Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:

If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.

If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.

I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.

I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”

A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..

But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama, being overly emotional, gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….

I get this, and I can see why the hypocrisy is galling, but actually instead of less context (swapping masculinity for femininity and seeing if we still like the logic), I reach my conclusion by adding more context.

Toxic masculinity really is worse than toxic femininity. Violence is worse than gossip. Like on one hand we have the evil of Abigail from the Crucible, but on the other hand we have… war.

I’m extremely anti-masculine because even as a man I can step back and say “masculinity has caused way, way too many deaths.” Aggression is bad for the self and very bad for the people who get stepped on, and yet it’s a degenerate and dominant strategy in our social and economic model.

Unfortunately, because “acting like a cliche man” is so advantageous, the real risk is an ideology that latches onto to the particulars of “being a man” as the problem and copies the behavior, thinking it can be purified if done by someone else.

So what you get is people harassing men in a confrontational manner, using all the tools of masculine aggression, but thinking it’s not toxic masculinity because it’s done by a woman (or by a group of people including some men, but who say they are doing it on behalf of women.)

And at it’s worse, the phrase “toxic masculinity” seems part of that memeplex, whereby we take the worst behaviors of man-world and legitimize them so long as they are being done by people we are calling not-masculine.