Popluar shifts in vocabulary can be very telling of cultural and philosophical trends. “Man” has been excised from the vernacular–mankind has become humankind, Time’s “Man of the Year” is now “Person of the Year” and so on. What we need, it would appear, is a gender neutral society, one in which it is gender is played down and personhood played up.
To speak of manliness, to espouse it, regardless of your take on what, in fact, it means to be manly is rather unpopular. Our cultural cues call for eviscerated, emasculated, unemployed men. We are to play down our differences from women, empower thier liberation from the home and thier success in the workplace. Accordingly, Harvard professor of Political Science, Harvey Mansfield (heh) writes: “The true, the effectual, meaning of women’s equality is women’s independence … independence from men and children… in maximum feasible independence.”
No doubt, men and women are thoroughly equal, equal but different. However, equality seems to be often mistaken for sameness. Although the differences, in my opinion, do not amount to that of the contrast between Mars and Venus, men and women are different. They work, communicate and dress differently and not merely due to social convention. These differences are universal and transcultural. Instead of playing down our differences, what would it look like to affirm and celebrate feminine wisdom, poise, and attire…and conversely, masculine strength, fortitude, and bold indifference?
What then is the cause of such high cultural rates of unemploymed manliness? Women or feminist philosophy? Neither. Harvey proffers an alternative: “Unemployed manliness is nothing new in the world, and in particular it has not been caused by feminism. The entire project of modernity, however, could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed.”
He explains: The first modern thinker Machiavelli began from the observation that the world suffered from “ambitious idleness.” The reason for this was the domination of the world by Christianity, a religion that puts the honor of gaining salvation in the next world above worldly honors that engage the ambition of manly men.” Is the emasculation of men the product of a Christianity that makes men so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good? Have we placed salvation in the next world above honorable activity in this world? If so, is this indeed Christian?