327

Anyone who proposes chickens in the city should be required to visit Croton.

The city keeps blowing money on landscaping while its neighborhoods get worse every year. That has got to change. Direct investment is needed to rebuild the commercial corridors these neighborhoods were built around. It should be priority #1, should have been for a long time. But no, we'll end up building 3 more versions of the Q before we subsidize a single storefront.

The plan we went with for Euclid Avenue is what I might have suggested for Carnegie.

Males. Biological males. That's the only definition I know of that doesn't rely on dubious social constructs. It's also the simplest. I do think we're pretty much on the same page. I approach it the way I do because I'm focused on political optics and messaging. I feel like our side shoots itself in the foot by miscalculating what's offensive to whom, and which offenses are the most electorally damaging. Not all women are feminists and many of them actually support the social constructs we find dubious... including some aspects of Toxic Masculinity. So for every feminist emboldened by the term, we risk alienating one female and three males. That gets us nowhere. Millions and millions of women voted for a known pussy grabber. We can't treat women as a monolithic voting bloc that loves abortion and hates traditional gender roles. We also can't treat men as the enemy. Toxic Masculinity comes way too close to that.

Masculinity is not a behavior or set of behaviors. We have two genders for reproductive purposes. Actual relationships may vary. Actual behaviors may vary. Every human being is free to be whoever they want to be. When we start attaching behaviors to gender, we chip away at free will and it becomes harder to see individuals as individuals.

No, but only liberals suggest it's a problem. In a democratic system that may not be a good move. It takes a lot of explanation before Toxic Masculinity doesn't sound like a potshot at half the world, and the explanations don't quite make it work because they rely on prejudice. There are indeed men who do bad things and they should be dealt with. But only they.

All you're furthering is the conservative argument that PC rules only apply to conservatives. This concept breaks all of them, and now we're making broad conjectures about black society.

It's not confusing. If you don't intend to invoke all the masculine people, don't say masculinity. Problems can arise whenever we say one thing and mean something else. This phrase is one adjective and one noun. It bears multiple readings but the clearest one sounds like intentional trolling. People need to own that. We can argue about subsets all day long but that's meta-textual. My opposition to "toxic masculinity" is political and academic, but "white trash" is a bit more personal for me. I don't think it's a good comparison because it zeroes in on its chosen subset and really goes at them, while also insulting every other color of poor people by default. No hiding the ball there. That term belongs in the 20th century dustbin. Why don't we just say honky instead? Honky is good clean fun.

Sounds like a great reason to never say "toxic masculinity," since our whole point is that the toxic ideas are not masculine and should never be construed as such. We want these two concepts to be miles apart, not rammed together. Right? And to get the results we're looking for, we need people to listen to us... Swedish people, by the sounds of it, so this notion of "toxic Swedishness" has to go. No matter how pervasive we think the Swedish problem is, they're never going to respond well to that kind of terminology, no matter how many times we tell them we were only referring to those other Swedes over there, the bad ones.

These are all bad teachings that shouldn't be taught. But it remains dead wrong to attach one person's bad acts to any other person on the basis of gender, or race, or origin, any other ascribed characteristic. I don't care if every criminal you ever met is Swedish and you've never met a non-Swedish criminal... you still do not refer to criminal behavior as Swedish. I can't believe I'm having to fight so hard for this premise.

I'm not offended, I'm concerned that the phrase toxic masculinity (and the thinking behind it) is unhelpful. I agree with X that the phrase is being promoted to score political points and I believe that effort is misguided. There is no question that bad behavior is bad and should cease, the issue to me is that stereotyping by gender won't get us there.

If the same commercial were made about any given race or creed, instead of gender, would this approach be problematic in any way? You know it would. "We realize all of you aren't bad... but maybe if the good ones could help... those others..."

This really gets to the heart of it... which men? The insult appears to have splattered onto at least a few (billion?) people that nobody thinks are jerks. That's what I'm gathering here. And typically in cases like that, we admit fault and refine our language. We don't keep insisting that those offended were too dumb to get it. That's more like what Louis CK would do. I still haven't seen this razor commercial and at this point I doubt that its content is really the issue. The issue is whether it's ever OK to stereotype, and it's been brewing for a while at the edges of whatever movement this phrase is part of. Another deeper issue here is what gender even means, to what extent it's objective and biological vs arbitrary and behavioral. People can talk right past each other without first establishing that part.

So the film Mean Girls is a study on masculinity? Keep digging!

This person has the answer but lets it slip through her fingers.

My definition of masculinity involves private parts and their roles in reproduction. And there's nothing toxic about it. No, this topic isn't complex, unless you want to assign genders to behaviors, at which point it becomes a pretty large can of worms.

This exact logical structure is used to terrifying effect against various ethnic groups throughout the world. You and I both know that we cannot extrapolate in this way. Behaviors are not gendered any more than they are racial-- regardless of statistics.

Absolutely not. Here, you're talking specifically and exclusively about one relationship, with no spillover intended or implied. That is different than attaching "toxicity" to half the human race, categorically, when everyone agrees that you're really talking about specific behaviors. Why is there such unbridled yearning to claim that masculinity itself is toxic? Why so much resistance to respecting individuals as individuals?

No. In that case, there's no debate over whether it's the environment itself that's toxic. In this case, the toxicity applies to the behavior rather than to the gender. And again, behaviors are not gendered. When females catcall, whether toward a male or another female, they are not engaging in masculinity. I'm not claiming that female catcalling is some kind of serious problem. My point is that the toxicity you're referring to cannot be attached to "masculinity" because it doesn't apply to all masculinity, nor does it apply exclusively to masculinity. It's both overinclusive and underinclusive. I know it's easier, and perhaps more fun, to call out 4 billion dudes without bothering to differentiate. But that doesn't make it work. We can't rationally oppose some stereotypes while fighting to the death for others.

That book has failed to launch its title as a popular expression or a term of art. Parenting is still a thing that we all believe clear behavioral standards should apply to, and my point is that masculinity isn't. Any behavioral standards that apply to masculinity also apply to its opposite. To the extent the standards differ, we are telling people how to behave-- and judging them-- based on gender. I thought the whole idea was to get away from that. Again, we can't have it both ways.

I've never once heard anyone say "toxic parenting" and I work with Children and Family Services. That is not a concept or phrase that anyone is promoting. Some parenting is bad, some is good-- but it does not follow that some masculinity is bad. We're talking about traits that we've acknowledged aren't actually gendered, and you're still assigning bad traits to masculinity when in fact they are simply bad. Bullying is not a component of masculinity, no matter how much Piers Morgan wants it to be. Therefore the toxicity of bullying does not spill over to masculinity. Bullying fits under the category heading of toxic while masculinity does not. The more we try to conflate these categories, the more people (not just men) will ignore the valid point we're making about bullying.

But you don't believe those traits are properly masculine. Piers Morgan does. So what's toxic is Piers Morgan and the thinking he represents, to which masculinity is not bound. I think this is a crucial distinction to make-- we can't defeat the problem if we can't identify it beyond pointing at 4 billion people.

If they're wrong, then so is the phrase toxic masculinity. So is every statement that attaches bad behaviors to either half of the human race by gender. We can't have it both ways.

I would argue there's a value in "toughness" and it need not equate to aggression or cruelty. Either way, the gender of the person exhibiting the trait is simply not relevant.

Then there's no such thing as toxic masculinity. Instead there are toxic traits and behaviors.