A team of researchers, including Binghamton psychology professor Richard Mattson and graduate student Michael Shaw asked men between the ages of 18–25 to respond to hypothetical sexual hookup situations in which a woman responds passively to a sexual advance, meaning the woman does not express any overt verbal or behavioral response to indicate consent to increase the level of physical intimacy. The team then surveyed how consensual each man perceived the situation to be, as well as how he would likely behave.
The work is published in the journal Sex Roles.
“A passive response to a sexual advance is a normative indicator of consent, but also might reflect distress or fear, and whether men are able to differentiate between the two during a hookup was important to explore,” said Mattson.
The team found that men varied in their perception of passive responses in terms of consent and that the level of perceived consent was strongly linked to an increased likelihood of continuing or advancing sexual behavior.
“The biggest takeaway is that men differed in how they interpreted an ambiguous female response to their sexual advances with respect to their perception of consent, which in turn influenced their sexual decisions,” said Mattson.
“But certain types of men (e.g., those high in toxic masculine traits) tended to view situations as more consensual and reported that they would escalate the level of sexual intimacy regardless of whether or not they thought it was consensual.”
Toxic masculinity isn’t necessarily the “masculine” traits themselves. You can have traits which are considered masculine, and those traits not be toxic. Toxic masculinity has more to do with the expectations of traits/gender norms rather than the idealized traits. A trait (or lack of a trait) might make people in a patriarchial society see you as more or less of a man, and that expectation is the toxic masculinity.
Basically the toxic masculinity is just how society rewards or punishes you for what degree you meet certain normative male/masculine gender roles.
I have a lot of compassion for people who have been poisoned with toxic masculinity. The toxicity comes from a place quite abusive to men. It demands a vision of a man who is what I think of as emotionally castrated. Completely denied any exhibitions of passive sadness, outward facing compassion, grief, fear or desire for anything outside a small range of approved desires. In return they are given tools of violence, silence, denial and anger to express virtually everything. To ask for help is framed as failure. The people whom they love have to interpret their sense of love and compassion only through grandiose acts or through that narrow conduit of allowed emotional reactions… But it is so hard to connect with someone through the medium of anger.
When people are told “suck it up! Be a man!” it make those things aspirational… But it’s just the sugar around the outside of the conditioning. The inside is bitter isolation. I will always remember my Mom telling me that my Dad was so scared to have sons. He didn’t think he could do right by sons. He struggled so hard with his own conditioning but it never suited him. It never suited my grandfather to whom my Dad always felt like he communicated with always at a distance, the mask only cracking when he was sick in hospital and my Granddad never left his bedside. A deep reservoir of feeling that could never be expressed except in silence between men except under extremes. A strict taboo of self denial… For what?
Undoing that damage is so hard even when you are aware of it. The toxicity can’t always be healed and some of that damage is permanent.