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.”
Is’nt it the definition? It’s like saying drivers who drive fast are more likely to drive fast…
I wouldn’t say it’s the definition, but I agree this is not surprising.
Toxic masculinity is much more though. Men bullying men because they do something “not manly” is toxic masculinity. It can be anything from not enjoying sports to showing emotion for any reason (even crying if a family member died).I was in a private elementary school for six years with the same asshole teacher who treated me like shit all the time. There were several reasons, but big ones were that I didn’t like sports and I was sensitive, so I cried when something upset me.
Toxic masculinity fucked me up in a major way and it wasn’t even my own father (who also didn’t like sports and had no trouble showing his emotions) who did it to me.
It’s a terrible term for very real problem of toxic gender roles. I’m not sure if you meant to imply that these roles are only reenforced by other men, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Men and women reenforce these gender roles against men and boys, promoting the poor behavior.
There are definitely a lot of mothers who expect their sons to grow up to be “real men” and it’s unfortunate.
This is the true original definition of toxic masculinity, thank you for saying that.
Yeah, men who are assholes, behave like assholes. News at 11
It’s called a tautology, and yes.
Not surprising but always good to have studies to prove these kinds of things.
Some More News did a recent episode on toxic masculinity and the lack of good role models for young men and came up with the very simple solution (sorry, spoilers) to young men who have trouble getting girlfriends:
Make a female friend. Not a friend you hope will be a girlfriend, not someone you think about fucking, just a friend. A woman you can talk to like a buddy. Learn about how to talk to women from a woman.
It is sad that great role models for men don’t really exist right now. Who would most men look to for guidance? An actor? They’re fine and all, but they’re not usually symbols of greatness, they’re actors…
Politicians? Definitely not, we all know there isn’t a single politician that anyone can really look up to.
Corporate leaders? Selfish people at the least, destructive at worst. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos aren’t anybody anyone should be going to for advice.
Online pundits? That’s where men are finding themselves because those are the only people talking to men specifically. Their guidance is flawed (an understatement), but when they’re the only ones addressing the problems men have, of course many young guys are going to gravitate toward them.
There are plenty of good men out there. Teachers, bosses, coaches, etc.
Nobody gives a shit about them, because they aren’t famous, rich, or complete piece of shit. Those are the only ‘men’ anyone looks up to.
The issue is that not there are no good male role models, it’s that we have decided the only ‘good’ men are famous, and anyone else is subpar. Our cultural assumption is that all men are bad by default, and that only the best of the best rise above it.
Personally, I’m sick of this nonsense. The vast majority of men I have ever known are good men. But society loves to shit on them because they aren’t sexy, popular, or wealthy. And we love to focus on the POS men who are, who cheat, lie, and steal their way to the top.
It’s quite similar to the issue women faced (face) for so long with old role models like blonde Barbie, etc etc. not equating experiences but it’s all about what media is trying to push as a standard. It doesn’t help that society does often look down on men expressing emotions (beyond anger) and other behaviors that are seen as feminine coded. I’m glad I have people around me that I do and live where I love so I can be myself a bit more.
He talks about that in the video. I actually brought it up in that post you replied to, the lack of good role models for young men.
My role models, the people I aspired to be like as a kid, were always fictional characters.
The Doctor from Doctor Who, Jake from Animorphs, Tyrion Lannister.
I definitely never had anyone from real life who’d I consider worth emulating.
Same, but I also see a trope of men often being dumb or evil or both in a lot of current media. And that really doesn’t help create role models
At least they still have uncle Iroh
I hate having to explain this shit to my daughter.
We were talking about the “man vs. bear” thing and about trusting strange men and how even if a man isn’t horrific enough to try to assault her, many men who help her will expect sexual favors in return and would at the least harass her.
This world is so ugly and I have to show her that on a daily basis.
about trusting strange men
Fair enough but the problem isn’t just “strange men.”
I agree, and we’ve talked about that issue as well more than once, but this was specifically in regards to that whole “what would you be worried about more if you’re alone in the woods, a strange man or a bear?” thing that was spreading around where lots of women said they would be more worried about the strange man.
The reason it really happened was that my daughter said to me that she would pick the man because the man would help her get out of the woods, so I was explaining to her why many women say they wouldn’t trust the strange man.
She’s (almost) 14. She doesn’t really understand how some men will end up preying on her yet.
Sounds like your daughter has good common sense to me
You’re missing the point. Of course being lost in the woods with another human is preferable to a bear. The point in choosing the bear in the hypothetical scenario is that women have felt so uncomfortable around men for so long, that it’s almost preferable to risk the bear than risk the man. It’s making a statement about how women feel they’re being treated by too many men every day.
Maybe listen to the women who say they choose the bear, they’re telling you something is wrong with how they’re treated.
And the worst part is that some men’s reactions prove the women’s points
In posts to social media that I have chosen not to share, men have made gleeful memes of women being savaged, ripped apart, bloodied, mauled and eaten by bears.
They’ve shared videos of bear attacks with captions either mocking women or saying they deserve this fate for choosing the bear. “What did they expect?” these men claim, unwittingly echoing the very mindset women are protesting against.
https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/man-vs-bear-debate-reactions/
There have also been the men responding by saying they hope that women get F***ed by a bear or murdered for daring to feel that a bear is less of a threat than a random man.
https://medium.com/@SpencerGall/man-vs-bear-how-are-so-many-men-missing-the-point-0345d4c2de0f
The self-awareness of those guys is non-existent. How can you be so obtuse as to fall into the exact behavior you’re being called out on?
It baffles me
The bear or man meme thing made me realize a lot of people don’t seem to have passed 10th grade English. They get so caught up in like the literal evaluation of the text and don’t even think about the subtext or deeper meaning. They probably think Dracula is just a story about a dude that bites people, and star trek is just about space ships.
Which makes me wonder about your gender…
I wouldn’t say guys wanting to fuck equals an ugly world.
“Guys wanting to fuck” because they did a woman a favor is the issue.
How would you like it if every time someone did you a favor, they not only expected sex in return, but treated you like shit if you turned them down?
I guarantee you plenty of women on Lemmy can tell you stories about that happening to them more than once.
Oh my, TLDR! (Statement not a summary)
sexual advances without consent by men is masculine toxicity by definition.
Toxicity is a spectrum. Some people are entirely toxic and love it. Others are slightly toxic and not aware. Yet others put in honest effort, struggling to reduce their own toxicity.
Thats not just men, that’s people.
This post right here is exactly why ‘toxic masculinity’ is a fucking shit term that should never be used.
The intended meaning of the phrase was never ‘men, who are toxic’, or even ‘men who are toxic’, even though that’s the straight-line interpretation of it.
What it’s supposed to mean is ‘overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic’.
Given that that’s a fucking mouthful and the short form is horribly misleading, I always go with “gender policing” instead.
Stop telling people how to do their gender, and a vast number of social problems will evaporate. It also places the blame on the actual cause of the problem, and expands to cover mandatory-performative-femininity as well, which is also a shit thing to subject people to.
‘overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic’
Huh, I always thought this was obvious but I can see how people can take it as “men who are toxic” since feminism is flattened down in some people’s minds to mean “women who want to dominate men” like wtf.
Also, thanks for introducing me to “gender policing”!
You know, gender studies is arts-faculty - people who devote their careers to parsing the subtlest nuances from the gauziest wisps of meaning.
Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.
I’m just a little bit cynical about this.
Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.
I don’t think anyone actually believes that-- it seems like you see it from bad faith actors online/in the manosphere. No one thinks someone who hates “big trucks” hates all trucks, or “crowded places” hates everywhere, or more to the point, that someone who wants to cut “toxic people” out of their life is going to never see another human. Yet somehow applying an adjective to “masculinity” makes it really easy to be misunderstood?
If the argument is that they should’ve come up with a phrase that’s less vulnerable to corruption by bad faith actors I might buy it, but I’m willing to bet that even something as specific as “overly performative aspects of how men express their masculinity because they squash their feelings and thus become dangerous to people around them, especially women” would still magically be “misunderstood” on the internet and reduced to “feminists say all men bad”.
“Big” is not a negative adjective. “Truck” is not (mostly) an identity or demographic group. You’d have to make up some term like maybe “murder trucks” to get close to an analogy. Would you not suppose that someone who advocated against “murder trucks” thought trucks were bad?
“Crowded” - maybe mildly negative. “Places” - not an identity or demographic.
“Toxic” - Ok. “People” - This hardly seems like an identity or demographic. Maybe if martians start talking about “toxic humans” we’d have an analogy.
And that whole last paragraph is just a straw man.
Let’s consider some real analogies.
“Poisonous Hinduism” “Virulent Femininity” “Malignant Jewishness” “Destructive Liberalism” “Pestilent Blackness” “Dangerous Queerness”
I literally just looked up synonyms for toxic and picked random identity groups. Could you imagine trying to make any of these phrases academic terms?
Could you imagine trying to make any of these phrases academic terms?
That’s a good point, but (most) of your chosen identity aspects aren’t widely known for being accountable for negative things like violence. How about something like “dangerous republicanism” or “genocidal zionism”? Maybe if exaggerated (or even say, toxic) masculinity wasn’t being weaponized so much these days to lead young men toward alt right fascism it wouldn’t come up in academic settings.
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Really? I’ve never once felt personally attacked as a cis man when I’ve heard the phrase “toxic masculinity.” I know when I’ve been a tool as someone will have probably told me or I feel disappointed in myself after the fact. I’m also a queer guy and on the spectrum so I’ve never really given a fuck about behaving “masculine.”
Really? I’ve never once felt personally attacked as a cis man when I’ve heard the phrase “toxic masculinity.”
Strangely enough, me neither - in fact, the first time I heard that term I knew exactly what it referred to. My problem with it is that it doesn’t go far enough.
With the best will in the world, I think you’re still conflating the symptom with the disease.
Gender-policing is abusive, and abused people often behave in problematic and indeed shitty ways. While of course there are no excuses for shitty behaviour, it’s also incredibly shit to turn around and frame that behaviour in terms of the criteria by which they were picked out for abuse in the first place.
For intance (to get into properly uncomfortable territory), it’s fair to say that systemic racism drives poverty and disadvantage, which in turn can drive all kinds of antisocial behaviour and societal problems. But imagine for one second some sociologist coming up with the concept of ‘toxic Africanity’ (or equivalent) to describe it. They would get fucking dragged, and rightly so.
It’s not about being ‘probably one of the good ones’. It’s about looking at a bunch horrible maladaptive coping strategies, and asking what the hell it is we’re expecting people to cope with, and why we put up with that.
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Thank you. It boggles my mind how people seem so oblivious to this problematic phrasing and how unnecessarily divisive it is. I wish these words could be plastered across the internet.
sexual advances without consent by men is masculine toxicity by definition.
It’s a whole lot more than that.
How do you have Toxic Masculinity? That’s not how the concept works…
How do you have Toxic Masculinity?
Yeah, it’s a flaw in the way it’s framed, methinks - it’s very easy to discern men who display behavior that are “high in toxic masculine traits” because they are the visible tip of the iceberg.
“Bears with teeth more likely to cause injury to people they bite.”
boy this terminology is wierd. I think advances are always without consent. They are first moves. Assuming they mean making advances after already recieving some sort of no then its more like that is a sign of toxic masculinity.
EDITED: yeah reading it I see they mean advances like advancing from a stage so that makes more sense. still seems a bit chicken and egg to me though.
The entire narrative aroudn sexual relationships is heavily biased in terms of women and their subjectivity of who/what is attractive.
The same actions taken by men of different physical attributes will have different general rates of acceptance/rejection by women.
Which also applies to women. Hot people get away with more horrible shit because they are hot.
And yet people refuse to admit this very observable and repeatable fact about human behaviour.
The better work is not about ‘men vs women’ it’s about ‘how your level of sexual attractiveness permits antisocial behaviors’
and the ugly truth is that a lot of people simple HATE ugly people, men or women and get insulted that an ugly person approaches them.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t particularly matter because (in the context of this submission) it’s really up to the woman. There may be some truth in this given the primordial drive to procreate that attractive people can get away with more… But again, it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps better-looking individuals are just more experienced and know the subtle signs of an evolving relationship. Perhaps they’re not as desperate or forward or aggressive in advancing too quickly. Either way — again: it doesn’t matter because it’s the woman who decides, arbitrary or not.
This is outright wrong. Physical attractiveness is way bigger of a deal in women than men and there is a lot of hypocrisy around it. I had a friend in high school who was, without beating around the bush, fat. He would bemoan how women would not give him a chance because he was fat but then he himself would not go after women of his same build. He preferentially went after thin hot women. Worse he was when he finally was in a realtionship with a woman of equivalent hotness he started one up with her hotter friend. Im way hotter male wise than he was and he could not figure out how my more sincere approach to relationships was likely a bigger factor than my relative looks. Now that is anecdotal but I have a second hand thing to. It was a news piece and I don’t have the reference so take my word or not but it was a study on tips between male and female servers. They both had to be cordial and pleasant and provide good service but controlling for those factors they each had one factor that would increase the tips. For women it was looks. For men it was making their customer laugh.
Spoken like a true incel.
So an increase in unwanted advances, positively correlates to an increase in ugly people?
Absolutely not surprising in the slightest.
This just in, studies using modern day neologisms are likely to find more evidence of modern day neologisms.
Toxic humanity is what it is. Expressed by males here.
Well said!
No surprise in any way at all.
Reported that they would escalate the level of sexual intimacy regardless of whether or not they thought it was consensual.
Gentlemen, the moment you’re questioning in your head if the girl is consenting, you use your voice and ask something along the lines of, “do you trust me?” or, “keep going?”, or “do you like this/it?”
Fkin no brainer. smh
I wish I lived in your world. I’ve had 3 rejections specifically because I asked for permission to kiss.
You revealed rejection, almost certainly did not create it by asking.
You are free to assume they lied to me.
Are you saying that they would have kissed you if you had just gone for it, but because you asked they said no?
I’ve met two people like that that I can remember, and I’m pretty sure not dating them was dodging some bullets.
But it’s also very likely that if you had just gone for it, they would have awkwardly moved out of the way.
I am saying they claimed that. I have no more knowledge than you do if they were telling the truth.
You dodged three bullets, bro. If a woman gets turned off by asking then she’s either not into you or she wants you to chase her, and both should be deal-breakers.
Wow. Three whole rejections.
Might as well give up now and become a monk.
Or, you know, give women what they are literally telling me they want, which is what I did.
Yes, but only three times and then you give up?
Of course not. It was only three times where the problem was asking for consent to kiss, not only three times for consent period. My consent rejection list is considerably longer than 3.
Didn’t I see you in those threads about the women choosing bears over men supporting the idea of men listening when women tell men they need to change their behaviour? Why are you now attacking me for doing it?
Believe it or not, suggesting you need to try harder when your post suggests you’ve only tried three times is not an attack.
I’m very interested in how many posters in this thread are non-virgin men, because I’m not seeing any discussion of how behaviour like this is often absolutely necessary in order to get anywhere with a woman. Every woman I’ve ever met, including my current gf, has found explicit consent at every step an absolute mood-killer, and I’ve been rejected multiple times by other women for checking for it. I’m expected to sinply make an advance and give her the opportunity to reject it. I absolutely hate this, but it’s reality. I’m sure not all women are like the women I’ve met, and I don’t have hard numbers for you, but it’s also how every woman works in every movie, every book, every story about romance, so I’m sure most people reading this post at least understand what I’m referring to.
behaviour like this is often absolutely necessary in order to get anywhere with a woman
I can’t speak for the women you know, but most, if not all, of the women I know prefer men who aren’t overly-aggressive misogynistic assholes.
Every woman I’ve ever met, including my current gf, has found explicit consent at every step an absolute mood-killer
Cool. There’s a big difference between asking for explicit consent every time and noticing passive response and it’s a bit disturbing that you don’t seem to understand that.
but it’s also how every woman works in every movie, every book, every story about romance
It isn’t, but it certainly is in a lot of them that are written by men.
noticing passive response
I don’t know how unique or widespread my personal (male) experience is, but I’ve always had a very difficult time noticing anything less than a blatant response.
I’ve discovered (in retrospect) that I have missed tons of hints, clues, and subtle responses that I have been shown over the decades. Absolutely oblivious.
And in my attempts to be a decent person, I have always treated what I perceived as a lack of interest/consent and not pushed forward.
I suspect my romantic life and even friendship circle would be much more lively had I been better able to notice many of those subtle clues.
Even now approaching my grey-hair years, I am not very good at “picking up what people are putting down” unless they are quite blatant in their intentions.
Then I guess you need to find someone who is blatant enough to help you understand.
You’re not owed a girlfriend or sex.
Gross. Yeah, no. You should definitely be asking for consent if nothing explicit has been said. I’ve done it many times and it was always appreciated (including by my now wife on our second date when I asked her if I could kiss her), but more importantly, it was the right thing to do. If for some reason there’s a person that is put off by asking, that’s kind of a red flag to be honest. Good communication in relationships and sex is essential and the foundation of any healthy relationship.
There are many ways of asking, too. It doesn’t have to be some stitled “Would you like to have sex with me right now?” Also just generally communicating a lot before and during sex acts as consent and helps to build trust.
A lot of women have had truly awful experiences with men. Good communication and obtaining consent is not only treating women with the kindness and respect they deserve, but it also makes you stand out among the many men with poor social skills that make unwanted advances all the time.
Ick
If a woman has a problem with me asking if I can touch her then I probably don’t want to.
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That’s fantastic; I’m happy for you.
Agreed. Your down votes and my down votes are toxic celibacy from those who no longer know how to go out and speak to women in person. Their lives are lived mostly on their phones.
What’s amusing is that these same people will, in other threads, bash men who take the only other feasible approach, which is the giving up you’re referring to. They want to have their cake and eat it, too: in this thread, it’s never ok to make a pass at a woman, but if you make a thread about being lonely, you’ll be told you’re a coward for not making passes at women.
