The Twisting of Tonic Masculinity

the use of words to mean their opposite

I have been mulling over another tonic masculinity episode for some weeks and talking with my daughters and women friends about how the term’s been appropriated and redefined. The question that I’ve asked myself is whether my objection to its use without attribution is egoic, in wanting credit, or something more important.

I’d like to open that question in the comments because maybe I’m being petty and should drop it and let this term have a life of its own. Or maybe feeling bullied into being passive, aka female, and not defending my intellectual progeny (not property) is emblematic of the problem. You tell me.

I’ll start by presenting the context of its origins when I responded to Charles Eisenstein’s post I Like to Fight. Then I’ll dive into the interview of ‘The Tonic 7’ on RealFemSapiens and their definition of the term.

As I prepared to write this episode, Jay Rollins added to his Tonic Masculinity Project by inviting a guest post by W. McCrae for a woman’s perspective on Trusting Men. I didn’t save a copy of my comment before he deleted it, but it expressed that I didn’t know how to feel about my erasure from the concept. It seemed to me that if Charles Eisenstein had coined it, rather than me in response to him, it would have been attributed every time.

I also noted that he and William Hunter Duncan were not part of the Tonic 7 interview after he broke with ‘John Carter’ as “the angriest person [he’s] ever known.” So it seemed that Tonic Masculinity had, in turn, been stolen from him. Jay posted in reply:

Tereza, no one owns "Tonic Masculinity." It's [a] fine, pithy turn of phrase, but the work was clearly defining it, and that work has been done.

Please don't use my comments section to air your personal grievances, particularly those directed at people not mentioned in an article, and please don't shit-stir here. The situation to which you're referring is over, and is not relevant to McCrae's excellent, positive piece.

This is my house. If I want drama here, believe me when I say I know how to initiate it and how to end it. If you want drama, you have a blog of your own.

Does that feel like a threat to you? “Believe me when I say I know how to initiate and end drama”? My reading is that I should feel intimidated and afraid of retaliation. And is it drama, shit-stirring or a personal grievance to tell the person who hijacked your term that it’s not okay? If what I said had no credence, there was no reason for Jay to delete it.

But Jay’s point is that my pithy little turn of phrase was nothing and the real work was defining it, and “that work has been done.” In which case, I suggest they take the work they’ve done, over which they clearly have ownership, and invent a pithy little phrase to express it. If it’s worth nothing, that shouldn’t be hard.

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In the meantime, let’s look at the concept that Charles Eisenstein explained, to which I responded with a definition that I then coined tonic masculinity:

I Like to Fight

In a nuanced article called I Like to Fight, Charles describes the annual convergence of a men’s organization called the Sacred Sons. He stands in a circle of men, thinking, “Without the kind of healing I am seeing here, this world has no chance. The world can heal only if men heal. And it is happening. We are ready.” As men stepped into the circle and told their stories, he wrote:

The field of love in the circle was palpable, dispelling the fear, the posturing, the guarding, and the hiding that keeps men apart and denies them “the brotherhood that is the medicine.” It was a masculine love: uncompromising in its stand for what we know each man can become.

He concludes with:

What I will say next, though I am speaking of men, applies also to women when circumstances call forth their inner masculine. In my speech that night, I invoked a story I heard about one of America’s all-too-common mass shootings, the Aurora Theater shooting of 2012. Four of the men who died there died because they interposed their bodies between their girlfriends and the shooter. I said something like this: “That is a core aspect of masculinity. Each man here has it in him to do that. Each man here would offer his life to protect what he loves, to protect life itself.” I continued, “The fact that many men, including ourselves, have often failed miserably to live up to that potential does not make it untrue. It is who we really are, and our purpose here is to bring this, our true nature, into full manifestation.”

In those words I was also suggesting what the higher incarnation of the fight is. The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die. Courage and not violence defines him. The fight, then, is a special case, appropriate in special circumstances, of the willingness to put everything on the line, to offer even one’s own body and all the ego holds precious, in service to life.

The world is in bad shape right now. Rainforests are disappearing, insects are declining, children are going hungry, entire nations are falling into poverty, wars are raging, health is declining, totalitarian powers are ascending. We need men who are willing to risk themselves to change all that. Sometimes, this does involve an actual fight, for example legal battles, debates, political battles. I honor the fighters. However, the ultimate victory will not be won by fighting.

To this I responded, “This does my heart good. I think we need a world that puts children at the center, surrounded by women, who are surrounded by men. Tonic masculinity.”

What are the salient points Charles made that I defined as tonic masculinity?

• [to] offer his life to protect what he loves, to protect life itself.

• one who is willing, if need be, to die.

• Courage and not violence defines him.

• … the willingness to put everything on the line, to offer even one’s own body and all the ego holds precious, in service to life.

• who are willing to risk themselves to change all that.

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Now let’s look at how the Bro Pack has defined the term. In Mark Bisone’s The Cat Was Never Found, he posted In From the Cold in which he wrote:

On January 10 of this new year, my good buddy Jay Rollins started a fire.

It was the best kind of fire, the one which warms and illuminates. Similar campfires have been dotting the landscape ever since, prompting some seriously talented writers to add their own insights to Jay’s brilliant formulation of “tonic masculinity” as an antidote to our cultural and spiritual disease.

The beauty of tonic masculinity is that it is a team sport. To act as men is to build up the other men around us, so that together we can stave off the forces of entropy, chaos, mediocrity and evil. It pushes us to unearth those talents that are best suited for such a worthwhile purpose, not only in ourselves but in each other.

Thus far, John Carter, Harrison Koehli and L.P. Koch have gifted us with brilliant takes on the concept.

In Mark’s attribution to Jay, my pithy phrase becomes a ‘brilliant formulation’ to which three men have gifted ‘brilliant takes on the concept.’ Mark, it turns out, will be the only one to ever mention me. In The Bro Pill that links to the interview, after a list of the (tonic) men it was raining, he added that Third Paradigm’s Tereza Coraggio has been doing a kind of meta-commentary series on our articles.

He was also the only one to mention me in the interview when he said, “Tereza, the female writer who’s last name I forget … we’ve been engaging with her and I appreciate her work—from a certain angle—but …” and then names a point where he disagrees.

You can see how awkward this is. Without saying that I’m the originator of the term, there’s no reason for Mark to have brought me up as merely a female writer. I’m surprised that the interviewer, Aly Drummond, didn’t ask where the phrase came from. I would have been curious about their response.

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Here’s the reason I think that attribution is readily and enthusiastically given to Jay and then I become a random fan doing a meta-commentary on them: they’re defining masculinity as opposed to femininity, rather than tonic vs. toxic, and it’s unmanly that the term was coined by a woman.

Their version of tonic masculinity is against feminine traits in men, who they see as weak and flabby, against gay men, particularly anti-trans, and anti-women in general except for those they see as exceptions. This includes the interviewer Aly.

Aly is mid-20’s, married in the military and pregnant. She states that her audience is almost all men, “maybe there are a few women,” and will probably always be men. I watched Aly’s initial video manifesto, From Feminism to Freedom, and I have to say that I like her. She’s speaking from her own experience, which is refreshing, and reminds me of Candace Owens, who I was surprised to find I agreed with on many points. Yet Aly is what my daughters tell me is a ‘pick-me girl’ who bonds with men by throwing other women under the bus.

She “gets yelled at by women” when she quotes statistics like 50.1% of women are childless; by 2030, 45% of women between 22 and 45 will be single; and marriage is occurring at a rate of 6 per 1000. She’s against a ‘gynocentric social order’ that ‘pedastalizes’ women and realized after college that “all the problems in [her] life came from women. She states, “I want to stay home and serve my husband” and that, if you’re lucky enough to marry a masculine man, expect to be told to your face that things you say are stupid.

As a data junkie myself, I would never yell at Aly for these stats, which I think illustrate the problem. But I don’t think this problem has been created by putting women on pedestals, nor do I think it’s the fault of men. As I’ve said, I think we have a system that serves the ejaculations of men with children as an inconvenient byproduct.

What Aly is citing goes to my definition of tonic masculinity. We need a world that puts children at the center, not gynocentric but childcentric. And that puts mothers with them, surrounded by men. In the discussion they talk about women in the military not needing to serve if they’re pregnant or breastfeeding, so they can have sequential babies and ‘cheat’ the system. Is that a gynocentric social order?

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Another concept Aly brings up is the longhouse. In online right circles, this represents the female-dominated Iroquois system of governance to which our leftist culture is devolving. They observe with satisfaction that when militaristic Western cultures came in, they wiped them out. I’m not sure why destroying communities of elderly, women and children would be considered a masculine virtue but in any case, it’s contradicted by the Iroquois story of the Jigonsaseh I tell in When Mothers Ran the World, linked at the end.

Here are some examples, without attribution, of statements in the interview made by ‘the Tonic 7’ that I considered to be anti-feminine rather than anti-toxic:

• Masculinity is like porn, you know it when you see it.

• Masculinity is ‘superiality’—being willing to part with the consensus. It displeases women when you have a strong opinion they don’t agree with and you don’t ‘soften’ it.

• No one likes a mixed workforce very much because men can’t fight with a girl—if you win, you lose and if you lose, you’ve lost to a girl. It’s not like a male competency hierarchy.

• Masculinity is single-minded focus, breaking something down.

• Why is masculinity called toxic? Because men are more disagreeable. It’s going to be a man who stands up with his arms crossed and says, “This is wrong.”

• The longhouse is enforced egalitarianism because women don’t want to stick out and be the best at anything.

• Women compete indirectly, which creates an opening for psychopaths to enter and be given power. That’s not as easy in direct competition.

• It seems like every girl I see on Tinder is talking about how much they like watching True Crime Dramas. [They’re] writing letters to serial killers. Because of sexual depolarization, we have feminized men who are fat and women who aren’t so attractive, so they end up looking for Dark Triad guys.

• The left invented toxic masculinity. By introducing the idea of tonic masculinity and pushing it into the lexicon, we’re flipping the script. Toxic is the absence of masculinity as well as when it goes a little bit too far and you have a serial killer.

Essentially, then, they’re defining tonic masculinity as something that’s a hair below serial killers who, along with men who aren’t very masculine, are what they define as toxic masculinity. It’s an attempt to flip the script using my term as a lever. What they’re careful never to do is define toxic masculinity because the traits commonly associated with it—domination, arrogance, superiority, competition, violence and outright misogyny—are what they’re calling tonic. Problem solved!

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When I look at all the problems that Charles lists and their urgency and severity, it’s clear to me that we need to heal the heart of the world. It will take women and men together to do that, especially men like these who are complex, original thinkers and excellent writers. Tonic means healing while toxicity is poison. What needs to be healed, in my opinion, is the relationship between men and women in the common cause of raising children—not just their own family but a whole generation.

I hope that they join me in that.

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For an alternate history of the Iroquois longhouse, here’s When Mothers Ran the World:

In a recent essay on The Rings of Power, Charles Eisenstein differentiates between feminine power and 'honorary men.' The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow tells the creation epic of The League of Five Nations and the Jigonsaseh, or Mother of All Nations. As we enter our dark winter of the soul and look at the cult of immaturity in so-called leadership, they show us why we are orphaned by our culture and deprived of the feminine power of all of us.

and this is the first episode I did on ‘the Bro Pack,’ Tonic Masculinity & the Mad Hatter:

Unbeknownst to me, eight magnificent male writers took my concept and ran with it! Jay Rollins wrote Tate Modern, John Carter of Postcards from Barsoom wrote Tonic Masculinity, Harrison Koehli on Political Ponerology writes "What is a man? Quality masculinity is tonic masculinity", Luc Koch does What is Tonic Masculinity?, Mark Bisone of The Cat Was Never Found wrote In From the Cold, William Hunter Duncan of Born on the Fourth of July posted Sacred Masculine, Grant Smith wrote Tonic Intersectionality, and Doctor Hammer published The Hearth and the Wild Wood. I conceived an idea and the boys birthed and nurtured a movement!