Toxic Masculinity Quotes

“There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to the defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Boys with their first beards can be a thorough pain in the neck.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“Manhood Diaries (The Sonnet)

Onun için cennet ol, cehennem değil.
Vicdanlı bir adam ol, hayvan değil.
Sé una bendición para ella, no una maldición.
Onun yaralarına ilacı ol, tuz değil.

Be her paradise, not prison.
Be her man, not master.
Be a miracle to her maladies.
Be her crown, not custard.

There is no alpha male and beta male,
There is only man and baboon.
Decency defines a man's character,
Not the virility of his heirloom.

Partner on the streets,
Slave between the sheets,
That's what a real man is.
Undaunted in danger,
Uncompromising in calamity,
That's what a real human is.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“Our society doesn't allow any foreign objects. I've always suffered because of that," Shiraha said, drinking jasmine tea made with a teabag from the drink bar. I was the one who had gotten the jasmine tea for him since he didn't make any move to get anything for himself. He just sat in silence, and when I placed it in front of him he started drinking it without even saying thank you.

"Everyone has to toe the line. Why am I still doing casual work even though I'm in my mid-thirties? Why haven't I ever had a girlfriend? The assholes don't even bat an eyelid when they ask whether I've ever had sex or not. And then they laugh and tell me not to include prostitutes in the count. I don't make trouble for anyone. But they all seem to think nothing of raping me, just because I'm in the minority."

I considered him one step short of being a sex offender. But here he was casually likening his own suffering to sexual assault, without sparing a thought for all the trouble he'd caused for women store workers and customers.

He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim, and never the perpetrator, I thought was I watched him.

"Really," I said, even wondering whether he made a habit of being self-pitying. "That must be hard.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“What are you on?' said AJ. 'Leon's mum has died and you are determined to add to the total sum of misery by going out with the girlfriend of the nastiest piece of manhood that was ever assembled in the factory of life...”
― Sally Gardner, The Door That Led to Where

“Truth is, I feel obligated to act out a prescriptive performance every day. Some figurative rite of passage into manhood.”
― Tony Keith, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet: A YA Memoir in Verse of a Black, Gay Teen's Journey to Self-Discovery through Poetry

“Our everyday exchanges are the foundation for violence. Acceptance of male control in day-to-day conversations is equivalent to acceptance of the dominant attitude the rapist exhibits. Eradicating those everyday violent exchanges destroys the foundation of support that rapists enjoy.”
― Cathy Winkler, One Night: Realities of Rape

“Men are so often made to feel inadequate and stupid for having feelings and problems and expressing their doubts and fears. Fight Club was the pressure cooker that lanced the boil of the pent-up existential crisis in masculinity that continues even more so to this day.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When men feel small they are dangerous.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“The two things most universally desired are power and admiration. Ignorant men, as a rule, only achieve either by brutal means, involving the acquisition of physical mastery. Culture gives a man less harmful forms of power and more deserving ways of making himself admired.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt

“All of Her is Holy Site
(Boys Be Men, Sonnet)

Way to a woman's heart is through
her eyes, not between her legs.
All of her is holy site, to wander
unwelcome even with eyes is sickness.

First be her sanctuary, her safe haven,
then be the filthiest beast you can be.
Slave to her kinks between the sheets,
and in society be her shameless shield.

Anybody can stay the night,
takes backbone to stay the life.
Penetration of flesh is animal affair,
human miracle is to touch the mind.

Boys be Men! Lift your brain above your belt.
In monsoon be her brolly, in drought be her rain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Boys be Men! Lift your brain above your belt.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Not every battle is ours to fight; sometimes, the greatest victory comes from standing back and letting God fight for us.”
― Shaila Touchton

“Richard Burton by Stewart Stafford

Jester’s coxcomb to a fool’s translator?
A brothel-creeper in a neon-puked alley,
A bean-counter totalling rice grains;
Surreptitious, scrumptious attic grub.

Stand back, witness me Manspread!
Lease me your lobes while I Mansplain!
Overcome, I expire in an orchestra pit
From the fumes of acute "Toxic Masculinity."

Hear my epitaph: "Women aren't funny...
so put on the Earl Grey, love!" Coup de grâce!
Many have said where I should stick my opinion,
But I leave the worst to the collective imagination.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It's impossible to examine the conditioning that leads boys and men to exhibit some of the more harmful aspects of the 'boys will be boys' mentality later on in life without critiquing the mindset and practice from which this evolves.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“An inability to deal with emotions in healthy ways is what toxic masculinity is all about. And, in most cases, what this really stems from is fear. They're afraid of the world changing, because then they might have to actually work a bit harder to be seen as important within it. So they shit on women and people of colour and anyone else fighting for political equality alongside them and screech about 'SJWs' and feminism being 'cancer' and think this is enough to mask the stench of fear that rolls off them in waves. But as any true Star Wars fan can tell you, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Not all men!' isn't just a mating call for the lazy and aggrieved, it's also a diversionary tactic used to shift attention away from the substantial issues of discrimination and oppression that impact women's lives and channel it instead into men's feelings. Worse, it demands that women temper our complaints, that we frame our discussions of the violence we've experienced at men's hands in a way that doesn't implicate any of the men we know or work with or sit next to on the bus or even just casually pass by in any one of the infinite numbers of corridors on the internet. Sure, you may have been raped or beaten or grown up with a violent father or been groped by a colleague--but the important thing to remember here is that not all men are like that, and unless you acknowledge this then aren't you kind of just as bad as those men out there who hate women enough to kill them?”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“The status quo might revere men as a class, but it destroys them as individuals. And it teaches them to destroy others in return.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“If it turns out they don't have the power they have grown up believing their masculinity entitles them to, what do they have?

They have an internet connection and a giant chip on their shoulder. It's a recipe for disaster, and it's blowing up in all our faces.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Let's be clear about what is and isn't harmful to boys. Having faith in oneself is an important part of self-esteem. Having faith that one is never wrong and indeed that one's masculine status gives them license to test that theory every day leads to harm being done to others and a failure of the self to progress beyond a crude ego. There's a pretty big fucking difference, and it's doing no one any good to let it continue unchecked.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's not an overstatement to characterize the toxic teachings of men like Yiannopoulos as being central to the radicalisation of today's young white men, and marginalised people (which includes women, but certainly isn't limited to us) do not have to negotiate with terrorists to secure their rights to live peacefully.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Again, not every spurned man will respond to his own unexamined rage by grabbing a gun or a knife or even just a well-organised online harassment squad and slaying whichever women has pissed him off that day. But enough of them do for us to know that it's a problem. We don't stop by isolating them from each other and passing their deeds off as a result of mental illness or depression. We understand it by recognising it as part of a culture of learned entitlement in which the logical endpoint for falling short is violence and retribution.

We change it by going back to the beginning, and starting again.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“There is nothing and no one privileged white men won't do and fuck over to affirm their power. Their depth of entitlement should no longer be astonishing, yet it continues to stun in its audacity.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“But anger belongs to men, and so Dr. Blasey Ford could not appear before the world and show what the rage of abuse and trauma really looks like. That was a privilege reserved for Brett Kavanaugh, like so many of the privileges he's enjoyed before it.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's easy to think of toxic male bonding and abusive, harmful behavior happening either on the fringes of society or among people who lack influence and power. But the truth is, power is where this all stems from.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Rape culture has succeeded in convincing the general population that rapists never look like men you know, and, therefore, the men you know can never actually be rapists.

Supporters (conscious or otherwise) of rape culture are extremely invested in maintaining the fiction about what properly defines a rapist. A rapist isn't the man you work with or the one you drink beers with at the pub. He isn't the man you train with at the gym or the one you play football with on the weekend. He isn't the nice young lad who lives in a college dorm while studying engineering. A rapist isn't married with children, nor does he have parents or siblings or a network of people who've known him all his life. He isn't the bloke who fixes your car, the one who holds the door open for stragglers, the man who sells you veggies at the greengrocer or that nice guy who reads the weather on the evening news. He isn't your brother, your son, your boyfriend or your husband. He's certainly never wealthy or even from a moderate middle-class background, and his class--especially when combined with white skin--protects his actions from ever being liked to those of a real rapist.

Real rapists, as everyone knows, are those antisocial, itinerant Shadow Men who live in the walls and bear no resemblance to other men at all. Real rapists exhibit openly misogynistic attitudes, which is how you can tell the difference between them and men whose misogyny is carefully cloaked in more complex contradictions, the men who are 'really good blokes' who, at worst, have 'just made a mistake' and at best are being hounded by vengeful women after fame and money.

Listen, it would certainly be a lot easier if rapists were easy to identify by the five-pronged tail growing out of their butts. If we could clock rapists in both public and private spaces, we could better protect ourselves from their choices. Unfortunately, life isn't that simple. Rapists aren't accompanied by the piercing smell of rotten eggs, nor is their skin covered in thorns. Rapists do indeed look just like everyone else.

Why, some of them probably even look like men you know.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“The reality is that many Black men in the household are conditioned to see that their sole responsibility as a parent is to provide financially, so they are unable to connect emotionally and vulnerably in romantic relationships.”
― Jasmine Marie, Black Girls Breathing: Heal from Trauma, Combat Chronic Stress, and Find Your Freedom

“She is not a territory to conquer, she is a temple that grants entry only through trust, even the gaze must be earned.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“She is not territory, she is temple (Sonnet)

She is not a territory to conquer,
she is a temple that grants
entry only through trust,
even the gaze must be earned.

I'll never get down on one knee,
if I do, I'll get down on both knees -
absolute surrender, nothing left out.

I don't wanna be a tourist, a passing fling,
I am a pilgrim to your love, to your life,
and at times when you permit, to your body.

By default all women are my sisters,
I may make an exception if I lose my heart,
even then my conscience wouldn't allow filth,
till I've earned her unwavering trust.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“She is not a territory to conquer,
she is a temple that grants
entry only through trust,
even the gaze must be earned.

I'll never get down on one knee,
if I do, I'll get down on both knees -
absolute surrender, nothing left out.

I don't wanna be a tourist, a passing fling,
I am a pilgrim to your love, to your life,
and at times when you permit, to your body.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat