#thank you mutuals for tolerating another ted lasso post

[benicebefunny]

It's pretty wild how neoliberalism, particularly social media discourse and thinkpiece journalism, has turned a valuable concept like toxic masculinity into yet another racist gender binary.

Take, for example, Ted Lasso.

As a cultural norm, toxic masculinity does not always require top-down enforcement through physical violence. It's not just the guys at the top of the hierarchy who are beating toxic masculinity into people. People throughout the social hierarchy keep toxic masculinity going through subtler means, like language and organizational structure.

The Ted Lasso fandom (and many journalists covering the show) have simplified this to "toxic masculinity is when lower-status men say mean things."

And because toxic masculinity has become a binary, this means that the only "bad" masculinity resides in mean-saying, lower-status men.

Everyone else is exhibiting "good" masculinity. Even when they're enacting physical violence and call other men bitches.

At the end of the day, what this does is stigmatize characters who are less traditionally masculine--as defined by white norms. And, crucially, it grants a free pass to characters who fulfill the ideals of traditional white masculinity.

And that's how we get this bizarro world where men of color, particularly Nathan and Sam, are hyper-scrutinized for using their words and expressing their emotional needs. And where white characters like Beard and Roy are beloved for bottling up their feelings and threatening/using physical violence.

Roy headbutted Jamie so he could hug him after. If that's not toxic masculinity, I don't know what is. But the fandom doesn't have time to unpack that. It's too busy arguing that Nathan calling Colin a motel painting is somehow worse than Colin physically attacking Nathan everyday for god knows how long.

I'm not trying to reverse the binary here, making Nathan good and Roy toxic. The problem is that we are thinking about masculinity as a good/toxic binary. People--including fictional characters--relate to masculinity in ways that are far more complex than merely good or toxic. We lose so much when we reduce masculinity to just another binary.

Also, the good/toxic binary--like binaries in general--is a tool of white supremacy. So maybe let's knock that shit off.