WHAT IS TOXIC MASCULINITY?

 Wed--Kwei

Annamaria’s piece about the universality of girls’ suffering got me thinking about this phenomenon. I won’t get too much in the psychological weeds in this post, but although the post is a little “light,” the topic isn’t.

What is toxic masculinity?

Definitions: Masculine toxicity is a set of cultural and societal norms of masculinity that emphasize physical violence, aggression, emotional repression, as well as homophobic and sexist behaviour as the way men are “supposed” to act. The elements include

• Misogyny
• Homophobia
• Discrimination against anything other than heterosexuality
• Aggression
• Being “stoic"
• Physical and mental toughness (don’t cry like a little bitch")
• Emotional insensitivity
• Self-sufficiency (“I don’t need your help”)

Many of these are reflected in societally sanctioned aphorisms like, “don’t be a pussy/bitch;” “be a man:” “man up;” “boys don’t cry;” “suck it up;” “boys will be boys,” etc. In toxic masculinity, deviation from the traits above would be labeled as “weak."

Terminology of toxic masculinity

In response to a question, how or when toxic masculinity started, someone replied, “How far back would you like me to go?"

The societal concept of masculinity obviously dates back millennia, but in the modern age a movement called the mythopoetic men’s movement (MMM) developed in response to the second wave of women’s movement of the 1980s and nineties. It originated in psychoanalysis modeled on Carl Jung’s theories, and the term “toxic masculinity”arose then as well. But it was rarely used in media and almost never in academic writing until around 2015.

One result of the MMM is the Mankind Project in which males bond with each other in non-sexual fashion, including “wild men" excursions into the wilderness. Circles are made, and men are encouraged to share their feelings, listen and be listened to, and supported by their fellows. The excursions aim to liberate men from the usual shackles of society--phones, TV, social media, etc.

Cultural norms and toxic masculinity

When I was in Ghana in 2021, I went to a part of town called Jamestown, which happens to be where my father was born. Jamestown and neighboring Bukom are famously known to have produced five world boxing champions like Ike Quartey (possibly a fourth or so cousin). Boxing in Bukom is life itself. Kids start almost as soon as they can walk. Boxing is disciplined fighting, but on the streets of Bukom, it’s a different matter. If a fight arises or someone tries to “diss" you, you would have to protect your honor and either attack or defend yourself. While I was there, I witnessed one chaotic physical exchange between two young men as I was leaving a chop bar with a soda. The point is that fighting with one’s fists is thoroughly sanctioned in Bukom where boxing is king. Is it toxic masculinity? Arguably so, but if it’s an honor code in Bukom that you fight to defend yourself, is it really toxic masculinity, or is it social norms? I’m not sure, really. All I know is that fighting with my fists to solve an issue wouldn't be my first choice I probably wouldn’t survive in Bukom.

They start early

Toxic masculinity and social change

The #MeToo movement represented one of the most important challenges to toxic masculinity in the workplace. It called out bullying, misogyny, assault and rape in different settings and examined why particularly odious men like Harvey Weinstein in positions of power are permitted to serially offend and get away with it. It has opened many men’s eyes and new awareness of the garbage women go through--not only once in a while, every day.

Next: Toxic masculinity in the workplace

ANOTHER YEAR OF THE WOMAN?

Kwei Quartey

There have been several "years of the woman," including 1984, 1992, 2012 and 2018. I believe 2020 will be my personal Year Of The Woman.

By the end of 2017, I had completed my fifth Darko Dawson novel, Death By His Grace. In it, Darko's new sidekick is a young female cop, Mabel Safo, who has been transferred to the Criminal Investigation Headquarters in Accra after she has been sexually assaulted by her commander. My original idea was to have Mabel continue with her own series while Darko was in the background or on a parallel track. However, in what would turn out to be a wise decision, my editor urged me to develop a new series separate from Darko. I don't believe it was by accident that I created a female detective. She had been developing in my subconscious, and although I didn't know it so early on, she was to be shaped by the events of 2017-2019.

Many important women's moments occurred in the period between 2017 and 2019. Time magazine's 2019 Person Of The Year is a diminutive but fierce Swedish teenage girl called Greta Thunberg. Beginning in August 2018, she made the world sit up and pay attention to climate change in a big way.


The steely gaze of Greta Thunberg (Shutterstock/Aaron-Schwartz)


In politics, Spain’s new Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez  appointed a majority-female cabinet in June 2018. In that same year, more than 100 women were voted into office in the U.S. House of Representatives. New Orleans swore in LaToya Cantrell as the first female mayor in the city’s history.

In entertainment, Ava DuVernay, director of A Wrinkle in Time and a close collaborator with Oprah Winfrey, joined the “$100 million club” of directors with films surpassing $100 million in earnings, and Jennifer Lee, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and codirector of Frozen, is named chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.


Ava Duvernay and Oprah Winfrey, two powerful women in entertainment (Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock)


The Me Too Movement

Undoubtedly, this was the most powerful of women's moments. Me Too (or #MeToo) exploded onto the scene in 2017 when The New York Times (NYT) and The New Yorker first reported that dozens of women were accusing American film producer Harvey Weinstein, formerly of The Weinstein Company (TWC), of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse over a period of at least thirty years. In fact, credit for the name Me Too goes to Tarana Burke, a black female activist and advocate who created the term more than 10 years ago in 2006 to remind women, in particular those of color, that they were not alone in their experiences of sexual assault.


Tarana Burke (Lev Radin/Shutterstock)

On October 15, 2017, American actress Alyssa Milano, crediting Burke for the origins of Me Too, tweeted, “If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

On January 1, 2018, as a crushing tsunami of sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein and many other powerful men broke the dam, Hollywood celebrities founded the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment and gender inequality in the workplace.

Later, in September 2018, during a particularly cringeworthy congressional hearing, an anguished Christine Blasey Ford testified to allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school.


FICTION IN THE ME TOO ERA

(A tidbit of interest: J.K. Rowling, has once again topped Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s highest-paid authors. Rowling, the fantasy author and well-known outspoken feminist, raked in $92 million in 2019, the magazine reports.)

Cultural shifts are reflected not only in real life--news, articles, and non-fiction books--but also in fiction. Three recent novels, Milkman, by Anna Burns; His Favorites, by Kate Walbert; and Those Who Knew, by Idra Novey, have Me Too episodes within their pages. No doubt, there are other books that tackle sexual assault and there will be more to come. Fiction in the right hands--from Morrison to Atwood--can awaken us to ideas, experiences, and truths about which we heretofore knew little or nothing.

Writers of fiction should be sensitive to cultural phenomena, which may play major or minor roles in their novels or contribute to the milieu of the work in subtle yet important ways. Me Too planted a seed of new awareness. As I wrote The Missing American, in which Ghanaian protagonist Emma Djan makes her debut appearance, that seed grew and began to flower. In an interview with Terry Gross, Meryl Streep observed how women have learned to look at the world through male eyes, but men have difficulty doing the same thing through female eyes. With Me Too, I found the impulse to learn to do that compelling. 

Things happen when the time arrives, when we are ready. Five years ago, the Emma Djan of 2020 could probably not have been created, but she's here now. I like Emma a lot. I find myself relaxed and soothed around her while in retrospect I realize I was tense and jumpy with Darko--perhaps the inherent male tendency to compete with another male--a remarkably prevalent characteristic across many animal species.

What will happen to Me Too in 2020? I believe the movement will progress and mature into something much more powerful than we have seen. From 2017 to 2019, the ground was being prepared for 2020, and Emma Djan arrives at the perfect time early in the year. It's no wonder that 2020 is my Year Of The Woman.

Kwei Quartey

#MeToo; When Women Travel

Sujata Massey

When women began posting accounts of sexual assault a few months ago, I listened. I counted myself fortunate to make it through a little more than a half century without rape. Also, I haven't experienced workplace harassment. But as the #MeToo stories have continued, some uncomfortable memories are surfacing. 

The first time, I was fifteen. It was a summer that I traveled with my mother and younger sister, exploring Germany and Austria. A summer of great times: going bowling and disco dancing with my cousins, eating lots of curry wurst, taking long rides on trains and watching little villages flash by the window. We had arrived the Nymphenburg Palace, a famous site in Munich. My mother was in the ticket line and I was standing around with my younger sister. A middle-aged white German man approached me and spoke in broken English. He was a professional photographer. I was so pretty. Could he take my photograph? 

That was exactly the kind of language to flatter an awkward teenager and make her acquiescent. 

The photographer told me to stand a little bit away from the crowd; he was getting the angle right. I smiled as he took a few pictures. And then he suddenly rushed forward and began unsnapping the front shoulder fastenings of my overalls. I felt his fingers fumble at my breasts. I began weeping as I twisted away, realizing that I’d been tricked. My little sister rushed toward me, also crying loudly, and the stranger vanished into the crowd. I cannot remember if my sister and told my mother. I know that I considered myself to blame  in allowing the man near me and my precious little sister.

Decades passed, and I became a young woman who dated a lot of nice guys and a few jerks. I was comfortable saying no and setting limits on behavior that made me uncomfortable. At 27, I married and began a career as a self-employed writer. I wrote novels that took me on solitary research trips to Japan. I marveled at being able to walk around at eleven or twelve at night in Japan without fear, at being able to eat alone in restaurants without interruption, at disembarking at lonely train stations without hassle. It was a pretty charmed travel experience.

Yet my second bad experience happened while I was traveling again in Europe. I was sent on a short book tour to Finland, a country where the Rei Shimura novels are very popular. Meeting readers was a very cheering experience. I chatted, signed books, and thoroughly enjoyed the company and assistance of my Finnish editor as I traveled through the capital city, Helsinki. 

During the tour, I had two days free, so I traveled by myself, taking an efficient train west to a small town with a spa where I booked a night’s stay. I looked forward to some long walks outside, and perhaps some spa treatments.  I requested an hour-long massage at the spa. The receptionist was sorry to say that all the regular massage therapists were booked. Then she had an idea. She would phone in an alternative massage therapist, not a regular spa employee, someone in the area who had offered to work part time if the need arose.

When I checked in for my massage the next morning, I wasn't worried to discover the masseur was a male. I’d had excellent, professional massages from therapists of both genders. I walked into the massage room, and when the door closed, the man told me to undress and get under a sheet. But here’s the strange thing. It is standard operating procedure for a massage therapist to leave a client alone to undress and get underneath the sheet. This man stayed put, his eyes glued on me.

I would like to say that I walked out of the room then and there, but I didn’t. I was a traveler, and I thought maybe they did things differently in Finland.  I felt very uncomfortable as I turned my back to him and began undressing, trying to wrap the sheet around myself for privacy while doing that (an impossible task).

Once on the table, he began the massage. I was lying on my stomach, and I noticed right away that his touch was very light and did not seem to be following a pattern. He was unskilled at therapeutic touch, I thought with annoyance. And then he told me to turn over.

Suddenly, I decided to believe what my instinct was telling me. This man wasn’t a professional massage therapist at all. I told him sternly that the massage was finished and I ordered him to leave the room. It took a little more yelling, but he did go. I dressed in a flash, my body shaking, and I went to the reception desk.

The person there didn’t realize the extent of my complaint about the nonprofessional, ogling therapist. I was likely too upset to be able to communicate the seriousness of the situation.I had prepaid for the massage; there was no refund. And honestly, money wouldn’t have helped. He saw what he saw of me. Nothing could erase the sense of violation.

With my Asian appearance and American accent, I stand out as a visitor in Europe. And the sad reality is that women who travel are an easy mark. Molesters can make quick hits, guessing that victims have nobody nearby to call to for help, and that victims will chalk it up to bad luck during travel. Such perpetrators also know that foreign women are less able to communicate effectively with local police and give the kind of details that would lead to apprehension.

Women who travel cannot anticipate these sudden intrusions. Also, we don't have enough time to mentally store the details of attacks, the way you would about a coworker you know or someone you’re dating. Think about all the groping incidents on subways and buses throughout the world. Even planes are territory for molestation. A first-class airplane seat was where a woman reported relentless physical harassment from Donald Trump in the early 1980s. The New York Times video of her account is embedded below.

An effort to shield women from sexual abuse in public is one of the arguments behind purdah, the conservative custom of women staying behind veils or confined to their homes. Purdah began hundreds of years ago among mostly Muslim families in the Middle East and South Asia, but included wealthy Hindus as well. I write about purdah in The Widows of Malabar Hill, my latest novel). The custom largely died out in the early twentieth century, but it helped build an international misbelief that good women stay home and disreputable ones roam. And now that the Taliban, ISIS and other radical conservative groups have taken over villages and towns in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, enforced purdah is back and crueler than ever.

I suspect the men who went after me were locals in their communities who acted alone. But there are increasing situations where groups of men set out to simultaneously molest a lot of women and girls. Consider the multiple attacks by an alleged 2000 men against approximately 1200 women celebrating New Years Eve 2015-16 in public in Cologne, Germany--and copycat incidents in other countries.

Men who prey on women travelers usually get away without being named.  But our voices do carry, and my hope is that molesters will someday find their sordid occupation is no longer a safe adventure.  

Skeeffo: A New and Needed Word

Annamaria on New Year's Day 2018!

I know! I should be all happiness and light on the first day of the new year.  People expect me to project my typical cock-eyed optimism.

Though it may not seem like it at first glance, this really is a jubilant essay because it celebrates my favorite public events of 2017.

I am talking about the #MeToo Movement.

2017 was the watershed year, when AT LAST brave American women outed men who abused them. During the past several months, we have seen powerful men disgraced, sent packing from high profile jobs.  No longer can they use their power platforms to be disgusting toward women.  Disgrace will dog their steps for the rest of their lives.

Women are no longer too embarrassed to speak up.  A new day has dawned.

Given the tsunami of publicity, I don't think I am being overly optimistic that something very basic has changed.  Many men who got away with it in the past are now notorious.

Think you can still do that sort of thing?  Want to try it, Mr. Big Shot?  A little piggish behaviour?  Tempted to use your position to grab a woman's privates?  To show her yours?

Is it worth your entire reputation?  Your job?  Your future?  All the admiration you've garnered for your past achievements?  Wouldn't you rather zip up your fly?  And keep your hands in your pockets?  And bite back those nasty insinuating words?

Men all over the United States have to be asking themselves if the paltry rewards that were theirs in the past are now worth the risks.

I only hope the trend spreads until civility is everywhere in the world.

To keep the trend going, I do think we are missing one thing.

We need a word to designate a man who engages in such disgusting behaviors.  So far, there has been no pejorative clear enough.  We have terms for women who "misbehave."  Plenty of them.  But what do we call a such a man.  "Bastard" isn't specific enough.  "Pig" has too many other meanings.  We need a word as unambiguous as "whore."  Something that means only that sort of man.

I propose a new invention to describe a very old, but until now secret set of behaviours.  I say we call such a man a "skeeffo."

I take my neologism from the Italian adjective "schifoso," which means "gross" or "disgusting" in the dirtiest possible way.  The noun "skeeffo" would designate men like Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Donald Trump in the way they have treated women.  A skeeffo is a man who thinks he ought to get away with it.

To put a colleague on notice, all a woman would have to say is, "Be careful.  Martin is a skeeffo."  

I like how a person has to twist his expression into one of disgust to say "skeeffo."  I am spelling it with two f's because it looks more disgusting that way.

Do you agree that the language needs such a word?  If not 'skeeffo," what would you suggest?

 I hope we all find a great year in 2018.  And that the little girls born this coming year will never have to suffer skeeffos in silence.