In 2024, Oregon State University assistant professor of psychology Steven Sanders created a scale to measure toxic masculinity. Researchers say for masculine behavior to be deemed as “toxic,” it must be damaging to the person or people around them. But why should we study this? What impacts does it have in our society? Sanders joins us to answer these questions and more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The phrase “toxic masculinity” has been around for about 40 years. But it wasn’t until pretty recently that social scientists tried to quantify it. Two years ago, the Oregon State University Psychology professor, Steven Sanders, created a scale to measure toxic masculinity. He joins us now to talk about it. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Steven Sanders: I’m happy to be here, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Why did you decide you wanted to study masculinity, either toxic or otherwise?
Sanders: That’s actually a very funny story. In my lab there’s a rule that students are not allowed to discuss anything that they can’t define and quantify. A couple of students were discussing men being toxic and what toxic masculinity was. I challenged them to come up with a definition and show it to me in the literature. They couldn’t. They could not show me a good definition, they couldn’t show me a solid way to measure it. And that kind of surprised me because, like you mentioned, we’ve been talking about it for four decades.
The difference was, for toxic masculinity, instead of it being a construct that psychologists studied and measured, and measured and studied, and then made its way into popular culture – we talked about it briefly – popular culture found it, and it made it a thing and it was in the popular discourse. But we, as psychologists, didn’t do a very good job of quantifying it. For some reason, I’m a glutton for punishment and I like doing instrument development. So we started the process.
Miller: Why do you think it hadn’t been quantified and studied in the way that you did, before?
Sanders: I think because it’s got a bad rap, where when we talk about toxic masculinity, people immediately assume that you’re attacking men, and attacking manhood, boys and boyhood. So it’s not very safe politically. It’s not safe to do that research, and you have to be very careful and very respectful when you’re talking about masculinity or femininity in general. So when you talk about something being toxic or harmful, you have to take a very measured approach.
I was willing to do it because I’m at Oregon State and I feel very supported to do whatever research that I wanna pursue, as long as I do it in an ethical and respectful manner. So we chased it down and we built the instrument.
Miller: You said you’re a glutton for punishment as well. What are the challenges in creating any kind of numerical scale that is supposed to capture something real, repeatable and provable about human thought and human behavior?
Sanders: Yeah, it’s rough because what you are attempting to do is to take a phenomenon that is experienced by multiple people in multiple contexts and boil it down to a questionnaire. And that questionnaire has to be able to represent those experiences in a way that’s reliable. So it has to be consistent across time and it has to be valid, where you’re measuring what you are claiming to measure. We have really good methods in place to do that. But the reason I say I’m a glutton for punishment is because it’s not easy to do it well.
In my lab, we recently published another development paper where we built an instrument to measure campus climate. So we took another complex construct and spent multiple months going through the literature, going through collecting data and analyzing data to make sure that, again, it’s reliable, so it’s consistent across time and it’s valid. It’s measuring what we say we want to measure.
Miller: You’ve grouped some of the indicators of toxic masculinity into a few broad categories. One of them is “masculine superiority.” What are some of the questions that you would ask to get at that?
Sanders: The way those work, those are called “domains.” So you’re looking at these different domains of a construct. The domains were initially generated after collecting qualitative data. So we asked thousands of college students, both men and women, about their views on masculinity in their daily lives, how they see masculinity represented in media online, on television and in print. And we used that to come up with these constructs that are beneath the construct of toxic masculinity.
The first one is, like you said, masculine superiority. That’s asking whether or not people think that men should or should not work for women, or that men are just flat out superior to women. Or you say that if you, as a man, are making a sexual advance on another person and they reject it, do you see that as some sort of challenge to your masculinity? We believe that those items, in part, represent the idea of masculine being superior to feminine.
Miller: Another set of indicators were grouped together as “gender rigidity.” What does that mean?
Sanders: That’s the idea of you holding fast to gender norms and gender roles. What we have as a society – and we’re moving away from it in some respects – are the expectations that men and women fill specific roles and aspects of life. So if you think about “Stepford Wives,” the movie, those women, after they went through that procedure, there were certain things that they were doing that they weren’t doing before the procedure. Because those were the roles that were pressed on them by men. So we’re measuring how much do you adhere to those roles or those expectations and norms, and how much do you sort of put those on other people?
Miller: Another set of questions gets at what you lump together and call “repression of suffering.” What are examples of that?
Sanders: When we talk about repression of suffering, we’re looking at men sort of shoveling things down. We hear it all the time, whether we’re thinking about comedians doing stand-up, where they say “men don’t go to the doctor,” or if a man is hurting, he kind of smiles through it or he toughens through it. So on our instrument, one of those items is “if I don’t feel well, I just ignore it.” So looking at the physical aspects of men’s health. Where you might be sick, and instead of going to the doctor, taking medicine or just laying down and resting, you follow through the rest of your day. Along those same lines, “if I’m sick, I just refuse to go to the doctor,” or “I ignore pain when I feel it.”
Those things all harken back to how boys are socialized in a lot of ways. I remember being young, and falling down, and being told by my uncle and my dad, “OK, you’re fine, get over it, rub dirt on it.” And when I got older in the army, they would literally tell you, “soldier on, soldiers don’t go to sick call, you get over it and you keep moving forward.” So we’re looking at that particular aspect of masculinity.
Miller: Those are good examples because, unlike the masculine superiority examples, where you’d be hard pressed to find the positive version of that, the positive iteration of that in someone’s behavior or language, with the repression of suffering, I don’t think it’s that hard to see some benefits to soldiering on and also some drawbacks. So how do you start to tease those out? When it’s helpful for anybody to just toughen up a little bit and deal with adversity, and when that’s a real negative?
Sanders: That’s a great question. So our definition started with looking at toxic masculinity as men and boys endorsing ideas about being a man or being a boy, to a level that is harmful to themselves or people around them. That’s when we define it as being toxic. And when we talk about being able to overcome adversity, we have a word for that. We call it resilience. So resilience is not inherently a negative thing. That’s not a problem. But when you start trying to overcome by pushing through stuff you should not push through, that becomes a problem.
The best example I can give is my favorite basketball player of all time is Kobe Bryant. That can be controversial for a lot of reasons. He tore his Achilles. And I’ll never forget … he tore his Achilles, he walked to the free throw line to shoot his free throws and then walked off the court. That’s amazing. That’s awesome. I’m very happy he did that because if he didn’t shoot those free throws, that’s a problem. But he could have done irreparable harm by pushing through that injury. And I think that’s when we have to draw the line.
When pushing through is no longer about turning in an assignment or finishing a research paper, when you’re pushing through and hurting yourself by doing it, possibly doing harm that we can never recover from, that’s when it’s a problem. So not going to the doctor, because I have to take my son to the doctor instead, that’s fine. But if I don’t go to the doctor, and I never go to the doctor because I’m pushing through the pain, that very well could be something as serious as cancer that I’m not getting checked out. That’s when it becomes a problem.
Miller: What have you and other researchers, since you started doing this, found in terms of how common toxic masculinity is?
Sanders: Much like any other construct, we assume that it’s a spectrum. So you have it. It might be at a very minimal level, where you might endorse one part and not endorse something else, where you might agree that, “OK, crying makes me weak.” But you might disagree when it comes to myths about rape and sexual assault. So what we notice is that no one, in any study in which we’ve used this instrument, had a score of zero.
But what that means is not all men are toxic because, again, it has to be at a level that is hurting other people or hurting yourself. So much like when we administer depression screeners to students on National Depression Screening Day, you don’t see a lot of zeros. But you also don’t see scores that are causing harm to people in 100% of the population. So I think it’s kind of a mixed bag, honestly.
Miller: In a sense, I see your research as saying two things at once. First, #notallmen. But second, for some men, there’s either something about their notion of masculinity or their masculinity itself that is inextricably tied to their negative behavior. First of all, did I put words in your mouth or do you feel like that’s a fair encapsulation of some of your findings?
Sanders: I think you did a great job of paraphrasing what it took us 20 pages to write, so I appreciate that. But you’re right. Step one, it’s not all men. We can’t look at a construct and say that all men are bad or all men are doing these things. But what we also have to recognize is that the messages that boys and men receive – what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be masculine – can be inherently flawed. You don’t see a lot of male superheroes do a great job of being a platonic male friend to a female character. You don’t see a great representation of that.
So what does winning mean for all of the movies and TV shows I watched as a child? It means you got the girl at the end. So if you don’t get the girl at the end in real life, does that make you a failure? We have to figure out about these messages that we’re giving boys and men. And we also have to understand when you internalize a message, it does modify your behavior. It’ll take a lot of work to make sure we’re putting people in a position to live a healthy life.
Miller: Do you have to be a cisgendered or transgender man to have toxic masculinity?
Sanders: No. What we found is there is no statistically significant difference in endorsement of toxic masculinity based on gender identity between transgender and cisgender men. So that is a very fancy way of saying when we did the math, the probability is basically zero that there’s a difference between the two.
Miller: But those are for whether it’s cis or trans men. But I’m wondering, what about women? Can women have what you qualify, quantify now as toxic masculinity?
Sanders: I’m going to say yes, but we have never administered this instrument to women in my lab. We’ve only been interested in men and young men specifically. But, I don’t see why they can’t endorse these things. Because, again, it’s about you having these beliefs and behaviors at a level that’s harmful to yourself or others. So it’s very possible that a young woman might believe that men are better than women and it’s harmful to her. So I don’t see why she can’t endorse that.
Miller: I guess one of the things behind my question is how you think about “manliness” at a time when, for many people, both gender binaries and also gender essentialism are really being questioned?
Sanders: Yeah, and I think that’s perfectly fine because as a lot of us know, gender is a social construct. So any societal or social construct is something we built ourselves. It can be rooted in physical characteristics. It could be rooted in history. It could be rooted in some sort of context that was an error appropriate, and that’s fine. But as long as we have those constructs, as long as we’re using gender, as long as gender is one item of the demographic forms we fill out, that’s gonna be a part of our identity. The definition we use in my lab for identity is the story you tell yourself about where you fit in the world. As long as part of that story for millions of people is their gender identity, we need to study how that gender identity impacts their health and their health-related outcomes.
Miller: I want to go back to where you started, which is that you have this rule in your lab, that if students are gonna be talking about some phrase, bring something up, they have to be able to show the academic rigor behind it, the data behind it. Since you’ve been doing this work, what kinds of conversations have you had with undergrads or with grad students?
Sanders: It’s been very interesting. So one of the students who had that conversation, she was a sophomore when we started in undergrad and now she’s a first-year grad student. I’ve watched the development for these students change from random conversations to them actually reading outside of the lab, coming in and generating ideas for themselves. One of my current students, she is a junior. She wanted to study prosocial behavior and parasocial behavior. And she walked into the lab about three months ago and said, “Dr. Sanders, there’s no way to measure this for people who identify as Black.” And I said that doesn’t sound right. She showed me the literature.
So these students at Oregon State have taken it upon themselves when we issue a challenge, they raise themselves to it immediately. And so we’ve been able to have conversations about measurement and measurement accuracy, and who’s this measurement accurate for and in what context. So that’s really enjoyable to me.
Miller: Is there an opposite, in your mind, of toxic masculinity?
Sanders: Well, I think toxic itself is the opposite. What we think is that a lot of things are healthy in moderation, in the right amount. And the example that I like using is water. Drinking water is not a bad thing, but if you try to drink 10 gallons of water at one time, you very well could get sick and die. So I don’t want people to think that there’s an opposite to toxic masculinity. Masculinity in and of itself is not a bad thing. The way you endorse it, the way you display it, is when it becomes bad. So I think the toxicity is what becomes the opposite.
Miller: But I guess I’m wondering if, in your mind – because it’s clear in terms of sexist behavior, harmful behavior, violence towards others, perhaps violence towards yourself – based on your work and just popular conceptions of what toxic masculinity is, there have been a lot of renderings of what that looks like … I guess I’m wondering if, setting aside metaphors like water, if you can put into your own words if there are actual positive attributes that, in your mind, are tied specifically to masculinity?
Sanders: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one popular construct is benign sexism. When we talk about benign sexism, that is essentially where you modify how you treat or behave around people you identify as the opposite sex. And it’s based on your masculinity. So that is something that I display. I typically try not to curse in front of women because of how I was raised. It’s not inherently a bad thing. That is healthy. The way that I try to talk to women is informed by my religious views and beliefs.That is tied to my identity as a man. And I do think that’s healthy. So I’m wondering if that kind of answers your question.
Miller: In a sense, it sounds like maybe the old-fashioned word for what you’re describing to me is “chivalry.”
Sanders: Absolutely. I think that does cut to the quick, this chivalrous behavior. So I think we think back to those codes of chivalry, where you are protecting women, you are being respectful to women and being courteous to women. That just sounds like healthy masculine behavior to me.
Miller: Maybe. I can imagine someone saying, “I don’t need to be protected. And if you like to swear in front of the guys” – this is a woman I’m imagining – “you should swear in front of me too. You should treat me the same.” I can imagine someone saying that what you’re describing is actually a kind of, in its own way, still a kind of sexism that I’d like to quash?
Sanders: Absolutely, and that’s part of why we have to do this research and we have to have these conversations. Because it’s not always about our intentions but often about our impact. So even if I have the best of intentions with my behaviors, if there’s a harmful impact, the only way I’ll know is if either we have a conversation about it or some researcher does the study to figure out if there’s a harmful impact.
I don’t think this will be the last study that my lab does. In fact, we’re carrying out a project right now, looking at prosocial behavior, endorsement of toxic masculinity behaviors and mental health in college-aged men. Because we wanna understand how these things interact with the health and educational outcomes for men. We will eventually extend that to women. I’m working with another professor here at OSU. Her name is Aurora Sherman. She wants to understand how these behaviors and beliefs interact in both men and women. So we are extending that work with her.
Miller: Steven Sanders, thanks very much.
Sanders: Absolutely, thanks again for having me.
Miller: Steven Sanders is an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University.
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