Was just listening to a Swedish podcast. It was about gender studies and thereby also toxic masculinity. He made the argument that toxic masculinity is just the newest version of original sin. Sounds plausible. He compared gender studies with the Christian idea that man is inherently evil, and we need to repent. Since men are part of a structural oppression, anything we do is automatically part of the oppression. So there's no way a man (or white man) can't oppress. Which is why we're often encouraged to take a step back and become passive.
It explains why we think the concept of toxic masculinity is so alluring. I've always maintained that when we stopped being Christian and became atheists, we just replaced Christian functions with secular versions of the same, and then just continued as before. So this theory about toxic masculinity/original sin, certainly fits my view of the (secular'ish) world. It also explains why Gender Studies so often comes across as a cult/religion, rather than academic discipline. Because they always know in advance what the result of their research will be.
I'm not saying this is true, or true in all cases. But I think it made a lot of sense.
Thoughts?
Sounds like this person doesn't know much about religion, human beings, or valid analogies.
The only similarity between Christianity's original sin and "toxic masculinity" is that they both have very broadly to do with "harmful" actions, but as evaluated from completely different, largely conflicting, ethical systems.
In fact, masculinity itself has more in common with religious ideas in genesis than does the concept of toxic masculinity.
The idea of original sin, like everything else in Genesis and most of the Bible is all about promoting an unequal authoritarian hierarchy, and declaring that anything the breaks that chain of command is "a sin". It establishes God's command (no matter how seemingly arbitrary) to be law, and establishes that just as God rules over man, man is to rule over woman. Man doomed himself to be cast out of the garden b/c he broke both of those chains of command, allowing himself to talked into something by a lowly woman, and then to break command of God not to eat the fruit. IOW, the masculine did not rule over the feminine as it "should" and that led to man's downfall. That's a less both out of the Bible and just about every antifeminist handbook on how to be a "real man".
Note that contrary to the naturalistic fallacy that right wingers love to fall for, masculinity as it manifests in society is not simply man's natural state. It is as much as concept as is toxic masculinity. There are biological differences in the biology and psychology of males and females, but how those get accentuated, heightened, and manifested in specific behaviors is the result of socialization and culture.
Without that socialization (e.g., if males and females were treated identically), the gap would be smaller and most men would be less "masculine" relative to today and especially the recent past. In societies that seek to create more black-white gender norms, the traits are more typical of each sex become the expected norm, with a kind of competition in which more and more extreme versions are rewarded and deemed the "true" manifestation of that gender. That means that what would be an extreme outlier in these traits (and extreme outliers in biological traits are often dysfunctional) becomes the typical "average" toward which each gender is pushed.
So along comes feminism, which is only partly academic but in large part inherently political and moralistic, meaning that it has an a-scientific agenda to change the state of society based upon ethical preferences that women being treated as inherently inferior sucks.
Toxic masculinity is a lot like the concept of "drug abuse", there is some objectively valid concepts underlying it related to real objective damage that it can do (mostly to the females around the person in the case of toxic masculinity), but also both concepts contain an ethical value judgment that those consequences are to be avoided and thus that level of either masculinity or drugs is toxic or abuse.
This applies to gender studies as well, where the academic pursuit of factual knowledge about sex and gender is at most a tool sometimes used toward the real goal of political and social change. I have yet to see a gender studies department where activism wasn't highly prevalent, and many such departments make it very explicit, such as at Cornnel who in the first sentence of their homepage for their Gender Studies program states that all the academic study within the program is "with the purpose of promoting social justice".
The undergraduate degree requires a capstone project where "You will be encouraged to take part in activism as part of the gender studies program."
This is why the research often lacks scientific rigor, because it is usually going outside the bounds of science to reach ethical judgments rather than just factual conclusions. The conclusion that "toxic masculinity leads to bad outcome X" is somewhat of a tautology, because the label "toxic" presupposes that it is harmful and leads to bad outcomes. So, it isn't that gender studies are "religion" but that they are academics in the service of political change, and part of what it is seeking to change is the ideology of masculinity reflected in things like patriarchal religions and Genesis.
While all activism must go beyond the relevant science (b/c it requires ethical premises), activism does not need to go against science or to make up "facts". Where gender studies sometimes goes wrong is overplaying it's constructs, such as allowing the concept of "toxic masculinity" to cover too much conceptual ground and incorporate male tendencies that cannot reasonably be deemed "toxic", or trying to use the concept as an explanation for outcomes it cannot be causally linked to.
When it comes to rape, the problem isn't that toxic masculinity isn't relevant, but that it almost a tautology. When it comes to forms of sexual assault involving physical threats and force, a mix of tendencies towards violent aggression, misogyny, and a desire to sexually dominate and control women are clearly factors if not almost logical necessities to engage in such actions. For example, unless you a full-blown sociopath lacking brain functions for basic empathy, it doesn't seem psychologically possible to threaten a women with violence if she doesn't let you fuck her, unless you hate her and devalue her humanity. And if she is largely a stranger to you, then you can't feel that way toward her unless you just generally feel that way about women (aka misogyny).
Since those traits are pretty much definition features of the concept of "toxic masculinity", then toxic masculinity isn't really a cause so much as a label for the collection of related factors that combined to cause the event.
