by Jason Nethercut
Many people praised Gillette’s recent advertisement for taking a stand against the worst manifestations of toxic or hegemonic masculinity. Others like Piers Morgan insisted that masculinity itself was under attack in the ad. “Let boys be damn boys & men be damn men,” he tweeted. Many Men-of-the-Internet shared this perspective, culminating in the release of another advertisement in explicit response to the Gillette Ad by the Egard Watch Company. Triangulating the diverse responses the Gillette Ad has elicited, one is forced to conclude that there is much confusion over what exactly Gillette is addressing.
If one were to go looking for a foundational expression of the ideology targeted by the Gillette ad, many roads would lead back to Aristotle. And indeed, many strands of Aristotelian thought are alive and thriving today. Regardless of influence, what interests me most is how reading the Gillette ad through the lens of Aristotelian philosophy can reveal a way forward for modern masculinity. Viewed through the lens of Aristotle’s philosophy, the Gillette Ad highlights the flaws in Aristotlelian biology, and the ways that we, knowingly or not, continue to view the world through this inherited lens. But can Aristotelian ethics save masculinity?
To be clear: toxic masculinity is not all masculinity. And so the Gillette ad is not waging a war on masculinity, pace Morgan et al. As the Good Man Project defines it, toxic masculinity is “a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status, and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of maniliness, where strength is everything and emotions are a weakness.” Toxic masculinity derives from a binary notion of gender that understands behavior as fundamentally gendered; “men” are not allowed to do “feminine” things (e.g. express vulnerability) or have “feminine” traits (e.g. emotionality).
So it is not a stretch to point out that modern toxic masculinity operates with the same notion of gender hierarchy that is found in (traditional/scholastic readings of) Aristotelian biology, where male form is opposed to female matter. But, paradoxically, this very notion of gender gives rise to behaviors that violate the basic premise of Aristotelian ethics. The “crisis of masculinity” that so many on either side of this issue have identified from this perspective represents an Aristotelian house-divided-against-itself. If masculinity is to survive, the Gillette ad suggests, we would do well to discard Aristotle’s biology in favor of his ethics.
Throughout the Aristotelian corpus, we find emphatic assertions that resonate with the set of assumptions from which modern toxic masculinity operates, including the idea that women are categorically inferior to men (Politics 1254b3); that women have a naturally deficient capacity for reason and, therefore, are naturally suited to obeying men (Politics 1260a9); that women are “infertile men” because they play no seminal role in procreation (Generation of Animals 727b18); that by nature the female is more cowardly and less honest than the male (Physiognomica 809a38).
With ideas like this, it’s easy to imagine Aristotle approving of the basic binary perspective of gender upon which toxic masculinity is founded. If gender is dichotomized, and if men are biologically and socially superior to women, systematizing a gender hierarchy, as part of which “feminine” qualities should be supplanted by “masculine” qualities, is a logical next step.
And indeed, Jordan Peterson, everyone’s favorite pseudo-scientific dilettante, offers proof that neo-Aristotelian notions of gender inform modern toxic masculinity. Peterson feels so much anxiety about the need for this gender binary, that he has suggested that if we even slightly change our conceptualization of masculinity and femininity as “basic categories,” people will cease being “human” altogether. Wow. Calm down, my man. You know, you really should smile more.
Peterson is wrong, even if he’s right about what Aristotle probably would have had to say about gender binaries. The Gillette ad, and the many voices who want to eradicate toxic masculinity, do not reject masculinity wholesale. Rather, at its root, what is being advocated is an expansion, a development, of what we consider masculinity to be. Necessarily this involves transcending binary thinking about gender, but that doesn’t mean repudiating the humanity of those who identify as male. The Gillette ad asks men to grow, to be more gentle, more empathetic, more connected with their humanity and with that of their fellow (non-male) humans. Fundamentally, this is a call for a less constricting masculinity than that which society now insists upon.
If Aristotle is right that men are more rational than women (he isn’t, but stick with me), then surely men can reason their way into seeing that toxic masculinity truncates the humanity of those of us who have been acculturated into it. If anger is the only emotion a man is told he can express, then men are going to be angry. If resolving conflict through violence is a function of masculinity, then men are going to feel justified in resorting to violence when they are angry. If men are superior to women, then men are going to treat women as if they are inferior. And if men feel anger towards women, then it makes sense, by the logic of toxic masculinity (to the extent that we can speak of this ideology as logical), that men will feel justified in expressing this anger violently towards women. Surely all men (#yesallmen) are reasonable enough to recognize the flaws in this way of thinking.
The stakes in recognizing the parallels between Aristotelianism and toxic masculinity turn out to be quite high. And given all the problems that coincide with Aristotle’s pronouncements on gender, it may come as a shock that the Gillette ad advocates a fundamentally Aristotelian solution for the problem of toxic masculinity: if men perform better actions, they will become better. This is the basic insight of Aristotelian ethics, of course, that humans become good by doing good things. As Aristotle says, “by doing just acts…the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man” (NE 1105b). For Aristotle, humans achieve virtue (aretê) by doing good things, and the attainment of virtue is the primary prerequisite for happiness (eudaimonia), which is the goal (telos) of ethics. The irony, then, is that modern day defenders of toxic masculinity, like Jordan Peterson and Piers Morgan, would appear to insist on the validity of Aristotelian biology, but to balk at the practice of Aristotelian ethics.
One of the most insidious aspects of being acculturated into toxic masculinity is having to confront the fact that at your worst moments, even as you strive to purify yourself of this acculturation (and all men (#yesallmen) should strive to purify ourselves of this acculturation), you are capable of performing the very same behaviors you find so odious. We have seen what happens when men (like Brett Kavanaugh, for example) are forced to account for their own toxic masculinity. Angry outbursts are usual. And I imagine that many men, like myself, recognize exactly what we are witnessing when this happens, because I imagine that many men, especially at our most fragile moments, have resorted to our programming in order to deal with this fragility. I would encourage men who deny the truth of what I’m saying to devote themselves to more honest self-reflection (in other words, listen to Socrates, if you can’t absorb what Aristotle is telling you).
To realize the full potential (and Aristotle would encourage us to actualize this potential) of what the Gillette ad is advocating, we men must make ourselves less fragile, less toxic, more introspective, better. And to do this we need to grapple with the binary notions of gendered behavior we all carry around, however deeply, within us. I suggest that we can most effectively dismantle these Aristotelian notions of gender and gendered behavior, by embracing more fully Aristotelian ethics. We have to practice these behaviors in order to change them. And we need to change them in order to transcend toxic masculinity.
Jason Nethercut is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the interaction between poetry and philosophy in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and how Lucretius situates his work in literary and intellectual history.
Enjoyed very much your article.
I wonder how would the great philosopher feel, reading about his extensive work and a XXI century Gillette ad!!!