Just a thought …

I can’t help but muse occasionally on the wholly predictable firestorm of outrage that would result if someone with a public voice were ever to use the term ‘predatory femininity’, or ‘parasitic femininity’, or ‘malignant femininity’. The shrieking reaction would be, There’s nothing predatory/parasitic/malignant about being a woman! Which is, of course, absolutely true. Why, I’m descended myself from a long line of women, and anything negative I ever saw in any woman, anywhere, could pretty much be found in roughly equal measure in some man somewhere. It’s not the gender that’s to blame for any such undesirable characteristic, it’s the nature and/or behavior of the individual exhibiting said characteristic.

And yet, “toxic masculinity” is a term so common these days that it’s practically become a truism. Following which, if any man ever objects to the term, that just goes to demonstrate his privilege, his guilty conscience, his mansplaining tendencies, his butthurt sense of entitlement …

Heck, I’ve betrayed my own toxic masculinity simply by admitting that I find those words annoying.

Because, you know, that’s just what us men are like.