LogFAQs > #965184704

adjl posted...

When somebody talks about "white cars," do you interpret that to be a suggestion that cars are inherently white, or do you interpret that to mean they're discussing a specific subset of cars that are white?

If someone was talking about a bad bowl of cereal and and they called it toxic cereal, I'd wonder what the fuck is wrong with them, cereal isn't toxic. If you're talking about cars, and you talk about "toxic cars", I'd assume you were talking about something about cars that is toxic in some context. If you referred to toxic women, I would assume you're talking about women as a whole as toxic without futher context. The adjective you use is key, you can't use something as definitive as colour the same way as something as subjective as toxicity.

adjl posted...

You could, but the scope of such issues is so narrow that you're better off referring to them specifically instead of using blanket terms, particularly where any discussion on the subject is generally going to involve more than just what rapists expect of women.

That paints an interesting image. The idea of rape culture being able to be described as toxic femininity, and yet it's a term that is essentially only used as a retort and claimed to not even exist by some. Very suspicious that there's only one element of toxic femininity that does get referenced, and that reference doesn't needlessly bring in gender.

adjl posted...

By contrast, many of the ideas that fall under the umbrella of "toxic masculinity" very explicitly identify themselves as being part of a social ideal of masculinity. "Real men shouldn't need therapy" is immediately and unmistakably established as being an ideal for men to ascribe to. It clearly belongs to a broader issue of promoting unhealthy behaviours for the sake of achieving some arbitrary ideal of "masculinity," which means a blanket term that amounts to "promoting unhealthy behaviours for the sake of achieving some arbitrary ideal of masculinity" is completely appropriate.

Really, though, it all falls into the larger problem of gendering basic behavioural standards. Ultimayely, toxic behaviours are toxic no matter what sort of genitalia are attached to them, and good behaviours are similarly good for everyone. Trying to use gender norms to justify bad behaviour or discourage good behaviour is just plain stupid.

I'd say it's pretty stupid to bring in gender at all in the term "toxic masculinity" for precisely the same reason, it is gendering behaviours which is completely unnecessary for engaging with the problem. As you say, toxic behaviours are toxic no matter what. So when the intent is call out toxic behaviour, what is the benefit of gendering the language?

adjl posted...

It's more the specific examples I gave. "Men shouldn't spend time with their kids" would be both misandrist and an example of toxic masculinity. "Men don't need to learn to solve problems non-aggressively," however, is just the latter. Most of what falls under the umbrella of "toxic femininity" is more of a direct attack on women and their place in the world (so "misogyny" is appropriate), whereas quite a lot of toxic masculinity amounts to giving boys and men a free pass to behave badly instead of directly attacking them. That free pass often does harm men in the long run, but that's too indirect to really call it "misandry."

The distinction isn't gendered, it's a matter of the sorts of attitudes and behaviours that make up the respective concepts.

I don't see how that isn't also misandrist. Being dismissive or patronising of men isn't not misandry because it's not aggressive, it's equally devaluing of men's autonomy and humanity. Treating women as incompetent or emotionally unstable is very much misogyny, and we rightly call it out as such. I don't see a point where such things can be delineated.

adjl posted...

Sure they are. The pay gap is perhaps the most notorious one, particularly the way that it's so consistently handwaved with "women just work in lower-paying fields" and "women just don't try as hard to get promotions or negotiate their salaries" instead of asking why women don't seek promotions and choose to work in lower-paying fields en masse. You cite outliers as being the basis for considering men to be advantaged, but stop there instead of asking why almost all of those outliers are men (and there are absolutely enough outliers for that to be statistically significant).

Here's the rub; it's not a hand wave in any way, it's directly responding to the claims, and rather than you showing data on why women aren't seeking promotions or choosing to work in lower-paying fields, you handwave the existing research. Just as data was used to refute the pay gap, people are perfectly happy to use the data to debate the whys too, but it's your cause, your activism, it's on you to bring forward evidence to your initial claim. Please do bring data on the whys for men occupying the very top too, I'd love to see that, at least it would be fresh debate. But I'm pretty comfortable in my assumptions why, so I'm not going to be swayed without data.

adjl posted...

Past that, we've already covered women being 3 times more likely to attempt suicide in this topic. Women are significantly more likely to be the victims of sexual assault or harassment, particularly in professional contexts.

Yup, and the neat thing about crime is that it pretty much exclusively occupies the extremes of people. The most poor, the most sociopathic, the most depressed, the least restrained, the least safe. I'd say that willingness to do these things are typically signs of detachment from society, and thus less subject to gender norms.

It may suggest that, what with how testosterone works with sense of justifice, men at the edges who are sexually deprived (read: incels) are more hormonally driven to violate other people's autonomy to achieve their percieved "fairness" and women at the edges, being subject to more cortisol, are more likely to turn to self-harm and shutting down.

I believe these aren't issues that are easily ascribed to either social expectations or pressure. They're also not factors that have any meaning to those still operating within social bounds as people in a more healthy state are much more able to operate in their conscious self. Hormones have a much smaller share of influence in their decisions when in a basic social model, being as we are social animals.