The cult of 'manliness': a curmudgeon's defense of "manly men" devolves quickly into self-parody.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

IT'S A TOUGH job defending manliness in the age of irony. Interviewing Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard and the author of the new book Manliness (real men don't use subtitles), New York Post movie critic Kyle Smith observes, "People can hardly say the word 'manly' without cracking up." Mansfield ruefully agrees: "It's very easy to make fun of manly men."

Yes, and it's very hard not to think of the self-proclaimed "manly men" of the old Saturday Night Live sketch, sailing the world aboard the Raging Queen, or perhaps the Merry Men's chorus in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: "We're men--manly men! We're men in tights!"

But a more fitting theme for Mansfield's opus would be the All in the Family opener, "Those Were the Days," wherein the Bunkers waxed nostalgic for the years when "girls were girls and men were men." Now those days are gone, and it's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world. And so a man's got to do what a man's got to do: write a book about being manly.

A Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus for the literati, Manliness ranges from Aristotle to Nietzsche to Simone de Beauvoir, but Mansfield's message is fairly simple: Men--the manly kind, at least--are by nature strong, dominant, aggressive, self-confident risk takers. Women are the weaker sex, dammit, and they ought to face this fact, stop trying to be men, and temper the excesses of manliness with nurturance and gentle criticism.

In a 1997 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Mansfield warned that "the protective element of manliness is endangered by women having equal access to jobs outside the home" and that nonfeminist women "often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves" or when they insist that "people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex."

He has apparently mellowed a bit in the ensuing decade: He now says careers and equal opportunity in public life are fine as long as distinct sex roles are preserved in private life. In interviews, he has suggested that the wife should earn no more than a third of the couple's joint income and do no less than two-thirds of the housework. He also advises that, married or single, men and women should adopt marital-like roles--"the men protective and authoritative as if they were husbands, the women nurturing and critical as if they were wives."

Mansfield has told National Review he is "particularly trying to persuade women" of the benefits of manliness. He...