Fellow blogstress Bookworm lauds Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, whose latest book, “Manliness” earned him an IWF-cosponsored reading to a packed room and also a flogging with a wet noodle in the New York Times by the extremely bizarre Walter Kirn. (See “A Manly Man,” March 16, and The Other Charlotte’s trash-job on Washington Post feminista Ruth “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman?” Marcus, “Manliness vs. Malaise,” today below.) One of Mansfield’s points is the dirty secret that men actually enjoy war, for all its bloodiness,because it allows them to channel their agression in a positive way. So Bookworm alerts us to this post about her father, who actually enjoyed his military service during World War II:
“Despite having seen some of the most bloody fighting World War II had to offer (five years in North Africa and Southern Europe), my father still looked back on his service as the best time in his life. He loved the camaraderie, the discipline, the purpose — and he loved the right to be aggressive. I’m not saying that my father was an unusually violent or aggressive man. He was simply a young man with a lot of normal testosterone flowing in his body. There’s no getting away from the fact that this testosterone almost certainly elevates aggression — not weird, psychopathic aggression, but the kind that leaves a man hot under the collar when a store clerk is impolite, while his wife manages to ignore the whole thing. I also don’t think my father was unusual in finding war stimulating. I gather from Milblogs, from military memoirs, from psychological studies, etc., that many men do not find military service entirely distasteful, even during war time. If one accepts as true my premise that ordinary, well-socialized young men with appropriate testosterone levels are more prone to aggression, it falls to a society to figure out how to channel that aggression.”
She continues:
“If one accepts as true my premise that ordinary, well-socialized young men with appropriate testosterone levels are more prone to aggression, it falls to a society to figure out how to channel that aggression. Throughout history, war has been one way of doing so — indeed, probably the primary way of doing so — since it takes that male energy, focuses it away from the community, and uses it to acquire land and wealth (and, in the old days, labor in the form of slaves). This leads me to the question lurking behind this post: what happens when you make military service a societally unacceptable option for young men and, indeed, encourage young men to feminize themselves?”
Bookworm’s column was pegged to a protest by two students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School of a blatantly ideological “peace studies” class taught by the anti-manly Colman McCarthy, who used to be a columnist for the Washington Post until he got to be a bit much even for the notoriously liberal Post. One of the protesting students, Avishenk Panth, sent this e-mail to Michelle Malkin:
“Mr. McCarthy integrates his teaching of peace with his views of how society ought to be. For example, he has called free market capitalism a form of ‘economic violence,’ competitive school sports a form of athletic violence, and grades/tests/homework a form of ‘academic violence.’ He claims that the US has a violent constitution and a society that thrives on violence.
“As the moral and peaceful solution after 9-11, Mr. McCarthy called on America to apologize to the terrorists and ask for forgiveness in reciprocation.”
What will this insistent substitution of metrosexuality for manliness lead to? Another French Revolution, opines Bookworm, in which men who looked like this were rounded up and guillotined by men who looked like this.