Tonic masculinity, an antidote to the toxic kind

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Issue #154: writing with a day job and learning to ignore what doesn’t matter
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.

What else we’re reading

• Emily J. Smith, whose debut novel is out next February, details how she wrote it during breaks from her day job as a product manager in tech. I took so many lessons away from this story, mostly: Treat your job as a job, not as a messianic call to save the world. You’ll be happier and you’ll have more energy for less lucrative things that light you up.
• Political science professor Darren Zook zeroes in on why every U.S. campaign speech is allowed to end with “God bless America”: There is no law separating church and state in the U.S. constitution. Most of us misunderstand how America’s founders envisioned the interplay between religion and government. In fact, they thought everyone’s religion should inform their politics — the only thing they were against was the establishment of a national church like the Church of England.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on ignorance

Humans have a bias toward action, which makes doing nothing excruciatingly hard for us (take it from me, the person who responds immediately to every text I receive). Ignoring unimportant problems is a skill. For every nagging item that lands in your inbox, ask yourself: Can I afford to ignore this? If yes, do that.

And the winner of Friday’s quiz is…

Sargas for correctly identifying these three biases:

1. Gambler’s fallacy: our belief that an event’s probability changes based on past outcomes, even if it’s all random.
2. Outcome bias: judging our decisions based on their outcomes, instead of based on the quality of our decision-making.
3. Bikeshedding: fixating on trivial matters while ignoring more important problems.

Congrats, Sargas! We’ll be back on Friday with a few new quiz questions based on this week’s newsletters.

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com