Are there any single heterosexual females present tonight in the audience who are looking for Mr. Perfect? Well… I don't think it comes as a surprise if I tell you that one can search for a really long time, for a lifetime, in fact. There's a wonderful scene in the Woody Allen movie Purple Rose of Cairo. Mia Farrow is playing this single lady who can't find the perfect man for herself. One guy is too childish. The other too rude. The third too reckless. She instead decides to devote her time to reading books and watching movies, and at one point she happily exclaims: 'I've just met a wonderful man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything.' 

This funny scene suggests that we derive many ideas about ideal manliness and masculinity from fiction: from movies, from television, from commercials and from Hollywood. On the cover of Mansfield's book we find, for instance, an image of Tarzan. I have never met Tarzan, but I think he is wonderful. Unfortunately like Mia Farrow's character, I can't have him because he's fictional. What I can do though is to try to find someone who is Tarzan-like in real life. And who knows, maybe I'll get lucky, because there are some men who also think that some women are looking for Tarzan and in order to increase their reproductive success, they copy some of his jungle behaviour when dating. 

Images of masculinity matter. The stories that we tell about men matter. And the discourse that we produce about manliness has consequences as well. Recently our guest speaker Harvey Mansfield has contributed to this discourse with his book Manliness. He is not the first, and unlikely the last writer to have a say on this hot issue. In the past five years, there has been a tsunami of books on boys and men, with titles such as The Future of Men, the Alphabet of Manliness, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and The Dangerous Book for Boys. There is a good reason for this enormous interest in males, manliness and masculinity. Let's face it: women are increasingly able to make their own money, have careers, and even run for  the United States presidency. Men are no longer considered an integral part of the family unit that provides care, protection and income. Instead of being the provider, the average heterosexual man merely offers a supplementary value to the quality of women's lives. This process of increasing economic and social independence of women has been referred to as the Great Gender Shift. It has made some men nervous about their role in the public and private spheres. So nervous in fact that a great many books are trying anxiously to restore masculinityto its past glory as a trait exclusively reserved for the male sex.  

 

So what is manliness according to Mansfield and, further, where does his concern about this concept come from?  

Mansfield criticizes a utopic vision of a gender neutral society that doesn't acknowledge the potential of manliness. The potential lies within the confidene of manly men, their ability to command, their independence and their power to get things done. This gives men the ability to be, and I quote 'protective of this wife and children because they are weaker' unquote. Mansfield says that although there have been two feminist waves he sees little changes in gender roles overall: women still do the cooking, men mow the lawn And there must be a reason for it. Therefore, he asks himself: If patriarchy could have been avoided, why is it seemingly a universal socio-political structure? The basic stereotype is that men are aggressive; women are caring, men rational, and women emotional and so on. And guess what, they are not just stereotypes, but also simple common sense, says Mansfield in his book. In the end, it all comes down aggressiveness. And I quote Mansfield from his book: 'Men have manliness so as to compete with other men; women use the manliness of men to protect themselves and their children,'.  

Mansfield especially reprimands feminists for their ideas about gender neutrality. Referring to Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, he writes that:  'Refusing to be women, our feminists from 1970 amount an attack on nature.' In my opinion, this is a very sloppy reading of the history of feminism. Harvey Mansfield reduces the feminist contribution to intellectual thought by considering feminism as a conspiracy to abolish sex differences and deny biology. Mind you, there are also feminists who have put difference forward at the centre of their philosophies. And most feminists - male and female feminists- eloquently put forward that sex, religion and race should not serve as a basis for political and social subordination of certain groups of people. One can not use nature as an excuse for what is simply the acting out of discriminatory behaviour. Feminism is about freedom of choosing embodying identities for both sexes, and I don't think that feminist waves, of which there are at least three, was meant to make women mow the lawn and men to cook. 

When feminists and other theorists say that masculinity and feminity are social constructions, it is easily misunderstood as a denial of biological differences. You can be a feminist, acknowledge biological differences AND argue that masculinity and feminity are social constructions.  In her intelligent review of Manliness, Martha Nussbaum mentions some of the different masculinities that come up in a search for a cross-cultural perspective on manliness. Nussbaum  points out that studies on Jewish males refashioned Roman norms of manliness, making the astonishing claim that the true man sits still all day with a book and has the bodily shape of someone sedentary. Nussbaum also mentions Indian concepts of masculinity that vary widely across the continent as well as how homo-erotic bonding between men at one point in history was thought imperative to cement a military combat unit.  

Instead of restoring manliness, such as Mansfield does, it would be good to underscore the difference between manliness (which is tied to 'man' and who is a man anyway?) and masculinity (which is a quality, attitude, trait available to any embodiment). Mansfield confuses the issue of sex and gender or morphological difference and gender attribution. I wonder what he has to say about transsexuality or genderqueer identities. Surely manliness is not reducible to be about white heterosexual masculinity. One could also think of Judith Halberstam's influential concept of female masculinity and broaden it, as Halberstam does, to gay masculinity or black masculinity.  

 

Unfortunately, when you look at the discourse on masculinity nowadays, you usually see masculinity reduced to two options. He's either soft or macho, and if he doesn't look like John Wayne or Tarzan, he has to be incredibly funny to make up for this. In the memoir My Year as a Man, the American journalist Norah Vincentdescribes in great detail how this homogenizing process works. She is a woman who went undercover to conduct participant observation for a year. The purpose was to study what white American manliness is all about. Being a man is not easy, she concludes. You have to deal with constant rejection and sensitivity is routinely mocked and shamed and beaten out of you. Being a man is a performance you can deliver: you have to curtail everything, throw spontaneity out of the window and replace it with control. Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it is other men, other women, even children. And everyone is also always on the lookout for your weaknesses and your inadequacies.  That is the straightjacket of the male role, and it is no less tailored to suit certain political purposes than its feminine counterpart. Mansfield, let's not slip back into that straightjacket.  

So what's the agenda behind Mansfield's concept of Manliness - why would he actually want to restore the straightjacket of essentialist thought on manliness? I would argue that, behind these ideas about masculinity lurks a politically conservative agenda that really is about power relations, about private and public space, about who gets to decide the nature of the relationship between masculine privilege and male bodies. There are political stakes involved in keeping masculinity studies in the sole purview of heterosexual males. If the Great Gender Shift might be understood as the shifting of masculinity to the providence of women, then the manly men basically wants to undo that power shifting. 

 

This is not to say that manliness is not an important topic. It is of grave importance at this historical moment. And we should study it with care and complexity from a philosophical, biological, sociological and cultural perspective. For instance, some contemporary radical organisations emphasize to young men from a poor economical background manly virtues such as courage, prowess, honour and sacrifice. They teach them to assert a strong masculine identity for their political purposes. This works precisely because if you have no money, no income, no education, all you have left is the power of your masculinity. In this case, you can easily see how a simplistic or reductionistic biologically driven notion of the sexes doesn't make sense or help us to make sense of the political impact of masculinization.  

I would like to put forward an alternative definition of manliness that features in The Future of Men, where Ken, a 40-something businessman from Atlanta,  is busy trying to find his perfect female mate for life. In the process, he finds out that his masculinity is not so much about what women want. In fact, masculinity is about his idea regarding how women perceive him. For Ken, masculinity is all about women. 'Masculinity has nothing to do with men,' he says. 'The whole issue of masculinity rests entirely with women. It is not per se a male issue. Men spend most of their time in relationships in trying to be what the woman perceives as masculine, something that men do a life long time to figure out what it is that women want from them. ' I like this definition of the white heterosexual masculinity because it distinguishes biology from gender, manliness from masculinity, and, moreover it recognizes heterosexual masculinity as a performance between men and women, and it acknowledges the ongoing social changes that Mansfield tries to shut out in his study on manliness. It actually helps us understand why Mia Farrow can be spending a life time searching for the perfect men, and end up discovering that indeed, he is fictional.