manliness, the quality of one gender, or rather, of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy we are attacking,Read more at location 76
Responding too quickly, I said: "What impressed all of us about him was his manliness." There was silence at the other end of the line, and finally the female voice said: "Could you think of another word?" Read more at location 77
We now avoid using "man" to refer to both sexes, as in the glowing phrase "rights of man" to which America was once dedicated.Read more at location 78
The attempt to make our language gender-neutral reveals something of the ambition of our democracy today. A gender-neutral language implies a gender-neutral society,Read more at location 81
The principle of equality, born in modern times, is several centuries old, but as its application to the sexes is very new, we can see that even democratic peoples were long content to ignore very obvious inequality Read more at location 83
Gender neutrality in theory is abstracting from sexual differences so as to make jobs and professions (especially the latter) open to both sexes.Read more at location 89
How can you regard sex as irrelevant when it used to be considered highly relevant? The answer is that one must oppose the traditional thinking and "raise consciousness" as to what women can or ought to do.Read more at location 91
It is not enough merely to set aside sexual differences. That is the principle. But since the new principle, like everything new in morals and manners, will meet resistance, it is necessary in practice to abolish or lessen sexual differences,Read more at location 93
From a formal, negative, principle abstracting from sexual differences it becomes an actual, positive reformation so as to do away with them.Read more at location 95
Because there are no gender-neutral human beings, the gender-neutral society cannot simply let nature take its course:Read more at location 95
they believe that gender neutrality can be achieved only if women are as sexually free as the most adventurous men. Read more at location 97
They do not want the sort of equality that might result from being superior at home if inferior at work. They have decided that work is better than home.Read more at location 99
To think that home is better is no more than the "feminine mystique;" the notion Betty Friedan attackedRead more at location 100
men are right to think as they do, and they deserve to be imitated by women in this fundamental point.Read more at location 101
work offers you more choice. "Choice" is the byword of modern women, and not only in regard to abortion.Read more at location 103
Thus the true, the effectual, meaning of women's equality is women's independence - which in turn means, so far as possible, independence from men and from children.Read more at location 106
to gain maximum feasible independence, women will want to imitate men, lead the lives of men, and seek to reduce family responsibilitiesRead more at location 108
An alternative strategy is to get men to do more housework, to behave more like women, both partners making equal sacrifices of their independence.Read more at location 109
In the old society, marriage was called a contract but the woman had a servile role she could not escape.Read more at location 110
If a man finds a complaisant woman, let him rejoice while it lasts. If he does not, too bad; he, not the woman, needs to adjust.Read more at location 113
The sexual difference is not so much set aside as actually diminished. Not only are women behaving more like men, but also men are more welcoming to such women, more sensitive toward them, as we say.Read more at location 115
Men have had to curb, if not totally suppress, their sense of superiority to women. And having done this at the behest of women, they have in a way abandoned the contest and acknowledged the artificiality and fragility of their superiority.Read more at location 118
The women's movement in its initial phase in the 197os released women from the oppression of milleiniia, let them be angry, and with exhilaration seized the task of starting a revolution.Read more at location 121
This was the heyday of feminism when, excited by a spirit of transgression, women were none too pleased with men and not shy about letting them know it. Read more at location 124
One thing women let men know was that sexual harassment had to stop. Sexual harassment has existed ever since predatory males have been around, and until now it has been contained by the code of a gentleman.Read more at location 125
For a traditional example of sexual harassment, not of course taking place at the office, one need only think of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which Mr. Wickham, a man somewhere between a fool and a villain, takes advantage of Lydia Bennett.Read more at location 127
The gentleman, as opposed to a cad or a lout, does not take advantage of those weaker than himself, especially women.Read more at location 130
he allows time for choice or second thoughts by the woman and does not proceed if he is not wanted.Read more at location 132
The gentleman, however, is an embarrassment to the gender-neutral society. A gentleman, we now think, has the same pretension to inequality as the harasser, and because he carries this infection within himself, it may get the better of him on some future occasion. The old ideal of gentlemanliness was tolerant of male pretensions, seeking only to transform them, not remove them. We now believe it is safer to rely on the law rather than an ideal.Read more at location 133
gender neutrality came into being, replacing gentlemanliness as the standardRead more at location 137
A gender-neutral society can, we might think, lose its partisan character. In its mature phase it can leave behind most, perhaps all, of the specific, divisive theses of the feminism that brought it to be.Read more at location 145
Of course, you can see sexual differences if you look for them (as we shall do), but why look?Read more at location 147
Let there be a division of labor not between the sexes but within them, so that differences between the sexes can be treated in the same way as differences within the sexes.Read more at location 158
Nonetheless, a certain resistance to the gender-neutral society has been noticed by its admirers. One of them speaks hyperbolically, and preemptively, of "backlash,"Read more at location 162
but there is no backlash; there is only inarticulate resistance in the form of reluctance, a residual, bodily, behavioral unwillingness on the part of men to do their share in the upkeep of gender neutrality.3Read more at location 163
The independent woman does not have a wife to make her independence viable - to do the housework, cooking, and child rearing.Read more at location 166
The government can be called in to provide funds for day care, and with these or with income from her job,Read more at location 169
The people she hires, often women, are employees and not so dependent as she used to be.5 Even if they do everything - not a likely prospect - they have to be managed.Read more at location 170
The woman does because her husband does not want to do women's work. What! How is it possible that men will let women do men's work but not reciprocateRead more at location 171
in this enlightened age, the age of raised consciousness, men still do not care for what they regard as women's work.Read more at location 175
Other women saw no reason to denounce in universal terms particular men they happened to love, but this was perhaps because they saw no reason why these men could not behave more reasonably than men have behaved up to now. Read more at location 182
By some accounts, American men are doing more around the house than they used to doRead more at location 184
In household tasks a considerable degree of sexual division of labor remains in force. Women still do the cooking; men mow the lawns.Read more at location 187
we have lost the name we used to have for what mainly resists gender neutrality, which is manliness.Read more at location 193
men's disdain not only for women's work but even for women - which let us hurry to say is unjustified and irrational -has shown itself to be neither ephemeral nor transitional.Read more at location 196
From one angle, the attempt to create a gender-neutral society, never before recorded in human history, has been an amazing success. It has aroused virtually no open opposition.Read more at location 197
There was no George Wallace, no Bull Connor, no massive resistance to oppose the women's movement.Read more at location 199
Yet from the standpoint of the complete gender-neutral society, how little has changed. The late feminist political scientist Susan Okiu stated the principle of such a society as "a future in which men and women participated in more or less equal numbers in every sphere of life, from infant care to different kinds of paid work to high-level politics."9Read more at location 209
Legal assistants are 83 percent women; nurses, 93 percent; dental assistants, 98 percent. Pilots are 96 percent men; truck drivers, 95 percent; construction trades, 96 percent; car mechanics, 98 percent. As children grow up, their teachers are 98 percent women in kindergarten, 83 percent in elementary school, 58 percent in high school, and as we saw, 43 percent in college.10 In business, women excel in small enterprises, in finding a niche for a specialized ambition.Read more at location 215
In going to work, women have not deserted the home and most of them show a secret liking for housework.Read more at location 219
What they have abandoned is not the home but domesticity- the virtues of the home, the justification for staying home.Read more at location 220
The book is a subdued but still very manifest claim on behalf of women to rule the household not from the top by making big decisions but from beneath by assuming the right to declare when it is clean.Read more at location 222
Even more pronounced than women's penchant for nesting is their desire to take loving care of the babies to be reared in the nest.Read more at location 223
To these reservations against gender neutrality, we may add women's hesitancy to condemn manliness.Read more at location 226
With the disaster of September II, aooz, Americans were sharply reminded that it is sometimes necessary to fight, and that u1 the business of government, fighting comes before caring.Read more at location 228
The old Adam is still effective and still visible despite all that Hollywood and the media (when they want to be serious) do to instruct us in gender neutrality. Read more at location 241
Or is this judgment made too soon? We are still in transition from the old patriarchal society to the new gender-neutral one, it might be objected, and it will take time to see the change completed.Read more at location 242
Everywhere in the media we see portrayed the aggressive female and the sensitive male-Xena the Warrior Princess and Alan Alda or Warren Beatty (sometimes together).Read more at location 247
Women may have trouble in playing the aggressor, they may not be consistent, they may not be as pleasing to men in the new format; but despite the difficulties they can usually manage. Women are more malleable;Read more at location 248
Yet men reject and resist the expectation that they should abandon their manliness.Read more at location 250
Their unofficial desires are not what they should be officially to maintain the gender-neutral society.Read more at location 252
This means that every woman has, or is entitled to, a grievance against her man and against men in general. The fact that her man is probably no worse than any other she can find may induce her to be resigned to her fate, or it may not. Either way she cannot be happy in the society that was supposed to bring the liberation of women.Read more at location 255
Men, too, are not altogether happy. They have shown themselves willing to accept women's liberation verbally as long as it does not subtract from men's satisfaction at home.Read more at location 257
With the higher incomes men receive they get more honor than women, more "recognition." Manliness prevents men from giving equal honor to women: this is the issue behind inequality in housework.Read more at location 259
It is for them, I suspect, still something of a treat to be in the company of a man who behaves like a gentleman. Women are quite expert in the interpretation of small courtesies,Read more at location 262
gentleman. What is he doing in the gender-neutral society? His chivalry is not only obsolete but also dangerous.Read more at location 267
The protection he offers women comes at the price of recognizing his claim, usually unspoken, that certain things must be left to men.Read more at location 268
It may not matter that firemen are mostly males and dental assistants mostly females, but presidents, legislators, and justices give a character to the whole; if they are mostly males, the society is not really gender-neutral. Read more at location 273
The first mode predominated in the early wave of feminists in the r96os and 1970s led by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, which was more critical of women than men. In the r98os, however, an attempt began from within academia to "deconstruct" manliness and to replace it with masculinity.Read more at location 278
The process known as deconstruction addresses the question of power. It asstunes that the notion of manliness has nothing to recommend it but the power of those who dreamed it up or "constructed" it.Read more at location 282
Why should power-seeking be especially male? If so, that would be very damaging to a gender-neutral society because it would imply that women are not so gifted as men when it comes to shoving rivals out of the way. And yet if it is not so, how do we explain the apparent fact that all previous societies have been ruled by males?Read more at location 285
When one deconstructs manliness, is the effect to expose manliness as mere aggression,Read more at location 287
Manliness tends to be insistent and intolerant, and it is truly a threat to the gender-neutral society. Those who want to "deconstruct" or do away with it may be wrong but they are not anxious over nothing.Read more at location 293
Darwinians, as we shall see, believe in a kind of social construction of manliness that has taken place gradually over millions of years. Why would it take less time to reverse the construction?Read more at location 295
The manly man is in control when control is difficult or contested - in a situation of risk. He knows his job, and he stands fast in that knowledge.Read more at location 302
The independence of a manly man would keep him from getting involved with other people. He would be aloof, satisfied with himself and none too interested in other people's problems.Read more at location 307
In private life, in the family, this ability makes him protective of his wife and children because they are weaker.Read more at location 311
John Wayne is still every American's idea of manliness. That tells you something about the standing of manliness because John Wayne is not of our generation;Read more at location 314
Manliness, like suffering, deals with fear. The Greek word for manliness, andreia, is also the word the Greeks used for courage, the virtue concerned with controlling fear.Read more at location 327
Recalling the men who fought fascism and recoiling from this extreme of distrust, we realize that manliness is not all bad.Read more at location 331
recall the incident in the first chapter of Tom Sawyer between Tom and the new boy in town, the one with the "citified air" that Tom could not put up with. When they meet in the street, Tom finds it necessary to challenge the new boy. The result is a dispute over nothing,Read more at location 333
Another view of manliness, more negative than it appears, can be found in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, at the end, in Mark Antony's tribute to Brutus. The speech ends: "His life was gentle, and the elements so mix'd in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, `This was a man"' His life was gentle, says Antony -not anxious.Read more at location 338
So we are beginning to get a picture of manliness, neither altogether favorable nor repellent. Manliness can have something heroic about it.Read more at location 352
What prevents a woman from being manly? Today we must explain what has for so long, for millennia, been taken for granted. Are not women as confident as men?Read more at location 358
Manliness is knowing how to be confident in situations where sufficient knowledge is not available. Most people are either too enthusiastic about manliness or too dismissive of it.Read more at location 365
That's particularly true today when the picture of manliness conveyed to us is as direct and unsubtle as the actor Russell Crowe in Gladiator, the singer Ted Nugent in Cat Scratch Fever; and the wrestler Jesse Ventura in Governor of Minnesota. Read more at location 368
"The problem is that men need to feel important. 1118 Exactly! Now what is the cause of this feeling and is it justified? Read more at location 372
