Toxic Masculinity

I’m a touch-typer. But I bashed my left pinkie against a fence while doing yard work, so it hurts every time I use caps or  the letters q (ouch), a (ouch) and z (ouch). So I hope y’all appreciate this while reading this post.

A friend of mine visited Seattle recently, and brought back one of their leftist rags for my amusement. It’s called “The Stranger.”

In an article titled “She Was Getting On with Her Life Without Him, Which Made Him Jealous,” Heidi Groover cites several cases of domestic violence against women, and blames them on “Toxic Masculinity” and guns.” In fact the subheading reads:

The Shooting in Mukilteo Is the Latest Example of What Happens When Guns Meet Toxic Masculinity

The article begins:

By now, the plot points are familiar. A woman dates a man. The two break up. He’s jealous, “heartbroken,” he can’t take no for an answer. He buys a gun – or has one already. He kills her.

Groover brings up Orlando:

After the June mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte described toxic masculinity as a “specific model of manhood, geared towards dominance and control…

And then there’s the obligatory Trump-bashing:

It creeps into our political discourse as Republicans demand we “bomb the hell out of ISIS” and Donald Trump brags about his penis size or implies that his supporters should shoot Hillary Clinton.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the connection between (allegedly) bragging about one’s penis size and male violence. To me, it looks like she’s condemning all masculine attributes. I get the impression that Groover has a problem with males, and guns, in general.

Let’s bear these points in mind – as we compare “Toxic Masculinity” and “Toxic Islam.”

Groover may object to “bombing the hell out of ISIS,” or maybe she’s  simply citing this expression as an example of male aggressiveness. Either way, there’s little doubt she’d agree that only a small fraction of Muslims are terrorists.

I would venture to say that an even smaller fraction of men commit domestic violence – yet Groover has no problem generalizing about masculinity by calling it “Toxic Masculinity” and blaming it for a lot of what is wrong with the world.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no “Masculinity Handbook” that lays down guidelines for men.Maybe if there were, and that guidebook condoned violence against women, then we could condemn this ideology as a whole.

As it so happens, there IS a guidebook for Muslims, and it does call for violence against both non-Muslims and women*.

How convenient for Groover to bring up the Orlando massacre, and ignore the Islamic aspect of it, focusing only on the guns and the fact that the murderer was a man. If so, then let’s teach American history as follows:

Native Americans were robbed of their lands, and largely eradicated, because of males and guns. The “White Man,” per se, had nothing to do with it.

Even more ironic is that Groover attacks the only candidate who wishes to protect women from Islamic persecution. Trump doesn’t want to see American women suffer the way European women are suffering – from ongoing sexual assault by Muslim men.

But we needn’t speak only of Muslims. I wonder if Groover would blame the perpetual bloodshed among inner-city blacks on “Toxic blackness.” This would be about as valid as blaming men, in general, for violence against women.

Speaking of “Toxic blackness,” Groover writes:

More than a third of women in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and those rates are higher for women of color and women who are not straight or cisgender.

Since it’s obvious that “women of color” primarily date “men of color,” then this is just another way of saying that “men of color” are more abusive to their women. The same, apparently, goes for homosexuals. In other words, what we have here is “Toxic color” and “Toxic homosexuality.”

Aside from all that, I think it’s worth pointing out that every female domestic violence victim chose her abuser over other men. Whether the two were still together at the time, or had previously separated, she chose him. I’m not saying that, because of her poor judgment in men, she deserves to be abused or killed. Not at all. But I am saying that these victims bear some responsibility in their own misfortunes – because there were plenty of kind and gentle men they could have dated. Instead, they went for the psychopaths, the “bad boys,” the gangstas and the controlling types.

*Some say that’s not what it actually means, and that such passages are “taken out of context,” but what difference does it make to us whether that’s what it means or not if many of those well-versed in Islam do interpret it this way?