Toxic Masculinity

I’m tired of semi-literate thinkpieces about the phrase “toxic masculinity” that are all about “my boys are wonderful; men are great; you are painting with too broad a brush.” You, sir or madam, who writes those turgid, self-congratulatory pieces, are a moron. “Toxic masculinity” is a phrase; a phrase is a part of speech which is defined as two or more words that together have a specific meaning and is not a clause (i.e., does not contain both a subject and verb). In this case, it is a noun phrase, which clearly and concisely defines a specific sort of masculinity that is toxic.

It very clearly does not say that all masculinity is toxic. We know this first from the grammar, which in this case in English is unambiguous, and secondly from logic, where we learned that universal affirmatives can only be partially converted. Toxic is an adjective, meaning “poisonous,” that in this phrase modifies the noun, masculinity, meaning “characteristics of maleness.” All toxic masculinity is masculinity, but not all masculinity is toxic.

You very stupid people think you are being clever with your word-gymnastics. Watching your imprecision with the English language, a tool I use professionally every day to literally save lives, is like watching a sloth use its enormous slow-twitch muscles and a giant axe to destroy Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. It is an offense against literally everyone who wants to use English correctly. It is an attack upon the thing that makes English, as a language, so great: its pith. It is an assault on meaning, grammar, and context for a…