Coined to Defend, Used to Prosecute

Brothers & Friends —

Years ago, when my wife was on staff with an international university campus ministry, a good deal of our life happened in other people's living rooms. Four couples, somebody's coffee table, coffee going cold on it, a Bible open to whatever we were working through that season. Ministry happened while sitting down.

One evening, during a weekly planning meeting, an all-too-familiar scene unfolded. The wife of the couple whose home we were meeting in did not approve of the suggestion for next week's student engagement plan. The tone shifted from disagreement to disapproval to disrespect. Her words transitioned from the ministry, to his inability to understand students (which was odd since we were all in our twenties and only years removed from college), to intellectual jabs at him for not knowing how to think, and emotional uppercuts at his parenting skills. He was silent, with a mustered-up smile reminiscent of a contender in a boxing ring, staggered by a blow, trying to convey the message, "I'm alright."

Nobody said anything. And we continued our planning.

Here is what I have thought about since. If he had raised his voice on any one of those evenings, if he had said a single hard sentence back to her in that room in front of his friends, every one of us - men and women - would not have received it well. It would have arrived instantly, carrying the authority of a diagnosis. Nobody would have needed to look it up. Nobody would have needed to agree on it first. Mean. Impatient. Unloving. Misogynistic. Or better yet: toxic.

We had a word waiting for him the second he pushed back. We had no word at all for what was actually being done to him.

That word, toxic, (and the phrase that substantiates it, “toxic masculinity”), the one sitting in every mouth in that room, mine included, had never once been asked where it came from. So I went looking. What I found isn't what I expected, and I don't think it's what most people arguing about it expect either.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" was coined by a man named Shepherd Bliss. When, exactly, even he can't say. His best memory puts it around 1986, the year he named his men's group (ref1). Bliss was part of what got called the mythopoetic men's movement: the retreats, the drumming, the poetry, a lot of earnest American men in the 1980s trying to recover something they were fairly sure had been taken from them.

He used the phrase to describe his own father's militarized, authoritarian manhood (ref2). His definition is "behavior that diminishes women, children, other men," and he has said the expression was "not meant to condemn all males" (ref1). In 1990 he told a reporter he chose a medical word on purpose: "like every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote" (ref2). The movement's big book came out that same year, Robert Bly's Iron John (ref3). It wasn't asking men for less masculinity. It was asking for more contact with a true one.

So this is the displacing thing. The people who defend that phrase are right about where it came from. "Toxic masculinity" was never coined to mean that all masculinity is toxic. The word toxic was there to narrow it, to mark off what a man becomes when he's cut off from something good, so the good could be argued for. If you were told the phrase was built as a weapon against men, you were told something that isn't true.

For almost twenty years after that, the phrase stayed small. In 2005, a psychiatrist named Terry Kupers used it in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, writing about men in prison. He meant "the need to aggressively compete and dominate others," the habits that kept those men from accepting the help they needed (ref4). It was narrow, and it was aimed at treating the man.

Then it traveled. Carol Harrington, a sociologist who writes from inside feminist scholarship, wrote the most careful history of the term I've found. She went into the databases and counted. From 1990 to 2011, texts using the phrase never numbered more than 20 a year. After 2017, they ran into the thousands, most of them outside the academy. #MeToo carried it, and the hashtags around it (ref2). By January 2019 it was selling razors, in a Gillette ad a lot of men took personally (ref5).

Somewhere on that trip, the fences came down. Harrington looked at 60 scholarly articles published since 2016 that used the phrase. More than half never defined it. They used it, in her words, "to signal disapproval" (ref2). She isn't a men's-rights writer. She's worried, as a feminist, that the term has gotten too loose to do the work it was made for.

I don't think anybody planned any of this, and I don't think it's a story about anybody's malice. It's a story about distribution, about how a phrase gets passed hand to hand until nobody remembers what it was for.

But a man feels the difference, even if he's never heard of Shepherd Bliss. In the fall of 2024, Pew asked Americans whether people in this country have mostly positive, mostly negative, or neither positive nor negative views of men who are "manly or masculine." Among men, 33 percent said mostly negative. Among women, 18 percent (ref6).

Now let me be fair about what that chart does and doesn't say. Most Americans don't think the country looks down on masculine men. More say the view is positive (43 percent) than negative (25 percent), and that holds for men too, though barely: 36 to 33 (ref6). This isn't a picture of a nation that hates men, and I won't pretend it is.

And the people who use the phrase carefully, as Kupers did, are mostly trying to keep someone safe. A good number of them are trying to keep men alive. The scholarship is about habits and conduct, not about who a man is. I grant all of that.

What the chart does show is fifteen points of daylight between men and women standing in the same country, giving different accounts of the same weather.

Here's my smaller, more stubborn point, and then I'll let you go. My friend on that couch wasn't living downstream of the definition. He was living downstream of the usage. Nobody hands a man the footnote before the phrase arrives. He doesn't get Bliss in the eighties or Kupers in 2005. He gets the room.

There's a harder question underneath all this, and it deserves its own letter: where is the line between a man's steadiness and his suppression, and who gets to draw it? We'll get there.

For now, the next time you hear the phrase, and you will this week, you'll know it started out on the side of men like him. Masculinity is not a sin. It never was, even to the man who coined the phrase.

Walking with you,
Rev. Saī