Opinion: In praise of tonic (not toxic) masculinity
After slapping 2022 Oscars host Chris Rock for making a joke about his wifeās appearance Will Smith was exiled from the event for 10 years for this display of what was condemned as toxic masculinity. That his movie Bad Boys: Ride or Die was one of this summerās big hits, suggests views of both Smith and masculinity may be evolving. (Credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images files)
Special to Financial Post | Lynne Cohen
6 min read
By Lynne Cohen
Will Smith is back. And like all good action heroes, just in the nick of time.
Before the release this summer of his latest movie Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the last anyone had seen of Smith was at the 2022 Academy Awards where he slapped comedian Chris Rock for making a rude joke about his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith. For defending his wifeās honour ā something that would have been considered obligatory male behaviour a few generations ago ā Smith was widely condemned for his ātoxic masculinityā and banned from the Oscars for a decade.
Moviegoers had other ideas. After a string of box office failures in the first part of this year, Bad Boys: Ride or Die was widely acknowledged to be the first legitimate blockbuster of the summer, earning over US$100 million in its first weekend and pushing the entire Bad Boys franchise past US$1 billion. Such commercial success suggests the public isnāt as repelled by displays of traditional masculinity as the Oscar people were. Lots of us apparently will pay good money to see Smith rescue his kidnapped wife and pump the bad guy full of ātoxicā bullets.
Despite plenty of noisy opinions to the contrary, there remains something vitally necessary about the qualities that have long defined manhood: courage, risk-taking and competitiveness among them. Rather than condemning Smith for acting like a man off-screen, we ought to be encouraging all men to act likewise all the time. (Perhaps with a bit less slapping.) In fact, Canadaās future may depend on it.
These days, however, acting manly risks public admonishment, if not a medical diagnosis. In 2019 the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity ā which it defined as āachievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence ā¦ (and) self-relianceā ā to be a āharmfulā malady in need of correction.
It gets worse. Despite ample and convincing evidence that a stable two-parent family is the best environment for raising healthy and successful children, today dads are widely treated in popular culture as incompetent buffoons. And feminist rhetoric is now explicit in its enmity. In a particularly vicious 2018 Washington Post column, feminist scholar Suzanna Danuta Walters declared of men: āWe have every right to hate you.ā
āThere is this general anti-male animus in society today,ā laments Janice Fiamengo, a retired professor of English at the University of Ottawa. āEverywhere is this sense that men are at best irrelevant to womenās lives, and at worst, a menace to society. I see almost no appreciation for menās unique and distinctive abilities and gifts.ā Perhaps the first step to publicly recognizing the many benefits of masculinity is to rebrand it from toxic to tonic.
The term ātonic masculinityā was coined by Miles Groth, a psychologist at New York Cityās Wagner College, in 2021 to highlight the positive and necessary aspects of manliness. Tonic, Groth notes, has two meanings. It is āan invigorating substanceā as well as the home key of a musical composition. Tonic masculinity, in other words, represents both harmony and healing.
Groth notes the vast significance of the specific work men do. Surgeons, garbage men, soldiers, loggers, miners, bus drivers and those doing many other jobs that traditionally have been ā and in most cases still are ā male-dominated remain absolutely vital to society. Many of these activities involve a high degree of personal risk and/or self-sacrifice. In Canada, men account for 95 per cent of all on-the-job fatalities. The power of tonic masculinity, Groth writes, āis seen in men who pursue careers in public service such as first responders and ā¦ men who serve in the military.ā Men push limits and explore frontiers.
No woman has yet landed on the moon. Men first circumnavigated the globe, climbed Mount Everest and reached the North Pole. The same goes for intellectual exploration. Of the 970 Nobel Prizes given out since the awardās inception in 1901, 905 have gone to men. And those 65 women winners are predominantly in the non-scientific fields of peace and literature. The prizes in physics, medicine, chemistry and economics have been thoroughly dominated by men.
It is important to stress that, on average, men are not smarter than women. Rather, their performance in intelligence measures displays greater variability at either end. At the very top and very bottom of the distribution men are in the majority. Proving male stupidity is easy, as the Darwin Awards readily attest. At the other end of the spectrum, the most comprehensive population-wide intelligence tests (conducted in Scotland in the 1930s and 1940s) revealed that at an IQ of 140, considered āgeniusā level, there were twice as many males as females. Other studies on mathematical ability report that within the top four per cent of quantitative reasoning, the male-female split is 60-40. A Duke University investigation of exceptional students in the U.S. and India reported that within the top 0.01 percent of SAT/ACT scores for math and science, there were more than 2.5 males for every female. The U.S. membership of Mensa is 64 per cent male ā although in fairness joining Mensa seems a very male thing to do.
These sex differences at the very highest levels are not related to any of the obvious physical advantages that men hold. Rather, this variability is an embedded masculine trait with no bearing on size or strength. Part of the secret may lie in the competitiveness that has always been essential to male behaviour. Competition pushes men to constantly strive to outdo each other. The evolutionary origin of this can be found in the competition for mates, but it carries over to all other activities and fields. Beyond sports and business, this dominance extends to fields that have no practical or physical component. Men dominate chess, bridge and even Scrabble tournaments because their drive to succeed leads them to spend more time studying and practicing.
This gender divide has profound implications for Canada as a whole. Since 2015, our country has had a self-declared āfeministā government, with all that implies. Justin Trudeauās first official act as prime minister was to unveil a perfectly gender-balanced cabinet. On domestic policy, he has focused almost exclusively on redistributing Canadaās existing pool of wealth through programs such as child care, pharmacare, dental care and so on.
Meanwhile, Ottawa has proven openly hostile to resource development, agriculture and other āmaleā pursuits that involve creating new wealth, pushing frontiers and building big things. Canadaās many problems, including our faltering productivity and other economic maladies, the shrinking military, the housing crisis and our damaged international reputation are best understood as evidence of a lack of competitiveness, independence and risk-taking at the national level: traits that are typically associated with traditional masculinity. Canada, in other words, needs a lot more Will Smith. And soon.
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