"Didn’t I find, like Paul Theroux, 'the quest for manliness essentially rightwing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic, and fueled largely by a fear of women'?"

"Yes, absolutely, and this belief did nothing to change the fact that I have wanted and sometimes tried in life to feel more manly. In fact, I was trying as I rendered judgment on the Wilderness Collective video, because one of the easiest ways to feel manly is to feel superior to other men’s efforts to feel manly."

From Ben Crair's TNR piece titled "Bro Fall/I lost my masculinity in Brooklyn, so I climbed a mountain to get it back." The Paul Theroux piece he quotes is "The Male Myth." I'm going to concentrate on the Theroux article, a NYT op-ed from 1983. What I love about it being 30 years old is that it's (presumably) underblogged. So let me begin the catching up on blogging "The Male Myth."

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life. (By contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness.)...

Even the expression ''Be a man!'' strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. Man means ''manly'' - how can one think ''about men'' without considering the terrible ambition of manliness?...

The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is effectively separated from women - it is the most savage tribal logic - and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance....

Femininity - being ladylike - implies needing a man as witness and seducer; but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so grotesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy - because it denies men the natural friendship of women....

The quote in the post title fits here. He goes on to speak of his personal struggle becoming a writer in a country where writing seems insufficiently manly, which supposedly is why male American writers invent protagonists who drinks heavily and hunts or wrestles and so forth.

There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted that to be a man is somehow - even now in feminist-influenced America - a privilege...

And this is also why men often object to feminism, but are afraid to explain why: Of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe - and with reason - that their lives are much worse.

Well?

Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chris Matthews daintily allude to Obama's masculinity deficit.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw said it was "just inexplicable" that the Obamacare website "suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos." The President should have pressured "Kathy Sebelius and other people" about the "rollout" which was "going to be our big play for the second term."

"Big play" picks up on that football metaphor Obama used 4 times in his November 14th remarks. "We fumbled," he said, though in real football, it's an individual player who fumbles. But here was this "big play," and somebody fumbled. Was it "Kathy"?

The moderator David Gregory, immediately steps up to frame the next question in macho terms: "Who's got the muscle?" The manly (though 50-years-dead) JFK somehow shoulders his way into the conversation. Gregory turns to Chris Matthews and says:

You were making the point to me this week about, you know, where's his Bobby Kennedy? Who's got the muscle? When the president says, and he did say, "The user experience of this website is everything," who had the muscle in the White House to get it done and make sure the president gets what he wants?

Muscle, muscle, muscle. If a right-winger had phrased the question that way, somebody would call this misogyny. These 3 men — Brokaw, Gregory, and Matthews — are hankering for a muscular man who can nail the big play. He depended on a Kathy when he needed a Bobby. And here's what Chrissy Matthews said:

Everybody goes to their battle stations when there's chaos. 

I'll see you your football metaphor, and raise you a military metaphor.

You always go to where you've been arguing before. But I've always been arguing this president doesn't have a chain of command, a very clear line of authority and unique responsibility. I remember Sebelius, who I like of course, most people do like her, she's a public servant. 

She's liked. Kathy's likeable enough. She's a good servant.

But when she was asked, "Who's in charge?" in that committee, under oath, she started to talk about someone, the head of C.M.S., who handles Medicare and Medicaid. Among 30 or 40 other responsibilities, this person had the rollout responsibilities.

And was "this person" male or female? Female. Marilyn Tavenner. Can you say her name without vaulting back in time to your old macho icons Jack and Bobby? They knew what "responsibilities" to give their Marilyn.

Matthews reaches even further back, to an even manlier man:

Look at Japan, the occupation of Japan, it simple: Put one guy in charge, Doug MacArthur. 

Put one guy in charge. Doug. Call him Doug, not Douglas. Not — in the style of "Kathy" — Dougy. He's Doug. And there was a guy! Put one guy in charge.

You put somebody in charge and they're uniquely responsible for its success or failure. Obama doesn't do things that way. He's got floaters, like Valerie Jarett, floating around. 

Floaters. Like Valerie Jarrett. The disrespect! They can't even spell her name right in the transcript. Floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around. Matthews being a good Democrat somehow feels secure that the double meaning of "floaters" won't bring on the accusations of racism that would surely have burst forth if a Republican had talked about Jarrett like that.

He doesn't want to have a real chief of staff, like a Jim Baker.

He's saying — it's hardly subtle — that Jarrett's not a real man. You need a man. A man like Bobby or Doug or Jim.

He doesn't want to give authority to people, and I think it's been a real problem.

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float?

"If you are truly a feminine woman at your core, but don’t know how to let your femininity surface, you will end up unhappy, feeling miserable and depleted."

"It takes a lot of energy to reject a part of you that is there whether you like it or not. And even if you think you are happy, something will feel like it is missing some day. Why? Because you’re rejecting a part of yourself. Being able to claim your feminine energy is at the heart of your own happiness, and most definitely the happiness of your relationship."

From a post titled "How Most Women Reject their Femininity (and How you can stand out from the crowd)" at a website called "The Feminine Woman," written by Renee Wade. I stumbled into this the other day as I was participating in a Facebook discussion that got onto the topic of feminine beauty, and I went on a search looking for examples of the most feminine-looking face (not the most beautiful feminine face).
I'd remembered reading about a study that found that people thought a man's face was most appealing if it was slightly more feminine-looking than the average male face. I was wondering if the most beautiful female faces would be those exactly at what is the average among women or tending slightly masculine or tending slightly feminine. I know that the most extremely male-looking faces are experienced as ugly, but what about the most extremely feminine faces? I wasn't even sure what that would be. A very small, pointed chin? A tiny, tiny nose and gigantic eyes? I really don't even know.

I got sidetracked onto that "Feminine Woman" site, which I thought raised some interesting issues that I'd like to talk about. I'm not saying Renee Wade is a reliable expert or an impressive theorist in the realm of gender studies. I had a flashback to the "Total Woman"/Marabel Morgan phenomenon of the 1970s, which was, even then, ludicrously uncool.

I'd like to put aside the notion that women should be feminine — because that's what God or nature intended or because it's traditional or the foundation of society or whatever you (or somebody else) might think.

I'm interested in individual expression, freedom, and happiness.

Let's hypothesize that there is something internal and psychological that we've been calling "femininity" (because it corresponds generally to having the female body type). You have as much or as little of it as you have for whatever reason. With that understanding, reread the quote that begins this post.

Now, the question becomes: What does it mean to be extremely feminine?

And: What would it be like if those who are psychologically at the extreme of femininity were to feel supported and encouraged to openly and proudly manifest their femininity? Try to answer this question without confusing it with the efforts of those who don't actually have this inward orientation but who are aspiring to images and stereotypes about femininity out of social pressure or as a means of competition for other things they may want.

"How Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage."

A great article by Ariel Levy. Worth subscribing to The New Yorker to get access. I had The New Yorker in audio podcast form, and this article inspired me to subscribe to the print edition. It begins:

"Fuck the Supreme Court!” Edith Windsor said, one hideously hot morning in June, when she’d had just about enough. Then she sighed and mumbled, “Oh, I don’t mean that.” What she really meant was that she was hot, she was tired of waiting, and, most of all, she was tired of being told what to do. “I’m feeling very manhandled!” she said.

It was Windsor’s eighty-fourth birthday, and she was spending it staring at a laptop screen as information from scotusblog.com flashed by in a typeface too small for her to read comfortably. Four years earlier, Windsor’s partner of more than forty years, Thea Spyer, died, leaving Windsor her sole heir. The two were legally married in Canada, in 2007, but, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was not eligible for the exemption on estate tax that applies to husbands and wives. She had to pay $363,053 in taxes to the federal government, and $275,528 to New York State, and she did not think that was fair.

There's some excellent material about lawyering, including getting the right plaintiff as the face of the issue. One "experienced movement attorney" explains that "Women are better than men" and "post-sexual is better than young." Windsor was not just female and presumably "aged out of carnality," but, we're told, didn't "look gay."

Her pink lipstick and pearls would make it easier, [her lawyer Roberta] Kaplan knew, for people across the country to feel that they understood her, that she embodied values they could relate to.

Some movement lawyer types thought Windsor was the wrong plaintiff because she was too rich, and her legal problem was a problem of a rich person. Who owes $600,000 in taxes? What kind of civil rights movement forefronts suffering of that kind?

"There were these calls," Kaplan said. "These people from Lambda were like, 'We really think that bankruptcy is the perfect venue to challenge DOMA,' because they had a bankruptcy case they wanted to bring. Finally, I couldn't stand it. I said, 'Really?  I don't want to be disrespectful or classist, but do you really think that people who couldn't pay their personal debts are the best people to bring the claim?"...

Kaplan was convinced that Americans dislike taxes even more than they dislike the rich...

"I am wary of a solution that can be reduced to a kind of 'female machismo,' because a woman has a different make-up than a man."

"But what I hear about the role of women is often inspired by an ideology of machismo," said Pope Francis.

Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops. I say this because we must not confuse the function with the dignity. We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church. We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman. Only by making this step will it be possible to better reflect on their function within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.

This is guarded and abstruse. The key word seems to be "function," as if it's all about the usefulness of women. Obviously, he's not talking about formal equality. If he's a feminist, he's a difference feminist. A lot of deep thinking is needed about what women are for.

What is woman's place, her specific place in those places of the various areas?

"Young men in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada have also fallen behind."

"But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve," writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic.

Using evidence and not ideology as their guide, officials in these countries don’t hesitate to recommend sex-specific solutions. The British Parliamentary Boys' Reading Commission urges, “Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading material that will appeal to disengaged boys.” A Canadian report on improving boys’ literacy recommends active classrooms “that capitalize on the boys’ spirit of competition”— games, contests, debates. An Australian study found that adolescent males, across racial and socioeconomic lines, shared a common complaint, “School doesn’t offer the courses that most boys want to do, mainly courses and course work that prepare them for employment.”

This tracks the "Gendertopia" hypothetical I use in my Constitutional Law II class when I teach about Equal Protection and classification by sex. And it ties to the topic, raised in the previous post, about schools using nonfiction books to teach reading, an issue I tied to the boys-falling-behind problem here.

Hoff Sommers stresses recognizing the differences between boys and girls and taking steps to help boys (which of course lights a fire under those who've argued that girls have been held back and if anyone's going to get special help, it should be girls). I recommend avoiding all that drama and ideological struggle by embracing what are, after all, the best American values. We don't need to follow Britain and Canada. We should forefront individuality, autonomy, and freedom.

How? Have a variety of schools, built on different learning models that are built on preferences that  relate to things that could be portrayed as stereotypically male and stereotypically female, but don't talk about how the learning styles are male or female, and don't bias the individual children and their parents to match the boys to the boy style and girls to the girl style. Give them choice and freedom. If your son or daughter wants to learn how to read with science books, to experience a teaching method built on games, contests, and debates, and to figure out how things work by taking them apart and putting them back together, he or she could pick the school that works like that. And there's an equivalent school — perhaps with the cooperative projects and long periods of quiet reading — that can be chosen by boys and girls who flourish in that environment.

I realize that I'm being stereotypically feminine in wanting to move forward in a way that makes everyone happy and avoids discord, but I'm sure that the schoolchild version of me would pick the school built on the stereotypically male learning model. Don't dissuade girls like the young me from going to that school by calling attention to it as a solution for the problems of boys. And don't propagate the idea that boys are a problem, that masculinity is a disease! That's all so unnecessary, and it's offensive to the core American values of individuality and freedom.

I know Christina Hoff Sommers is trying to stir us up and we need to rouse ourselves, but once roused, people will fight, so let's have some impressive harmony-enhancing solutions at hand.

"More than a book, 'Lean Back (and Relax!)' is a manifesto ('MAN'-ifesto) intended to reduce gender inequality..."

"... by encouraging men to step aside and let the ladies do more of the work. 'Lean Back' aims to help gals, finally, bring home more bacon, while guys, finally, learn to 'Lean Back (and Relax!).'"