Tonic Masculinity & the Mad Hatter
Tonic Masculinity & the Mad Hatter
On Jay Rollins and his merry band of men: one for all and all for one!
This is a tale of two Tonic Masculinities. As I mentioned in Tonic Masculinity and Feminine Wiles, I had coined the term (to my knowledge) in a comment on Charles Eisenstein’s I Like to Fight, where I wrote: “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.” Jay Rollins, who writes The Wonderland Rules, wrote: “Stealing ‘tonic masculinity.’" I replied: “Yes please!” Then six weeks later, Jay posted a cryptic note: “Me and the boys took it and ran with it. :-D”
I didn’t discover what he meant until my reader Gavin Mounsey commented: “Looks like people are scooping your term and running with it!” followed by a list of links.
So Jay wrote Tate Modern on Jan 10. On Jan 14, John Carter of Postcards from Barsoom wrote Tonic Masculinity saying "I stole that from Jay Rollins, and I’m not giving it back." On Jan 19, Harrison Koehli on Political Ponerology writes "What is a man? Quality masculinity is tonic masculinity" citing John Carter and with a clever gin & tonic photo and then Luc Koch does What is Tonic Masculinity? citing all three.
In one, they mentioned Doctor Hammer, to whom I was already subscribed, so on his latest I posted this chronology and invited him to further thievery since, as a dad of three daughters, he might have a different perspective. I got replies from all four along with Mark Bisone of The Cat Was Never Found who wrote: “Hey, you left me out, Tereza! I stole it too!” And I since found that William Hunter Duncan, author of Born on the Fourth of July, also posted on it. His comments and link on my Malone post added some deep analysis on JJ Couey. And Grant Smith of The Radical American Mind!
To their thoughtful responses, I wrote:
The first thing I want to say is that you're magnificent writers and I'm so pleased to have this somewhat accidental association with all of you. Mark, I'm looking forward to reading yours also. When I told my daughters I was an influencer, I said, "And these aren't just any blogs. These guys have put in research into the etymology, the context, the connotations and created a whole world around it, complete with sci-fi imagery. I feel like, in an odd little flip, I had the momentary pleasure of conception and they did the hard labor of bringing it to birth and nurturing it into life."
What I'd like to do is join the conversation. When I posted my own Substack on Tonic Masculinity & Feminine Wiles, unknowingly at the same time as yours, it was in response to someone who banned me for 100 yrs for commenting that I didn't think men should tell women what 'feminine intelligence' was. I thought there was work to be done in his own zone, of what men should aspire to (and not the liberal tropes he was spouting). So I've had to ask myself, is it mine to suggest to men what tonic masculinity should be?
We are, I believe, all in agreement that something has gone terribly wrong with relationships between men and women, and with the core concept of family, from which the good and the dysfunctional all come. The perspective I have to offer isn't just as a woman, as in 'this is what I think we need from you guys,' it's as a mother of young women who are navigating this terrain. My focus is in bringing about a feminine economy, socio-spirituality and metaphysics. It's about trying to birth a whole new metanoia.
I'm glad that you've all become real people to me through your thoughtful responses. I'd like to take some time and put together an episode giving a feminine elder perspective of what I meant by it. I hope that you'll see this as a co-parenting endeavor, with your blessing. And I will no longer give it the somewhat snarky title of "Tonic Masculinity is Not a Brofest." But thanks for letting me get that title out of my system here ;-)
I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun! So this is my part of what I hope is an ongoing dialogue of reinventing the world of women and men! Here is the first generation of Tonic Masculinity:
To savor this conversation-in-eight-parts, I’m going to start with Jay Rollins in this episode, who started my snowball rolling. He writes about Andrew Tate as “the single worst example of masculinity on the internet” and explains why. The contrast, Jay says, is Tonic Masculinity:
Tonic Masculinity is using the right tool for the job, and the tools that I’ve found work best for the job of being a man, the real tools in the toolbox of masculinity (which is surprisingly heavy), are a combination of doing your duty and treating others with the respect they’re due. Those are the tools good men reach for most frequently, and they require a certain amount of practice and elbow grease to ingrain the habit of applying them.
Jay describes himself as ‘a charming bastard’ and says that wasn’t always the case. He defines charm as “the process of correctly assessing how you are perceived by others and then intentionally emphasizing the parts of your affect and presentation that people obviously like.” But, he states, charm isn’t the 3-in-1 tool you use to solve all your problems; it’s the 3-in1 oil you apply to all your other tools. Clever, eh?
He sees Tate as oozing charm in all the wrong places like a toxic masculinity oil spill. For Jay, work ethic is key, whether it’s “the effort to overcome the temptation to be an asshole when it’d make your friends laugh or the effort to show up even when you don’t want to …” He looks at leadership as never asking your men to do something you wouldn’t do. And he says, “Caring about men in your community, making sure they don’t spiral into depression, or addiction, or just loneliness, is also Tonic Masculinity. You check in on your friends.”
Lest this seems tame, let me clarify that Jay is a wild card in the Mad Hatter deck for whom The Wonderland Rules is named. In Martian Wonderland, he and John Carter “make fun of more or less everyone” and “explain the application of Tonic Masculinity to the etiquette of shining your shoes,” among many, many other funny things. His Sunday post on the method behind Tonic Masculinity is called Dance Class. And he has a really adorable dog:
In this post on Dogs and Democracy, Jay writes:
There is no secret to what we’re doing with the Tonic Masculinity Project. Our goal is to shift society from a dominance orientation to a prestige orientation.
I don’t want elites using sociolinguistic expertise to dominate others. To be clear, it’s a thoroughly selfish desire on my part. I don’t like being dominated myself, and a dominance-oriented society is one in which the majority is unhappy; as someone who reads people without effort, I absorb the environmental emotional state shared by everyone around me. If everyone around me is unhappy, I’m unhappy.
But there has to be a hierarchy; we’re not unlike dogs in that we are anxious if we don’t know which social strata we inhabit. And the impossible feat woke Marxcissists always try to accomplish—changing the inbuilt biological rules that govern human behavior so as to put the marginalized on top of the hierarchy by fiat—is madness. It is an insult to human dignity; it does not and cannot ever work.
So what we’re all doing, all of us in the Neo-Gonzo Axis, and all of the projects with which we’re affiliated, is changing which set of rules we follow.
Tonic Masculinity is an attempt to live by rules established and codified by the Founders of the United States: a prestige-oriented hierarchy based around competence, excellence, and initiative. No more, no less.
Our elites lead. Theirs rule.
A society premised on Tonic Masculinity is one in which the slices everyone gets are a little smaller, but the whole pie is much, much bigger. The net effect of a world in which everyone instinctively looks for positive-sum games is that everyone ends up with a little more, not a little less, and the common goal becomes being happy as opposed to ingesting as much as you can consoom.
As my readers know, I’m all about changing the set of rules we follow. But hierarchy is the inheritance order of the archons, or rulers, from ancient Greece. And rather than democracy or the Constitution, both of which I debunk, I’d suggest the word anarchy, which literally means ‘rule by rules rather than by rulers.’
All in all, I’m proud to have co-parented this concept with Jay, who made it part of his tribe’s identity. It is clearly a tribe of men who support each other. We have a stereotype of men as competitive and women as cooperative but teamwork is a masculine concept. A book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam goes through the loss of community in our lives, back to the year 2000. For men this has left them navigating a cutthroat business world that celebrates every female promotion while sifting through every random male comment for sexist undertones.
I remember my dad having the Knights of Columbus with their costumes and pageantry, bars with cheap beer and shots, and secret rituals. I didn’t begrudge them their brotherhood and neither did my mom. At my dad’s funeral, the ‘young’ men were in their ‘70’s carrying the casket and giving testimonials that surprised me with things I didn’t know. Love is love, as the woke crowd says, and there’s a love between men that doesn’t take away from women but brings them back home more complete, more sure of who they are and more committed to being their best selves.
I think Jay is right to separate means and ends, the tool from the job, on the topic of charm and what it’s used for. I have a YT video on Jocko Willink that asks, Is Our Love Being Pimped for Profit? In the same way, our charm or likability has become a marketing tool. What we’re told is to put our charm to work, getting people to trust us and believe that we like them, so we can sell them something. It’s the way of the world.
For Jay and all of the boys in the band, I wish them a feminine economy in which our love and labor serves family and community. The skills that they’re developing of honor, duty and kindness are exactly what we need to restore the world of men and women, and bring some goddamn fun back into relationships. Thank you Jay, for setting the tone of the Tonic!
When I posted the links to Charles Eisenstein and told him he was a concept grandpa, he wrote “I’m reading my way through these. There is some terrific writing here. And to think it would have passed me by if you hadn’t shared in these comments.” To be continued, maybe including Charles …
For more, here’s Is Our Love Being Pimped for Profit?
In Russell Brand's interview of ex-Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, he asks, "Is our beauty being harnessed for nefarious ends." I rephrase that by asking "Is our love being pimped for profit?" Are all of us being monetarily raped and economically drafted into servicing the empire? I differentiate between the work we do and the job we're paid for, and quote John Cusack on sugar daddy politics and Arundhati Roy in defense of self-defense. I suggest that we sell our bodies but keep our hearts and minds free, and explain why Russell is my favorite hooker in the YouTube brothel.
or Debunking Democracy on Shoshana Zuboff:
Shoshana is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and has been called the Karl Marx of our era. In Russell Brand's Under the Skin interview, she debates whether "a spiritual solution under autocracy is a fringe thing, full of despair that can't be realized", and only democracy can save us. Russell states that incremental reformism is an insipid milksop inoculating against real change. I explain why Russell is right and Shoshana is wrong, along with looking at the politics of narcissism and what a Marxism for our era would look like.
or The Constitution Convention Coup:
Should we invoke Article 5 and call a new Constitutional Convention? This episode looks at the original con-con as a con and a coup against the Articles of Confederation and State Constitutions written by the people. I examine why the term 'anti-Federalist' is Orwellian double-speak for those who supported a federal government against the centralizers. The Framers were primarily motivated by direct taxation to fund a standing army in peacetime, and the protection of slavery. When people praise the Constitution, they usually mean the Bill of Rights—which were the conditions under which the States agreed to ratify. But instead of their dozens of substantive changes, Madison wrote what he called his "nauseous project of amendments" to nullify and neuter the opposition.
Lovely piece!
Personally, I can't describe myself as an anarchist, much as I tend to generate anarchy. I do think hierarchy is very important - the natural hierarchies of competence and ability, specifically. There need to be rules, and rulers can't be above them - chieftains and kings must be bound by conventions and constitutions. But at the same time, coordination for collective action generally requires someone to be in charge, to delegate, to assign tasks. This isn't just ideology, but experience - I've been in organizations operating according to consensus-based decision-making, and it was impossible to get anything done because no one ever agrees; and of course, when everything is voluntary, the classic collective action problem, 'someone else will do it', is perennial.
Yet at the same time, it is absolutely crucial that those who achieve or are granted higher positions act from a place of reciprocal responsibility towards those in subordinate positions. I believe the problem now is that too often those in power are parasitic. There's no sense of noblesse oblige, and philanthropy is too often philanthropathy (stolen from Tessa Fights Robots). Further, subordinates must be able to withdraw their fealty when these responsibilities go unmet.
Finally, thank you for bringing our essays to Charles Eisenstein's attention. I've been reading him for years, and have an immense amount of respect for him. He's had a huge impact on how I see the world.
Looking forward to all the future directions this will go! And the many tonic generations to come.