Blog 2: Manic Men

Jake Majaury

With the ever-expanding control the internet gets every day the more common it becomes in our lives, the more problems it seems to create. I’m of course talking about the Andrew Tate era of the internet. Masculinity has always been a very hot topic of debate, the fundamentals of masculinity have been changed, flipped, and reversed all throughout the beginning of time. There’s been a regression in progress toward making everyone fit their own definition of what it means to be masculine because of the rise of toxic masculinity. We’ll explore this idea looking at male aggression, why one might be toxic towards others, and some ways we could potentially mend this void of compassion/acceptance with the help of the different mediums that have come out revolving these ideas.

Taking out your anger on people is not a healthy form of expressing yourself.  Aggression has always coincided with masculinity, whether it’s on the more major scale of world wars resolved by death or just a scuffle to win over a pretty lady at the bar. Michael Kimmel touches on this a lot in his short story “Masculinity as Homophobia”, explaining the perfect example of this with the original expression of having a chip on your shoulder, being a guy balancing wood on his shoulder until someone decided to fight him. Men feel the need to express themselves through acts of violence and Kimmel is very much aware of it being one of the biggest things he addresses. Even when he wrote in 1994, he could sense a form of regression with the sentence “Manhood is equated with power-over woman, over other men”. Although in all fairness we’ve become more accepting since 1994 we still aren’t perfect, and with the rise of these toxic masculinity representatives, it’s starting to see a drop in progress. He says that manhood is equated with power over everyone which ties into the misogynistic and homophobic topics that have been surfacing even after all the campaigns and positive protests that have been conducted over the last few decades. An example of some more extreme aggression is in the video “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” by Vice News we see that someone from the white nationalist group drove their car into a big group of protestors injuring and killing some. Vice even talked about the incident with the leader of the movement who didn’t see it as a problem, it also didn’t help that former president Trump criticized both sides, I won’t get political even though that’s a crazy thing to say especially at such a high and influential position. The huge protest in Charlottesville shows similarities to problems of toxic masculinity that we’re discussing now, obviously racism and homophobia are not excluded to just men, but we see a trend. To really solve some of these problems it’s important to understand how they are started.

We must cut off the issues of extreme behaviors linked to toxic masculinity at the source. Super “macho” men have swarmed to social media to try to give their own take on masculinity and spread some very dated ideals that follow the trend of racism, sexism, and homophobia into the minds of impressionable boys who might be searching for some sense of purpose or community. The best example of this was in the documentary “Inside Incel” done by CBC, they dove into the world of men who turned to a life of misogyny and crime in some cases due to a sense of loneliness and neglect, these extremist/toxic groups are formed of the shared experience of neglect and being turned down almost as if the world has turned a shoulder. All these people that share a similar experience and negative feeling towards some groups or people can result in a lot of trouble which we’ve seen many examples such as the Alek Minassian situation that occurred a couple years back. The same thing is happening with the whole Hustlers University which targeted a similar demographic of young men on the internet. The big problem with all of this (apart from all the homophobia, racism, and sexism) is how much of a voice people have gained just by proclaiming ideas of toxic masculinity, very extreme cases leading to people turning to violence. Now that we have an idea of where these groups have begun and the many problems, they’ve created we need to explore some possible solutions.

                  Fixing the problem is the hardest part of any aspect of life. Everything starts to look like nails when you’re a hammer, it may be a bit of a corny saying, but it holds some truth here. Violence is not the answer to everything, people get a sense of power when they put down others in this case hammering in the defenceless nails. We learned to talk, we learned to write, and if we just communicated our problems so many issues would leave us all breathing. Will James proposes useful solutions in his talk “Online Influencers, Toxic Masculinity, and the Classroom”. The first thing he preached was creating a safe environment for children in school and properly educating them on masculinity and how too much of one thing is never good. He believes that while we may not be able to cut the problems off at the source in the near future it’s important to educate the younger generations in class and have them all sign a “contract” that promises they will treat all equally and respect the codes of the class. With his methods, we’re sure to create a safer future for the younger generations that might be able to tackle these problems with new resources. Issues such as the Charlottesville protest and the incel epidemic discussed in previous paragraphs are exactly what James promotes in his idea for safe learning environments for young students to learn and develop ideas of the negative expressions of violence created through toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity has caused a regression in accepting everyone’s own definition of masculinity. We see this with the constant aggression coming from men, the roots of masculine toxicity, and then the ways how we can fix this. The world we live in is a world full of hate and anger, but that’s not permanent, there’s a future where we learn to live with one another without clawing at our own people’s eyes, it just takes a little work.

Kimmel, Michael. Masculinity as Homophobia. 1994.

 Charlottesville: Race and Terror. YouTube, Vice News, 14 Aug. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P54sP0Nlngg&t=5s. Accessed 28 Mar. 2022.

Inside Incel, CBC, The Fifth Estate, 27 Jan. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqWjCHPg9gA. Accessed 25 Sept. 2023.

 James, Will, Online Influencers, Toxic Masculinity, and the Classroom, Vanier College, March 5, 2024