Toxic Masculinity and Friendships

What does “toxic masculinity” mean to you? How does it feel and manifest?

I was caught off guard the other day when a friend asked me those deceptively simple questions. Toxic masculinity is a concept I thought I had a firm grasp of, and I believe I do in the abstract, but I don't try very often to put my lived experience of it into words. After taking some time to think about it, these are the thoughts I shared with her:

My personal experience with toxic masculinity has been pervasive and subtle.

I’ve steered clear of men who are stereotypically toxically masculine and who treat everything as some form of conquest. It’s felt easy, from the outside, to identify which actions are and are not motivated by toxic masculinity. But when it comes to myself, and the friendships I’ve made, it’s finely mixed in with my worries and my sorrows, my life and my identity.

I don’t perceive the specific actions of myself and the men in my life as toxic masculinity. Not to say that they never are, I just don’t perceive it because I'm too close to my own emotions and intentions. I only see it when larger patterns emerge that remind me how deep rooted it is in our culture and how conscientious I need to strive to be.

I was a sensitive child but I was very lucky.

I don’t remember adults in my life telling me to “man up” or try to steer my interests in traditionally masculine directions. I grew up around remarkable girls and women and wasn’t taught to think of femininity as an Other. The need to be “manly” never loomed very large in my life.

Even so, middle school through college, I felt toxic masculinity calcify inside me in spite of myself.

Over thousands of small instances, normal moments accumulatively turn into something more: I wonder if I was too sincere or I try to laugh off something that bothered me. These are human, universal experiences, but they're also societal cues. Society, most of the time, is so pervasive and big that it feels like a backdrop of white noise.

Toxic masculinity manifests in my friendships.

The men I’ve befriended are considerate, earnest, open minded people. We’ve made each other laugh and have deep intellectual conversations. One thing that these relationships are usually not is emotionally vulnerable. That isn’t for a lack of trying. I’ve even broached the subject with men about this exact thing before. It is, on an unspoken and subconscious level, something that is never completely absent.

It's a factor in my friendships with women too. I've experienced a greater willingness from women to do emotional labor for their friends. I'm always self conscious of the fact that I'm more confessional with women than I am with men. It's not innately harmful but it is imbalanced and unfair if that becomes the defining reason for a friendship.

This isn't to say that my friendships are toxic.

On the contrary, my friendship's defining features are that they make me a better and more fulfilled person. But relationships take work and the periphery always holds a little darkness. Our friendships don't exist outside of the culture we live in, and even our closet relationships, especially those relationships, are expressive of societal struggles, even if only in indirect ways. That's a context that can't and shouldn't be ignored. Factors such as internalized toxic masculinity, however seemingly distant, cast long shadows.

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Thank you to my friend for asking about this. I'd never been asked about it so straightforwardly before. It got a lot more fleshed out and verbose as I wrote it but this was essentially my answer. There's a lot more to say but I'll leave it there for now.