I have a bad feeling about this.
— Han Solo
I overhear this phrase in coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants more than any other single phrase.
I don't know why it's on the top of women's minds right now—at least the minds of the women who frequent coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants—but it definitely is.
I don't know what's happening to women; but—whatever it is—I have a bad feeling about this.
Perhaps you can blame their wrath on Andrew Cuomo, Jeffery Epstein, or Texas's Republicans.
But, whatever the cause, I think men are soon up for a collective asswhuppin' (defined by Urban Dictionary as an "intense physical retribution involving heavy bruising, put upon a person in need of a life-lesson in civility, politeness, and manners").
The phrase "toxic masculinity" was coined 36 years ago by farmer and writer Shepherd Bliss. He thought it described the authoritarian streak displayed by his absent, career-military father.
Over the decades since, however, the phrase has come to denote practically all the attitudes and actions of men, who by dint of gender are not only vulgar and sloppy, but aggressive, competitive, homophobic, sexist, and misogynistic.
That's seems awfully harsh; but I'm not most men's target.
Novelist Norman Mailer, fairly macho himself, believed that contemporary American males were toxic because they were without honor.
"Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain," he wrote in 1962. "And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."
I think Mailer was onto something.
Somewhere on the journey to manhood, American men forgot about honor.
