Thank you for that question. I will do my best to answer it, but with the caveat that it's extremely complex.
I should note that there's a distinction between what you correctly identified as toxic masculinity and masculinity more generally, and also between toxic masculinity and men. Some effects of the gender culture of the CAF are simply because there are a lot of men in the CAF, and it's an institution that has traditionally been built around men. Some of those effects are neutral or even beneficial. As a woman who works in the defence communities, I sometimes joke that, aside from having to hear about sports all the time, the negative masculine characteristics in my workday are not that extreme. However, there's that particular linkage between a very physical idea of what it is to become a man, that sort of toughness, and the aggression that is sometimes cultured even in Canadian society, but particularly in military training. There is an aspect of dominance, and sometimes even sexual dominance, that can be built into those narratives even unwittingly.
We see it in popular culture as well. The hero of a movie about war is often a hit with the ladies, for example. If you don't think about that critically, you don't realize what the plot line of the romance in the movie is. Can we recognize the fact that it's extremely heteronormative that we associate masculinity with heterosexual sexual prowess and that kind of thing?
It's very difficult to untangle this, the positive or neutral aspects of masculinity and men, from toxic masculinity and how it affects sexual harassment in the military, because what we're essentially getting at is the core identity of the people who serve. There's a proud tradition of being extremely fit and extremely resilient physically, especially within the army combat arms. It's very hard to say that some of that swagger or braggadocio is harmful to your female colleagues because they feel excluded from it, or they feel threatened by it, without also threatening the core of what it can mean for those men to be men and to be soldiers.
I think societally we do a very bad job of explaining what positive masculinity looks like or even discussing positive masculinity. Sometimes I will hear from my CAF colleagues, “I don't grope women. I don't make sexist jokes, but am I toxic? Am I a toxic masculine person simply by virtue of being a man in the military?” Of course the answer is no, but it's very difficult to discuss something as severe as sexual harassment and sexual misconduct without making it about individuals, almost unintentionally.
I don't know if I've answered your question. I'm sorry.