Thank you as well for engaging back with these ideas. I greatly appreciate being able to discuss these kinds of complex social issues in ways that are both respectful and nuanced. I think it is very interesting and worthwhile to factor in human evolutionary history when describing the behaviors of contemporarny men and women, but also think there is a limit to how much this aspect of human history accounts for modern behaviors. I think this is because our environments have changed very much very quickly, and that because of this our species is currently floundering. There’s too much noise to make out how much our ancestral signals contribute to our behaviors, although I do think these influences exist and should be considered at all times (I am, after all, above and beyond all else, a scandalous psychoanalyst who believes that humans are mostly unconscious beings). In this evolutionary vein, the prefrontal cortex is our newest piece of mental machinery and I think us humans are still learning how to use it. I also think it is very difficult for our species to handle the rapid changes technology and the internet have given us, especially in terms of accessing information and knowing how to made decisions with it, especially when there are many options to choose from. This is beside the point, though.

I appreciate you bringing these ideas in, as they help me have a clearer understanding of how to accomplish understanding the aim of this essay, which I stated thusly: “My overall aim in this paper is to present a theoretical framework to describe how masculinity becomes toxic, and what I am claiming is that it becomes toxic by repeatedly imitating and attempting to embody the phallus.” I believe that both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity exist, but didn’t say that this in this essay, and believe I should have (I suppose this is why there is an edit button, right?). I also say later on that “I also do not believe that men or masculinity in general are toxic, but that its toxificiation is both rampant and based in unexamined sociocultural wounds.” My approach is to describe when men act inappropriately, and to offer a way to understand the process by which these behaviors manifest; I definitely believe men act inappropriately sometimes, and that men acting inappropriately is becoming more and more common as women collectivize and obtain more institutional power. I admittedly have not thought much about how women contribute to this dynamic of “toxically gendered” behaviors, however, and therefore appreciate you drawing attention to the responsibility women have in affecting this behavior. I definitely don’t think that men are the oppressed victims and women are the culprit, though. I suspect we might disagree about this, and if so then that’s alright; if we do then I hope we can meet in the middle and agree that both men and women abuse one another in different ways, and it’s important to name and describe how these behaviors take place so that our species can continue more healthily into the future as a unity instead of continuing a divisive war of opposition.

I once had a social psychology teacher who said that the only thing that would unite humanity would be an alien invasion, because then we’d all have a common out-group member to defend ourselves against. I think about this whenever social issues are discussed in order to (try to) keep perspective on our shared humanity despite our regular encounters with difference.