Men & Women & the Tonic Tilt
on Head Jester John Carter of Postcards from Barsoom
On my way to the Farmer’s Market, I ran into my favorite book slut. This is a term I use with admiration, since I can only aspire to be as indiscriminate in my genre affections. In lieu of hello, I asked what she was reading. The Sentence, she replied, by Louise Erdrich. But in this case, it seemed, her affections were not reciprocated:
I just get tired of it being so anti-white. I’m reading and thinking, ‘Hey, I’m white.’ And anti-male. There’s one good male character. I just don’t know why we can’t like each other.
I would describe my friend as a post-hippie feminist, who reads Afro-futurism and Latin magical realism as well as fluff pieces on Orcs opening coffeeshops (Legends & Lattes being her ‘cozy fantasy’ recommendation). I’m just saying that it takes a lot for this woman to have reached the end of her confront-your-inner-racist rope.
Why can’t we just like each other? It’s a damn good question.
In this second of the series, I’m responding to John Carter of the visually sumptuous and verbally scandalous Postcards from Barsoom. As a provocateur par excellence, I’m sure that scandal is his game and controversy his aim. John is a complex thinker and we found unusual common ground in critiquing the metaphysics of veganism. We also discussed anarchy and multiethnic nationalism. And had some words on words. These are some of the interesting conversations in the comments on The Mad Hatter, and I recommend checking them out and jumping in.
My focus here is John’s article on Tonic Masculinity:
There are four questions that John’s essay prompted, that I’ll be addressing:
Is the soul of a woman different than the soul of a man?
John talks about sexual depolarization. Is sexuality polarized?
When men bond over a common goal, what should that be?
Why can’t we just like each other?
John begins by talking about gender dysphoria as a general malaise in the culture. As he says, “We’ve got plenty of physically mature humans wandering about who have no real idea of what it is to be a man or a woman. Evidence: just look at them.” And then he refers to an essay on The Artificial Woman authored by, in his words, “The always fascinating and ever-so-slightly terrifying Megha Lillywhite. Megha writes:
… leftists and traditionalists alike have deconstructed the woman to her component parts and in the process missed her soul. For leftists, the woman is a concentration of estrogen in the bloodstream, a set of breasts made of silicon or otherwise, a makeup regime and a pronoun. For traditionalists, the woman is a biological window, a number of eggs in her ovaries, an artificial womb, mammary glands to feed a child, a maid to clean the home and make food. Both movements profane the essence of a woman that has the power to inspire: her humanity.
Megha then quotes Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable in the scene where Fantine sells her knee-length hair so her daughter can have a wool skirt and not be naked in the cold. Megha cites this as Woman for Sale. Yet the part that Fantine sold was an ornament, the part she kept—the one that would do anything for her daughter—was her soul.
John writes:
As the old saying has it, women are born, men are made. The distinction isn’t as pure as that, but there’s an essential truth to it. Even in the absence of good guidance, and saturated with terrible advice, a lot of females will sort of muddle through and figure out more or less how to become a woman through sheer instinct if nothing else. Males need to be shown the way towards becoming men. They need to be molded and tested by other men. They need to be torn down and built up, terrorized and encouraged, bullied and bantzed.
The word soul comes from the Gothic saiwala meaning a drop returning to the sea. I don’t think there is a spiritual difference between the drops that fall into the bodies of men or of women or of individuals at all. But a woman is born again as a mother when she gives birth and forever after her heart lives outside her body. There is, from my experience, an instinct that takes over of the scariest love imaginable, that you don’t choose and you’re helpless to resist. It never lets go.
I think that for men, they have a choice to love or not to love. A man might not even know he fathered a child because he has the kind of relationships that aren’t. A man can walk away once or several times a day. But the choice to love and take responsibility for a child, day in, day out, is the surest way a man becomes a man. It’s a humbling experience because there’s nowhere to hide from reality—every judgment you have of others will come back to haunt you in the form of your kids. Charles Eisenstein and Doctor Hammer are exemplars of that path to manhood.
But it extends, I think, to seeing every woman as a potential Mother, whether or not she has children or will ever have children. The primary function that makes a woman a woman has been turned into a luxury, a hobby on the side, if you can afford it. When a mother is forced to walk away from a child, a world collapses. There is no greater sign of society’s failure. And it happens every day in a million homes because of our twisted system that says our purpose in life is to make the rich richer. That needs to change.
the polarity of sexuality
My earliest epiphany that so-called dichotomies were not was in third grade when a visiting priest talked about free will vs. predestination. I’ll save that for another time. The next was in college taking some personality exam, maybe the Myers-Briggs—which I’ve just discovered to have been developed by a mother and daughter. I felt that I was both an introvert and extrovert but not something in the middle.
As a myopic kid who walked with an open book, I was an extreme loner with, it must be said, a chip on my shoulder against the popular kids. Sometime in high school I was cast in the role of a Greenwich Village bopper and decided to stay in character. Being an extrovert was something I considered work, so I took it seriously and perhaps became better at it than those who expected it to be fun.
I think that masculine-feminine is the same—two different continuums that intersect. If we look at the masculine as rationality, logic, literalism, the extreme of that alone might be termed autism. If we look at the feminine as intuition, imagery, symbolism, the extreme of that would be schizophrenia. Neither one is better. Neither is useful on its own, even within the same person.
In Imagination Seeks Attention, I linked to Jill Bolte Taylor’s TEDtalk, which is very powerful. As a neuroanatomist, she has a stroke on the left side of her brain, which might be termed the masculine. She describes beautifully her experience of the right side, which was an expansive feeling of wellbeing and Oneness, a moment of the eternal present in which she felt at peace and love for everyone.
And then the left side would kick in and say, “We’ve got a problem.” She describes the laborious process of finding a coworker’s number from comparing nonsensical shapes and dialing it, only to find she’d forgotten language and talked like a golden retriever! Help arrives anyway and years of rehab follow but she believes that accessing the right side of the brain through meditation is the way to imagine world peace and bringing that back to the left side is the way to accomplish it.
In the same way, I feel that the healing of masculinity and femininity only happens in tandem. The tonic form of both is plotted on the diagonal, starting where the lines intersect. To become stronger as a man means drawing on the right side of the brain where you might be engulfed in an expansive sense of love for all people. To become a fuller woman means taking that intuitive love as a mother into the analytical realm of how to make the world you want for your child possible for everyone.
project for a neo-gonzo century
John writes:
Male groups function best when they serve as vehicles for the direction of their members’ collective will to power. They need to be directed at making real, consequential changes in the world, in such a fashion as to directly improve both the members’ lives and the lives of those they care about. … The key element is that the group is organized around a project, and the project is something that will raise the status of members by improving the lives of people in their community, ideally by bringing something new into those lives that they didn’t previously have access to. The whole self-improvement angle of Tonic Masculinity is a subset of goal-directed activities: you want your bros to be fit, strong, and sharp because that makes all of you fitter, stronger, and sharper, and thereby makes the goal, any goal, easier to achieve.
What is a goal worthy of these fitter, stronger, sharper TiTonic Men, not to be confused with Titanic? Saving the world is the only project that comes to mind. Forget skinning Bambi or becoming one with the wolf pack—those are merely means to an end, as John points out. There are numbers to crunch and algorithms to write, unsexy as that might seem. There’s a vampire squid of a global economy that needs to be cut down to sushi-size and you’re the right men for the job.
My book awaits.
why can’t we all just get along?
I started this post with my friend’s question—can we just like other cultures, genders, ethnicities, races, without having to dislike others? In the Battle of the Sexes, can we lay down our arms and snuggle into someone else’s? Does someone have to lose for someone else to win?
In David Graeber & David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, they write about schismogenesis as the tendency for neighboring tribes to define themselves in opposition to each other. When I respond to Doctor Hammer, I’ll be bringing that into the psychological jiu-jitzu required to raise three girls. But the Davids say that in every culture, the primary measure of a boy is “not a girl” and a girl is “not a boy.” They always push away from each other, no matter how little distinction is made.
Maturity is, I believe, getting over this. Masculinity is the right foot and femininity the left. If you only use one, you go in circles.
In conclusion, I’ve struggled with whether John’s essay is a very witty and erudite “Bros before Hos,” a word that John uses more freely than I’d prefer, which is not at all. I think that it’s up to women to reinvent words like slut and whore, but they should be off-limits for men in the same way the n-word is for whites. Just my opinion, which may get me voted off the island.
As the contrarian of political correctness, however, John brings up topics that deserve discussion and he does it in a way that’s smart and quick-witted, making connections that need to be made. If you have an offendable bone in your body, check it at the gate to Barsoom. If you are easily offended, don’t land. But if you want to explore the foreign terrain of an entirely original and untamed mind, enter at your own risk. The cyberwolf is friendlier than you think and likes to be scratched behind the ears.
I will be continuing this series next with William Hunter Duncan, who wrote Sacred Masculine and Second Christmas on his blog, Born on the Fourth of July. In the meantime, check out Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk on Imagination Seeks Attention:
In this far-ranging video, I look at whether AI art is Art, an article by M T Xen on Imaginal Hygiene, and a TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor on My Stroke of Insight. Rob Brezsny looks at imagination as the magic wand that shapes your future and Caroline Casey says, "Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow." The right side of the brain is what A Course in Miracles describes as revelation, with the linear left side describing miracles. I posit imagination as the corpus callosum between the two, passing love notes.
And to continue the theme of imagination, this is The Utopian Imagination on Naomi Klein:
In Russell Brand's interview, Naomi asks "What does the world look like after we win?" She states that we need a vision, a revival of the utopian imagination. I talk about the arrogance of hopelessness, and propose AA groups for activists addicted to it. We need to find our people, who take seriously that we will win and develop pragmatic visions. I quote Ursula K. LeGuin's speech that "Hard times are coming ... We'll need writers who can remember freedom." I suggest that our utopia-planning committee fall madly in love with each other and rigorously challenge ideas while adoring the person—something for which Russell's viewers are perfect.
Personally, I envision sexual polarity the same way I think about a magnet. The N and S poles are distinct in one sense, but intrinsic parts of the same whole in another. Each completes the opposite, and in the middle they flow into one another and become indistinguishable. However, the more distinct the two poles become, the further apart they move, the stronger the magnet, and the further its field can reach. Just so with sexual polarity. Each sex needs the other, but the more distinct they become, the stronger their unity. Thus a society of highly masculine men, and very feminine women, tends to have greater dynamic energy than an exhausted, dissipated society of depolarized androgynes.
The 'bros before hos' vibe was deliberate, and is something of a reaction to the current state of society, in which male spaces are de facto banned, and it therefore becomes extremely difficult for men to come into their own.
This is perfection:
“A woman is born again as a mother when she gives birth and forever after her heart lives outside her body. There is, from my experience, an instinct that takes over of the scariest love imaginable, that you don’t choose and you’re helpless to resist. It never lets go.
I think that for men, they have a choice to love or not to love. A man might not even know he fathered a child because he has the kind of relationships that aren’t. A man can walk away once or several times a day. But the choice to love and take responsibility for a child, day in, day out, is the surest way a man becomes a man. It’s a humbling experience because there’s nowhere to hide from reality—every judgment you have of others will come back to haunt you in the form of your kids.”