Chapter Three  Manly Assertion

Let us now leave the gray, flat, featureless domain of science to look for something new. Our science rather clumsily confirms the stereotype about manliness, the stereotype that stands stubbornly in the way of the gender-neutral society. But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact? In this chapter I will elevate manliness from aggression to assertion and thereby discover its connection to politics.

Aggression is a vague word because it applies to any action that increases your power. Power is a vaguer word because it doesn’t tell you for what purpose power will be used. Any action, even a smile, can look like aggression if you don’t see the point of it; and if you deliberately refrain from looking at its purpose, like the scientists we have studied, you leave it to be inferred that its only, all-purpose purpose is to increase power. But let’s suppose, against that view, that power has a point. Let’s suppose that it is used to assert something, which means to assert the worth of something, to make a claim on behalf of someone or something. Pay attention, says the manly man, which means pay attention to me. Manliness is not mere generalized pushiness but rather a claim on your attention. That is why the male animal displays and the manly man struts and boasts.¹ He has a point to make and the point is important! His aggression takes the specific form of an assertion of importance applying both to himself and to the matter he raises. If you want to be manly, you have to be assertive (so a fashion among women for “assertiveness training” arose in the 1970s). Modern science overlooks as-sertiveness because it feels uncomfortable with the notion of human importance. It wants to explain human events by means of universal laws that give no respect to our sense of self-importance and offer no solace for our delusions of grandeur. Manliness, too, is about the universe, but it claims a place in it for human importance.

To see assertive manliness, we will look at literature rather than science. Continuing on from Kipling’s poem, we will go to Ernest Hemingway, the writer in our time (or just before) most celebrated for manliness, and to Homer, whose hero Achilles is the paragon and paradigm of manliness. Literature has the same aim as science, to find and tell the truth. But literature, unlike science, also seeks to entertain—and it could not entertain if it did not know some truth not well known by science about the human resistance to hearing the truth. Literature uses fictions that are images of truth while science tries to speak truth directly and succeeds only in speaking abstractly. Literature requires interpretation, and interpreters will disagree, a situation that science cannot abide and literature welcomes. Literature is open to different degrees of understanding from a child’s to a philosopher’s, while science speaks in a monotone and wants its audience of other scientists to be on the same level so that its results will be replicable. Science relies on non-scientist publicists to address the multitude of nonscientists. Science has fruits that benefit the body; literature nourishes the soul. Literature takes on the big questions that scientists set aside and ignore, and so literature has more to say about manliness. The evidence literature offers for its insights comes from the intelligent observation of those who produce it. Great writers are both witnesses to truth and judges of what they see. We readers can replicate their insights according to our capacities, and we have to do so without the guarantee supposedly provided by scientific method that the truth conveyed is the same as the truth received. In studying human affairs, the trouble with the scientific guarantee of replicable evidence is that it’s also a guarantee of clumsiness and mediocrity.

Manliness is not too modest to assert itself, to tell us the value of the manly man. Here is a small collection of manly assertions: “It is what a man must do.” “But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.” “And pain does not matter to a man.” The most famous one: “But man is not made for defeat…. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

These quotations come from Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, a novel published in 1952.² They would probably not be written today, but Hemingway is almost today and his book, though out of fashion, is still read. It offers our most convenient access to manliness as something we do not quite recognize but is not yet over the horizon. Hemingway was a macho fellow and a seeker of adventure when coupled with fun; he was ridiculed in his own lifetime—by Noel Coward, for example, in a special rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It”—when manly foibles were received more with amusement than indignation.³ But this book is a serious work and we should consider it.

It is clear from its title that the book is about man and nature. Man is the old man and nature is the sea. The old man fishes for marlin, a big fish that is a challenge to catch and that can also be sold for food. The old man is named Santiago and is called so not by the narrator but only by the boy he mentors, who is called Manolin by the old man. No mature man is a character in the book although two or three persons are mentioned and there are several references to the “Great DiMaggio,” the Yankee baseball player whom the old man admires. The old man stands for man because of his intelligence and his experience, working together. A mature man would be closer to his physical peak, but the old man has just enough strength and more know-how, “tricks” of the trade. One particular thing he knows is to be patient. If you want to catch a big fish, you must wait for your luck to come. To be sure, when after a succession of failures the old man finally goes out by himself—the boy having been discouraged by his family from going along with one so unlucky—he quickly hooks his fish. The manliness of catching a big fish can be taught but has to be done alone.

The old man goes out on the sea, which represents nature because the land is divided into countries with various regimes that do not permit direct contact with nature. To be manly on land you would have to deal with a particular social context, as Hemingway did in his earlier book on bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon, which is about Spain.⁴ In this book, Hemingway’s manliness is unpolitical. The old man fights with a fish and as a fisherman he stands for man more easily than if he were Cuban or American. He contends with a marlin and several sharks, and he dreams of lions on the beaches of Africa. It is not that he is not Cuban, but he is described in a way that makes his manliness accessible to all regardless of political differences or di- verse “values.” The old man’s love of baseball is shared by both Cubans and Americans.⁵

Is man the dominant animal, as Darwin says? No, the old man thinks (for sometimes he thinks and sometimes he talks to himself) of the marlin whom he kills as his brother. The battle could have gone the other way, but the old man won through trickery. The marlin is a more noble thing than man, whose integrity is compromised by his intelligence. Human intelligence works with nature as well as against it, for the stars that show the old man where he is are his friends, as is the bird that helps him catch his bait. After he has caught, fought, killed, and taken possession of the marlin, the old man has to bring him back to shore. He runs the gauntlet of sharks, who are not his brothers; he fights them off, but there are too many and they succeed in stripping the marlin of flesh, leaving the old man with its skeleton. He comes back with the evidence of his exploit but without profit from it. It is a trophy he deserves because he won the battle with the fish and because he did not conquer all nature to do so. What he won, he won fair and square.

Through the sharks nature gets even with him. “And what beat you, he thought. Nothing, he said aloud. I went out too far.” He went out too far because the marlin pulled him out to sea, but the old man takes responsibility as if this had been his error. Then he can say aloud—assert—that nothing beat him, only himself. “I went out too far,” says this very reflective manly man of himself. Manliness is the willingness to challenge nature combined with the confidence, inspired by the knowledge, that one can succeed. It is also defined by the knowledge that one can fail, depending on the chance of catching a great fish and handling it successfully. Chance prevents nature from dominating us, and us from dominating nature. You win some, you lose some. If we could conquer nature and eliminate risk, we would not need manliness.

Manliness is an assertion of man’s worth because his worth does not go without saying. So too, because worth needs to be asserted it needs to be proved; in asserting, one must make good the assertion. Did the old man go out too far, as he admitted? He did; he could not bring back his prize. Yet of course most of Hemingway’s readers—those who do not think him sentimental—will not agree that the old man went out too far, and the mar-lin’s skeleton proves that his deed was not a dream or a fisherman’s lie about the one that got away. The old man thinks a lot; he seems to be a kind of self-taught philosopher. He has thought out the difference between being defeated and being destroyed, and he has decided that despite what you might think, being defeated is worse. The boy “keeps him alive,” being a sort of student, and the old man found it pleasant to talk to him after his battle with the great fish. His manliness includes the analysis and the teaching of manliness. It does not have much religion. “I am not religious,” the old man says before reciting his prayers “mechanically.” He thinks (and does not say aloud) that he has no understanding of sin, but “there are people who are paid” to think about sin. He does not oppose those people or the Church, and in describing his story Hemingway actually supplies obvious parallels to Christ’s agonies on the hill of Calvary.⁶ He shows, however, that the old man suffers for his manliness and not to redeem himself from sin. It seems the old man does not like the idea of being dependent on divine help but does not object to others’ belief. His manliness is full of contrivance in the clever ways he knows to subdue the fish, but it does not rely on advanced technology. It happened today; it could have happened in any age. Manliness does not depend on newly acquired power over nature; it is if anything endangered by such power. Manliness contends with nature but respects nature because it is prompted by nature. We, Hemingway’s readers, can see the manliness of Hemingway’s hero because we, too, are prompted by nature to appreciate it. The old man is aware that he serves as an example to others who will be inspired by the news of his deed. It inspires us too, Hemingway’s readers, but it also makes us envious. We see the definition of man summed up—displayed in deeds and asserted in accompanying speech—in the best one of us.⁷ Hemingway is enough of a Christian to want to displace Christ.⁸

Hemingway’s old man gives us access to the heights of manliness that cannot even be glimpsed by modern science. The old man is not necessarily of our time but he is not repugnant to our time. His humanity, unlike Christ’s, is somewhat withdrawn from what most people feel and know. At the end of the story, a woman tourist and her male companion look igno-rantly at the long backbone of the great fish and mistake it for a shark. Not having read Hemingway’s book, they do not appreciate the old man’s feat. The old man’s manliness is not political; it cannot claim the recognition of a community as opposed to that of a young student.⁹

Next we go to Achilles, the manly hero par excellence without whom a book on manliness can hardly be composed, the archetype of the he-man and the asserter of his worth and the worth of his kind.¹⁰ Achilles, let’s admit, is a bit difficult for us. In contrast to the old man, Achilles is a warrior in the prime of life; he has a name and especially a lineage; he consorts with gods; he distinguishes himself undemocratically from the hoi polloi, the anthropoi or the human beings; and he finds himself not alone but in combat and competition with other heroes and in a relationship with nonheroic human beings, thus for both reasons in a political situation.

Achilles is a he-man (aner) above and distinct from human beings. We are used to holding the broader designation to be higher: humanity, mankind, humankind are nobler and more generous than any group of humans, which as such will necessarily have parochial interests at odds with the whole. To be devoted to humanity is a life well spent. But in Homer’s Iliad the he-men of the Greeks (Achaeans) and the Trojans are presented as nobler than mere human beings, who lack individuality because they are incapable of great deeds. Humanity, it appears, is a collective word that has no singular, for to be an individual you have to be a great one. He-men are few, and they are identified with heroes. All the he-men are males, but most males are mere human beings along with all women and children. You could taunt he-men by calling them women, much as we might say to an adult, “stop acting like a child.” When Hector, hero of the Trojans, challenged the Greeks to a duel and none responded, Menelaus rebuked the Greeks as women, calling them Greeks in the feminine plural.¹¹

Instead of submerging themselves in the category of humanity, he-men or heroes connect themselves to the gods. They are sons of gods or they can trace a lineage to a god. Achilles was the son of Peleus, who was the son of Aeacus, the son of Zeus. There you are: Zeus is his great-grandfather. Not surprisingly, Zeus takes an interest in Achilles and the other heroes. He and other gods intervene on behalf of heroes; for example, at the beginning of the Iliad, Athena directly prevents Achilles from killing Agamemnon, appearing to him while invisible to others and pulling him back by his hair. Zeus is a father to the he-men, the heroes, but a ruler of human beings, who do not get his individual attention. Human beings suffer neglect and would be excluded from the care of the gods if they did not constitute a kind of au-dience before which the he-men display their heroism. Thus patriarchy in the style of the Iliad is not the fatherhood of God over the brotherhood of men but a compound of fatherly care of heroes and fatherly indifference to human beings outside the family. The gods care for the best men, and the best men seek to resemble the gods; they are even called demigods.¹²

Among the Greek heroes, however, there is a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over Bryseis, Achilles’ slave woman, stolen by Agamemnon. Agamemnon is king by virtue of his lineage, and when first presented in the Iliad, he is not called by his name but his father’s, “Atreides lord of men.”¹³ Achilles, knowing himself to be the better man, disdains Agamemnon’s claim to his respect and obedience, and the two exchange furious insults. We see enacted the “wrath of Achilles” with which the Iliad begins, a wrath said to be “divine” and prompted, or supported, by the wrath of Apollo, who is also involved in the incident. The quarrel is not so much over the woman as between the two parties, Agamemnon claiming the authority of his lineage and Achilles the power of his virtue. The eternal dispute between ancestral and natural right opens up among the he-men because lineage, even to the gods, does not guarantee virtue, or as we would say, birth is one thing and merit another. Agamemnon relies on his scepter, symbol of his authority and made by the god Hephaestus, but Achilles swears by a scepter of his own and relies on his spear.¹⁴ Manliness appears first not as a claim of authority but as the assertion of virtue against authority, an assertion always required because authority is always in the way of virtue and virtue never gets a free welcome from authority. In the course of asserting itself against authority, virtue becomes a possible claim on the basis of which one can assert one’s worthiness to rule, thus a claim to authority. Even then it is only one of several claims and must expect to face resistance from other claims.¹⁵

Or does virtue not need to be asserted when it can be recognized, as today, in a competitive examination taken by all? Our “meritocracy” may seem to have solved Homer’s problem of combining virtue and authority without fuss from the virtuous and condescension by those in authority. But to do this, meritocracy must understand virtue in conventional ways so that it can be recognized and scored by those in authority. We are aware that true virtue is rarely the winner of a competitive examination; and if it is, it cannot take success for granted and still needs to assert itself. Meritocracy does not eliminate the necessity of advertising one’s merits, and we should not look down upon Achilles’ boastful vaunts.

To vindicate his wrath, to make good on his claim, Achilles faces great risk as it has been foretold to him by his mother, Thetis, that if he returns to war to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus, he will die soon after.¹⁶ He has a choice between returning home to live in peace or staying at Troy and going to battle to be killed with great glory. Eventually he chooses glory, dies, and goes to Hades.¹⁷ When Odysseus later sees his shade there and asks him how things are going, Achilles replies, “Better slave on earth than king of hell!” He was dissatisfied with the choice he had made. Manliness rejects the safety of self-preservation in favor of the glory of risking one’s life to vindicate one’s rights and deserts. Homer shows us Achilles ruing his decision, and he wrote in the Odyssey of Odysseus’ finding his way home through many risks, having made the choice that Achilles declined. Homer does not endorse either the wrath or the repentance of Achilles, it seems. He sings of his wrath and its consequences to remind human beings of the need for heroes, and heroes of the need for humanity. Achilles’ assertiveness causes him to sulk in his tent—which is the aloofness of the manly man, as we have remarked—and to vindicate his right by avenging the death of his friend, a return to battle and a kind of entry into politics. For Odysseus, the return home permits him to resume his family life and his rule in Ithaca, after asserting his right to both against the suitors of his faithful wife.

What most obviously distinguishes Homer from Hemingway is the presence of the gods as actors in the story. The gods are a reminder of the need for authority in human affairs, of a higher power to which human beings can point when claiming their rights. Gods are necessary to manly assertion because without them assertion is mere assertion, arbitrary and unsupported. But gods also get in the way of manliness, as Hemingway indicates, by forcing men, even he-men, to call on and thus depend on them. Possibly Hemingway’s readers are supposed to supply the prayers of thanks that the old man seems to forget after he returns from fishing; in this way prayers ratify what heroic men have already done on their own and do not imply dependence on the divine. Even so, Hemingway seems less humane than Homer, more adamant in his aristocratic disdain. His manliness, while not trampling on the weak, offers them no succor, no recognition. Those who cannot catch a big fish are to admire those who can, perhaps in the way we all—all of us fans—admire the grace of Joe DiMaggio. A baseball player doesn’t threaten us but doesn’t help us either. By hobbling the heroes, the Homeric gods keep them restrained within our category of the anthropoi, not the same, not equal, but comparable and subject to human weakness. Achilles thought himself human only because he was not immortal and not because he was weaker than a god. That’s a delusion Homer makes us see—makes Achilles see.

In our time there are many who say that heroes lack humanity and few who will admit that humanity needs heroes. But at all times heroes have to assert themselves. The question is, what is in it for us?

We have seen two instances of manly assertion, one recent, the other ancient, one outside politics, the other political. They have in common the assertion of oneself and the desire to prove a point to others, even if the point is not directly political like the demonstration by Hemingway’s old man of how to catch a big fish. To make the point, the manly man stubbornly insists on himself, and when he does that, he stands for stubborn insistence on himself. Not only is he manly, but he also represents the need for manly men. He does this against any rational arrangement—including that of our gender-neutral society—by which one might wish to dispose of the irritating self-centered stubbornness of manly men. Yet manly assertion is a mode of speech and speech has a certain rationality: it makes sense, though often in deplorable fashion. What we must understand now is the combination of stubbornness and rationality in manly assertion. Out of that combination comes the political.

Let’s start from the example of patriarchy, a political term used today. Patriarchy referring to male domination, is the name by which the women’s movement has dubbed all previous human societies, somewhat as the French revolutionaries gathered all preceding eras in one category, “the old regime,” to designate the age-old castle of oppression. And the women’s movement is right: every previous society, including our democracy up to now, has been some kind of patriarchy, permeated by stubborn, self-insistent manliness. Even our reason is infected and effectually controlled by the manly types; contrary to reason, for example, men have dominated the professions that require learning, not excluding the academic profession that is supposed to be devoted to learning. In protest, some of the braver sisters turned against reason itself, calling it “phallic,” accusing it of a bossy attitude toward women’s feelings, and condemning it for trying to direct or foreclose their choices.

It may go too far to accuse reason itself of being patriarchal. As Socrates said, a reasoned argument has a “logic” of its own that the reasoner cannot control but has to follow. But the accusation is right to suggest that stubbornness is added to rationality in manly assertion. An assertion, one could say, is a statement or proposition that the asserter tries to control. So there’s no doubt that “Father knows best” is the very spirit of patriarchy, in which Father’s authority is mixed with Father’s knowledge. The phrase is usually spoken by Mother, often ironically, though Father is not above saying it himself if the occasion seems to demand the assertion of authority. Think of Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners saying “I’m the King” to his ever-skeptical wife Audrey Meadows. “Father knows best” is a family motto that is easily translated into politics when those in power claim to know what’s good for those in their control. The claim to knowledge is not added on like an accidental extra, however. Manly assertion appears first as stubbornness, but it is more than that; it claims to be knowledge. Patriarchy would not have grown up and flourished everywhere if there were not more to it than the tyranny of fathers. We will easily underestimate the difficulty of getting rid of patriarchy if we are not more careful about the reasons why it has survived.

What are those reasons? Reasons—because the one reason of survival is not enough; it no longer holds in the leisurely ease of our civilization, and in any case, it never was enough. Human beings want quality time in their sojourn on the planet; they want more than self-sacrifice for the sake of keeping the species going. They are interested in why the species should be preserved—the point overlooked by Darwin. Why did primitive peoples, desperately poor by our standards, living on the margin of existence, and subject to daily risks we can hardly imagine, waste their time and substance on religion? They wanted to know that they matter, that’s why; and they were willing to spend heavily for the answer to that question from time and resources they might have saved for their material well-being. Other animal species seek to survive; humans want to survive with honor. It is through manliness that humans insist that they are worthy of the attention of the gods or have an honored place in the scheme of things.

Manliness might not seem to be involved in the meaning human beings want for themselves. The stereotype tells us that manly men are not necessarily the smartest or cleverest of human beings; they are men of action like John Wayne, not thinkers. Indiana Jones is an anthropology professor but seems to spend most of his time in the field. Hemingway’s old man is a thinker, an exception to the rule, but then the professorial critics of the work, who don’t care for men of action, don’t notice that this one thinks (and thinks more than they do). We will not ignore the fact, as do the scientists who study sex differences, that the best thinkers, the philosophers, have been almost exclusively male.¹⁸ But let us put it aside for the time being. The philosophers, though male, do not seem to be manly men of action. And the men of action, in their irrational, very unphilosophic way, seem to represent stubborn resistance to any reasonable scheme such as a gender-neutral society that sets aside sex. The more extreme feminists may be wrong to imply that philosophers can never rise above the self-interest of males, but they would be right to say that manly reason is assertive (“phallic”).

What, then, do manly men contribute to the meaning of life since they do not think deeply or objectively about it? Strangely, their very stubbornness is a contribution. Instead of thinking deeply, and acting often in a petty way, the manly man makes an issue of himself; he asserts himself in some way. That is what his “aggression” means; he is stubborn for the sake of something and yet also and always on his own behalf. He connects himself—his personal stubbornness—to something bigger than himself—the issue in which, he claims, he and his honor are involved. When the scientists of stereotypes say that men are more aggressive than women, they leave out the end for which men are aggressive and the reasoning by which they support it. It’s what men do with their aggression that matters, for however childish and self-interested they may be, they advance a cause for their complaints. Manly stubbornness is often, even usually, negative and selfish, but it is never merely that. To make an issue of something is a positive act. Even with a sulker like Achilles you can work out the principles by which he lives. Manliness is both irrational and rational: irrational because the manly man insists on his own importance no matter what; rational because he has reasons for doing so.

Now, to make an issue is a political act. It is to bring to general attention some unnoticed injustice done to you. The injustice harms you, but in making an issue of it you claim that it affects others too. Achilles expands his complaint against Agamemnon from stealing his girlfriend to not honoring the best of the Greeks.¹⁹ The latter is a more serious matter as it implies a general proposition that rulers should honor the best, a proposition of course including Achilles, in his humble opinion, but not confined to him. This claim transforms a private wrong, which you might suffer patiently, into a public wrong for which you insist on a remedy. The injustice will sometimes be done by society or the government, the powers that be; so to make an issue of it suggests that you are willing to challenge authority to get justice done. How far would you take this challenge? If you are a responsible person, and not a mere complainer, you might decide that it’s up to you to step in to straighten things out. Not only do you make your claim public, but to be consistent, and to carry your point further, you take up the reins of control yourself, perhaps even leading a revolution against the status quo in extension of your manly logic. This is manly aggression when it is carried out to its conclusion, good or bad. What manly men contribute to the meaning of human life is its actualization in society. Biased as they are, they may not see justice well; they may be guilty of disastrous mistakes, as was manly Ajax in the Iliad. But when confronted with a problem, manly men get busy.

We in our liberal society speak often of the distinction between private and public, believing as we do that our liberties are safe only when a line is drawn to keep the public from interfering too much with the private. We don’t want people to pick up the habit of crossing this line, of raising issues too often on subjects for which we have an established law, custom, or policy. The right of private property builds fences that protect us from overmuch interference either from fellow citizens or from the government, reacting to their pressure. But we also have a right of free speech, a right to address our fellow citizens, to raise issues, and thus to create a public question out of a previously private matter. It takes a certain quality of soul to do this, and the quality is manliness, the manly responsibility we have defined. The feminists had a slogan, “the personal is the political.” They meant that what had previously been considered private, male-female relationships, had to be redefined by political means. They meant, too, that the original relationship had been defined by an act of political oppression done by males. The redefining from private to public is a manly act, in this case done by angry women who had a grievance and wanted a new society that would make room for their remedy. There are many injustices—such as this one, done to women—that remain latent until someone has the gumption to speak up and “act up,” as the gay activists say.

One cannot assume that the distinction in our society between private and public is where it is because it has to be there. Surely there are matters that are private in all societies—somehow sex comes first to mind—but still, they are treated differently in different societies. Coming of age in Samoa is not the same as in an American high school.²⁰ The difference is enacted and enforced by the public either in legislation or by custom. But the American high school is not the same as it used to be. When it is changed, the source of change is either public, the public changing its mind, or private, when the previous public is persuaded to change its mind or is just plain overthrown. In the latter cases, what was private opinion becomes the public rule, for example, our new gender-neutral society. The gender-neutral society replaced patriarchy, which also got its start from a previous change. There are differ-ent kinds of patriarchy, and the one that allowed women to vote in 1919 took over from the one before that time that did not.²¹

We must not look at public and private statically as a distinction that never changes; we must remember that the public emerges from private, latent interests or opinions that find expression. The public, the political, needs to be asserted; what is public now was once asserted, what will be public in the future will be asserted against what is public now. Politics is assertive, and as-sertiveness is a kind of aggression—the kind that is unwilling to let things be as they are. It is aggression that has received a certain form in an organization or regime and that acts for a certain end or ends.

Yet because the public emerges from the private, it does not follow that the public is created by the private, as most modern political thinkers say. No, the public is always there; always a ruling status quo exists that establishes for any society what is public and what is private. Aristotle said that man is by nature a political animal. He connects this to the fact that man is by nature a rational animal, with opinions on good and bad, just and unjust, harmful and advantageous.²² When you have an opinion you have a reason, and the reason applies not only to yourself but also to others like yourself. If you, a male, assert “my wife shouldn’t fight in the army,” you need a reason why wives or women generally should not do this. That reason keeps your assertion from being a mere whim, and it transforms your assertion from a personal statement to a principle that ought to rule others besides yourself. Our rationality prevents us from living on the basis of idiosyncratic preferences. Of course our reasoning may be unsound or biased; it usually is. But the attempt to reason renders us political animals. We cannot live without giving reasons to justify how we live. So we cannot live without a notion of the public, of a political association that attempts to enact and enforce what we assert, using reasons. Without reasons, our assertiveness would be mere unfounded aggression, a pure power move; without assertiveness, our reasoning would be dormant and ineffectual.

Aristotle is more assertive about the rationality of man, more discreet about the assertiveness. He tells us directly that having reason or speech (logos) makes us naturally political animals. But he doesn’t set forth the argument for assertiveness that I have made. He doesn’t want to encourage as-sertiveness. In his time, he thought, men were already tougher than they needed to be. As we shall see, the philosophers generally take a dim view of manly assertiveness. When Aristotle says “man” is by nature political, he says “human being” (anthropos), including women, not he-man (aner). Using the same distinction as Homer in the Iliad, Aristotle disagrees with Achilles that only he-men have the virtue to be political. Women share in human rationality, and they also share in assertiveness. Aristotle admits this latter fact in a subdued manner, and we have seen it again in the manly assertiveness of the women’s movement in our day.²³ It would seem that we have the basis for the gender-neutral society in the very call for that society by the women’s movement. If women can take their personal grievance and make it political, isn’t that enough to show that women are as assertive, and therefore as political, as men?

Not so fast. Though it’s clear that women can be manly, it’s just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men. Women, we have seen, have less of the brute spirit of aggression when compared with men. That is what the studies show and what our hormones confirm. The statistics on crime make it plain as a pikestaff that men surpass women by far in the reckless aggression that draws the attention of the law.²⁴ This shows that men have aggression to spare; they keep it in stock so as to have it ready when it is needed and even, or especially, when it is unneeded and unwanted; like Tom Sawyer, they offer it on slight occasions as a free gift, useful or not. Not all men are like this, but very many more of them are like this than women. The ready excess of aggressive assertion in men reveals the strength of their habitual inclination. Men can spit, cuss, tell dirty jokes, read porn, and drink beer. Modern women are doing their best to catch up with men in these attainments, and they do seem to have made modest progress in cussing, I say condescendingly. But they remain way behind men in natural, easy-going, effortless vulgarity.

Lacking as women are, comparatively, in aggression and assertiveness, it is no surprise that men have ruled over all societies at almost all times. It may seem wrong and unfair to cite the ungovernableness of men as their title to govern, and the moderation of women as the proof of their unfitness. I am not quite doing that. Modern biologists, overlooking what is specifically human, have taught us to say that manly types defend their turf.²⁵ Thus they connect aggression to defense of whatever is one’s own. They point to the behavior of other mammals, which first create their own turf, marking out its boundaries with any convenient means, and then defend it. The biologists are not wrong to point to our human animality and to draw inferences from the differences that can be observed between males and females in almost all species of animals. It’s an impressive fact that aggressive masculinity is not unique to humans but runs rampant throughout the animal kingdom among both wild and tame beasts. If one thinks in the mode of evolution, the fact that defending one’s turf is animal makes it older, deeper, and more ingrained than anything merely human. If, like Hemingway, you think outside that mode, you see nature repeating the male-female distinction with interesting variations.

What is specifically human in the defense of one’s turf? Tom Sawyer, we recall, in marking his turf very decently drew a line in the dust with his bare toe. “Turf ” is what people say today to refer to their honor. Impressed as we are with the evolution of humans from animals, and democratically inclined not to put on airs, we are drawn to the biological idea of defending turf, the generic rather than the specifically human trait. Yet it’s honor that manly men want to defend. Like a dog barking from his yard, we humans are parochial and patriotic, loyal to particular communities if not to masters. But honor differs from turf by asserting the defense of a general or universal principle or cause that is attached to the community. Honor is attached to a particular territory, but by the same token the territory is attached to honor. We honor different things in different societies, but we all know what honor is. Honor has to be asserted and claimed because nature does not make it clear to all concerned what truly deserves to be honored. You have to stand on your hind feet and raise your voice. Of course, if you are placed where your honor is not contested, you don’t have to make a fuss; you simply accept the result of a previous effort by somebody else on your behalf and to your benefit.²⁶

Honor is a claim to protect one’s person, family, and property—and the beliefs embodied in them. A sense of honor is the source of the protective-ness so characteristic of manliness. Honor joins together private circumstance and public belief so that those who desire it feel entitled to act as they do; through the assertion of honor they surpass mindless aggression not devoted to a cause. Yet because honor always has a particular attachment, it is always somewhat arbitrary. Tom Sawyer didn’t have to draw the line where he did. He didn’t have to draw one at all except that he is something of an honor-lover. Honor comes to a focus on a point of honor, a point on which you decide that your honor is engaged. Often there is a code of honor that tells you what you mustn’t tolerate, where your honor is engaged, and that you must take a stand. The point and the code of honor are conventional; they could be otherwise than they are. But honor itself is part of human nature as it develops and perfects animal nature.²⁷ In assertiveness for the sake of honor, human nature requires a supplement of convention made by human choice and legislation. Our nature is partly determined by us. The biologists are wrong to try to understand honor in terms of turf. They should reverse the point and try to understand turf in terms of honor, as honor lacking in rationality.

Manly protectiveness is the responsible side of manliness discussed earlier. A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him. He makes an issue of some matter, engages his honor, and takes charge of the situation either as a routine or in an emergency. Not every activity of protection carries a risk, as when a man provides peaceably for his family. But the willingness to take on risk is the primary protection enveloping all other ways of providing for someone. From this fact we recognize the connection between turf or honor and politics. Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule. How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do? This is how manliness leads to patriarchy, a form of rule in which the rulers behave as if they were protective fathers. Here I use “patriarchy” in the expanded (feminist) sense of every government based on manliness, not merely those governments staffed by males.

Part of the patriarchal code of honor of society before it became gender-neutral was male gallantry toward women. Gallantry is a formality of protection, sometimes extravagant, which is a sign of readiness to protect should protection really be needed. It continues in faded and diminished form today because women like it. Women know it’s inconsistent with their independence to have a man open a door for them, but out of the goodness of their hearts they allow it—while at the same time allowing themselves to be inconsistent. What is the true nature of gallantry? Sometimes “gallantry” is used euphemistically or ironically to refer to sexual conquests like those of Don Giovanni. Is gallantry really an admission of the superiority of women as it appears to be, or is it fundamentally insincere because it always contains an element of disdain? The man who opens a door for a woman makes a show of being stronger than she, you could say (Kant said it); but on the other hand, the woman does go first.²⁸ We shall return to the possibility that being a sex object is not the worst fate in the world.

I seem to have drifted into, if not a defense, then a sympathetic explanation of the way men have traditionally treated women. But cannot women protect men? It’s clear that in the home women take care of men in a ratio well beyond fifty-fifty. Can’t women also rise to the occasion in dangerous emergencies? All of Elmore Leonard’s novels explore manliness in its ordinary American excesses, both bad and good, when men are committing vicious crimes and when, endearingly, they are preventing or avenging them. In Killshot he tells of a woman who saves herself and her manly but tardy and somewhat unwary husband from being murdered. How does she do it? By asking herself what he would do and then doing it. Let’s look also at High Noon. At the end of this film celebrating manliness, Grace Kelly, a Quaker lady, shoots a criminal in the back just as he was about to shoot her husband in the back. The manly man needed help and got it from a refined woman who did not believe in the use of violence but still shot pretty accurately.²⁹ It seems, moreover, that women also defend their own honor. In our day they have their own personal codes as to what they will and will not “do,” that is, allow to be done. “No! Not on the first date!”³⁰ Yet though women have honor, they need society to vindicate it through shame and punishment; and society sometimes needs to be activated by manly men. In High Noon, the whole town is frightened and it’s up to Gary Cooper to act. And though Grace Kelly saves him at the end, one cannot imagine their roles reversed; only in a pinch does she, like Leonard’s heroine, do what a man would do.

Is it possible to teach women manliness and thus to become more assertive? Or is that like teaching a cat to bark? It is hard to persuade someone to abandon or acquire a trait that he or she holds or lacks not through persuasion but generically, as an animal. But one can persuade a human someone to modify, rather than eliminate, an animal trait. That is the specifically human way to treat an animal endowment. To modify a trait you have to accept that some underlying ground for it exists and will continue to exist; you must respect that essence. You may have no proof or even any thoughts about essences, but for practical purposes you go along with a manly essence. In that case you are trying to form willful, wild manliness into a more manageable variety—or to find a hidden reservoir of manliness and bring it to the surface. In the 1970s some psychologists and therapists tried to get women to take “assertiveness training” to prepare themselves for the new gender-neutral society.³¹ Women were being asked to accept the manly essence and to take measures to share in its advantages. Far from doing away with manliness, they would adopt it and use it for themselves.

The idea had its critics, and one can see why it did not succeed. Assertive-ness training presupposes that women have a defect in that department. While men have excessive assertiveness and need to be tamed, women have too little and need a boost. Their training aims to teach them to make their own case, a habit one takes for granted in men. If that’s so, it’s no wonder that men have dominated business and politics. With or without training in moderation, men were just doing what comes naturally. But if women don’t take steps to reduce their assertiveness deficit, will they succeed as well as men in the formerly manly occupations? Perhaps their true policy is to assert themselves as women and not try to become artificial men, but that policy requires a certain distance from manly assertiveness.

A mass-market effort began in the early seventies to offer books and workshops on assertiveness training for women.³² It found support from the linguist Robin Lakoff ’s influential book Language and Woman’s Place, describing a “woman’s language” of weak and ingratiating speech. Lakoff and other feminists deplored this unassertive style and wanted to see it corrected. They did not give much thought to what America would be like if both sexes tried to “get ahead,” as Americans say. Or is it that women used to get ahead vicariously through their men but now want to get ahead on their own? That would suggest there never was appreciation in either sex for the good things you get by giving rather than taking. Yet perhaps women do retain something of their traditional critical attitude toward the ways of assertive men and toward the value of the worldly goods you get by being assertive. Which is better for women, love or money? Perhaps there is a middle thing, neither love nor money but combining both: recognition (an important word, we shall see, for some feminists). But recognition for what? For being successful in love or with money? The question cannot be avoided.

The gender-neutral society with equal assertiveness for women results, it seems, in an unreflective embrace of commercialism and other forms of mundane ambition. Was there really nothing to the objections that used to be made, by both left and right, to the exploitation and the pettiness of a bourgeois society? There is, to be sure, a New Age feminism that is in principle quite contrary to feminist careerism. It opposes bourgeois society as wasteful and exploitative and seeks to reconnect with nature respectfully as women used to do in olden times of tale and myth when women were fairies, witches and goddesses.³³ New Age women sometimes sell souvenirs of this bygone age, but their career plans go no further than this. They keep their distance from the artificial manliness delivered by assertiveness training.

The feminist psychologist Mary Crawford, an intelligent observer, says that women are less assertive because they have less power. It’s not that they have less power because they are less assertive. Assertive women, she adds, meet disapproval; so it makes sense for them to ingratiate themselves, instead of asserting themselves, with the men who have power. If only women had fine offices with secretaries and limousines with chauffeurs, as men do, they would develop a robust sense of entitlement and easily slip into the habit of self-assertion. Here Dr. Crawford disagrees with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who thought it ridiculous for a woman to assert herself. That’s what he meant when he made his famous remark quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Aristotle played to the same sentiment when he reported that the magnanimous man is expected to have a deep voice.³⁴ Do women become shrill when they assert themselves and thus fail to impress others with their authority? In my experience it is difficult for a man who is attracted to a woman not to find her cute, rather than intimidating, when she gets angry. But “formidable women,” as we call them, do exist. Expelled members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet might think they had met one of them.

Perhaps Crawford is mistaken to focus on the overall power of men. She is thinking that men are—were—those in power. But powerful men assert themselves against other men as well as women, for example, Achilles against Agamemnon, and to be assertive is not simply to sit down calmly in the seat of authority. To get to that seat you have to compete, and in a competition there are losers—usually more of them than winners. To assert yourself you must take the risk of losing.

Today’s women want power, but they are not so eager to accept the risk that goes with seeking power. An indication of this failing is the willingness of women to claim solidarity with other women in the “women’s movement.” Women today take pride in “our” power, “our” advances, as they become ever more like men while remaining ever the same as women. A men’s movement would be more divided against itself, each individual man looking out for himself and caring less for the general cause of his sex. Some men do complain of the plight of the male sex, but they are thinking of themselves. Both women and men like to reflect on their paths to the top. Successful women often speak with commendable gratitude of the “support” they received from other women, possibly a “support group.” Men are more likely to exaggerate their independence, or if grateful, to mention lessons from sources they were perspicacious enough to consult and take to heart.

Even to speak assertively is risky. To initiate or to dominate a conversation you must take the chance that your remarks will not be well received. People may not laugh at your joke, and perhaps the risk that they will not is the reason why women don’t usually tell jokes. But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. Crawford gives an example to which she does not give enough weight. During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”³⁵ It’s a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question.

The staple of feminine humor is the put-down of complacent males: dreams of glory!—but dating from the feminine mystique. That kind of assertion ensures that women hold their own when men speak or act first. But it’s less risky. One has only to think of Jane Austen to be assured that women have a sense of humor, distributed in lesser quantities to lesser brains. Women do make jokes, only not so noticeably as men. Women have the humor of the wise; they observe and remark in subdued or ironic fashion. Men have the humor of the powerful; they expect everyone to laugh aloud. Today’s woman thinks she can have wisdom and power together: wisdom without modesty, power without risk.

Facing risk is a feature of manliness that goes with holding power. More than most women, indeed, more than most men, the manly man accepts—nay, welcomes—a risky situation. He is not looking for the life of Riley. And he does not, as has been alleged, fear competition from women, though no doubt he is wary of women who have found a way around competition. Only power in its nonhuman, physical meaning—the power of gravity, for example—is power that cannot fail, that carries no risk. Human power has the freedom that comes with indeterminacy, but freedom comes at a cost, the risk that you may not get what you want. All of us accept risks in small things, but those who welcome risk in large enterprises do the rest of us a great benefit. They give effect to our desire not to be determined by outside forces however beneficent; they represent human freedom.

In the smaller, piecework enterprise of reproducing the human race, men take on the duty of insemination (where the risk is mostly with women) and before this, in a ceremony not fully considered by Darwin, the business of asking for a date. When you ask someone for a date, you risk refusal; you put your ego on the line. Traditionally, men ask and women dispose; each sex has “power” of a kind. It was thought that women would not have the gumption to take the first step, make the first move, and men would not have the realism to sit by the telephone and accept their fate. Lately, women are showing more gumption while men still lack realism. Confusion reigns in the gender-neutral society; as Jimmy Durante would have said, everybody wants to get into the act. I have the impression that the forwardness women display—immodesty is too severe a label—still differs from manly confidence. It is called “showing interest” as if it were a response to a man who was just about to ask you for a date. Or is this splitting hairs? In any case, the liberated woman takes advantage of the general retreat from the formality of dates, specifying one sex as the initiator. But someone still has to ask or move first: assertiveness is a feature of human reproduction, and, so too is modesty, to keep it in check.

Assertiveness training aims to toughen speech rather than actions. This fact accords with Aristotle’s reason for why man is by nature a political animal, which is that man has speech, not merely voice like other animals. With speech men assert opinions and make claims as to why their opinions are better than other people’s. Politics is expressed in speech, assertive speech in which we claim that our policy, our party, our regime is superior to someone else’s, the other party, the rival regime. But although politics is mostly speech, the assertive character of political speech directs it against others. As-sertiveness means against someone, some other human or set of humans. You are not merely expressing yourself, saying what’s on your mind, contributing to a discussion, offering a comment. You are making a claim against others in order to justify the way you do things, which in the full sense means to justify the way you rule. Assertive speech justifies the way you live; it indicates why you defend your way of life; it leads to action. So, assertiveness training that merely taught women how to put a point across would not be sufficient. A sign of this is the recent popularity of training in karate (or some variant) for women, an activity intended to show willingness to fight to defend one’s independence, one’s right to say “no”—together with the competence to back it up. Hollywood has been supporting the action side of assertiveness training with films where star actresses like Angelica Huston, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis appear as hit men well versed in the ability to kill.³⁶ Of course hit men do not really fight or defend themselves, and they take care to give themselves every advantage. They are not like John Wayne but rather are just the sort of professional thug he typically takes care of. They are manly only insofar as they do not suffer from squeam-ishness and do not favor gun control.

Our line of thinking makes war or conflict central to politics and manliness the inspiration of both. It has behind it the evidence not only of males ruling over all societies at almost all times but also, as we have seen, of male preponderance in crime and in the prison population. For good and for ill, males, apparently impelled by their manliness, have dominated all politics we know of. Is there something inevitable about this domination or is it merely experience up to now, creating a stereotype from which we are free to depart? Does patriarchy have a future?

One reason to doubt its future is that manliness seems undemocratic, while the direction of history in America and elsewhere seems to be toward ever more democracy. To put oneself forward, even in behalf of someone else or a higher cause, seems to require a display of ego. The manly man will take it personally if you do not pay attention to what he says. But a display of ego implies that one is not satisfied with what satisfies most people; it is at base an aristocratic impulse. Women, having less “ego” (in the popular sense of willingness to display it), are more democratic than men. They display themselves cosmetically so as to attract men, and vain women are certainly egoistic. But attractive or vain women merely expect you to pay attention to them (and will be disappointed if you do not); they do not insist on it peremptorily, like the manly man. It is take it or leave it. They do not say “c’m’ere” with the authority of Gary Cooper speaking to Katy Jurado in High Noon. There are, to be sure, many shy men and women. The shy men wish they could display their egos, and the shy women believe they should not as they think modesty becomes them. The traditional stereotypes take their cue from the ego man and from the modest woman, and not due to arbitrary “privileging” but because the man’s ego is more directly dominant than the woman’s.

For confirmation we can look back to the wisdom in Aristophanes’ play The Assembly of Women (392 B.C.). Athenian democracy differs from ours in that women did not vote or share in rule, but Aristophanes was able to imagine what would happen if they did. In the play he shows that women are more democratic than men.³⁷ Praxagora, she-general of the women of Athens, leads them in a plot to take over the conventional government by men and replace it with a new one manned by women. Surely a manly deed? But the women take command by pretending to be men—wearing false beards, applying imitation tans (women then were pale because they worked indoors), arriving at the Assembly before the men, dressed as men, and voting in the new order as if it were a legitimate decision of the old one. The totally novel design of rule by women is arranged and appears to be a last resort of the corrupt government of men, always eager for innovation and willing to try anything however fantastic. The women do not publicly claim to rule as women; this is not a women’s movement but a successful plot of women pretending to be men.

Before the takeover, Praxagora gives a speech to the women she has assembled in a rehearsal of what she will say later in the Assembly. Despite having a “feminine heart” that might hinder public speaking, she says that women have great experience in delivering erotic speeches to their lovers in bed. They know how to say “I love you” and also how to give excuses—two necessary skills for a politician. Then, still in rehearsal to the women only, she says that women ought to rule because they are not equal but superior to men—and superior in what? Women are more conservative and law-abiding and also more devoted to the common good than the corrupt men running Athenian democracy, who live off public handouts and by suing prominent persons. In a list of women’s political qualifications, the only item relating to rule is the ability to henpeck their husbands, a form of indirect rule. Once installed, Praxagora’s new order proves to be as novel as the new rulers: attempting to do away with all causes for being bad, it introduces communism in property and in the family. Nobody will be envious of others and no disputes will arise. Free dinners will replace democratic deliberation in the Assembly. Politics will be abolished and will be replaced with free love. Our 1960s slogan of make love not war is realized—and there’s no politics, either.

Aristophanes presents women as lacking manliness, which means lacking not so much the desire to rule as the desire to claim publicly for oneself the right to rule. Even Praxagora, the remarkable leader, makes no claim on her own behalf for the office to which she is elected. Halfway through the play she disappears and we see her rule as it applies in practice but not in person. The new order she installs transforms Athenian democracy in accord with women’s lack of desire to raise issues. Her communist design removes disputes from city life, abstracting the democracy from politics; democracy is made more democratic by being feminized, depoliticized, so as to make everyone happy. As long as there are political decisions to be made, those who do not benefit will be unhappy.

It turns out, however, that some are unhappy under Praxagora’s regime as well. Implementing the sexual communism of that regime, the new law prescribes that men and women will be sexually available to one another. But in order to compensate for the sexual advantage of the young and beautiful, an affirmative action provision in favor of the old and ugly allows them to claim a right of sexual access ahead of those who are naturally more attractive. A scene develops in which three hags, each uglier than the one before, squabble with a young woman for first dibs on the service of an appalled young man. By following out the logic of the antipolitical feminine heart together with the egalitarian logic of democracy, the Assemblywomen have squelched the love of beauty that adorns human life. Aristophanes rehearses the women’s movement of our day and perhaps gives us a glimpse into the future of affir-mative action. The difference between him and us is that he has no idea of gender neutrality. Somehow, despite his poet’s love of the individual and aversion to essences, men and women have distinct political natures, men being more direct and assertive than women.

Two facts in American politics today reveal that the stereotype is still tolerated in our gender-neutral society. The stereotype is that women are less aggressive, less assertive than men, and it appears in our refusal so far to employ women in combat as well as in the gender gap in voting. As to the first, our thinking about manliness leads us from assertiveness to the political to conflict. Raising an issue may well be tantamount to picking a fight. One could say, then, that manliness is best shown in war, the defense of one’s country at its most difficult and dangerous. In Greek, we have noted, the word for manliness, andreia, is also the word for courage. Aristotle says that courage is best shown in battle.³⁸ What we call political courage, the willingness in a democracy to face unpopularity, is lower on the scale than facing death for the sake of one’s country. Yet courage in battle may have a political consequence. Those willing to face death for their country have often asserted that their courage gives them the right to rule or to share in rule. The issue raised today over women in the military concerns the sovereign claim of manliness as the title to rule. For if women can fight as well as men, why can they not govern as well, and as deservedly?

It is some time since women have had the right to vote without the right to fight. Now it would seem that this situation must be corrected to solidify women’s equal claim to rule. If we survey the gender-neutral society as a whole, the exclusion of women from combat stands out like a sore thumb. What can justify this anomaly? Yet who can reasonably deny that women are not as accomplished as men in battle either in spirit or in physique? The partisans make much of the issue. Conservatives say that this proves women are not the same as men; liberals just go ahead regardless, making the competence of women in everything a point of honor so as to deny (in manly fashion) what cannot reasonably be denied.³⁹ One can perhaps take a position above the fray and say that the gender-neutral society does not require perfect interchangeability among men and women; it can go along with Aristotle’s qualification (on the meaning of “nature”) and maintain that men and women are the same “for the most part” if not perfectly. But perhaps, again, this is too superior a view. If the partisans are extreme, they are often more illuminating than the more sensible middle, and right now we are trying to illuminate. Besides, ability to fight is not a mere detail of the big picture. As noted above, it is an important claim to rule (think of the slogan, “old enough to fight, old enough to vote”), and it is the culmination of the aggressive manly stereotype we are considering.

The average male soldier is not a warrior in the manner of Achilles. In peacetime such warriors are called “gung-ho” by other soldiers, with uneasy admiration but without envy. In wartime the warriors come to the fore and by their example lead the others, who fear being shown up as cowards. Women, up to now, have not been warriors nor have they shown any inclination to be led by warriors. They shun risk more than men and they perceive risk more readily than men; they fear spiders.⁴⁰ Men, especially warriors, seek out risk as if they could not live without it, and no doubt foolishly they may welcome war. War is hell but men like it. To become the equals of men in combat, then, women would have to become warriors or warriors would have to become obsolete. We see women becoming warriors in the movies and on television: the hit women mentioned above, the film GI Jane, and the television show Xena, the Warrior Princess. A man watches these performances with a degree of skepticism. He has some experience with the anger of women and with the intrepidity they show in expressing their anger to persons much larger than themselves. But there might come a point when these stronger persons would have to be fought rather than merely told off. The idea of women as warriors would then be exposed as a bluff, and foreseeing this humiliation, the very great majority of women would take a pass on the opportunity to be GI Jane. In the NATO countries where women are allowed in combat units they form only 1 percent of the complement.⁴¹ Whatever their belief about equality, women might reasonably decide they are needed more elsewhere than in combat.

Then, we might ask whether we need manly warriors at all. In the movie Fargo (1996), a woman police officer triumphs over men who are either unmanly or whose manliness takes the form of vicious cruelty merely with her plodding but intelligent, asexual professionalism. The movie seems to say that rule-bound professionalism is replacing erratic manliness in occupations that were once manly, and that by this means women, who are steadier than men, can replace them, or at least do as well. Women don’t fly off the handle so easily. The argument for professionalism in the police is stronger than for the military because the police enforce the law and need to be seen as respecting it.

What does a professional army do with the warrior? Until recently the professional army tried to make use of the warrior instead of replacing him, and officers exhorted their men to behave as men, by which they meant but rarely said, “be courageous.” Nowadays they urge the ranks to be professional in a gender-neutral sense devoted to cool, controlled, dispassionate killing of the enemy, somewhat like the hit men only paid less. When excessive manly passion has been successfully curtailed, soldiers like these may have more quality time for their families. One writer holds out for public adoption an “ungendered vision of aggressivity with compassion.”⁴² The alternative to women as warriors, it seems, is women as we know them. Nonetheless, women as we know them today do not want to be excluded from the category of warrior even if they do not want to become one. In a recent decision regarding women in the military, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that any classification by sex, in order to be constitutional, has to be “exceedingly persuasive.”⁴³

I doubt my words can meet that test. So let us leave this tricky matter for our politics and our necessities to decide. Perhaps we shall be lucky enough not to require an efficient and fearsome military, and instead we can go for equal justice, if that’s what it is, like Canada and Denmark. As things are, we do not confine the right to vote to those who fight. In not doing so we imply that women as women (and not as warriors) have something to contribute to our politics. The result of their contribution, we now see, is a gender gap in the voting of men and women.

In the last three American presidential elections, men and women voted for different candidates. In 1996, men were very slightly for Dole and women heavily for Clinton; in 2000, men went 53 percent for Bush and women, 54 percent for Gore; and in 2004 men were 55 percent for Bush and women, 51 percent for Kerry. For elections, the 2000 and 2004 results are substantial differences, as 53 and 55 percent of the vote represent an easy victory. But from the standpoint of sex differences, 53 percent is about equal, somewhat over half. In regard to women in combat the sex difference in capacity is larger, but when it comes to women in politics, the sex difference is muted, and it is a difference in outlook more than capacity. Why should manly as-sertiveness be less pronounced in politics than in war? Recall that Aristotle said that human beings, not just males, are political by nature.

The difference in outlook of men and women in recent American politics follows the central stereotype that we have been pursuing from aggression to assertiveness. Men, more willing than women to take risks, tend to favor policies of self-reliance and to oppose government programs that provide care and succor to the needy; and men are readier to go to war or to use force in foreign policy. Women, more risk-averse, favor those programs and seek to avoid conflict by supporting policies that promise peace. It appears that in the last two decades of American politics, the gender gap has been created by men turning conservative; women have remained faithful to the New Deal and the Great Society.⁴⁴ So, it is said, the Democrats are the Mommy party and the Republicans the Daddy party, as if political parties were like parents and behaved like counterparts rather than opponents. The gender gap in support for the parties is much less for the married than for singles, suggesting that the sexes are more themselves when they live apart. When a woman gets married, she turns right; if she gets divorced, she turns left in search of support from the government, replacing her unsatisfactory husband.⁴⁵

One reason why the gender gap in voting is not wide is that women are divided among themselves. Some observers go so far as to speak of a war between the conservative housewife, who refuses to cooperate with the gender-neutral society, and the liberal, career woman, who wants to extend gender neutrality as far as it goes.⁴⁶ In this war each party does her best to hurt the other. The housewife does more than half the housework, which makes it harder for the career woman to teach her husband equality; and the career woman disdains men’s fidelity and refuses their courtesies, which are vital to the housewife. So the mom ends up voting for the Daddy party, and the critic of motherhood goes for the Mommy party. Each woman wants security, but one finds it in her husband, the other in the government. Women used to be considered the conservative element in society, the upholders of the common good against manly ambition and of morals against manly aggression. In the Assembly of Women, Aristophanes shows how women move easily from conservative morals to radical schemes of big government; a reaction against democratic corruption gives rise to a plot to overthrow the whole manly system of self-interest and to set up a government that takes care of you without your having to exert yourself. It’s a comic overthrow that was thought impossible by Aristophanes, as we see from his getting us to laugh at it. But it suggests a connection between the politics of liberal women and conservative women. Though opposed, they are both womanly in their distaste for the politics in which they have become involved.

That marriage mutes but does not remove sex differences suggests that men and women learn from each other. That means they must be capable of learning from each other; there must be something in each sex enabling it to learn from the other. Isn’t it possible that a married couple might be in love? And when you’re in love, you want in your beloved some things you lack but appreciate; and these might be not only features of the body but also qualities of the soul. A man learns not to charge, and a woman not to flinch, at every danger. Or at least, if you cannot change yourself, you can be glad to have a spouse to do what you won’t do. Is it like this in politics too? In any case, though men and women have opposed tendencies, there are plenty of liberal men and conservative women. Among the Democrats, for example, are union members standing up against the bosses and the rich in manly fashion, and also blacks doing the same against the whites who dishonor them by not treating them equally. You can look at the New Deal programs as protection of the weak and also as assertion by the strong.⁴⁷ Republicans for their part like risk and competition in the free market, but they also like steady wives and husbands for whose loyalty you do not have to compete. It seems that manly assertiveness is not enough, or not capable of standing alone; a manly person cannot always despise the unmanly, he needs the realism of those who know human weakness. Families and politics are associations that bring men and women together and make them mutually appreciative. As electoral differences go, the sex difference is not great. Certainly in American politics today it is less than the race difference or than the difference between churchgoers and nonchurchgoers. But these differences reflect situation and belief while the gender gap is about natural temperament.

Apart from how women vote, they are less active politically, less interested in politics, less well informed about politics than men.⁴⁸ Just as women are less likely to know the names of players in the National Football League (or even the names of the teams!), so too in politics they know less because they care less than men do. Again, the difference is moderate. An interesting study by three political scientists—of the kind I have been disparaging—has made the point. It traces the gender gap not to sex differences but to “par-ticipatory factors,” such as education and income, that give men greater advantages in civic skills, enabling them to participate politically. But the facts that men are better educated (operationally, make that “formally educated for a longer time”) and make more money than women do not close the gap, and the authors have to resort after all to the diverse psychologies of men and women. Resort to psychology implies that men and women make different uses of their education and income. For example, when a woman gets married or has a child she works less, but when a man experiences the same two events, he works more.

The authors believe that if more women were on the ballot, the gender gap in political activity would disappear. As social scientists they need to find an explanation that does not depend on human will or (which is the same thing) chance, and when they have done this, the gender-neutral society will come inevitably into being.⁴⁹ It will not require an education in the principles of gender neutrality because the authors do not specify what sort of education. All that is needed is more education of women—whether in public schools, military schools, or nunneries makes no difference to this highly refined but strangely obtuse analysis.⁵⁰ Here we see that the liberation of mankind, and especially womankind, by social science will come through the same hapless determinism as did its enslavement to manliness by Darwinism. For only a new determinism of social construction can surely defeat the old determinism of biology. So think my social science friends who constitute a support group for the gender-neutral society.

If we move from political participation to political ambition, we find the deficit of assertiveness in women more marked. To judge by the peak, the character of Margaret Thatcher proves that forceful and successful ambition is possible in women (a fact we knew already from such historical examples as Queen Elizabeth I). But it is also clear that women politicians and rulers are far less than half the total number, and this happens in democracies where women make up half the electorate. Women do not run for office as readily as men do, nor do most women, it seems, call on them to run. It seems that they do not have the same desire to “run” things as men, to use the word in another political sense that like the first includes standing out in front.⁵¹ Women are partisan, like men; hence they are political, like men. But not to the same degree. They will readily sail into partisan conflict, but they are not so ready to take the lead and make themselves targets of partisan hostility (though they do write provocative books). It is interesting that, in contrast to black male civil rights leaders, no feminist leader in our time has run for office. This forbearance has to some extent reduced partisan division within the cause of women, and all women, conservative as well as liberal, can take satisfaction in the next “first woman” to invade a male privilege. Women have made the gender-neutral society more by shaming men than by ruling them, but that very accomplishment leaves them short of equality in ruling. Or does it? Traditionally, women were thought to excel in indirect rule that is not asserted in the blustering fashion of males. Today, women gain in rule as much by practicing modesty as by refusing to be modest—as much by accepting tradition as by denouncing it.

In this chapter we have ascended from manly aggression, discoverable and measurable by science, to manly assertion that is seen and shown better by poets. A wiser, more open-minded science would welcome and incorporate the truths seen by poets, who are spokesmen for human importance and thereby leaders in human assertiveness. That science would not neglect our animality, but it would dwell on what is special about human beings and take particular interest in the assertiveness by which human beings express their strong sense of deserving a share of the best. It would not be so suspicious of exaggeration and anecdote; it would be more aware that to be human is to be individual. It would need to understand manliness, for when manly men assert themselves, they compel us to remember their names. They make themselves, and the rest of us who depend on them, distinct from the nondescript, commodified human beings who are the subjects of our social science.