29; Matthew Goodwin, The roots of extremism: the English Defence League and the counter-jihad challenge , briefing paper (London: Chatham House, 2013), p. 6, http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Europe/0313bp_goodwin.pdf ; Treadwell and Garland, ‘Masculinity, marginalization and violence’, p. 621; Bartlett and Littler, Inside the EDL , p. 14; Pilkington, ‘“EDL angels stand beside their men … not behind them”’; Elizabeth Pearson, To what extent does gender matter in extremism in the UK? , PhD thesis (King's College London, 2018).

Busher, The making of anti-Muslim protest , paras 51–2.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, ‘A question of honour: women, ethnicity and armed conflict’, Third Minority Rights Lecture, Geneva, 1999, http://www.sacw.net/Wmov/RCoomaraswamyOnHonour.html .

But only those cases involving men framed as Muslim.

Author's interview with ‘Daniel’, 25 Aug. 2016.

Jelke Boesten, Sexual violence during war and peace: gender, power, and post-conflict justice in Peru (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 4.

Ruth Frankenberg, White women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness , new edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 1.

Osamudia R. James, ‘White like me: the negative impact of the diversity rationale on white identity formation’, New York University Law Review 89: 2, 2014, pp. 425–6.

Camille Gear Rich, ‘Marginal whiteness’, California Law Review , no. 1498, 2010, pp. 1497–594.

In fact, half of the participants are Irish, or describe themselves as of Irish heritage, a finding also noted by Busher in his 2015 study of the EDL, The making of anti-Muslim protest , para 362.

David Cameron, ‘PM's speech at Munich Security Conference’, 5 Feb. 2011, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130109092234/ http://number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference/ .

Roger Hewitt, White backlash and the politics of multiculturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4.

A violent offshoot of the EDL often expressing racist ideology.

Author's interview with ‘Darren’, 4 Aug. 2016.

Ramón Spaaij, ‘Men like us, boys like them’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 32: 4, 1 Nov. 2008, p. 380; J. W. Messerschmidt, ‘Becoming “real men”: adolescent masculinity challenges and sexual violence’, Men and Masculinities 2: 3, 2000, pp. 286–307.

Rory Cellan-Jones, ‘Tommy Robinson banned from Twitter’, BBC News, 28 March 2018, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43572168 ; Alex Hern and Jim Waterson, ‘Tommy Robinson banned from Facebook and Instagram’, Guardian , 26 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/26/tommy-robinson-banned-from-facebook-and-instagram .

Kupers, ‘Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison’.

Treadwell and Garland, ‘Masculinity, marginalization and violence’; David Goodhart, The road to somewhere: the populist revolt and the future of politics (London: Hurst, 2017), p.19.

Pilkington, Loud and proud .

A term also familiar from Pilkington.

Eric Dunning, ‘Towards a sociological understanding of football hooliganism as a world phenomenon’, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 8: 2, 2000, p. 151.

Chris Walton, Adrian Coyle and Evanthia Lyons, ‘Death and football: an analysis of men's talk about emotions’, British Journal of Social Psychology 43: 3, 2004, pp. 406, 412.

Halberstam, Female masculinity .

Pilkington, ‘“EDL angels stand beside their men … not behind them”’, pp. 243, 253.

Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, p. 848.

Luisa Maria Dietrich Ortega, ‘Looking beyond violent militarized masculinities’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 14: 4, 2012, pp. 489–507; Miranda Alison, ‘Women as agents of political violence: gendering security’, Security Dialogue 35: 4, 2004, pp. 447–63.

Lori Handrahan, ‘Conflict, gender, ethnicity and post-conflict reconstruction’, Security Dialogue 35: 4, 2004, p. 439.

Véronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, ‘The scripting of Private Jessica Lynch’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30: 1, 2005, pp. 25–53.

William Ian Miller, The anatomy of disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. xiv.

Stephanie Lawler, ‘Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities’, Sociological Review 53: 3, 2005, p. 435.

Skeggs, ‘The making of class and gender’, pp. 966–8.

Imogen Tyler, ‘“Chav mum chav scum”’, Feminist Media Studies 8: 1, 2008, pp. 29–30.

Helen Wilson and Annette Huntington, ‘Deviant (m)others: the construction of teenage motherhood in contemporary discourse’, Journal of Social Policy 35: 1, 2006, p. 69.

Pilkington, ‘“EDL angels stand beside their men … not behind them”’, p. 253.

Author's interview with Tommy Robinson, 26 Sept. 2016.

Marshall Peter, ‘EDL women tell Cameron we're not sick’, Demotix, 8 Oct. 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111011144736/ http://www.demotix.com/news/863998/edl-women-tell-cameron-were-not-sick .

Francesca Scrinzi, Caring for the nation: men and women activists in radical right populist parties , final research report (Brussels: European Research Council, 2014), p. 3.

Scrinzi, Caring for the nation , p. 3.

Author's interview with ‘Jane’, 1 Sept. 2016.

Author's interview with ‘Iain’, 10 Dec. 2016.

Sara Ahmed, The cultural politics of emotion , 2nd rev. edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 176–7.

Linda McDowell, Redundant masculinities? Employment change and white working class youth (New York and Chichester: Wiley, 2011); Kimmel, ‘Globalization and its mal(e)contents’.

Nicola Ingram, ‘Working-class boys, educational success and the misrecognition of working-class culture’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 30: 4, 2009, p. 423.

Zalewski, Feminist International Relations , p. 84.

Gavin Bailey and Phil Edwards, ‘Rethinking “radicalisation”: microradicalisations and reciprocal radicalisation as an intertwined process’, Journal for Deradicalization , no. 10, 2017, pp. 255–81.

Terry A. Kupers, ‘Psychotherapy with men in prison’, in Gary R. Brooks and Glenn E. Good, eds, A new handbook of counseling and psychotherapy approaches for men (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), cited in Kupers, ‘Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison’, p. 716.

Zalewski, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–12.

Paul Kirby and Marsha Henry, ‘Rethinking masculinity and practices of violence in conflict settings’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 14: 4, 2012, pp. 445–49; Stern and Zalewski, ‘Feminist fatigue(s)’.

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What Is Toxic Masculinity?

Toxic masculinity is the reason why women do not feel safe in the streets..

Posted March 12, 2021 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

The tragic murder of Sarah Everard this past week sparked conversations about women’s safety, misogyny, and male violence. It is not the first time that our society is alerted to what has been termed "toxic masculinity." There have been many opportunities for discussions and self-reflection recently, particularly with the #MeToo movement a few years ago—and even further back in history, too, with countless feminists and other women speaking up over the years.

Why haven’t we listened yet? Why are there still men who are surprised to hear women’s daily experiences with misogyny? How many more stories of rape, violence, and murder must we face before we confront the roots of toxic masculinity?

Toxic masculinity is the result of a set of strict rules that prescribe what being a man should be. These toxic "man rules" include:

• A man should suffer physical and emotional pain in silence.
• A man shouldn’t seek warmth, comfort, or tenderness.
• A man should only have the emotions of bravery and anger . Any other emotions are weaknesses. Weakness is unacceptable.
• A man shouldn’t depend on anyone. Asking for help is also weak.
• A man should always want to win, whether in sports, work, relationships, or sex .

We don’t have to look far to see traces of toxic masculinity in many men. Why is that? It is not because men are naturally bad people. It is because men were boys who were often taught terrible lessons from a very young age—for example, "boys shouldn’t cry," "boys shouldn’t be sensitive," "boys should defend themselves," "boys shouldn’t want to play with girl’s toys," "boys should be rough," "boys should want to conquer the heart of girls," etc. These are only a few of the very common damaging messages boys grow up to absorb.

The consequence of this kind of messaging is boys becoming men who are emotionally blunt, and who may find it hard to connect with others—particularly their girlfriends or wives, if they're heterosexual. In most cases, these messages will make it difficult for these men to have a good relationship with their partners. But in the worst of cases, it can transform into rage and, unfortunately, murder.

Toxic masculinity doesn’t only kill women. It kills men, too. Within those strict "man rules," men can become desperately unhappy and unable to reach out. Three-quarters of deaths by suicide in England and Wales are men.

If we want to change the world, if we want to stop misogyny, if we want women to be safe in our streets and men to be psychologically healthier, we need to start with how we raise our boys—in every single household, in schools, and in our communities.

It’s a long road to changing our society, but we must start now. Turning a blind eye or not challenging those "man rules" is colluding with them. We must challenge those rules every single time, and then, in time, we may prevent future tragedies.

Silva Neves is a COSRT-accredited and UKCP-registered psychosexual and relationship psychotherapist in London.

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The new crisis of masculinity

What’s the matter with men — and how do we fix it?

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What’s going on with men?

It’s a strange question, but it’s one people are asking more and more, and for good reasons. Whether you look at education or the labor market or addiction rates or suicide attempts , it’s not a pretty picture for men — especially working-class men.

Normally, more attention on a problem is a precursor to solving it. But in this case, for whatever reason, the added awareness doesn’t seem all that helpful. The “masculinity” conversation feels stuck, rarely moving beyond banal observations or reflexive dismissals.

A recent essay by the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba on this topic was different. It was — apologies for the cliché — one of those pieces that “broke through.” Besides being well done, Emba’s treatment of the topic was uncommonly nuanced, which is increasingly hard to do when tackling “controversial” topics.

So I invited Emba onto The Gray Area to talk about the state of men and what she thinks the way forward might look like. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Sean Illing

Worrying about the “state of men,” as you say in your piece, is an old American pastime, so what makes this moment different?

Christine Emba

I think that now we have actual data showing that men do seem to be in a real crisis, and we also have data on how the world has changed. We can all see this in our own lives. Our social structure, our work structure, our economy, has changed really significantly over the past 30 to 40 years. And that necessarily changes how people fit into the world.

A lot of the changes have had a direct effect on men specifically. So we can look at the stats that we have right now about how men are doing, and we see that for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 74 are awarded to men . We know that when you’re looking at deaths of despair, which is a more recent phenomenon, 3 out of 4 of those deaths are males .

And then there are social factors, too. There’s been a change in who the high earners in our society are. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husband or romantic partner. And in 1960, that was fewer than 4 percent of women.

So we’ve seen the economy change in ways that have moved away from the strength jobs, from traditional union jobs and factory and labor jobs that were mostly seen as male jobs and helped promote this idea of the man as the provider who can take care of a whole family on one income. Now it’s more about soft-skilled credentialism and that favors jobs that tend to skew toward women. Because of the feminist movement and women’s advances — which, to be clear, is a great thing — women have entered schools and the economy in force and they’re doing really well. And I think men are beginning to feel a little bit worried and lost in comparison.

Why is this such a difficult problem to talk about, especially for people on the left?

This was actually one of the major inspirations for writing this piece, because I was trying to get at that question, and I even felt as I was working on this piece my own reluctance to attend to it empathetically. I theorize that there are a couple reasons for this.

First of all, justifiably I think, progressives and people on the left want to preserve the gains that have been made for women over the past several decades. The feminist movement and movements for women’s equality are still pretty fragile. We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic that suddenly it was women dropping out of the workforce en masse. It’s really easy, on the left and just in politics generally, to think of things as being zero-sum. So there’s this fear that if we start helping men, then we’ll just have forgotten about women and there won’t be space or time for women anymore. I think that’s a mistake. We should be able to do two things at once. We can recognize that both women and men are members of our society and we should want to help everyone.

I think there’s also something really appealing to someone with a progressive mindset about the idea of gender neutrality, or gender neutrality as an ethos that we should aspire to and avoid making distinctions between men and women or masculine and feminine. We’ve moved in liberal society toward a real ideal of individualization; the idea that there could be one form of masculinity or manhood that’s good risks alienating people who don’t necessarily fit into that box. And then ascribing certain traits to men, especially if they’re positive traits, might create worries that we’re subtracting those traits from women. If we say that men are leaders, does that mean that women are always going to be followers? Or if men are strong, are we actually saying that women are weak? I think there’s a fear of doing that.

Finally, I think there’s a generalized resentment, especially after the Me Too moment — but also after a feminist movement in the 2010s that encouraged a pretty silly and uncritical form of man-hating and misandry where it was cool to be like, Men are trash, men suck. Wouldn’t the world be better without men? What are they even for? It was a feeling that you needed to do this sort of thing to prove your liberal bona fides that you love women enough.

There’s also the fact that because progressives in the mainstream have not really taken up the masculinity question, the people who have taken it up tend to be on the right and often they tend to be problematic figures. You see incels and men’s rights activists and Ben Shapiro burning Barbies, and there’s a fear that if you speak up for men, everyone’s going to be like, You seem too interested in this. Are you one of them? It’s a branding problem.

It’s definitely true that the left, for all of these reasons, has ceded this space to the right and the right has happily filled the vacuum. So what do you see happening with people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate ? These are very different people, I’m not equating them, but they inhabit this space in revealing ways.

It’s a super interesting question. I do think that it’s important to try and draw distinctions here. There’s sort of a spectrum of what I call in the piece “the manfluencers” — a ridiculous word for a ridiculous phenomenon. But there is a range of people who are maybe slightly more benign. I think Jordan Peterson started out as more benign, although he’s gotten fringier since, to people like Andrew Tate, who I think are just straightforwardly bad people. And you have also people like Josh Hawley and Joe Rogan and Bronze Age Pervert and all of these people in between.

I think it’s just factually accurate that conservatives and the right have always been more invested in — and more clear about — gender roles. So it’s almost natural that they have a clearer vision of what manhood is and what men should do. But I think they realize that there was an opening here. Young men especially are looking for role models and realizing that they feel unsure and uncomfortable of their place in the world.

There’s a young man who I interviewed for the piece, who was like, I just want someone to tell me how to be. If the progressive left is like, We’re not going to tell you that, just be a good person, you don’t need rules. And then young men are like, No, I’m really asking you. I really want rules, actually , the right is happy to give them those rules.

If people have an identity as a man or masculine, the right is not going to say it’s toxic and only talk about toxic masculinity. They’re positive about it and they frame it as something that you want to aspire to, that’s actually transgressive and great and historically superior to whatever’s going on today, for better or worse. And being told that your identity is a positive thing, and here’s a road map to how to fulfill it, whether it’s actually good or bad, that something is going to beat out nothing anytime.

I think there’s something earnest about Peterson’s project, or there certainly was, but the Tate phenomenon is different. To me, this is what happens when masculinity becomes steeped in fear and resentment. With Tate, unlike Peterson, there’s no pretension to anything virtuous. It’s just, Hey, the world hates you. The world wants to make you weak, wants to make you soft, so take what you can get, crush your enemies, abuse women, double down on everything they hate about you. It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.

But I still don’t think a lot of people quite understand Tate’s reach. Do you see him as a creature of a very particular moment or do you think he represents something bigger and more enduring?

The Tate phenomenon, as you say, isn’t just about Tate. There’s a whole space with very online figures like Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, who wrote this book, Bronze Age Mindset , that’s become a very conservative phenomenon. I think you’re exactly right. This is a vision of masculinity that’s super basic and sort of tailored to a 15-year-old who doesn’t know any better. It’s all about just shouting and showing off your cars and your women and your money, and that’s what being a man is. It’s very clear: just work out and be mean. It’s simple and it’s superficially appealing because there are a lot of fast cars and pretty girls. And I guess that appeals especially to young men who haven’t thought about it very much.

But I do think, in the absence of better road maps, in the absence of other models, people like Tate present a very clear, visible model. He’s everywhere. You see him everywhere if you’re a kid online. I think that’s also part of what has let him be underestimated. His reach is enormous among younger men, like middle school through high school-aged kids. They’ve all heard of Andrew Tate, to the point that, actually, in Britain, where he’s from, there was a campaign last year where teachers in high schools and middle schools were talking amongst themselves about how to combat Tateism in the classroom because these middle schoolers who had watched Andrew Tate videos were getting up in class and telling their female teachers to shut up, because they don’t listen to women, and that’s what Tate taught them.

His videos spread on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook before he was banned from all of those sites. Fifty-five-year-old dads weren’t necessarily on TikTok, and I think didn’t realize how much reach he had and how much of a hold he had. And the same with all of these online figures who are sort of flying under the radar because they’re online. But I do think it’s important what you point out about their immorality.

Jordan Peterson, and even to some extent the Josh Hawley figures, are saying, Well, it’s good to be a man, but also being a man means being responsible in some way, contributing to society in some way. The Tateist version of masculinity is totally divorced from anything positive. It’s just about defining yourself in opposition to women and taking what you can get. But it’s a clear path and it feels almost transgressive, which I think is part of its appeal because he’s like, Call me toxic. I love being toxic. I am toxic masculinity. To a 15-year-old edgelord, that is aspirational, I guess. But it’s really ugly and it’s not good for society in any way.

What do you think a truly healthy masculinity looks like? You identify three traits in the piece — protector, provider, and procreator — and I know a lot of people will hear that and, not without reason, immediately think of the patriarchy of yesterday. Do you think that’s a mistake?

Another great question. Even when I was writing the piece, I was wrestling with my reluctance to try and define masculinity or cheer on masculinity too much and my belief that we actually need to do just that. One of the things about the piece that seemed to strike a lot of people was the fact that I admitted that I like men. I want them to be happy. And I also do think that there is something distinctive that one could call manhood or masculinity that is a different thing than womanhood or femininity.

So you pulled out the concepts of protector, provider, procreator, and I got those from the anthropologist, David Gilmore, who did this cross-country study a couple decades ago looking at what it meant to be a man in all of these different groups across several continents. He found out that almost every society did have a concept of masculinity that was distinctive from just being male. It was something that you earned and was also distinctive from being female. It had to do with being someone who protected the people around you in your community, who provided in some way for your family. That often looked like not just providing, but creating surplus in some ways and sharing that with others. And then there was the idea that procreating, having a family, was what being a successful male looked like.

In our modern moment, I think that can look like a lot of different things. In my essay, there’s a callout where I ask people to write in and tell me about their ideal of masculinity. When I think about masculinity myself, there are a couple of attributes that seem to come up a lot, and it’s stuff like strength used well and responsibility, performing your duties, looking out for people who are weaker than you.

The pushback that I get very often when I talk about this is what I was saying earlier, people are like, Why do you have to say that’s being a good man? Why is leadership or ambition or adventurousness a male trait? Aren’t women leaders? And of course, yes, but I do think that being a good person is not a clear enough road map. It’s not a strong enough, clear enough norm, and that’s what younger people especially are looking for.

I think what it means to be a good person is in some ways tied to your embodiment, to your human form as a male person or a female person. For instance, [younger] men tend to be — though not always — much stronger than the average woman or old person. So being a good person, if that is your embodiment, necessarily means thinking about what that says about your responsibilities. What do you do with that strength?

Richard Reeves, who wrote the book Of Boys and Men , talks about how masculinity and femininity, or male and female, overlap a lot. But on the far ends of the spectrum, there are very big differences, and that tends to be where our definitions of male and female come from.

It’s true that you can’t talk about masculinity and femininity without acknowledging some differences between the sexes. And yet, that acknowledgment is utterly compatible with the reality that much of what we call gender is a performance, is a cultural construct. And I don’t know why we seem unable to avoid this zero-sum trap. You see this in lots of other cultures where there’s a respect for the masculine and feminine ideal. There’s no zero-sum relationship. These are poles at opposite ends of the continuum, and possessing virtues at both ends of the spectrum is seen as wise and healthy. I don’t know why we can’t do that.

America really likes extremes. I think we like things that are very clear-cut and we’re used to seeing things that way and seeing them used to marginalize people or somehow denigrate people who don’t fit the exact norms. I think people who think of themselves as good progressives and liberals really don’t want to do that, and so shy away from espousing norms because they might leave someone out. And I understand that. But for the people who are asking for a road map, who want to be told who to be, just saying B e whoever you want to be, but be a good one is just not helpful.

There’s also an age factor here and I noticed this in the responses to the piece. There were older men who would write in and say, What’s the problem? I’m a man, I feel great about it. I don’t see the issue. That’s great for you, but for young people, who don’t have that much life experience, who are trying to figure out who to be, having some kind of norm or ideal, even if it’s loose, can be helpful. And then as you grow older and you get life experience and you figure out how you fit in the world, you make the norm up for yourself. But they’re looking for a starting point.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here , and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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The Issue of Toxic Masculinity Essay

Toxic masculinity is the sum of values and behaviors that are traditionally viewed as “masculine” in many cultures and includes several crucial characteristics that allow calling it toxic. First of all, toxic masculinity suppresses feelings and refuses to display them because it is viewed as a sign of weakness (Salam, 2019). Secondly, it requires a man to maintain the appearance of hardness and toughness at all times so that no one could doubt his manhood (Salam, 2019). Additionally, toxic masculinity views aggression and violence as a sign of power and the main grounds to decide whether someone is worthy of respect (Salam, 2019). Finally, it is also related to misogynistic views: while it praises supposedly male characteristics, such as toughness, it also despises supposedly womanly qualities, such as emotionality or concern for others (Baldoni, 2017). Put together, these qualities can harm those around a man who believes in toxic masculinity. Moreover, they can harm such a man himself because they make him more likely to get into trouble or on the receiving end of disciplinary action.

Eddie Carbone may serve as an example of toxic masculinity, which does him much harm by the end of the play. He convinces himself that Rodolfo does not truly love Catherine because he thinks that openly displaying one’s love for a woman as unmanly – therefore, it must be a trick. In this sense, Eddie demonstrates a disregard for emotions typical for toxic masculinity (Salam, 2019). He does not care about what Catherine wants for herself, showing the toxic masculine disregard for women (Baldoni, 2017). He tries to physically dominate Rodolfo under the pretext of teaching him to box – and, as such, use violence and aggression to assume his power (Salam, 2019). Finally, he attacks Marco with a knife, demanding that he would clear his name, even though Marco has already proven to be stronger (Salam, 2019). It suggests that appearing tough and uncompromising in matters of honor is more important for Eddie than the actual chances of winning a fight against Marco. As a result, Eddie’s fate by the end of the play is a clear illustration of how toxic masculinity can be dangerous and harmful.

Baldoni, J. (2017). Why I’m done trying to be “man enough” [Video]. TED.

Salam, M. (2019). What is toxic masculinity? The New York Times.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Masculinity — Of Monsters And Men: Challenging Toxic Masculinity

Of Monsters and Men: Challenging Toxic Masculinity

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Guest Essay

Ethan Crumbley’s Parents Were Just Part of a Much Bigger Problem

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.

James and Jennifer Crumbley never anticipated that their then-15-year-old son, Ethan, would use the 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun Mr. Crumbley had bought — ostensibly as an early Christmas present — to kill four students at a Michigan high school. At least that’s the argument their lawyers made in court before Ms. Crumbley, last month, and Mr. Crumbley, almost two weeks ago, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter in separate trials. Prosecutors argued that the Crumbleys did not do enough to secure the gun and ignored warning signs that Ethan was planning to use it.

After every mass shooting by a teenager at a school, there is an instinct to look to the shooter’s parents to understand what went wrong. In the case of the Crumbleys, this seems obvious: Ethan left disturbing journal entries fantasizing about shooting up the school, and stating that he had asked his parents for help with his mental health issues but didn’t get it. His father said the family had a gun safe but the safe’s combination was the default factory setting, 0-0-0.

One factor that’s gotten less attention, however, is how the Crumbleys’ attitudes and actions reflect an increasingly insidious gun culture that treats guns as instruments of defiance and rebellion rather than as a means of last resort.

I’ve been thinking about this case a lot because I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s in a rural part of the Deep South where almost everyone I knew had guns in the house, unsecured, and mental illness was stigmatized and often went untreated. Church was considered a superior venue for counseling, and only “crazy” people sought professional help. If the evidence for criminal negligence is a failure to lock up a gun and ignoring signs of mental illness, many of the adults I grew up around would have been (and still would be) vulnerable to the same charges as the Crumbleys.

It’s convenient and comforting for many people to believe that if it had been their child, they’d have prevented this tragedy. But prison visiting rooms are full of good, diligent parents who never thought their kid would be capable of landing there.

My parents didn’t own a gun safe, but kept guns hidden away from us, which, like many gun owners at the time, they thought of as “secured.” The men in my family were all hunters and the guns they kept were hunting rifles, not AR-15s. (You can’t feed a family with deer meat that’s been blown to bits.) I knew my parents kept a handgun, too, but it was never shown to us, or treated as a shiny new toy.

Gun culture was different then. It would have never occurred to my parents to acquire an entire arsenal of guns and display them prominently around the house, as some people now do, or ludicrously suggest that Jesus Christ would have carried one . They did not, as more than a few Republican politicians have done, send out Christmas photos of their children posing with weapons designed explicitly to kill people at an age when those children likely still believed Santa existed. Open carry was legal, but if you were to walk into the local barbecue joint with a semiautomatic rifle on your back emblazoned with fake military insignia, people would think you were creepy and potentially dangerous, not an exemplar of masculinity and patriotism.

All of these things happen now with regularity, and they’re considered normal by gun owners who believe that any kind of control infringes on their Second Amendment rights. Children are introduced at a young age to guns like the Sig Sauer that Ethan Crumbley used. They’re taught to view guns as emblematic of freedom and the right to self-defense — two concepts that have been expanded to include whatever might justify unlimited accumulation of weapons.

“Freedom” is short for not being told what to do, even though the law very much dictates how and when guns should be used. “Self-defense” is often talked about as a justifiable precaution in the event of home invasion, though home invasions are as rare as four-leaf clovers and do not require an arsenal unless the invader is a small army. (It’s also worth noting that basic home security systems are far less expensive than many popular guns, which suggests that at the very least, some gun owners may be intentionally opting for the most violent potential scenario.) Most important, too many children are taught that guns confer power and can and should be used to intimidate other people. (Relatedly, any time I write about gun control, at least one gun owner emails to say he’d love to shoot me, which is not exactly evidence of responsible gun ownership.)

Mass shooters often begin with a grievance — toward certain populations, individuals they feel wronged by, society at large — and escalate their behavior from fantasizing about violence to planning actual attacks. A study from 2019 suggests that feeling inadequate may make gun owners more inclined toward violence. In the study, gun owners were given a task to perform and then told that they failed it. Later they were asked a number of questions, including whether they would be willing to kill someone who broke into their home, even if the intruder was leaving. “We found that the experience of failure increased participants’ view of guns as a means of empowerment,” wrote one researcher , “and enhanced their readiness to shoot and kill a home intruder.”

The study hypothesized that these gun owners “may be seeking a compensatory means to interact more effectively with their environment.”

Good parents model healthy interactions all the time. If their kids are struggling with a sense of inferiority or are having trouble dealing with failure, we teach them self-confidence and resilience. Parents who treat guns as a mechanism for feeling more significant and powerful are modeling an extremely dangerous way to interact with their environment.

What’s particularly hypocritical here is that the most strident defenders of this culture skew conservative and talk a lot about what isn’t appropriate for children and teenagers. What they think is inappropriate often includes educating kids about sex, about the fact that some people are gay or transsexual and about racism. It’s a perverse state of affairs: Exposing children to simple facts is dangerous, but exposing them to machines designed to kill is not. You can’t get your driver’s license until you’re a teenager, or buy cigarettes and alcohol until you’re 21, but much earlier than that, kids can, with adult supervision, legally learn how to end someone’s life.

Parents can’t ensure that their child won’t ever feel inferior or disempowered, or even in some cases become delusional or filled with rage. Teenagers do things that their parents would never anticipate every day, even if they’re close and communicative. Some develop serious drug habits or become radicalized into extremism or take their own lives.

One thing parents can ensure is that their children cannot get access to a gun in their house. The only foolproof way to do that is to ensure that there’s no gun in the house to begin with. Barring that, parents can make sure they are not reinforcing a toxic gun culture that says that displaying and threatening to use lethal machines is a reasonable way to deal with anger or adversity. That message makes the idea of killing someone seem almost ordinary.

That doesn’t prevent school shooters; it primes them.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.

Source photographs by CSA-Printstock and John Storey, via Getty Images.

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I quit my tech job to be a stay-at-home boyfriend who cooks, cleans, and sews for my girlfriend. I have no plans to return to the 9 to 5.

• William Conrad, 25, and his girlfriend Levi Coralynn, 26, have been together for three years. 
• Conrad is a stay-at-home-boyfriend, while Coralynn, a content creator, supports them financially. 
• Conrad previously worked in tech but has no plans to return.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with William Conrad, a 25-year-old stay-at-home boyfriend and content creator from Canada. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

For the last three years, I've been a stay-at-home boyfriend. I cook, clean, and do the laundry — and I've never been happier.

My girlfriend Levi is big on social media and makes enough to provide for us both financially. She works from home, and I do 90% of the domestic chores. Our dynamic very much flips societal norm on its head, but it works for us, and we love it.

On a typical day I wake up a little earlier than Levi to make us some coffee. We usually share a coffee, hang out for a while, and do Wordle together. Then, she'll do some work while I either prepare food or do other household chores. If we're not ready to eat, I might do some work on the computer alongside her.

Since she works from home, we pretty much spend every minute of every day together, which I love because she's my best friend before anything else.

We lead a very communal life, and that applies to how we navigate money too. We've never had the perspective of "this is my money, this is your money." It's very much a joint venture, and most of our purchases are done together anyway.

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I help with the backend of her business, doing the accounts and bookkeeping, just as much as I do things around the house.

Being a stay-at-home boyfriend allows me to do what I love

Levi and I met on Hinge around three years ago when we were living in different cities. I was living in Toronto, near where I grew up, while she was in Alberta. We started talking online and knew we needed to meet in person, so she came to see me in Toronto.

Our first date was a week long and we stayed in an Airbnb . Shortly after that, we moved in together in Ontario, and we've been together ever since.

Growing up, I didn't have a strong sense of what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to sit in an office all day looking at a monitor. I've always liked creating things and working with my hands. But I ended up studying computer science at college and then found a job at a tech startup .

When I met Levi, I was doing freelance jobs here and there, and some more consistent stuff in the tech world. She was deep into her career as a content creator and needed help running her online business. She thought I'd be the perfect fit and asked if I would work for her. So I quit my job and became a full-time stay-at-home-boyfriend.

It wasn't that I didn't enjoy my job, but this was just a greener pasture that I could step toward. It was an opportunity that was better suited to me, I think, in the long run. I was really into cooking and sewing before I even met Levi, and this meant I could focus on those interests more and hone my skills.

I have no plans to return to the 9-to-5 and would only do so if our online businesses stopped working.

I started posting online to show the world a softer type of masculinity

In August 2022, I started posting snippets of my life on TikTok. My videos mainly showcase the meals I cook for Levi, but sometimes it's me braiding her hair, hemming her clothes, or fixing things around the house. I'm soft-spoken and have a gentle manner, and the comments from my mainly female audience have been overwhelmingly positive. These are all things I do anyway, but it was Levi's idea to share it with the world.

It was around the time that Andrew Tate , the anti-feminist influencer, was really popular, and there was an oversaturation of toxic masculinity online. We saw this need and an opportunity to present a kind, loving man in the online space. One thing I'm very proud of is showing the duality a man can have. I have both feminine and masculine characteristics, but I'm still a man.

I was raised in a very nurturing household where both my parents worked and split the domestic tasks evenly. Everyone contributed to the household, and gender was never tied to a specific role, so living this way has never affected my sense of masculinity.

Social media is giving young men a skewed image of what women want

Women often comment things like "Where do I buy mine?" on my content. And while it's always nice to hear that someone thinks I'm a good boyfriend, it's also sad that a loving dynamic seems to be a scarce thing.

Lots of women are looking for a man who will cook them a nice meal and be gentle, but maybe not enough men value these things.

I think toxic masculinity on social media might be giving young men and boys a skewed perspective of what women want. I hope to inspire other men to lean into their feminine traits more without feeling like it threatens their manhood.

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