Excellent question! Sure…I guess it could. But think about it. Would the perceived toxicity be from femininity or feminism?
Since you brought it up and I was curious what exactly is toxic femininity, I decided to Google “what is toxic femininity?” This is the AI overview that I got:
Toxic femininity is a broad term that describes the pressures women face to conform to rigid and stereotypical feminine traits. It can include:
- Ignoring one’s own needs to support others
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Being passive, cooperative, and submissive
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Deriving value from physical beauty and pleasing men
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Being defined and judged by a male figure in one’s life
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Accepting violence and domination in order to survive
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Being meek, emotional, and self-sacrificing
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Restricting behavior to fit stereotypically feminine traits
Toxic femininity can have negative effects on health and well-being, including: Increased stress levels, Sabotaging one’s sense of identity, Feeling powerless, and Unhealthy relationships.
Toxic femininity is fueled by sexism, and is the inverse of toxic masculinity. Both toxic femininity and toxic masculinity are unhealthy because they pressure people to fit a mold instead of being authentic.
Then I did the same for toxic masculinity. This is the AI overview:
Toxic masculinity is a term used to describe a set of exaggerated masculine traits that can be harmful to men, boys, and society:
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Dominance: Using violence, control, and dominance to assert power and superiority
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Emotional illiteracy: Hiding or repressing emotions
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Sexual entitlement: Having an entitlement to sex
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Hostility to femininity: Rejecting feminine traits, such as accepting help, domesticity, and most emotion
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Toughness: Being strong, aggressive, and emotionally hardened
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Power: Being worthy only if you have money, power, status, and influence
The term originated in the 1980s within the New Age men’s movement. The movement sought to increase community among men, and to be free to express emotion.
Toxic masculinity can have a negative impact on men, women, and society. For example, men who identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender face higher-than-average levels of hostility and pressure to conform to masculine norms.
Some examples of toxic masculinity include:
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Telling someone to “man up” when they show emotion
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The expression “boys will be boys”, which advocates for careless, aggressive, or damaging behavior in young males
I share this, not to make any statement concerning which is worse, but to further consideration in the discussion of why men under 35 may be struggling.
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Let’s compare this:
To this:
This is just so interesting. Just so you know, when you use an AI the final results pass through a hand-made Alignment layer that filters the actual results through a “cultrual” lens. Google’s AI has been notorious for alignment to far left ideals. Do you recall the uproar about the images it created when asked for a picture of our founding fathers.
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I agree. As I said, I think the comparisons may help when considering the original post:
One may or may not agree with the AI overview. I shared it to add to the conversation as to why there’s a seemingly growing gender divide, which may be contributing to the apparent struggles of men under the age of 35.
Understanding others…or at least trying to understand the position of others without blaming or becoming defensive…is challenging. (Wish I had time to say more now, but I have an appt.)
Rogan (and others) like to denigrate females. This does nothing good for either males or females. The article I posted presented some alternatives for young males which is more positive. I don’t get why it seems to upset some people here.
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The popularity of Rogan is a direct response to the left’s preferred man-bun vision of masculinity and a refutation of a far left-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain.
Rogan has ~4.5 million Spotify followers and ~17.5 million YouTube subscribers, and the left is struggling to find a podcast counter to him.
Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
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Oh, my, that’s painting a whole group of people with a single brush. I would consider myself left leaning, but I definitely do not despise males, nor do I treat them with disdain. I don’t have any type of vision of masculinity, let alone a vision of man-bun as preferred masculinity. The one hard and fast rule I have, though, is that boys will be boys is unacceptable when it’s used as an excuse to allow boys to be disrespectful. So I guess that I do have a preferred type of masculinity … and it’s pretty much the same as my preferred type of femininity … treat others with respect.
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Is there a “girls will be girls” equivalent? Because I’ve seen pleanty of posts on CC lamenting bad girl behavior.
I think your post sounds reasonable depending on the situation and what “disrespectful” means. Public schools, in my experience, have very little tolerance for what many see as high-energy boy behavior. In our case this resulted in our public school recommending we seek medication for our S to “take the edge off”. This meeting went down in the history of our family as “the day dad told the school administrators to pound sand”. Said son graduated with BS and MS in CS from Stanford and is currently sitting on startup money that many people will never see.
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I stated that my preferred type of femininity is also treat others with respect.. I don’t recall that I have heard anyone say that girls will be girls, and I have no idea what would be the female equivalent of boys will be boys. And I don’t consider it relevant. Being allowed to treat one another with disrespect is the root of so many problems. There’s a reason every major religion has a version of the Golden Rule, as do non religious societies. If we worked at helping children learn to treat one another and the world around them with respect, perhaps we’d live in a world country where people are less focused on vengeance, violence, and other toxic things. But there I go, being so very female and all.
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Such a nice sentiment, then oops, I think your bias is showing 
I don’t want to get in the middle of a squabble here, but I do think toxic femininity exists.
To me, that looks like using your looks/sex appeal/sex to your advantage, mean-girl/queen-bee behavior, crying to get your way. Most women don’t engage in this behavior anymore as opportunities for women have expanded – there can be more than one woman in the boardroom, who earns partner, etc. As the world no longer thinks women are most valued for their looks, women are free to drop the old tropes.
Color me amazed.
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So? 3 of the top 10 Insta accounts are Kardashians. Doesn’t make me think any more of them.
Coincidentally meds were recommended for our S, too. He went on them briefly (it did not go well) and we took him off. I think it’s great that you stood up to the school As Magness mentioned in the article, he thinks more men in the elementary schools as teachers would be a good thing and I agree. Perhaps the stereotyping that was shown toward your S and mine would not happen so frequently. I also think it’s great that your S has had academic and career success. But this thread is about young men who are struggling and I think the article has some very good points.
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There was definitely one girl in my middle son’s class like that. She was something. Gorgeous but manipulative. She strung him along for months. 
It was hard, because I could see how toxic she was, but DS was besotted.
But, perhaps it should make you think about all those followers. Not sure the number or the demographics.
Interesting thread. I think there are young men struggling (and young women too, I’ll get to that)j and there are a variety of reasons for it. The book I read on it, “Boys Adrift” has some interesting observations I think hold true. For example, in schools, the model of teaching is one that works better for girls I think than boys. The early emphasis on academics , with pushing down “serious learning” into kindergarten, has hurt boys I think. The lack of physical motion in schools, where they have eliminated things like recess, hurts young men (I think it hurts girls too, but in different ways). That lack of physical activity translates often into being fidgety in the classroom, not focused, then someone quite honestly without the training to determine it, are diagnosing them as ADHD and doctors who quite frankly are not trained, go about it (the author of the book is both a PHd in psychology and an MD, and he said kids are being diagnosed without following the criteria). There also in schools with zero tolerance policies has been a wiping out of understanding the difference between real threats of violence and where it is part of a story someone writes that has any violence in it. He gave the example of a boy who got suspended because he wrote a paper on the Battle of Stalingrad and he was pretty vivid in his descriptions, which quite frankly having been a young man, would be the way a lot of boys would write about it, it gets misinterpreted with people with their finger on the panic button IMO.
. A big one is the loss of experiential learning, where you do things to learn, schools, especially these days, are substituting videos and online screen based learning for actually doing it, like going to a pond to look for tadpoles and other life.
I think to that in today’s regimented world kids are growing up in (Mann would be proud, the Prussian training program has been fully realized) that boys are growing up feeling like they don’t have agency, far too much is being told what to do and leaves them little access to it. Things like leadership are often limited to things like sports, which as they get older is very self limiting, especially these days. The author of the book points out that the online video games boys are playing have aspects where they have the appearence of control, the shoot em up games there are leaders, etc (and he doesn’t think it is healthy, nor do I).
I highly recommend the book (authors name is Leonard Sax), even if you dont agree with all his statements or ideas (and I don’t necessarily) it made me think about it.
He talks about masculinity and what it means, and no, it isn’t man bun masculinity gag, but he makes points about it, like caring about others as a big one. Joe Rogan and the rest are the type that think that bullying is ‘part of growing up’, and they also have an idea of masculinity that Sax rejects. He mentioned a famous Harvard professor who claimed that John Wayne was the definition of masculinity, and he rightfully points out that John Wayne was absolutely not that (neither the man, nor the movie image), he was a pretty horrible person. Personally, I would point out Jimmy Stewart, what he was like in his personal life, how he was with people, and read about how he was as a flight commander in WWII in B24’s, and you see a lot of it. Caring, protective, being sure of yourself but not an obnoxious jerk, all were attributes he had. And with women it means respecting them, not seeing them as something inferior to yourself or worse, something you are supposed to dominate or own, that traditional view of men’s roles is toxic IMO. Rogan is a milder version of Andrew Tate and his ilk (yes, he has millions of followers and yes, he is a creep) in his views.
The other thing I think is a problem we no longer have anything for young men that says “I am a man now”. In Judaism when you hit 13, you ritualistically become a man, there are expections on you both religious and otherwise. Sebastian Junger in his book “Tribes” talks about that, that young men don’t have anything like that today. They really don’t have duties in the family the way they once did, they might be expected to go to school, get good grades, go to college, but there never really is that transition. After that young men were expected to make decisions for themselves, given responsibility, which doesn’t really exist any more. Even with their future, parents unwittingly are choosing their path for them, deciding things, they don’t even have full control of that, parents for example deciding what are good things to do to get into a good college, telling them not to try things they may fail at.
Anyway, I recommend the book and it is not political, he is as critical of some things that the right criticizes about modern schools as well as things from the earlier times people say is not a problem, like bullying or boys dominating in classrooms. He is very critical of the med crazy ADHD diagnoses and that I think he is dead spot on, you don’t med away problems that aren’t really ADHD.
BTW, though not the topic of this thread, I would be really careful about saying how today’s society is so set up in favor of young women. The same author wrote a book about girls growing up, and while he points out the things that did work to girls advantages, he also talks about the dark side of girl’s seeming success, that there is this incredible pressure on them to be perfect, to be perfect students or athletes (a lot of which is from them, not outside), it talks about the issues girls have with boys , the pressure that exists there and how relationships with other girls is so much harder, especially with social media. I mention this because in the rants of certain people, they make it seem like young women have it easy and that they have it easy because boys have been marginalized; it is more like in some ways modern society has made it harder to be a boy and in ways that work with being a girl, but it has hurt both of them in major ways.
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That was long but good. Thanks for your thoughts.
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I remember reading that book when my DS was in elementary school and it really resonated with me. I would also highly recommend it. Thank you so much for your post.
I really think if these males under 35 would just work on their appearances and understand their position the would be more successful.
#womeninmalefields
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Not sure what that means.
I went to see my under-35 S and his band play at a venue last night. They are an eclectic group of guys, and they probably look less than professional to some. Yet they are all gainfully employed in jobs that require an education beyond high school. A couple have significant others; my S does not. They all seem well adjusted, happy, able to support themselves. In other words, I don’t think they are struggling any more than anyone struggles in life, and I haven’t heard them complain that anyone is holding them down.
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