The Adventurous GIT

As a certain world-travelling pagan writer  recently pointed out , using the phrase "toxic masculinity" can be troublesome. By using the phrase, is a speaker implying that all  masculinity is toxic, or only certain types? Since I've dropped the label into both the title and will be using it throughout this post, let me define it as coherently as I can so there can be no future quibbling about what, exactly, I am speaking about. Toxic masculinity, for the purposes of this post, is defined twofold: (1) The behaviors, attitudes, and speech by which people of any gender or none attack (either verbally or physically) others who do not conform to a set or sets of behavior, appearance, and attitude that have been defined by certain cultures as inherently "masculine" or "male." (2) The behaviors, attitudes, and speech by which people of any gender or none argue or imply "male" as the superior gender, and/or interact with "female" in obj...

Less than 20 blog posts into this mad experiment, and I've had my words shared across dozens of pages, a couple hitting views in the thousands. I've been shared to far corners of Facebook whose intersectionality with the Pagan (and specifically Heathen) audience I originally envisioned for this blog makes a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon  seem straightforward. Seriously. But am I someone who should be saying some of these things? They're being shared and read, so there's obviously an audience who appreciates that they're said at all, and a large majority of the feedback I've gotten has been positive. From a certain point of view, I am practically the  worst  person to be sharing these thoughts, though. My upbringing was so cliché American White Bread™, it's practically an SNL skit without a punchline: White, firmly Middle Class, two parents, Christian, Private School, International Exchange Student... The list can go on, but you get the idea. ...

Recently on Facebook, a popular (and very good)  Mythology Page  shared two sets of pictures, and the reactions to both sets were extremely telling, with one picture in particular completely blowing up in terms of reaction and comments. The first set of pictures was from an amusing calendar (which you can, and should, pick up from the original artist HERE ) playing on a punny pin-up theme using the Norse Gods entitled "Dat Às." It's technically pronounced like "ace," and it means "God" or "Deity" in Norse, but you get the joke... So we have a series of beefcake images poking fun at the Norse Gods in a lighthearted way, and the biggest push-back I can find on this page is for the following image: Do you want me to put the hammer down?! The push-back involved a simple error on the artist's part: Using the "Ð" character for the "Th" in Thor, when it should have been "Þ". The difference is "Ð...