When I mention my grandparents hailed from Sicily, there’s sometimes a big grin and then the inevitable: “Oh, so you have Mafia connections!”
Despite all the strides society has made in banishing harmful stereotypes, it’s still considered fair game to joke about certain groups.
Check the greeting card displays and you’ll find depictions of Irish folks as drunks and old people as incompetent. On TV, mentioning someone is Christian usually brands them as an uptight party pooper.
Now we have a new negative stereotype wending its way across the internet — toxic masculinity.
As defined by the American Psychological Association, “Traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”
I disagree, since a stoic person can remain calm during emergencies, which makes them invaluable during catastrophes, whether it’s a tornado, earthquake or fire.
It is not simply a masculine trait, obviously, because mothers must remain stoic when little Johnny is throwing a royal fit in the grocery store because he wants a Twinkie.
Competitiveness is something children learn early, whether they’re boys or girls, as they play board games and race each other around the playground. Without competition, there’d be no Super Bowl, no scholastic awards and no spelling bees.
As for dominance, if you’ve ever been with friends trying to decide on a restaurant, you know someone must take the lead. If each person expects someone else to make the decision, everyone will go hungry.
What about aggression? Well, if a thief started kicking in my door, I would long for someone, male or female, willing to meet the thug head-on — and among my friends, that would be a man.
Yes, it’s true that male aggression can become toxic at times, leading to horrendous deeds like murder and rape, but the vast majority of men would never in a million years sink to such depths.
Anyone who believes in God would have a tough time asserting that he created males with an inborn proclivity for toxic behavior.
In the Bible, Cain kills in cold blood, while Abel is peaceful, even though they’re both males. Granted, we also have the example of the bloodthirsty men who whipped Jesus mercilessly before pinning him to a cross, which was certainly toxic behavior.
Still, Jesus and his followers, male and female, lived by the compassionate, decidedly non-toxic precept, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
We live in a sinful world, which Flannery O’Connor called “territory largely held by the devil,” where men and women alike sometimes display poisonous behavior, such as neglect of children, cruelty toward neighbors and sexual misdeeds.
We all struggle with tendencies toward violence, lust and selfishness, but we can tame our hurtful impulses with the help of God’s merciful grace.
The men who bombed the Twin Towers displayed the most toxic human behavior possible, while the male firefighters who risked their lives to save people exhibited selflessness and Christlike love.
It takes stoicism and a degree of healthy aggression to run toward a life-threatening situation. And, yes, there were also heroic female firefighters that day, but their behavior isn’t under the scrutiny of the APA.
According to the doctrine of toxic masculinity, the male firefighters inherently possessed a poisonous nature, despite their willingness to die for others.
This doctrine is wrong and harmful, like stereotypes about Irish people and Sicilians, and it’s downright insulting to all the virtuous men in the world.
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