Is Manliness Optional?
By Harvey Mansfield
Today the very word “manliness” seems obsolete.
There are other words, such as “courage,” “frankness,” or “confidence,” that convey the good side of manliness without naming a sex. But to use them in place of “manliness” begs the question of whether moral or psychological qualities specific to each sex exist. Our society today denies that such differences are real, and seeks to abolish all signs of such qualities in our language. To the extent that feminism recognizes gender differences at all, it presents them as bad, and as the fault of men.
The women’s revolution has succeeded to an amazing degree. Our society has adopted, quite without realizing the magnitude of the change, a practice of equality between the sexes never before known in human history. My intent is not to stand in the way of this change. Women are not going to be herded back into the kitchen by men. But we need to recognize that there have been both gains and losses in this revolution.
Manliness can be heroic. But it can also be vainly boastful, prone to meaningless scuffling, and unfriendly. It jeers at those who do not seem to measure up, and asks men to continually prove themselves. It defines turf and fights for it--sometimes to defend precious rights, sometimes for no good reason. Manliness has always been under a cloud of doubt--raised by men who may not have the time or taste for it.
But such doubts about manliness can hardly be found in today’s feminism. Contemporary feminists, and the women they influence, have essentially a single problem with manliness: that it excludes women. Betty Friedan’s feminist classic The Feminine Mystique is not an attack on manliness, but on femininity. It insists women should be strong and aggressive--like men.
Though the word is scarce in use, there is an abundance of manliness in action in America today. Young males still pick fights, often with deadly weapons.What we suffer from today, is a lack of intelligent criticism of manliness. Feminism has undermined, if not destroyed, the counterpart to manliness--femininity--and with it the basis on which half the population could be skeptical of the excesses of manliness.
Of course, women are still women. While they want men to be sensitive to women, they don’t necessarily want them to be sensitive in general. That’s why the traditional manly male--who is protective of women, but a sorry flop when it comes to sensitivity--is far from a disappearing species.
Manliness offers gallantry to women. But is gallantry fundamentally insincere because it always contains an element of disdain? The man who opens a door for a woman makes a show of being stronger than she, one could say. At the same time, the woman does go first. Manly men are romantic about women; unmanly men are sympathetic. Which is better for women?
The “sensitive male” who mimics many female emotions and interests, while discarding the small favors men have traditionally done for women, is mostly just a creation of contemporary feminists who are irritated with the ways of men, no longer tolerant of their foibles, and demanding new behavior that would pave the way for ambitious women. Feminists insist that men must work harder to appreciate women. Yet they never ask women to be more understanding of men.
Manliness is a quality that causes individuals to stand up for something. It is a quality that calls private persons into public life. In the past such people have been predominantly male, and it is no accident that those who possess this quality have often ended up as political rulers and leaders.
Manly men defend their turf, just as other male mammals do. The analogy to animals obviously suggests something animalistic about manliness. But manliness is specifically human as well. Manly men defend not just their turf but their country. Manliness is best shown in war, the defense of one’s country at its most difficult and dangerous. In Greek, the word for manliness, andreia, is also the word for courage.
For good and for ill, males impelled by their manliness have dominated all politics of which we know. Is there something inevitable about this domination or are we free to depart from it? With more and more countries moving toward democracy and peace, perhaps manliness will become less necessary.
Yet there might also be a democratic manliness. In democracies, Tocqueville said, a manly frankness prevails--an open and fearless stance of “man to man” in which all are equal. Does democracy, then, tend to produce, and require, manliness?
Feminists find all sexual roles objectionable. They are insulted by the idea that nature has determined different social parts and purposes for the sexes. They have largely forced the abandonment of any idea of sexual nature in favor of the feminist notion of “choice.” A woman today has the choice of every occupation that used to be reserved for men, plus traditional women’s roles. Inevitably, “choice” for women opens up choices for men too. What happens when men are no longer pressed to face the duties that used to go with being a man? Traditionally, the performance of a man’s duties has required him to protect and support his family. To be a man means to support dependents, not merely yourself.
But the modern woman above all does not want to be a dependent. She may not have thought about what her independence does to the manliness of men (it might make men more selfish). And she may not have considered carefully whether the protection she does without will be replaced by sensitivity, or by neglect. The statistics on male abandonment of their children in our day are not heart-warming.
According to feminists, any traditional notion that the different sexes complement each other serves merely to justify the inferiority of women. On its face, complementarity suggests real equality--each sex is superior in its place. But if you are sure that the best positions have been the men’s and that women have been the “second sex,” then in order to achieve equality you must go for full interchangeability of the sexes. You must deny any natural preponderance of one quality or another in men and women.
Do men and women have different natures that justify different social roles? Or are these natures just “socially constructed”? If women can conclude that their roles have been designed artificially by society, then they are free to remake themselves without constraint. But the latest science suggests that being a man or a woman is much more than having certain bodily equipment (see the article below). Perhaps men and women are characterized more by how they think than by their sexual organs.
While maleness is partly just a fact of biology, in humans it is linked to thinking and reason in ways that make manliness something much more than mere aggression. In humans, masculinity is more than just defense of one’s own; it has been extended to require noble sacrifice for a cause beyond oneself.
Certainly, women reason and sacrifice too, and they are not devoid of aggressiveness. But their participation in these things is not “equal.” As Aristotle said, men find it easier to be courageous--and women find it easier to be moderate. Of course, you cannot avoid Aristotle’s qualifier, “for the most part.”
For the most part, men will always have more manliness than women have, and it is up to both sexes to fashion this fact into something good.
The New Science of Sex
By Iain Murray
Two centuries ago, protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a treatise entitled “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in which she theorized that men and women are essentially the same. The roles they play, she suggested, are merely social constructs. The buzz phrase since then has been that “the mind has no sex.”
But there is growing scientific evidence that the mind does have a sex, and that other unexpected components of the body have a sex as well. An article in the New York Times Magazine by former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan helped start the sex-difference debate up again early in 2000. After experiencing upsurges in various feelings since he began injecting testosterone in order to combat the effects of his disease (Sullivan is HIV positive), he started to look into the scientific research on testosterone’s consequences. Although the different effects of male and female hormones have been known for some time, the research that Sullivan uncovered indicates a much more fundamental role for testosterone than was previously acknowledged. There are significant differences between men and women in their brains and genes as well.
There are two strands to this data: animal research and human research. Newborn female rats develop penises and the willingness to use them after injection with testosterone. While male zebra finches sing, females don’t unless they are injected with the hormone. In species where females are dominant, meanwhile, such as certain hyenas, the females naturally have higher levels of testosterone than the males. Among animals, it seems to be testosterone that is associated with “male” behavior.
Much the same is true in humans. One study Sullivan cited showed that men (and women) with high testosterone levels “experienced more arousal and tension than those low in testosterone.… They spent more time thinking, especially about concrete problems in the immediate present. They wanted to get things done and felt frustrated when they could not.” Human studies show that our testosterone levels rise in response to confrontation and sexual situations. Athletes’ testosterone rises in competition, and it remains high in the event of victory, but lowers in defeat. The same is true, interestingly, of the fans following the sport.
All this holds true for both men and women. The crucial difference is that men have 250 to 1,000 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood plasma, while women have 15 to 70. Testosterone is crucial in making men men--literally. It is an infusion of testosterone making men men--literally. It is an infusion of testosterone around six weeks after conception that makes an embryo male (the default sex for humanity is female), and it is a further rush at puberty that lowers male voices, produces body hair and builds muscles. Testosterone is clearly associated with aggression and risk-taking.
We know, however, that testosterone levels can be influenced by the social environment. An Emory University study found that an alpha-male monkey had, as expected, high testosterone levels, but that placing him in an environment with hostile females lowered his testosterone levels to those of submissive males. His initially high testosterone levels did not protect him or maintain his dominance. So while testosterone is important, it does not seem to be the final determining factor in what makes men and women different.
What about genetics, then? Males possess a Y chromosome, which women do not. The role of genetics in sex is much deeper than that, though. It is now generally accepted, for instance, that it is the father’s genes that build the placenta. This is one aspect of a mysterious process known as “imprinting,” whereby the genes of placental mammals seem to remember from which parent they come. This is why, so far, it has proved very difficult to create a functioning embryo from the genes of “parents” of the same sex (and why it proved so difficult to create a viable mammalian clone).
One of the most interesting aspects of imprinting is that, in mice, there is a gene that determines “good” motherhood. A female mouse who fails to have the gene imprinted is perfectly normal except that she will build a poor nest, allow her pups to wander off, and fail to keep them clean. Her pups, not surprisingly, usually die. The responsible gene is inherited from the father. The mother’s gene never imprints.
Something similar may apply to humans. A study by researchers from the Institute of Child Health in London looked at “Turner’s Syndrome” girls, who are missing the paternal paternal X chromosome. These girls scored lower on recognizing other people’s feelings, realizing the effect of their behavior on others, obeying commands, and interacting socially. They acted like geeky men.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychiatrist at Cambridge University, is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, which affects boys more than girls by a factor of eight to one. Autistic children can be extremely withdrawn, but they are not stupid. Many are exceptionally good at certain tasks, generally involving systematizing. They are, however, exceptionally bad--to the point of being unable to function in society--at tasks that involve empathizing with others (just like the Turner’s Syndrome girls).
Baron-Cohen has concluded that most people have a mixture of brain types: S for systematizing and E for empathizing. Men, however, are much more likely to lean toward the S-type brain, and women toward the E-type. In his new book The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain, Baron-Cohen concludes that autism is an example of the “extreme male brain.” He provides evidence that sex differences in brain types show up again and again in tests, even in babies as young as one day old.
It should be stressed that not all men have male brains, and not all women have female brains. We are talking about general patterns here. In the case of hormones, genes, and brain architecture there is clear evidence that nature tends in different directions for men and women, but obviously individuals vary. And the way a person is raised--the nurture in addition to nature--plays a role in his or her sexual identity as well.
But most often, nature will win out. As it did in the case of a boy in the 1960s whose circumcision was botched so badly it was decided to castrate him and raise him as a girl. In 1973, Freudian psychologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University declared to the world that “Joan” was becoming a well-adjusted teenage girl, thereby confirming the theories of Wollstonecraft and her successors that sex was a thing imposed, not something innate. But investigators tracked Joan down in 1997. They found a person who had always felt deeply, inexplicably unhappy as a woman, had eventually discovered the truth about himself, taken steps to reverse his sex change, and ended up as a happily married man.
And then there are the genetic revelations. Scientists have found that the Y chromosome is not as small and stunted as previously believed. Humans and chimpanzees famously share 98.5 percent of the same DNA. Judging by the new scientific discoveries, it appears that men and women differ genetically by up to 2 percent. So, genetically speaking, a man is as much like a woman as he is like a chimpanzee.
A guy’s wife could have told him that.
