Toxic Femininity - Why Has This Universal Paradox Been So Ignored?

Much has been made these days of toxic masculinity and how men are congenitally predatory, abusive, and dismissive of women - ogres, troglodytes, prognathous throwbacks to grunting Neanderthals.  Combined with whiteness, toxic masculinity becomes a poisonous potion, a virulent viral plague.  Feminism is too weak to counter such ape-like grossness.  Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir only hinted at the ugly nature of men; and it took another generation to fully expose their innate, foul brutality.  Men were now the enemy. 

Buy what about women?  For centuries throughout world literature, women have been portrayed as duplicitous, untrustworthy, libidinous, and ruinous.  Desdemona was not the weak, innocent victim of Othello's jealousy. She was at least complicit in the case.  She was an independent woman, unique for the times, a woman who defied her aristocratic family and married the black Moor, Othello, no shrinking violet and certainly inquisitive about the sexual nature of the virile, heroic field general. 

Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Volumnia, Lady Macbeth, and Dionyza were defiantly strong women who thought nothing about plotting the murder of those who threatened them. Lady Macbeth told her weak, dilatory husband to man up, show her what he was made of and get to the business of killing the king.  

Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in a vile moment of vendetta and wronged woman pique sends her sons to rape and mutilate the daughter of King Titus Andronicus.  Dionyza, watching Pericles' daughter left in her charge grow up to be more beautiful, charming, and graceful than her own daughter, and over the feeble objections of her weak, uxorious husband, plots to have her murdered. 

Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen's play of the same name, attempts to destroy two men simply because she can in an expression of pure Nietzschean will.  Hilde Wangel encourages The Master Builder to climb the steeple and fall to his death.  

Laura, the wife of The Captain in Strindberg's The Father, drives him literally mad with jealousy and suspicion about the paternity of their daughter, has him committed to an insane asylum, and takes over control of their daughter and the family finances. 

Miss Julie in Strindberg's play treats her male servant Jean like a dog.  Raised by a proto-feminist, man-hating mother, Julie demeans and humiliates Jean while at the same seducing him as an expression of her power. 

The literary list is endless. A bibliography of books written by misogynist men? A reflection of the times when women were legally and socially owned by their husbands and would use any wiles or means to destroy them?  Or something innately insidious - a natural instinctive mistrust of men because of the servitude of pregnancy?

The characterization of women in the past has been harsh indeed; but why have modern women, presumably free from all traces of male chattel, been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing  men they have married?  Why have they stayed married despite all signs that point to dissolution and preferred to nag, irritate, and badger instead?

The image of the hag, the badgering, incessantly critical, unhappily married, resentful, unpleasant woman should have been long ago relegated to the archives.  Successful modern day women have either acquired enough financial capital to leave a bad marriage; or have, like Shakespeare’s heroines, figured out how to get the best out of their husbands and their marriages to satisfy their needs; but the unsuccessful women, the majority, still have not sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  Only women know whose child they are carrying, and there is no more poisoned arrow in their quiver.

Instead, women go toxic with their bickering, bitching innuendoes and never confront men on the battlefield, equal in strength, open and martial in their intentions, courageous and honest.  They are still confused, caught between their patriarchal upbringing and modern 'Be All You Can Be' propaganda. 

A confounding factor in all this is feminism itself.  On the one hand feminist jihadists are asserting their absolute strength, authority, ability, and independence; but on the other are demanding safe spaces, neutered men, congenial and protective institutional environments, limited free speech and civil rights.  What is a woman to do?  Which is she?  Strong, competent, and independent; able to negotiate the world of men easily and quickly? Or dependent, still needing shelter and accommodation?

In addition women are taught as part of the ‘male toxicity’ canon that men’s natural, biological, sexual drives – aggressive, demanding, persistent, simple, and undeniable – are wrong, retrograde, and destructive.   There is something wrong and suspicious about male pursuit.  Casanova is dead. 

Yet millennia of human history demonstrate just the opposite.  Human evolution has depended on male aggression, competitiveness, and pursuit.  While there is no doubt that such masculinity can have its excesses – the bell curve describes all human activity and ability – there is no reason to deny its reality or its legitimate place in modern society.

Therefore most women are caught betwixt and between.  They settle for bad marriages, bad jobs, and bad children and instead of doing something, complain, rage, nag, and harp and become as toxic in their own way as their wandering, dismissive, wandering husbands.  In being taught that the system itself is the enemy and that only by destroying it and remaking it in women’s image can women ever find reward, women have been sold a bill of goods.  

Women need no institutional support, no self-interested twisting of legal codes, and no patrons.  True equality can only be achieved by asserting one’s moral authority, intelligence, and individual will.  In being taught that evolutionary biology is wrong, women have been further deceived.  Rather than dealing with biological difference – as Shakespeare’s daunting heroines did – women are instructed to deny it.  Certainly no good can come of that.

The honesty of Shakespeare and his successors is absent in today's culture of identity, diversity, and inclusivity. One cannot call a spade a spade - women in this apogee of women's place can do no wrong, deserve every advantage over men, and must be respected as society's true generals - or saints.   The only spade called is male toxicity, that spreading, infectious, viral swarm of bad intention, ugliness, and hormone-fueled ignorance.