Can Tantra Offer an Alternative to Toxic Masculinity?

Criticism can identify what is wrong with masculinity, but it cannot by itself teach a boy or man what to become. The phrase toxic masculinity points towards patterns such as domination, emotional shutdown, entitlement and the use of violence to protect a fragile identity. Naming those patterns is useful. Leaving a vacuum in their place is not.

Men need a positive education in strength, sexuality, responsibility, emotion and relationship. Tantric men’s work is one attempt to provide it. The important question is not whether the label sounds ancient or exotic, but whether the practice produces men who are more trustworthy, present and capable of carrying responsibility.

In brief

• Condemning harmful male behaviour is not the same as forming healthy men.
• A useful men’s group combines honesty, standards, mutual challenge and practical training.
• Strength and tenderness are not opposites when both are governed by awareness.

The problem with defining men by pathology

A boy who repeatedly hears what men must not be may become careful, but he does not necessarily become mature. He still needs answers to practical questions. What is courage without recklessness? What is leadership without control? How should he relate to anger, desire, competition, failure and the feminine?

Where credible adults and communities do not answer, somebody else will. Online figures offer certainty, hierarchy and a language of power. Their appeal is not always evidence that boys admire cruelty. It may show that clarity, even distorted clarity, feels preferable to shame and vagueness.

The alternative cannot be a return to a model in which men are emotionally sealed, sexually entitled and valued only as providers. It must be a fuller model.

What Tantra contributes

Tantra is often reduced in the West to sexual workshops or mystical decoration. In the traditions and communities I have encountered, it is a broader worldview concerned with consciousness, energy, discipline, love and the relationship between apparently opposite qualities.

Applied to men’s work, this creates a useful starting point: masculinity is neither a licence nor a defect. It is a field of potential that requires education.

Traditionally masculine capacities such as direction, discernment, courage and the willingness to protect are not rejected. They are tested. Direction without listening becomes domination. Discernment without humility becomes judgement. Courage without care becomes risk for its own sake. Protection without respect becomes possession.

Qualities commonly described as softer, including empathy, receptivity, affection and emotional openness, are not presented as evidence that a man has become less masculine. They make strength safer and more intelligent.

Inside a men’s group

Foca Yariv, who has led tantric men’s groups in London, described the work to me as a combination of understanding and practice. Men speak honestly about relationships, sexuality, fear, purpose and failure, but conversation is not the final product. The group asks how insight changes conduct outside the room.

This matters because men can use language about consciousness as another form of performance. A person may speak fluently about vulnerability and remain unreliable. He may praise the feminine in theory while treating actual women as instruments of validation. The group must therefore return repeatedly to behaviour.

Can he admit a mistake without collapsing or counterattacking? Does he keep his word? Can he hear a boundary? Does he use anger as information rather than permission? Can he remain present when a partner’s emotional reality does not flatter him?

Responsibility rather than superiority

One long-term participant told me that the central change was accepting greater responsibility for his life. That distinction is crucial. Healthy masculinity is not a claim to rank above women or other men. It is an increasing willingness to answer for one’s choices, impact and unused capacities.

Responsibility also corrects a common distortion in spiritual and self-development spaces. Men can become fascinated by archetypes, polarity and heroic language while neglecting ordinary duties. No symbolic warrior compensates for unpaid bills, broken promises, dishonest sexuality or emotional absence.

The test of an ideal is the life it produces.

Respecting the feminine without idealising women

Tantric language often speaks of Shakti, the dynamic feminine principle. At its best, this invites men to approach the feminine with wonder rather than conquest and to recognise qualities they may have devalued in themselves.

But veneration can become another abstraction. Real women are not symbols placed on an altar. They are individuals with judgement, contradiction, agency and boundaries. A man does not demonstrate reverence by projecting perfection onto women. He demonstrates it by meeting them as full human beings.

Likewise, women are not responsible for validating a man’s masculine development. Men’s work should reduce that burden, not disguise it.

The middle path between macho and passive

Many men experience the cultural choice as a crude binary. Become hard, dominant and invulnerable, or become agreeable, apologetic and detached from your own force. Neither produces an integrated adult.

The middle path is not a bland compromise. It asks for enough strength to tolerate tenderness and enough sensitivity to govern strength. A man may need to set a boundary firmly in one moment and listen without defence in the next. Maturity lies partly in choosing the quality the situation requires rather than performing a fixed identity.

Standards for any men’s work

Tantric groups do not receive an exemption from scrutiny because their intentions are spiritual. Any group can reproduce hierarchy, conformity or charismatic abuse. Useful men’s work should welcome questions, respect consent, distinguish guidance from obedience and allow members to leave without punishment.

Its effects should also be visible beyond the group. Are partners safer and more respected? Are participants less defensive and more dependable? Do they become capable of intimacy without losing direction? Do they use power with greater restraint?

From critique to formation

The strongest argument for tantric men’s work is not that it owns the final definition of masculinity. It is that it treats character as a practice.

Men do not become trustworthy by adopting the right vocabulary. Responsibility, presence, courage, erotic integrity and emotional honesty are formed through repeated choices, honest feedback and service to something beyond the ego.

The phrase toxic masculinity may help us recognise a poisoned expression. Men still need somewhere to learn how the same energies can become medicine.