justlainguages

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. 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.   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. Resembling Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report blaming the “tangle of pathologies” in Black communities on single mother led households, the movement included a rebuke of the feminized man that was developing because of men being raised in single parent households. 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. 

October 7th, 2025 was the second anniversary of Al Aqsa Flood, the HAMAS led, Palestinian attack on Israel aimed at freeing Palestinian political prisoners and winning their struggle for national liberation from Israel’s U.S. sponsored, illegal and murderous occupation of Palestine. October 7th was also the day, after passing a security clearance, receiving an advance set of rules, providing identification, passing at least three checkpoints and going by rolls and rolls of what looked like razorsharp barbed wire, I attended the “Day of Responsibility” (DOR)  held at S.C.I. Cole Township presented by the Lifeline Association…

Habari Gani?! Ujima! Collective Work and Responsibility -"To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers', sisters', and siblings' problems our problems and to solve them together." On Christmas Eve, with the “cooperation” of the Nigerian government, the U.S. fired more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles into Sokoto State, Nigeria. According to news reports these came from a warship off the coast of Guinea, and this warship would have been under the control of AFRICOM, the U.S. Military Command in Africa.

In his 1983 book, Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat, J. Sakai provides excellent insight into the nature of racism, the White left, and the position of Black and other oppressed people in the U.S. To help us understand these domains, Sakai breaks down settler colonialism more broadly, including the U.S. as a settler-colonial state, White people as settlers, and the rest of us as people of oppressed nationalities within this settler-colonial state. The roots of this system lie in Europe’s parasitic and patriarchal ruling class, which, in its stunted mental state, disrupted societies’ inclination to consider the needs of the broad community, including the environment, and consistently placed its desire for power over others over societies’ long-term health and perpetuation.