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Stand off with Trump supporter and native leader

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The horrific mass murder of innocent pedestrians in Toronto on April 23 triggered a mixture of torment and grief. The pain many of us experienced for the innocent lives lost in the traumatic act of violence and brutality was heartbreaking, fear-inducing and life-changing.

Yet the possible misogynist and sexist motives are not surprising in a world that constantly violates women, girls and boys and the sexually diverse, (dis) abled, poor, Indigenous and racialized.

For many of us, this reality brings up anger and memories of murdered women, men and children.

The praise given to the Toronto police officer, Const. Ken Lam who arrested without incident the accused mass murderer was widespread.

Was the fact that the police officer was Asian one of the reasons he did not shoot or kill the accused? Did his racial identity have anything to do with his reasoning? Or did the racial background of the accused impact his decision?

Did Const. Ken Lam learn from the past mistakes of the Toronto Police Service, especially the Andrew Loku shooting?

These questions have not been fully unpacked in our media but have certainly been spoken about over coffee or tea in many activist circles. These closed-door conversations of grief have manifested among politicized Black people and racialized folks who could not help but compare the facts.

This recent tragedy has led to conversations in general about how Black, Indigenous and other racialized people have been treated by our media and police systems.

As a witness and participant to these conversations, I wanted to share some of the ideas that come out of them. I write about racism's impact on health and so I discuss these ideas as they relate to our health and well-being.

Black lives matter

To many, it feels like a white-skinned mass murderer's life is still more valuable than the life of a Black, Indigenous and/or racialized person who has "no weapon" and has killed no one, in Canada or elsewhere.

In general, media coverage of crimes involving accused Black perpetrators include photos resembling mug shots, with faces devoid of emotion. The perpetrators are assumed to be "guilty." In contrast, news stories often show white accused perpetrators with smiles, in photos from "better moments" in their life.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Facebook

These images can give viewers optimism and cause them to doubt that the accused committed such heinous crimes (the Bruce McArthur alleged serial killer as well as the Kalen Schlatter case in Toronto comes to mind).

What is the impact of seeing these distinct images and media bias on a daily basis? Experiencing forms of racist violence daily leads to significant anguish.

The grief we feel is cumulative as we witness over and over that Black lives do not matter but white mass murderers' lives do matter and are protected by any means necessary.

All of the white male suspects involved in these incidents survived: The Charleston Church massacre; the Québec mosque massacre; the Toronto van attack

Microaggressions add up

Some people use the idea of microaggressions to explain subtle offences or insults. But use of this term renders the long-term impact of racism on racialized people's health null and void and denies the real insidiousness of experiencing harm and violation on a daily basis, due solely to skin colour and other intersectional factors.

Read more: Racism impacts your health

In fact, "microaggressions" are cumulative and detrimental to our health.

The term microaggressions, popularized by psychologist Derald Wing Sue and coined by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce, is usually defined by the idea of brief daily experiences of racism.

These include being followed in a popular drug store or clothing chain, so much that you never bring other purchases into the store (out of anxiety) or you do not open your bag until at the cashier (out of hypervigilance and fear of being accused of shoplifting) while simultaneously seeing that other white people are not being surveilled. This causes stress to one's system. These are not subtle nor "micro" actions when they happen every day.

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Some recent examples of anti-Black racism, racism and anti-Indigeneity include: Afghan men hanging out in a fast food diner abused by a fellow patron for speaking Dari; three Black teenagers falsely accused of shoplifting while shopping for their prom dresses; Black folks being asked to pay before eating at a restaurant; Black men being racially profiled and arrested while waiting for friends; A Black woman being arrested while eating; Black women being harassed while engaging in leisure activities; Indigenous boys being profiled while on a university campus tour. The list goes on and on.

White colleagues passing you in the hallway and staying silent when you greet them, colleagues tensing up physically or trying to avoid you - these are not subtle, they are real manifestations of the racist violence experienced on a daily basis in mainstream (white) workplaces.

The impacts are often sadness, distress, anger, grief, anxiety, isolation, fear, job loss and dissociation (sometimes strategically as a way to survive often virulent environments) - and these affect one's health.

These same white colleagues are often in positions of power and have sometimes even worked in social justice, social work, public health, international development and global health realms where they are praised for their "diversity" lens and given many opportunities.

Two recent examples illustrate: The recent resignation of prestigious legal scholar, Angelique EagleWoman, from her role as dean of Lakehead University's law school because of anti-Indigenous racism; and the anti-Black racist statement to a Black junior scholar by Michael Marrus, emeritus Prof. of history and holocaust scholar, during his tenure as Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto. His statement was: "You know this is your master, eh? Do you feel the lash?"

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinc

Both examples demonstrate that racism, sexism and other forms of violence are rampant in our daily systems and represent a microcosm of our daily experiences.

The blatant difference in treatment experienced by people interacting in the same way creates distress, emotionally and physically. We experience trauma and grief from this long-term impact, even when we simultaneously are uplifted by our over-earned resiliency and resistance.

Read more: Grief is a direct impact of racism: Eight ways to support yourself

In cases of white mass murderers versus innocent Black folks, the different media portrayals - and therefore public empathy - of innocent victims and survivors based on racial identity are significant. We often see racist portrayals of Black victims/survivors.

Black lives matter and we continue to fight for our voices and communities to be heard, remembered, respected, empathized with and healed. To put it simply: We fight not to be killed (figuratively and emotionally), humiliated, traumatized and violated on a daily basis locally and globally.

It is with this lens that we view the recent tragic events and the heroic actions of the police officer in Toronto, as we mourn and grieve for so many lives taken by senseless violence. We continue to try and heal lived experiences of violence and dismantle systems of oppression.

This leads to sometimes uncomfortable and critical conversations.

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Are the lives of white killers more important than everyday Black folk?

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The horrific mass murder of innocent pedestrians in Toronto on April 23 triggered a mixture of torment and grief. The pain many of us experienced for the innocent lives lost in the traumatic act of violence and brutality was heartbreaking, fear-inducing and life-changing.

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The backlash against the backlash has begun. Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips of Hangover trilogy fame, has opened to conflicting reviews and negative press.

Having been hailed as a masterpiece when it first screened at the Venice film festival (and drawing an eight-minute standing ovation), a slew of anxious commentaries have since worried about the film's potential to incite mass shootings and civilian violence. Since its general release, the tide has begun to turn once again in favour of the film, suggesting that the general public is far more capable of discerning the difference between social commentary and incitement to violence than some pundits believe.

The film takes the iconic comic book villain from the Batman series, and traces his evolution from the failed comic, Arthur Fleck, to the devilish monster, "Joker". Despite its roots, the film is far more concerned with how evil manifests in the real world than with comic book villainy, offering a compelling portrayal of the failure of a certain ideal of white, American masculinity.

This ideal, witnessed in the Hollywood tradition from Clint Eastwood to Sylvester Stallone, posits an image of the successful American male as virile, violent, and economically independent. These men are agents of violence for the benefit of society, figures who protect American values against perceived threats from the outside using extreme force.

Having now seen the film, I think the controversy around it speaks to a certain hypocrisy around the depictions of violence - we like our violence slick and stylish, and don't want to have to think about our role in creating the individuals who commit it. Amazingly, Joker does just this.

Male violence

The first half of Joker takes the viewer on a journey through the many ways Fleck falls drastically short of the American male ideal.

A gang beats him up; he has an ill-defined mental illness, takes prescription drugs, and sees a counsellor; his colleagues bully him. Significantly, he is feminised - he lives with and cares for his mother, in what we are invited to view as Norman Bates-esque creepiness. The viewer also watches him dancing, his semi-naked body an emaciated form put on display as it gyrates and contorts before the camera.

The film reflects what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls the "aggrieved entitlement" of the white American male, where the failure to procure the social status and goods you believe you deserve (money, employment, property, sex, family), leads to anger and violence at groups you blame - women, people of colour, sexual minorities.

And so it is no surprise that some are troubled by Fleck's close approximation to incels (involuntary celibates). It has been suggested that in the character of Joker, incels could find a "patron saint" who embodies many of their supposed traits: isolation, anger, lack of employment, and failure to attract women.

Films like Joker - and antecedents such as Fight Club, which has been taken up as an icon by white supremacist groups in the US - invite us to question the line between reality and fiction. Do such films reflect social conditions or do they, in the end, help create them?

Sympathy for the devil

Much of the debate around Joker's potential to inspire "copycat" violence has centred on the film's apparent "empathy" or "sympathy" for Arthur Fleck. The theory goes that violent-minded young loners will see Fleck and try to emulate his actions.

But the audience is not encouraged to empathise with Fleck. Film techniques that encourage the audience to identify with a character, such as point-of-view shots and close ups, rarely occur in Joker. Instead, we see Fleck through a range of distorted surfaces, such as windows, mirrors, and television screens.

Fight Club's main characters were buff, brawny, articulate leaders of a movement. Fleck's body, by contrast, is a grotesque object of disgust. His skinny form as it contorts and writhes is difficult to watch, and we also witness black bruises, snot dripping from his nose, grainy and caked clown make up. His laugh, initially a curiosity, makes you writhe in your seat by the end of the film. Certainly, there are times when we pity his situation, and may feel moved to condemn the social conditions that contribute to his isolation. But we want to turn away from this man, not become like him.

This is where the suggestion that the film tries to incite incel violence fails. Commentators appear to have forgotten that how "we", larger society, see people like incels and other extremists, is not the way they see themselves. Threads on 4chan (a website that hosts an incel forum) have said that comparing incels with Joker showed how wider society viewed them - as monsters.

Heroes and villains

People who commit acts of violence on behalf of an ideology don't imagine themselves as lonely, depressed, unattractive, and physically weak men like Fleck - they join these movements to leave such inadequacies behind. They imagine themselves in the guise of the cowboy, the Terminator, Rambo, the American sniper - heroes fighting the forces of "evil".

And so there is a deep hypocrisy in certain responses to Joker, a film which, in the end, contains far fewer scenes of violence and death than any Tarantino film. Joker is not a satire, nor is its violence "cool". Our witness of the dank and depressing origins of the movement overshadows everything.

Fleck's story disrupts any easy distinction between "good" and "evil", a narrative mainstay of Hollywood film from Westerns to Marvel. The problem with the heroes and villains narrative is that there is no responsibility required on the part of the viewer or the other characters - some folks are born bad and deserve what they get.

Fleck is evil, ugly, and cynical. But so is the world he lives in, a world whose inequality and cruelty towards the most vulnerable in society finds echoes with our own. Perhaps we condemn Joker because the elevation of a spiteful, selfish, and narcissistic caricature of a man to a state of power feels painfully, and shamefully, close to home.

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Joker makes for uncomfortable viewing - it shows how society creates extremists

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The backlash against the backlash has begun. Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips of Hangover trilogy fame, has opened to conflicting reviews and negative press. Having been hailed as a masterpiece when it first screened at the Venice film festival (and drawing an eight-minute standing ovation), a slew of anxious commentaries have since worried about the film's potential to incite mass shootings and civilian violence.

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- Challenges that men face within society
- Stereotyped
- Certain social occasions presents masculinity challenges
- Environments can shape challenges e.g. School compared to home

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went to my GP for fatigue. It's important to be diligent about your health when you're vegan. Low iron, low protein, low B12. But my doctor chucked in a new one: "Could be low testosterone." I smiled because I understood the connotations - of course my dietary requirements would butt heads with my perceived manhood, especially in a culture where straight men don't like recycling because it's .

The results came back and my testosterone was indeed abnormal: "Too high," he said, surprised.

Next set of results: somehow higher. My endocrinologist appointment is booked for September.

How peculiar. I'm not very aggressive, my walls remain unpunched, I cry merely thinking about the finale of Fleabag. My libido? Boringly benchmarked. Strange.

Very strange in a society that squares testosterone as synonymous to manhood and masculinity. And, in doing so, stops very legitimate and talented athletes at performing in their favourite sports.

Our society is obsessed with masculinity. It's riddled with it.

And as the United States face another slew of mass shootings, much of the commentary wags fingers about all things tangible: video games, white supremacy, plummeting mental health, insultingly easy access to semi-automatic firearms ... yet it's always the men. It's the men who terrorise the land, which is admittedly unsurprising when remembering that America is a nation fashioned directly from white male supremacy: colonisation, the mass genocide of its native peoples.

The way we use "toxic masculinity" now creates a binary around an imaginary 'good man' vs 'bad man'

It's men who commit the most heinous acts (yet we continue to sell women the idea that all they need to do is lean into it all. Very strange.)

We're no different here in Australia. We're a settler-colonised state, very much engaged in ongoing colonisation. And while our day-to-day atrocities might live on a less militarised scale - knifings, rape, domestic violence, abuse, wreaking havoc in Bali - we're as committed to masculinity as all the rest.

In 2019 we finally have a semblance of a language with which to talk about sexual assault and abuse thanks to the global response of the #MeToo movement. We're finally centring the narratives of victim-survivors and reframing abuse as a men's issue, in direct result of male violence. Masculinity teaches men about their God-given rights to power, possession and entitlement; to land, to space, to women's (and other men's) bodies.

The narratives of #MeToo have granted a growing awareness of gender issues within the mainstream. An idea of "toxic masculinity" has managed to penetrate our Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. Toxic masculinity: aggression, possession, homophobia, emotional frigidity. The ingredients to a perfect hellscape.

What does non-toxic masculinity look like? No clue. Because at every stage and scale of masculinity - the roles, the set of normative behaviours arbitrarily assigned to little kids who are deemed to carry a certain pair of genitals - I see the same understanding around power, possession, aggression, entitlement.

We understand men as stoic, using the women in their lives as emotional crutches, who are angry and/or misunderstood, who play with balls, eat red meat because red meat is for men, drink beer, wash, rinse, repeat but never help with the laundry because that's women's work.

Maybe we've got toxic masculinity all wrong: maybe it's not a type of masculinity at all, but instead its ultimate descriptor.

This caution isn't new. William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954 - a case study of what happens when you drop a group of young boys on to an island. Left to their own devices, they fall back on their socialisation. The island becomes a site of bullying, aggression, death - a microcosm of the war they seemingly escaped. Golding very much looked to explore that "darkness in man's heart".

But the way we use "toxic masculinity" now - as a carceral kneejerk to awful behaviour - really doesn't get to the heart of the issue. It creates a binary around an imaginary "good man" vs "bad man" that isn't altogether useful. Why? Because "bad men" will keep sprouting out from the conditions we set for the socialisation of our children. "Bad men" will keep exploiting their powers in a culture that continues to uphold and revere masculinity as a fundamental norm.

Hercules didn't defeat the Hydra after chopping off its head - more heads continued to grow. Hercules defeated the Hydra after getting to its heart.

But the broader problem of "toxic masculinity" is that it's neither intersectional nor does it address the structural issues shaping these men into the monsters we look to lock up. In thinking through Raewyn Connell's work on "multiple masculinities," - how masculinity can differ across class, race, sexuality - Michael Salter maintains: "The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well."

In focusing heavily on individuals, with little attention paid to culture or broader structures, the easiest targets of this "toxicity" are men impacted by other forms of structural inequality (such as poverty and racism). These men are then most likely to fall back on to their masculinity due to the overarching discrimination and marginalisation they already face. For them, masculinity becomes a familiar comfort - to women's imminent discomfort. They become the "bad men".

But "good men" are worthy of interrogation, too. While we typically use "good" as a proxy for "non-violent", we miss the fact that these "good men" are complicit in a culture that harms women (and other men). Our behaviours might not be necessarily "toxic" but we take little to no action in actively challenge the system or our own masculinities - because it continues to reap us enough benefits.

What could positive and healthy manhood look like? Is it just ... femininity? Or are "care" and "empathy" maybe just part of the human condition?

In 2019 we largely understand gender as socially constructed, but sometimes I fear that we forget what that really means - to construct socially means that gender comes into action through our ongoing movement, language and dialogue. It becomes enforced and reinforced through continual ritual, repetition and rehearsal from a very, very young age. The more we practice, the more we cement it as a social norm.

Today we're far more comfortable in playing with alternatives to the gender binary. We've taken the playbooks handed to us as children and scribbled in notes, swapped pages - softening the hardcover borders of our masculine and feminine expression. But what we haven't really tried is setting the book alight completely. Burning it to the ground.

Seemingly impossible? Sure. We all have such understandably large investments in our gender identities. Baby steps first: Maybe let's recalibrate our approach to masculinity, because maybe it's our reverence and obsession with masculinity - to constantly define it, demand it, be it - that's most toxic of all.

At the end of the day, I'm still tired. But it's not my iron, not my protein, not my B12.

It's not my testosterone.

But all the masculinity is certainly exhausting.

Dejan Jotanovic is a freelance writer based in Melbourne

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Our society is obsessed with masculinity, and it's making me tired | Dejan Jotanovic

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went to my GP for fatigue. It's important to be diligent about your health when you're vegan. Low iron, low protein, low B12. But my doctor chucked in a new one: "Could be low testosterone."

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Humiliation + Entitlement = to Agreived Entitlement

Men who experience aggreived entitlement perceive violence as jusitified and neccsary for 'restoring' their dominance against those who caused humiliation

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This describes a gender identity that is characteristic of socially or economically marginalised men, whose perceived claim to masculine power is contradicted by economic and social inequality.

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Other men are excluded from the benefits of hegemony in various ways - not afforded the same amount of social prestige. Connell refers to these as ‘subordinate masculinities

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Refers to the hierarchy of masculinities - the dominance of men and the sub-ordinance of women

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Masculinity is situational, meaning that different forms of masculinity arise out of different contexts.

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doing gender" is the idea that gender, rather than being an innate quality of individuals, is a psychologically ingrained social construct that actively surfaces in everyday human interaction.

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-it refers to everyday practices and the way these are typically and habitually performed in (much of) a society.

-Social practices shape everyday life and are familiar to all members of the community, even if not everybody participates in them.

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The constrained liberty of social actors who make choices and decisions regulated by social structures.

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-Organised properties of societies (gender, race, class) that serve as the backdrop to social interaction and communication.