An Ohio State University (OSU) male graduate student is buying into the theory of “toxic masculinity” being responsible for a raft of ills on campus — including the brutal robbery, rape and murder of an OSU student, Reagan Tokes, reports The College Fix.
Tokes was a 21-year-old undergrad who was on the brink of earning a degree in psychology form the university when her life was cut short — only after she was forced to take money out of an ATM and raped in front of her two-year-old child.
Police charged Brian Lee Golsby, a convicted sex offender who was out of prison after serving time for a 2010 rape.
Though most OSU students have expressed outrage over the apparent leniency of the criminal justice system that returned Golsby to society so quickly, graduate student Joachim Bean believes the tragedy encapsulates the concept of “toxic masculinity” that he has apparently swallowed after years of indoctrination from university professors.
Bean wrote a letter to “The Lantern,” the OSU newspaper, detailing his theory:
“This very sad and unfortunate event, among too many others before it, requires me to address the male privilege, for lack of better words, I face in this community, and the world at large,” Bean asserts. He continues, “It saddens me that we live in a world that because of one’s gender or sex, there is a dichotomy of freedom and safety. This most recent incident, along with countless other incidents before it, really leaves me wondering what can be done about the role of toxic masculinity in today’s world — which we see coming from a level as high as our world’s biggest leaders, to individuals we know and encounter in our daily lives.”
Bean might be quoting from a contemporary sociology syllabus as he further details his male guilt: “I know as a male I possess an unfortunate and unequal power, but I also feel a lack of this power in our culture to facilitate change in the hearts and minds of so much I see in our community and around the world. The world is a broken place, and it’s going to be very hard to put it back together. I know I need to try harder to be the change. I know I haven’t done enough in my own life to address the many aspects of toxic masculinity, and throughout the past year, my eyes have been opened by thinking differently and much harder about these things.”
The College Fix, seeking some clarification on Bean’s contentions, was rebuffed by the student who said, “my thoughts on the matter are complete, and I have nothing more to say.” So the student news service then sought further response from OSU’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality.
Professor Linda Mizejewski, responded that she was “always reluctant to have ‘toxic masculinity’ attached to psychopathic behavior,” not because it so absurd to do so but “because it glosses over the versions of toxic masculinity that are considered entirely normal.”