Toxic masculinity says men have to be violent in a violent world, but why is the world violent? Because of toxic, violent men. And they'll even admit that. They certainly don't believe they need protection from femininity. So they reinforce their need for violence by violence and it becomes a toxic feedback loop.
You can see similar patterns in violence even if you exclude masculinity from the equation. We need an army to protect ourselves from other nations' armies which only exist to protect those nations from other nations' armies. It's turtles all the way down.
But I think there's a deeper protection racket going on, at least with the patriarchy. The patriarchy can't exist without violence and threat, so it constructs this feedback loop to give it a raison d'être. It says, in effect, "You wouldn't want no one should get hurt," while being the one who hurts as well as the one who gets hurt. Untangling that sentence is nothing compared with untangling the patriarchy, obviously.
Anyway, just a cheerful thought for your morning commute or whatever, mostly because I wanted the excuse to make a meme.
CW: eye contact
