Why 'Toxic' Masculinity was the Key to my Success

Being 'nice' isn't always what people need.

This morning, I interviewed Rachel Wilson, author of the book Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation. Her book argues that like many ‘compassionate’ movements nowadays, feminism was basically yet another product of looking at the world from a Marxist perspective and putting everything in terms of ‘oppressed and the oppressor.’ This kind of lens leads to a knee jerk reaction of ‘do the most compassionate thing first and worry about the downstream effects later.’ Like most Marxist things, that which carries a label of compassion for the disenfranchised deserves at least a closer look.

I realize the notion of being critical of something like feminism sounds like it would have to be misogynistic, but the point of Rachel’s book is to analyze whether the tenets of feminism are 100% good for women or not, or maybe if there is some downstream collateral damage from the movement. After all, her goal is to piece out what do women actually want and what is actually good for women?

One thing that stood out during my interview with her was her claiming that there were more women against the women’s suffrage movement than there were women who were for it. And that those women had good, logical reasons for why women’s suffrage wouldn’t necessarily be to the benefit of women.

Here is part of the description of Rachel’s book’s page on Amazon.

In modern society, it is simply assumed that women’s liberation was a good thing. But what if it was never an organic, grassroots movement for social justice? Did feminism liberate women from an oppressive, evil patriarchy? Or did it rip away the fundamental structures that afforded them stability, security, and purpose, turning them into wage slaves for corporations and tax revenue cash cows for governments? What if feminism left women more vulnerable than ever by destroying the family?

I understand these sound like wild accusations, but for them make sense you really need to read Rachel’s book or you can wait for my full interview with her to come out. Rachel’s book isn’t actually the topic of this Substack post, but I’m letting you know who she is since our since I’m sharing a clip from my interview with her.

Before the clip starts, we were talking about some of the differences in upbringing with daughters and sons and how boys learn a lot about emotions and boundaries through rough and tumble play. A son might be having fun wrestling with his Dad and he gets frustrated because he can’t ‘win’ so he figures a good punch to the face might be a good move. He will very quickly be sharply informed of a new boundary - that punching others in the face is not an appropriate way to act, even if it is what your emotions told you to do.

We also talked about how that can extend to a son learning the so-called ‘masculine’ way to deal with emotions. That is, the son will learn from his father the boundaries that inform what is the appropriate, ‘masculine’ way to let your emotions guide your behavior.

Rachel discusses men being told to be more emotional and I tell a story about how I sent a letter to my Dad telling him about how he was totally in the wrong for making me work a job doing manual labor and ignoring my emotions and being so harsh on me. Then, something had me realize just how necessary his so called ‘toxic masculinity’* was and I wrote him another letter thanking him for the job.

*In case it wasn’t obvious: I use the term ‘toxic masculinity sarcastically.

FYI the voiceover of this post has the audio of the clip attached.

Here’s the clip: