Toxic Femininity: It’s Probably Not What You Think

“There’s toxic masculinity,” one Reddit user wondered in August on r/AskReddit, “but what are examples of toxic femininity?” The question clearly struck a chord, attracting over 5,000 responses trying to tease out the concept from the popular question-and-answer forum.

“Mother who treat other people like crap and then justify it by saying they're a mama bear,” replied a user. “Being shamed for natural functions,” suggested another. “Women are more likely, I feel, to judge body hair, wrinkles, grey hairs, etc.” One commented: “To me it would mean women who bag on other women for womaning [sic] differently than they do.”

The term “toxic femininity” has been in usage for almost a decade, but has taken on a new lease of life in the post-Trump, post Me-Too era. In 2013, a Times article used it to describe a painting of Vivien, the cunning seductress who ruins Merlin in a Tennyson poem; in 2014, the New York Times contrasted it to “tough-guy masculinity” in a piece lamenting the death of the fictional gumshoe detective.

Just a few years later, the femme fatale-adjacent term started evolving in meaning as the phrase “toxic masculinity” picked up steam. In a 2018 Medium post titled Toxic Femininity Holds All of Us Back, social psychologist and author Dr Devon Price described it as pressing makeovers and handbags on uninterested teenage girls, or being told to be “sit like a lady” by your teacher and that not wanting children is “unacceptably unfeminine”.

“It was all toxic femininity,” they write. “It was a cultural disease. It was nobody’s fault. And everyone around me suffered from it too… The problem was never just masculinity. It was, and is, inflexible gender roles for men and women alike.”   

Today, Price tells VICE: “I'm not claiming to be the origin point for the phrase. I think a lot of people who use the term arrived at it independently, as I did, because it seemed so self-evident that if toxic masculinity is a social force, well, toxic femininity must be too.”

“I thought it was important to highlight that just as culture imposes a lot of restrictive standards on us about what it means to be a man or to be masculine, it also does the same to us regarding femininity.” 

Hannah McCann, a University of Melbourne lecturer in cultural studies, first heard the term in a 2018 piece by Sydney Morning Herald journalist Jane Gilmore and, in 2020, published a paper on it in the academic journal Psychology & Sexuality. She notes that online discussions of the term can often be “very antifeminist” and “used to argue that women can be ‘toxic’”.

“This use of toxic femininity is a reactionary backlash against feminist discussions of ‘toxic masculinity’,” she tells VICE. “These anti-feminist definitions promote harmful stereotypes of femininity – such as the idea that women are naturally gossips or ‘bitchy’ – and often suggest that men are ‘victims’ of this.” Those on the r/AskReddit thread might not have gone that extent, but some of their understandings of the term – especially ones rooted in stereotypes of feminine behaviour and individual women’s questionable actions – aren’t all that far off. 

It’s much more productive and fair, McCann argues, to instead look at how “certain approaches to gender are toxic, rather than some individual expressions or traits, because this allows us to see the bigger political picture”.

“For example, we might talk about how anti-trans feminists have a ‘toxic’ approach to femininity, because they promote: surveillance of women’s bodies and a rigid gender binary located in biology,” she says. “Or we might consider how the Christian right advocates for a version of femininity that is rigidly heterosexual.”

As a trans man, Price says that their own behaviour has been constantly policed “in the name of upholding a particularly restrictive, binary form of femininity”, adding: “Nowadays, I am also particularly aware of how hard this hammer comes down on butch women that I know.” 

“Even just having a flat kind of neutral facial expression can get a masculine woman branded as ‘angry’, simply because she is refusing to maintain the really heightened performance of smiley warm femininity our culture expects.” 

What’s most important, they add, is that the term shouldn’t be perceived to be “blaming the victims of sexism for their own suffering… It's pointing to how both our views about masculinity and our views about femininity are socially enforced, not individual neuroses or insecurities that came out of nowhere”.

So if you find yourself groping for the right term to describe your awful manager, hold off from using the phrase “toxic femininity” and ask yourself if you’re placing too much weight on her gender. It could be that she’s just a bad boss, full stop – in which case, why not blame capitalism instead? 

@Iolachristina

This article was updated for clarity on July 20, 2022.