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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

Functions are either asynchronous or synchronous. There's a dividing line between the two.

Masculine traits are not cleanly divisible like that. Is masculine emotional distance toxic? Maybe so, if it leads to unaddressed problems; or maybe not, if it helps a man to reframe things positively. Is taking control of a group toxic? Yes if it overwhelms or dominates others, and the man doesn't know how to follow; no if it's a willingness to step up only in situations where a leader is necessary. Is mansplaining a thing, and am I doing it? On the one hand, some men are braggarts and instant experts on everything; on the other, everyone needs to explain their own thoughts sometimes, even laymen.

I assume academics are well aware that some gender-coded traits are double-edged swords, but that nuance is lost in public conversations. I don't think I've ever heard a respectable public figure describe toxic femininity, either, though it obviously exists.

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Good comment. In addition addition to a very complex dividing line between toxic and healthy, there is the larger problem of creating phrases of the form "toxic X" or "healthy X" where X is an identity. There is no part of our culture where X is allowed to have the value of "blackness" or "gayness" or "femininity". The wording itself reduces the entire issue of problematic human behavior to the mechanical act of decoding a persons identity and then applying stereotypes. In that sense, it very much reminds me of astrology, which asserts that it can say something meaningful about you once you tell your birthday. I say that this astrological assertion is precisely as stupid as the identity-based assertions.

Bonus: here is the actress from the Hanna TV series, describing the father character from the show, the man who sacrificed his life to protect her from extraordinary threat, and Esme Creed-Miles lazily throws out the "toxic masculinity" label. The phrase is just a reflex, at this point, and has no meaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPMdEtzoj-Q&t=433s

> There is no part of our culture where X is allowed to have the value of "blackness" or "gayness" or "femininity".

I don't think this is as true as you claim. While the word toxic isn't used, black culture and to a lesser extent gay culture are often described as toxic or harmful, either to those groups or to society more generally.

This is even more true if you look at, e.g. transness, where an article about how it's contagious was in the NYT this week. And, IME, there's usually agreement that men aren't solely to blame for toxic masculinity, while allusions to these other toxic cultures are usually used to specifically avoid addressing issues that affect those groups.

I overstated that claim. I cannot really claim anything about "all of our culture". I'm speaking purely about my real-world experience, which is informed by social media, mainstream media, the family court part of the criminal "justice" system, corporate speech codes, and specific stories of how university students have utterly destroyed the careers of professors on little or no pretext.

I suspect that the good-hearted members of any community, however that is defined, are generally more against woke/cancel culture than for it, since it dehumanizes everyone. So, yeah, your assertion is totally compatible with this state of affairs.

I haven't heard about the NYT article. Do you have a link?

I apologize, I appear to have just been totally wrong, I think I crossed like three wires and ended up turning a recent article not in the NYT into an NYT oped in my head. My mistake, it wasn't my intention to mislead.

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