“To me, the fragility has to do with both the trauma and the injunction against being human,” he told me. “The essence of [toxic] masculinity is invulnerability. The more vulnerable you are, the more ‘girly’ you are. The more invulnerable you are, the more ‘manly’ you are. So the fragility of being a human, the simple human vulnerability, is suppressed. Men are trying to live up to a standard which is inhuman, and they’re dogged by a sense of falling short of that standard over and over and over again.”
