Weighing In: Manliness, A Bad Word for a Good Thing

In his essay "What Makes A Life Significant," William James gives voice to the "manly virtues" that Wagley, in her "Defense of Manliness," seems to want to defend. I say "seems" because, like Sam, I'm not exactly sure what her article is advocating for. If it's anything like what James wanted when he called for a life of "precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger" then I'm all for her program. But if it's something that only men can do or be....well, then we have a problem.

James's essay takes the form of a search. He wants to find out why his blissful little vacation at a place called the Chautaqua Lake Assembly Grounds left him feeling so unsatisfied.

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.

And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,-I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."

I'm told that many students consider this essay one of the best things they've ever read. (Harvard had a wonderful panel in the essay's honor a few weeks ago.) Ultimately, Traveler James tells us that the significant life must require idealism wedded with struggle. We have to "back up" our "ideal visions" he says, "with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character."

Did you catch that phrase, "manly virtue"? Yes, it's unfortunate. But James clearly thought that his ideal, this strenuousness of life, was a universal good (and in fact, that's central to one of his points, that "progress" through time, from one culture to another, doesn't necessarily make our lives more meaningful. Struggle is a universal fact of a significant life.) And furthermore, James was writing in the at the turn of century, when the word "manly" wasn't yet an embarrassingly outmoded word. So we forgive him; his essay is universalist and sympathetic, and it's beautiful.

You can't say the same about Wagley's "Defense of Manliness." At a basic level, here's an extremely frustrating read. One wonders in vain when reading her piece: Is manliness reserved for men? Is being a man a sufficient condition for manliness? A necessary condition? And what does it have to do with modern American society (and Risk and mandolins and all the rest)?

Consider Wagley's thesis: "Our culture emasculates men by stripping manhood of its corresponding virtues and reducing manliness to predatory sexuality. " We have two lemmas here: first, that we have "stripped manhood of its corresponding virtues"; and second, that we have "reduced manliness to predatory sexuality."

I think the second point is patently wrong. The fact that James still resonates with us is indication that the life of strenuousness and courage has not fallen out of favor. This seems plainly right. Senators authorize wars in order to not seem "weak"; firefighters run into collapsing buildings to save their fellow Americans. Who says we don't lionize strength in America?

Which gets us to the first lemma in the sentence quoted above, which is that we have "stripped manhood of its corresponding virtues" (emphasis mine). This is unseemly. Wagley maintains that manliness "corresponds" with manhood. That only men can be manly. How else are we supposed to read sentences like these: "Denigrating manhood harms society because when we assault manliness, we devalue men." Here "men," "manhood" and "manliness" are one in the same; we "denigrate" one and thus we "devalue" the other.

This is sexism plain and simple -- and it's also, one notes, a massive contradiction. If we value courage, bravery, endurance etc -- as James does -- than shouldn't we want all people to exude these traits? Shouldn't we want to extend them to women as well as men, to old people as well as young people, to everyone? So Wagley backtracks. She writes in response to Sam's post: "I certainly hope that if nothing else, people might say I have some “manly” qualities myself!"

You read this and you think, Is she just totally confused about what the problem is? The problem is not the ideal; the problem is the word. "Manly" is an old-fashion and misogynistic word that undermines the very point that one might rightly be trying to make. It excludes and denigrates the very people one is trying to convince; it's sexist and a waste of time and I simply wouldn't recommend we keep using it. If Wagley has some idea of "nobility" in mind, then I suggest she reframe it in a way that all of us can benefit from hearing. I suggest she look to James as a model.

Photocredit: Wikimedia