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Comment by jbboehr | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to necessarily imply you are doing this, but I suspect "toxic masculinity" is a motte-and-bailey[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

The term has been used utterly consistently across many decades of academic writing. It is absolutely not a motte and bailey. It truly is about how many masculine-coded expectations trap men in harmful behaviors and patterns.

It's a motte and bailey in the way it's socially used. The way it goes is, people will make fun of masculinity in general, and throw around "toxic masculinity" as a meme at any display or mention of masculinity. When challenged, they retreat to the motte of claiming they mean "toxic masculinity" purely in the academic sense.

Almost every concept is used badly by some laypeople. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is widely used by cranks to make all sorts of nonsense claims. That isn't the fault of the idea.

Feminist theory is a serious academic discipline that isn't just making shit up to attack men.

It's such a confusing misnomer that the majority of both proponents and opponents of it wildly misuse it all the time.

Just call it something like "toxic gender roles" or "toxic gender expectations" and you short circuit the entire debate.

I don't believe that it would actually short circuit the debate, since there is a contingent of people who insist on maximally misunderstanding work in this space.

But regardless, the name does derive from some historical reasoning. For many decades feminist theory used to consider the feminine to be aberrant and the masculine to be the cultural norm and a pure good, only investigating the ways in which femininity trapped and harmed people. "Toxic masculinity" was a re-evaluation of these assumptions, identifying ways that masculinity, like femininity could trap and harm people. The term was positioned against the assumptions of the time and "toxic masculinity" expresses this position much better than "toxic gender roles" since it was explicitly about changing how feminism thought about masculinity.

That is no longer especially significant to the term, but inertia exists.

I would never claim “just” however I would say for an area that dovetails well with studies in micro-aggressions, context, bias, and the importance and nuance of words they are shockingly bad at naming things. Maybe you’re right maybe they dont dislike men but they tend to name shared social ills after men an awful lot...

> shockingly bad at naming things

As we all know, naming things is one of the two hardest things.

LOL! However, in that discipline I feel it is the only thing?

This is my first encounter with the term, so forgive me if I’m using it wring, but it feels like this convo was literally motte and bailey’d.

Op: don’t link testosterone and violence - the real problem is toxic masculinity not testosterone a thing all men have.

Someone: you’re not doing this, but toxic masculinity is a motte and bailey

Someone else: no it’s a well defined idea

You, moving the goalpost: how the term is used socially it is

If someone is using the term as you suggested, by all means call out their actions. But if they are not - as op did - why bring this up?

Personally I find the idea of toxic masculinity a useful tool to understand and categorize the things society is telling me i should aspire to, many of which are harmful to who I am personally

I thought the convo was: OP made an otherwise valid, neutral point, then bundled in a defense of a hotly contested phrase, purporting to tell us what it "really" means. jbboehr responded that this was a motte-and-bailey. UncleMeat was like, no it's not, so I tried clarifying what I thought jbboehr was getting at.

And as we know, people never misuse academic words outside academia.

>It truly is about how many masculine-coded expectations trap men in harmful behaviors and patterns.

That's the motte. The bailey is using the term to sell expected patterns and behaviors that are not necessarily any less harmful, just more desirable to the person doing the talking.

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