The whole debate about toxic masculinity is blown out of proportion by the mainstream media. The majority of men, like women, are good people who don't go around hurting or wanting to kill or rape people, but our education system and the media are painting a false picture of reality when it comes to bad or violent behavior men and women can display.
A recent Gillette ad taking on toxic masculinity completely ignores that most men don't behave the way the ad posits men behave and has sparked a controversy on social media and the press. But before we get into that let's look at how women, contrary to popular belief, are not immune to predatory behavior.
[source[(https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/stantis/ct-gillette-commercial-20190115-story.html)
Of course, there are some people, both men, and women, who are selfish, narcissistic individuals with ill intent, but I don't think men have a monopoly on that kind of behavior. History is full of examples of evil, murderous, power-hungry women the media seems to have amnesia about.
Also known as the Torture Mother, Gertrude Baniszewski was an Indiana divorcee who oversaw and facilitated prolonged torture, mutilation, and eventual murder of a teenage girl, Sylvia Likens. It was later discovered that the death and majority of the torture was actually carried out under Baniszewski’s instruction by her teenage children and other kids from the neighborhood. When the woman was convicted of first-degree murder in 1965, the case was called, “the single worst crime perpetruated against an individual in Indiana’s history.
One of the most notorious female criminals in the US history, Ma Barker was the leader of the feared Barker Gang that consisted of her sons. Once the FBI’s Public Enemy Number One, Barker orchestrated a bunch of robberies, murders, and kidnappings throughout the American Midwest during the early 1930s. In 1935, she was killed in her hideout in Florida in what was the longest shootout in FBI history. Back then, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI’s first director, described her as “the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.
Once branded “the most hated woman in Britain,” Myra Hindley and her twisted boyfriend, Ian Brady, shocked the world with terrifying crimes in the 1960s. In the case known as “The Moors Murders,” the couple raped, tortured, and killed five children aged between 10 and 17 in and around Manchester, England. Hindley was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences. She died in jail in November 2002, aged 60, after suffering respiratory failure following a heart attack.
Dagmar Overbye was a Danish serial killer who murdered up to 25 children – including one of her own – during a seven-year period from 1913 to 1920. Overbye was working as a professional child caretaker, caring for babies born outside of marriage. Out of the babies she killed, some were strangled, some drowned, and the rest burned to death in her masonry heater. In March 1921, Overbye was sentenced to death in one of the most-watched murder trials in Danish history. The sentence was later commuted to life in jail. Overbye died in prison in 1929, aged 42.
Known as the Chocolate Cream Killer, Christiana Edmunds was an English killer and mentally ill woman with a very weird hobby. She would buy chocolates from a shop, poison them with strychnine, and then return them to the shop. Other people would buy them and become ill. In 1871, a 4-year-old boy died from eating one of the chocolates she had poisoned. Edmunds was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment due to her mental state.
Delphine Lalaurie was one of the most admired socialites of 1830s New Orleans, living in a three-story mansion on Royal Street and entertaining many guests. Despite gossip dogging her heels that her slaves were treated inhumanely, investigators couldn’t find any evidence—until a fire at her house in 1834 brought the police to LaLaurie’s secret torture chambers. When breaking down the door to the slaves’ quarters to save them, bystanders found several who had been hideously maimed and disfigured, with some kept in spiked iron collars and their limbs stretched to a grotesque degree. When the news got out, outraged New Orleans residents rioted and stripped the house down to the walls. LaLaurie fled the city and died in Paris in 1842.
Known as the “Witch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch was one of the most despicable women of the Nazi Third Reich. The wife of concentration camp commandant Karl Otto Koch, Ilse took sadistic pleasure in torturing and abusing the Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald, and there are numerous tales of her making lampshades and other sick handicrafts out of the skin of murdered prisoners. Ilse Koch committed suicide in prison in 1967.
One of the most terrifying female murderers ever, Belle Gunness racked up a tremendous body count. Standing 6 feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, Gunness's children died under mysterious circumstances (common with poison), then killed her husband (also allegedly by poisoning) and used the insurance money to buy a house and land. She then remarried and allegedly killed her new husband’s infant daughter and him as well. Gunness then took out a classified ad in the Chicago daily newspapers advertising her status as an eligible widow with property. When prospective suitors would come courting, the murderess would drain their bank accounts and then murder them, disposing of their bodies in the hog pen. When the cops started to get suspicious, Gunness skipped town and was never found, leaving over 40 murders unpunished.
Griselda Blanco - Drug dealing is traditionally a man’s game, but there have been women willing to play. One of the most notorious was Griselda Blanco, the Colombian cocaine drug lord known as the Cocaine Godmother. Blanco embraced her vicious nature from an early age—at 11, she kidnapped and held for ransom two kids in Colombia and eventually shot one. Upon relocating to the United States, she established a cocaine operation in New York and eventually relocated to Miami, where she ruled the drug trade with an iron fist. Dealers in the area knew that crossing Blanco would result in certain death, and the body count from her operation was enormous. Her life of terror eventually caught up with her, though, as she was shot in the head and killed by gunmen in 2012.
Elizabeth Bathory, considered the most prolific female serial murderer in history, was a Hungarian countess who used her political power to satiate her savage urges for blood. Báthory began to lure young women to her castle with promises of jobs, only to brutally torture and murder them.
Katherine Knight was known as a nice girl who had a bit of a temper, launching into terrifying rages when things didn’t go her way. Then at the age of 16, she got a job at a local slaughterhouse, and hung her knives above her bed in case she ever "needed them." She tried to strangle her first husband David Kellett on their wedding night because he fell asleep after having sex three times, and later gave him a serious skull fracture with a frying pan. She also cut the throat of boyfriend David Saunders’s dingo pup in front of him. Knight finally went to jail in 2000 for the horrific murder of John Price, whom she stabbed 37 times. She then hung his corpse on a meathook, decapitated him and cooked some of his body parts, intending to serve them to his children!
Katherine Knight
Irma Drese is another hideous monster from Nazi Germany, who was known as the “Beast of Belsen” for her vicious doings at the concentration camp there. Appointed warden of the women’s section of the Bergen-Belsen camp, Grese ruled with an iron fist, cruelly beating her inmates with a plaited leather whip, setting vicious dogs on them and even murdering them in cold blood for the slightest offense. She loved to punish any woman in the camp who managed to retain a vestige of beauty, and her insane vanity actually led her to think she would have a career in the movies once the Nazis win World War II.
Wu Zetain was the Empress of the Zhou Dynasty, taking office when her husband, the Emperor Gaozong, suffered a crippling stroke in A.D. 660. Wu proceeded to expand China’s borders while working to make herself absolute ruler of the nation. She created a secret police force to spy on her rivals, and anybody who threatened her rule was executed. This policy extended to anybody—she had her own infant daughter put to death alongside other members of her family. Zetian was eventually deposed from the throne by a violent revolt in A.D. 705 and died the same year.
Enriqueta Marti - It takes a certain kind of evil person to prey on the most disadvantaged members of society, and Enriqueta Marti was one of a kind. The vicious Catalan woman would dress in rags during the day and roam the streets of Barcelona begging for change. She wasn’t poor, though—she made a fantastic living with her night job. When Marti would encounter homeless children on her travels, she “adopted” them, taking them home with her and either forcing them into lives of prostitution or murdering them and using their remains to make salves and ointments that she claimed cured tuberculosis. In 1912 police connected her with the kidnapping of a young girl and arrested her, and the next year she was lynched by her prison mates before she could even go to trial.
Evil comes in all shapes and sizes. Men, women, and even children have all been known to be exceedingly evil. History has no shortage of killer queens. Many of these killers were as cunning and premeditated as they come, not acts of passion or self-defense and demonstrate that women can be just as violent and evil as men.
This list could go on forever but my point is that despicable behavior is nothing new nor does it belong to solely men. I keep seeing these debates and media campaigns that colors men as the root cause of all the ills our society suffers from while immunizing all women from taking any responsibility for the bad behavior they can exhibit. There have been plenty of women in power throughout history that have been just as violent and ruthless in their actions while grabbing lands, creating their empires, and dominating their enemies that seems to demonstrate that these characteristics are more human than gender-based.
Like most men, I find the level of attention the topic of toxic masculinity is getting these days a little overwhelming. My father never sat me down when I was a child to tell me not to rape people. My parents just raised me with enough sense to know it was wrong to do that. The idea that schools feel that male children are so toxic and such a threat to women that they have to do that instead of the child's parents seems bizarre.
Talking about how not all men are like that, in fact, most men are not like that, is somehow in the eyes of abused women denying the problem exists. Talking about it in context is not denying its existence. Saying that both sexes are known to do really bad things to each other is not exercising the male privilege, it's just talking about it.
In a recent ad by Gillette created a lot of controversies that has divided men and women, and men and men over the topic of male toxicity. I see this as just another way the media is trying to divide people to more easily control us and we need to be aware of this.
Forbes wrote:
Gillette recently rolled out a new advertisement. Discussing the topic of toxic masculinity, the ad was purposely released before the Super Bowl in order to generate a conversation, and it has. Within days of its release, the ad has been the subject of controversy, garnering over 1 million dislikes on YouTube, an angry tweetstorm, and a potential boycott as incensed customers have taken to destroying their Gillette products.
At the center of this controversy is the idea that the commercial seems to be attacking the company's consumer base, men, by highlighting male misbehavior. However, viewing the commercial with the assumption that the ad desires to demonize men, misses its point. The commercial doesn’t seek to malign all men or masculinity but identifies male misbehavior and encourages all men to be active in stopping it. Gillette’s commercial attempts to tackle a bystander problem. source
Imagine, for example, if the perfume manufacturer Yves Saint Laurent created an ad portraying the worst in female behavior so they could empathize with a male audience to grab more market share while encouraging men not to be innocent, silent bystanders when that kind of female behavior happens. What kind of blowback would that have from their female customers? How do you think they would react or feel?
Imagine what the blowback from that would be from women, but men are just supposed to agree and take it without saying a word about it. Where are women identifying female misbehavior and encouraging all women to be active in stopping it? Where are examples of women's attempts to tackle the bystander problem? Unfortunately, they're few and far between the attacks blaming only men for what I see as a human condition.
If you haven't seen the ad here's a video of it.
We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film)
While I understand that abusing women is bad and we should talk about it and make people aware of these problems, I'm curious how the media and women would react if a similar video was made to show all the bad things women have done to men in our society. I'm not in any way diminishing the issue just pointing out that acting badly, domineering, oppressive, or violent is not a monopoly of men only. It's more of a human trait shared by both sexes.
What isn't shared equally is how our society, laws, and media treat someone who commits violent acts against the opposite sex. Women often get away with such behavior and men are supposed to just take it on the chin or be a man about it.
Women have been known to lie to frame men of false abuse and go to great lengths to do it. In this video the reporter says he's never heard of a case like this but it happens more often than you could believe. The accused husband had to spend $20,000 to prove his innocence beyond all doubt and even though what she did is punishable by law no charges were brought against her to this day. There couldn't be a more clear case against her.
Woman Hits Herself to Falsely Accuse Husband
In response to the Gillette ad, this video was just posted on YouTube showing equally toxic behavior perpetrated by women. The idea that women don't start wars is completely and historically untrue. The idea that only men are violent is false. The idea that only women can be victims is biased and incomplete. Human behavior, both good and bad, are shared by both sexes.