What is the Essence of “Toxic Masculinity”?
This article was first posted in issue #18 of Let’s Get Free’s magazine “Daughters.” Daughters circulates to more than 2000 people incarcerated in PA prisons and is posted with their permission.
The phrase “toxic masculinity” is attributed to Shepherd Bliss, a psychologist, writer and participant in what began in the 1980’s as largely professional class White men gathering in conferences, retreats, articles, and books in a movement Bliss named the Mythopoetic Movement. (1) A pivotal figure in this movement, the Minnesota poet Robert Bly, authored one of the key texts of the movement’s initial period, the 1990 NY Times best seller, Iron John, A Book About Men. (2) The title references the Germanic tradition’s Grimm’s Brothers Fairy Tales’, and one of its stories “Iron John.” In Iron John, a young boy grows to manhood via punishment, conquest and patronage from a wealthy father figure and rewarded with wealth, a wife and rulership. (3) Resembling Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report blaming the “tangle of pathologies” in Black communities on single mother led households, (4) the movement included a rebuke of the feminized man that was developing because of men being raised in single parent households. (5) Bliss understood “toxic” masculinity as an abusive masculinity and thus sought its “antidote,” a diverse masculinity with healthy, even earth saving outcomes. But Bliss could still be heard to advocate for a masculinity in which men were generative and women nurturing. (6)
Not surprisingly, the concept of “toxic masculinity” emerged from this White male movement without any critique of the role of other White masculinity as leadership notions like “rugged individualism” and “manifest destiny.” Of course these ideas of masculinity served as ideological cover for the colonization of what came to be known as the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous and African peoples. The movement, with its flagship text rooted in Germanic folk tales, saw no issue with its universalization of the ideal concept “man” and “masculinity” as one that was the same across all geographies and all times. Run-of-the-mill Eurocentrism and a form of cultural imperialism. (7)
In his book “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa” Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop takes aim at universal roles of men and women and makes a case for two different kinds of societies, one emerging from Africa as matriarchal, key indicators of which were a sedentary agricultural life, inheritances passed through the mother’s side of the family and a notion that a child was fully the mother’s and half the father’s. This he named the Southern Cradle. On the other hand, the Northern cradle birthed the opposite set of characteristics and emerged from an Indo-European matrix. A marker of this patriarchal structure was the economic and religious subjugation of women, e.g. women were kept apart from other women so that they could not form economic guilds and were not permitted to participate in the veneration of the family ancestors, which were the husband’s ancestors. (8) Friedrich Engels, while ignoring Africa in accordance with the racist Western Enlightenment and also ascribing to a universal theory of historical development, albeit one suggesting universal movement from matriarchy to patriarchy, noted in studying the Americas’ Indigenous peoples that the imposition of patriarchy (9) on matriarchal societies led to women losing property and being assigned labor roles that robbed them of control of their own destinies, (10) a system that eventually passed into capitalism. Taking this examination of gender into pre and post colonial West Africa, Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi, again observed the role of women in “The Invention of Women: Making An African Sense of Western Gender Discourses.” Looking at her own Oyo people in what is today called “Nigeria,” she argues the category “woman” was imposed by British colonialism. Using the non-gendered basis of Yoruba names as one example, Oyerumi makes the case that physical genitalia was simply that, genitalia and not an indicator of social role or importance. So, if “women” were an invented category so would “men” need to be an invented category. (11) In this way, the toxicity comes from static gender roles rationalizing the usurping of women’s role in the economy and family.
To be clear, “toxic masculinity,” is surely describing a real problem: abusive masculinity and men. And yet, the diagnosis of professional class settler White men cannot provide us a pathway to liberation and self-determination. How might we gather to examine how masculinity might serve the process of capital accumulation by White settler colonies, particularly the colony’s capital class and what we want to do about that collectively? For example, it doesn’t take much to see how the Mythopoetic Movement’s emphasis on mother-led families raising feminized boys and men would have served Ronald Reagan’s use of “the Welfare Queen” to vilify Black women. To look at another issue, how might professional, working and non-working class ideas of Black masculinity contribute to violence in Black neighborhoods that facilitate gentrification and displacement? How about how Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine,” an unoriginal rip off of “the Monroe Doctrine” that claimed the Caribbean and South America as possessions of the U.S. also uses masculinist narratives of “taking back what’s ours” be used as a cover to steal oil from Venezuela?
Placing next to the notion of a healthy masculinity, I am curious what we might think about men placing greater attention on Iwa Rere, or what the Yoruba call good character, (12) and less on what it is to be a man. In this notion of Iwa Rere we include the practice of being committed to defeating the class relations that drive capitalism: Europe to Africa and Africans, White settler colonialism to Black, Indigenous and other people of oppressed nationalities, capital class to working class and men to women. A question might be “How do our notions of manhood make us a violent tool of White settler colonialism and how do we put an end to it?”
Footnotes
Peter Wright, “Shepherd Bliss: The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement,” Gynocentrism and its Cultural Origins, 3/5/21, accessed 1/20/26, https://gynocentrism.com/2021/03/05/shepherd-bliss-the-mythopoetic-mens-movement/
Daniel Penny, “The Strange History of “Toxic” Masculinity: How a self-help concept dreamed up by New Age therapists and poets turned into a caricature and sparked a right-wing backlash,” GQ Magazine, 8/16/2024, accessed 1/17/2026, https://www.gq.com/story/the-strange-history-of-toxic-masculinity
Grimms’ Fairy Tales: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, accessed 1/20/26, https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/iron_john
Sam Klug, “The Moynihan Report Resurrected,” Dissent, Winter 2016, accessed 1/20/26, https://dissentmagazine.org/article/moynihan-report-resurrected-daniel-geary-black-power/
Jill Johnston, “Why Iron John is No GIft to Women.” New York Times Book Review, 2/23/1992, accessed 1/19/2026, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/23/books/why-iron-john-is-no-gift-to-women.html
Peter Wright, “Shepherd Bliss: The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement,” Gynocentrism and its Cultural Origins, 3/5/21, accessed 1/20/26, https://gynocentrism.com/2021/03/05/shepherd-bliss-the-mythopoetic-mens-movement/
Marimba Ani, Yurugu, An Afrikan Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Baltimore, MD, Afrikan World Books, 1994) 511-515
Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and of Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity, (Chicago, IL, Third World Press, 1959/1978) 34-38 Ibid, 28-32
Ibid, 18-19
Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (New York, New York, International Publishers, 1942/2007) 119-125
Justin Laing, “Review: The Invention of Women by Dr Oyeronke Oyewumi” Just Lainguages, 8/19/23, accessed 1/20/26, https://www.justlainguages.com/blog/review-the-invention-of-women-by-oyeronke-oyewumi
Lloyd Weaver and Ademola Fabunmi, Iwa Rere: Morality in Yoruba Traditional Religion, (Brooklyn, 2016, The Serengeti Network, A Division of Serengeti Entertainment), 8-10
