What is “Toxic Masculinity”?

What is "Toxic Masculinity"?

The failure of current culture to define the term “toxic masculinity” (as mentioned in the recent Gillette ad) is a serious problem. Does it mean a subset of masculinity is toxic? Or, does it mean masculinity itself is toxic?

If masculinity itself is toxic (as some people claim is the point of the recent American Psychological Association guidelines) there is no motivation for men to change anything about themselves. “I was born this way!” they might retort. In that case (according to Leftist logic) perhaps men deserve toleration, acceptance and accommodation in the same way sexual minorities have recently been championed by the general culture. There are more women, so men are the sexual minority after all.

If toxic masculinity is only an undesirable kind of masculinity, then we need to ask: what does good masculinity look like? But so far our culture’s answer seems to be: it looks like femininity, which is not very inspiring for most men.

Furthermore, the notion of toxic masculinity suggests the possibility of toxic femininity, in which case there is no need to target men and boys specifically as uniquely bad individuals. It’s like we are saying: “Whatever is good in you, boys, you share with females, and whatever is bad in you, boys, is just you.”

If a similar Gillette ad had been directed toward our daughters, maybe we could see how un-motivating this line of reasoning is: “Ladies, some of you are ok. A good many of you are failing. ALL of you could do better. Oh, and please buy our razors.” Men don’t like being condescended to, manipulated, and having assumptions made about them based on their sex. Men and boys, like women and girls, don’t respond positively to sexism (defined here as “prejudice, stereotyping or discrimination based on sex”).

Male bullying, male violence and male sexual sins cannot be isolated as only the responsibility of males. For instance, increasingly, women raise boys without fathers. If gender is a social construct, as the radical left claims, and children are increasingly raised by single women (40 percent of all births in the US are to single mothers), and women dominate child care, education, medical, counseling, and social work fields, then men cannot be entirely blamed for negative outcomes with sons who are being raised entirely by women, and that they may not even be allowed to see.

Female misbehavior can be just as devastating as men’s. Our honest experience should teach us that women are capable of being unjust, dishonest, and quite aggressive, (though usually socially instead of physically). However, the recent move to allow women to abort their own children up to the age of birth in New York State should teach us that both men and women are capable of devastating atrocities toward even the weakest and most vulnerable.

At one time, feminists seemed to teach that with the challenges we face, we can’t afford to alienate or devalue one half of the human race. Maybe they should revisit that idea?

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[Image Credit: Public Domain Pictures]

This post What is "Toxic Masculinity"? was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Katherine Baker.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (38)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/ Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions. These photos were all processed in the early 1960s and my guess is that they were processed near the date they were taken. All are photos of people except the last one which shows a 1950s snow covered car. Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration. March 1961 June 1963 December 1962 December 1960 https://supload.com/HJO7L2-_X

RUN: The Commodore 64/128 User’s Guide (November 1989)

RUN: The Commodore 64/128 User’s Guide (November 1989)

RUN was my favorite magazine dedicated to the Commodore 64 and it was also one of the longest lasting. The November 1989 issue of RUN includes: Features

• Making an Impression with Printers - Looking for outstanding output at reasonable cost? Here's some advice for potential printer purchasers.
• The Nuts and Bolts of GEOS to RUN Paint - How to transfer geoPaint screens to RUN Paint with your C-64 or 128.
• Friendly File Copier - Fast and menu-driven for ease of use, it works with any two Commodore-compatible drives and your C-64.
• Caribe Bein' - Create your own online character and mingle with others in QuantumLink's new tropical hot spot.
• Non-Habitat Forming - How Club Caribe came into being.
• Build a Better Basic - Add a host of structured commands to your C-64's built-in-Basic.
• Wall Street 128 - Make and break fortunes with roller coaster price fluctuations in this C-128 stock market game.
• Deep C-64 World - Turn your C-64 into an underwater wonder to delight your eyes in this colorful electronic aquarium.

Departments

• RUNning Ruminations - RUN acquires Commodore Magazine.
• Magic - The number-one column of hints and tips for performing Commodore computing wizardry.
• News and New Products - Recent developments and releases in the world of Commodore computing.
• Mail RUN - Readers tell about their unusual applications, and RUN solves the Case of the Jumping Pointer.
• Software Gallery - Reviews of:
• Hollywood Squares
• Chomp!
• Thunder Blade
• RoboCop
• Destroyer Escort
• Baal
• Sky Shark
• Games Gallery - Take a high-speed chase to car-and-motorcycle racing fun and excitement!
• Commodore Clinic - Answers to your questions about Commodore computing.
• geoWatch - Benefit from this GEOS user's experience and design your own fantastic fonts.
• RUN's Checksum Program - Run it right the first time.
• Coming Attractions; List of Advertisers

...and more!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Climate Hysteria Is Dangerous (But Typical)

 

In a MLK-day interview with Ta-Nehsisi Coates, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) opined that “We’re like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

On its face, this seems silly. She’s misreading an October report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel called “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” But is it surprising that a radical politician would exaggerate something? That’s what politicians often do. And so do many media outlets—see this story in The Guardian that AOC used to justify her statement on Twitter, which opens with the following dire paragraph:

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

The recent report does not say the “world will end” unless we “address climate change” within 12 years. Instead, it says that in order to keep warming below 1.5°C, we should reduce emissions nearly 50 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, and then quickly reduce them to zero, perhaps by 2050.

The UN report, unfortunately, is as misguided as AOC and The Guardian. It assumes that all the warming since the mid-19th century is caused by human emissions of dreaded carbon dioxide. It’s not.

There are two major periods of warming since then. The first, from 1910-45, can have little, if any, human component. When it started, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the preindustrial background was far too small to have caused the 0.45°C warming that subsequently ensued (a calculation showing this is in here). If such slight changes caused that much warming, surface temperatures would be so sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide, and it would be so hot by now, that climate change actually would be dire.

That’s about half of the total warming that has been observed. So we really have about another degree to get to the 1.5°C human-caused warming.

AOC and The Guardian are referencing the 2030 benchmark used in multiple projections throughout the report. It is similarly used in the UN’s 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development, also referenced in the report. This benchmark year is used alongside other benchmark years (e.g. 2050) to indicate projected emissions and temperature trajectories under different abatement assumptions.

Nowhere in the lengthy report does it claim that 2030 is an immutable deadline of any sort, after which all abatement efforts will be futile. Moreover, the report itself acknowledges that the current, nonforcible commitments of the Paris Climate Accord, if met by all signatories, would still fall dramatically short of achieving the dodgy 1.5°C target.

End of the world? No. Exaggeration for political effect? Yes. AOC’s really doing nothing more than politics-as-usual.

This article was reprinted from the Cato Institute.

Derek Bonett

Derek Bonett is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, where he writes on a range of regulatory issues, with a particular emphasis on financial markets and commercial banking.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.