In June 2003 the band Electric Six released their debut album Fire. I still have that album lying around somewhere. One of the songs on that album was called Gay Bar in which the music video depicted Abraham Linclon in the White House hanging out with other men that also look a lot like Abraham Linclon. The music video won two best music video of the year awards. The song made it to No. 5 in UK singles charts, but interesting only made it No. 32 in the Irish charts. I haven’t heard the song in years. However, as soon as I heard about the war breaking out in Iran, this song was the first thing to come into my head, and every time I see lunatic world leaders bragging about their supreme military capabilities on the news I immediately start singing that song in my head. What’s also interesting is that song was released a month after the Iraq began back in 2003.

So what’s the connection? No, I not suggesting that these so-called leaders are homosexual but rather the answer belongs to the realm of toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity refers to cultural norms and behaviours associated with traditional male roles that promote harmful traits and attitudes. These include:

• Aggression and Dominance: Valuing physical strength and aggression, often leading to violence or bullying.
• Emotional Suppression: Discouraging men from expressing emotions or vulnerability, promoting the idea that showing feelings is a sign of weakness.
• Heteronormativity: Upholding strict norms around gender and sexuality, often stigmatising anything perceived as feminine or non-heterosexual.
• Entitlement: Expecting power and control in personal relationships and society, often leading to misogyny and disregard for others’ rights.

These toxic men, that are not just limited to world leaders of course, spend their whole lives unconsciously trying to prove to the world that they are the manliest of men because the worst thing possible in their fragile egos is that someone might perceive them as ‘gay’. Nothing wrong with actually being gay by the way, but to the toxic male being gay means being less than a man, an idea that only lives inside their mind. Of course for the rest of us being gay doesn’t make you any more or less of a man than anyone else. To understand the problem I need to go back to the beginning, when we were all tiny children.

Every person begins life with what psychoanalytic theory calls psychic bisexuality. By this I do not mean sexual orientation. Rather, the term refers to the idea that the psyche (the mind) contains both masculine and feminine dispositions. It suggests that individuals possess the potential to identify with either gender and the capacity for attraction toward either sex, with later developmental experiences shaping how these potentials are ultimately expressed.

From this perspective, toxic masculinity can be interpreted as a cultural mechanism that represses the expression of traits associated with the feminine, such as expressing emotions, asking for help, or showing vulnerability, enforcing a narrow and defensive form of masculine identity. According to psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva this repression takes the form of abjection, which is a violent, compulsive disavowal of anything deemed as feminine, soft, or dependent.

In Kristeva’s framework, abjection explains why men wound themselves. A boy socialised into patriarchal masculinity doesn’t simply learn to value dominance, he learns to abject, to expel and violently repudiate, everything associated with the mother, vulnerability, and interdependence. This creates a constant internal civil war: the more a man identifies with rigid masculinity, the more aggressively he must reject any sign of his own vulnerability, embodiment, or relational capacity. Basically men with toxic masculinity traits are in deep denial about their repressed feminine side.

Andy Fisher’s work in ecopsychology adds another crucial layer: this dissociation is not just personal pathology but political. The psychological splitting that creates toxic masculinity also justifies the domination of nature, women, and any group coded as “natural” or “body-identified.” Patriarchy, ecology, and individual psychology aren’t separate systems, they’re expressions of the same wounded masculine consciousness.

One can see this so clearly in the likes of Trump, Ben, Putin, and many others in their quest to dominate and their pre-occupation with doing absolutely everything within their power to make sure they don’t show any sign of weakness. One can also see that when other leaders such as the UK Prime Minister and the Spanish Prime Minister question and call out Trump, Trumps response is to try and shame them for showing weakness or for showing their feminine side. Then you have the Epstein files, that’s just got toxic masculinity written all over it. Well Mr. Trump and all the other toxic leaders, we know your dirty dark secret, yeah we know you have a feminine side, and your greatest fear is it being exposed.

However, the feminine dimensions of the psyche that toxic masculinity rejects aren’t weakness. They’re wisdom.

Interdependence, attunement to cycles and seasons, receptivity to other beings, and recognition of mutual vulnerability aren’t feminine weaknesses imposed on men, they’re capacities inherent to human psychology and essential to survival on a finite planet. The abjected “feminine” is actually ecological intelligence.

When a man reconnects with the natural world, not as a place to conquer but as a living community of which he is part, something profound shifts. He begins, necessarily, to recover his own relational and embodied self. He must recognize that he depends on soil and water and other creatures. He must develop attunement to subtle changes, to patterns of growth and decay. He must practice receptivity and patience. He must surrender the fantasy of autonomous control.

This isn’t New Age sentimentality. It’s the essence of healing from the psychological abjection that creates both toxic masculinity and ecological destruction. I don’t think we can ever cure these toxic world leaders, but by learning about what toxic masculinity is, we may begin to see it more clearly in both ourselves and in others, and with that knowledge we may be more objective about who we vote in as our leaders. Maybe we will still want these types of leaders or maybe we won’t, but at least it will be an informed choice. Here in Ireland we don’t really see those kinds of extremes in politics. We see a few with extreme views trying to make their way into politics, but I think the general public are smart enough to see through them. For me, I’d much rather see a more rounded leader in charge, whether they be a man or a woman.

Ultan