| > I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? I'd frame them in a way that centers on behavior ("domineering", "violent") without gendering them. I think this makes the actual things that are toxic clearer and that lumping them into "masculinity" makes them less clear. > "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic Yet you've probably seen at least a few people who take this as a reason to worry about "chemicals" in general, despite that covering literally everything. Things like this just make me think that if we want to avoid harmful associations, we have to simply not pair up the words at all. If someone is being violent, we can complain about that without bringing their identity into the frame. > why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats But the term is bad because it does nothing whatsoever to illuminate which things might actually cause that and there are probably many causes it lumps under a single umbrella wrongly. I've seen stats that indicate one of the bigger causes is untreated psychosis, which has nothing in particular to do with being male, or any other identity that's over-represented in arrest data for that matter. And to me that just reinforces the idea that the identity shouldn't be used at all when framing the problem. I'm aware of the correlations, but we have to find actual causes and, e.g. get people mental healthcare to fix the behaviors creating toxicity, rather than accepting a framing that centers on someone's very identity as if that's the thing that's problematic. And I can say "causes" because causal modeling is a thing now. I've been reading the Book of Why lately and it's interesting how much things have advanced even in just the last couple of decades or so. |