Manly Womanly

My understanding and our understanding (society’s, the saints’, America’s) of male and female virtue and vice has even more gaps in it than normal.

The normal pattern for gaps in knowledge is to have a strong idea of a virtue and its opposing vice, while having almost no concept at all of the opposing virtue and the distorting vice.  This is natural.  It happens all the time.  A good example is the discussion that started all of this off, the Nameless Virtue.  Here we have a virtue that our society loves and cherishes: authenticity.  And a vice that our society hates so much that its used as a pejorative for everything to the point where it has almost no meaning: hypocrisy.  But the idea that there could be a virtue in the same territory as hypocrisy and that there can be gross or cancerous authenticity is a concept that we struggle to express.  It took me a long essay to get there.

But manliness and womanliness are special cases in that almost everything about it is completely obscure: good, bad, and indifferent.

Let’s start with manly.  Manly is almost the only positive term associated with being a man that I know of and its deeply deeply old-fashioned (see also manhood).  ‘Masculine’ dosn’t have a distinct positive valence, it can be used neutrally to negatively.  The reality is that while we are generally negative towards male things we still don’t have a clear idea of what male things are and don’t appear to want to.   Being able to beat up people and condemn them for unspecified traits appears to be a loadbearing part of the  modern system.  Sneers rather than rules.  There are somewhat artificial terms like ‘hyper  masculine’ ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘macho’ but to the extent they have a clear meaning they just condemn a chunk of male traits like strength, power, sexuality, violence, competition, and risk taking while leaving out others.  Our positive idea of masculinity, to the extent that it is concrete at all, tends to consist just of inverting these negatives and calling them positives (which to be clear they can be).  But there are big chunks of manliness (and whatever negative manliness would be called) that are invisible: systematizing, easy creation and participation in large scale coordinated hierarchical groups, deep cameraderie in small groups oriented around goals and joint effort, relative inattention to emotions, relationship particulars, and social cues.  I believe there are negative male traits very much but I have no clear picture or word in my head for what they are.