<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/18/manhood-josh-hawley-review/>
"For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis.
Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the
1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee
would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation
worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little
boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of
the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we
are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft,
sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone
badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from
the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in
1999. No wonder there is such a chorus of complaints about the dearth of male
role models. After so many centuries of coffee, reading and cigarette-sucking,
are there even men left to emulate?
Of course, there are men to look up to in practically every field of human
endeavor. Eliud Kipchoge, the only person to complete a marathon in under two
hours, is a man; Ding Liren, the world chess champion, is a man. But these
figures are succeeding in their capacity as athletes and competitors, when what
is needed is not someone who is good and, incidentally, male, but someone who
is good
at being male — someone whose primary occupation is masculinity
itself. Men do not want inspiring examples of fortitude or ingeniousness; they
want what Faludi has called a “gender rule book,” preferably one that is easy
to follow.
A gender rule book is precisely what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri attempts to
provide in “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” the latest in a long
line of guides. Recently, there’s Jack Donovan’s “The Way of Men,” which boasts
that it is for anyone who has ever “wished for one day as a lion,” and Jordan
Peterson’s best-selling “Twelve Rules for Life,” which is nominally
gender-neutral but in fact instructs readers in the art of masculinity (and
which is a literal rule book). New Age types can consult Robert Bly’s “Iron
John,” the loosely Jungian urtext of the mythopoetic men’s movement, published
in 1990, which counsels men to embrace their “Zeus energy.”
Pseudo-intellectuals may prefer the more refined if less coherent “Manliness”
(2006), by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who blusters about chivalry and
gentlemen. These books have significant differences, but they all find
themselves in the awkward position of claiming that masculinity is both
unassailable and endangered, both natural enough to be obvious and fragile
enough to require defense."
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "This is some damned fine writing. Worth it
just for the lede alone."
To be clear: this review is fine writing, not the book being reviewed. :)
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
