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Recently, scholars and the media have been suggesting that the Western world is experiencing a masculinity crisis. However, semantics matter and we may have been approaching the matter from a wrong angle.

Michael Salter, who is a Scientia Fellow and an associate professor of criminology at the University of New South Wales at Sydney currently serves on the board of directors for the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

He agrees that masculinity can indeed be destructive. However, Salter believes that both conservative and liberal stances on this issue commonly misunderstand how the term toxic masculinity functions.

"When people use it, they tend to diagnose the problem of masculine aggression and entitlement as a cultural or spiritual illness—something that has infected today’s men and leads them to reproachable acts," Salter wrote. "But toxic masculinity itself is not a cause. Over the past 30 years, as the concept has morphed and changed, it has served more as a barometer for the gender politics of its day—and as an arrow toward the subtler, shifting causes of violence and sexism."

"Despite the term’s recent popularity among feminists, toxic masculinity did not originate with the women’s movement. It was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s, motivated in part as a reaction to second-wave feminism," Salter said.

"Through male-only workshops, wilderness retreats, and drumming circles, this movement promoted a masculine spirituality to rescue what it referred to as the 'deep masculine'— a protective, 'warrior' masculinity—from toxic masculinity. Men’s aggression and frustration was, according to the movement, the result of a society that feminized boys by denying them the necessary rites and rituals to realize their true selves as men."

Salter explained that this claim of a singular, real masculinity has been roundly rejected since the late 1980s by a new sociology of masculinity.

"Led by the sociologist Raewyn Connell, this school of thought presents gender as the product of relations and behaviors, rather than as a fixed set of identities and attributes."

"Connell’s work describes multiple masculinities shaped by class, race, culture, sexuality, and other factors, often in competition with one another as to which can claim to be more authentic. In this view, which is now the prevailing social-scientific understanding of masculinity, the standards by which a 'real man' is defined can vary dramatically across time and place," he explained.

Connell and others theorized that common masculine ideals such as social respect, physical strength, and sexual potency become problematic when they promote unattainable standards, since falling short can make boys and men insecure and anxious, which might prompt them to use force in order to feel, and be seen as, dominant and in control.

"Male violence in this scenario doesn’t emanate from something bad or toxic that has crept into the nature of masculinity itself. Rather, it comes from these men’s social and political settings, the particularities of which set them up for inner conflicts over social expectations and male entitlement," Salter continued.

By the mid-2000s, despite Connell’s objections, her theories were being portrayed in ways that echoed mythopoetic archetypes of healthy and destructive masculinity.

In a 2005 study of men in prison, the psychiatrist Terry Kupers defined toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.”

Referencing Connell’s work, Kupers stated that prison brings out the “toxic” aspects of masculinity in prisoners, but that this toxicity is already present in the wider cultural context.

Since then, the return to toxic masculinity has leaked from academic literature to wide cultural circulation, and the reason is understandable. It offers a simple diagnosis for gendered violence and masculine failure.

"New proponents of the concept, sometimes unaware of its origins, tend to agree that men and boys are affected by a social 'sickness' and that the cure is cultural renewal—that is, men and boys need to change their values and attitudes," Salter wrote.

Yes, research consistently shows that boys and men who hold sexist attitudes are more likely to perpetrate gendered violence. But where do these sexist attitudes come from? 

Are men and boys just the victims of cultural brainwashing into misogyny and aggression, requiring reeducation into the 'right' beliefs? Or are these problems rooted more deeply, and created by the myriad insecurities and contradictions of men’s lives under gender inequality?

"The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well," Salter said.

But material realities matter. "In one Australian Aboriginal violence-prevention program that I evaluated with colleagues, Aboriginal educators worked in partnership with men and boys to identify the key drivers of gendered violence and inequality. Solutions were rooted in cultural pride, tailored to local contexts, and underpinned by recognition of the intergenerational impacts of racism and trauma," Salter said. "The program understood that masculinity itself isn’t toxic, and instead sought to understand and change the roots of toxic gendered behavior."