It’s Hallowe’en! The night where we dress up as ghosts and goblins and celebrate all things spooky. Or if you’re me, the night where I dig out the same pumpkin costume that I’ve put on all three of my babies so far while being thankful that I have a creative spouse who takes on the more elaborate job of making paper mache masks and cardboard swords.
I’ve been thinking this Hallowe’en about how it’s funny that once a year, we dress ourselves up as scary evil creatures, but year round we dress other people up as scary evil boogeymen. In other words, we make our opponents out to be worse than they are. This is similar to straw manning, but instead of misinterpreting the arguments and positions our opponent holds, we misinterpret their motivations.
The term toxic masculinity is often used to imply that men, generally, are cold-hearted beasts but what it actually refers to is stereotypical male traits, validated by culture, taking forms that are not only damaging to the society but even to men themselves. In toxic masculinity strength morphs into violence and assertiveness turns into entitlement. The result is a man who can’t take no for an answer, and who often become the subjects of #MeToo posts.
Even though the conversation often revolves around toxic masculinity, there is the other side of the coin — toxic femininity. As any self-help guru worth their salt will tell you — where there is a yin, there is a yang. So yes, there is such a thing as toxic femininity and it comes in many forms. Though it is hard to perfectly define toxic femininity because it isn’t a simple, enclosed box. But like…
Balls! 