HMN 2026: How Most men do not subscribe to toxic masculinity traits

A growing niche space, the manosphere, has been taking shape in today’s online forums and social media, preaching an aggressive definition of what it means to be a man. It promotes traits such as misogyny, dominance, and opposition to feminism—behavior generally considered toxic—as the epitome of masculinity.

Among the growing concern of a rise in such movements, a team of researchers decided to address the fact that there is very little empirical work that actually defines or measures toxic masculinity.

The researchers analyzed nationwide data from a representative random sample of 15,808 heterosexual men in New Zealand, aged 18 to 99. They examined how strongly men identify with their gender alongside attitudes such as sexual prejudice, narcissism, sexism, and support for social dominance. They uncovered five distinct profiles, with the largest group (35.4%) displaying largely non-toxic patterns.

One surprising finding was that strongly identifying with one’s gender was not a strong sign of toxicity. Even among men whose attitudes matched patterns linked to toxic masculinity, being a man was only slightly more important to their sense of identity than it was for other men. The researchers therefore note that strongly identifying as “manly” does not automatically make someone toxic.

The findings are published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities.

Is all masculinity toxic?

Psychologist Shepherd Bliss first coined the term toxic masculinity in 1990 as a part of the mythopoetic manhood movement. He defined it as behaviors that diminish women, children, and other men, highlighting a harmful part of the male psyche. Ever since the #MeToo movement, the term’s meaning has significantly evolved.

Today, toxic masculinity is used as a blanket term to describe everything from overt misogyny and rape culture to restrictions on women’s reproductive rights to mansplaining and avoiding household work.

Despite the term being prevalent in mainstream discourse and having over 10,000 articles on it published since 2020, many of these works do not actually empirically measure it. Instead, the term is often used simply to indicate disapproval of certain behaviors. Scientists believe that overgeneralizing masculinity as inherently toxic risks doing more harm than good, especially as men struggle with health and well-being concerns.

To overcome this gap, the researchers of this study examined how common different patterns of problematic masculinity are among men by focusing on eight key traits and beliefs: gender identity centrality, sexual prejudice, disagreeableness, narcissism, hostile and benevolent sexism, opposition to domestic violence prevention efforts, and support for social dominance.

They collected relevant data from a major ongoing project, the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS), and conducted Latent Profile Analysis, a statistical method used to identify distinct groups or profiles within a dataset. The findings led them to five distinct masculinity profiles.

Over a third of men (35.4%) fell into an atoxic group, showing low levels across all harmful indicators. 53.8% of men could be clustered into two moderate profiles, exhibiting low-to-moderate scores on most traits and differing mainly in levels of sexual prejudice. A smaller group of 7.6% fit a benevolent toxic profile, due to high scores in benevolent sexism alongside elevated sexual prejudice.

Finally, a very small but concerning group of 3.2% of men fell into a hostile, toxic profile, displaying high levels of sexism, narcissism, and even resistance to preventing domestic violence.

The results also indicated that simply identifying strongly with being manly did not, by default, predict problematic masculinity.

The researchers note the need to separate harmful expressions of masculinity from healthy, constructive ones. Further studies using more diverse samples could provide valuable insights for developing interventions tailored to different toxic masculinity profiles.