Speaking as a guy, this doesn't really speak to my life. The most strident enforcers of toxic masculinity on me during my childhood were women, and these were women, many of them feminist (educators and my mother and her friends) who enforced this form of masculinity on me *for the benefit of women* and *at my expense*.
My father, who is more politically conservative than my mother, actually cared about my emotions and growth as a human being. My mother saw me as a vehicle to make her look good to her female peers, and to give her granddaughters one day. One of the problems of this idea of the "patriarchy" is that it doesn't model reality effectively - women who enforce toxic gender roles are assumed to be footsoldiers in a fundamentally male power structure, and that's not how life works. It's assumed that men and boys have unearned advantages in the economy and power structures of society, when in a lot of ways it's actually the reverse - girls are overwhelmingly favored in K-12 education, and when they enter the workplace as women many industries have a pro-female bias as well. The idea of "the patriarchy" just doesn't explain a lot of what goes on in the world, and the resistance to discussing the alternative models is a huge problem.
There's a whole different thing going on here with female writers sexually objectifying the emotions and sexualities of queer men, but we don't have to get into that directly. What I will say that as a guy, women will objectify my emotions for their own amusement, which is extremely dehumanizing and is not the same thing as actually caring about me as a human. When someone wants you to "open up" and "be vulnerable" but it's just about satisfying their ego, then it's not a good thing and you'd be right to reject it.
Speaking as a guy, this doesn't really speak to my life. The most strident enforcers of toxic masculinity on me during my childhood were women, and these were women, many of them feminist (educators and my mother and her friends) who enforced this form of masculinity on me *for the benefit of women* and *at my expense*.
My father, who is more politically conservative than my mother, actually cared about my emotions and growth as a human being. My mother saw me as a vehicle to make her look good to her female peers, and to give her granddaughters one day. One of the problems of this idea of the "patriarchy" is that it doesn't model reality effectively - women who enforce toxic gender roles are assumed to be footsoldiers in a fundamentally male power structure, and that's not how life works. It's assumed that men and boys have unearned advantages in the economy and power structures of society, when in a lot of ways it's actually the reverse - girls are overwhelmingly favored in K-12 education, and when they enter the workplace as women many industries have a pro-female bias as well. The idea of "the patriarchy" just doesn't explain a lot of what goes on in the world, and the resistance to discussing the alternative models is a huge problem.
There's a whole different thing going on here with female writers sexually objectifying the emotions and sexualities of queer men, but we don't have to get into that directly. What I will say that as a guy, women will objectify my emotions for their own amusement, which is extremely dehumanizing and is not the same thing as actually caring about me as a human. When someone wants you to "open up" and "be vulnerable" but it's just about satisfying their ego, then it's not a good thing and you'd be right to reject it.