Being a Man

...But this perspective is badly skewed...

...But many did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism...

...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...

...Critics will rail against his excesses and feminists will be indignant and offended...

...He has no doubts about Nietzsche's manliness...

...For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything...

...She did not specify...

...For years, he has fought a forlorn battle at Harvard in defense of high standards...

...Mansfield reminds us that philosophers and poets were worried about manliness long before contemporary feminists began to anguish over it...

...they are the noble gentlemen in Aristotle's polis...

...Mansfield's amusing, refreshing, and outrageous observations must already be causing distress for his Harvard colleagues...

...They had their pick of any number of the polite, sensible, and sensitive thinkers of modernity...

...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...

...Achilles, Brutus, and Sir Lancelot exemplify the glory of manliness, but also its darker sides...

...their lives that women and children might be saved...

...He criticized Plato and Aristotle for putting reason above passion...

...Mansfield offers this advice to young men: Women want to be taken seriously almost as much as they want to be loved...

...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...

...He presents a magisterial survey of the role played by manliness in the thought of the great philosophers...

...Manliness is not sensitive...

...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...

...Women can be manly—Margaret Thatcher is an example—but manliness is the "quality mostly of one sex...

...As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices...

...So where did contemporary feminists turn for philosophical inspiration...

...they fear spiders...

...Manliness, says Mansfield, thrives on drama, conflict, risk, and exploits: "War is hell but men like it...

...Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of manliness...

...Why, then, did Nietzsche's point of view appeal so strongly to intellectual feminists...

...But the known solution is to teach boys (and men) to be gentlemen...

...Here, more than elsewhere, Mansfield dazzles us with the aptness of his insights, while being recklessly inattentive to nuance, exceptions, and complexity...

...We have succeeded in bringing the language to account, but we have not managed to exorcise masculine thumos...

...Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a "tragedy" for women...

...Both maintained that philosophers, not warriors, are the manliest of all...

...Its more serious preoccupation is exposing male insensitivity and violence...

...Manliness is often aggressive, but when the aggression is tied to the concept of honor, it transcends mere animal spiritedness...

...It is still mostly men who embody it...

...he can be depended upon not to snarl or attack a woman when he has the advantage or feels threatened...

...In the academy, women took full advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and thwart women...

...But many readers will be grateful to him for his candor and bravado...

...A healthy society should not war against human nature...

...Manly men (and women) are the guardians of Plato's Republic...

...Mansfield's analysis of women's nihilism gives us the lens to understand these developments as caricatures of the feminist will to "empowerment...

...He is also right when he points out that many feminist leaders emulate some of the cruder and unappealing qualities of manliness...

...A gentleman," says Mansfield, "is a man who is gentle out of policy, not weakness...

...It causes dogs to defend their turf...

...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...

...Theodore Roosevelt was manly...

...Just as a dog defends its master," writes Mansfield, "so the doggish part of the human soul defends human ends higher than itself...

...His description of "feminist nihilism" rides roughshod over many distinctions within feminist theory and the women's movement...

...They gave 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...

...From the Greeks to Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophers have extolled or deplored manliness—but mostly they looked for ways to control it...

...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...

...so was Harry "The Buck Stops Here" Truman...

...It is the dark side of the "gender neutral society" in which we now live...

...Every human being possesses thumos...

...When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually...

...First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public realm and private life...

...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...

...Pathological male thumos is everywhere: The play is a rogues' gallery of male oafs, losers, brutes, batterers, rapists, child molesters, and vile little boys...

...they must stop trying to feminize boys...

...Today, when scholars acknowledge sex differences, they do it timorously...

...But he does not cite any...

...In the decades following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine...

...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...

...It was more than that...

...They gave it its due while "remaining wary of its dangers...

...Too much is dangerous, but too little is fatal to a society's prospects for greatness—or even for its survival...

...Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to be free of all roles...

...It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity...

...They formed "consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training" workshops...

...None went to jail...

...In another context, he said women were for the "recreation of the warrior...

...nor should she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends...

...Today, we mainly cope with it by politely changing the subject...

...In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women...

...The ancients well understood that too much—or too little— manliness is a bad thing...

...Men continue to tell most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to editors...

...And when they tell you, try to listen...

...As Mansfield sees it, since the dawn of the modern era, philosophers have conspired against manly thumos...

...Manliness can be pathological, as in gangsters and terrorists...

...In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy of gender neutrality...

...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...

...on the contrary, he compares women to philosophers...

...Unlike radicals in other social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never engaged in violence...

...This says, in effect, that modern philosophy has been engaged in making wimps out of men...

...And yet, the complex range of behavior that "manliness" characterizes persists...

...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...

...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...

...When she said that women must seek "transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality...

...In the private sphere, his advice is vive la difference...

...Unfortunately, few modern philosophers have followed their example...

...Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman...

...What would Mansfield have us do...

...Above all, they must listen to them...

...This is loosely based on interviews with more than 200 women on the subject of their intimate anatomy...

...But, says Mansfield, manly men do not merely want to survive: They seek glory for themselves and their causes...

...Moreover, women seem to like manly men: "Manliness is still around, and we still find it attractive," says Mansfield...

...Not only did he valorize unrestrained male assertion, his contempt for women was famously explicit: The true man wants two things, danger and play...

...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...

...Hobbes placed self-preservation at the center of his theory...

...That means it has to civilize it and give it things to do...

...This creates problems for a society such as ours that likes to think of itself as "gender neutral," egalitarian, and sensitive...

...He was the only member of the faculty to vote against establishing a women's studies major...

...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...

...Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad...

...Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche...

...It tells us that some things are best left to men...

...Manly men are confident in risky situations...

...To take women seriously you must first take yourself seriously and after that ask them what they think...

...She described the pregnant woman as "a stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg...

...Women would be foolish not to pay close attention to Mansfield's subtle and fascinating argument...

...However, "our expectations should be that men will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women...

...In Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag...

...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...

...This is what I mean by a modest defense...

...So how did they succeed in changing American society...

...The world of gender studies has never before had to confront anyone quite like this solitary rogue male professor of politics...

...Both Plato and Aristotle developed a conception of ethical manliness based on courage, tying manliness to protectiveness and reason...

...No one, says Mansfield, understood the vices and virtues of manliness better than Aristotle and Plato...

...But it should surprise no one that this bossy, opinionated, and intrepid male thinker has a lot of advice to dispense...

...Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness...

...A woman should not expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is...

...Nietzsche is hardly the philosopher one would expect to emerge as the muse for modern feminism...

...He invests his perception of injustice with cosmic importance...

...He is not suggesting that women accept a subordinate role...

...Not all of contemporary feminism is a playing out of Nietzschean themes, but a great deal of it is...

...Allied with reason, as in Socrates, manliness finds its highest expression...

...By contrast, Nietzsche, a classicist by training, idealized the pre-Socratic Homeric age...

...Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they are less effective at being true Nietzscheans...

...His book is primarily a conceptual analysis of manliness...

...It is a form of manly assert-iveness unmoderated by Aristotelian ideals...

...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...

...Being a Man Harvey Mansfield ponders the male of the species BY CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS One of the least visited memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic...

...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...

...Today, almost no one remembers those men...

...It implies the sexes are objectively different...

...It would appear that Mansfield systematically underestimates the manliness of modern man, and of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes who helped create him...

...Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name...

...But those who are manly possess it in abundance, and sometimes in excess...

...but it can also be foolish, stubborn, and violent...

...Where Plato and Aristotle place severe constraints on manly expression, Nietzsche gives us a manliness unrestrained by anything outside itself...

...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...

...But many women will be charmed by his effrontery, and grateful for the truth and wisdom in Mansfield's elegant treatise...

...Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished...

...His advice to men on the subject of women: "Forget not thy whip...

...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...

...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...

...She rejected the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an authoritative moral order...

...It had to be broken—not accommodated—by handing over power and rights to an absolute sovereign...

...Women seem to desire more than men to make a nest and to take responsibility for making it...

...He preferred the warrior to the philosopher, exalting Achilles over Socrates...

...But one forgives Mansfield his imprecision and hyperbole because so much of what he says is profoundly true...

...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...

...John Stuart Mill would have been perfectly suitable...

...Not really...

...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...

...In Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield seeks to persuade skeptical readers, especially educated women, to reconsider the merits of male protectiveness and assertiveness...

...Beauvoir's womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan...

...Manliness can be noble and heroic, like the men on the Titanic...

...The very word is deemed quaint and outmoded...

...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...

...It is as if honorable manliness never existed...

...She compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery...

...Manliness," he says, "is a quality that causes individuals to stand for something...

...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...

...The manly man is not satisfied to let things be as they are, and he makes sure everyone knows it...

...The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection...

...Toward what end...

...Is Mansfield being fair to feminism...

...Men, for their part, need to be gallant to women and respectful...

...Manly men are romantic rather than sensitive...

...An example (not given by Mansfield) is Eve Ensler's male-averse play The Vagina Monologues...

...They follow every assertion of difference with a list of exceptions, qualifications, and caveats...

...Mansfield himself does not mind being a loner...

...He sets up a dramatic contrast between the manly ideal favored by Plato and Aristotle and the unrestrained masculinity promoted by Nietzsche...

...Nietzsche has burdened modernity with an exceptionally dangerous philosophy that Mansfield calls "manly nihilism...

...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...

...His discussion of Nietzsche's powerful influence on contemporary feminism shows Mansfield at his philosophical best and manly worst...

...He says a lot of useful things your women's studies professors probably forgot to mention...

...Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists...

...Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry...

...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 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...

...Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of sexism...

...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...

...The women who champion Eve Ensler's production are rightly concerned about the problem of male violence...

...Is Nietzsche its main guiding spirit...

...Women who like manly men will want to pay close attention...

...The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic...

...Here we have an example of women imitating masculinity in its lower range...

...both are traps that are incompatible with female subjectivity and freedom...

...It is not a self-help book...

...He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal opportunity to men and women...

...All the same, one would have expected him to find a few defenders of manliness somewhere in the annals of modern philosophy...

...Says Mansfield: "Manly assertiveness feeds on itself alone, and does not serve to protect and defend a cause greater than itself...

...Because the men followed the principle "women and children first...

...The entire project of modernity...

...No civilization can achieve greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males...

...it makes human beings stand up for their kin, their religion, their country, their principles...

...They invented science, the free market, and liberal government, and they refined the art of war, magnifying its lethality a thousandfold...

...And he deploys them without apology in shocker after shocker: [Women] shun risk more than men and they perceive risk more readily...