It’s become fashionable to call men toxic – to call masculinity a toxic thing, poisonous to culture and relationships. It hasn’t always been this way.

Though many women (and some primping men) through the centuries have taken some issue with the natural testosterone-infused aggression of men, the almost ubiquitous maligning of masculinity in the modern age is quite new – and quite bizarre – the product of a social-media culture that is everywhere all at once and decidedly misanthropic. Yes, they hate women, too, but men and their masculinity receive the lion’s share of the histrionic venom.

The modern man-haters would be scandalized by the late, great Hollywood legend Katherine Hepburn, who worshiped masculinity. She famously said: “I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to, and I’ve made enough money to support myself, and ain’t afraid of being alone.”

Indeed, men are the primary creators of things, the major doers of things, the ultimate protectors of people, the makers of civilizations and laws that honor both women and men, the front-line warriors battling the forces of evil that haunt each generation of humans. This is not to immune the fairer sex, we have different strengths. Women do many things of which men are not capable. They deserve their own commentary but alas, I’m a man and cannot write from a different point of view.

And men – real men – say exactly what’s on their minds in public, damn the torpedoes. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. Mr. Gable could not have said such a thing in modern movies, where women are the alleged heroes and men stand beside them grinning like ninnies.

The modern world wishes to make men “something else,” which Ralph Waldo Emerson warned about almost 200 years ago. Yes, being yourself was evidently a problem for all people even in Emerson’s day and before, through antiquity.

But never in the history of the world has one human gender be asked (demanded) to stop being itself. Many men now balk and simper and dissemble in public or on social media. Famous actors don’t stride confidently like the masculine giants Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster and Sean Connery. Young men are now told they must ask if they can kiss a woman, renouncing the age-old masculinity that real women love: She shows a desire to be kissed, and the attentive man accommodates her happily. The list of emasculating demands is endless.

But for a man to truly be a man, he must embrace his masculinity, enjoy it, celebrate it and express it. He must do as Emerson said: He must be himself in a world that is constantly trying to make him something else.

Katherine Hepburn would very much approve.