For girls, male strangers hiding in bushes at night are no secret. TikTok has its own answers for all teenage girls agitated about walking home alone. Under every couple of flicks on one’s phone were numerous do-it-yourself electronic cookbooks of self-defense pepper sprays -- a spoonful of chili powder, a grate of wasabi, and a dash of soy sauce -- they provide the perfect piercing sensation to whoever is tempted to follow you at night. But why has this absurd practice now gained widespread acceptance among teenage girls? And why is it that men are still perceived as intemperate? Hot-headed? Big bad wolves?         

            It’s 2023. And yes, the 80s term --"toxic masculinity" -- is still a thing.        

            The phrase was obscure back then, but it has become quite pervasive in recent discussions regarding male dominance. In fact, the terminology has appeared frequently anywhere and everywhere, from headlines regarding the Capital Riot to a blog about an abusive ex. As New York Times author Maya Salam puts it, "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."[1] Chiefly, it’s society’s stereotypical expectations of males -- dominant and tough -- gone wrong.

            In reality, emotions are meant to be expressed, not suppressed; bottles of repressed emotions are bound to overflow. People lacking the opportunity to healthily express themselves turn to other forms of release for their vexations. For instance, some men with unexpressed negative emotions take out their anger by verbally or physically abusing those around them, especially on “weak” and “vulnerable” women. In fact, evidence shows that 1 in every 3 women has experienced physical violence by an intimate partner, not to mention the countless “Little Red Riding Hoods” abused by male strangers. And let’s be honest, all girls have pondered the root cause of the abuse they receive, of this growing fear, of this unjust dominance. It’s toxic masculinity.

            Simply pondering this issue and suggesting that girls keep themselves at arm’s length, however, isn’t going to stop them from being so frightened that they go searching for occult concoction recipes on TikTok. From a societal perspective, we have to stop our stereotypical norms from expanding and, over time, worsening. Instead of teaching the next generation of boys not to cry and the next generation of girls how to protect themselves from abuse, we have to work together to make our ideas more 21st-century-like. It’s okay to express yourself. It’s okay to cry. But before society learns that, I’m adding an additional drop of lemon into my own self-defense spray.

[1] nytimes.com/2019/01/22/us/toxic-masculinity.html