The Cult of 'Manliness'

A curmudgeon's defense of "manly men" devolves quickly into self-parody.

Cathy Young from the July 2006 issue

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Today, of course, that manly moment is mostly remembered as an embarrassment, and no particular renaissance of manhood seems in sight—not even in the Mansfield home. The professor, it turns out, does such unmanly chores as the laundry. His wife Delba Winthrop, a Harvard lecturer, has told The Boston Globe, “I am sure he finds household work undignified.…But that holds for women, too. Somehow, it gets done.”

There’s one more argument for a renaissance of manliness, courtesy of the demographer Philip Longman in the March Foreign Policy. Patriarchy, he writes, confers an “evolutionary advantage” on a society since it
offers women no respectable roles other than motherhood and thus promotes reproduction. (He also says such societies “may well degenerate over time into misogyny,” as if the arrangement he describes were not misogynistic to start with.) In modern industrialized democracies, people with secular, progressive social values are reproducing far less than traditionalists of various stripes. Their share of the population will inevitably shrink in the generations to come, Longman argues, leaving people with patriarchal social values to dominate.

Longman’s reasoning is more sophisticated than Mansfield’s polemic, but it far too confidently assumes that children will share their parents’ values. Nor does it consider the possibility that educated people with progressive values might have a cultural influence disproportionate to their share of the population.

Don’t count on demographics to give the manly man the last laugh: It’s more likely that three generations from now, bookish conservatives will still be lamenting the decline of rugged manliness.