Manliness Takes It Where It Hurts
Walter Kirn flays Harvey Mansfield's new book, "Manliness," in the Times Book Review today. Kirn writes that "Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like 'Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men.'"
That is sort of a silly sentence, isn't it? And that's before we even get to "the great explosion of manliness." That may be the problem with choosing a subject like manliness to write about (to the extent that manliness is even a subject, which, now that I think about it, I might question): There's something so very odd about the entire project, it's hard not to write things that make one giggle.
But Mansfield gets a boost from the Times' enlightened conservative, David Brooks, who writes (and, since it's behind the TimesSelect firewall, I quote extensively):
...Harvey Mansfield's new book, "Manliness"...[is] two books in one. First, it's a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices of the thymotic urge. It's also a series of troublemaking generalizations about the differences between men and women.
"Over the next few weeks, Mansfield and his feminist critics are going to brawl — thymotically — over his assertions. I'm not as impressed by Mansfield's generalizations as he is, but he'll have one advantage: he understands the nature of thymos, which shapes this fight, and so much of our political life."
One thing about Brooks' construction annoys me: If anyone bothers to fight over "Manliness," it's not going to be Mansfield and his "feminist critics"—that's a loaded phrase intended to trivialize anyone who thinks that the book is silly. (Jut take it for granted: Conservatives never use the word "feminist" at face value.) I doubt that Walter Kirn is particularly known as a feminist, for example.
The people who have problems with Mansfield's book may just be men and women, like myself, who think that ascribing certain qualities to one gender particularly is a very difficult task, one which Mansfield has not succeeded at and may be pointless in the first place.
