Toxic masculinity is evident in the discourse of far-right parties and their political and party officials. However, the emerging trend is one of diffusion and normalization of this discourse more broadly. Our focus is the official, parliamentary discourse of political parties during the period 2015–2022. This timeframe covers both the economic crisis in the Eurozone and the COVID-19 public-health crisis, which has created conditions of vulnerability across large and diverse segments of the population to whom parties address themselves through Parliament. Using Large Language Models (LLMs) and political discourse analysis, our aim is to identify the dominant toxic-masculinity narratives (topics) found in the parliamentary corpora and to trace their partisan and ideological imprint. Having built a platform that integrates the full corpus of parliamentary proceedings—classified by debate and by MP/party—we can detect the relevant linguistic patterns that characterize toxic-masculinity discourse and map their partisan and ideological footprint. Our preliminary findings indicate both the diffusion of these patterns across a wide ideological spectrum that transcends traditional Left–Right divisions, and their convergence with nativist (e.g., anti-immigration) and authoritarian (e.g., patriarchal) patterns. Since our research within the project Masculinities for the Future of European Democracies (MEN4Dem) is comparative and interdisciplinary, we include corresponding material from the parliaments of Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
