Much has been written about toxic masculinity, much of it by much better scholars than me. What I would like to do in this piece, and subsequent pieces under similar headings, is analyze non-toxic manifestations of masculinity, discuss their functioning, and – as much as possible, without oversimplifying – present guidelines so that we can follow them in the future. There are, of course, pitfalls here and I want to acknowledge them at the beginning: just about everything we do has unintended consequences, and the suggestions that I make here will no doubt be liable to have them, too. Moreover, any behavior can be twisted into a toxic manifestation: you have to have the self-awareness to try to recognize that when it happens, and to accept the criticism when it comes up.
Read MoreI think that this resonates with many of us because we were given such reason to hope for the future when we were younger and it didn’t pan out. We were born in the “End of History,” when western liberal democracy had triumphed over the Soviet Union, and the future was supposed to just be an asymptotically perfecting version of the present with no huge revisions.
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