Toxic Masculinity Almost Killed Me

CW: mentions of violence, sexual assault, and suicide.

Gentlemen, we really need to talk. I know it often seems like we on the left (especially us feminists) give you a hard time for being male. I’ll admit that there is some justification for that perception. I’ll admit that sometimes you are treated unfairly and you are not given the proper amount of respect and charity that you deserve. However, there is also a basis for criticizing some of the ways masculinity is performed, and I want to show you how using my own personal experience with a thing we feminists often call toxic masculinity.

Before I do, it’s worth noting the adjective “toxic” and what we mean by it. An adjective, as you all know, is a word denoting an attribute placed before a noun in order to modify it. This means that masculinity and toxic masculinity are not the same thing. Yes, they share masculinity in common, but red velvet cake and chocolate cake are significantly different in ways that matter even though they are still both cake. So when we talk about toxic masculinity, we are not saying that masculinity as a whole is toxic, though I will acknowledge that some feminists do think that and even though I can understand why they think that, I certainly do not agree with them.

In order to illustrate what I mean by toxic masculinity as opposed to mere masculinity it is helpful to use the example of mass shooters, who are overwhelmingly male. When discussing the perpetrators of these heinous acts, many people will focus on traits such as mental health. It is more intuitive to think that mental health would play a causal role, but that still does not explain why these shooters are almost always male. Mental health is arguably just as much of an issue for women (if not more so since we often experience more trauma) as it is for men, yet women just aren’t shooting up public spaces to nearly the same degree. If mental health were really the main causal factor, it would stand to reason that women would also be engaging in this behavior, but that is not what we see. So why the focus on mental health if our intuitions can be so easily challenged upon further inspection?

When I witnessed the videos taken by the students being shot at by the Parkland shooter, I was immediately brought back to the moment I witnessed a man brutally shoot a woman in cold blood–especially when I saw the blurred images of bloody corpses on the classroom floors. I later made the following observations:

1.  We can have an extremely averse reaction (assuming we haven’t already become too numb) to seeing the carnage of wounded/dead bodies.
2.  We quickly try to frame mass shooters as psychotic, crazy or deranged.

But why? There is a common contributing factor for both (1) and (2), but let’s focus on (2) for now. Why focus on mental status rather than on other traits shooters tend to share in common like being male? It’s the same reason we are averse to gore and other things that remind us of unpleasant realities like death; it is the same reason why racism, xenophobia, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. are part of our reality; it’s why this kid thought shooting up a school was something worth doing: abjection.

Abjection can be defined as “the state of being cast off”. In psychoanalysis and critical theory, it’s how people primarily define themselves by creating boundaries between themselves and “the other”.

One of the most influential writers on this concept was Julia Kristeva. In her work Powers of Horror, she describes abjection as a kind of horror one feels when one is confronted with the reality of living in a body, or a breakdown in the distinction between subject and object, of self and other.

In other words, the abject is that which is “not me”. When we mature, we experience things we once considered part of ourselves be rejected. They are abjected from our sense of self or self concept. According to Kristeva, abjection is the disturbance of identity, systems, and order.

Now consider (1). The sight of the bloodied corpses stirs a horror within by forcing us to confront our mortality. Many of us reject, or resist, the idea that our bodies will all become inanimate corpses that will decay to dust. Thus, the corpse is the abject.

Now consider (2). Rather than focusing on the gender of the shooter, we focus on his mental status. Of course, mental health can, and often does, play a contributing role, but it is far more complicated than that. So much so that mental health is not found to play a significant role, yet we latch onto it anyway as an explanation because it makes it easy for us to abject, to define ourselves by what we are not. We look at Nikolas Cruz and in dealing with our horror, we say “that boy is deranged, he is insane, he is pyschotic, he is mentally ill, he is not me”.

Abjection in this case gets us off of the hook. It gets us a get-out of-jail-free card from examining how unhealthy expressions of masculinity and the presence and accessibility of guns, i.e., our values, norms and social systems, were factors.

Toxic masculinity, as I like to define it, is an unhealthy performance of masculinity that results through the abjection of primarily one thing: the feminine. Of course, any kind of masculinity is going to contrast itself against femininity, but toxic masculinity takes it quite a bit further than that. For example, emotionality is often associated with the feminine (as opposed to rationality which is often associated with the masculine), but a healthy masculinity does give room to emotion and emotional expression while toxic masculinity represses it. There are other things about the feminine that toxic masculinity goes further out of its way to reject, but emotional repression is its most toxic part.

To see how, I want to focus now on myself and my own performance of toxic masculinity as a transgender woman. Growing up, I learned very quickly that the feminine was forbidden, that crying was a sign of weakness I better learn to stop doing and that in order to be respected, I had to project toughness. My friends today say that I am what’s called a “high femme”–an especially feminine person–who doesn’t have a masculine bone in her body. However, I was relatively successful (or at least successful enough to convince myself and others that I was more masculine and less feminine than I actually was) performing masculinity when I was younger. Of course, “successful” is a relative term.

My performance of masculinity made me an emotional zombie. The only kind of emotions I could express (“safely” or otherwise) were related to anger and aggression. This almost killed me. I became extremely depressed and anxious. I was socially isolated and I had a tenuous connection with reality. It was as if I were hopelessly alone in a world that wasn’t real.

As feminine as I was, I still engaged in toxic behaviors. I talked about other women in distasteful and disrespectful ways, I felt a sense of entitlement to other people’s time and energy, and I was resentful of other people’s apparent success and happiness. In other words, I was a bit of a dick.

This all affected me so negatively that I became very suicidal several times in my life–I just couldn’t take it anymore. One of these periods of my life occurred around the time I was in El Salvador serving a church mission. It happened in a very poor, rural town as the sun was setting. I was purchasing water from a vendor when I heard what sounded like the firecrackers the local kids played with, but this felt different. These noises were louder, and immediately after the first four cracks, I heard screaming and then I saw people running.

I turned around and visually witnessed the final two cracks of the fire-spit bullets directed at a young woman. The shooter was a young man who couldn’t be any older than I was (which was 20 years old at the time). I saw him, I saw her body lying in a pool of blood, and I froze. It was as if it wasn’t actually happening; that I was watching it as if it were a movie–an experience that was a magnification of my typical experience. I didn’t process it for a while, but once I started to, I began to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it made my struggle with anxiety and depression much more difficult.

I eventually got help for my PTSD and the experience barely affects me these days, though the Parkland shooting did take me back. I mention this experience because it is a demonstration of how toxic masculinity almost killed me both as a subject and as an object of said masculinity.

Since transitioning, I have embraced my femininity and have made a lot of progress in overcoming the damage that I suffered before, though I still have some work to do. Now, as a trans woman, rather than worrying about my own performance, I feel that I need to worry about the performance of (straight) men. For example, as a bisexual person, I am attracted to both men and women. I would like to date men, but I don’t because I don’t feel safe enough.

Of course, I could be overestimating the risks involved, but I know that because of abjection, straight men have an especially hard time with the notion of dating a trans woman. Yes, there are good straight men who are perfectly comfortable with dating a trans woman. However, what I and other trans women have to worry about is something called trans panic.

Because of toxic masculinity and its abjection of the feminine, straight men when confronted with the notion of being attracted to and/or dating a trans woman often fear the implications (e.g., they worry that it might mean that they are gay or that their friends will think they are gay), a disturbance in their identity, which leads them to feel horror manifested as shame and disgust. This shame and disgust, these “powers of horror”, are what get us beaten, raped and (often brutally) murdered.

I believe toxic masculinity definitely plays a significant role, especially when coupled with the prevalence and accessibility of guns, in many of these shootings. It leads many men and boys to engage in unhealthy, sometimes violent, behaviors resulting from the fact that they never learned productive, healthy ways to manage their emotions.

It is instructive to note that a lot of these shooters have a prior history of this kind of behavior. For example, there is evidence suggesting that Cruz was abusive to women, as is often the case with many of these perpetrators. Women are also especially more prone to being murdered by their partners, and are five times more likely to be murdered when their partner owns a gun.

However, I am optimistic that these toxically masculine men are becoming less common as men are now more than ever given permission to accept their feminine sides and accept that their performance of masculinity can permit emotionality. Don’t get me wrong, I do acknowledge that there are already plenty of examples of healthy masculinity out there, it’s just that I have reason to believe that their numbers can and are growing, and as a result, I think I can start to feel a bit safer.

The Philosophy and Psychology of Fashion (Part 2)

When looking at one’s self from the mirror, the perspective that one is given is that of someone looking from the outside. However, unlike when looking at another person, the reaction that one might have is the thought “that is me?” Notice the inflection that denotes a question as represented by particular punctuation. The ‘?’ signifies more than just a mere question.

A signifier is a sign’s physical form (think of a word printed on paper)  and is distinct from its meaning, or the signified. For example, the word “duck” printed on paper is a sign that causes us to think of our own mental representation, or concept, of what a duck is. Of course, the signified doesn’t have to necessarily correspond to things in the world. (I dare you to not think of a pink elephant!)

The image we see when we look at ourselves in the mirror, i.e., from the outside, is a kind of signifier. Reflecting on what it feels like to look at one’s self in the mirror and ask “that is me?” makes it apparent that what we see in the mirror signifies something that seems to differ from the way we feel inside. It can be a kind of idealization of who we are–an ideal self. (Note that “ideal” does not necessarily mean morally perfect, or desirable. It is more accurate to say that it acts more as a model to organize one’s self around, whether for good or bad.)

It was previously explained that through language, or a set of signifiers, children progress from the instinctually driven phase of the semiotic to the goal-directed and intentional phase of the symbolic, which Lacan called the mirror stage, as it is the achievement of symbolic thought, of mental representation, that ushers in the awareness of one’s self.

Thus, the image we see looking back at us does not match what we feel from the inside. We feel a kind of incongruence–an incongruence between the signifier and the signified, the object and its concept, the real and the ideal. Where does this felt sense come from?

To answer that question, we need to think about what motivates us. An intuitive notion of motivation is that we act for reasons. After all, it seems like our actions are goal-directed as opposed to being random or driven by instinct. For the longest time, philosophers have debated about the kinds of reasons that have the force to drive action. Some believe that this force comes from inner desires. David Hume famously expressed that reason is the “slave of the passions”, meaning that reason does not sit in the driver’s seat of action. Rather, it serves as a guide.

Those who thought that reason was, or ought to be, in the drivers seat of rational decision making asserted that reasons must be external. Therefore, being rational requires doing certain things, regardless of whether or not we want to do them. However, folks who advocated this view failed to explain how these kinds of reasons can have any kind of influence on action whatsoever if being motivated to do something isn’t a requirement for doing it. What’s worse, how on Earth could moral realism–the belief that at least somethings are morally required, morally permissible, or morally impermissible all the time, everywhere, and for everyone–be feasible?

Immanuel Kant addressed this issue by arguing that being sensitive and responsive to moral reasons is built into the structure of the mind. In other words, part of what it means to be a person is to be able to recognize, be motivated by, and act on moral reasons. Lacan’s position was that the formation of the psyche, or mind, begins before the child is even born, and through the constant signification of norms and values, the self emerges.

Like Kant, Simon Critchleyargued that moral values are critical to the kinds of things we are, and the morality we structure ourselves around produces a sense of a coherent self. Thus, to be human is to be value driven. For Critchley, the kind of thing that we are is a moral subject that is both generating morality from within and is at the same time being created by it in a kind of feedback loop. Why? Because if a moral demand is to be placed on a subject, that subject must already exist in order to recognize and approve of the demand, and those demands must come form other subjects who are also created by and create said values simultaneously. Stated differently, we are constituted by the values we create via our actions which include our words, gestures and expressions–one of those expressions being the way we dress.

Therefore, fashion is a way of embodying our values. It is important for the realization of our sense of self in the pursuit of our ideal selves. Given the conclusion, it would also stand to reason that a part of caring for one’s self is caring for one’s own presentation.

The Philosophy and Psychology of Fashion (Part 1)

The “mirror stage” is a period in our development when we can (figuratively or literally) look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that the person staring back at us is us. It is when our awareness of ourselves, our sense of self, emerges and remains with us–typically for the rest of our lives. However, this mirror stage doesn’t begin until around 18-24 months of age, so what was life like before?

Jacques Lacan  (1901-1981) was one of the great psychoanalysts who popularized the idea of the mirror stage. Before the mirror stage, the ego (or self) has not yet emerged, so the child is not able to see herself as an individual separate from the rest of the world. She is, in a sense, one and whole with the world around her. But then, as the child acquires language, she begins to use symbols to communicate her needs and desires.

Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) pointed out that the language that is initially directed externally to elicit action from more competent others in order to satisfy the child’s needs begins to turn inward when those others are not always readily available, and so an internally directed, private speech develops. Through private speech, she begins to talk to herself in a way that helps her develop symbolic thought–mental representations–not merely of things in the world, but also of herself.

It is at this point that the ego and the id begin their dance with one another in her psyche. The ego promises a sense of a more unified subjectivity while the id continues to exist in the shadows, striving to drive the child to act through raw instinct.

For Lacan, our true selves lie beneath what our egos project to ourselves and to the world. We may consider our stream of consciousness to flow in an organized and fluid manner, but when we really take the time to just observe, the stream of consciousness is a tangled, disorderly mess of loosely connected (and sometimes conflicting) thoughts, feelings, and impulses. What contributes to the concealment of this chaos is viewing ourselves from the outside.

What we see in the mirror, for example, doesn’t always give us a picture of the way we feel ourselves to be from the inside. One of the ways we use to convey to the world our sense of our inner selves is through our dress. Fashion can be seen as a mode of being, an expression of who we are on the inside for the whole world to see. Of course, not everyone is going to be true to themselves in their expression. Sometimes people conform to cultural ideals that don’t necessarily ring true to who they are inside. And sometimes Society, through norms and expectations, will regulate what is and what isn’t acceptable expression.

Lacan referred to the realm we exist in as subjects as the symbolic. Before the child acquires language, she is continuous with the world but as she transitions into the symbolic realm, she becomes separated and cut off from it. The instincts and drives that once directed her movements become repressed. The distinction that emerges is what Lacan called the small other and the big other. The world at large is the big other while the self is the small other constituted by the norms, values, customs, etc. of the big other. Later, the child begins to recognize her primary caretaker as another small other much like, yet separate from, herself. In a sense, the child is not only cut off from the rest of the world, but also from other people.

If Lacan is right, then our sense of self is merely imaginary or inauthentic, and we are hopelessly alone in the universe. We can try to reach out to others with our outward expressions, but we can never communicate to others what truly lies beneath. Thus, fashion is a vain attempt at communicating an authentic self to others.

Fellow psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941) believes there is a way to overcome the symbolic and its repression. Think of the time before an infant can put together complete sentences, or even words. She attempts to mobilize and vocalize, but the noises, e.g., the “goos” and the “gagas”, are unintelligible and her movements are chaotically instinctual, i.e., they are before meaning, before intention. Once the child enters the realm of the symbolic, she is in a world of meanings and those mobile patterns become goal oriented. Kristeva acknowledges Lacan’s notion of the symbolic, but she posits another of her own she calls the semiotic.

The semiotic is essentially the expression of that authentic mode of being that Lacan denied was truly expressible. It is a kind of pre-meaning that makes it possible to communicate an authentic self to the rest of the world, and she believes that it was expressed at its best through poetry and other forms of artistic expression. For the sake of argument, we will consider fashion such a form of artistic expression.

If Kristeva is correct, fashion and other forms of presentation are actually very important for reaching out to the world and establishing meaningful connections with others, though there are a couple of major problems with her ideas.

The first problem concerns the idea that there is a self that is imaginary and a “real” essence that it conceals. Kristeva, like Lacan, appears to want to have her cake and eat it, too. If it is the case that one enters and remains in the realm of the symbolic (meaning), then one’s only access to what is real is mediated through the filter of these “imaginary” representations. Also, what sense does it make to speak of repressed drives if we are always experiencing and talking about them from from the position of being repressed individuals? How does it make sense to say with any certainty that there is both a real and and an imaginary self when the only self we have access to is the imaginary one?

The semiotic necessarily depends on the symbolic for its function. After all, there is no pre-meaning, or meaning making, without there being a meaning in the first place. These criticisms were articulated by Judith Butler (1956) in her works Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. For Butler, there is no “real” apart from the “imaginary”, there is no semiotic without the symbolic, and the norms of the big other do not just repress drives, they also generate them.

In conclusion, it is in fact possible to use fashion and other modes of expression to communicate to and bond with others. It has value and contributes to the richness of our culture and the functioning of our societies. Exactly how it can do this isn’t fully understood, but a lot of work has been done that is beginning to paint a beautiful picture for us.