For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in 1999. No wonder there is such a chorus of complaints about the dearth of male role models. After so many centuries of coffee, reading and cigarette-sucking, are there even men left to emulate?
Of course, there are men to look up to in practically every field of human endeavor. Eliud Kipchoge, the only person to complete a marathon in under two hours, is a man; Ding Liren, the world chess champion, is a man. But these figures are succeeding in their capacity as athletes and competitors, when what is needed is not someone who is good and, incidentally, male, but someone who is good at being male — someone whose primary occupation is masculinity itself. Men do not want inspiring examples of fortitude or ingeniousness; they want what Faludi has called a “gender rule book,” preferably one that is easy to follow.
A gender rule book is precisely what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri attempts to provide in “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” the latest in a long line of guides. Recently, there’s Jack Donovan’s “The Way of Men,” which boasts that it is for anyone who has ever “wished for one day as a lion,” and Jordan Peterson’s best-selling “Twelve Rules for Life,” which is nominally gender-neutral but in fact instructs readers in the art of masculinity (and which is a literal rule book). New Age types can consult Robert Bly’s “Iron John,” the loosely Jungian urtext of the mythopoetic men’s movement, published in 1990, which counsels men to embrace their “Zeus energy.” Pseudo-intellectuals may prefer the more refined if less coherent “Manliness” (2006), by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who blusters about chivalry and gentlemen. These books have significant differences, but they all find themselves in the awkward position of claiming that masculinity is both unassailable and endangered, both natural enough to be obvious and fragile enough to require defense.
Hawley toes the same wavering line in “Manhood,” in which he posits that masculinity is, at once, a biological endowment and a personal achievement. The book has many of the same tics as its forebears: It includes the usual eulogies for physical labor (romanticized as working with your hands), the standard invocations of legends from the “ancient Near East” purported to confirm manhood’s universality, the familiar hagiographic celebrations of Teddy Roosevelt and the obligatory assurances that “men” are called to be “warriors,” this time on the cultural battlefield.
But Hawley’s opus is less of a riot than its predecessors. As serious thinking about gender, works like “Iron John” and “Manliness” fail, but as parodies and performances, they succeed by dint of their sheer outrageousness. Hawley, a Republican and an especially dreary type of fervent Christian, is too much of a dour moralist to write, as Bly does, that inside every man lurks a “primitive being covered with hair down to his feet,” or to speculate, as Mansfield does, that women are not fit for combat because “they fear spiders.” Despite himself, he is doing drag, but he will be pleased to hear that he is doing it poorly.
“Manhood” sees itself as a tragedy, not a farce. American men, it proclaims, are in dire straits. They are not working, getting married or raising children. Instead, they are taking drugs, feeling sorry for themselves and watching pornography on their phones. Hawley’s tone is alternately sympathetic and scolding as he suggests that men have become aimless and irresponsible, a development that will surely prove catastrophic for the country. “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he writes, because “self-government” succeeds only when citizens cultivate “strength of character.” Women, it is implied, do not have enough of this precious resource to keep the country running.
Like a campaign speech, “Manhood” is an adventure in impressionistic and impassioned disorganization. Chapter breaks may as well be accidental; most passages could be reshuffled into any section without any loss of coherence. Hawley identifies six roles that men should occupy — husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king — but never manages to distinguish them clearly from one another. Men in each guise are supposed to do hackneyed and abstract things, like “endure.” We are treated almost at random to tirades about the “chattering classes” and, quaintly, the French Revolution, which is characterized not as an assault on monarchy but as a “campaign of wholesale atheism.”
Insofar as it is possible to impose an organizational principle onto “Manhood,” the book takes up four distinct projects, though not in any particular order. The first is halfhearted biblical exegesis. The second is wholehearted self-promotion. Hawley is keen to cast himself as a man of the people by neglecting to name his elite alma maters (Stanford and Yale Law School), name-dropping the less-demonized university where he says he taught many floundering young men (the University of Missouri School of Law), reminiscing about his participation in organized sports (football) and selectively remembering the parts of his childhood that he spent on his grandparents’ farm (where he went only during vacations). He is effusive about his grandfather, a farmer, and his uncle, who started a concrete-pouring business, but is comparatively silent about his father, whose profession (banker) he conveniently neglects to mention. His autobiographical forays are desperately folksy: He remembers “Christmases with a tree in the parlor and a fire on the hearth and summers of chasing fireflies in the front yard,” and recalls that meeting his wife “felt somehow like being at my grandparents’ house in Kansas,” which sounds punitively unsexy.
Hawley’s third fixation is liberalism, defined not as a political system but as an all-encompassing ethos that consists, primarily, of the fetishization of choice. There is no sin for liberals, he writes, but “the sin of intolerance.” This faulty account of liberalism as a philosophy of personal morality, rather than a philosophy of state action, is buttressed by even faultier intellectual history. It would be impossible to survey all that Hawley gets wrong — suffice it to say that America would be considerably more interesting if the Democrats read as much German philosophy as he believes they do — but his most impressively bizarre assertion is that the Greek philosopher Epicurus is the forefather of modern political theory. Hawley insists on interpreting Epicurus as a hedonist, even though the thinker urged his followers to moderate their appetites, and as a proto-liberal, even though he was famously allergic to politics.
Of course, there are men to look up to in practically every field of human endeavor. Eliud Kipchoge, the only person to complete a marathon in under two hours, is a man; Ding Liren, the world chess champion, is a man. But these figures are succeeding in their capacity as athletes and competitors, when what is needed is not someone who is good and, incidentally, male, but someone who is good at being male — someone whose primary occupation is masculinity itself. Men do not want inspiring examples of fortitude or ingeniousness; they want what Faludi has called a “gender rule book,” preferably one that is easy to follow.
A gender rule book is precisely what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri attempts to provide in “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” the latest in a long line of guides. Recently, there’s Jack Donovan’s “The Way of Men,” which boasts that it is for anyone who has ever “wished for one day as a lion,” and Jordan Peterson’s best-selling “Twelve Rules for Life,” which is nominally gender-neutral but in fact instructs readers in the art of masculinity (and which is a literal rule book). New Age types can consult Robert Bly’s “Iron John,” the loosely Jungian urtext of the mythopoetic men’s movement, published in 1990, which counsels men to embrace their “Zeus energy.” Pseudo-intellectuals may prefer the more refined if less coherent “Manliness” (2006), by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who blusters about chivalry and gentlemen. These books have significant differences, but they all find themselves in the awkward position of claiming that masculinity is both unassailable and endangered, both natural enough to be obvious and fragile enough to require defense.
Hawley toes the same wavering line in “Manhood,” in which he posits that masculinity is, at once, a biological endowment and a personal achievement. The book has many of the same tics as its forebears: It includes the usual eulogies for physical labor (romanticized as working with your hands), the standard invocations of legends from the “ancient Near East” purported to confirm manhood’s universality, the familiar hagiographic celebrations of Teddy Roosevelt and the obligatory assurances that “men” are called to be “warriors,” this time on the cultural battlefield.
But Hawley’s opus is less of a riot than its predecessors. As serious thinking about gender, works like “Iron John” and “Manliness” fail, but as parodies and performances, they succeed by dint of their sheer outrageousness. Hawley, a Republican and an especially dreary type of fervent Christian, is too much of a dour moralist to write, as Bly does, that inside every man lurks a “primitive being covered with hair down to his feet,” or to speculate, as Mansfield does, that women are not fit for combat because “they fear spiders.” Despite himself, he is doing drag, but he will be pleased to hear that he is doing it poorly.
“Manhood” sees itself as a tragedy, not a farce. American men, it proclaims, are in dire straits. They are not working, getting married or raising children. Instead, they are taking drugs, feeling sorry for themselves and watching pornography on their phones. Hawley’s tone is alternately sympathetic and scolding as he suggests that men have become aimless and irresponsible, a development that will surely prove catastrophic for the country. “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he writes, because “self-government” succeeds only when citizens cultivate “strength of character.” Women, it is implied, do not have enough of this precious resource to keep the country running.
Like a campaign speech, “Manhood” is an adventure in impressionistic and impassioned disorganization. Chapter breaks may as well be accidental; most passages could be reshuffled into any section without any loss of coherence. Hawley identifies six roles that men should occupy — husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king — but never manages to distinguish them clearly from one another. Men in each guise are supposed to do hackneyed and abstract things, like “endure.” We are treated almost at random to tirades about the “chattering classes” and, quaintly, the French Revolution, which is characterized not as an assault on monarchy but as a “campaign of wholesale atheism.”
Insofar as it is possible to impose an organizational principle onto “Manhood,” the book takes up four distinct projects, though not in any particular order. The first is halfhearted biblical exegesis. The second is wholehearted self-promotion. Hawley is keen to cast himself as a man of the people by neglecting to name his elite alma maters (Stanford and Yale Law School), name-dropping the less-demonized university where he says he taught many floundering young men (the University of Missouri School of Law), reminiscing about his participation in organized sports (football) and selectively remembering the parts of his childhood that he spent on his grandparents’ farm (where he went only during vacations). He is effusive about his grandfather, a farmer, and his uncle, who started a concrete-pouring business, but is comparatively silent about his father, whose profession (banker) he conveniently neglects to mention. His autobiographical forays are desperately folksy: He remembers “Christmases with a tree in the parlor and a fire on the hearth and summers of chasing fireflies in the front yard,” and recalls that meeting his wife “felt somehow like being at my grandparents’ house in Kansas,” which sounds punitively unsexy.
Hawley’s third fixation is liberalism, defined not as a political system but as an all-encompassing ethos that consists, primarily, of the fetishization of choice. There is no sin for liberals, he writes, but “the sin of intolerance.” This faulty account of liberalism as a philosophy of personal morality, rather than a philosophy of state action, is buttressed by even faultier intellectual history. It would be impossible to survey all that Hawley gets wrong — suffice it to say that America would be considerably more interesting if the Democrats read as much German philosophy as he believes they do — but his most impressively bizarre assertion is that the Greek philosopher Epicurus is the forefather of modern political theory. Hawley insists on interpreting Epicurus as a hedonist, even though the thinker urged his followers to moderate their appetites, and as a proto-liberal, even though he was famously allergic to politics.