Chapter Two  Manliness as Stereotype

It is a big change we make, a heavy responsibility we accept, when we go to gender neutrality and abandon manliness. In doing so we call manliness a stereotype. The word stereotype is a term of science, but it is also a word at large in our speech, used disparagingly to designate a construction of folklore or alleged common sense. When we call manliness a stereotype, we invoke or imply the authority of science. What does science say about manliness?

To support the change to the new society we call upon science to supply us with a study, for in our day a “study” usually means a scientific study. But there are no scientific studies of “manliness.” Manliness, a quality of the soul, is not something that science looks for by that name, for science likes to refashion and rename the objects of its inquiries, and its assumptions exclude qualities difficult to measure. Science is neither poetic nor philosophic; it does not care for drama, nor does it waste time in deep thought. It wants exactness, which to it means numerical exactness, and it looks for exactness everywhere. What kind of support, then, does gender neutrality get from science? Has science verified that manliness is a stereotype? In considering these questions we will get a view of how science treats a controversial topic like manliness, subjecting it to measurement. Science does not always speak with one tongue, though apparently it always wishes to do so. On manliness, social science is hardly of one voice and is quite shaky in its conclusions, and its concerns differ markedly from those of evolutionary biology, a “natural” science. But there is general accord between the two sciences of social psychology and evolutionary biology that we will address. Although neither science is able to say clearly whether manliness is a social construc-tion or a permanent feature of human nature, they concur that it is here to stay.¹

Before turning to the scientific treatment of stereotype, let’s first see what the manliness stereotype is. What do we nonscientists say? The definition of manliness I have given—confidence in the face of risk—is composed of a number of qualities thought to belong to men. Some apply to all men, others only to certain men, manly men. All are thought to be more or less characteristic of men, not equally true of every man. These ingredients of manliness make manliness specifically male. Without them confidence could as well be womanly (and I have said there is a womanly confidence). These qualities are, however, typically contrasted to womanly qualities, so that the stereotypes come in pairs. Stereotypes are about differences, and differences are more pronounced in contrast. Stereotypes give women an excuse for not being manly; after all, they’re women. At the same time, of course, they take away any excuse for a man who is unmanly. Manliness is an exclusion of women but a reproach to men, to unmanly men.

The basic stereotype is surely that men are aggressive, women are caring. This is what you would first think of and perhaps also the basis of the others. That men are promiscuous in sex, women faithful or at least unadven-turous, follows from the basic stereotype. So too do the beliefs that men are hard, women soft; men assertive, women sensitive; men seek risk, women security; men are frank, women are indirect; men take the lead, women seek company; men don’t cry, women do; men are aloof, women sympathetic; men are cold, women warm; men boast and show off, women are modest; men are forceful, women persuasive or seductive; men are loud, women quiet; men are laconic, women are loquacious; men are stoic, women complain.

It’s also said that men are rational, women emotional. One can easily imagine a sexist male saying that in exasperation to, or about, a woman. A more refined version of this pairing might say that men are abstract and idealistic, women are empirical and realistic. How is that related to the basic stereotype of aggression and caring? One might suggest that men use their reason to yearn beyond, and to seek to abstract from, the present situation, while women use theirs to study and make the best of the present. Men are more decisive because they can reject what they see before them, and women are more perceptive because they hesitate to do that. Thus both men and women have both reason and emotion, but differently. Yet to make this refinement moves beyond stereotyping into analysis, which stereotypes as such are supposed to avoid.

I have given a sexist accounting of the stereotypes merely by listing the male quality first in each case. To do so reflects the meaning of aggression, which is trying to be first in any situation of possible advantage. But in coming second, the womanly quality shows the need for the manly quality to be seconded, or rather, to have a counterpart. The traditional stereotypes thus aggressively assert that women are the second sex, just as Simone de Beau-voir noted in the title of her book, yet because the stereotypes come in pairs, “being second” seems to mean not merely “less” but rather providing the counterpart. Though caring is less aggressive than aggression, it is more truly a positive quality—and one not always less valued than aggression. In my list of stereotypes men do not necessarily have the advantage even though they are thought to be more aggressive in seeking advantage. Men come first, but second is sometimes better. We mustn’t make a stereotype of the stereotypes by making them seem more prejudicial to women than they are.

Still, being aggressive will usually get you ahead of those who are not aggressive, especially if they defer to you. That is the traditional stereotype of a man in relation to women. It gives him his sexist disdain for women and for their effeminacy. It makes him unwilling to give women their due and generally to cooperate in the gender-neutral society. It may inspire the superiority that is responsible for the manly man’s confidence discussed in chapter 1. What is the response of the gender-neutral society?

The response is in the word stereotype, and what is that? As used popularly today, a stereotype is a prejudice. A stereotype is an unreflective, self-serving generalization made by someone who is too lazy or too stupid to think carefully. That definition is too plain and much too judgmental to be found in social science, where the notion of stereotype has been developed. But let’s begin from popular speech even though it has been infected by science. The gender-neutral society we have been discussing rests on the belief that manliness, the quality of one sex, does not really exist; it’s only a stereotype taught to us by our patriarchal tradition, and serving the interest of that tra-dition, in which women are held to be unequal to men. We have lived with it up to now, but there is no necessity, there is nothing in nature, requiring us to continue living under a delusion that so drastically limits our freedom of choice.

The word stereotype came originally from printing: a stereotype is a kind of impression. As we use it now, the word implies that society impresses us with our notions, hence that different societies impress different notions. A stereotype is a convention, and conventions vary. You don’t have to be a scientist to suppose that manliness might be a convention varying in both time and place. It’s easy to see that a knight differs from a cowboy, a soldier from a priest, an aristocrat from a hardhat, a nerd from a jock, and a scholar from a pirate. The question, though, is how deep convention goes. Are these men totally diverse or are they various versions of one quality—of manliness? Does society’s impress create the form, as if molding putty, or does it work upon, or from, a model made by nature, as if dressing a doll?

The gender-neutral society regards, and is obliged to regard, manliness as a stereotype in the deepest sense. The deepest sense is also a pejorative sense, for it implies that society makes a distinction between men and women that it need not have made, one that is wrongly and unjustly imposed. For a society to be equally open in all aspects to both genders, there must not, strictly speaking, be any quality pertaining to one of them that gives it an advantage or a disadvantage in life’s occupations. Of course, science, wishing always to be open-minded, does not care in any case to speak either for or against a social arrangement or political proposition. Moreover, science earns its reputation for benefiting humanity by opposing common sense. After all, if unscientific common sense were enough to guide us, why would we need science with all its expensive apparatus, complicated concepts, and trained personnel? These are reasons why science would be neutral or hostile to the stereotypes of common sense. On one hand, science shows its neutrality by not insisting that common sense is prejudice; on the other, science shows its hostility by diminishing common sense to the status of imposed, inflexible stereotypes.

In the case of manliness, however, the sciences on the whole confirm common sense; they generally repeat the common-sense view that the sexes differ: men more aggressive, women more caring. This is no surprise, one could say—but no surprise is precisely the surprise. One must qualify this conclusion, of course, to accommodate diversity of results and controversy among scientists. One also senses that most scientists, whatever their findings, favor the gender-neutral society. But what they say does not really sustain it.

The concept of stereotype was first employed by the journalist Walter Lipp-mann in his 1922 book, Public Opinion, to give a name to the effect of culture on our perceptions and to contrast that to an appeal to reason.² It was then picked up by social science, notably by the Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport in his 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice.³ Allport spoke of stereotypes regarding sex; but his main interest was in racial prejudice.⁴ The feminists then applied the concept to sex, which they renamed “gender” (borrowing a term of grammar) to give emphasis to the point.⁵ “Gender” refers to one’s sex without resort to stereotypes. It is a word that maintains contact with the bodily shapes one sees with one’s eyes while refusing to draw conclusions from them. “Gender” goes with the possibility of being neutral between the sexes, while “sex” would be reserved for having fun. (No one speaks of “having gender.”)⁶ The traditional sex roles were stereotypes, the feminists said, both masculine and feminine and especially the latter. Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique” was the no. 1 stereotype, but next to it was its counterpart, manliness, insofar as it excluded women from occupations formerly reserved for men.

In the 1970s, the influence of feminist belief began to show in new psychological research on stereotypes, much of it by women. An important book by psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974), found some sex differences but was skeptical that they matter much or even that they exist. They blamed the belief in sex differences on the power of stereotypes.⁷ Others attacked previous work, for example, patronizing male posturing on the “maternal instinct,” as biased, erroneous, and prescientific.⁸ But as the new research developed, the results were not as expected: sex differences did not disappear under the pressure of scientific experiment. The researchers did not abandon their feminism or go back to their nurseries and kitchens, but they were fair-minded enough to report conclusions that must have disappointed them. Alice H. Eagly, a Pur-due psychologist, gave an account in 1995 of her change of mind, speaking calmly and objectively when in fact she was the heroine of a drama, “a political story.”⁹ Not only were sex differences found to persist, but some of them were also declared to be “large,” according to a measure that compares all psychological differences (which tend to be small).¹⁰

As a result of these disturbing findings, many of them produced by women researchers, the word sex has not been replaced by gender, and usage is now quite variable. When you hear the word gender, you don’t know whether it means sex in the sense of what is fixed or in the sense of what is changeable. You only know that it represents the aspiration of the gender-neutral society to declare that everything concerned with what used to be called sex can be remade. Deborah Tannen says, “Gender is a category that won’t go away.”¹¹ But the name for the category has changed or become confused, and perhaps that won’t go away either.

Eleanor Maccoby published The Two Sexes in 1998, changing the view she had held in 1974. She found to be spontaneous, not imposed by our culture, the behavior we all remember of boys aged eight to eleven: they “hate” girls and refuse to have anything to do with them. Schools can sit boys and girls alternately in the classroom, but when recess comes, they separate (led by the boys) into two clumps refusing to mix. Here is the germ of manly disdain for women that endangers the gender-neutral society—but Professor Maccoby mostly leaves interpretation to others.¹²

What other sex differences, apart from boys hating girls, have been confirmed? One fine example is the “water-level test,” in which a child is asked whether the level of the water in a glass half-full will be horizontal when the glass is tipped sideways. Boys are much more likely to recognize that the water will stay horizontal (if it didn’t, how could you drink?); girls even up to college age, influenced by the movement of the glass, do not grasp this as quickly.¹³ Women, it seems, are more “contextual,” just as the stereotype says. They see the water as in the glass, not abstracted from it—in which they are wrong but not foolish. Women, so expert in noticing, remember the location of objects in a room better than men.¹⁴

Most of the time one sex is not more correct than the other but rather sees or acts from a justifiably different viewpoint. Women smile more than men: of those who smile more than average, 65 percent are women.¹⁵ But isn’t it defensible both to smile a lot and not to do so? Would you want to do away with either the welcoming types or the reserved and have everyone in the middle like Goldilocks smiling just the right amount? Anyway, what is the right amount? It might be to smile always, because everyone needs to be assured he is welcome, or never, because nobody deserves that assurance. It seems better to have the variety in our lives arising from diverse temperaments. And diversity is not just a range of behavior along a continuum from snarling to sycophancy but also contains couples or counterparts, such as welcome and reserve, that are represented in the two sexes.

Two kinds of sex differences relevant to our later analysis of feminism have also been confirmed. First is the sex difference over having sex. Today men are still more promiscuous than women, despite what the gender-neutral society says. “I don’t pay them to come over … I pay them to leave,” said the actor regarding the prostitutes he patronizes. Women want to stay and have to be paid to leave; men want to leave and have to be induced to stay. The studies say that men think about sex more often than women do, and what they think about is not marital bliss but “an active sex life.” When men do think about marital bliss, they focus on lots of sex rather than the mere kissing and hugging that women prefer. Despite official disapproval of the double standard, the studies say it is still considered better to be a stud, like the actor, than a slut, like the women he sleeps with. Above all, in fantasies in which men can dream of their exploits with impunity and unfailing success, men show the life they really hanker for; and it’s not what women dream of.¹⁶ That men are more promiscuous than women in both attitude and behavior is perhaps the oldest common-sense fact there is, and the most useful for men and women to know. It is good to have it confirmed by science.

Steven Rhoads concludes that despite the gender-neutral society there has been no decline in sex stereotyping by people in general, who see men as more competitive and ambitious than women. The sexes still use the traditional stereotypes to describe themselves, men seeing themselves as more aggressive, women seeing themselves as more tender. Women are more likely to want to nurture, as shown in studies confirming that girls like dolls and boys like cars and guns, and that boys play rough and girls do not.¹⁷ Eleanor Maccoby says that you never hear a mother saying to her son, “Don’t play with the girls; they’re too rough.” By one name or another it seems true, and confirmed by science, that women have a “maternal instinct.” The Census Bureau, trying to keep up with the gender-neutral society, no longer inquires “who is the head of the household,” but instead wants to know who is “the family householder.” Nonetheless, in 1994, Rhoads notes, 91 percent of American couples said it’s the husband.¹⁸

Second, let’s take note of the sex difference over assertiveness. There are language differences in assertiveness that the linguist Robin Lakoff brought to light in her influential book Language and Woman’s Place (1975) and that the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen described in her best-selling You Just Don’t Understand(1990).

Lakoff pointed out certain distinctive features of women’s speech. Women use a more specialized vocabulary for female tasks, such as cooking; they use milder expletives than do men; they use more empty adjectives like “cute” than men do; they attach tag questions at the end of assertions (don’t you agree?); they use a wider range of pitch and intonation, as if avoiding flat statements; they employ “superpolite” forms, such as “I wonder if you would mind”; they sort of hedge their assertions; their grammar is more correct than men’s and avoids vulgar or coarse words; and they do not tell jokes.¹⁹ Lakoff believed that these differences showed hesitancy and ingratiation in women toward men, which she deplored as weakness. But Tannen in her work attempted to rescue “women’s speech” from Lakoff’s indignant scorn and to restore its value and legitimacy. Whereas Lakoff thought that women’s speech submerged their identity, Tannen shows how it expresses their womanly ways.²⁰ Her title, You Just Don’t Understand, says that there is something being conveyed and worth understanding in the ways men and women talk.

Listening to ordinary conversations, Tannen finds two “equally valid styles,” even two “worlds” that distinguish women from men.²¹ She does not begin by looking for stereotypes so as to test their accuracy, thus looking down upon her subject; instead she asks what men and women mean when they converse. Men and women live for contrasting ways of life: men want independence, women intimacy. When men speak, they report what they know or believe, as if lecturing in public to an audience. When women speak, they seek rapport with their listeners so as to connect with them. As men are always speaking as if it were in public, so women treat every audience as if the discussion were private. Both men and women speak in context, there is al-ways a “frame” in which conversation occurs, but women are more “contextual” than men. When men say something, it’s take it or leave it. Men’s speech is more assertive than women’s.

By omitting Tannen’s excellent examples I have made her book seem more abstract than it is, less contextual, perhaps more manly. Tannen sometimes uses her own reactions to illustrate the way women think, especially when it is a question of how the two sexes misinterpret each other.²² For her theme is misunderstanding in human conversation. The two styles are equally valid because each appears sufficient to itself; both men and women, if unin-structed by experience or by Tannen’s book, are satisfied with their style of conversing. Thus they do not really listen to the other sex; even women, who are supposed to be listeners, mistake disagreement in conversation for hostility. The two sexes misunderstand, misinterpret, each other. The same action, say a polite request, that looks like subservience to a man looks like sensitivity to a woman.²³ If a woman is silent, a man thinks she has nothing to say; if a man is silent, women think he does not need to speak. Silence means lack of power in the first instance; confident power in the second.²⁴ Somehow, as Tannen notes, women get the short end of the stick. This is not because women are frightened out of demanding their just deserts but because they want something different—intimacy rather than domination. Men with their seeming indifference to the context are actually very concerned with hierarchy; they want to rebel against it, show their independence of it, climb to the top of it, or establish an equality within it. Women are more democratic, or more effortlessly democratic, because they do not begin from the desire to contest.

Involved as it is with context, Tannen’s psychology constantly threatens to become political and shrewdly stops short of politics just when it might become partisan. On the whole, it can hardly be said to endorse the gender-neutral society. Although she does not directly address the question of whether the talking styles of the two sexes are fixed in nature, it is fairly clear that for her they are.²⁵ These ways are not imposed on men and women or on women by men; they are spontaneous and congenial to both sexes. More than that, they go beyond routine, habit, or unconscious custom; they represent two ways of thinking. The thinking is implicit and has to be elicited by Deborah Tannen, but it is there. In regard to women, we can say that Tan-nen “valorizes” the feminine mystique that Betty Friedan named and at-tacked.²⁶ Women are not moping in their suburban homes with nothing to do; they are doing what they like to do. What they like is the caring that the stereotype says they like, just as men enjoy being aggressive.

Yet Tannen, a very successful professional woman, does not stay at home satisfied with the intimacy of her family and friends. Nor is she bound by the feminine character she describes so well. You Just Don’t Understand implicitly promises understanding of the other sex, not just your own. At several points in the book Tannen suggests that it is possible to do this and that two good results would follow.²⁷ One is that the sexes will stop blaming each other so easily, and the other, more interesting, is that having learned both styles, we will be more flexible in our choice of strategies and thus freer.²⁸ This, I have to say, is a Machiavellian idea. After being persuaded at length of the integrity of the two styles, it is disconcerting to be told that one is free to be one or the other. And is this flexibility truly symmetrical? I can see how a dominating person could make use of the ability to seem caring, but how could a caring person be dominating without ceasing to be caring?

Pursuing the opposites of aggression and context, let us examine the sex differences in verbal fluency (advantage to women) and spatial ability (advantage to men). Women are more fluent with words than men; they are better at producing rapid and accurate speech.²⁹ Stuttering is almost entirely a male problem, as is dyslexia. Women can think of synonyms and do anagrams more quickly, and they compute faster. Their verbal facility helps them to keep contact with their context and to achieve and maintain a measure of intimacy. Men, on their side, excel at verbal analogies (of the kind recently abandoned for precisely this reason on the college SAT examinations), at mathematical problem solving, and especially at mentally rotating objects in space. Hence men are better at navigating—which is good, considering their proverbial resistance to asking directions (noted in chapter 1). But how is spatial ability in men related to their aggression? Aggression is selfish or self-centered. But to be self-centered, you need to be free or make yourself free from the environment in which you find yourself. Whereas infant girls look at what surrounds them, infant boys orient themselves to objects. Boys have better mechanical ability than girls. For these things you need to be able to abstract yourself, you need to be able to think abstractly, to see things as they might be in different contexts or without a context. That is the connection I see between aggression and abstraction. Aggression and abstraction are two forms of being single-minded.

This has been a quick survey of what the science of psychology tells us now about sex differences. In sum, it says that men are aggressive, women contextual. Other terms used for men are agentic, instrumental; and for women, expressive, communal, intimate. The various studies focus on narrow items like the water-level test because these can be quantified, but when you add them up—in what is called “meta-analysis”—the result is the same contrast. This contrast between the sexes follows the stereotypes, both in sum and in detail. In fact, as well as I can see, of the stereotypes listed at the beginning of the chapter not one has been disproved (including men’s boasting and women’s weeping).³⁰ Common sense has been vindicated by science, and I will add that, vice versa, science has been validated by having discovered in its way what everyone knows without science.³¹ For if science had discovered that women were more aggressive than men, one would rather believe one’s eyes than that science. Some scientists speak of “relational aggression” in women, referring to women (and girls) who attack other women indirectly; they “shun, stigmatize, gossip, and spread false rumors.” But relational aggression is not bold, and what is aggression without boldness?³²

Stereotype is a social-scientific concept designed to improve upon common belief, and yet we find that in regard to manliness the psychologists end up endorsing common belief. Are we to think that in this important matter science is no better than common belief? Is it possible that science falls short of it? The fact that science cannot speak of manliness by its name tells us something about science as well as manliness: science wants to be exact and manliness wants to boast. Because science desires never to overstate a point, it has trouble understanding the human desire to overstate. Common sense, as we have seen, can appreciate the desire to “feel important.”

Let’s return to the disdain for women on the part of the manly man, the superior feeling that makes him unwilling or unable to cooperate in the gender-neutral society. He will carry out the garbage and do other tasks he recognizes as his, but only those and not what he sees to be women’s work. The psychologists who admit sex differences are far from drawing the conclusion that manly disdain of this kind is legitimate, but some of them, we have noted, remark on the surprising accuracy of sex stereotypes. From the outset Lippmann and Allport had stipulated that stereotypes may have a “kernel of truth”; fewer Jews are drunks than Irish, said sober Allport in the free-speaking 1950s. These writers had understood stereotypes as categories, and anyone who thinks needs categories. How then do we distinguish the categories of the prejudiced from those of thinking persons who are not prejudiced? Allport, in liberal fashion, tried to describe “monopolistic” categories held inflexibly from “differentiated” ones open to new knowledge.³³ But if we accept the accuracy of sex stereotypes, it seems that people prejudiced in favor of manliness were right to hold that traditional belief inflexibly; and in doing so they held substantial truth, not a mere kernel. More recent psychologists have invented the notion of “cognitive shortcut” by which it makes sense to use hasty generalizations when one doesn’t have time to think carefully, with “differentiation,” as Allport wants. Psychologists habitually label “cognitive” every excuse for knowledge, in which they are partly right. It’s important to remember that prejudice is a claim to know, in that sense “cognitive,” but one mustn’t forget that it’s also an evasion of any attempt to learn. “Cognitive shortcut” is a psychologists’ evasion of the duty of science to sit in judgment over popular prejudice.

The psychologists suggest, too, that sex stereotypes are not acquired or practiced without thinking. One authorial foursome says that women’s language may not always be uncertain but sometimes deliberately sensitive. In order not to annoy an attractive male, a woman might play dumb so as not to offend him, thus thoughtfully and perhaps ironically conforming to the stereotype.³⁴ Such behavior is not correct in the gender-neutral society, but it may occasionally occur nonetheless. Maccoby points out that children first select spontaneously the sort of toy they like, and then, after becoming aware that it is the sort that boys or girls like, they apply the stereotype consciously.³⁵ The stereotype is the consequence, not the cause, of the behavior—or perhaps it is an interaction; and it shows awareness, not rigidity.

The same general sex stereotype appears in the much-read work of psychologist Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Her plea, directed particularly to feminists, is that their demands for the justice of equality should not over-34 Manliness as Stereotype look and thus devalue the characteristic “voice” of women, the ethic of care and attention to relationships. Gilligan does not tell us about the manly voice that is perhaps not so caring, and she does not infer that the caring voice of women disadvantages women in any way when in competition with a manly voice. Her work leads her to the stereotype of women, but it does not provoke her to reconsider hostility to stereotypes as such, still less to question the gender-neutral society. Her research has been criticized for lack of rigor as if rigor were possible. The most successful studies, such as those of Eleanor Maccoby and Deborah Tannen, have departed from strict science and accepted common sense in an uneasy alliance of professional rigor and the plain citizen’s naïvete. They are based partly, or mostly, on observation of behavior as it appears to us rather than on experiment under laboratory conditions intended to abstract from the ordinary appearances of things. They smack of phenomenology, a philosophical movement dedicated to “saving the phenomena,” that is, the way things appear to us humans as opposed to the theories and categories of quantifiable psychology. A sign of the difference is that Maccoby and Tannen use ordinary words for the most part and not the concepts—the jargon—of science.

The jargon of science is part of the ambition of science to examine what is obvious to us and to restate in more precise terms the words we normally use. Nobody objects if a botanist wants to call a daffodil narcissus pseudo-narcissus, and botanists do not care if we continue with the common name. But when it comes to human society, science is not, and cannot be, so tolerant. Here the common names stand for prejudices that protect society as it is and has been. At a certain point, social science decided to rename prejudices “stereotypes.” The scientific word then passed from books of science to everyday talk and was applied by the women’s movement to sex in order to change society. But change was already implied in the scientific usage. Social science invented the very idea of stereotypes in order to impugn common prejudice. It wanted not only to deny prejudice the status of common sense but to wave it out of political debate, which henceforth would be conducted exclusively among scientific hypotheses. Social science does not as a rule listen to prejudice. With such terms as stereotype it prejudges the truth of nonscientific opinion; it has a prejudice against prejudice. It is therefore in general hostile to the status quo and friendly to change toward the new gender-neutral society. The gender-neutral society, in turn, is very welcoming to social science and to such concepts as “stereotype” or such constructions as “he or she” that express neutrality—or should we not say scientific objectivity? Isn’t objectivity akin to neutrality? Objectivity requires one to put aside one’s personal attributes, including one’s sex, in understanding what is to be expected of the male or female sex. And neutrality toward the sexes presupposes that it is possible to look at them objectively, which means to judge by their behavior and not by outworn social expectations set by fuddy-duddies ages ago.³⁶

The ambition of science is thus to change society as a whole. It is no surprise that in everyday speech “stereotypes” are often called “traditional stereotypes,” especially in regard to sex. The tradition of different roles for the two sexes is impressively long—long enough to comprise all societies except advanced liberal democracies today. That tradition survived every democratic revolution except the most recent one of the women’s movement. But the knowledge that this would be the first sexually just society did not compel social scientists to hesitate, nor did it sober up the revolutionaries; on the contrary, it added to their exuberance at making a truly radical if perfectly obvious liberation. Both groups shared the optimism of Lippmann, Allport, and the others that society did not have to live by stereotypes. Previous thinkers were aware that society might not be resting on simple truth. Plato in his image of the cave said that all societies live by artificial shadows rather than knowledge.³⁷ It is nothing new to suppose that people are prejudiced, but the concept of “stereotype” amounts to a scientific denial that they have to be. Our use of “stereotypes” still carries with it the incautious optimism that science, with its objectivity, does its best to conceal. The concept recalls the original eighteenth-century Enlightenment that began the attempt to bring science to society so as to replace prejudice and superstition with knowledge.

Science so understood can make society competent to govern itself. It can give fresh justification to democracy, now no longer despised as the rule of an ignorant multitude but capable of becoming the rule of the enlightened. For the hidden ambition of social science is not only to make society more democratic but also to enlighten democracy. Being so apolitical, social science does not understand how democratic it is, and its ambition is hidden to itself more than to outside observers. The stereotype itself is a very democratic idea, presupposing both the dominance of democratic opinion and the possibility of correcting it. Stereotyping occurs when people prepare categories of “people perceived to differ significantly from one’s own”; stereotypes are made by the in-group to categorize the out-group.³⁸ With these categories they justify “discrimination,” meaning unjustifiable discrimination and assuming democratically that any discrimination is likely to be unjustified. Stereotyping is a democratic failure to be sufficiently democratic. In an aristocracy where the aristocrats are disdainful of the people as such, one would not speak of stereotypes. But the theory of stereotypes assumes that all people are alike and do not deserve to be held inferior.

The real problem in a democracy, however, may be just the opposite of stereotypes: considering those who are unlike to be alike. Tocqueville said that democracies tend to generalize, meaning that they generalize too far; they tend to make everyone similar (semblables) to one another.³⁹ Perhaps the gender-neutral society is an instance of overgeneralizing, in which democratic impulse and scientific objectivity go hand-in-hand, each deferent to the other but regarding itself as superior. Yet in fact we see that the psychologists of sex differences, most of them women, have mostly concluded that the sex stereotypes are generally accurate. They do not go so far as to question the idea of a gender-neutral society, but they know that their results do not favor it and are not congenial to its promoters. Democracy, too, has its pretensions, and the main one these days is that sex differences do not exist.

Yet even the best of the psychologists’ studies do not go beyond the rudiments of manliness. They suffer, in lesser degree, from the defects of scientific studies that use jargon, embrace statistical regressions, and close the door to common sense. There are five faults in the scientific studies I have read that greatly undermine their utility and authority. These are not imperfections of an immature field that could be remedied with more research of the same kind, nor do they result from the limitations of individuals (all of whom know science, in their sense, much better than I). They are systematic failures of method that hinder or prevent the understanding of manliness.

Scientific studies of sexual differences, we recall, are not about “manliness” so called. Why not? “Manliness,” it seems, is not a scientific word. It is said of an individual as a whole in consideration of all his manly actions, or better, manly deeds, and with a view to his disposition to such deeds. But the studies, seeking quantifiable precision, split up the sexes into discrete aspects or behaviors, such as spatial and verbal abilities or violent and nonviolent tendencies, and then never reassemble the pieces into a whole. They begin with man and woman but never return to man and woman as wholes. Men have better spatial abilities than women and are also (surprise!) more violent. Are these two things connected? Sometimes, using meta-analysis, the studies try to connect two aspects, but not these two; and they always stop well before they return to the whole individual being they started from. They focus on qualities they can isolate so as to measure them, but their precision is only in carving. Regarding individuals as wholes, the studies are so imprecise as to say almost nothing.⁴⁰ These studies stand in need of the precision they would gain from biography and history, showing manly individuals in action. What does John Wayne or Theodore Roosevelt show us about manliness in its completeness? A manly man is nothing if not an individual, one who sets himself apart, who is concerned with the honor rather than survival of his individual being. Or, better to say, he finds his survival only in his honor.

Lack of interest in wholes shows in the scientific rejection of the term natural. It is a term we shall soon need, and one long said to be harder to dispose of than you might think. The nature of a thing displays it as a whole to which its parts contribute. A whole with parts, like an apple, must be something fixed. Some time ago, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote a book in which she distinguished the layman’s typical remark, “naturally no human society” from the anthropologist’s statement of scientific caution, “no known human society.” Yet she went ahead and titled her book Male and Female as if there were no difference between the two statements. The reason is that she wanted “man” to mean men of many kinds or rather of diverse combinations of qualities so that man could be “open-ended.” Yet open-ended is still a fixed description of man’s … nature. Mead published her book in 1949, before feminism got started with its assertion of the possibility of creating one’s identity, and Mead herself was sure that there were “basic regularities” in the sexes that would limit our creativity.⁴¹ But the point is the same. The overcaution (or pretended caution) of science, based on its dogmatic assurance that nothing is for sure, lends credence to the revolutionary’s desire that anything be possible.

Instead of looking at men and women as wholes, the social psychologists put their diverse qualities on a unisex continuum and add them up. Alice Eagly speaks of the change in the 1970s from narrative studies to quantitative ones and remarks, “By implying that a continuum is the best metaphor for thinking about sex differences and similarities, … psychologists … escape the more simplistic debate about sameness versus difference.”⁴² These psychologists dislike versus; they prefer a continuum by which they assume prior to inquiry that every difference is a matter of degree. A boy is a wee bit more of this than a girl and a wee bit less of that. Thinking like this will prevent us from overstating the sex differences as do the stereotypes. But in fact it prevents us from coming, or even attempting to come, to a conclusion about the sameness and difference of the sexes. Nothing is more simplistic than the assumption of a soupy continuum from one sex to the other, whose purpose is to avoid debate. Later I shall speak of the manliness of modern science, but here we see unmanly evasion.

Unconcern with the best is another failing. Just as the studies focus on isolated qualities, so, relying on the deceptive precision of statistics, they consider mainly averages. But in the vernacular, “manly” is a term of praise usually reserved for the few best. Manliness is not so much what all males share, or what most males share with a few females, as what a few males have superlatively. The rest merely show traces of these few, and the few manly types look down on the rest whom they think unmanly. Now is a manly man the best man—as he plainly believes (and as Antony believed of Brutus)? Does he have in greatest measure the qualities that, as a whole, make one want to call a man a man? Should the rest of us share his opinion of himself? Many a woman has had to face the choice between romance with a manly fellow and security with a more careful, prudent type. Which is best? Which is more of a man? Can the two be combined?

The scientific studies looking at the average overlook the best, and therefore also the ambivalence of the best. They want concepts that cover all instances of what appears to be “man,” but they forget that the defining qualities of man are those of the best man as well as, or more than, the average. In no case is this truer than in that of the manly man, who is inspired by perfect examples of his own type. The manly man may be seen better in fiction, where a poet can exceed reality, than in science, or the kind of science, which confines itself to the universal case. Is the manly man Achilles or is he Socrates?⁴³

The studies lack nuance and subtlety. In order to establish sex differences they have to measure different behaviors, and what is measurable has to be unmistakable. It does not matter if the difference is tiny, but it has to be unmistakable so that it will not be open to interpretation. Any discovery open to interpretation tempts disagreement, and that we must not have. Science seeks agreement even as scientists disagree. Women, for example, are found to have greater verbal abilities than men, meaning greater fluency, or volubility, or persuasiveness, or eloquence, or something else. But what of the grace with which women persuade, contrasted with the authority of a male voice? “Verbal ability,” though divided into particular aspects, is a broad, clunky quality designed to measure rather than describe. It says nothing of the diverse ways men and women speak—or sing.⁴⁴

These studies are also too far from human life. Verbal ability and spatial ability are terms abstracted from the use of words and the manipulation of images in actual life. These are concepts constructed for the sake of scientific observers, not for the use of human beings. They suffer from the fatal need to “operationalize,” that is, from the need to restate the facts a scientist encounters in terms that he, as opposed to the human beings he observes, can operate with.⁴⁵ So “verbal ability” is fluency operationalized, made abstract so as to be measurable in experiments. Betty Friedan, by contrast, speaks of real human beings when in her famous book she raises “the problem that has no name.” She may be wrong in her analysis, but she looked at things the way human beings look at things and correctly sensed that women wanted or needed something new. In our studies, however, the problems are scientific; they are generated from difficulties of scientific observation and discrepancies of results. They are not the problems that human beings face and define. This means that the scientific studies abstract from the culture in which we live, the “regime,” as Aristotle called it. Their authors are aware, of course, that we live in a democracy now very suspicious of alleged differ-ences between men and women. They step carefully because they know that they are writing for the gender-neutral society. But they do not address that society or its democratic demand; with the exception of Alice Eagly and a few others, they do not directly consider the importance, or unimportance, of sex differences. It might be apes we are talking about, and in fact they do frequently discuss “primates,” and it seems with equal sympathy, too. There is some, but not enough—to repeat a word—phenomenology in the study of manliness now.⁴⁶

Some of the social psychologists, we have seen, refer to stereotypes as cognitive shortcuts. We haven’t the time to learn better; so we use “an implicit personality theory” and decide men are aggressive.⁴⁷ Social scientists often say that science differs from common sense only by making explicit theories that nonscientists hold implicitly. The true distinction, they claim, is not between common sense and theory but between theory that is unaware of itself and explicit theory that follows scientific method. To say this, however, understates the difference between science and common sense (as if there were a continuum between them) and causes science, not common sense, to be unaware of itself—unaware of its pretensions as well as its limitations.

I could have said at once that the studies do not evaluate what they try to describe. Here is the most obvious difference they have with the vernacular stereotypes, which are the basis of moral judgments about how men and women should behave. The scientists are professionally required to subscribe to the fact-value distinction, known loosely as “positivism,” a position in philosophy that sensible people never believed and that trendy people no longer believe.⁴⁸ Take, once again, the deficit in aggression to be found in women when compared to men. Is this sex difference commendable modesty in women or blamable timidity? No doubt it is both, sometimes one, sometimes the other. But modesty is not just a positive spin, nor timidity a negative spin on the same fact of nonaggressiveness; they are quite different facts, the first showing control in a woman, the second not. The difference may be difficult to discern but it is very important. Anyone who is satisfied with a broad, behavioral, allegedly value-free description, such as “less aggressive,” will not describe accurately but will mix together phenomena that are distinct. The same is true of men described as “more aggressive,” when we want to know whether they are properly so or not. Our everyday speech is more objective than scientific objectivity; it uses terms that do not hover hesitantly over an area of meaning but that bring things to a point. “A point” refers both to accuracy and to judgment. To evaluate well you must pay attention to the facts; but to describe well you must do so with the intent to evaluate.⁴⁹

Thus the social scientists take for granted the superiority of their theory without considering what it consists in. They try to condescend to common sense while taking advantage of its insight (for example, that men are indeed more aggressive). I will try to do the reverse. I will treat the scientific studies in manliness as imperfect versions of the stereotypes. I think that manliness is part stereotype or prejudice and part common sense. One difficulty is to sort out one from the other; another is to go beyond both.

Now it should be clearer why I am not offering another new “study” like those the press so frequently reports. One reason is that there is wisdom in the thought of the past. Another is that in the scientific methodology of the present there is a kind of guaranteed imprecision and unwisdom. It may seem ungrateful for me to say so because the sex difference studies I am denouncing do in general support a moderate manliness by telling the world that men and women are different, and more, that they differ pretty much in the ways that we have always supposed. To remove this ungracious impression, I will accept their support as far as it goes. I have nothing against science or against the good intent of scientists today, but I do think that their method, applied to human beings, gets in the way of science. By “science” I mean not a huge, well-financed, cooperative, corporate, enterprise, but mere understanding, the goal rather than the apparatus of science.

Assuming, then, the general accuracy of sex stereotypes, let’s ask why sex differences persist. What explains them? The gender-neutral society does its best to destroy them but only succeeds in minimizing them or in suppressing overt reliance on them, as when husbands abandon male privilege and say they will do half the housework but don’t actually do it. In the case of sexual promiscuity, the gender-neutral society by giving women an equal privilege makes it harder for them to say no, thus facilitating the aggressive fantasies of males and aggravating the sex difference in that regard.⁵⁰ The best efforts of social construction by the gender-neutral society have in some ways reduced but have not done away with sex differences. Hence, one concludes, social construction did not cause the differences. They must be traced to a deeper cause, to what is unchangeable, to nature. That is why some of the psychologists and sociologists turn to evolutionary biology to support their findings of sex differences still persisting in a society that wants to be rid of them.⁵¹ Manliness, we shall see, is not sufficient to itself but needs and sometimes wants the support of nature. So, too, social science in order to explain manliness (which it cannot name) goes eagerly if sometimes inexpertly to natural science in search of fundamental theory.

But before we do that, we can look at observable facts of plain biology showing that nature seems to put the equipment of aggression in the hands of males rather than females. Men have more strength, size, and agility than females, who in turn have greater dexterity, delicacy, and endurance (they live longer). It is no small help to an aggressive disposition to have the means available to express it in powerful fists, a sturdy chest, a head to butt with, and feet that can kick. Imagine the frustration of having a male’s desire to fight implanted in the yielding body of a female—an anomaly occasionally seen. Of course male aggression is mostly directed against other males, and a manly spirit in a very small male might cut a ridiculous figure, like a hare trying to lay down the law to lions.⁵² But in the relation between the sexes the physical superiority of males to females will give impressive support to their more aggressive wills. Despite the laws, the customs, and the morals that we live under, it is still a considerable fact that almost any man can beat up almost any woman. A man can be caught unawares (which happens more often than one would think), but “battered men” is not a general problem men complain of. The physical discrepancy sets the terms of a relationship, not preventing women from getting their way but requiring them to be indirect, persuasive, and “contextual.” Women have to smile and be reasonable or make a scene. Either choice is harder than just doing what you want.

That male’s willful will, too, is not just a concept, an airy, bodiless wish with nothing behind it. It has been found to have a chemical basis in the hormonal differences between men and women: men have much more testosterone. The political scientist Andrew Sullivan, who suffers from a condition requiring him to inject himself with testosterone, has written a graphic account of the leap in vigorous spiritedness that results. While it lasts he becomes a living, strutting stereotype.⁵³

Let’s turn now to the theory underlying sex differences. In our time the strongest scientific opposition to the gender-neutral society comes from evolutionary biology, a field that descends from the theory published in 1859 by Charles Darwin. It might seem strange that this should be so because “evolution” was first set forth in opposition to the opinion of both Aristotle and the Bible that the species were fixed and had always been as they are rather than coming to be by evolution. A theory of evolution would seem, then, to resemble a theory of social construction, which also features change. If manliness has not always been as it is but has been made, it would seem not to matter much whether it is made by nature’s evolution (actually, women’s choices in sexual selection) or by society’s artificial construction. But in fact it does matter. Nature’s evolution takes place over millions of years, whereas the changes demanded by the gender-neutral society are expected to occur soon or immediately.⁵⁴ Darwin’s theory may have been radical when first conceived, but now it serves the conservative purpose of defending manliness against those necessary changes. In my view it goes too far—oddly enough, it goes further than its great enemy, Aristotle—and is much too adamant in justifying a much too primitive manliness.

It is best to discuss Darwinism by consulting Darwin. Darwin himself may have evolved by chance, but his theory descends to us by design. Darwin makes the issues clearer than do his present-day followers because he wanted to build the edifice that they live in, and he saw the alternatives and made the choices that they accept as given. Darwin’s thinking is critical for modern beliefs about manliness, and we shall be returning to him frequently.

Darwin sees nature, or organic nature, as a “struggle for existence” in which the result is “the survival of the fittest.”⁵⁵ These two famous phrases (the second adopted by Darwin from Herbert Spencer) reveal the nasty character of nature together with its happy ending. Manliness in its aggressive stereotype proves to be not something artificial or accidental but the very essence of nature; and manly aggression is excused by the end that it does not wish but nonetheless brings about—the perfection of each species, especially the human species.⁵⁶ Nature has a good intention, but it does not use good means to that end. Nature takes care for the preservation of each species yet cares nothing for the individuals of that species. Its care for the species shows in the geometric rate of increase that the species would achieve if unchecked. That increase, however, is checked by other species, by others of the same species, by the shortage of available sustenance and space. So to each individual, and Darwin looks at nature from the viewpoint of the individual, life seems threatening rather than sweet. Nature’s generosity to the species is the cause of its lack of generosity to individuals. The species survives by reproductive oversupply in the midst of which every individual must scramble for his own life with the aid of natural instinct, in the case of man haunted by awareness and fear of death.

Here one might expect a complication arising from the discrepancy between nature’s goal for the species and man’s conscious goal to pursue his perfection as he sees it. But no, there is nothing special about man. Man has intelligence and “social habits,” but these do not free him from evolution. Darwin says that he is the dominant animal, but he is an animal nonetheless, differing in degree and not in kind from other animals.⁵⁷ His life, like any other form of life, is dominated by the struggle for existence. Darwin adds the concept of “sexual selection” to that of “natural selection.” Natural selection is nature’s preference, better to say insistence, that the species survive, and it is shown in the small improvements that constitute evolution. Sexual selection consists of the aims or “strategies” of individuals for reproductive success understood not as survival of the species but of the individual’s genes in following generations.⁵⁸

In sexual selection men and women devote themselves to self-preservation in an extended sense. They want to preserve not only their bodies but also—not their souls, of course!—their genes. They may have to risk their bodies for the sake of having offspring. This means that for Darwin as contrasted to Thomas Hobbes the state of nature has a competition for women as well as a war of all against all. The struggle for existence changes its focus from life in your own body to the life of the bodies to which you give birth. The struggle thus takes different forms for men and women, since women because of their bodies have care of gestation and lactation and men, because of theirs, do not. Men compete with other men for women in a struggle that does not, like the struggle for existence, end in death. But it does make man “more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman,” and gives him “a more inventive genius.”⁵⁹ Hence we have in Darwin, very much contrary to the gender-neutral society, natural sex roles. These are ways of life in which each sex specializes and must pursue lest any individual fail to preserve, which means propagate, his own genes. Self-preservation for Darwin seems less futile than for Hobbes because it does not end in the mortality of man; one can be preserved in one’s children. But the genes—one’s immortality—are dispersed in following generations.

In the end aggression is all there is. Man is not, as Aristotle said, a pairing animal who takes pleasure and finds utility in the company of one member of the opposite sex.⁶⁰ There are different versions of aggressiveness, but the underlying motive is the same. Women may not use their fists, but they use their attractions. Men have manliness so as to compete with other men; women use the manliness of men to protect themselves and their children. And if women consciously manipulate men for their purposes, men dominate women for theirs. A woman may look as if she is surrendering, but in truth she is indulging her relational aggression. The sex differences studied by the psychologists are apparent but not fundamental; both sexes are aggressive. As we know without psychology, you can smile at someone while getting one up on him. Still, the fundamental truth that all human beings are aggressive does little for the gender-neutral society. The apparent difference between manly domination and womanly manipulation must be maintained despite their fundamental similarity or else the strategies will not work. Women must continue to smile and defer while looking for a quality mate. For in their strategies for reproductive success, men need quantity and women need quality. Men must sow their seed as widely as possible, but a woman must choose carefully as to whose seed she bears and rears. The double standard rears its ugly head.⁶¹ It is not that man and woman form a couple and have a common good to which they contribute differently, which is the double standard Aristotle describes. It is rather that nature compels them to make use of each other: in Darwin’s view marriage is not a kind of friendship, and fidelity to it is not in the interest of the male. What man and woman have in common is the aggression in two opposed forms that divides them.

So far I have been looking at Darwin’s theory from a moral or human standpoint, one from which aggression is fully endorsed and justified as good for the species. From this standpoint, however, the manly man would hardly recognize himself. As we have seen him so far, he is preeminently an individual concerned with himself and the circle of those within his protection (which might be as large as his country). In his self-concern he wants the credit and glory for his deeds from those he benefits; he does not care about the preservation of the species or even that of his own descendants much beyond his grandchildren. A theory like Darwin’s that pretends to be based on individual decisions as to what will enable one to survive is strangely distant from the purview of actual individuals. Actual males do not care for nature’s purpose, as explained by Darwin, of perfection in the species. Their aggression is neither so selfless nor so selfish. It is for the sake of advantage now and in the near future for identifiable humans instead of in the indefinite future for his invisible, uncollected genes. Darwin’s theory adopts the idea of manly aggression but distorts it by truncating and abstracting it almost as if it were—a stereotype. The theory does not see that manly men want to protect themselves and theirs, that manly aggression does not want to survive by adaptation, that it is essentially defensive. Darwin’s theory tries to connect the individual with the ultimate collectivity, the species, while ignoring the bonds of friendship, family, and politics that are in between.

To explain this criticism, let us look more closely at Darwin’s theory and consider its difficulties as science. There is no space to elaborate but for our purpose there is no need. Darwin’s theory says that the species evolve; they are not fixed. The species evolve gradually by the “natural selection” of minute, chance changes from prior species, those changes that are “adapted to” the “survival” of the species being the ones selected. The gradualness of change by small adaptations is required not so much by the facts as for the theory itself, by the scientific understanding of causation; for each effect must be brought about by the conditions preceding it.⁶² If change were not gradual, one could not explain the later species on the basis of what came before it; one would have to assume a leap from one species to another by “special creation,” a concept smacking of divine intervention that Darwin set himself to oppose.⁶³ “Evolution” is not a consequence of Darwin’s theory but presupposed by it.⁶⁴ And yet how does evolution explain the existence of the species, which must be to some extent, or mainly, fixed? If there were very many chance mutations, why would they settle or cluster into the recognizable whole of a species? A species is a going concern, a whole being with functioning parts that can reproduce itself. It is not a cluster of mutations that happen to fit. A stock car can be adapted to become a hot rod by a teen-age mechanic, but how can an elephant be caused by chance fiddling with a pre-elephant? There is a distance between the mastodon and the elephant that cannot be bridged by mincing steps of evolution; at some point a distinct new being must be organized. The new being does not simply represent the survival of the old being, which according to the theory becomes extinct because it cannot compete with the new one.⁶⁵

In speaking of survival it is always necessary to specify survival as what?⁶⁶ Survival of the mastodon is hardly assured by its turning into an elephant. This is survival only in a perverted sense. Something is saved, one supposes, but more is lost; the previous organism was found not to be viable and it disappears. But of course it may not disappear. Not only do species have fixity, but they also have hierarchy. The fact that elephants, let alone cockroaches, cannot compete with men in the struggle for survival does not mean that they disappear. Evolution does not erode all the species into the one all-adaptive being—whether human being or cockroach—that has the highest capacity to survive. In sum, Darwin does not account for the species when he claims to explain “the origin of species.” He takes them for granted.

Thus Darwin takes for granted human beings as they are today; theirs is the origin to be explained by his theory. He does not show, as he claims, that the higher species evolve from the lower; he works backward from the species as they have evolved. The origin of the species refers to the species as they are now, especially the human species. Because The Origin of Species (1859) did not say much about human beings, Darwin wrote The Descent of Man (1871), to make it clear that man descends “from some lower form.” But the higher form, man, is the thing to be explained—this higher form. According to the theory, man is an accident and could have been other than he is. Yet without man, a being capable of science, there would be no science; so Darwin needs to show how a scientific being could have evolved out of some lower form. He does not really begin with the lower form; he knows beforehand that it is going to result in, and be capable of, science or intelligence. He begins from the awareness that the lower form is lower than what is going to evolve, a higher form. He is not, as he thinks, free of presuppositions but, in fact, takes for granted the intelligible hierarchy of nature somewhat as Aristotle laid it out. This is why he can speak of the grandeur and perfection of nature, and especially of man.⁶⁷ I do not mean to say that Darwin, the enemy of fixed species and of teleology, is a secret Aristotelian; what I say is that he had more difficulty than he knew in escaping Aristotle’s elaborated common sense.

Darwin’s theory should tell him that man is not a definite stopping point, that he is bound to evolve into something unknown.⁶⁸ Yet the difference between the higher form and the lower ones seems quite definite. When Darwin finds such human attributes as curiosity and dread in monkeys, he does so by measuring the distance down from the higher form rather than up from the lower one. He does not really derive the higher from the lower. Darwin himself spoke of the difficulty of explaining the evolution of the human eye, which seems so far ahead of any other animal’s eye.⁶⁹ In general, it is hard to conceive how mind could evolve from nonmind, how the ability to think, to make images and to see what is invisible (“I see your point!”), could evolve, bit by bit, from the absence of these advantages. Nor, pace Rousseau, is there evidence of such evolution.

These matters of theory may not overthrow Darwin, but they complicate the Darwinian picture of man and make a puzzle of the “struggle for existence.” Manliness in his view is aggression that is valued and chosen by women for their protection and thus “selected” by nature for survival to the next generation and beyond. Although men survive by attacking an enemy, species survive by being “adaptive.” But could not clever men take a hint from nature and survive by pretending to cooperate with others and concealing their aggression under cover of fraud? One could answer in the voice of morality and say that a fraudulent person does not preserve but only compromises himself. Some tincture of this voice is in the behavior of a manly man. Survival is self-preservation, which is self-defense, which presupposes that the self is worth defending—as it is. One defends a fixed, not an evolving, self. In defending it one risks it, for a half-hearted defense will soon be recognized by one’s enemy and overcome. Manliness is steadfast; it is taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible. In Darwin’s view manliness is not as we see it. It is subjected to the flexibility contrary to its nature that allows species to survive; and then he does not explain why manliness itself could not become flexible. “Existence” and “survival” become dubious when the “struggle” is among the “fittest” and the fittest are the most flexible.

Manliness understood as aggression instrumental to nature’s goal loses contact with males. If manliness is aggression instrumental to nature’s goal, we do not know how it is related to human goals. In this regard social Darwinism, though much despised, tells us something that Darwin does not. Is not “the female of the species” more deadly than the male when lesser capacity to fight is made up for by desperation and lack of scruple? In the poem of this name (1911), Rudyard Kipling writes that woman must be made “in every fiber of her frame” to protect her child “lest the generations fail.” That is Darwin in spirit if not in letter.⁷⁰ Her advantage over men is her total disregard of “some God of Abstract Justice” to which men are unable to be in-different. Every man is his mother’s son and thus better defended by her than by himself. But he would not be better ruled by her. A woman’s disregard of justice gives her license to command but not to govern, since governing has to do with justice. Despite the deadliness of females and the cowardice of men, for Kipling women cannot win and the sex roles remain.

Speaking of Abstract Justice reminds us of the absence of politics in Darwin’s theory. All we have is the individual and the species.⁷¹ Each cares only for itself and not for the other, though the individual, being mortal, is obliged to care for his progeny if he is to survive. There is no country, no common good to consider, and manliness is kept in thrall to survival, not permitted to be deflected into patriotism, let alone greatness. Recently Darwinians have attempted to fill the obvious vacancy in an ingenious enterprise they call “sociobiology.”⁷² To sum it up, one would have to say that they have not found a place for Abstract Justice except in the form of dire necessity or ferocity that Kipling described as female and maternal.

Manliness is not mere aggression; it is aggression that develops an assertion, a cause it espouses. The cause arises from the risk the manly man confronts, for if you risk your life to save your life, your “life” must be some immaterial cause, some version of Abstract Justice. You still want to survive, but with honor. Your survival is not dictated for you by nature’s command, like that of the female of the species (as Kipling presents her), but it is chosen by you. It is your survival because you state its terms. Unfortunately the men and women of science—manly in their abstractness whether they are stereotypers or evolutionary biologists—cannot appreciate manly abstract-ness in the form of assertiveness. They seem to have a set aversion to politics.