What is it about?
After the Metoo reckoning, there was a lot of discussion about "toxic masculinity" and how harmful it is. But are most men really "toxic"? in this study we aimed to understand more about what a toxic profile looked like, and how many men might fit this description.
Featured Image
Photo by Jopopz Tallorin on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We hoped our research would be helpful in avoiding stigmatising all men as holding toxic attitudes. We found only a small proportion of men (about 3%) fitted the "hostile toxic" profile. We also found that different sorts of men could score highly on gender identity centrality, meaning that a masculine identity could be important to men wihtout them necessarily holding "toxic" views. This is helpful to know in aiming to support positive ideas about masculinity in boys and men.
Perspectives
As a mother of a teenage boy working on this study felt particularly meaningful to me. I would like to mirror to him that he is a good young man, especially in the face of a lot of negative role models online and in the media. While I was writing this paper the TV series Adolescence came out on Netflix and there was an even greater awareness of the difficulties of boys and men. I hope this greater awareness will be lead to the modelling of positive masculinities for young men and how diverse and different these might look.
Deborah Hill Cone
University of Auckland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Are men toxic? A person-centered investigation into the prevalence of different types of masculinity in a large sample of New Zealand men., Psychology of Men & Masculinity, December 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/men0000547.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
