What Is Toxic Femininity?

My mom used a phrase the other day that caught my attention: toxic femininity.

We hear plenty about toxic masculinity. Toxic femininity gets considerably less attention. And yes, I know putting those two words at the top of an article is one way to get people to click. Fair critique. Now that you're here, though, I think it's a line worth casting.

Mom wasn't suggesting feminism had somehow been a mistake. Women spent generations fighting for rights, opportunities, independence, authority, and places at tables from which they had often been excluded. Those changes corrected genuine inequality. What she wondered was whether somewhere along the way some of that correction acquired a different cultural permission—the ability to diminish men in ways we would immediately recognize as inappropriate if the sexes were reversed.

I've seen mild versions myself. I've sat in professional meetings where women made generalized jokes about men and their supposed deficiencies. Men can't multitask. Men don't listen. Men need women to keep them organized. People chuckle and the meeting continues.

Reverse the sexes and I suspect most of us can feel the room change without conducting the experiment.

That doesn't mean men have become an oppressed class nor does it negate inequalities women faced and continue to face. It suggests we've developed different cultural permissions for talking about one another.

To me, toxic femininity is not female strength, independence, assertiveness, or equality. It is the use of femininity, female social status, or gender-based cultural permission to diminish, manipulate, stereotype, or exercise power over others while framing that behavior as empowerment—or protecting it from criticism because it comes from women.

There's an immediate problem, though, with blaming women for creating that permission.

A lot of men helped.

We (Men) Wrote (a lot of) the Jokes

Look at the entertainment industry of the late twentieth century. Television networks, movie studios, advertising agencies, writers' rooms, and corporate leadership were overwhelmingly male environments. If the clueless husband and incompetent father became familiar characters in American culture, men were writing the scripts, approving the commercials, financing the productions, playing the characters, and laughing too.

Guys, we were in the writers' room.

The television dads of the 1990s make the point wonderfully. Tim Taylor on Home Improvement was confident, masculine, mechanically talented, and loving, but spectacularly capable of turning that confidence into disaster. I’m sorry Tim, into MORE POWER! Argh, argh, argh! Ray Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond could behave like a complete baboon, and Ray Romano's own life and comedy helped shape the show.

Then there was Al Bundy, a defeated shoe salesman complaining about his wife, children, job, and seemingly every decision that carried him from four touchdowns in a single high-school football game to his couch. And what introduced this portrait of marital bliss every week?

Frank Sinatra singing “Love and Marriage.”

Who would want to improve upon that?

These shows weren't secretly attacking men. They were funny. Men and women watched and laughed together. Somewhere along the way, though, the joke outlived the writers' room. The clueless husband and bumbling father became familiar enough that the audience already knew the character.

Women didn't create that permission alone, but neither did they lack agency once it existed. As women gained greater cultural and institutional power, some were perfectly capable of picking up the ball men helped put into play and running with it.

Maybe society does better when it walks.

I've been rewatching Friends lately, and it's an unexpectedly useful reminder of how cultural norms move. The series contains jokes about homosexuality, masculinity, gender roles, and relationships that landed differently in the 1990s. In one episode, Rachel wants a tattoo. Ross strongly disapproves. Rachel gets it anyway, and then Ross discovers he finds it incredibly “sexy.”

Nobody needs to put Friends on trial. That's precisely why it's interesting. It was ordinary entertainment from its time.

The footage hasn't changed. We have.

So what are we laughing at today that people will find strange thirty years from now?

Barbie offers a newer example. The movie makes legitimate observations about sexism, patriarchy, expectations placed on women, and identity. It also sends fictional Barbie into our supposedly real world, where Mattel's corporate leadership is portrayed as overwhelmingly male. The actual Mattel board around the film's release was much closer to gender parity.

Can two things be true?

The underlying message can be valid while the representation used to communicate it distorts contemporary reality. Satire exaggerates; that's part of its power. But it's still fair to ask when exaggerating reality to illuminate a truth begins creating a false impression of that truth.

This is about where my dad would start talking about pendulums. He loves pendulum discussions, and unfortunately for me, I hear about them a lot…uh, I mean, he may have a point. Social change often requires enormous force because entrenched systems rarely move themselves. But a pendulum doesn't know it has reached the center. The energy that moved it away from one extreme carries it through equilibrium.

Correction can create permission. Permission can become inversion.

Which brings me back to Mom, because toxic femininity wasn't the only thing she'd noticed.

Mom = Dad ≠ Child

Mom had also noticed how often children in entertainment are portrayed as the people with the right answers while adults can't seem to figure anything out. Bart Simpson made humiliating Homer an art form. Kevin McCallister proved more capable than nearly every adult he encountered. And Zack Morris spent years trying to run circles around Principal Richard Belding on Saved by the Bell.

That last one deserves a pause.

Dennis Haskins, who gave us Mr. Belding for all those years, recently passed away. Before I borrow his character to make a point about authority, I want to thank Dennis and his family for the years he spent bringing love and laughter into our homes. For those of us who grew up with the show, Mr. Belding was part foil, part mentor, and part of the family we invited into our living rooms.

“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?”

Thank you, Dennis.

And yes, Zack usually had an answer. That's what made it fun.

I still love these characters. The point isn't to put them on trial either. It's to notice what entertainment can make familiar without explicitly telling us anything. The kid delivers the cutting remark to Dad and gets the laugh. She rolls her eyes at Mom, gets the final line, and walks away victorious. Nobody announces that children should disrespect their parents. We simply watch, laugh, and absorb the interaction.

Treating children with greater dignity was a legitimate correction. Children should be heard, ask questions, disagree, and develop independence. But respecting a child can drift into treating the child as a contemporary. Those aren't the same thing.

Mom = Dad ≠ Child.

That's not about human worth. It's about role, responsibility, experience, and authority. Mom and Dad are adults. The child isn't.

Children may deserve respect. Adults should always get it from children.

I even found one from my own past. One of my chores involved filling the bird feeder, and Dad had a particular way he wanted it done. I eventually figured out an easier way, tried it, and showed him.

Know how I know it worked? He uses my way now.

Whoops.

I didn't need to overthrow the household government to prove Dad wrong. I respected the adult, kept thinking, and found something better. Dad recognizing that didn't diminish his authority either. That's development, and it's something worthy of parental pride. Thanks, Dad. Please keep teaching.

Love can be unconditional. Pride should be earned.

Dad's Classroom

My father spent a career teaching and watched the relationship between parents, students, and teachers change. Earlier in his career, when a teacher reported that a student had misbehaved, the starting alignment often looked like:

Parent + Teacher → Child

The teacher could still be wrong, and a good parent could discover that and advocate for the child. But adult authority received an initial presumption of legitimacy. If one of my teachers told Dad I'd done something, his first reaction was more likely, “Jeremy, explain yourself,” than, “What did that teacher do to my son?”

Over his career, he watched that increasingly become:

Parent + Child → Teacher

The child says the teacher was unfair, and the parent enters already aligned against the other adult. Dad isn't alone in noticing it. Teacher surveys and exit interviews include concerns about student behavior, insufficient parental support, being second-guessed, and lack of respect. I even found versions of the complaint here in Wisconsin.

The shift can be summarized in one sentence:

Teacher authority becomes conditional upon the child's approval.

Students should challenge ideas. “I think you're wrong” belongs in a classroom. But that's different from deciding someone's authority is illegitimate because you reject their conclusion. That expectation doesn't necessarily disappear when a student reaches a university or later enters the workplace. We spend eighteen years preparing children for adulthood. We shouldn't spend those same years pretending they're already there.

Then my generation had children.

The kids who watched Zack outmaneuver Belding, Bart humiliate Homer, and Kevin McCallister outperform adults became parents. Our children got something we didn't have at their age: an audience.

A kid used to watch something, imitate it, and discover from the people nearby whether the behavior worked. Today that child can watch, imitate, post, receive attention, adjust, and repeat. Followers, views, comments, and public validation can create adult-looking status before a child has adult experience, responsibility, or accountability.

Mom can say no while forty thousand strangers tell the kid Mom is ridiculous, wrong, even stupid. A teacher can discipline a student while thousands of people who weren't there adjudicate the encounter online. So the result is that the relationship hasn't just changed; it has gained new participants:

Parent ↔ Child ↔ Algorithm ↔ Audience

The algorithm doesn't care whether the child is prepared for the status it can confer. It cares whether we keep watching.

William Golding stranded his children on an island without adults.

Ours brought Wi-Fi.

Who Did This?

Which brings us somehow back to toxic femininity.

This isn't ultimately a story about what women did to men. Men helped write the jokes. Women sometimes took the permission and ran with it. Parents changed how they parented. Entertainment reflected and reinforced those changes. Audiences rewarded what entertained us, and technology learned how to measure that reward.

We did this.

Culture isn't something that merely happens to us. We write it, perform it, watch it, laugh at it, imitate it, reward it, and eventually reconsider it.

That's why old entertainment is so revealing. Friends hasn't changed. Home Improvement hasn't changed. Al Bundy is still sitting on the same couch while Sinatra sings the same song.

We changed.

Thirty years from now, people will probably look at things we consider ordinary today and wonder what we were thinking. That's okay. Changing our minds is part of progress. The challenge may be remembering that progress doesn't always require running.

Sometimes we discover something genuinely unequal and apply enormous force to change it. Sometimes that force is exactly what was required. But once we're moving, perhaps we should occasionally ask where we are.

Did correction create permission? Has permission become inversion? Did we pass the place we were trying to reach?

Women's equality wasn't the mistake. Respecting children wasn't the mistake. Students challenging teachers wasn't the mistake.

The mistake is assuming that correcting an imbalance requires creating another one.

Elevation does not require inversion.

Women don't become stronger because men become weaker. Children don't become more valuable because parents become less authoritative. Students don't become better thinkers because teachers become less respected.

Maybe Mom was right to bring up toxic femininity. Maybe Dad is right about his pendulums.

And maybe society really is better when it remembers how to walk.

Mom = Dad ≠ Child.