A team of researchers, including Binghamton psychology professor Richard Mattson and graduate student Michael Shaw asked men between the ages of 18–25 to respond to hypothetical sexual hookup situations in which a woman responds passively to a sexual advance, meaning the woman does not express any overt verbal or behavioral response to indicate consent to increase the level of physical intimacy. The team then surveyed how consensual each man perceived the situation to be, as well as how he would likely behave.
The work is published in the journal Sex Roles.
“A passive response to a sexual advance is a normative indicator of consent, but also might reflect distress or fear, and whether men are able to differentiate between the two during a hookup was important to explore,” said Mattson.
The team found that men varied in their perception of passive responses in terms of consent and that the level of perceived consent was strongly linked to an increased likelihood of continuing or advancing sexual behavior.
“The biggest takeaway is that men differed in how they interpreted an ambiguous female response to their sexual advances with respect to their perception of consent, which in turn influenced their sexual decisions,” said Mattson.
“But certain types of men (e.g., those high in toxic masculine traits) tended to view situations as more consensual and reported that they would escalate the level of sexual intimacy regardless of whether or not they thought it was consensual.”
Is’nt it the definition? It’s like saying drivers who drive fast are more likely to drive fast…
I wouldn’t say it’s the definition, but I agree this is not surprising.
Toxic masculinity is much more though. Men bullying men because they do something “not manly” is toxic masculinity. It can be anything from not enjoying sports to showing emotion for any reason (even crying if a family member died).It’s a terrible term for very real problem of toxic gender roles. I’m not sure if you meant to imply that these roles are only reenforced by other men, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Men and women reenforce these gender roles against men and boys, promoting the poor behavior.
This is the true original definition of toxic masculinity, thank you for saying that.
Yeah, men who are assholes, behave like assholes. News at 11
It’s called a tautology, and yes.
“Men who are toxic generally are more likely to be toxic sexually”
Kind of a no-brainer. I guess it’s interesting that men who exhibit toxic traits are both more likely to falsely identify behavior as consensual and are more likely to proceed even if they do identify it as not consensual, but that’s not totally unexpected either.
Even if it’s obvious, it’s still good to have data to back these things up.
Fair enough, I suppose
Your daily reminder that “toxic masculinity” was a term coined by men sick of the negative mental health effects on having to conform to aggressive and dominate stereotypes.
Ya know, in case you think some other gender came up with it.
Its not how it is used now. EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted? Its literally how languages work.
Correct, now its mostly used as a lighting rod strawman that defensive insecure men attack while ironically complaining about how poor men’s mental health is.
Which is exactly what the 60’s men liberation movement was trying to avoid.
It gets thrown around by liberals plenty of times in order to simplify complicated gender issues. I try to be a better person, but the more I try the more I feel everything I do is wrong. I did not feel that why when I was more conservative.
bingo… as a guy anything i do that anyone else doesn’t like is because of my ‘toxic masculinity’.
seriously been told that i am a ‘toxic male’ for riding a bike. shit’s wild.
.
I’m intelligent enough to be a descriptivist rather than proscriptivist.
Correct. I lack those “toxic masculinity” and dating life is so hard for me. What they called “toxic masculinity” is what women seek.
That’s not true, but I’ve gone round and round with these black pill talking points enough to know that there isn’t anything I could say to change your mind, at least not here in this thread.
I implore you to seek out new content and to shut off whatever incel sources that told you this. It’s not some harsh but true reality that most people are too PC to say out loud, but a defensive mechanism to blame women for your loneliness. And tragically one that women rightfully see as 🚩 's and stay away from.
This lonely angry ideology is a self fulfilling prophecy and I can only hope that one day you understand that.
I ask you to recognize that “women” are as diverse as humanity as a whole.
Saying that all women are equal or want the same stuff, is like saying, all humans want the same stuff. Which just isn’t true. Maybe you should consider that doing statistics like “most women want that” is not going to give you a full picture of the situation.
Toxic masculinity isn’t necessarily the “masculine” traits themselves. You can have traits which are considered masculine, and those traits not be toxic. Toxic masculinity has more to do with the expectations of traits/gender norms rather than the idealized traits. A trait (or lack of a trait) might make people in a patriarchial society see you as more or less of a man, and that expectation is the toxic masculinity.
Basically the toxic masculinity is just how society rewards or punishes you for what degree you meet certain normative male/masculine gender roles.
I have a lot of compassion for people who have been poisoned with toxic masculinity. The toxicity comes from a place quite abusive to men. It demands a vision of a man who is what I think of as emotionally castrated. Completely denied any exhibitions of passive sadness, outward facing compassion, grief, fear or desire for anything outside a small range of approved desires. In return they are given tools of violence, silence, denial and anger to express virtually everything. To ask for help is framed as failure. The people whom they love have to interpret their sense of love and compassion only through grandiose acts or through that narrow conduit of allowed emotional reactions… But it is so hard to connect with someone through the medium of anger.
When people are told “suck it up! Be a man!” it make those things aspirational… But it’s just the sugar around the outside of the conditioning. The inside is bitter isolation. I will always remember my Mom telling me that my Dad was so scared to have sons. He didn’t think he could do right by sons. He struggled so hard with his own conditioning but it never suited him. It never suited my grandfather to whom my Dad always felt like he communicated with always at a distance, the mask only cracking when he was sick in hospital and my Granddad never left his bedside. A deep reservoir of feeling that could never be expressed except in silence between men except under extremes. A strict taboo of self denial… For what?
Undoing that damage is so hard even when you are aware of it. The toxicity can’t always be healed and some of that damage is permanent.
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Not surprising but always good to have studies to prove these kinds of things.
“Bears with teeth more likely to cause injury to people they bite.”
Reported that they would escalate the level of sexual intimacy regardless of whether or not they thought it was consensual.
Gentlemen, the moment you’re questioning in your head if the girl is consenting, you use your voice and ask something along the lines of, “do you trust me?” or, “keep going?”, or “do you like this/it?”
Fkin no brainer. smh
until she says ‘no’. you stop and take her home.
then she messages you the next morning ‘i don’t date pussies who take no for an answer’.
plenty of women have the toxic idea that their consent should and must be violated to prove your worth as a man, or equally, her desirability.
Then you congratulate yourself for dodging a bullet and focus your efforts on people who don’t play those kinds of games.
Someone who sends a text like that is also the sort of person to “forget” their birth control or lie about std test results. So yeah maybe you got your dick wet, but now you’re paying for child support and syphilis medication.
You assume there are people who don’t play those games.
I know there are because I go outside and meet them.
It’s a lot better not to participate in rape culture and risk committing sexual assault, rather than submit to a woman perpetuating toxic masculinity, ngl. I wouldn’t want to be the person to get raped just because other people think that accepting “no” for an answer is for pussies.
dating is participating in toxic everything.
Jesus Christ, no. don’t listen to this guy.
“You wanted me to rape you, on the off-chance that you were into that?”
“yes, and you’re a pussy for not doing it. I don’t date pussies.”
wanna cyber
How do you have Toxic Masculinity? That’s not how the concept works…
How do you have Toxic Masculinity?
Yeah, it’s a flaw in the way it’s framed, methinks - it’s very easy to discern men who display behavior that are “high in toxic masculine traits” because they are the visible tip of the iceberg.
Oh my, TLDR! (Statement not a summary)
sexual advances without consent by men is masculine toxicity by definition.
Toxicity is a spectrum. Some people are entirely toxic and love it. Others are slightly toxic and not aware. Yet others put in honest effort, struggling to reduce their own toxicity.
Thats not just men, that’s people.
This post right here is exactly why ‘toxic masculinity’ is a fucking shit term that should never be used.
The intended meaning of the phrase was never ‘men, who are toxic’, or even ‘men who are toxic’, even though that’s the straight-line interpretation of it.
What it’s supposed to mean is ‘overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic’.
Given that that’s a fucking mouthful and the short form is horribly misleading, I always go with “gender policing” instead.
Stop telling people how to do their gender, and a vast number of social problems will evaporate. It also places the blame on the actual cause of the problem, and expands to cover mandatory-performative-femininity as well, which is also a shit thing to subject people to.
‘overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic’
Huh, I always thought this was obvious but I can see how people can take it as “men who are toxic” since feminism is flattened down in some people’s minds to mean “women who want to dominate men” like wtf.
Also, thanks for introducing me to “gender policing”!
You know, gender studies is arts-faculty - people who devote their careers to parsing the subtlest nuances from the gauziest wisps of meaning.
Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.
I’m just a little bit cynical about this.
Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.
I don’t think anyone actually believes that-- it seems like you see it from bad faith actors online/in the manosphere. No one thinks someone who hates “big trucks” hates all trucks, or “crowded places” hates everywhere, or more to the point, that someone who wants to cut “toxic people” out of their life is going to never see another human. Yet somehow applying an adjective to “masculinity” makes it really easy to be misunderstood?
If the argument is that they should’ve come up with a phrase that’s less vulnerable to corruption by bad faith actors I might buy it, but I’m willing to bet that even something as specific as “overly performative aspects of how men express their masculinity because they squash their feelings and thus become dangerous to people around them, especially women” would still magically be “misunderstood” on the internet and reduced to “feminists say all men bad”.
“Big” is not a negative adjective. “Truck” is not (mostly) an identity or demographic group. You’d have to make up some term like maybe “murder trucks” to get close to an analogy. Would you not suppose that someone who advocated against “murder trucks” thought trucks were bad?
“Crowded” - maybe mildly negative. “Places” - not an identity or demographic.
“Toxic” - Ok. “People” - This hardly seems like an identity or demographic. Maybe if martians start talking about “toxic humans” we’d have an analogy.
And that whole last paragraph is just a straw man.
Let’s consider some real analogies.
“Poisonous Hinduism” “Virulent Femininity” “Malignant Jewishness” “Destructive Liberalism” “Pestilent Blackness” “Dangerous Queerness”
I literally just looked up synonyms for toxic and picked random identity groups. Could you imagine trying to make any of these phrases academic terms?
Could you imagine trying to make any of these phrases academic terms?
That’s a good point, but (most) of your chosen identity aspects aren’t widely known for being accountable for negative things like violence. How about something like “dangerous republicanism” or “genocidal zionism”? Maybe if exaggerated (or even say, toxic) masculinity wasn’t being weaponized so much these days to lead young men toward alt right fascism it wouldn’t come up in academic settings.
I think the core problem here is just a matter of rhetoric.
Like, I agree with you, and usually when an argument like this pops up, I spend most of my time making fun of the alpha male in the chat for their willful refusal to read above a 6th grade level. And it is willful, just to underline that part.
But the truth is really that it doesn’t matter how correct you are. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about how defensible “Toxic Masculinity” as a term really is, and you’d be right too, but that doesn’t really change the fact that you are arguing about it.
You know the adage about arguing with an idiot: they’ll beat you with experience.
As much as it does irk me a little bit to admit, “gender policing” is better (I think) because it’s much more difficult to assail (something I think you acknowledge is worth it), and it doesn’t spell out men in particular. It’s really hard to have the inevitable “yes, femininity can be toxic too, jesus christ” argument when it’s never even brought up.
irony for me is that anyone i knew in genders studies or who was a militant feminist or whatever… always always always dated the most toxic violent gender stereotype dudes.
Thank you. It boggles my mind how people seem so oblivious to this problematic phrasing and how unnecessarily divisive it is. I wish these words could be plastered across the internet.
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With the best will in the world, I think you’re still conflating the symptom with the disease.
Gender-policing is abusive, and abused people often behave in problematic and indeed shitty ways. While of course there are no excuses for shitty behaviour, it’s also incredibly shit to turn around and frame that behaviour in terms of the criteria by which they were picked out for abuse in the first place.
For intance (to get into properly uncomfortable territory), it’s fair to say that systemic racism drives poverty and disadvantage, which in turn can drive all kinds of antisocial behaviour and societal problems. But imagine for one second some sociologist coming up with the concept of ‘toxic Africanity’ (or equivalent) to describe it. They would get fucking dragged, and rightly so.
It’s not about being ‘probably one of the good ones’. It’s about looking at a bunch horrible maladaptive coping strategies, and asking what the hell it is we’re expecting people to cope with, and why we put up with that.
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Really? I’ve never once felt personally attacked as a cis man when I’ve heard the phrase “toxic masculinity.” I know when I’ve been a tool as someone will have probably told me or I feel disappointed in myself after the fact. I’m also a queer guy and on the spectrum so I’ve never really given a fuck about behaving “masculine.”
Really? I’ve never once felt personally attacked as a cis man when I’ve heard the phrase “toxic masculinity.”
Strangely enough, me neither - in fact, the first time I heard that term I knew exactly what it referred to. My problem with it is that it doesn’t go far enough.
sexual advances without consent by men is masculine toxicity by definition.
It’s a whole lot more than that.
The headline is a bit misleading. What it should say is that “men who score low toxic masculinity traits are more likely to seek enthusiastic/affirmative consent”. Which is a bit of a “duh” thing.
Even the authors admit that passive response is normative consent, and as much as I love enthusiastic consent, a lot of men AND women feel very awkward when you try that paradigm since they’re used to normative human sexuality. That’s especially prevalent with older men and women like millennials and gen X. Escalating sexual behaviour with passive consent is different from escalating without consent or against consent. Perhaps when affirmative/enthusiastic consent is normalized, we can have a different conversation.
“A passive response to a sexual advance is a normative indicator of consent, but also might reflect distress or fear, and whether men are able to differentiate between the two during a hookup was important to explore,” said Mattson.
That’s the exact point. In a future study they’ll be able to see if men who score high in toxic masculinity traits are more likely to not notice or actively ignore distress or fear.
I honestly suspect yes since empathy is not a valued trait in performative toxic masculinity, but with science it’s unwise to jump to unsubstantiated conclusions, like this headline does.
I’ve had several fledgling relationships end due to not being sexually aggressive enough. I’m too autistic to pick up on subtle hints, I needed a green light if they wanted me to make a move and they didn’t give me one and then got upset when I didn’t initiate things. It seems like such a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. I’m really uncomfortable with the “just keep pushing until I say no” expectation some women seem to have. It’s a part of why I’ve pretty much opted out of dating as a whole.
I totally relate to this. While we’re sharing personal experiences, I’d also share mine (if that’s ok):
I made very very contradictory experiences. Some girls just seem to get angry if you don’t approach them aggressively, some girls will tell you that you’re a rapist if you even dare to look at them for too long. It’s an impossible puzzle. No matter what you do, someone will always complain. That is why I don’t take these things too seriously anymore. As long as no-one gets seriously hurt, lots of things can heal. What’s important is to use your instincts to classify the situation, and act with an “open heart”. Then most things go well, and those that don’t mostly fail because of other, unrelated reasons. Such as pressure from the environment.
I’m glad they did the research but also duh. I’ve done an experiment on this by being a woman at a bar
boy this terminology is wierd. I think advances are always without consent. They are first moves. Assuming they mean making advances after already recieving some sort of no then its more like that is a sign of toxic masculinity.
EDITED: yeah reading it I see they mean advances like advancing from a stage so that makes more sense. still seems a bit chicken and egg to me though.
The entire narrative aroudn sexual relationships is heavily biased in terms of women and their subjectivity of who/what is attractive.
The same actions taken by men of different physical attributes will have different general rates of acceptance/rejection by women.
Which also applies to women. Hot people get away with more horrible shit because they are hot.
And yet people refuse to admit this very observable and repeatable fact about human behaviour.
The better work is not about ‘men vs women’ it’s about ‘how your level of sexual attractiveness permits antisocial behaviors’
and the ugly truth is that a lot of people simple HATE ugly people, men or women and get insulted that an ugly person approaches them.
This is outright wrong. Physical attractiveness is way bigger of a deal in women than men and there is a lot of hypocrisy around it. I had a friend in high school who was, without beating around the bush, fat. He would bemoan how women would not give him a chance because he was fat but then he himself would not go after women of his same build. He preferentially went after thin hot women. Worse he was when he finally was in a realtionship with a woman of equivalent hotness he started one up with her hotter friend. Im way hotter male wise than he was and he could not figure out how my more sincere approach to relationships was likely a bigger factor than my relative looks. Now that is anecdotal but I have a second hand thing to. It was a news piece and I don’t have the reference so take my word or not but it was a study on tips between male and female servers. They both had to be cordial and pleasant and provide good service but controlling for those factors they each had one factor that would increase the tips. For women it was looks. For men it was making their customer laugh.
Spoken like a true incel.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t particularly matter because (in the context of this submission) it’s really up to the woman. There may be some truth in this given the primordial drive to procreate that attractive people can get away with more… But again, it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps better-looking individuals are just more experienced and know the subtle signs of an evolving relationship. Perhaps they’re not as desperate or forward or aggressive in advancing too quickly. Either way — again: it doesn’t matter because it’s the woman who decides, arbitrary or not.
So an increase in unwanted advances, positively correlates to an increase in ugly people?
if only there was some sort of, say, image of pikachu, that could express my feelings upon reading this
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Well said!
Absolutely not surprising in the slightest.
This just in, studies using modern day neologisms are likely to find more evidence of modern day neologisms.
