This is an extremely long post... something I generally try to avoid at all costs... but it was difficult for me to pick and choose quotes, so I decided to post the entire article. Perhaps you'll only read the first few paragraphs and move on to something else... and that's okay... but I think there's a lot of value in what is said here...
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Being a Man
by Christina Hoff Sommers
04/10/2006, Volume 011, Issue 28
ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue
commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the
women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of
the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and
children first."
The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the
side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude.
The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the
Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be
saved."
Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to
the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry
makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special
protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that
some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak
its name.
In Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield seeks to persuade skeptical readers,
especially educated women, to reconsider the merits of male protectiveness
and assertiveness. It is in no way a defense of male privilege, but many
will be offended by its old-fashioned claim that the virtues of men and
women are different and complementary. Women would be foolish not to pay
close attention to Mansfield's subtle and fascinating argument.
Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of
manliness. It is modest, not because its claims are cautious--Mansfield
courts wrath and indignation on almost every page--but because, as he says,
"Most good things, like French wine, are mostly good and accidentally bad.
Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad. . . . This
is what I mean by a modest defense."
"Manliness," he says, "is a quality that causes individuals to stand for
something." The Greeks used the term thumos to denote the bristling,
spirited element shared by human beings and animals that makes them fight
back when threatened. It causes dogs to defend their turf; it makes human
beings stand up for their kin, their religion, their country, their
principles. "Just as a dog defends its master," writes Mansfield, "so the
doggish part of the human soul defends human ends higher than itself."
Every human being possesses thumos. But those who are manly possess it in
abundance, and sometimes in excess. The manly man is not satisfied to let
things be as they are, and he makes sure everyone knows it. He invests his
perception of injustice with cosmic importance.
Manliness can be noble and heroic, like the men on the Titanic; but it can
also be foolish, stubborn, and violent. Achilles, Brutus, and Sir Lancelot
exemplify the glory of manliness, but also its darker sides. Theodore
Roosevelt was manly; so was Harry "The Buck Stops Here" Truman. Manly men
are confident in risky situations. Manliness can be pathological, as in
gangsters and terrorists.
Manliness, says Mansfield, thrives on drama, conflict, risk, and exploits:
"War is hell but men like it." Manliness is often aggressive, but when the
aggression is tied to the concept of honor, it transcends mere animal
spiritedness. Allied with reason, as in Socrates, manliness finds its
highest expression.
Women can be manly--Margaret Thatcher is an example--but manliness is the
"quality mostly of one sex." This creates problems for a society such as
ours that likes to think of itself as "gender neutral," egalitarian, and
sensitive. Manliness is not sensitive. Today, we mainly cope with it by
politely changing the subject. The very word is deemed quaint and outmoded.
Gender experts in our universities teach as fact that the sex difference is
an illusion--a discredited construct, like the earth being flat or the sun
revolving around the earth.
And yet, the complex range of behavior that "manliness" characterizes
persists. It is still mostly men who embody it. We have succeeded in
bringing the language to account, but we have not managed to exorcise
masculine thumos.
After almost 40 years of feminist agitation and gender-neutral pronouns, it
is still men who are far more likely than women to run for political office,
start companies, file for patents, and blow things up. Men continue to tell
most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to
editors. And--fatal to the dreams of feminists who long for social
androgyny--men have hardly budged from their unwillingness to do an equal
share of housework or childcare. Moreover, women seem to like manly men:
"Manliness is still around, and we still find it attractive," says
Mansfield.
Mansfield's amusing, refreshing, and outrageous observations must already be
causing distress for his Harvard colleagues. But many readers will be
grateful to him for his candor and bravado. Today, when
scholars acknowledge sex differences, they do it timorously. They follow
every assertion of difference with a list of exceptions, qualifications, and
caveats. Into this world strides Professor Mansfield, loaded for bear, and
lethally armed with all the powerful stereotypes thought to be banished from
bien pensant society. And he deploys them without apology in shocker after
shocker:
[Women] shun risk more than men and they perceive risk more readily;
they fear spiders. . . .
Women seem to desire more than men to make a nest and to take
responsibility for making it. To do this, they sometimes need the help of
their men, and they nag them responsibly and more or less charmingly
according to their skill. . . .
In my experience, it is difficult for a man who is attracted to a woman
not to find her cute, rather than intimidating, when she gets angry.
Mansfield reminds us that philosophers and poets were worried about
manliness long before contemporary feminists began to anguish over it. He
presents a magisterial survey of the role played by manliness in the thought
of the great philosophers.
From the Greeks to Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophers have
extolled or deplored manliness--but mostly they looked for ways to control
it. No one, says Mansfield, understood the vices and virtues of manliness
better than Aristotle and Plato. They gave it its due while "remaining wary
of its dangers."
Unfortunately, few modern philosophers have followed their example. The
ancients well understood that too much--or too little--manliness is a bad
thing. Too much is dangerous, but too little is fatal to a society's
prospects for greatness--or even for its survival. Modern philosophers err
on the side of wariness and suspicion and, according to Mansfield, "the
entire project of modernity can be understood as a project to keep manliness
unemployed."
The entire project of modernity? This says, in effect, that modern
philosophy has been engaged in making wimps out of men. As Mansfield sees
it, since the dawn of the modern era, philosophers have conspired against
manly thumos. Hobbes, for example, ignored the higher forms of heroic and
philosophical manliness: He reduced it to a simple aggressive drive that
leads to a "war of all against all." It had to be broken--not
accommodated--by handing over power and rights to an absolute sovereign.
Hobbes placed self-preservation at the center of his theory. But, says
Mansfield, manly men do not merely want to survive: They seek glory for
themselves and their causes. For Mansfield, Hobbes is the extreme--but still
typical--example of modern philosophers' disdain for manliness: "Liberalism
is unmanly in setting down self-preservation as the end of man, as do Hobbes
and John Locke."
Mansfield himself does not mind being a loner. For years, he has fought a
forlorn battle at Harvard in defense of high standards. He was the only
member of the faculty to vote against establishing a women's studies major.
All the same, one would have expected him to find a few defenders of
manliness somewhere in the annals of modern philosophy. But he does not cite
any. With the possible exceptions of Baruch Spinoza and Edmund Burke, he
complains that philosophers of modernity just don't get it when it comes to
understanding and valuing male spiritedness: "Modern thinking does not want
to cooperate with manliness, and does not care for thumos."
In place of the heroic, but rationally controlled, conception of manliness
offered us by the ancients, modern thinkers give us a pallid, cautious,
risk-averse bourgeois manliness--a world of Babbitts, rather than Achilles.
But this perspective is badly skewed. Surely Mansfield would not deny that
the "bourgeois" male denizens of modernity have been responsible for some of
the most prodigious displays of genius in art, literature, and music. They
invented science, the free market, and liberal government, and they refined
the art of war, magnifying its lethality a thousandfold. It would appear
that Mansfield systematically underestimates the manliness of modern man,
and of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes
who helped create him.
His discussion of Nietzsche's powerful influence on contemporary feminism
shows Mansfield at his philosophical best and manly worst. Here, more than
elsewhere, Mansfield dazzles us with the aptness of his insights, while
being recklessly inattentive to nuance, exceptions, and complexity. He has
no doubts about Nietzsche's manliness. He sets up a dramatic contrast
between the manly ideal favored by Plato and Aristotle and the unrestrained
masculinity promoted by Nietzsche.
Both Plato and Aristotle developed a conception of ethical manliness based
on courage, tying manliness to protectiveness and reason. Manly men (and
women) are the guardians of Plato's Republic; they are the noble gentlemen
in Aristotle's polis. Both maintained that philosophers, not warriors, are
the manliest of all.
By contrast, Nietzsche, a classicist by training, idealized the pre-Socratic
Homeric age. He preferred the warrior to the philosopher, exalting Achilles
over Socrates. He criticized Plato and Aristotle for putting reason above
passion. For Nietzsche, says Mansfield, "Humanity is not to be found in
reason but rather in the spark of life--the assertion of each man's life by
that man." Nietzsche has burdened modernity with an exceptionally dangerous
philosophy that Mansfield calls "manly nihilism." Where Plato and Aristotle
place severe constraints on manly expression, Nietzsche gives us a manliness
unrestrained by anything outside itself. Says Mansfield: "Manly
assertiveness feeds on itself alone, and does not serve to protect and
defend a cause greater than itself."
So where did contemporary feminists turn for philosophical inspiration? They
had their pick of any number of the polite, sensible, and sensitive thinkers
of modernity. John Stuart Mill would have been perfectly suitable. But no,
says Mansfield, they turned down this nice guy--"a wimp when you come down
to it"--and "went mad for crazy manly Nietzsche."
Nietzsche is hardly the philosopher one would expect to emerge as the muse
for modern feminism. Not only did he valorize unrestrained male assertion,
his contempt for women was famously explicit:
The true man wants two things, danger and play. For that reason he wants
woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong
with her sexually.
In another context, he said women were for the "recreation of the warrior."
His advice to men on the subject of women: "Forget not thy whip." Why, then,
did Nietzsche's point of view appeal so strongly to intellectual feminists?
"In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women. . . . What
interested [feminists] in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as
fact--God is Dead--and the possibility of creating a new order in its
place." Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche. But many
did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism. In
Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag." Far from being critical of
Nietzsche's hypermasculine fantasies, his "will to power," and his rejection
of the Judeo-Christian ethic--she embraced it all and urged women to emulate
it.
Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." She rejected
the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an
authoritative moral order. When she said that women must seek
"transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of
nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and
family as a "tragedy" for women; both are traps that are incompatible with
female subjectivity and freedom. She described the pregnant woman as "a
stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg." She compared childbearing
and nurturing to slavery.
Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from
the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists. The
early feminists questioned the rigidity of sex roles, but they never doubted
that there was such a thing as human nature, and that women had distinctive
roles to play in the family and society. Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to
be free of all roles. Toward what end? She did not specify. Beauvoir's
womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone,
Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan. In the decades
following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine.
Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they
are less effective at being true Nietzscheans. Unlike radicals in other
social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never
engaged in violence. None went to jail. So how did they succeed in changing
American society?
As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices." They formed
"consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training"
workshops. Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of
sexism. Tantalized by the Nietzschean idea that knowledge was a form of
power, and not the result of disinterested inquiry, feminist scholars went
on a rampage "reinventing" knowledge. In the academy, women took full
advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and
thwart women.
Is Mansfield being fair to feminism? Is Nietzsche its main guiding spirit?
Not really. His description of "feminist nihilism" rides roughshod over many
distinctions within feminist theory and the women's movement. Alongside the
reckless feminism of Beauvoir, Firestone, Greer, and company, there was a
quieter, more reasonable, eminently sane version (inspired by those "wimps"
Locke, Mill, and David Hume) working its way through American society and
bringing needed reforms. Mansfield is aware of, and appreciates the
achievements of, this moderate wing, but Manliness gives the impression that
Second Wave feminism was one long Nietzschean production. It was more than
that.
But one forgives Mansfield his imprecision and hyperbole because so much of
what he says is profoundly true. Not all of contemporary feminism is a
playing out of Nietzschean themes, but a great deal of it is. He is also
right when he points out that many feminist leaders emulate some of the
cruder and unappealing qualities of manliness.
An example (not given by Mansfield) is Eve Ensler's male-averse play The
Vagina Monologues. This is loosely based on interviews with more than 200
women on the subject of their intimate anatomy. Its more serious
preoccupation is exposing male insensitivity and violence. Pathological male
thumos is everywhere: The play is a rogues' gallery of male oafs, losers,
brutes, batterers, rapists, child molesters, and vile little boys. It is as
if honorable manliness never existed.
Mansfield's analysis of women's nihilism gives us the lens to understand
these developments as caricatures of the feminist will to "empowerment." It
is a form of manly assertiveness unmoderated by Aristotelian ideals. Here we
have an example of women imitating masculinity in its lower range. It is the
dark side of the "gender neutral society" in which we now live.
The women who champion Eve Ensler's production are rightly concerned about
the problem of male violence. But the known solution is to teach boys (and
men) to be gentlemen. "A gentleman," says Mansfield, "is a man who is gentle
out of policy, not weakness; he can be depended upon not to snarl or attack
a woman when he has the advantage or feels threatened." And any gentlewoman
or "lady" is naturally more suited for the task of civilizing a vulgar,
barbarous male than a whole army of gender warriors.
What would Mansfield have us do? His book is primarily a conceptual analysis
of manliness. It is not a self-help book. But it should surprise no one that
this bossy, opinionated, and intrepid male thinker has a lot of advice to
dispense. Women who like manly men will want to pay close attention. He says
a lot of useful things your women's studies professors probably forgot to
mention.
First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public
realm and private life. In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy
of gender neutrality. He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal
opportunity to men and women. However, "our expectations should be that men
will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women."
Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our
schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness; they
must stop trying to feminize boys. A healthy society should not war against
human nature. It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity." That means it has
to civilize it and give it things to do. No civilization can achieve
greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males.
In the private sphere, his advice is vivé la difference! A woman should not
expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is; nor should
she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends. Manly men
are romantic rather than sensitive. They need a lot of help from females to
ascend to the higher ethical levels of manhood, and Mansfield urges women to
encourage them in ways respectful of their male pride.
Men, for their part, need to be gallant to women and respectful. Above all,
they must listen to them. Mansfield offers this advice to young men:
Women want to be taken seriously almost as much as they want to be
loved. To take women seriously you must first take yourself seriously and
after that ask them what they think. And when they tell you, try to listen.
He is not suggesting that women accept a subordinate role; on the contrary,
he compares women to philosophers. They are, on the whole, less assertive,
but that makes it easier for them to be observant, reflective, and calmly
judgmental: "It should be expected that men will be manly and sometimes a
bit bossy and that women will be impressed with them or skeptical."
The world of gender studies has never before had to confront anyone quite
like this solitary rogue male professor of politics. Critics will rail
against his excesses and feminists will be indignant and offended. But many
women will be charmed by his effrontery, and grateful for the truth and
wisdom in Mansfield's elegant treatise.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, is the author of The War Against Boys and coauthor of One Nation
Under Therapy.
"An excellent rant, Fran.
This line struck me the most:
'Always trying to find meaning in everything - Sometimes there isn't meaning.'
I agree with this. Sometimes there's just acceptance of things as they are. Trying to find meaning where there is no particular meaning can be as frustrating as trying to find pattern and order in a carton of spilled eggs. Sometimes things just are. Brownian motion. Random. Maybe that's all that there is and occasionally our pattern-seeking minds see something that looks meaningful, organized and comforting and we seize upon it. I just don't know anymore. Maybe it's just not possible to say this and this, therefore we can predict the certainty of that. Maybe the best we can do is to just observe, with acceptance, this. And this. And this.