Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
If you are generation X or older, you probably cringe at terms like toxic masculinity or whatever. I am myself an elder millennial and it took me quite a long time to figure it out as well. But I figured out there is some logic to the concept, and I just realised it again after reading this tweet on twitter:
Äsken Espalla huomautin itseäni nuoremmalle naiselle, että sen polkupyörän vaijerilukko oli tipahtanut vaarallisen lähelle pinnoja. ”Kuka vittu sulta on kysynyt neuvoa?”, sain vastaukseksi.
— Mikko Leskelä (@mikkoantero) October 22, 2022
Fair enough. Ei kukaan. Mutta tässä lyhyt ketju pyytämättä annetuista neuvoista 1/x
This is in Finnish, and it is a starter to a thread. It goes, freely translating “I just said (on a street in Helsinki) to a younger female that their bikes lock had fallen dangerously close to the the spokes, ‘who the fuck asked you anything’ she answered–fair enough, nobody, but here’s a thread about unasked advice”. And I believe people from many countries and even places in Finland outside Helsinki do not understand how common and how toxic this kind of behaviour is. It immediately brought to my mind the time when in a supermarket in Helsinki I told another customer she forgot an item in their basket, “God these fucking freaks” was her reply to her friend, obviously loud enough for me to hear, with eye rolls. And it is a very common thing to happen, when you are trying to be helpful, in Helsinki. I also remember university cafeteria, a student organisation clubhouse, whether trying to hold the door open, pick up dropped items, it is basically treated as not minding your own business when you do this kind of stuff. And when you get told often enough that your help is not wanted or good, you will 1) stop helping other people at all and, 2) start telling people that try to help you the same thing “you idiot”, and it is with the part 2 why the term toxicity is quite accurate indeed, it’s a negative behavioural pattern that is infectious and spreads fast.
And because I was 20–30 years old when living in Helsinki, it took me a couple of years abroad, to realise this is not a common human behaviour to avoid helping people, and almost a decade later to realise how strongly I avoid helping anyone due to these experiences, and this is where toxicity is actually quite accurate term to describe what happens. I don’t think you never stop expecting someone lashing back at you for opening a door or picking up a dropped fruit when you’ve dealt with it for your whole 20-somethings’s, or maybe it’s just me. Just, something to think about if you have a Finnish friend who you insist is being rude to you (though I have attested same patterns in Paris, New York etc.).
The more I think about this the more I realise the vast amount of toxic patterns that have affected my life and behaviour, and attitudes. I think I am going to use this page to list my observations and categorise them a bit, it might be useful for future me and maybe someone else too! The rest of the rant is organised as follows:
Also the example I gave in the intro, that made me think about the whole toxicity to begin with.
There is another term in modern discourse that older people might react negatively, internalised homophobia, when I finally made connection between toxicity and this it was a real light bulb moment. This pattern is probably familiar to at least most gays of my generation or older, growing up you tend to realise that the contemporarily popular camp gay stereotype isn’t appealing to you or relatable. Growing up you generally end up fighting against it one way or other. Where toxicity steps in is that this attitude finds a lot of positive response within alt-right, incel etc. communities, you even become “one of the good gays”. This attitude is also rather infectious as it gets mild approval within neutrally aligned crowds: of course the camp stereotype are annoying and evil, let’s make fun of them and blame them. But it doesn’t work like that cause it doesn’t end there, hate and disgust like that has no limits and it’ll reach back to you, why wouldn’t it.
The problem here is that the starting point was such a logical fallacy to begin with: these guys ruin my reputation because everyone makes fun of them, and I am associated to them, I’ll solve it by making fun of them too? Yeah, that’s not gonna work. The only workable solution is to fight against the making fun of and everyone wins, you’ll quite likely will stand on stronger grounds in your own self-image afterwards as well, there won’t be any arbitrary and artificial limits to be afraid of; even if it is 99 % not relevant. Yes, the crux of the problem is poor self-confidence and self-image which is very tightly tangled vicious circle here. But when you grow out of it and break free it’s hard not to wonder how dumb it was, like literally shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why it hurts. I mean let’s face it, the only way to have a future where you have gay representation that is not camp in the popular culture is to not ake fun of all this… for a moment in early 2000’s it seemed like this is where we heading at with gen z but there is a chance we’re regressing now at 2020’s? Time will tell.
I believe this has similarities with overall toxic masculinity and other such phenomena that have not been very relevant in my life overall.
The one about sense of humour and taste in music are related to me by my time in Helsinki again, here the source of toxicity is also the only group of peers and friends I had there, this also took years of being away and then meeting them afterwards to realise. But also this is the attitude of internet discussions of my generations by large strokes. Telling someone that their joke is old, that’s where it all starts at.