Toxicity Is Genderless

I used to say "toxic masculinity." I don't use it anymore. I've come to think the phrase points in the wrong direction.

Let me give it its due first, because it earned its place. The phrase didn't come from nowhere. #MeToo showed, case after case, the worst of what some men do with power, and "toxic masculinity" was a way of insisting the harm wasn't a few bad apples but something patterned — something a lot of boys are handed. The patriarchy does damage on its way through, including to the men it supposedly rewards: the ones shaped by it, raised inside it, taught early that feeling is weakness and dominance is strength.

Here's my problem: The phrase attaches the rot to the noun. It tells a boy that masculinity is the thing that turns toxic — that his masculinity is the raw material the poison is made from. I don't think that's right. The cruelty, the manipulation, the appetite for domination, the contempt for anyone vulnerable — none of that is masculine. It's just toxic. And toxicity is genderless. It runs through the manipulative boss and the cruel parent and the friend who keeps score; it has worn every gender and every role there is.

And toxicity is exactly the right word. Poison harms a body, and given enough of it, it kills one. The human kind does both — it corrodes the person carrying it and the people who have to live near it, eating away at trust, at confidence, at the sense that you are safe around someone. That is the thing worth naming and fighting. Not a gender. A poison.

Masculinity, when it isn't being sold back to us as a marketing category by men moving supplements and resentment, is a good thing. Think of the man who shows up early to help you move and waves off the gas money. The father who takes the smaller portion so his family has enough to eat. The guy who stays steady when something breaks and works out what to do. The one who carries the heavy thing so you don't have to. The one who notices the person being left out of the conversation and makes room for them. It is strength pointed outward — toward protecting, providing, steadying, building other people up instead of standing on them. Most of it never gets called masculinity at all, because we've gotten used to saving that word for the men making the most noise.

We say, often, that representation matters — that seeing someone like you on a stage, in a film, behind a desk, in an office no one like you has held before, leaves a mark on a young person. I think that's true. And if it's true, it's true for boys. They are watching too, sorting out what a man is supposed to be from whoever they're handed to admire. That makes the men we choose to make visible important.

In that vein, it might be worth resting the antihero for a while. The best of those stories are warnings, and a good warning is worth a great deal. But when nearly everything offered to a boy is some charismatic man behaving badly, the warning can get misread as the aspiration. The lesson lands upside down: he watches a man lie, cheat, and burn down everyone who trusted him, and comes away wanting the confidence and power — but somehow misses the part where it cost him his family, his friends, and eventually himself.

So I've dropped the phrase. Not because I've gone soft on the behavior — name the toxicity, all of it, wherever it shows up and whoever is doing it, as plainly as you can. But name it as toxicity. Because the other word tells a boy the problem might be him. Not what he does — what he is. That the male part is the suspect part, the thing to keep an eye on, hold down, and apologize for.

And a boy given only that has been given nothing to become. A warning is not a model. The grifters hand him a model — a bad one — and act like they're on his side. We shouldn't be surprised when he goes where someone seems to want him. The work was never to teach boys that masculinity is dangerous. It's to show them, often and unmistakably, what it looks like done well.

Representation is usually a conversation about who gets to see themselves on a stage, in a film, behind a desk. Less often it's a conversation about what kind of person is on that stage — and for boys sorting out what a man is supposed to be, that part matters as much as whether someone who looks like them is up there at all. So here are a few, real and fictional, who show a version of it worth wanting:

Steve Burns spent years hosting Blue's Clues, and the show worked because of how he paid attention: patient, curious, never talking down, treating a small child as someone worth listening to and worth waiting for. He's older now, and so are the kids who watched him. His brilliant podcast, Alive, picks the conversation back up for grown-ups trying to stay human in a more complicated world. The model is simple — a man who asks questions instead of asserting answers.

Keanu Reeves is famous for many film roles, but also, for how he treats the people around him. The stories are abundant: buying lunch for crews, talking to strangers like equals, giving up his seat. The one that sticks is that he reportedly handed back tens of millions of his own Matrix money so the effects and costume teams could be paid what they were worth. Take the reports with a grain of salt, but the pattern is consistent and decades long — power used quietly to lift the people standing below you, with no apparent need to be thanked for it.

Pedro Pascal is protective in the plain sense of the word. He guards his own privacy, and has openly stood beside his trans sister, Lux. When he spends his platform on people getting it bad, he does it by amplifying them rather than putting himself at the center, such as wearing the Protect the Dolls shirt, whose proceeds go to a trans crisis line. Strength turned outward, toward the vulnerable.

Stephen Colbert spent two decades doing political comedy. When The Colbert Report ended, he sold off pieces of the old set and put the proceeds toward DonorsChoose, which matched the funds enough to cover every open teacher request in his home state of South Carolina at once — roughly a thousand classroom projects, worth about $800,000, funded without making it a moment about him. And when The Late Show wrapped, the people showing up weren't just well-wishers passing through; they were writers, producers, and crew from twenty years back, greeting each other like the years hadn't moved. That kind of loyalty gets built by being decent when the camera's off.

Hank and John Green have spent almost twenty years online, and the throughline of everything they've built is the same instinct: take whatever you know and hand it over for free. Crash Course turned into a free education platform reaching something like fifteen million subscribers. Project for Awesome, their once-a-year charity push, raised more than $3.5 million in 2024 alone for causes their own audience nominates. They named their foundation, only half-joking, the Foundation to Decrease World Suck, and then built coffee and sock companies just to fund it — profits sent back out instead of kept. Two brothers who spent two decades building an audience without turning it into a brand about themselves.

Trevor Noah wrote Born a Crime before he said much else about himself, and the book — a #1 New York Times bestseller — was about his mother more than him: what it cost her to raise him at all, when his parents' relationship was, under apartheid, literally illegal. In 2018 he started the Trevor Noah Foundation, aimed at education access back home in South Africa — the country that made him.

Ted Lasso is fictional, but he earns his place because he's the template the real ones keep approximating: a man who leads with relentless, almost suspicious kindness, and whom everyone around him keeps mistaking, at first, for weak or naive. The show's whole arc is other characters recalibrating — realizing that caring this openly isn't the soft option, it's the harder one.

So who are your male role models? One rule — it has to be someone public. Actor, athlete, musician, or someone fictional, like a TV, movie, or book character. Men who model masculinity well. Someone a kid could watch and be better for it, and who you'd be glad your son wanted to be like. If you've got one, tell me. I'd like to know who's on other people's lists.