Tonic Masculinity Goes Viral!

usurped again by Eisenstein and the Walz campaign

Mathew Crawford sent: “Did you see this?” followed by:

Tonic masculinity, an antidote to the toxic kind

The Medium Newsletter By Harris Sockel

The first time I heard the phrase “tonic masculinity” I thought it was a typo. I’m so used to hearing about the toxic variety (about which there are 2,800 stories on Medium), that my brain couldn’t compute another T-word in that phrase.

And no, “tonic masculinity” does not describe dudes who like gin and tonics (that’s a different newsletter). The term recently cropped up on X and Threads to encapsulate VP candidate Tim Walz’s demeanor: He fixed your bicycle. He knows about gutters. To many people, he represents a mode of masculinity that is confident but not domineering, helpful but not smarmy.

According to gender equity researcher Amy Diehl, that’s “tonic masculinity”: being supportive and husbandly. “Tonic” means “vigorous and refreshing.” It also means the first note of a musical scale, or a song’s “home key” — the part of a song that sounds like a relief.

Brand strategist Nancy Friedman dug around for the term’s origins and (I was shocked by this) apparently it made its first appearance on Medium back in 2020, when a leadership coach wrote about how men can embrace (instead of reject or suppress) traditionally masculine archetypes like King, Warrior, and Magician.

I don’t see “tonic masculinity” as a political term. To me, it feels like more of a cultural one. For the last decade, culture has fixated on what makes a dude bad without defining what can make him good. Julius Bridgeforth defines it as expressivity: being effusive and zesty in support of people they love, instead of stoic and silent. It’s really just an energy of genuinely caring about other humans.

This is Nancy Friedman’s article:

Word of the week: Tonic masculinity

And the Washington Post: Masculinity’s Check Engine Light is On. Let Tim Walz Have a Look. Or ‘gender equity researcher’ Amy Diehl: Governor Walz and Second Gentleman Emhoff represent "tonic masculinity, the antidote to toxic masculinity." Here’s Stevepsyd on Threads: Tim Walz is a living example of *tonic* masculinity (vs. the toxic kind) and I'm all over that! Let's celebrate tonic masculinity and share it for men everywhere. (def. of tonic: a feeling of vigor or well-being).

This is accompanied by a meme of Walz clutching his chest beatifically saying “Tonic Masculinity at its very best!” And the X post reads, “It's tonic masculinity: it helps and heals, instead of harming. It's the antidote to toxic, and I love it.”

So the term that I coined has been usurped again! First it was Jay Rollins, John Carter, Harrison Koehli, Luc Koch, William Hunter Duncan, Doc Hammer, Mark Bisone, Grant Smith and Daniel D. who all changed its meaning to what I considered toxic. I’ll link those episodes at the end.

Now it’s been turned at a left angle and used by the he/him moderators at Medium and WaPo and a Twitter poster who uses the name Ax Lizzie and has a thumbnail of a woman with a bloody slash across her face. They are using it to give character to the amorphous blob of a personality named Walz. A political slogan for those who the so-called Tonic Men are completely against.

We need a phrase for that. Let’s coin it. How about poetic injustice? Quick, slap a hashtag on that: #poeticinjustice. There.

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charles fucking eisenstein

For those who are new, let’s start at the beginning with the comment I wrote on Charles Eisenstein’s Nov 27, 2022 post:

I Like to Fight

Charles concluded with:

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. … 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. … 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.

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.

It was liked by Charles and 105 other people, with enthusiastic replies that go the length of the first page, including Jay Rollins saying “Stealing that,” which he since deleted. Charles pinned a note just above it, since it was the top comment, saying how touched he was by all the lovely comments.

And then, when I just did a YT search on #tonicmasculinity, I found that Charles fucking Eisenstein stole my term. His March 2024 interview on the Engendering Love Summit is called Tonic Masculinity: Initiation into Healthy Manhood. Charles says:

3:31 there's also a masculine element of generosity that even goes to the point of the greatest gift possible of self-sacrifice that that um I came to think about this after one of the mass shootings uh in our country um it was the Aurora theater shooting where somebody went into the premiere of Batman and just like started just open fire and killed uh quite a number of people um four of the people who died, died because they put themselves in the path of the bullet on purpose for men did that to protect their wives or girlfriends uh and there's this Primal like this is the the the light aspect of the warrior archetype you know that the shadow aspect is killing the light aspect is I'm willing to die to protect what I love what I love is more important than I am myself I am a being uh with with his own service to offer the world

4:37 and that is the essence of what I would like to call tonic masculinity

7:02 why um I think it's so important to to reclaim it and to reframe it um as tonic

So masculine generosity and self-sacrifice means stealing the ideas of women and passing them off as your own. And now that we’re thinking about it, do we really believe that four men threw themselves in front of speeding bullets before they could hit their girlfriends? Or is this another thing he made up like the photos of the Salvadoran prison that his ‘friend’ took but were later proven to be AI generated? And why does his animated video show people throwing themselves into a black hole to save humanity? There’s a self-sacrifice theme here that was never my definition of tonic, which means healing not stealing.

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consulting the medium

In my conversation with the Medium moderators, where I explained my genesis of Tonic Masculinity, Tony Stubblebine he/him replied about 4 hours ago:

Hi Tereza, we're always interested in the origins of ideas and phrases. Am I understanding correctly that you started using this phrase in 2023? Are you able to trace that usage all the way to the current application to Tim Walz?

I'm curious mainly because it seems possible that there may be multiple independent inventions of this phrase. It appeared first on Medium in 2020.

https://medium.com/@yirlenemertens/how-to-create-a-work-environment-that-enhances-tonic-masculinity-6265cdbd67ee

As I currently understand your comment, you coined it independently in 2023. And then it's showing up again lately in reference to Tim Walz, which could be a third independent invention of the term.

I answered:

Hi, Tony, and thanks for responding! I coined the phrase (to my knowledge, which is only to say I didn't get it from somewhere else) on Nov 27, 2022 on Charles Eisenstein's thread where it got 106 likes and was the top comment.

On Jan 15, 2023 I did my first episode with it in the title: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity-and-feminine-wiles

As I'm researching this for my article, I noticed that the 2020 Medium article uses #tonicmasculinity in the meme. When I do a search on that, I come up with a 2019 article from The Theology of the Body Institute—the same as Christopher West when he posts the Jordan Peterson use of it on YT. So it seems this originated on a Catholic anti-porn site.

It seems possible the 'work environment' author got it from the Tobin Institute since the timing is soon after and they both use the hashtag. With Mirlene having only 2 followers on Medium, I really doubt she caused it to go viral 4 yrs later.

Another Medium moderator JLove wrote about 3 hours ago:

Hello Tereza,

The earliest use of the term "tonic masculinity" that I could find, was in a two part article published on October 5, and November 2, 2021 by Miles Groth in the Newsletter from The Centre For Male Psychology (see link below).

In this search there was referenced an article published in 2020 here on Medium by a "leadership coach" though without any link to it.

So, this leaves the readers of your comment a bit confused. If this uncorroborated reference is to one of your articles, could you please provide a link to it - thanks.

https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings?author=61518974786cf0674151d542

I answered:

Hi, J and thanks for providing those links. In my dispute with the 'Tonic 7' who had taken my term and changed the meaning, they did a search and said, "Aha! Someone used it before you."

So it's not actually the first use of the phrase, since ideas emerge in many places spontaneously. It's whether there's a line tracing it back.

The gap between a 2020 article on work environments with 2 likes and no comments seems, to me, an unlikely source. As does an academic article from 2021. Certainly Miles Groth coined the term for his use of it, but I can't see Christopher West—the next use of it—reading Miles Groth. He's opposite to his perspective.

The first use of the term regarding Walz is Ax Lizzie on X. Has anyone asked her if she made it up or heard it somewhere? I'm not on X so I can't ask myself. I'd just be curious.

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lizzie borden took an ax

The earliest use of #tonicmasculinity regarding Walz is Ax Lizzie who also goes by brainmist on bsky.social with the same disturbing thumbnail. A search there shows that she(?) first posted with that hashtag 10 months ago in Nov 2023, so a year after my first use of it and the couple dozen videos, articles and interviews generated by it. Her first mention is:

The positive counterpoint of toxic masculinity isn't anti-masculinity, as the fragile manboys would insist. It's not misandry. That's such a myth. It's #TonicMasculinity. Masculinity that heals, comforts, supports, makes safe, never threatens, sustains, nurtures. And there are so many examples.

Other examples she gives back in Nov 2023 is “The heroes pulling babies out of the wreckage of Palestine, then trying to make the babies laugh even as they're crying?” And Patrick Stewart, as Captain Picard and in his bromance with Ian McKellan. The rest refer to Walz.

So here are the options for where Ax Lizzie’s phrase originated:

1. Spontaneously, as mine did.

2. A 2021 academic article on male psychology or on post-gender studies.

3. A 2020 workplace article with 2 followers and 2 likes.

4. A 2019 Catholic anti-porn article that led to popular pro-Peterson YTs.

5. Me or the dozen authors that trace back to me with thousands or tens of thousands of followers or Charles fucking Eisenstein.

Since it’s being used for the VP candidate of one party and was stolen by the campaign manager of another who just threw his support behind the third, I think I’m underpaid. I’m giving words away for free that are swinging elections! This working for love, not money, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Did I mention Bernie Sander’s campaign slogan was A 2020 Vision and I bought the domain a2020vision.org in 2012?

But I still think Tonic Masculinity is a term that I infused with meaning, to capture what’s missing in our world. And I don’t think that Tim Walz, Jordan Peterson, the Tonic 7 or Charles fucking Eisenstein are representing that quality by slapping it on like a false label. The content is still poison.

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Here are all the episodes I’ve done on tonic vs toxic masculinity, in reverse order so you can see the trajectory. They’re VERY entertaining. Maybe I should steal Eisenstein’s phrase, “I Like to Fight”:

What is toxic masculinity? I give several examples from the reactions of those who usurped my term, "tonic masculinity" demonstrating that they don't have any idea.

I discuss the appropriation of my term, tonic masculinity, and how it's being used to 'flip the script' by representing domination, superiority, aggression, violence and misogyny as 'tonic' with serial killers who 'go a bit too far' and feminized men as toxic. I analyze an interview of 'The Tonic 7' called The Bro Pill on RealFemSapien and my erasure from the concept. And I discuss the context in which I coined it on Charles Eisenstein's article, I Like to Fight.

Luc Koch weighs in on Tonic Masculinity, What Is a Woman?, Extrasensory Perception, Gnostic liberation, Red-Pilled in Disneyland, and the nature of good and evil. Rudolf Steiner appears in two places at once; David Graeber argues with Lobaczewski on whether psychopaths are made or born.

William Hunter Duncan continues in the theme of Tonic Masculinity by writing what being a man means to him. This includes having skills, protecting who and what you love, and re-enchanting the world. I quote Sylvia Federici's book by that name and Peter Linebaugh on his definition. William writes about being a son returning to help out his parents, and I add my own experience in that realm.

John Carter of Postcards from Barsoom on Substack has written Tonic Masculinity. In response, I ask four questions: 1) Is the soul of a woman different than the soul of a man? 2) Is sexuality polarized? 3) When men bond in a common project, what should be their goal, and 4) Can't we just like each other? I explore schismogenesis and the right-left hemispheres of the brain as the feminine-masculine.

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!

On Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, I was banned for posting for 100 years for saying that men shouldn't define feminine intelligence. The same day Robert Malone revoked my subscription under his three strikes 'asshole' rule. Another Rob (of universe c137) introduced me to a lecture by Leonard Shlain on The Alphabet vs. the Goddess. I connect these to how women think differently than men, and why we need masculinity rather than feminist men.