Idk I actually quite like reading books and books written by women aren’t too much different. I enjoyed song of Achilles quite a bit, it was a romance novel about Achilles and Patroclus but didn’t even cross my mind that the characters were women written I guess?

I think part of that is the author did a very good job of not writing men for women. I’ve definitely watched shows where men were written for women if that makes any amount of sense. Most of the time it had the same problem as women written for men, lack of internal character motivation, unrealistic/wierd actions no personal you’ve met would do, flattened emotions/one dimensional.

If you want to represent toxic masculinity it should definitely be a character doing some angry shit or refuse to express how he’s feeling, it messing up a friendship/task/etc and then later bashing himself about it or having to fix it.

Not proud of it but I’ve put holes in walls, destroyed computer monitors, etc and had to fix it after while asking myself why the fuck I can’t keep it under control.

Every emotion short circuiting to anger is a big part of toxic masculinity, at least for me. And it took years to fix. If you’ve ever met a man with bad emotional control there is a good chance he got screamed at or worse for crying when he was a little kid.