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LAST UPDATE | 1 Apr
MY LATE DEAR mother, Colette Redmond, was born in Dublin in 1919, the year that the first female MP, Nancy (Viscountess) Astor, entered the Westminster Parliament (then the seat of power in Ireland and Britain), and the year after (some, privileged) women first won the vote.
Inevitably, in that turbulent era, she was well acquainted with hardship (her mother had started life in a tenement in Gardiner Street) and conflict, especially in the Civil and Great Wars, and she became the archetypal ‘independent’ woman with robust opinions. She was also a formidable activist in the realm of unmarried mothers (as she herself had been in the 1950s) but, curiously, the only true grievance I ever heard her utter was in relation to the opportunities afforded to girls.
Like all the mothers I knew as a boy, I remember her indignation at the ‘unfairness’ with which women were treated in Ireland, from obligatory resignation from the civil service if they got married, to the men-only golf clubs, and she routinely rehearsed the mantra that it was a ‘man’s world’. Mind you, she loved the company of men, and much of the stuff that she – and her girlfriends – came out with was the banter to be expected in the eternal Battle of the Sexes.
While my mother was an impassioned believer in fairness, I can’t help but think that she’d be astonished and concerned at how far the pendulum has swung the other way now and how ‘gendered’ roles are reversed.
I think she’d have been anxious about her grandson, in a world in which — according to countless online and mainstream media articles — men are ‘lost and confused’, and a ‘crisis’ is engulfing modern masculinity. And I’m sure she’d have been profoundly exercised by the recent widely acclaimed Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, in which a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, is arrested and eventually found guilty of the murder of a girl in his class at school, Katie.
The ‘thesis’ of Adolescence is that a much-loved son is driven to stab his classmate to death by a poisonous mixture online — and then offline — of cyberbullying, ‘incel culture’ and weaponised ‘misogyny’. It has been described as ‘a masterclass in televisual storytelling’ and ‘a searing viewing experience that scars’, and it is a brilliant portrayal of teenage male emotional immaturity.
But I’m not convinced that it addresses the real driver of intensifying male rage, which is the now-widespread perception that boys’ hopes, dreams and feelings are increasingly the object of scorn, and the very essence of their being — their masculinity, in its myriad manifestations — is demonised as fundamentally ‘toxic’.
The term ‘toxic masculinity’ was first coined in 1990 by a gentle ex-army chaplain, teacher and farmer, Shepherd Bliss, who was one of the gurus of the ‘men’s movement’ in America in the late 20th century. He wanted men to devote more time and thought to their relationships with other men, their children, and women, as well as to sexual equality and to taking better care of their health, because if they did, “society as a whole would almost certainly be transformed for the better.”
He came up with the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ to describe the sort of men (like his own military father) who were authoritarian, emotionally distant, and often absent. Their male offspring developed an insatiable and unrealistic need to ‘prove their masculinity’ (often violently), specifically due to the absence of a devoted father figure.
This idea of toxic masculinity seems to have ‘caught on’ as a result of the widely published writings of family therapists, like Frank Pittman and Steve Biddulph, in the late 1990s. It then spread into the arena of academic and political policy debate when it was suggested (for instance, in a 1999 testimony to the US House Judiciary Committee inquiry) that ‘toxic masculinity’ might be a major factor in the growing epidemic of mass shootings, like that in the Columbine school massacre.
In the initial aftermath of that inquiry, people like Don Eberly, the founder of the US National Fatherhood Initiative, promoted ‘engaged, mature’ fathering as an antidote to toxic masculinity and its manifestations. Then, subsequently, in the early years of this century, the concept of toxic masculinity started to be used in social science discourse to describe ‘marginalised’ males, especially those in prison, and an American psychiatrist, Terry Kupers, defined it as ‘the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia and wanton violence’.
The phrase steadily permeated academic social science but, as Dr Carol Harrington, a New Zealand sociologist specialising in sexual violence politics, explained in a 2024 GQ article (‘The Strange History of “Toxic” Masculinity’) use of the phrase exploded around the time of the #MeToo movement and the first Trump presidency, when it was widely deployed as a “term of abuse for… powerful men we somehow can’t get away from”. Thereafter, the expression was employed by undergraduates, academics, journalists, politicians, the American Psychological Association, consumer brands such as Gillette, and activists on all sides in an essentially indiscriminate manner.
A cursory glance at the online ‘literature’ indicates that the term is routinely misinterpreted and offensive to many men and — in the absence of a universally agreed definition — Dr Harrington concedes that it is a ‘shorthand’ way to describe a problem that is very real, but specific to some individuals, and not an inherent or universal attribute of every male. ‘Ultimately,’ as the article in GQ puts it, ‘toxic masculinity is a metaphor, not a scientific theory’ for aggressive, domineering males, and while such types will always be around, careless use of the label is positively unhelpful.
Arguably, the most sensible Irish online advice comes from Spunout: ‘For some people, toxic masculinity can be a sensitive subject, or even taken as an insult. However, the phrase… is not meant as an insult to a person or to a group… (but) it is used to describe certain ‘masculine’ behaviours that can be harmful both to others and to men themselves.’
In fact, I think that we have a huge and underappreciated problem in the Western world of ‘Toxic Anti-Masculinity’. This is a sort of inversion of the misogyny that prevailed in the 19th century, when ‘hysteria’ — a uniquely feminine ‘ungovernable emotional excess’ (first attributed by the ancient Egyptians to a ‘wandering uterus’, hystera being the Greek for uterus) — was a common diagnosis.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and it is the male of the species who is now routinely diagnosed with ‘toxic masculinity’, another uniquely gendered problem attributed to ‘too much testosterone’.
Intriguingly, we have only discovered lately — thanks to popular culture — that this evolutionary ‘flaw’ is not only responsible for uncontrollable anger, violence and an irresistible urge to dominate and ‘mansplain’, but it also makes men laughably stupid when it comes to domestic chores, multitasking and parenting (as adverts and rom-coms show us every night online and on TV).
So the story of young Jamie may be a parable for our times, insofar as it exposes the deplorable online recruiting sergeants (like the infamously misogynist Tate brothers), but the Tates and their ilk are catering for a much more worrying underlying — and burgeoning — male resentment, and its alarming ramifications.
For instance, a recent Ipsos survey in the UK found that two-thirds of ‘Generation Z’ males felt that the pursuit of ‘equality and empowerment’ of women had gone too far (along with a third of females of all ages). And a powerful opinion piece in the New York Times by the novelist Sarah Bernstein, titled “How Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Leads to Loneliness, Anger and Donald Trump,” noted that men’s and women’s fortunes were trending in opposite directions, and many attributed Mr Trump’s election as President to ‘sexism, misogyny and racism’.
I take those accusations with a pinch of salt, but I do accept that many young men today believe they are as right to be enraged as the suffragettes a century ago, and as militant. In short, they feel dispossessed, disempowered and confronted by a world of artificially diminished opportunities.
So, demonising young men, telling male teenagers they are part of the ‘Patriarchy’ (guilty of their forefathers’ ‘sins’) and crushing their dreams in an anti-masculine ecosystem is not only unfair, it is profoundly dangerous because it nurtures the resentment that the ancient Greeks called the wellspring of war.
Faced with these observations — especially the final one — I don’t doubt that my mother would have said of the impact of today’s Toxic Anti-Masculinity:
“Well, what else would you expect?!”
Dr Chris Luke is a retired consultant in emergency medicine and host of the Irish Medical Lives podcast.
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