Liberal actress Meryl Streep said she rejects so-called “toxic masculinity” — a term which is far too often parroted by feminists, harmfully stereotyping men and rhetorically casting women as victims. Streep noted that the term can be devastating to boys, and is rather silly, since females can also “be pretty f***ing toxic.”
“Sometimes I think we’re hurt. We hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. I do,” Streep said during a Q&A for hit television show “Big Little Lies” hosted by Vanity Fair.
“And I don’t find [that] putting those two words together … because women can be pretty f***ing toxic,” the Oscar winner continued.
“It’s toxic people,” said Streep. “We have our good angles and we have our bad ones.”
According to the U.K.-based Independent, “Streep added that she thinks labels can be ‘less helpful’ than direct communication when calling out detrimental behaviour.”
“We’re all on the boat together. We’ve got to make it work,” the actress said, referencing “certain behaviours and attitudes commonly associated with men that are perceived as being harmful, such as repressing emotion and acting in an aggressive manner,” according to the outlet.
Streep has been an outspoken feminist, cheering on award speeches from her counterparts who suggest women are being discriminated against when it comes to pay in Hollywood, for example.
In 2017, the actress teamed up with the likes of feminist Gloria Steinem to outline “demands to industry executives about the future—namely, she said, for equal pay,” reported Vanity Fair.
“We are after 50/50 by 2020,” said Streep. “Equal means equal. And if it starts at the top, none of these shenanigans would have filtered down and it wouldn’t have been tolerated.”
Recently, razor company Gillette unleashed an ad tackling so-called “toxic masculinity,” which was hit with praise from feminists and backlash from the general public. The controversial ad absurdly showcases a culture wherein men excuse boys’ “toxic” rapey and bullying nature as “boys being boys.” As outlined by The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the ad is wildly problematic, stereotyping men and depicting a culture which does not reflect the reality we live in.
Moreover, increasingly in the media, we’ve seen traditional masculinity smeared as “toxic.” As noted by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, writing at National Review, society can fall into serious trouble if “manhood altogether” is denied.
“[I]n a society that denies manhood altogether, that denies men’s special protective and creative role in society — or worse, categorizes masculinity as mere violence — it’s easy to fall into a simplistic self-identification with toxic manhood. The age of emasculation cannot last,” Shapiro argued. “It will eventually boil over into violence, sink away into irrelevance, or return to the truth: that the male aggressive instinct can be good but must be trained, not excised.”