On Manliness

Don't forget to name the three things you've always wanted to do but haven't tried yet.

OpinionJournal.com has a Featured Article from March 4, 2006, on manliness, and it's a wonderful description of Harvard (yes, the same Harvard that threw out its president Larry Summers because he angered feminists) professor Harvey Mansfield and his book called Manliness.

His new book, "Manliness" (manfully, no subtitle), argues that the gender-neutral society created by modern feminists has been bad both for women and men, and that it is time for men to rediscover, and women to appreciate, the virtue of manliness.

Mr. Mansfield's contention that women and men are not the same is now widely supported by social scientists. The core of his definition of manliness--"confidence in a risky situation"--is not so far from that of biologists and sociologists, who find men to be more abstract in their thinking and aggressive in their behavior than women, who are more contextual in their thinking and conciliatory in their behavior.

Science is good for confirming what "common sense" already tells us, Mr. Mansfield allows, but beyond that, he has little use for it: "Science is a particular enemy of manliness. Manliness asserts something you can't scientifically prove, namely the importance of human beings." Science simply sees people as just another part of the natural world.

It's a well-written article, with much more in it, and I can't agree enough with Professor Mansfield. What a society does when it tries to make men and women exactly the same is that it robs both sexes of the qualities that make them unique, qualities that equip them to complement each other in a way that makes the whole of society greater than the sum of its parts.

Instead of continuing down the road the feminists have laid out to us, I'd like to see us return to the old days, "when men were men, and women liked it that way."