Society has a new ‘perverse attraction’ to toxic male characters, NY Times column argues
A New York Times essay recently remarked on how culture seems to be shifting away from condemning toxic masculinity to viewing it as a dark and "perverse" sexual fantasy.
In his Tuesday piece, Compact Magazine editor Matthew Schmitz detailed how toxic males have a growing sexual hold on the culture and that more recent Hollywood movies are delving into that dynamic rather than painting such characters as completely detestable.
"While the official disapproval of the toxic male persists in these movies, it coexists with an unacknowledged and often perverse attraction to him. All of which speaks, however uncomfortably, to the continuing appeal of toxic masculinity — or perhaps of masculinity as such," Schmitz wrote.
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The author discussed how, despite the #MeToo movement and progressive activists’ efforts to stigmatize problematic male behavior throughout the Trump era, there were "signs of uncertainty" about whether the culture was willing to condemn it outright.
"If the second election of Mr. Trump and the rehabilitation of various "canceled" male figures are any indication, lots of people harbored doubts about whether ostensibly toxic men could, or should, be banished from society," he wrote.
Schmitz then pointed to recent Hollywood movies that reflect the culture’s open "ambivalence" towards toxic males.
"These films — including ‘Babygirl’ (2024), ‘Fair Play’ (2023), ‘Cat Person’ (2023), ‘Deep Water’ (2022), ‘The Voyeurs’ (2021) and ‘Instinct’ (2019) — suggest that today’s sexual politics are trending away from progressive pieties," he stated, adding, "While the official disapproval of the toxic male persists in these movies, it coexists with an unacknowledged and often perverse attraction to him."
He compared this attraction to that of another forbidden attraction society indulged in nearly a century ago, stating, "When noir emerged as a genre in the 1940s, it was centered on the dangerous appeal of the femme fatale, a figure at once alluring and threatening, impossible to ignore yet deadly to embrace."
Schmitz noted that this attraction to "ambitious, sexually independent women" stemmed from "momentous changes in American society" that were happening at the time, when women "entered the work force in large numbers, taking jobs that were traditionally done by men and performing them competently."
"Americans who had conflicted feelings about this new type of woman saw their ambivalence expressed in noir," the editor wrote, adding that these femme fatale characters "were sexually bold and economically avid." They also "took men and money that didn’t belong to them."
As these characters were considered "transgressive" in their time," so is the toxic male today. He is "the cultural figure that most sharply elicits ambivalence is the toxic male," Schmitz stated.
However, he explained, these films don’t absolve the toxic male characters of their behavior as "most of these films punish" the characters. The way they're depicted serves to "reveal a gap between what people are supposed to want and what they actually want," he stated.
"By depicting a socially disfavored type in exaggerated and often compelling terms, they reveal the contradictions in public morality," Schmitz wrote, adding, "They show that we aren’t entirely ready to dispense with toxic males, just as the United States in the 1940s found something appealing in the women who flouted traditional notions of femininity."