How Are Men Fallen? Evaluating a New Toxic Masculinity Scale

Just as both men and women are created in God’s image, we are also both fallen. Moreover, there can be sex differences among men and women (often simply in terms of percentages and not absolutes) in the ways they demonstrate virtue and vice. What that means and what the redemption of masculinity and femininity might entail are perhaps two of the most confusing and controversial conversations in academia today.

The problem with much of this conversation today, from a Christian view, is that many scholars focus upon the fallenness of a particular sex while eschewing efforts to set forth a positive redemptive vision for what it means to be an excellent man or woman. We especially see this problem with men and the focus on “toxic masculinity.” Academics are overly preoccupied with pointing out male problems versus setting forth a vision of masculine excellence.

For instance, some scholars have created a new toxic masculinity scale.¹ Now, every scale in psychology contains implicit, or perhaps even explicit, empirical and moral claims, many of which are up for debate in both society and the academy. Not surprisingly, this new toxic masculinity scale falls prey to various forms of ideological corruption, as well as simple sloppy item design. Before getting to those problems, I first want to provide some context.

Christian Evaluations of Masculine and Feminine Ideals

Throughout history, cultures have had moral ideals about what a good man or woman is in the same way they have general ideals about what a good husband is and what a good wife is. They also have fairly accurate stereotypes of men and women in general (85% accuracy according to this recent study).

How one separates the wheat from the chaff though is still the important question.

Christians should start this process by recognizing that virtually every virtue and moral ideal outlined in the Bible is directed to both sexes unless it is certain sex-based roles that do not apply to the whole sex (e.g., husband/wife). As a result, the differences between an excellent man and a woman are not the virtues they are to demonstrate but how they embody them. For example, the average man is stronger than 99% of women, so men will embody Christian virtues in different ways regarding physical strength.² The same is true for things like self-control and risk-taking due to testosterone.

In this regard, Christians should recognize that our masculine and feminine ideals can be both potentially helpful and potentially fallen. Historically, we see this problem in the moral ideals implicit within the terms gentleman and lady. Both terms were used extensively in higher education in the mid- to the late-eighteenth century to communicate moral ideals for the different sexes.

At its best, the gentleman ideal derived its understanding from the Christian fruit of the spirit, gentleness, as well as other Christian virtues and then applied it to a man with both physical and social power.  Here is an example of how some of these virtues influenced an early fraternity code:

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity, who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements, who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.³

At its worst, the so-called “gentleman” was the fraternity boy with great manners and lots of resources who can win a lady of high society while drinking and whoring on the side with his buddies. As I have written before and elsewhere, the gentleman and lady ideas were eventually rejected due to their fallen association with external manners more than substantive Christian virtues (the movie Titanic is a clear early twenty-first-century secular takedown of the fallen version of these early twentieth-century moral ideals).⁴

Since that time, female scholars have turned to various forms of feminism and post-feminism to find their moral ideals. In contrast, academics never really replaced the gentleman ideal. Instead, they have largely focused on what men are doing wrong. That’s why a group of scholars have produced the language and now a scale around toxic masculinity.

The New Toxic Masculinity Scale

Oddly, to develop their scale, the scholars used qualitative interviews with 721 white, largely female Pacific Northwest students at a public university (“494 females, 197 males, 23 non-binary students, and 6 gender-fluid students,” p. 3). The sample is likely one of the most liberal in the country when one accounts for geography and sex. They then came up with the following definition of toxic masculinity, “toxic masculinity is the overemphasis and indulgence in societal-based masculine traits to an extent that is harmful to oneself and/or others” (p. 3).

The authors then asked 6 experts to identify items from their coding “that did not reflect that definition, were inappropriately worded, were loaded, were double-barreled, or were reductive.” They also used additional means to reduce the scale to 28 items.

Now, a little over half the items measure some obviously problematic attitudes from a Christian perspective (“10. Men are superior to women; 16. Men should not work for women.; 18. I don’t value the opinion of women.”23. Lying to my partner is okay, because I am a man, etc.). They could also be reversed and used to create a toxic femininity scale.

Yet, almost half the questions measure behaviors that are a far cry from toxic masculinity although they are certainly emotionally problematic. Two sets of questions simply measure attitudes that are not good for men or humans in general. The first involves crying (1. If I cry, I am weak; 2. Crying means I am weak; 3. Expressing sadness publicly makes me weak; 4. Public displays of sadness means I am not masculine.”). Honestly, the number and percentage of women who have apologized to me for crying in both professional and personal settings shows that items 1-3 are also a problem for women. Thus, I would only consider #4 a measure of unhealthy masculinity (versus toxic). The great thing about Christianity is that its moral models (both male and female) demonstrated a healthy relationship with public crying (e.g., “Jesus wept”).

The second set involves pain and seeking medical help (e.g., 24. “If I am in pain, I don’t let people know.”; 25. “I ignore pain when I feel it.” 26. “If I am sick, I refuse to go to the doctor.”; 27.” If I don’t feel well, I just ignore it.” I grant that acute pain is something to which we should usually respond and that men stereotypically like to avoid the doctor. Yet, these are the kind of silly items one comes up with if one is deriving scales from college students who have not experienced chronic pain or lived with someone who does. For example, three of our four family members must constantly deal with chronic pain, and although we have to discuss it at times, it is best not to make it central to our family life. Sometimes those of us with chronic pain do need to ignore pain and not talk about it constantly. It’s certainly not a sign of toxic masculinity.

Five questions rate the respondent’s lack of adherence to or adherence to recent gender ideology (11. Gender and sex are the same thing; 12. There are only two genders; 13. Gender is not different from sex; 14. It is propaganda that there are more than two genders; 20 Men should only use masculine pronouns (e.g., he/him). In addition, two other questions focus on one’s attitude toward sex workers (“32. Sex workers have no self-respect; 33. Sex work isn’t a career”). So, a total of six items are going to be problematic for any human who does not buy into the post-modern belief that one can self-author additional genders.⁵

In the end, I would throw out half of these measures as helpful in identifying some aspect of toxic masculinity.

Where Is Physical Violence (or the threat of)?

This kind of instrument is what happens when you misuse grounded theory to develop a scale for toxic masculinity largely from a majority sample of young college women in the Pacific Northwest who have not had extensive life experience and then revise it using academics with more concern for ideology than reality.

Any worthwhile measure of toxic masculinity should instead start with the reality that men are 93% of those in prison.⁶ Why are they in prison? They misused their physical power for acts of violence such as murders, robberies, rapes, assaults, domestic violence, etc. That’s actual toxic masculinity that is harmful to oneself and others.⁷ Views of crying, use of pronouns, and whether one goes to the doctor in pain do not place you in prison (unless you are a teacher in the UK or Ireland and fail to use a person’s pronouns)

This scale, which is supposed to measure how fallen men are, inadvertently demonstrates two problems with the contemporary academy. Not only does the academy, including the Christian academy, often fail to offer men positive ideals about what it means to be an excellent man, but as this scale demonstrates, it also fails to show familiarity with reality and what is most toxic or fallen about men.

Should Christians create their own instruments to make distinctions between the godly and ungodly/sinful/toxic man or godly and ungodly/sinful/toxic woman? The book of Proverbs seems to indicate that such distinctions can be helpful. Certainly, we can and should do better. What we need to offer is a clear understanding of how the virtues of Christ sometimes must take unique forms in male bodies with greater muscle mass and testosterone.

1. Steven Michael, Sanders, Claudia Garcia-Aguilera, Nicholas C. Borgogna, John Richmond T. Sy, Gianna Comoglio, Olivia A. M. Schultz, and Jacqueline Goldman. 2024. “The Toxic Masculinity Scale: Development and Initial Validation” Behavioral Sciences 14, no. 11: 1096. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14111096
2. David M. Buss, ed., Evolutionary Psychology: Foundations, vol. 1, 2^nd ed. (Wiley, 2015).
3. John Hechinger, True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), ix.
4. For the history of this development in higher education see my chapter on gender in Perry L. Glanzer, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
5. Granted it is not clear what item 33 is trying to measure. Everyone should acknowledge, empirically speaking, that sex work is a career for certain women and men. Now, whether it should be seen as a legally or morally acceptable career is another question (which seems to be the slant of the question, but it is worded poorly). So, instead of identifying the objectification of women, particularly through the use of pornography or one’s negative views of sex trafficking, this measure thinks real men should embrace women who traffic themselves?
6. Shannon, S. K., Uggen, C., Schnittker, J., Thompson, M., Wakefield, S., & Massoglia, M. (2017). The growth, scope, and spatial distribution of people with felony records in the United States, 1948–2010. Demography, 54(5), 1795-1818.
7. In addition, any toxic masculinity scale should extend its analysis to the uncontrolled anger that often precedes and accompanies this violence. That there is not one item dealing with the anger of men in the final scale demonstrates how ridiculous this measure is. Men may not want to cry in public, but they struggle to control and direct their anger. Thus, it should not be surprising that one of the specific commands given to men as men is “I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument” (I Tim. 2:8). Now, sometimes the cause for male anger is injustice but often times it comes from silly slights, spurned advances, disputes over sports matches, someone cutting them off in traffic, practical jokes, emotional insecurity, and more (one of the original 100 measures was, “67. When I am angry, I lash out,” but it was discarded from the final measure).