Is Manliness a Virtue?

Today the very word “manliness” seems quaint and obsolete. We are in the process of making the English language gender neutral, and manliness, the quality of one gender, or rather, of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy we are attacking, the evil we are eradicating. Recently I had a call from the Harvard alumni magazine asking me to comment on a former professor of mine now being honored. Responding too quickly, I said: “What impressed all of us about him was his manliness.” There was a silence at the other end of the line, and finally the female voice said: “Could you think of another word?”

There are other words, such as courage, frankness, confidence, that convey the good side of manliness, at least, without naming a sex. But to use them, and to drop “manliness,” begs the question whether moral or psychological qualities specific to sex exist. We today deny that they do exist, and we seek to abolish all signs of such qualities in our language, in consequence of the women’s revolution against patriarchy led by contemporary feminism. Our suspicion of manliness comes from the animus of that revolution, from its sense of outrage at injustice prolonged over millennia.

The woman’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 that has never been known before in all human history. All societies up to now, without exception, have been more or less patriarchal, with males somehow always in charge. No example of a society less sexist than ours–let alone a nonsexist society–is ever cited to shame our society and to guide it back to reason. Yet we feel free to launch a thorough transformation as if success were assured, indeed as if no problems will be encountered.

My intent is not to try to stand in the way of this change, and let myself be overwhelmed or ignored. What has happened will stand. Women are not going to be herded back into the home–not, at least, by men. Any modifications to full sexual equality, it seems to me, will have to be led by women. Men have lost the confidence to defend their privilege, once thought to be their right, or their duty. But it is not too soon to begin to judge what has been gained, and what has been lost, by the women’s revolution. And the best way to begin is to look at the quality of manliness, which should be obsolete but isn’t. The word is rarely heard, but the quality is still much in evidence.

My study of manliness has led me to a preliminary observation about its dubious status at present. This is that manliness has always been dubious. It is true that until recently, most men have held a confident belief in male superiority, to put it mildly. Even now, few men would wish to exchange their sex for a woman’s (though it has been done). Today’s sensitive male might also be said, in some cases, to perpetuate rather than correct that male superiority which takes the form of gallantry toward women. But thoughtful men of all kind–poets, playwrights, philosophers, novelists, essayists–have almost all had something to say about manliness. They were not complacent. And what they have said, strangely enough, has been critical to one degree or another. It is not true that “patriarchy” is a system of oppression uncritical of itself, which has been supported by ideologists of male power unwilling to challenge the central quality of manliness that inspires it.

Let us look at two well-known authors who show their doubt of manliness, in two well-known writings. They will also give us a first stab at defining manliness.

First, recall the incident in the first chapter of Tom Sawyer between Tom and the new boy in town. It is a dispute over nothing, arising merely for the sake of superiority: a meaningless argument, vain boasting on both sides, a line drawn in the dust, the dare to step over it accepted, a scuffle followed by recriminations and threats. It is not hard to guess that this is Mark Twain’s picture of manliness done in childish caricature. He seems to say that manliness is childish, only perhaps not so funny and its irrationality not so obvious or so innocent when assumed by adult males. In the adult version, the scuffle is a war. Twain’s critique–though this is just a glimpse of a wonderful book–resembles a woman’s disdain for men’s foolish daring.

Another view of manliness can be found in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, at the end, in Mark Antony’s tribute to Brutus. The speech ends: “His life was gentle, and the elements so mix’d in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man.'” Of course, Brutus has just lost the battle and has died by his own hand; so any tribute from Nature would be a kind of consolation in defeat. Indeed we perhaps especially reserve tributes to manliness for noble losers; nothing more substantial is left to them. But we human beings have to make the tributes. Nature, unfortunately, does not stand up and speak for itself, as Antony seems to wish; Antony, a man, has to speak up for a man and say how perfect he was.

Actually, it is Shakespeare, speaking through Antony, who speaks for nature. Poets must assert the dignity and excellence of man against nature because nature on its own preserves no memory of the best human beings. It is only through Shakespeare (and other poets, aided by historians) that we know of Brutus, only through Homer that we know of Achilles. Manly men like Antony have a tendency to believe that manliness speaks for itself, as if manliness were a natural perfection that all can recognize implicitly, that nature makes perfectly obvious. In Shakespeare’s view–again, nothing but a glimpse of one speech–manliness looks better than it does in the scene from Tom Sawyer. Since it serves the function of defending us against tyrants like Julius Caesar, it is not merely foolish. But manly men tend to exaggerate the naturalness of their behavior, and they forget the need for poets, who are not men of action. Manliness is biased in favor of action. That is a severe criticism, when you think about it. One could even say that thinking is by itself a challenge to the superiority of manliness.

So we are beginning to get a picture of manliness, neither altogether favorable nor dismissive. Manliness can have something heroic about it (Tom Sawyer, the boy who caricatures manliness, is nonetheless Twain’s hero). It lives for action, yet is also boastful about what manly men will do and have done. It jeers at those who do not seem manly, and asks us continually to prove ourselves. It defines turf and fights for it, sometimes for no good reason, sometimes to defend precious rights. And it exaggerates its independence, as if action were an end in itself and manly men were the best or only kind of human being.

This is only the beginning of a definition, but it is solid enough from which to see that manliness has not been touted to the world by the men who have been in charge of it. Manliness has always been under a cloud of doubt, raised perhaps by men who do not have the time or taste for it. It is even possible that manliness is not in the interest of men, or of all men.

Now I have another observation, which is quite strange in view of the first one: such doubts about manliness can hardly be found in today’s feminism. While reflective males (and, of course, women too) in the past have seen many defects in manliness, feminist authors in our time, and the women they influence, have one problem with it–that it is not open to women. Their main complaint against manliness is for its exclusivity. And it’s not that manliness is necessarily exclusive because manly men, like Tom Sawyer, draw lines in the dust, but that manliness excludes women. The feminist movement in America began with Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique (1963). That book is an attack on femininity, not on manliness. It blames men for foisting the feminine mystique on women, for getting them to believe that it is better to seem frail, dumb, and submissive. The implication is that in truth it is better to be strong, smart, and aggressive–like men. The feminists’ first complaint against men was that they were Male Chauvinist Pigs. This did not mean that they were messy creatures, but that they were greedy pigs, hogging all the good things in life for themselves. In other words, it’s better to be a man. Manly qualities that make one want to be a man are better than womanly qualities that might make one hold back. Feminists pride themselves on “agonistic” qualities that make you want to struggle, which is a version of manliness under another name.

The consequence is that we suffer today not so much from lack of manliness as from lack of criticism of manliness. Once one begins to look for manliness the thing rather than manliness the word, there is much of it around to be seen. Young males still pick fights like Tom Sawyer, and now with deadly weapons. Tom’s Aunt Sally now has a job, and not only does she have less time for him but also she has lost her confidence that, as a woman, her role is to scold the excesses of males. Feminism has undermined if not destroyed femininity, the contrast and counterpart to manliness, and so the basis on which half the population could be skeptical of manliness has been removed from the scene. (Even the “difference feminists,” led by Carol Gilligan, who make a point of the special qualities of women, have little or nothing to say about manliness, or about the complementarity of the sexes.) Since we educate women to be like men, how are they supposed to be skeptical of what they are given to admire?

Of course, women are still women. They may have become more like men, but the reconstruction is not complete and perhaps it never will be. Women are more like men, but in the manner of women. Encouraged by Kathleen Turner and Angelica Huston, who played “hit men” in the flicks–to say nothing of “Xena,” the warrior princess–they are more aggressive than they used to be. But still, in the manner of women, they are not as willing to admit it and boast of it as men are. They do not want men to be aggressive if that means getting one’s way by ignoring or oppressing women. They want men to include women; in the past, men have embraced women instead of including them. Men must be sensitive, not so much sensitive in general as sensitive to women. The sensitive male of the 90’s is the creation of contemporary feminism.

The sensitive male is not in the first place sensitive in all regards, a dreamy, poetic type, but he is sensitive to women, and consequently, sensitive to things women feel strongly about. The traditional manly male is protective of women, but when it comes to sensitivity, he is a sorry flop. He does not observe women and he does not listen to them: for all the love that he may profess, he does not take women seriously. His gallantry, women may suspect, is protection not for women but for himself, because it keeps women safely inferior to him, agents of his success unable to share the benefits of his reputation and recognition. Thus, sensitivity should not be mistaken for old-fashioned courtesy. It is not the respect due to a lady, mostly in the private circumstances of married life, but recognition of women’s demand for the equal justice that will take them out of private life into the public. Sensitivity disdains the small favors men do for women, and may even regard them with suspicion. Sensitivity is concerned with paving the way for ambitious women who are a little irritated with the ways of men and no longer so tolerant of their foibles.

Two much-discussed features of our time tell us what the sensitive male must do. One is to put an end to sexual harassment. Sexual harassment does not have any fixed definition, and that is one reason for the controversy that it has raised. It can be understood narrowly as demanding sexual favors in return for being treated as one deserves or broadly as making women feel uncomfortable. Since many more women work outside the home now, sexual harassment in the workplace was bound to become more frequent, and more of a problem. The sensitive male, however, is asked not merely to mind his manners but to look at the matter in a woman’s perspective. One cannot say to him, “treat women as you would like to be treated,” because the uninstructed male would not mind much of what makes a woman uncomfortable, or so he thinks. Perhaps there is no neutral treatment, from neither the man’s nor the woman’s perspective. Either the man feels constrained or the woman feels uncomfortable. Ideally, the sensitive male could be defined negatively: he is one who doesn’t feel constrained when he doesn’t make women feel uncomfortable.

Another predicament for men today is the gender gap–the fact that men and women vote for different parties and candidates, and prefer different policies. Actually the gap is much less pronounced between married men and women. But perhaps that fact suggests that men and women are different in themselves. When they are not acting on one another, as when they are single, the difference is more obvious. The gender gap is not deliberate; neither sex intends to vote against the other, in order to diminish its influence. But it just happens that when each sex follows its inclination, they vote as one might expect on the basis of the traditional stereotypes, men more for independence, women more for security. For this reason one might think the gender gap to be an embarrassment for feminism. It might seem to show that women are trying to be men without wanting to admit they are still women. If, regardless of physical disparities, women think differently from men, how can we be sure that they are fit for occupations formerly reserved for men? But no: feminism has succeeded in presenting the gender gap as the fault of men, requiring men to appreciate women better rather than women to be more understanding of men. It is men who should be embarrassed, and they should relieve their embarrassment by showing greater sensitivity.

Thus, neither sexual harassment nor the gender gap has been thought to require an understanding of manliness. In both cases men are asked to change their ways after becoming more sensitive to women, and it is assumed that this is not only desirable but also possible. No analysis is offered to explain why men are given to harassing women and why men vote differently from women. That they do the first is unjust, that they do the second is unnecessary (and unwise, if they want to win elections). So, in entering men’s occupations, women do not simply become like men; they do get to keep some part of the feminine, understood in practical terms as what makes women comfortable. But they also do not squarely face the manliness of men. Why does manliness get in the way of women, denying them justice and preventing their inclusion? What will happen to the manliness of men when women join men in men’s occupations? Can it continue as it was? Or, on the contrary, if it does continue, who will tame it? Feminism does not simply adopt the manliness of men when it demands to share men’s privileges. While denying that manliness belongs only to men, so that it provides an excuse of male exclusiveness, it also insists on adjustments to make men sensitive. But are these adjustments feasible to make, and what will they do to the manly qualities in men that liberated women want to imitate? In our time manliness is under a cloud, but it has not been subjected to an examination. Women are caught between declaring their ambition to do what men do and affirming themselves as women. Men wonder how they can do justice to women and still be manly.

What we need is the study of manliness that is lacking today from both those who suspect it and those who might defend it. A study asks questions, and my questions about manliness are political, social and intellectual. These categories do not determine the structure of the book, which is history in reverse, but they show what I hope to uncover.

1) The political meaning of manliness comes first. Manliness is an individual quality that causes a human being to come forth, stand up for something, and make an issue of it. It is a quality held by private persons that calls them forth into public, hence into politics. In the past such persons have been predominantly though not exclusively males, and it is of course no accident that those who possess a quality that propels them into politics end up as the rulers: once in politics they do not modestly depart after the occasion of their entry has passed. What starts out as protest against some injustice easily crosses over into aggression on behalf of a cause, and then into defense of the aggressors. Manliness seems to be a mixture of defensiveness and aggression.

The manly types defend their turf, as we have been taught to say by the sociobiologists. They rightly connect manliness to the behavior of other mammals, who first create their own turf, marking out its boundaries with any convenient means, and then defend it. Tom Sawyer very decently drew a line in the dust with his bare toe. The analogy to animals obviously suggests something animal in manliness, which in turn suggests other things. What is animal in human beings may be functional, but it is not rational or not fully rational; and if it is part of our biological nature, it is also deeply ingrained. But of course manliness is specifically human as well. Manly men defend not their turf but their country, which stands for something. 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. Aristotle says that courage is best shown in battle. The issue raised over women in the military today concerns the sovereign claim of manliness as the title to rule. For if women can fight as well as men, why can they not govern as well, and as deservedly?

Here is a line of thinking that makes war or conflict central to politics, and manliness the inspiration of both. It has behind it the evidence not only of males ruling over all societies at almost all times but also of male preponderance in crime and in the prison population. For good and for ill, males, apparently impelled by their manliness, have dominated all politics we know of. Is there something inevitable about this domination or it is merely experience up to now, from which we are free to depart? What is the future of patriarchy?

One reason to doubt its future is that manliness seems undemocratic, while the direction of history in America and elsewhere seems to be toward ever more democracy. To put oneself forward, even in behalf of someone else or a higher cause, seems to require a display of ego. The manly man will take it personally if you do not pay attention to what he says. But a display of ego implies that one is not satisfied with what satisfies most people; it is at base an aristocratic impulse. Women, having less “ego” (in the popular sense of willingness to display it) are more democratic than men, as Aristophanes shows in his play The Congresswomen. As more regimes become democratic, and existing democracies become more democratic, all should benefit from the fact that democracies do not fight one another. Perhaps, then, manliness will be less in demand at the end of history, when all states are democratic and peaceful. This is what William James feared in his famous essay on “The Moral Equivalent of War.” The moral equivalent is manliness, and James thought it so valuable that it ought to be generated artificially now that survival no longer makes it necessary.

Yet in contrast to such fears, based on a supposed incompatibility of manliness and democracy, there is a democratic manliness, as explained by Tocqueville. In democracies, he said, a manly frankness prevails, an open and fearless stance of “man to man” in which all–or all males–are equal. A man does not have to hide his feelings as he does in an aristocracy, where he is always living in the presence of superiors and inferiors. When Americans travel today, they often judge the men they meet as unmanly in comparison with American men. Their manners seem precious to us, perhaps because they maintain a certain reserve toward others that is a vestige of the aristocratic past of their societies. Such men can be sexy–think of Marcello Mastroianni–but sexy is not the same thing as manly. It is a question, however, whether the sensitive male is either sexy or manly–though he is intended to be very democratic. Will modern women be attracted to the kind of man who is sensitive to them and perhaps a little too eager to please?

In sum, manliness as we have known it has been at the core of politics. What will happen when the gender gap is closed and politics is feminized or made available to women on an equal basis? Either manliness must be transformed into a sexless quality or its relevance must be reduced, if it cannot be eliminated altogether. And a second question: how are manliness and democracy related? Should democracy regard manliness as an enemy because it is the privilege of one sex, or does democracy require, and tend to produce, a certain manliness?

2a) The social meaning of manliness covers another set of questions. Since I was just speaking of sex, we may begin from sexual man, a private aspect of manliness that implies the social. Sexually, a man must “perform” in a way that a woman need not. The performance is of course more a matter of desire than choice, but still there is something theatrical about male sex that easily reminds us of showing off. Whereas brute animals show off for the purpose of display, which has a biological function, human ones show off in the more metaphorical sense of making a drama of yourself. I have already mentioned the use that poets make of manly men, and the criticism with which philosophers respond. This duel between poetry and philosophy is featured in Plato’s Republic, which could be described as a debate on the value of manliness. To make a drama of yourself is to make a federal case of your private troubles, to invest them with universal or cosmic significance as did Achilles when Agamemnon stole his girlfriend. Manly men bring cases of injustice to the attention of society or of the gods, but they do tend to exaggerate.

Or, on the contrary, is it not the case that truly manly men do not complain but suffer without complaint? But they are not humble. They are at their best when championing the deserving cause of someone weaker than they are, but they do not allow themselves to be insulted. They have a strong sense of honor. Though they do not complain, they make it clear that they are not complaining. You could even say that they boast of not complaining, or that they boast of not boasting. Manly men make assertions, and then they make good on them, or fail nobly. Now we are back to “performance.”

2b) Another social aspect of manliness is its attitude toward women. Here the single feminist criticism of manliness enters: is male chauvinism necessary to manliness? It certainly seems that manly men have had the habit of distinguishing themselves from the unmanly, whom they frequently call effeminate. They do not simply let others make the distinction but seem to feel the need to insist on it themselves. Theodore Roosevelt never praised manly deeds without also scorning weaklings and mollycoddles who shirk them. Now, is this habit necessary to manliness or can it be dispensed with as obsolete and unworthy? Is it possible to remove the exclusivity of manliness that the feminists indict and still get the same oomph? The energy of manliness seems to go with its eagerness to pass judgment–adverse judgments–on others. So if manliness is made sexless, so too must chauvinism.

Yet manliness, besides condemning effeminacy, offers gallantry to women. What is the true nature of gallantry? Is it really an admission of the superiority of women as it appears to be, or is it 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, you could say (Kant did say it); but on the other hand, the woman does go first. And manly men are often those most easily deceived by women–such was the reputation of the Spartans, who were the most manly Greeks. Manly men are romantic about women; unmanly men are sensitive. Which is better? Which is better for women?

2c) That brings us to sexual roles, the feature of all previous societies that feminists find most objectionable. Even more than “patriarchy”–the rule of men–the belief that nature has confined different social roles for men and women is now found insulting to women. The belief has now largely been abandoned in favor of the feminist notion of “choice.” “Choice” in a new expanded sense applies not only to the decision to have an abortion but also to the range of choices that men used to have. A woman today has the choice of every occupation that used to be reserved for men, plus women’s roles. The latter are now transformed because women choose them rather than being condemned to them. But does this mean that they are performed better because they are now done willingly, or that they are done less well because women feel free to neglect them? Looking at men’s roles, one wonders what happens when men no longer have the duties that used to go with being a man. “Choice” for women is inevitably choice for men, too–and perhaps more for them than for women. If women find it easier to love their children than men do, then women’s duties toward children are less “dutiful,” more supported by inclination, than men’s duties. In the traditional view, the performance of men’s duties is aided by another feature of manliness, the desire to protect and support one’s family. To be a man means to be able to support one’s dependents, not merely oneself alone. But the modern woman above all does not want to be a dependent. She has perhaps not reflected on what her independence does to the manliness of men (it might seem to make men more selfish), and whether the protection she gladly 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.

The noun “parent” has always existed, but only recently has the verb “to parent” been created (by sociologists). Previously, the work that verb includes was done separately in two verbs–to father and to mother. Can the separation between father and mother be overcome so that “parenting,” which is neither, becomes a reality? Father and mother are the fundamental roles that undergird the sexual difference in occupations. If you can get rid of that difference in role, then all other differences will disappear too. One could say that the authoritative father and the loving mother correspond to the public and private spheres as wholes, the one where aggression is paramount, the other where caring is the theme. Abolition of sexual roles might then be expected to produce a mixing of public (understood broadly as the wider world) and private (the realm of familiars). Is this possible and desirable?

We now presuppose, more or less, that men and women are exchangeable. Are we forgetting about how they are complementary? According to the feminists, any traditional notion that the sexes complement each other serves merely to justify the inferiority of women. Complementarity, if it really takes place, is a kind of equality in which each sex is superior in its place. But when you are sure that the overall superiority has been men’s, and that women have been the “second sex,” then to have equality, you must go for the exchangeability of the sexes. Yet there seems to be some truth in the complementarity, say, of aggression and caring, in hard and soft temperaments. The one is to accomplish, the other to preserve–and in between is neither. Of course, there are hard women and soft men. But the idea of “choice” must depend on there being no natural preponderance of one quality or the other in men and women. The logic of choice leads to the ideal of perfect flexibility in which nothing external determines, or even influences, our choice. That ideal of freedom is very like the final stage of communism that Karl Marx sketched so briefly, in which the division of labor has been done away with.

Underneath the question of roles is the question of nature: do men and women have different natures that justify different social roles–even different fates, as Tocqueville said–or are these so-called natures actually “socially constructed”? Social construction is a crucial element in the feminist argument because that idea enables women to escape the prison of nature. Once women see that their roles have been made for them, not permanently by nature but artificially, by society, they realize that what was made by humans can be unmade and remade by humans. The difficulty is that one woman cannot do this by herself; she needs the help of society, perhaps in the form of the women’s movement. Will she then become the prisoner of society if not nature? Surely the range of choice open to women now is greatly enlarged, but this success makes the remaining restrictions on choice harder to tolerate.

And what about manliness? Manliness does not easily accommodate choice because manly men are rather imperious and do not mind ordering other people around. Their frankness makes them sound a little bit peremptory, especially when they are “telling off” some bully or presumptuous upstart. When manliness is extended to women, manly women will be bossy to other women. Bossy people of whichever sex are a hindrance to choice, yet manly people tend to be bossy. Being manly, therefore, is less likely in a society characterized by choice, which as such prefers the sort of tolerant, easy-going person who doesn’t close down other people’s choices. Again we see that feminism constricts manliness without really meaning to do so.

2d) Still another question for the social meaning of manliness is whether there is a natural “sexual constitution” to be found in all societies. That is the notion of George Gilder, a very lonely critic of feminism who has no academic appointment, in his book Men and Marriage. In his argument Gilder makes explicit what is presumed in works of evolutionary biology and sociology. These authors deny that all relations between the sexes are socially constructed, and claim that there is an instinctual or innate relationship built into human beings that precedes and determines any thinking they may do on their own. Starting from the complementarity of sexual intercourse, where nature uses us for her purpose, they find all important sexual relations to be an implicit bargain reflecting ingeniously programmed strategies for survival.

Aristotle said that men come together for the sake of life, and stay together for the sake of the good life; but this complication does not enter into the biological viewpoint, which looks at everything as means to survival. But survival as what? To answer that question, some understanding of the good life must enter in, set forth with the assertiveness supplied by manly men. Manliness represents the desire in us to refuse to be nature’s slaves and to insist on socially constructing even our “sexual constitution.” Socrates said that sexual intercourse should be accompanied by beautiful speeches of love, so as to humanize what is otherwise brute pleasure. The biologists help to restrain the excesses of social constructionists, especially those who think that they can do away with sexual differences by renaming sex “gender.” For where does the power to name come from if not from nature? Nature enables and requires us to construct our own lives. Thus the dichotomy between nature and social construction cannot be correct: our nature leaves us free, but our freedom is limited by our nature. Manliness is the epitome of this conundrum because it seems to come from our nature, yet stands up for us against nature. That is why manly men behave so oddly. They are not artificial; they do what comes naturally. But what is natural to them seems excessive and unnecessary to the rest of us.

2e) We have been led to the question of whether manliness is nature or nurture. Is it permanent or ephemeral? Clearly manliness is related to what Plato called “spiritedness” (thymos), the defense and the defensiveness of one’s self that human beings share with animals. Spiritedness is less rational and reflective than manliness (which is not what one would call thoughtful). It appears in women as well as men, though perhaps in different ways. Women get angry too, but somehow with less drama and more subtlety than men. Or are sexist statements like that one, based on warmed-over common sense, now obsolete?

Perhaps manliness is capable of being abstracted from males and refashioned into something sexually neutral such as strength of soul. Descartes made a key concept of strength of soul, and there is no doubt that it applies more generally than manliness. One would readily agree that many women have admirable strength of soul. But again, do they have it in the same way as men? It seems that women have more steadiness and endurance, men more alacrity and ambition. In the movie Fargo, a woman police officer triumphs over men who are either unmanly or whose manliness takes the form of vicious cruelty merely with her plodding but intelligent, asexual professionalism. The movie seems to say that rule-bound professionalism (for example, the “professional army”) is replacing erratic manliness in occupations that were once the most manly, and that by this means women, who are steadier than men, can replace them, or at least do as well. Women don’t fly off the handle so easily.

3) The intellectual meaning of manliness answers the question of whether there is a sexual constitution in thinking. Is there a man’s and a woman’s point of view? The point of view may not arise from the situation of men and women, but the reverse: the situation from the point of view. Perhaps men and women are characterized more by how they think than by their sexual organs, the higher being the cause of the lower. For if you think only of the sexual organs, you confine the meaning of men and woman to the sexual union, a brief encounter whose consequence is sometimes the birth of a man or woman. What about the lives of men and women apart from reproduction? When we are not doing nature’s work, and perhaps even then, our minds are busy with–one would not say thinking, except in the broadest sense. Being a man or a woman is much more than having certain bodily equipment; one has a certain outlook, too.

Yet, just because sexuality is also a matter of thinking, it is possible for a woman to see a man’s point of view, and barely possible for a man to see a woman’s (the sexes seem to be asymmetrical in this). It is possible to recognize one’s bias and thus to transcend one’s sex. No doubt one doesn’t leave one’s sex behind when transcending it. The pure thinking of mathematics has no sex, but men and women have different aptitudes for mathematics, even for different parts of it. Here lurks the old mystery of how body and mind are connected.

In what way, however, do we transcend our sex? There seem to be two ways: by generalizing or by rising above. Today the feminists in their academic way speak of “self” and “other,” and their very abstract discourse spills over into real life, too. By mutual recognition and reconciliation, the two sexes come to understand and appreciate each other. The process consists in leveling; the two sexes (or one of them–the male) may begin with pretensions, but they learn to abandon them. You learn to want or love someone on your own level. But what of eros that aims at something higher than oneself–love of beauty, wisdom, perfection? Here is transcendence in a truer sense that does not generalize or level down pretensions but on the contrary seeks something rare and wants to justify one’s pretensions.

The asymmetry of the sexes that I spoke of applies to abstracting from one’s sex. Women often understand men, but men rarely understand women. Men tend to be manly, a quality that makes them oblivious of the sexual difference. It is part of manliness not to see that manly is male, and therefore lacks something; the manly man thinks manliness is enough and does not understand what is missing. When one is oblivious of sexual differences, it is easy to leave them behind. Women, understanding men better, are more sensitive to sexual differences, hence more aware of themselves, hence less able to forget themselves. Men through their manliness are more transcendent; women, without that advantage and that encumbrance, are better aware of what is left behind.

Is manliness a virtue? It is too close to our biology, which means to a quality of lower animals, to be called a virtue. It is subhuman and subrational; it lacks the element of voluntary choice necessary to virtue. But in humans, the quality of manliness can ally with the reason specific to humans so as to rise above its generic nature, in the process becoming specifically human and, at the same time, a possible virtue. The alliance with reason enables manliness to pass from aggressive defense of one’s own to noble sacrifice for a cause beyond oneself.

But of course women have reason too, and they are not devoid of aggressiveness. Therefore, the price of humanizing manliness, of raising it from quality to virtue, is allowing women to participate in it. It will not be equal participation because, as Aristotle said, men find it easier to be courageous–and likewise, women find it easier to be moderate. In thinking of the sexual difference, and of human nature generally, you cannot avoid Aristotle’s hedging phrase, “for the most part.” For the most part, men will always have more manliness than women have, and it is up to both sexes, having faced that fact, to fashion this quality into virtue.