Welcome back to Forged Fridays and we are still in the heat of summer and continuing in The Forge: Hot Takes series. I have said this many times but this is the first time I’ve written it and posted this online and I’ve been waiting to write this one for a while. So here it is: Hot Take #2 There is no such thing as “toxic masculinity.” Now before you head straight to the comment section, I want you to go on a journey with me and look behind the cultural gender war and see the deeper thing that has happened. So let’s actually test this out, because if the statement that “toxic masculinity doesn’t exist” is true, it first needs to survive some hard questions. Some of them may be close to these: What about the men who’ve started wars for nothing but ego and territory? What about the ones who build empires on the backs of people they crushed to get there? What about the husband who controls every dollar his wife touches, or the father whose kids flinch when he raises his voice, or the boss who dominates a room just to remind everyone he can? What about the fact that when you look at who commits the overwhelming majority of violent crime, who starts the wars, who abuses the vulnerable, who hoards power at the expense of everyone underneath them, the answer is almost always men? If that’s not toxic masculinity, what do you call it? 1+1=2 right? That’s a fair question, and most of us men would rather change the subject than answer this question head on. We say something like “well not all men are like that” and move on. That’s not going to work here. The evidence is real. Something in a lot of men has produced enormous, historic, generational harm. But here’s the deeper question hiding underneath: was it the masculinity they possessed that did that? Or was it their masculinity, void of the very thing that was supposed to govern it? Because look closer at every example. The tyrant who started a war for ego wasn’t submitted to anyone; he’d stopped believing any authority stood over his own. The husband who controls every dollar isn’t providing, he’s hoarding, using strength to shrink someone rather than protect her. The father whose kids flinch isn’t leading, he’s dominating, and domination is the opposite of what leadership was supposed to be. The boss who fills a room with his own ego isn’t strong. He’s covering for something he’s afraid people will see if he doesn’t. Every single one of those men had the same thing missing. Not too much masculinity. A masculinity that had stopped doing what masculinity was made to do. A twisted and broken shadow of what true masculinity was always supposed to be. THE WRONG SUSPECT Here’s the sleight of hand culture has pulled off, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. What’s actually broken in every one of those men is unaccountable, ungoverned strength. But culture just handed it the nearest label instead. Toxic masculinity. As if the maleness of the man is the active ingredient in the harm, instead of what’s missing underneath it. That’s not a small error. It’s the whole ballgame. Because once “masculine” itself becomes the suspect category, you haven’t actually solved the problem those men caused. You’ve just made every man carrying real strength, the ones actually protecting, providing, leading toward something bigger than themselves, feel like a suspect too. You’ve told every good man that the safest thing he can do with his strength is hide it. And a lot of us believed that. We heard the phrase enough times we stopped asking what actually went wrong in those men and started asking something else instead: what’s wrong with me? How do I even grow when the very thing I’m made to become is the thing I’m being told is the problem? That question has no good answer, because it’s the wrong question. Let me say this emphatically…You are not toxic for being a man! You’re only dangerous when your strength answers to nothing and no one. THE REAL ENEMY BEHIND THE LABEL But let’s go one layer deeper, because “culture” isn’t actually the source. Culture is just the delivery system. Behind the confusion, behind the sleight of hand, behind an entire generation of men trading their strength for an apology, there’s an actual enemy with an actual target. Scripture doesn’t leave room to pretend otherwise. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness. This didn’t originate in a university, a headline, or a hashtag. It originated in the pit of hell. Here’s why. A man surrendered to Christ, confident in who God made him to be, comfortable in his own skin, walking into dark places and exposing what’s hiding there, that man is one of the most dangerous things to the kingdom of darkness. He’s not easily controlled. He’s not easily shamed into silence. He leads. He protects. He confronts evil instead of accommodating it. Satan wants that kind of man gone. So he didn’t attack masculinity by telling men to stop being strong outright. That’s too obvious, too easy to resist. He attacked it at the root, at the level of identity itself. Convince a man that the very thing God built into him is the thing that’s dangerous, and he’ll neutralize himself. No war required. Just a label, repeated enough times, until good men started policing their own strength instead of stewarding it. That’s not a culture war. That’s a spiritual one, and many men don’t even know they are in the battle. IMITATION MANHOOD Here’s the trap a lot of men have fallen into instead. They felt the attack, even if they couldn’t put their finger on it, and they knew something in them wasn’t supposed to be silenced. So they went looking for how to be a true man. The problem is where a lot of them went looking. Podcasters. Influencers. Politicians. Intellectuals. Guys who are boisterous, confident, unbothered by criticism, and dead certain of themselves. Some of what they say isn’t wrong (I actually enjoy a lot of their podcasts). Discipline, ambition, physical strength, refusing to be pushed around, these aren’t bad instincts. But watch closely and you’ll notice what’s missing every time: submission. None of it answers to anything above itself. It’s strength with no authority over it, confidence with no accountability under it, exactly the same problem we just traced in the tyrants and the domineering husbands. This time they are just posing in front of a gym mirror and a chasing a microphone instead of a crown. That’s not masculinity either. That’s machismo, boys who never got discipled by a real man who has walked with God, so they built their own blueprint off of a copy of a copy of a copy. And it is now so pixelated, no wonder men are confused on how to thrive today. Real strength was never the ability to answer to no one. It was always the ability to submit to God and lead everyone under your care because of it. So if it’s not the tyrant, and it’s not the counterfeit either, what does real masculinity actually look like when it’s fully submitted and fully strong at the same time? A MAN OF STANDING Scripture gives us a picture in an unexpected place. Boaz. Ruth 2:1 introduces him as “a worthy man,” but the Hebrew there is gibbor chayil, the same phrase used elsewhere for mighty warriors and men of valor. Boaz had real strength, real standing, real authority in his community. And what did he do with it? He noticed a vulnerable widow gleaning in his field, and he used every bit of his power to protect her, provide for her, and elevate her, without ever controlling her, without ever making the moment about himself. He told his men to leave extra grain for her on purpose. He made sure she was safe from harassment. He didn’t demand anything in return. He eventually redeemed her and took her to be his wife. An amazing act of strength, cunning, and strength. That’s the whole argument in one man. Real strength doesn’t announce itself by dominating a room. It announces itself by what it does for the people who have less power than you do. Boaz was dangerous to nobody except the men who might have hurt Ruth. That’s what submitted strength looks like. Not weaker. Aimed. WHY THEY WILL STILL CALL IT TOXIC Here’s what you need to know going forward: understanding all of this won’t make the label disappear. There’s something that happens when a man walks into a room fully surrendered to God and empowered by His Spirit. You can feel it before he says a word. Like a lion walking into a clearing, fully walking in who he was made to be. Confident. Unshaken. Kingly. When a man brings a presence like that, everything in that room senses his strength. And because a man like that exposes the works of darkness, darkness trembles. That’s precisely why he gets called toxic. Not because he’s controlling anyone. Because a man who is comfortable in who God made him to be exposes what everyone else has learned to hide from. He holds a room accountable just by being in it. He calls things what they actually are. People who’ve built a life around not being confronted don’t want a man like that anywhere near them, so they reach for the label instead of reaching for the mirror. So don’t be surprised when it happens to you. Walk in real conviction, hold a real standard, refuse to look away from what needs to be confronted, and someone will eventually call it toxic. Because you’re in a spiritual battle and your strength is in direct competition to evil and those who promote it. WHAT WE ACTUALLY NEED MORE OF So no, there’s no such thing as toxic masculinity. There’s sin, and there’s counterfeit, and there’s an enemy who’s convinced a generation of men that the solution to both is to stop being men altogether. But there’s also this: real masculinity, submitted to God, aimed at protecting and provi
