Word of the week: Tonic masculinity

Not to be confused with gin-and-tonic masculinity.

Have you heard about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz? Right, he’s Kamala Harris’s Democratic running mate in the 2024 U.S. presidential race. Sixty years old. Former U.S. congressman. Former high school teacher. Former football coach. Former National Guardsman. But did you know that he “spends Saturday mornings at the laundromat with a bag of quarters just in case you’re short”? That he “has some jumper cables, just give him a minute”? That he “already has the grill fired up”? That he “doesn’t mind being corrected, he loves learning new things”? That he “understands the Infield Fly Rule”? That he “doesn’t care if it’s less or fewer, he knows what you mean”? That he “bought those plums and put them in your icebox”?¹

Tim Walz may not really do or think any of those things, but something about the guy — genial, sincere, kind, competent, a little corny — makes it all seem credible enough to inspire a new single-serving website², “Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle.” Every time you click on the site you get a new Tim Walz “fact”: Tim Walz thinks you’re doing a fine job. Tim Walz is happy to check over that job application for you. Tim Walz will keep an eye on your kids when you’re running late for school pickup. Tim Walz asks anyone taller than him “How’s the weather up there?”

Tim Walz knows how to hold a piglet. Minnesota State Fair, 2019, via Prospect

This persona, this vibe, stands in such stark and novel contrast to the men on the Republican ticket — boorish, avaricious Trump; creepy, perpetually pissed-off JD Vance — that people have been scrambling for a way to describe it. “Midwestern Dad” is one recurring label. “Normcore” is another.³ But so is a more formal appellation, tonic masculinity.

Call and response on X/Twitter, August 6

Here’s how Washington Post contributor Monica Hesse put it in an August 8 column (“Masculinity’s check-engine light is on. Let Tim Walz have a look”):

I’d been trying to think of a better descriptor than Midwestern Dad to get at the aura Walz projects. After all, not all good men are Midwestern or dads. Soon I realized the perfect term had already been coined. “Tim Walz has tonic masculinity,” I saw several fans write online.

Yes. That. Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who, as another user joked, would start his job at the White House “being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.”

Here on Substack, Lyz Lenz wrote that Walz and Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, “offer competing visions of masculinity to the opposing ticket — one where men are the cheerleaders for women, rather than the other way around.”⁴

“Tonic masculinity” is at least four years older than the current election cycle. The earliest reference I’ve found is in Yirlene Mertens’s February 2020 essay, published on Medium: “How to Create a Work Environment That Enhances Tonic Masculinity.”

That too-tight black suit and bowtie look less like a tonic-masculinity uniform and more like the gin-and-tonic archetype.

“Tonic masculinity happens when male archetypes” — king, warrior, magician, and lover — “are embraced,” wrote Mertens. She added: “Not that evident nowadays if you ask me.”

Tonic masculinity’s most prolific exponent has been Miles Groth, a professor emeritus of psychology at Wagner College in New York. In 2021, Groth published “Tonic Masculinity in the Post-Gender Era” in New Male Studies. From the abstract:

The word tonic has two senses that I want to apply to masculinity. One, found in music, refers to the home key of a composition. The other denotes an invigorating substance or influence. I believe that masculinity is re-emerging of necessity to provide both a sense of harmony as well as much needed positive energy to help heal an ailing social body.

Sounds like Tim Walz! Groth has expanded on his theme in later writing for the Centre for Male Psychology.

“Tonic masculinity” also shows up in some Christian (and pro-Jordan Peterson) contexts, as in this video from Christopher West, a founder of the Theology of the Body Institute.

As you’ve probably surmised, “tonic masculinity” was coined to contrast with “toxic masculinity,” a term that arose from the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s and became “a catchall explanation for male violence and sexism,” as Michael Salter wrote in The Atlantic in 2019. Men’s-movement men “considered toxic masculinity a characteristic of immature men who had not yet found their deep, spiritual masculinity,” according to WebMD. Yes, toxic masculinity can be a medical condition. (And before you raise your hand to ask, yes, there’s also such a thing as toxic femininity.) And wouldn’t you know, some assholes — sorry, “purebloods” — have decided to reclaim toxic masculinity in order to “make America masculine again.” They may have been too busy flexing their pecs to notice that their slogan’s acronym is MAMA.

There’s another, older term for what “tonic masculinity” attempts to define: mensch. Yiddish borrowed the word from German, where it simply means “a person” or “a human being.” In Yiddish, though, it has deeper meaning: an upright, honorable, decent person; a person worthy of admiration; a person of noble character. The quality of being a mensch is menschkeit (or menschlichkeit), but if you want to say “menschiness” that’s OK with me.

Leo Rosten (who preferred to spell it mensh, to distinguish it from German) put it this way in The Joy of Yiddish (1968):

It is hard to convey the special sense of respect, dignity, approbation, that can be conveyed by calling someone “a real mensh!”

As a child, I often heard it said: “The finest thing you can say about a man is that he is a mensh!” Jewish children often hear the admonition: “Behave like a mensh!” or “Be a mensh!” This use of the word is uniquely Yiddish in its overtones.

But as the ads for Levy’s rye bread used to say, you don’t have to be Jewish. Tim Walz is a Lutheran and a mensch. Or a mensh. Those other fellas? Feh!

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“Tonic” is popping up in other new contexts, too. Here’s what I wrote about “social tonic” in June:

1. Dog whistle for William Carlos Williams fans. And by the way, you can order any of those Walz-isms printed on a pink T-shirt.

2. “Single-serving website” was coined by Jason Kottke in 2008. And Kottke.org is where I learned about Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle.

3. I wrote about “normcore” in 2014. Can I brag a little? That post is the #1 footnote in Wikipedia’s “normcore” entry.

4. Or they’re teachers. See this post by Nancy Nall about Tim Walz, geography teacher.