A while back I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his New York subway confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.
Unfortunately there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity. I must oppose them too. I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?
Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details. But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off, dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.
Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.
Although some behavior by men can be correctly described as toxically masculine, there is nothing ‘toxic’ or otherwise objectionable about normal masculine behavior.
Addendum
William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal:
Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.
You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.
This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it.
Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?
I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.