Just as the phrase "climate change" fails to capture the fundamental nature of a theory that was originally labeled "global warming," the commonly heard phrase "toxic masculinity" substitutes similarly imprecise language for the more explicit notion that the biologically ordained striving by men to achieve dominance is bad.  Many women nowadays wish to bury the fact that their female ancestors sought protection by attaching themselves to dominant males; they suffer under the illusion that the cave man days are over and that as a result, men must now change their biology.

These women presume that civilization protects them sufficiently that they no longer need seek out protection by a loyal male.  They are delusional.  They think themselves capable of achieving the sort of competitive dominance needed to maintain their own autonomy because they view the abstract concept of society – or civilization – as an imperishable item largely immune from destruction.

In fact, both society in general and civilization in particular are fragile things that have in the past collapsed with surprising suddenness.  One could look to ancient times for examples (e.g., the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the face of invasion by Germanic barbarians or the sudden disintegration of Mayan culture due to unknown causes), but modern examples might be more convincing.

For example, late in the 20th century, the Soviet empire fell apart when nobody expected such a thing.  In the aftermath, it was men, not women, who emerged as the power-brokers – often as tyrannical dictators.  As for Russia herself, those who amassed power and wealth from the break-up were almost exclusively men.  This happened only thirty years ago, when Western women already had achieved a great deal of independence and ought to have been able to seize possession of at least a few valuable scraps of power or wealth during the ensuing chaos.  Nothing of the sort happened: men grabbed it all.  This was at a time, incidentally, when the Soviet enterprise prided itself on the degree to which its women were encouraged to be doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs.  It was a Soviet conceit that their revolutionary movement had at last put women on an equal footing with men, and yet Russia's post-communist regime was a man's world.

That example is not recent enough?  The feminine ascendance to "equality" is more recent than that?  Well, then, let us consider the current trend in the world that sees radical Islam – a male-dominated culture if there ever was one – challenging the West.  Many choose to ignore the threat and pretend the challenge is insignificant, but anybody who examines the situation carefully will be hard pressed not to conclude that radical Islam is waging a remarkably effective war.  The ISIS caliphate has crumbled, but at the global scale, the West remains on the defensive.

This example is particularly ironic since many feminists ignore the degree to which women in even moderate Islamic societies are under the protection of men.  If the jihadis succeed in their avowed agenda to topple the West and replace it with a society based on Islamic values, the women of the West will be subjected to a rude awakening.  Jihadis do not respect women's rights; they will use force to enact a system that puts women in their place – their Islam-designated place.

Female politicians and female heads of corporations and respected female professionals will suddenly discover that they cannot not go to work without permission from their husbands.  Women will be categorized as less reliable than men in courts of law.  They will have lesser rights of inheritance than men.  In short, the great advances achieved for women in the West will be swept away and replaced by a religious code that idealizes childrearing and homebound duties as perfect feminism.  Sharia law does not look kindly on the hopes and aspirations of Western feminism.

If feminists succeed in eradicating toxic masculinity in Western men, then the jihadis will surely win the war.  Neither hardened Western women nor emasculated Western men will be sufficient to thwart jihadi aggressiveness.  In the aftermath, Western women will likely resort to practicality: they will scorn the Western male and attach themselves to those more highly competitive Muslim men who will have risen to dominant positions.  Most likely, the plight of the Western women will be less deadly than that of the emasculated Western men, but female survival will nevertheless require brutal compromises.  Women will become property once again.

Biology has dictated that on average, women are smaller and weaker than men.  For this reason, little girls grow up with a natural tendency to rely on deception to survive.  They often avoid direct confrontation with men for the same reason men always avoided direct confrontation with lions: the odds for survival are bad.  Even in this modern era of assertive feminism, most women have no problem doing everything in their considerable (sexual) power to maintain the idea that men need to shelter and protect them.

In childhood, the great majority of little girls quickly learn that the best way to offset the physical superiority of little boys is to pretend pain whenever disadvantaged by greater strength.  This ruse usually diminishes with adulthood, but it rarely disappears completely.  By abjuring stoicism in this sort of circumstances, women reinforce the notion that they need to be protected.

According to Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, studies have confirmed that men are more confrontational than women and that women are wired to be more accommodating than men.  He claims that this was unavoidable because women – but not men – had to cater to the outrageous demands of helpless infants.  Men did not have to develop such an accommodating nature, but if they were to have any chance of passing on their own genes to a new generation, they had to protect and defend both the mother and the child, a task that required confrontational skills.  According to Peterson, these differing life imperatives contributed to the biological evolution of psychic differences between men and women.

Of course, feminists who proclaim the toxicity of men most likely reject the idea that male aggressiveness is a biologically governed trait: they are pretty much obliged to do so if they wish to eliminate the patriarchy.  To counter the biological explanation for male dominance, they often invoke a mythical golden era of cooperation when women were not subservient and may indeed have been dominant.  There is little support for the theory: primitive groups brought into contact with the outside world during the age of discovery showed few traces of any such societal order.  In virtually all of them, men were dominant over women.

Feminists would insist that this is pure injustice, but cultural anthropologists think more in terms of survival than justice.  Societies compete with other societies and either through war or cultural absorption only the successful ones have passed on their traits.  If cultural anthropologists think culture patterns are shaped mostly by the drive to survive, and cultures dominated by women have been the exception, then perhaps male dominance is needed.