in her words: What Is Toxic Masculinity?

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“By far the worst thing we do to males — by making them feel they have to be hard — is that we leave them with very fragile egos.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author

For decades, we used terms like “macho,” “red-blooded” or “machismo” to describe the kind of hulking masculinity that men were, on some level, expected to aspire to.

Now we have “toxic masculinity” — an expression once relegated to women’s studies classrooms that suddenly seems to be everywhere.

Last week, the razor company Gillette released an advertisement titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” a spin on its longtime slogan “The Best a Man Can Get.” The ad challenges viewers to confront #MeToo and issues of “toxic masculinity” that manifest in acts like bullying and catcalling. It suggests that men abandon the “boys will be boys” mentality and instead hold other men accountable for misogynistic attitudes and behavior.

While the spot got plenty of love — it has been viewed about 25 million times on YouTube and 40 million times on Twitter — it also unleashed a torrent of backlash, including calls to boycott Gillette.

It came days after the American Psychological Association released its first-ever guidelines for psychologists working with boys and men who are socialized to conform to “traditional masculinity ideology” — which it says can hinder them from exploring what it means to be male — as well as an article in The Times about a new breed of straight male rockers who are protesting old notions of manhood.

“All these norms that we see aren’t normal at all,” said Joe Talbot, the lead singer of the British band Idles. “It’s a giant lie.”

So what does “toxic masculinity,” or “traditional masculinity ideology,” mean? Researchers have defined it, in part, as a set of behaviors and beliefs that include the following:

• Suppressing emotions or masking distress

• Maintaining an appearance of hardness

• Violence as an indicator of power (think: “tough-guy” behavior)

In other words: Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly; that they have to be “tough all the time”; that anything other than that makes them “feminine” or weak. (No, it doesn’t mean that all men are inherently toxic.)

[READ MORE: Many Ways to Be a Girl, But One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules]

It’s these cultural lessons, according to the A.P.A., that have been linked to “aggression and violence,” leaving boys and men at “disproportionate risk for school discipline, academic challenges and health disparities,” including cardiovascular problems and substance abuse.

“Men are overrepresented in prisons, are more likely than women to commit violent crimes and are at greatest risk of being a victim of violent crime,” the A.P.A. wrote.

Wade Davis, a former N.F.L. player who now speaks to men about gender inequality and masculinity at companies like Google, Netflix and the N.F.L., said that there are no better messengers to help men confront these issues than other men.

“I don’t think it’s the work of women,” he told me recently. “I think it’s the work of men like myself who need to be talking to our brothers, fathers, our friends.”

It’s individual men, he continued, who are “going to have to, at some point, decide how to define manhood and masculinity for himself.”

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Remembering the unsung women of the civil rights movement

“Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement,” Coretta Scott King said in 1966. Most of us know names like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, but there are dozens of other women who are less known but equally critical to the civil rights movement.

Women like Gloria Richardson, who famously waved away the bayonet of a National Guardsman during a protest in Cambridge in 1963; Dorothy Height, the president of the National Council of Negro Women, who would often be cropped out of pictures of organization presidents; Ella Baker, a field secretary and branch director of the N.A.A.C.P.; and Dorothy Cotton, who taught students how to peacefully protest even as people taunted them, pushed them and threatened their lives.

[READ MORE: Stories of the Women Who Steered the Movement]

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More from The Times

• “So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.” Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work sold strongly, has died. [The New York Times]

• “This case is part of a growing trend in which federal district courts.” The U.S. Supreme Court revives transgender ban for military service. [The New York Times]

• “Kamala Harris For the People.” The California Democrat declared her candidacy for president, joining two other prominent female senators, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. [The New York Times]

• “By keeping compensation secret, we might obscure structural inequalities.” Employees work harder, are more productive and are better at collaborating when salaries are transparent, studies show. [The New York Times]

• “We cannot have a statue of two white women representing the vote for all women.” Central Park will soon get a long fought-for statue of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but not every feminist considers this a victory. [The New York Times]

• “When I was pregnant, no item was free from the boy-or-girl question.” Tales of gender blasphemy from deep within the land of princes and princesses. [New York Times Opinion]

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From the archives, 1973: ‘An exercise of raw judicial power.’

Forty-six years ago today, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision: Roe v. Wade. In a 7-2 vote, the Justices struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing abortion across the country.

The next day, a headline across the front page of The New York Times read: “High Court Rules Abortion Legal the First 3 Months.”

Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

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