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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 26, 2006
Manliness
One week I write about the feminine virtue of modesty, then last week, I say in passing that women “understand orders differently from men”, and that they don’t belong on the front lines in combat. This last remark, especially, turned out to be a great way to meet women. A lot of them wrote to me -- about half in agreement, and the other half striving to illustrate my point.For the record, I do not review books in these columns; I just mention and recommend the odd really good one. I do sometimes review such books, when a paper gives me several thousand words, but do not even try to fully “blurb” a book here, since the sort of book that can be blurbed adequately is not the sort I recommend. There is a marvellous new book by Prof Harvey C. Mansfield, the “last conservative standing at Harvard”, entitled Manliness (published by Yale, and just out). If my reader wants to delve more deeply into the subject and its ramifications to the moral and social order, go read that book. It was a long time in the writing, and harvests the reasonable thoughts of a man who has shot his roots deeply into history and philosophy, and is therefore capable of holding his ground with more than raw courage. He thinks we should continue to declare publicly “the equality of the sexes”, but ignore it privately. This struck me as too reasonable by half. In shared DNA, a man is actually genetically closer to a male chimp than to a human female (as many women observed, before science). Our brains are configured differently (whether by evolution or intelligent design), and it would follow that our behaviour varies accordingly. We look backwards in time (the only objective way to test propositions about human nature), and find that this has been acknowledged in all human cultures. Exceptions may be allowed, even sometimes encouraged -- depends on what is at stake. But to work from the premise that men and women are interchangeable, or that their characteristic virtues are equally distributed, or could be, is to work from a view of nature that is monstrously wrong. Salt and sugar are not equal; they may sometimes look very similar but they do not taste the same. I cook, and I can tell you, they are both necessary. But the cook who assumes they are interchangeable is not therefore a better cook. Men are not pure salt, nor women pure sugar. But you can't substitute mangoes for anchovies in a recipe, either. Or rather, to give the feminists their due, you can substitute them. But then you get results something like our society today. Verily, men and women do not even look the same, despite much contemporary cross-dressing. For starters, men are, on average, bigger, and taller. Most women, including most feminists, long to have a big, strong, reliable, adoring man beside them, and to look up into his eyes -- a man who can’t be pushed around, though of course, being of the more sceptical sex, the woman will be constantly testing this. Now, it is true, especially today, that many women prefer a little squeaky man, to run around doing errands for her (since her dog can’t wash dishes or fetch groceries). Still, while he’s doing his chores, she’d prefer a “big” man for a lover. Am I being crass? Only for the purpose of pointing to what is perfectly obvious, and significant within almost every human activity. I hate it when we have to start an argument by denying the obvious. And remember: the larger size of men is just the exclamation point on the rest of the proposition. Read Mansfield's book for the question whether manly virtues may be abstracted from men, per se. Answer is, yes, to some degree, and we legitimately admire the manly virtues in e.g. Margaret Thatcher -- who, incidentally, always played housewife with the late Sir Denis, and once said, "I will not have any women in my cabinet." She understood: women with pronounced male qualities are exceptional. Nor are the male virtues necessarily virtues in a woman; and vice versa. Male "courage" and female "modesty" have been complementary through recorded time. Men protect women by instinct. Women also protect men, but in different ways, and selectively. Modesty is a virtue in the male, courage in the female, but then they take, respectively, masculine and feminine forms -- even in the face of legislation, or surgery. David Warren
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