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The man made of steel can still feel.
At least that’s what the deep masculinity movement says. Its rallying cry asks men to reclaim a pre-industrialized conceptualization of masculinity that encourages emotional expression, camaraderie instead of competition with other men, and a celebration of the differences between males and females.
Toxic masculinity is what’s possessing the drunk dude drag racing in a car, pumping out exhaust while speeding on the interstate.
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We’re living in a time when it seems that very fabric of our society is getting torn apart by divisive identity politics—and with it, our ability to act collectively for the common good. During this time, so many of the world’s problems are being blamed on men. Because it’s the patriarchal system that we’re living in. It’s the patriarchal system that harvests our energy to our own detriment. It’s the patriarchal system that is destroying the earth. However perhaps the root of the issue has nothing to do with the nature of gender, but the nature of the industrialized world instead.
The term toxic masculinity has been thrown around quite frequently recently to explain all this. It’s the cause of rape culture, organized violence, and the 50 percent of youth who live without fathers. Toxic masculinity is what’s possessing the drunk dude drag racing in a car, pumping out exhaust while speeding on the interstate. It’s the philosophy behind the phallic monuments, constructed as an ode to colonization, studding our nation’s capital.
In the era of late capitalism in Western civilization, toxic masculinity is being called out as the root of all evils, but it’s almost always associated with some kind of flaw that is intrinsic in the biology of men rather than a cell or gene inside us that gets mutated when it’s exposed to a certain environment, just like cancer. If this is so, that environment is our mainstream culture whose male role models so often have the qualities of the industry titans who created the industrialized world.
To keep the machine going requires desensitization. It requires being disconnected from the rhythms of the self and the natural world.
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In many ways, toxic masculinity represents the idealized, unconscionable alpha male who only emotionally expresses anger, doesn’t stand up against rape or assault out of fear of coming off as gay to other males. It is a man that can act decisively and often recklessly without regard to consequence other than his own benefit, who can command others to bend to his will, who views people as objects to use on his path to the top of the social pyramid instead of feeling beings. These patterns of behavior are very much survival mechanisms in our society, have been pinned to gender instead of the living conditions that create them.
Look at the characteristics of industrialization: the profit-at-all-costs ethos of big business, the weapons needed to conquer the wildness of nature, grading and valuing others based on their productivity, standardization and silenced uniformity. To keep the machine going requires desensitization. It requires being disconnected from the rhythms of the self and the natural world. There is great stress involved with having to perform at all times to avoid perishing and to develop an invulnerable ego to hide our weakness—lest we be found out. With this stress comes the need to act out. To indulge in the socially promised pay-offs of playing the game of the industrialized world, at the expense of everything else.
There is human energy that powers the industrial machine, and there are other kinds of fuel that power it too—dirty fossil fuels that are extracted from the ground, and the economic arms race to claim them. For as much damage as it does to humans, the industrial complex does equally as much, if not more, to the earth. It’s all a metaphor for a philosophy of human existence that does not work anymore.
So, what if, instead of solving the problem of toxic masculinity by returning to a pre-industrial state—like the deep masculinity movement prescribes—we transition our society to a post-industrial one? One defined by renewable energy, technologies that do hard labor for humans so we can spend time together instead, economic balance with the natural world, and the understanding that women and men are equally as sensitive and can accomplish very many of the same tasks?
By men and women working together to create a less toxic society, rather than attacking the gender that created it, we have a far better chance of bringing harmony we seek with one another into fruition.
I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Are you ready to do something about all this?
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