Messages To The Void

The void beckons you

November 28, 2025

Masculinity Isn’t Toxic. The Absence of Mentors Is.

Masculinity isn’t toxic — the absence of masculine mentorship is.

The phrase “toxic masculinity” has had a good run.

It shows up in think pieces, HR workshops, campus debates, Twitter dogpiles and therapy sessions. It’s become our shorthand for everything from sexual harassment to schoolyard bullying to men who won’t go to the doctor.

It’s also a phrase that a lot of boys and men quietly hear as:
“You are poisonous.”

Before anything else, let me be blunt about what I’m not saying.

Men who abuse their power to harm others — who ignore consent, demean women, or commit sexual violence — should face real consequences: social, professional, and legal. Hold their feet to the fire. No hesitation.

None of what follows is a defense of that behavior, nor a plea for sympathy for abusers. Some actions aren’t “misplaced” or “unskilled.” They are unequivocally wrong.

My argument is narrower:

Masculinity itself is not toxic.
What we’re mostly seeing is untrained, misplaced masculinity. Power without guidance, instinct without skill.

And the language we use matters. Calling it “toxic masculinity” doesn’t teach boys anything about how to become good men. It teaches them that something in their nature is suspect — that their instincts are shameful.

And the language we use matters. When you tell boys their masculinity is toxic, you’re not teaching them how to be good men — you’re teaching them that their nature is a problem. Shame doesn’t civilize them. It drives them straight toward the only people telling them they’re not broken: the loud, furious corners of the internet built on resentment and misogyny.

Masculinity as a Force, Not a Verdict

Masculinity is not a moral category. It’s not even just a list of behaviors. It’s a pattern — an archetype that appears across cultures: strength under pressure, protection, direction, risk-taking, structure, the willingness to step into danger so others don’t have to.

Women can embody those traits. Many do. Men can embody traits we culturally code as feminine: nurture, sensitivity, emotional fluency. None of this is exclusive.

But as a social pattern, masculinity exists for a reason. It’s how many people — especially boys and men — naturally move toward responsibility: “Give me the weight. I’ll carry it.” Remove that energy from a society and you don’t get a peaceful utopia. You get drift, fragility, and chaos.

So if masculinity is a kind of power, the right question isn’t, “How do we get rid of it?” It’s:

How do we teach boys to use that power well?

That’s where the phrase “toxic masculinity” fails us. “Toxic” doesn’t mean needs training. It means bad in itself.

Traits Are Neutral. How We Use Them Isn’t.

Almost every behavior we label “toxic” in men has a context where it becomes not just acceptable, but necessary and even noble.

Take aggression.

Aggression used to humiliate a colleague, intimidate a partner or dominate a conversation? Harmful.
Aggression used to defend a friend being harassed, to push back against injustice, to protect loved ones in real danger? Not toxic — moral.

The trait is the same. The target, the context and the control are different.

Or consider boldness in romance — one of the most fraught areas for young men today.

A man who feels entitled to touch or kiss someone without caring what she wants is dangerous.
A man who is paying attention — to words, to nonverbal cues, to the tone of the interaction — and makes a move that is clearly welcomed? That’s often exactly what both people hope for.

We don’t want a world where no one ever takes the risk of leaning in for the first kiss. We want a world where people have the skill and emotional maturity to tell the difference between desire, ambivalence, and discomfort — and to stop immediately when they get it wrong.

There is a vast moral gap between someone who discards consent and someone who misreads a complex moment, hears “no,” owns it, apologizes and adjusts. The first is entitlement. The second is the awkward but necessary process of learning.

Or look at mockery.

Mocking someone because of their race, gender, sexuality or religion? That’s cruelty.
Mocking an ideology that denies others’ humanity — Holocaust denial, white supremacy, homophobia? That’s not toxic; it’s punching up. It’s using sharpness in defense of the vulnerable rather than against them.

Masculinity’s edge becomes toxic when it punches down.
It becomes protective when it punches up.

So instead of treating masculinity as inherently dangerous, we should be teaching boys something far more nuanced:

Powerful traits require three things: consent, context and conscience.

Aggression, boldness, competitiveness, protectiveness, confrontation — these aren’t things we should scrub out of boys. They’re things we should train.

From “Toxic Masculinity” to “Misplaced Masculinity”

That’s why I think “toxic masculinity” is the wrong frame.

It collapses intention, skill and context into a single moral judgment. It tells boys: “Something about you is rotten.”

A better term might be misplaced masculinity.

Masculinity becomes destructive not because it exists, but because it’s aimed badly, timed badly, or unbounded by empathy.

A man who uses his strength to scare his family has misplaced his masculinity.
A man who uses that same strength to protect strangers in a crisis is embodying it well.

The difference isn’t the presence or absence of masculinity. It’s where it is aimed, how it is constrained, and whether it is guided by conscience.

“Misplaced masculinity” and “untrained masculinity” give us something the phrase “toxic masculinity” never does: a path to improvement.

If the problem is toxicity, the solution is removal.
If the problem is misplacement, the solution is training.

The Real Crisis: Power Without Mentors

So why is untrained masculinity so rampant right now?

For most of history, fathers were often emotionally unavailable, but they were at least physically present. Boys saw men working, repairing, leading, sometimes failing. They had uncles, older cousins, elders, guilds, religious communities, apprenticeships. Masculinity wasn’t always gentle or wise — often it wasn’t — but it had structure.

Today, many boys face a double crisis.

First, there’s still the emotionally distant father — the man who was taught that “boys don’t cry,” who has no idea how to talk about feelings, nuance, or consent because no one ever did that for him.

On top of that, there’s a rising number of fathers who are simply absent: gone because of divorce, incarceration, addiction, overwork, or the quiet attrition of a life that never learned how to stay.

Layer onto that the collapse of male mentorship traditions. We’ve lost most of the rites of passage that once marked the journey from boyhood to manhood. Fewer apprenticeships, fewer elder-led communities, fewer male teachers, fewer spaces where older men deliberately shape younger ones and say, “This is what your strength is for.”

Now ask yourself: if you’re a fourteen-year-old boy, full of hormones, loneliness, confusion, and unchanneled aggression — where do you go?

You go where every other confused person goes: the internet.

The Counterfeit Fathers of the Internet

This is why so many young men fall into the orbit of “red pill” ideology and aggressive online influencers.

It’s not because teenage boys wake up eager to be misogynists. It’s because the internet is the only place talking directly to them in a language that sounds like certainty.

These influencers offer what real communities once did:

The problem isn’t that these young men are drawn to darkness.
The problem is that they’re starving.

Boys don’t turn to toxic influencers because they love toxicity.
They turn to them because they are desperate for mentorship.

The tragedy is that much of this content mixes half-truths (yes, rejection hurts; yes, confidence matters; yes, some dating advice is manipulative on all sides) with a deep current of contempt and dehumanization.

It’s like giving a thirsty person water laced with poison: the relief is real; so is the damage.

Men Need to Teach Masculinity — Not Apologize for It

If we want fewer men acting out in destructive ways, we cannot just tell them what not to be. We need to show them what to grow into.

That means men taking responsibility for modeling and teaching masculinity as a skill, not an accident.

It looks like:

There are unhealthy expressions of femininity too — but they have not shaped the last few centuries of public life in the same way, and they’re not my area to dissect. The more urgent task is to repair the part of the story I’m inside of: how we raise boys into men.

Retiring the Wrong Enemy

“Toxic masculinity” was a useful phrase for naming real harm. It jolted us into seeing patterns we’d rather ignore.

But as a long-term framework, it collapses too much. It tells a generation of boys and men that their nature is suspect, that strength is guilty until proven innocent, that the safest masculinity is no masculinity at all.

That doesn’t produce better men. It produces ashamed, confused, resentful ones — the perfect audience for the very influencers we worry about.

We can do better.

We can say, instead:

If we want a world with fewer headlines about men behaving monstrously, we don’t need more slogans about toxicity. We need more fathers, more elders, more rituals, more real conversations, and more men willing to say to boys:

“Your strength is not the problem.
No one ever taught you how to use it.
Let’s fix that.”

#culture #masculinity