Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality

Summary: Can men have a non-toxic masculinity, and what would that look like?

Non-Toxic Masculinity is a book that I decided not to read initially. And then Josh Butler's book and TGC article came out. And Patrick Miller stonewalled Sheila Wray Gregoire and then eventually apologized. So many other things happened recently that are mainly about toxic masculinity that I decided to accept a review copy.

Up front, I am not the target audience here. I am 50 and have spent nearly 15 years as a stay-at-home uncle and then dad. I have not once earned more than my wife. I am firmly in favor of women's ordination. My senior sociology project in the mid-90s was about the acceptance of rape myths among students at evangelical colleges. I have long thought that many men are toxic. I read Everyman's Battle on a friend's recommendation and immediately threw it away as trash precisely because it treated women as the problem instead of rightly paying attention to evangelical sin avoidance as the problem. I favor men working toward being less toxic, but I am highly suspect of any gendered approach to discipleship for men.

I was too old for the main purity culture teaching; I had been married for several years when I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out. The term dodging a bullet is probably too weak of a statement when I have talked to people about the harm of purity culture. In my mid-20s, despite being a fairly outspoken egalitarian, a seminary professor and a friend separately challenged me because they thought I was adopting a kinder, gentler form of sexism. I can remember talking about the problems of porn (and this was long before smartphones) and suggesting that part of breaking the power of porn was to firmly establish that women in those videos should be treated as “mother, sister, daughter.” My friend challenged me to think about how that framing still established women in relation to men and not as a child of God or imago dei. My professor challenged me to think about how I was thinking of marriage as a means of equipping me for others things. I argued with both of them but eventually came to realize that they were right.

It wasn't good enough to be a kinder, gentler sexist that categorizes women by their relationship to other men (by default, still maintaining a gender hierarchy). And it was not good enough to think of marriage as a means of maturity building. I do not live up to my ideals, but from that point, I have attempted to live as if all hierarchy violates God's good creation, whether it be gender, race, class, or other types of hierarchy.

While I appreciate the open discussion of the harm of purity culture, the problems with the way that the church has created a “sexual prosperity gospel” (if you avoid premarital sex, then you will be rewarded with “mind-blowing” sex in your marriage), the problems of both porn and the problematic ways that the church has handled porn and many other topics, my main problem with most books written toward men is still present. I do not believe that men and women are simply interchangeable, but I do think that men and women are far more alike than they are different.

In many cases, books written to men about “how to be a man” are not really about masculinity, they are about maturity. I think mistaking instructions on maturity for instructions on masculinity harms both men and women. Both men and women should be encouraged toward maturity. And if you are speaking to men about maturity, then you should not be framing maturity as if it were particularly masculine (or feminine).

This is often true in discussions of the fruits of the spirit within gendered books. There is no gender in fruits of the spirit, both men and women should embody fruits of the spirit. Toward the end of the book, Wagner connects masculinity to fatherhood. Wagner's main point was that a broad view of fatherhood, not just biological fatherhood but the care of others, is part of being masculine.

“Every time a man seeks to take responsibility for, cultivate, nurture, protect, repair, renew, or redeem his corner of creation, he is acting like a father and living out the chief end of his sexuality.”

“Male sexuality is relational. Fatherhood is a particular type of relationship made possible by our sexual bodies. Our bodies are intended to serve us in forming connections with other people too. Romanic relationships are not the only context in which our sexuality is relevant; they show us we are relational creatures. Through sexual embodiment, we are connected to everyone who shares our bloodline–siblings, children, parents, grandparents, cousins, and beyond.”