Cover Story: The Manly Ideal - Gone, but not forgotten - masculine role models

It is commonly said-but I believe it anyway-that boys need fathers in order to grow up into well-adjusted men. It is less commonly said-and equally true-that boys lack proper masculine role models even in homes where the father is present.

Consider the number of men you know who seem to be not wholly adult but stuck in some eternal adolescence symbolized by the wearing of casual clothes at weddings, funerals, and even leveraged buyouts. The average Internet billionaire, for instance, seems to be permanently dressed for the beach. Compare the slight uneasiness you feel about him with the complete confidence you had in your father and even in your father's friends.

If such personal comparisons are too painful (and I am beginning to sweat slightly), consider the leading men in Hollywood movies and compare them with the stars of the '40s and '50s. Whether they were bachelors in romantic comedies or married men in domestic ones, actors like Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy seemed eminently mature. They wore suits, went to offices, drank cocktails, danced fox trots, and solved problems. If they were playing fathers, there was generally a point in the plot where they had to give understanding advice to their teenage daughters. Even more remarkable, they managed to be credible in doing so. It was an adult world they inhabited, and we could all imagine their handling life's difficulties with efficiency and even aplomb.

Can we imagine Brad Pitt or Sean Penn giving us that same confidence? I think not. They seem to live in a world of glorious irresponsibility. Even their pleasures-rock music and discos-seem adolescent. Now, these are merely surface impressions and are probably very unfair to Messrs. Pitt and Penn, who are serious actors and, for all I know, spend their leisure hours engrossed in Schopenhauer. But they represent the Hollywood model for the modern male-a permanent adolescent on a toot.

Adolescent irresponsibility can often be a charming quality. But it wears badly. And it is at war with the formation of a strong responsible character that in men we used to call manliness. We shrink from even using the words "manly" or "manliness" today because the feminist sensibility in polite society regards such terms as sexist. And when manliness is equated with responsibility, as above, the feminist asks with heavy sarcasm: Are not women responsible too?

So let me compound the offense: Yes, women are responsible-indeed they are naturally responsible. Their vulnerability to child-bearing and in child- rearing forces responsibility on them, and millennia of Darwinian evolution have stored responsible instincts in their genetic makeup. It is men who have to be trained to responsibility since their evolutionary inheritance encourages them to be promiscuous drones, leaving a succession of ladies in the lurch. (Have I offended enough people yet? If not, carry on reading.)

Our civilization at present has embarked on the experiment of freeing men from a sense of responsibility through such means as no-fault divorce, government support for single mothers, and the removal of stigma from virtually every human activity that is not actually criminal. Among the visible signs of this experiment are the large numbers of middle-aged adolescent males buying coffee and aspirin in supermarkets. And a disturbing picture of where we are headed-a world of promiscuous sex divorced from reproduction, collective child- rearing, universal cosmetic surgery, cold-hearted selfish personal relations: in short, a world designed to accommodate universal irresponsibility-is drawn by Aldous Huxley in his prescient pre-war novel Brave New World.

We have traditionally persuaded men to embrace the sober virtues by associating responsibility with decent manly behavior. Far from a scientific description of a genetic quality all men share, manliness is in fact the prescription for a social virtue that all men lack in a state of nature. If responsibility is the least natural ingredient in manliness, it is not the only ingredient. Manliness has other components such as courage, duty, and even chivalry that are more obviously related to male genetic qualities such as an excess of testosterone. Here, of course, feminists again step in triumphantly to depict manliness as a socially approved form of aggression, and the Brute as the ultimate manly man, ready to wreak havoc if someone in a bar steps accidentally on his toe.

In the social history of moral tales, however, manliness is not permission for aggressive behavior but a set of rules that inhibit aggression in most cases while requiring it in others. A genuine manly man does not pick on weaker opponents, employ unfair methods of fighting, or kick a man when he is down. The totalitarian logic that the best time to kick a man is precisely when he is down has to be regarded with distaste by anyone with aspirations to genuine manliness. Indeed, Churchill strongly disapproved of the climax of the 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp because the chivalrous colonels were defeated in a military exercise by a young officer who seized them before it was scheduled to begin, justifying his action with the argument that "the Nazis don't play by the rules, and neither should we."