We Need To Have A National Conversation About ‘Toxic Femininity’

We’ve spent several years now talking about “toxic masculinity,” though I’m not sure what exactly it means. It’s a great example of what Andrew Hofer calls “Trojan terminology” — think “white supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” “anti-racism” etc. These are all phrases where Hofer notes there’s “a larger debate we need to have about the use of neologisms to sneak in all sorts of extra baggage that people disagree about.”

In the case of toxic masculinity, the vast majority of violence has always been committed by men. We can be honest about that and take reasonable steps to address male violence and misogyny. However, the rise of internet culture, and whatever else our woke montagnards are currently banging on about, doesn’t mean a problem inherent to the human condition has suddenly become uniquely “toxic.” By any historical standard, life for women in the West is the best it’s ever been. Not that reality stopped Democrats spending a tens of millions of dollars on ads implying hoards of abusive husbands are threatening their wives if they vote for Kamala Harris.

But by successfully branding men as toxic, no one hesitates anymore before disparaging men, whereas huge swaths of Americans are loathe to criticize feminism or make generalizations about women. Even when we can say that feminism has become, very literally, toxic.

Last week saw the rise of a TikTok trend that went by the moniker of “Make Aqua Tofana Great Again.” For those of you that are not feminist history nerds, Aqua Tofana was a deadly cocktail of arsenic and belladonna that was sold and marketed to women in 17th century Italy, who used it to off hundreds of men that were allegedly abusive or otherwise problematic. Anyway, the first video on this got 1.3 million likes and MATGA was off to the races.

Obviously, a lot of people weren’t taking the election results well, but this is something altogether different. I have a feeling if there was a major social media trend where men were plotting to off women en masse for voting for Kamala Harris, we’d be on the receiving end of a another media jeremiad about online radicalization and the need to censor social media. Instead, I’m not sure a single major media outlet even picked up on the Aqua Tofana insanity, let alone the less subtle vitriol. Here’s a video about shooting random white men from a woman who’s only coherent motivation seems to be that she can’t regulate her emotions.

Elsewhere on parts of the information superhighway where it’s a bad idea to roll down the window, we had women responding to Trump’s second term by endorsing the “4B movement.” The Bs don’t translate from the original Korean, where this feminist movement sprung up in the last decade, but essentially there’s four tenets involved: No sex with men, no giving birth, no dating men, and no marriage to men.

Obviously, this resembles a cult far more than a pragmatic plan for female happiness, but the ladies on the 4B Reddit community seem quite serious about it — one of them even offered up her own land to start a commune. While I don’t want to belittle this effort … oh, who am I kidding? If someone would just set up some cameras, I’d pay a modest sum to watch the ensuing comedy of “The Real Femcels of Upstate New York.”

Of course, I feel compelled to point out that not all women have lost their minds. And I mean that earnestly, unlike the feminists who spent years mocking the phrase “not all men” every time an ordinary guy suggested it was a tad unfair to blame half the planet for Harvey Weinstein’s crimes. In fact, white women voted for Trump, and rather than respecting this as a valid choice, it resulted in some nuclear grade Mean Girls vitriol from leftist women. Here’s a video of a black woman saying she hopes white women who voted for Trump get raped.

Those are all pretty extreme reactions, not that there’s a shortage of those to be found in a country where about one in four women are being treated for depression. But the more moderate version of protest by liberal women still involves shaving your head en masse. Or if you’re not that courageous, you can give yourself a flattering pixie cut and still tell yourself that you’re doing this to make sure “no Trump-supporting misogynist men ever talk to you again.” I have zero desire to talk to any of these women, but if I had to, I would tell them that any dramatic gestures you make to in reaction to men are an admission that their approval means a lot more than you are willing to admit.

What a lot of women — again, this is not all women! — don’t understand is that not everything is about them, and the data bear this out. I don’t doubt that years of reflexive belittling of men affected the way they voted in this election. Men between ages 18-29 shifted a staggering 30 points to the right (and, worth noting, women in the same age cohort also swung right, albeit less dramatically). But it would be oversimplifying to the point of ridiculous to think men voted for Trump to intentionally to spite women, or that they were susceptible to political programming. In fact, it’s women, not men, who have radicalized:

The so-called “discourse” has been so focused on men being inherently bad, those with the loudest megaphones seemed to forget that men have their own needs and aspirations that don’t revolve around accepting a lowly place in an intersectional hierarchy. “I don’t know how to say this gently, but young men don’t want control over women’s bodies,” observed Polimath on X. “They want to be this guy.”

Not that any of the following men are above criticism as male role models — far from it — but what do Democrats offer young men in terms of aspirational figures compared to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and J.D. Vance?

Following last week’s stunning electoral defeat, actress Christine Lahti tweeted a note of thanks to Democrat veep candidate Tim Walz, and made the odd-but-perfectly-exemplary claim that he was a great counterexample of “toxic masculinity.” Suffice to say, she deleted the tweet after people did not respond well.

As it turns out, Walz was a great example of toxic masculinity — just not in the way the term is usually understood. On paper, Democrats thought he checked the boxes as a white male assistant football coach. In the real world, he was a spazzy goofball who lied about his military service and was so beholden to denigrating his identity as a man that as governor of Minnesota, he was responsible for putting tampon dispensers in boys locker rooms. If toxic masculinity is bad, toxic shock masculinity has to be worse.

The problem is that healthy masculinity is best realized not by erasing the distinctions between men and women or catering to one over the other, but by embracing the complementarity of the two sexes. Whether they resent this being mansplained or not, women have a responsibility to be the nurturing and moderating influence on men the same way men have a responsibility to channel their aggressive tendencies to provide for and defend women.

Instead, we have created a growing class of women who are narcissistically rushing to TikTok to announce they’re “getting my tubes tied 2 days after Trump was elected because so the government can’t take away my choice.” I’m sorry, but if your highest moral commitment is sex without consequences you don’t deserve to be happy. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious expression of self-loathing than willingly excising your ability to reproduce, the most fundamental characteristic defining what it means to be a woman. And it’s hard not to conclude whatever anger these women are feeling ultimately has nothing to do with misogyny or politics.

I don’t have any ideas about how to go about helping these women find peace, but the conversation we need to have can’t begin and end with threatening men, ceding to radically left-wing political demands, or pretending abortion — which is still widely available, despite the hysteria — is unassailable.

For now, the first step is to admit you have a problem, and toxic femininity is a real thing we’re going to have to confront and deal with before it drags the whole country over the edge.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator