This book invites—no, demands—a response from its readers. It is impossible not to be drawn in to the provocative (often contentious) discussion that Harvey Mansfield sets before us. This is the first comprehensive study of manliness, a quality both bad and good, mostly male, often intolerant, irrational, and ambitious. Our “gender-neutral society” does not like it but cannot get rid of it.
Drawing from science, literature, and philosophy, Mansfield examines the layers of manliness, from vulgar aggression, to assertive manliness, to manliness as virtue, and to philosophical manliness. He shows that manliness seeks and welcomes drama, prefers times of war, conflict, and risk, and brings change or restores order at crucial moments. Manly men in their assertiveness raise issues, bring them to the fore, and make them public and political—as for example, the manliness of the women’s movement.
After a wide-ranging tour from stereotypes to Hemingway and Achilles, to Nietzsche, to feminism, and to Plato, the author returns to today’s problem of “unemployed manliness.” Formulating a reasoned defense of a quality hardly obedient to reason, he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness, and to give it honest and honorable employment.
On the same subject, a 1998 commentary by the author:
Reproductive Health Matters
Volume 6, Issue 12 , November 1998, Pages 116-121
The partial eclipse of manliness
Harvey Mansfield
Abstract
Our society as adopted, quite without realising the magnitude of the change, a practice of equality between the sexes that has never een known before in all human history. It is true that, until recently, most men have held a confident belief in male superiority. But thoughtful men of all kinds have almost all had something to say about manliness and what they ave said has been critical to one degree or another. Women, today, are caught between declaring their ambition to do what men do and affirming themselves as women. Men wonder how they can do justice to women and still be manly. This paper concludes that the price of humanising manliness, of raising it from quality to virtue, is allowing women to participate in it.
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1 comment:
Hello.
This fundamental change of the previous few decades should provide changes in data on what women see as attractive in men's looks, traits and behaviour. That should in turn affect how men will change their behaviour. Interesting times
CCDimitriou
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