No, This Study Did Not Show That 10% of Men Are “Toxic”

I wrote to the lead researcher of this study five days ago asking a simple question to verify the items used in their study. I have yet to hear back.

No, This Study Did Not Show That 10% of Men Are “Toxic”

A recent paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinities has been circulating with a striking implication: that roughly 10% of men fall into “toxic” categories, divided into what the authors call Benevolent Toxics and Hostile Toxics.

The study’s authors are careful in places. They repeatedly note that most men are not toxic. They criticize the careless way the term “toxic masculinity” is often used. On the surface, this looks like a responsible corrective to cultural excess.

But when you look closely at how they arrived at that 10% figure, something doesn’t add up.

Not statistically.

Conceptually.

Or morally.

What follows is not a rejection of research, nor a denial that some men hold hostile or unfair views of women. It is a critique of how ordinary male attitudes and traditional relational values were quietly rebranded as “toxicity”, and then presented to the public as a population-level diagnosis.

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What the Study Actually Did

The researchers used a large New Zealand survey and grouped men using a statistical technique called latent profile analysis. They relied on eight indicators they believed reflected “toxic masculinity,” including:

• hostile sexism

• benevolent sexism

• narcissism

• disagreeableness

• opposition to domestic violence prevention spending

• social dominance orientation

• sexual prejudice

• gender identity centrality

Based on how men clustered on these measures, the authors identified five groups. Two of them—together totaling about 10% of the male population—were labeled toxic.

One group was labeled Hostile Toxics (3.2%).
The other was labeled Benevolent Toxics (7.6%).

And that is where the trouble begins.

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What “Benevolent Sexism” Actually Measures

The most troubling category in the paper is not the group labeled “Hostile Toxic.” The items used to define this group consist of attitudinal statements expressing skepticism or distrust toward women—for example, beliefs that women manipulate men, exaggerate discrimination, or are easily offended. One may strongly disagree with these views, and many will find them uncharitable or inaccurate, but they remain attitudes, not behaviors. Endorsing such beliefs does not, by itself, establish misogyny, abusiveness, or harm; it simply reflects a particular way of interpreting gender dynamics that differs from prevailing cultural norms.

The most glaring problem lies with the Benevolent Toxic label.

To understand why, we need to look at the actual questions used to classify men as “benevolent sexists.”

The study used a shortened version of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. For benevolent sexism, the items included statements such as:

• Women should be cherished and protected by men.

• Women tend to have superior moral sensibility.

• Many women possess a purity that few men have.

• Every man ought to have a woman he adores.

• Women tend to have more refined taste and culture than men.

Let that sink in.

Men who agree with these statements are being placed in a category labeled toxic.

Not abusive.
Not coercive.
Not violent.
Not manipulative.

Toxic.

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Admiration Is Not Pathology

These items do not describe harm.
They do not describe cruelty.
They do not describe domination or abuse.

They describe traditional admiration, protectiveness, and gender differentiation—ideas that have been part of heterosexual relationships for centuries and are still widely endorsed by both men and women.

You can debate whether these beliefs reflect outdated gender roles.
You can argue that they reinforce inequality.
You can even say they belong to a prior cultural era.

But calling them toxic is a different move entirely.

“Toxic” implies something dangerous.
Something corrosive.
Something that harms others by its very presence.

There is nothing in these items that demonstrates toxicity in that sense.

What the authors have done—quietly, but decisively—is to collapse moral disagreement into moral pathology.

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This Is a Category Error

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory was never designed to diagnose “toxic men.”

It was designed to measure gender-role ideologies—specifically, how people think about men and women in relation to one another.

Even within that framework, benevolent sexism has always been distinguished from hostility precisely because it is:

• subjectively positive

• relational

• affectionate in tone

The idea behind the scale is not that benevolent sexists are dangerous, but that idealization can coexist with inequality.

That is a subtle sociological claim.

It is not a diagnosis of character.

The moment the authors labeled this cluster “Benevolent Toxics,” they crossed from description into moral reclassification.

They took:

“Men who endorse traditional, protective, admiring views of women”

and turned it into:

“Men who embody a form of toxic masculinity.”

That conclusion does not follow from the data.

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Where the “10% Toxic” Claim Comes From

Here is the sleight of hand that matters most.

The authors found:

• ~3% of men high on hostile sexism and antagonistic traits

• ~7% of men higher on benevolent sexism and gender identity centrality

They then added these groups together and described them—explicitly or implicitly—as the toxic minority of men.

But these two groups are not the same.
They are not harmful in the same way.
And one of them does not meet any reasonable definition of toxicity at all.

This is how a morally charged statistic is manufactured:

1. Measure attitudes

2. Assign value-laden labels

3. Aggregate categories

4. Present the result as a population diagnosis

At no point did the study measure:

• abusive behavior

• violence

• coercion

• exploitation

• emotional cruelty

• criminality

• antisocial functioning

Yet the takeaway offered to the public is:
“About 10% of men are toxic.”

That is simply not what the data show.

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Why This Matters

This is not an abstract academic quibble.

When researchers label admiration as toxicity, something important happens culturally:

• Men learn that affection is suspect

• Protection is reframed as control

• Devotion is recoded as pathology

• Masculinity itself becomes morally radioactive

And once that happens, the category of “toxic masculinity” becomes infinitely expandable.

Any male-coded value can be absorbed into it.
Any deviation from ideological neutrality can be framed as harm.
Any man can be placed under suspicion—not because of what he does, but because of what he believes or values.

That is not science.
That is moral inflation.

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A Fair Question the Authors Cannot Answer

Here is the question I would like the authors to answer, plainly and publicly:

What empirical criterion distinguishes a man you label “Benevolent Toxic” from a healthy, loving, non-abusive partner who holds traditional relational values and treats women well?

There is no answer to that question in the data.
Because the distinction is not measured.

It is assumed.

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The Irony

The authors repeatedly say they want to avoid stigmatizing men.
They say they want to clarify toxic masculinity, not weaponize it.

And yet, by labeling traditional male admiration as “toxic,” they do exactly what critics have warned about for years:

They turn masculinity itself into a moral problem.

You don’t need to deny sexism exists to see this.
You don’t need to defend hostile attitudes toward women.
You just need to insist on conceptual honesty.

This study did not discover that 10% of men are toxic.

It discovered that some men hold adversarial gender beliefs, and others hold traditional, admiring ones—and then it renamed both “toxicity.”

That move tells us far more about the cultural lens of the researchers than it does about men.

And men deserve better than that.

Taken together, these methodological problems raise a deeper question—not just about this study’s conclusions, but about whether “toxic masculinity,” as operationalized here, is a meaningful construct at all.

The study’s “hostile toxic masculinity” category is no more empirically grounded than the benevolent one. The five hostile sexism items used do not measure violence, abuse, coercive control, or entitlement to harm; they measure skepticism toward feminism and resentment of perceived gender favoritism. The inclusion of a narcissism measure does not strengthen the case, since the Narcissistic Personality Inventory assesses non-pathological traits such as confidence, leadership, and assertiveness—not exploitation, cruelty, or lack of empathy. Finally, the paper introduces domestic violence as a presumed risk without having measured any domestic violence attitudes or behaviors at all. Taken together, the hostile-toxic category does not identify dangerous men; it identifies men who are traditional, agentic, and ideologically noncompliant, and then reinterprets those traits as toxicity through labels rather than evidence.

Despite its stated aim, this study fails to conclusively estimate the prevalence of “toxic masculinity.” None of the instruments used directly measured violence, abuse, coercive control, or endorsement of harm. Instead, the study inferred toxicity from attitudes toward feminism, conformity to traditional male norms, emotional restraint, and non-pathological traits such as confidence and leadership. Even the category labeled “hostile toxic masculinity” rests on speculative links rather than demonstrated behaviors. For more attentive readers, the result is paradoxical: rather than clarifying the nature or prevalence of toxic masculinity, the study invites the conclusion that the construct itself may be conceptually incoherent—less a measurable psychological phenomenon than a moral label applied to disfavored male traits and beliefs.

Men Are Good