Read some actual comics, Kyle.

Superman is an incredibly kind and tender character. (If he’s not being written that way, then he’s not being written well.) He inspires hope not just through his heroics, but also through his kindness toward other people. That’s his thing. Don’t you DARE call tenderness a “weakness.” Get your toxic masculinity the hell away from me and go read a badly written Batman comic if you want a “tough” male character.

Barbie movie never said "we need to stop men" it said "we need to stop toxic masculinity" and if that made you feel called out I got some news for you

Men, boys, and eggs of my acquaintance, I cannot stress this enough:

Nobody worth being with will ever judge you based on your deli sandwich choices.

Sincerely, a dude who had to watch like two dozen men pretend to find vegetarian sandwiches unthinkable in order to maintain a sense of masculinity today.

It is now woke to dare talk about your feelings, eat healthier and have hobbies and interests, guys.

why do so many men get pissed and personally offended when they see men in make up and long hair, fucking excuse me look at these beautiful fucking men

don’t let your toxic masculinity keep you from being pretty

edit: removed the pic of Kim Dracula from the post. thank you, @electricbullet for informing me that they’re non binary and use they/them pronouns :) 💛🤍💜🖤

Tim: Is your masculinity fragile or why is your costume blue?

Dick: Tim, what—

Tim: Mine is red, almost pink.

Tim: I'm a real man.

Jason: Then Superman is gender fluid?

It feels like there's this narrative that fandom keeps wanting to explore, with Steve Harrington, about this very specific type of martyrdom where self-sacrifice is an expression of a lack of self-worth. And, like, yes, write the narrative that's meaningful to you, and yes ok Steve does admittedly get beaten up a lot, but -- legitimately I do not think this narrative is actually Steve's story.

Like, without gendering things too much, there is something in the Steve fanon that I keep seeing that's so reflective of the specific kind of sacrifice and societal pressures exerted on girls, specifically -- this story of 'you make yourself worthy and worthwhile by carving pieces out of yourself', of believing that you must always give and never receive to justify the space you take up in the world. Yes, boys can experience this same pressure (and obviously trans and nb people of all genders run into it as well! sometimes a lot!), but especially in the mid-1980s cultural context where Stranger Things takes place, it's just...really not likely to be a dominant narrative for Steve to be operating under? It doesn't even really match the Steve we see on screen -- who is happy to make sacrifices for the sake of others, yeah, when needed, but who's not particularly kind or giving unless somebody asks first.

And Steve does get hurt a lot on other people's behalf! And this is a problem! It's just a completely different problem than the one fandom keeps writing.

Steve, and I'm going to say this forever, is a story about toxic masculinity, which the show may or may not even know it's writing. The archetypes influencing Steve's character as it shows up on the screen (and the stories and messages that Steve would actually be surrounded by in his actual life) are not deconstructions of suffering heroes who never should have had to fight in the first place and were destroyed by it. That's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. Steve's not Buffy. Steve's cultural context is Indiana Jones.

Steve is The Guy! And part of being The Guy is that you're expected to take the hits -- not because Steve is less important than the women-and-children he's supposed to protect, but because, the story says, he will get less hurt. Why should Steve get in between Billy and Lucas? Because Steve is an eighteen-year-old athlete and Lucas is in middle school, and of the two of them, Steve actually stands a chance. (And yes, Steve got badly hurt there, and Max had to save him -- but if Lucas, if Max had taken that beating they would not have been running through those tunnels later.) Was somebody else better-qualified to dive down to the uncertain bottom of a cold lake in the middle of the night? Steve doesn't list his credentials there as a way of justifying some ideal of martyrdom; he is literally the most likely person on the boat not to drown.

And make no mistake: when Steve's pulled into the Upside-Down, he survives the bats long enough for backup to get there. Realistic or not, he's apparently tough enough that he's physically capable of hiking barefoot through hell without much slowing down. Steve is the tank for the same reason as any tank: because he literally has been shown to have the most hit points in the group. You cannot honestly engage with Steve in this context without dealing with the fact that he's right.

AND THIS IS A PROBLEM! This is still a problem! But it's not the same problem that fandom seems to expect. It's not an expression of caretaking or the need for self-sacrifice; it's not an issue with Steve valuing himself less. It's an issue of toxic masculinity so ingrained that Steve doesn't even recognize he's suffering from it, because one of the tenets of toxic masculinity is that Big Strong Guys don't suffer. It's just a concussion, it's fine, he'll walk it off. It's not that Steve thinks he deserves to get hurt, or even that he's less deserving of safety than the others. It's that absolutely nothing in his cultural context allows him to admit that he can be hurt in a significant way.

There's still so much tension that can be gotten out of this situation, I swear. There's so much that can be explored in writing! Hell, the show itself is deconstructing some of this trope, believe it or not, by giving us a Steve who absolutely can take all the hits thrown his direction but still doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with his life. It turns out that doing his job as The Guy is only mildly helpful in horror movie situations (mostly by buying time for smarter, squishier people to do the damage from behind him), and somewhere a little worse than useless in everyday life.

But Steve does not go out of his way to self-sacrifice, he really doesn't. He just does his job. He's The Guy. Of course he's not going to let a kid or a girl or some scared skinny nerd who just learned about monsters yesterday take the hits. Of course Steve's got this.

Pit Babe is one of my favorite types to trope that BL does not take enough advantage of and that is 'what happens when your only way out is hypermasculinity but you really aren't like naturally and so wear it like a shield again the softness so deeply inherent in your nature that your cannot risk it being exposed?' and the answer is... Babe. Babe happens.

A hypermasculine racer who tries to avoid any kind of sexual or romantic connection and pretends he doesn't care at all who melts the instant anyone shows him that they can treat him sweetly and loses himself entirely in even the tiniest amount of affection because he has never been able to safely allow himself that affection.

Babe wears masculinity like a second skin and he blocks people out and he snaps and he glares and he teases the friends he doesn't love because they are safe and they remind him that he will never love or be loved because he is not that kind of man and he scoffs and bets the first person who's given him what he wanted on a race because that's what men do. They don't care.

But the longer he spends with Charlie the less comfortable he gets in his second skin. Charlie peels him bare with a stroke of his hair, with a kiss to his forehead, with a sweet smile, with breakfast in the morning, by fighting for him, by protecting him, by waiting at home for him, by soothing him when he sulks and pouts. Charlie found all those soft parts that Babe has been protecting with his masculinity and exposed them so tenderly and so kindly and with nothing more than love.

And I love that. I want more of that. I want more toxic masculine characters realizing the persona they've crafted for themselves is not their true self but rather a mask, armor, a second skin for the world and to be able to expose the softness in the safety of the person they love.