Toxic Masculinity by any other name...

I made this video and then hesitated to publish it. I felt that I’d made my point. So instead I recorded another video on Kennedy and Malone and published that. Then John Carter’s roundup recommended three posts on Tonic Femininity. Huh?

Bridgette, who writes as Motherucker, starts with Tonic Femininity Part 1: Understanding Female Behavior within the Framework of Competition Style:

A refreshing antidote to the airless idea space which seeks to smother the spirit of masculinity has been poured into the crystal glasses of at least seven admirable Substack contributors of the gentleman variety. What are the boyz drinking? Tonic masculinity. What does it cure? Toxic masculinity.

If you are unacquainted with the Tonic Seven, I highly recommend you give each of their newsletters a firm handshake at your soonest convenience. … It is my understanding that what binds them together in collaborative friendship is a shared interest in offering a descriptive alternative to the widely misunderstood and abused concept of toxic masculinity.

Bridgette then analyzes women and how they are genetically driven by “the occult forces of nature women are generally subjected to.” She writes, “the focus of the present essay is to discuss tonic femininity as an alternative to toxic femininity, it is useful to hone in on stereotypical feminine behavior so that we may understand its interplay with externalities.” But since, unlike toxic masculinity, toxic femininity isn’t a term in use, her second essay defines it and gives an example:

What better way for a self-deluded status-seeking woman to convince herself her vicious behavior is warranted than to convince the men she competes with that they are the problem? For an example of this, look no further than the drama currently unfolding over at Tereza Coraggio’s page. This woman is positively stewed because she believes she was not given due credit for coining the term tonic. Adding more simmer to her pot, she believes the term tonic has also been hijacked because it gained popularity when the tonic seven found a cooler use for it. Her response to this has been to play a round of reputation destruction against the the tonic seven. Now that the term has been appropriated and turned from nothing into something, it suits her to attempt to take the credit for the traction it has gained by throwing the tonic seven under the bus, to hell with whether they actually deserve it or how this might impact the idea itself. The next part in this essay will offer an alternative to this lamentable behavior for all to consider.

And the third essay gives the antidote to this lamentable behavior:

Unfortunately, no one can control the mouth of a vicious woman but herself. Tonic men and women may hope to be a positive influence on her, but control is not in their arsenal. And vicious women by definition make vicious choices targeting the demoralization of their competition. … There is no shortage of classless women who casually demean others to prop themselves up. It is all too easy to mistake good fortune for virtue, then parlay that mistake into a baseless sense of superiority. While behavior like this will always rankle, it is up to the truly virtuous woman to take it in stride. All you need to concern yourself with to have a charmed life nourished by tonic wholesomeness is being undeniable in your practice of virtue by contrast.

Bridgette’s example made the point I was aiming for in my video. ‘Tonic Femininity’ makes no sense and has no traction because ‘toxic femininity’ isn’t a thing. Bridgette needs to spend most of her three articles defining it, giving examples and coming up with evolutionary reasons that explain the lamentable behaviors of women she’s disparaging and to whom she feels superior.

To Bridgette and the ‘Tonic 8’ (including Jay Rollins), the cure for toxic masculinity is renaming it. It doesn’t exist except as a concept made up by the left to emasculate men. Toxic femininity is a real thing but toxic masculinity is a fiction. And so I have gone ahead with my article to give examples—from my own life, from geopolitics, and from the responses to my last post—of what toxic masculinity is to me.

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I’ve come to realize that men honestly have no idea of what it means to be toxic.

I once had a friend with an interest in community economics. We were part of two discussion groups but every time there was a question or comment, he would answer. Both groups fell apart after I pointed out this dynamic, which I’m sure was blamed on me. And then he did the same in a class I was teaching on economics. When nothing else worked, I had to ask him to stop coming. He can’t help it.

I’ve lost track of how many men, when they find out I’ve written a book on economics, start explaining economics to me. It’s an entirely unconscious reflex.

My dance teacher was telling me that it drives her crazy that men have no spatial awareness. Women will self-assemble into rows, making sure they’re not blocking the person behind them. Men will plunk themselves into the center and everyone else will have to crowd into their periphery. They’re clueless that this is going on.

Although these are harmless examples, I want to start by showing why this is important. On a global scale, the US assumes its right to dominate, control, and set the rules of its rules-based order. Meanwhile, Russia and China are behaving in a way that’s decidedly feminine—they’re cooperating, whether or not that’s a trick is yet to be seen. Latin America and Africa, along with the Middle East, are wanting to join the party. European leaders, male and female, may be plenty macho but the people are womaning up and have had enough of serving NATO machismo.

Pepe Escobar writes in Waiting on the End of the World

So "creditor oligarchy", in fact, can be explained as the toxic intersection between globalist wet dreams of total control and militarized Full Spectrum Dominance.

Globalist neoliberal totalitarianism of course won’t disappear under a sand storm. At least not yet. There’s still a maelstrom of toxicity ahead…

How I define toxic masculinity is superiority, ego, domination, competition and prioritizing the self over others. In geopolitics this manifests as militarism and economic oligarchy.

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Now let’s look at how that translates into the personal realm.

Jay generously sent back my comment that he’d deleted. So I’ll start with that, so readers can decide for themselves:

Beautifully written, W. Curiously enough, I am planning to do another episode on my term of Tonic Masculinity today. When I coined it, it was as "a world that puts children at the center, surrounded by women, who are surrounded by men. Tonic masculinity." I agree that it's not for women to tell men what masculinity is but it wasn't about masculinity as opposed to femininity, whether feminine traits in men, gay men, trans or women.

The term was tonic as opposed to toxic, healing as opposed to hurting. What needs to be healed? Per my definition, the relationship between men and women in doing the work of the world—raising the next generation. Not as a single family but as the reason societies exist, the reason humanity hasn't died out.

I've been struggling with how to say that it feels very hurtful and not very tonic that the only reference to me has been Mark's in saying that I've been 'doing a metaseries', essentially about the guys using my term. I can't help feeling that if Charles Eisenstein had written it, rather than me in response to him, it would have been attributed every time.

And Jay, I can't help noticing that after you, with my blessing, stole it from me, it was taken from you so that the interview of 'The Tonic 7' didn't include you or William. In fact, it was taken by someone you described as 'the angriest person you've ever known,' who is intentionally offensive in his references to women, who is hostile towards gay and trans people (not just how it's being weaponized), and believes men should be bullied.

And is also someone whose insight and intelligence I respect, and don't want to alienate. What will be the backlash of me writing that? To be cut out? To be just another critical woman? I don't know. But if I'm not saying it because I'm afraid, whatever makes me afraid is toxic by definition. It's become the exact opposite of what I meant by tonic. I'm not the authority on the term because I'm not the author. And I think that authorship has been taken from me because I'm a woman.

Jay added to his repost:

The point of the concept is that it's everybody's; I wanted it out in the world and out in the world it is. The Tonic 7 did a fine job of broadcasting it on Aly's show, and since it apparently hasn't registered to you that I don't feel the same sense of entitlement that you do to ownership of a concept that I am, at best, polishing up and resubmitting to the collective unconscious, let me be explicit that they had and have my blessing.

Please don't accuse me of threatening you again. It's not true, and it cheapens the project you claim to care about. …

At the end of the day, you shoehorned a grievance into my comments section, on someone else's guest post. Then, when you got an entirely appropriate (and entirely polite) dismissal of your attempt to divert another woman's spotlight, you conveniently forgot the content of said grievance.

Don't cast aspersions on my ethical standards or decisions, Tereza. This is about your belated recognition that a phrase you didn't invent and don't own is popular and you didn't get to brand it, not about anyone else's ethics.

Personally, I think it's bonkers that you, a woman, are trying to own and contain the definition of healthy masculinity, but whatever. You want to define it, buy a time machine. You want to monetize it, you're gonna have an easier time, and I certainly wouldn't try to stand in your way; be my guest.

On another thread, Jay continued:

Competition between men is basic to masculinity, Tereza. Competition with men, as a woman, on the other hand, makes you Little Miss Bossypants.

The fact that you don't understand the first makes you fundamentally unqualified to judge masculinity, let alone define it for men. The fact that you don't understand the second is either the cause or the result of your social tone-deafness and general inability to read a room, particularly but not limited to any room some authority figure hasn't placed you in charge of.

See what I mean? No commentary even required on my part. Jay comes right out and says that it doesn’t matter how good my argument is—women can’t compete with men and to try is to be socially tone-deaf. Read the room! Men don’t want you here! We’re talking man-stuff, big ideas. Who authorized you to open your mouth? And how dare you claim to be the author and authority over what came out of it?

Jay followed up with, “Point me to the threat or lawyer up, Tereza. In fact, I'd suggest a retraction. I'm not a fan of being defamed.” Maybe he and Robert Malone could share Steven Biss and get a package deal. Unless I recant and say that yes, threatening with lawyers is tonic masculinity. Silly me to think otherwise. Just like a girl.

Another person’s comment on the thread was “If pure jackassery did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The current controversy and actions of Mizz Tereza seem to fit the bill.” Followed, I’m sure, by high-fives.

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Here are some quotes from the other guys:

Grant Smith Writes H2F Man 11 hr ago

You have no a priori claim to respect, attention, authority, deference, or consideration for the usage of these terms or anything else, nor do I. These things must be earned. I find attempts to cloak desires for recognition with appeals to propriety off putting. I presume this is merely a product of my nature. I prefer to engage in the world of ideas as a prestige hierarchy. I allocate attention based on appreciation and admiration for excellence. I don’t care who came up with what first. I only care who can deliver excellent ideas with which to engage. I also don’t expect anyone to read or recommend my shit if they don’t think it is worth their time. …

I don't think the phrase has inherent value. The phrase tonic masculinity isn't what is useful or interesting, it is the definition my boys provided for it that makes it useful and interesting, at least from my perspective. I think I just said I wasn't impressed with it until I read Harrison's article, which should give you an idea about how I value ideas. This extends to intellectual property which I'm quite skeptical of. I don't expect you to agree, but ideas aren't worth anything to me until they are transformed into something useful. In this case, I think the only thing that makes tonic masculinity useful is as a heuristic to facilitate the harnessing of innate character strengths and personality variables to cultivate virtue, which can easily be abstracted beyond masculinity (which is what my article was about). …

If you want to have any chance of winning you should focus on making a compelling case as to why your preferred usage of the term is superior instead of focusing on issues of propriety. I would say something cheeky like "it's our term now, come and take it" but the fact of the matter is, I don't think any of us have any desire to continue to talk about masculinity. We've all said our piece and moved on. That is why we are the Tonic 7 and not the 'tonically masculine 7'. Is it safe for me to assume that you don't claim the word 'tonic' as your own?

To this, I suggested that if the ideas have value but not the term, they should use the ideas over which they have full ownership and leave the term out of it.

Doctor Hammer Writes Doc Hammer's Anvil Apr 12

In this case proper masculinity is being willing and able to do violence to stand up for what is right, the over abundance being excessive violence of a serial killer. …

The differences between how men and women tend to act are important and necessary for men and women's cooperation, and forcing one to be more like the other than their nature inclines them is going to cause them problems and lead to vice. For example, men are more disagreeable (in the personality trait sense) than women, so, yes, on average when there is an unpopular thing that needs said at personal risk, it will be a man saying it. Trying to beat that tendency out of men because it is deemed too "confrontational" is bad for men and bad for society. …

Finally, if we didn't sufficiently define "toxic masculinity" it is only because there is no clear definition other than "Whatever wailing Twitter blue checks don't like" or perhaps "Anything your great grandfather would have considered normal masculine behavior."

In a lengthy exchange with Doc Hammer on evolution, Jim Austen gives many data points and states:

When women started to make headway in science, the story had to change to reflect the evidence. Neoteny and maternal care/oxytocin, coupled with Maternal Culture, made male apes Human. Yes, we are a Maternalized species. No other group of male apes can get along like Humen, nor take care of offspring, cooperate for so long without ripping penises off. Or focus on other goals besides sex and violence. That's all from maternalized males.

Jim gives nine citations for his claims including Richard Wrangham, author of The Demonic Male: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence. To this Daniel responds:

Wow. Are these the pickup lines you use at feminist rallies?

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Daniel has written his own parody post, A Confession and a Heartfelt Apology … and a desperate plea for the editors of Bartlett's Book of Quotations to Update their entry on the term "Tonic Masculinity". It begins:

I must offer a confession and a truly heartfelt apology to those I have offended and wronged with my words (as the woke Marxcissists have taught us, offensive words are “literal violence” and are therefore bad, though literal violence is good and beautiful because it is the “voice of the unheard,” such as oppressed elected officials of color). Yesterday, I was informed via an angry treatise, cataloguing my own and several other substackers’ sins, that I am a third-hand term stealer. …

It turns out, this term was the sole and exclusive intellectual property of one Tereza Coraggio, who is quite irate that it was used without her permission, and to add insult to injury, used in a way that she considers to have been the “Twisting of Tonic Masculinity,” so she is now demanding every subsequent user of this term give her credit for inventing it or, failing that, to cease and desist immediately from the use of her term in any and all written, verbal, or telepathic forms of communication. …

So to all my fans and admirers and groupies and pen pals and members of my fan club and so forth, I have to come clean with you all: I did not use the term “tonic masculinity” second-hand, as I initially claimed. No, regrettably, I used this term third-hand. And like Mr. Salzman and his band of time-traveling plagiarists who used the term in 2019, I did not give credit to the original wordsmith, Ms. Tereza Coraggio, for inventing the term in 2022.

Daniel asked, “do you think we ripped off your ideas? But then you seem upset that our own takes on ‘tonic masculinity’ were at odds with your own, indicating that you are upset that we did *not* use your ideas.” I replied:

Let me give an example. Let's say I was the person who coined 'regenerative agriculture'. Monsanto's PR lackeys come along and say it means chemically enhanced GMOs because they grow better. As someone who believes in the concept that I captured with the term regenerative ag, I'd want people to steal my idea and my term all day and night and never give me credit because I want a world that gets restored. But when Monsanto takes my term and makes it mean the opposite, they're destroying the concept I coined the term to promote. That's immoral. Ideas are meant to be stolen and only add by it. This group has stolen the term and destroyed the concept it encapsulated.

A very interesting comment was from Aly Drummond, the host of RealFemSapien who had interviewed the ‘Tonic 7.’ She wrote:

Aly Drummond Writes Seasonal Womanhood Apr 15

I actually disagree with the term tonic masculinity altogether because it's based on the premise of toxic masculinity, so it's interesting to watch all the fuss. Toxic masculinity is any form of masculinity that doesn't serve women to their perfect liking.

Anyway, I hosted you gentlemen despite this because I knew it was an alternative paradigm that my male audience could benefit from. My audience even pointed out that tonic is a response to toxic and are wary of it, but I did tell them essentially, "Hey, it's a different POV and you might like these guys regardless." And they did!

So Aly again makes my point. She, her audience, and the ‘Tonic 8’ don’t believe that toxic masculinity exists. So it’s a term that makes no sense for them to use, except as a semantic trick to negate the concept without actually changing the behavior.

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Although not in response to my post, I think what ‘John Carter’ said on his Substack Notes is pertinent:

Yeah, you're toxic, retrograde, racist spits WHITE men, but we need you to go die for us in Taiwan and Ukraine, so just forget about how much we despise and come Be All You Can Be!

Anyone who’s read or watched Third Paradigm certainly knows my stance on the US proxy war in Ukraine and warmongering in Taiwan. These are some of the most devastating impacts of the arrogance, superiority and willingness to inflict violence that I’d term toxic masculinity—the culmination of 3500 years of it. That’s equally true when enacted by patriarchs without penises like Hilary Clinton and Victoria Nuland.

Other examples of toxic masculinity are the Great Reset, depopulation, geoengineering, bioweapons disguised as vaccines, central bank digital currencies, small business bankruptcies, home dispossessions, widespread cancers, famine through destruction of farms and animals… The list goes on and on, with no end in sight.

It’s not credit or ownership that motivates me, but the sense that we need the concept described by Charles Eisenstein and defined by me as tonic masculinity. It’s the only way we’ll end this madness. I’ll end with the response I gave Jay:

When you wrote "stealing that" and I gave you my blessing, you didn't specify that you were only stealing the last two words devoid of the meaning I'd given them. Had you stolen and expanded on my concept, I would have been delighted even if you'd never mentioned me.

Ideas only increase by someone taking them, it's like taking a branch from a tree and grafting it onto your own root stock, your way of thinking. What you did was say, hey, that looks like a tree with some vigor, and pulled it up by the roots, cut off the trunk and then grafted your own ideas onto it. It destroyed my idea and used the stock phrase to promote an entirely different, and I think opposite, idea.

I'm absolutely not trying to define healthy masculinity, or proper masculinity as Doc phrases it. Those are entirely things I leave up to you, the way I think that feminine intelligence shouldn't be defined by a man. But the word tonic only works because it's the inverse of toxic. And I don't think you or your group recognizes what toxicity is.

You've made tonic into a feel-good fig leaf for toxicity.

Will this be met with more ridicule, satire, insults and gaslighting? Or a recognition that the world is in serious trouble and the next generation needs us, if there is to be one? Here’s hoping.

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To follow this up, here’s We Need to Agree to Agree:

As Ukraine and the Great Reset wreak havoc, we need to share a purpose, a process to separate truth from lies, and a plan. And perhaps, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we need to consider six impossible things before breakfast. I look at things I never thought I'd question, like climate change and Elie Weisel. I debate good vs evil, big vs small, Franklin vs Hamilton, and Trump vs no one. And I wonder how to bring together the dozen journalists left who aren't deluded: Matthew Ehret, Robert Malone, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand.

and this is Forgiving Hitler, which Jay cites as proof of my moral character:

I examine the spiritual, psychological and geopolitical reasons to forgive Hitler, not by absolving his guilt but by questioning the WWII official narrative. As the personification of evil, is Hitler a projection of a systemic brutality that was only spurred by his defeat? I question the cause of the anger invoked and how it relates to 'triggers' of 9-11 or the CoVax. I end by looking at the hope and possibility for social change when we give all people the same integrity we give to ourselves.