DOES OUR CONCEPT OF MANILINESS MATTER?

[Hiromi]

http://www.boundless.org/1999/features/a0000025.html

 

Excerpts from : The Crisis of ManlinessWaller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada

 

Fatherhood and manliness have always been closely connected, not only because fathering a child is a palpable proof of manhood, but also because fathers are supposed to provide their sons with a model of what to become. And yet, as a culture, we have never been more conflicted about what we mean by manhood....

 

Given these signals from the culture, confirmed every day by real acts of mayhem, some hold that we should try to get rid of manliness altogether and make more rigorous efforts to create a genderless personality free of male violence. The recent horrific shooting in the Arkansas schoolyard, with little-boy killers waiting in their army fatigues to ambush their classmates and teachers, might suggest that they are right. Add to this the fact that the majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 25, and there seems good reason for discouraging male children from embracing any notion of manly pride.

 

But it is not so simple. The last 30 years have witnessed a prolonged effort at social engineering throughout our public and educational institutions. Its purpose is to eradicate any psychological and emotional differences between men and women, and the grounds that any concept of manliness inevitably leads to arrogance and violence towards women and to rigid hierarchies that exclude the marginalized and powerless. This experiment was meant to reduce violence and tensions between the sexes. And yet, during this same period, "macho" violence and stress between men and women may well have increased. Recent crime statistics suggest as much in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom the countries where the feminist social experiment stigmatizing manliness has had the greatest latitude to prove itself.

 

As the recent book by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead confirmed, absent fathers are one of the strongest predictors of violence among young men in the United States, at least as important as poverty, lack of education, or minority status. The ease with which men of my baby-boomer generation have abdicated our roles as fathers is undoubtedly connected with feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Boomers were told that we shouldnt be hung up about providing masculine role models for children and should do whatever made us happiest, including escape an unsatisfying marriage. After all, to hold things together for the sake of the children would restrict both men and women to old-fashioned "patriarchal" responsibilities. The results of this hard, bright credo of selfishness are todays under-fathered young men, many of them from broken homes, prone to identify their maleness with aggression because they have no better model to go by.

 

It seems plain enough that we are missing the boat about manliness; for there are forms of pride and honor that would be good to impart to young males. Indeed, manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to it, are the surest means of promoting respect for women. Equally, manly anger and combativeness can provide energy for a just cause. Horrified as we are by the cult of warrior violence in the Balkans or Rwanda, we may have gone too far toward the opposite extreme in the Western democracies. As Michael Kelly recently observed, "There are fewer and fewer people, and they are older and older people, who accept what every 12-year-old in Bihac knows: that there are some things worth dying and killing for." Abolitionism in the ante-bellum United States, the Allies defeat of Nazi Germany, and the civil-rights movement of the 60s would never have succeeded without the legitimate expression of anger against injustice. The point is not to eradicate honor and pride from the male character, but to re-channel those energies from the nihilistic violence of Fight Club or the Arkansas schoolyard to some constructive moral purpose.

 

To do this, we must recover a sense of what it means to be manly honorable, brave, self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings of delicacy and respect toward loved ones. For if young men are cut off from this positive tradition of manly pride, their manliness will reemerge in crude and retrograde forms. Some 30 years ago, the Rolling Stones recorded a misogynist rant called "Under My Thumb." Today, it is one of the songs that fans most frequently request of these aging shamans of adolescent attitudinizing. In three decades, tension between men and women not only has not disappeared but may actually have intensified, and we must wonder whether the experiment in social engineering itself is one reason why.

 

For hostility towards women is an aberration of male behavior. If, as the prevailing orthodoxy contends, the male gender were intrinsically aggressive, hegemonic and intolerant, then by definition male behavior could never improve. The message young males receive from feminist reasoning is not, You should be ashamed of liking "Under My Thumb," but, Thats the way your gender thinks about women.

 

All that 30 years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive maleness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility. The gurus of sensitivity have tried to convince men to become open, fluid, non-hegemonic and genderless beings who are unafraid to cry. But little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we cant give them all Ritalin. Psychologists have begun to express concern about our educational institutions readiness to pathologize what once would have been regarded as boyish high spirits rough-housing, "hating" girls, locker-room language and to treat ordinary immaturity with powerful drugs.

 

Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes, and the way to educate them to treat girls and women with respect is to appeal to their heroism, not to try to blot it out. Look at those kids performing daring flips on their skateboards, or sailing on their Rollerblades into the heaviest downtown traffic like warriors contemptuous of danger. They are almost always males. Look at that squeegee kid with his shaved head and horsehair plume, decked out like some road-warrior Achilles. Walk into one of those high-voltage computer emporiums, selling our centurys most potent icon for the extension of human mastery over the cosmos. Who are the salesmen? Almost always cocky young men, celebrities-in-waiting in dark suits and moussed hair, hooked on the sheer power of it all.

 

One thing is sure: Given our current confusion over the meaning of manliness, we have nothing to lose by re-opening the issue. If academic feminism is correct that violence toward women stems from traditional patriarchal attitudes, our grandparents lives must have been a hell of aggression and fear. Yet, if anything impresses us about our forebears, judging from their lives, letters and diaries, it is the refinement of their affections for one another and of mens esteem for women in particular. Perhaps we cannot return to that world. But boys and young men today need re-introducing to this tradition of manly civility.

 

Despite recent caricatures of the Western tradition as one long justification for the oppression of women, our greatest poets and thinkers from Homer to Rousseau have explored the delicate interplay of love and self-perfection. In Homers Odyssey, Telemachus, son of the great war hero Odysseus, embarks on a journey to find his missing father and thereby save his mother from the oppressive noblemen who want her to give up her husband for dead and marry one of them. As he searches for his father in an adventure parallel to Odysseus own search for a way home to his long-lost wife and child, Telemachus is educated by his adventures and grows from a boy into a man, guided by the wise goddess Athena, who is also his fathers best friend among the gods. Telemachus search for his missing father, guided by the goddess, in effect provides him with the upbringing that Odysseus was not able to give him, although he still inspires it from afar because the boy learns during his travels of his fathers exploits and wants to prove himself the heros worthy son.

 

When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mothers protector from oppressive men, who has to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father would be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective. They are Telemachus.

 

 

 

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

[FireKat]

Any male can be a father but it takes a true man to be a daddy.

Hey legal types, I had a thought which is bugging me..... Is it a copyright violation to copy/paste complete items? Are parts OK? No heavy lawyer talk, just a simple yes, no, maybe.

[evmori]

I cut down trees

I skip and jump

I love to press wild flow'rs

I put on women's clothing

And hang around in bars

 

I cut down trees,

I wear high heels

Suspenders and a bra

I wish I'd been a girlie

Just like my dear papa

[OldGreyEagle]

He's a lumberjack and he's OK

He sleeps all night and he works all day.

 

Well, he gives references to where the copies come from, as long as he doesnt pass it off as original work and its credited to where its from, what can be done?

[Kudu]

Real Men don't use the caps lock key.

 

[OldGreyEagle]

How many real men does it take to change a light bulb?

 

 

 

None, real men are not afraid of the dark

 

or

 

One, but the light bulb has to want to change

 

 

[packsaddle]

What Trevorum said the first time, 'NO' (and I didn't use the CAPS LOCK KEY, EITHER, NOR RIGHT NOW, NEITHER)

 

FireKat, to answer your question, I've run my plagiarism checker on many of the posts in these forums over the years and some of us seem to more prone to the...ahem..behavior, than others. But in this format, while his cutting and pasting might cause me to fail him on an essay it probably won't lead to legal action.

[evmori]

Change! My grandfather put that light bulb in!

[MarkS]

Can one really be truly manly if one has to determine whether or not they or their beliefs fit in a particular definition of manliness?

 

I don't think one can be manly if they have to question what being manly is.

 

However, if one must seek some outside source or inspiration to verify their manliness, you might as well have fun with it. Therefore I suggest the works of Bruce Feirstein for confirmation.(This message has been edited by MarkS)

[FireKat]

Good to know that one of my favorite websites will not dissapear bscause someone enjoys cutting and pasting more than discussion.

How many men does it take to change a light bulb.

None - they avoid the household chore till the wife does it.

[CalicoPenn]

Real Manly Men don't change light bulbs! They wrestle a bull to the ground to kill it with their own bare hands, butcher the beast, render the fat into tallow so they can make candles out of it, not forgetting of course to braid wicks out of fibers from a cattail leaves which they've harvested themselves from the middle of a marsh, then use flint (found and dug themselves) and steel (which they've formed, tempered and forged from scratch themselves) to start a fire so that they can light their candles.

 

Calico

[Hiromi]

Well Fire Cat,

 

I guess you can give it as well as you can take it.

 

From one sexist to another - here's lookin at you Kid.

 

Pappy(This message has been edited by Pappy)

[OldGreyEagle]

"...not forgetting of course to braid wicks out of fibers from a cattail leaves which they've harvested themselves from the middle of a marsh,..."

 

Harvesting a plant is woman's work, a real man would know that

[CalicoPenn]

"Harvesting a plant is woman's work, a real man would know that"

 

So what you're saying is that a man can't be a real man without a strong woman at his side to dig in the muck?

 

And what about Mountain Men - you know, the guys who actually did things like this for long periods of time in the wilderness without the company of anyone else, let alone a woman? They must have whimpered in defeat anytime they had to cook, sew, harvest plant parts, etc.

 

Calico

 

[OldGreyEagle]

" They must have whimpered in defeat anytime they had to cook, sew, harvest plant parts, etc."

 

Hey a real man kills what he needs and then eats the animal raw, and who needs to sew, if the Good Lord wanted us to walk around naked, we would have been born that way.(This message has been edited by OldGreyEagle)