Modern Manhood

by Roger Scruton

 Feminists have harped and harpied on about the position of
women in modern societies. But what about the men? The
radical changes in sexual mores, patterns of employment, and
domestic life have turned their lives upside down. Men now
encounter women not as "the weaker sex" but as equal
competitors in the public sphere—the sphere where men used
to be in charge. And in the private sphere, where an ancient
division of labor once gave guidance to those who crossed
its threshold, there is no knowing what strategy will be
most effective. Manly gestures—holding open a door for a
woman, handing her into an automobile, taking charge of her
bags—can spark insulted rejection; displays of wealth,
power, or influence are likely to seem ridiculous to a woman
who herself has more of them; and the disappearance of
female modesty and sexual restraint has made it hard for a
man to believe, when a woman yields to his advances, that
her doing so is a special tribute to his masculine powers,
rather than a day-to-day transaction, in which he, like the
last one, is dispensable.

The sexual revolution is not the only cause of men's
confusion. Social, political, and legal changes have shrunk
the all-male sphere to the vanishing point, redefining every
activity in which men once proved that they were
indispensable, so that now women can do the job, too—or at
any rate appear to do it. Feminists have sniffed out male
pride wherever it has grown and ruthlessly uprooted it.
Under their pressure, modern culture has downgraded or
rejected such masculine virtues as courage, tenacity, and
military prowess in favor of more gentle, more "socially
inclusive" habits. The advent of in vitro fertilization and
the promise of cloning create the impression that men are
not even necessary for human reproduction, while the growth
of the single-parent household—in which the mother is the
only adult, and the state is too often the only provider—has
made fatherless childhood into an increasingly common
option. These changes threaten to make manhood redundant,
and many children now grow up to acknowledge no source of
love, authority, or guidance apart from the mother, whose
men come and go like seasonal laborers, drifting through the
matriarchal realm with no prospect of a permanent position.

The unhappiness of men flows directly from the collapse of
their old social role as protectors and providers. For the
feminists, this old social role was a way of confining women
to the household, where they would not compete for the
benefits available outside. Its destruction, they contend,
is therefore a liberation—not of women only, but of men,
too, who can now choose whether they wish to assert
themselves in the public sphere or whether, on the contrary,
they wish to stay at home with the baby (which may very well
be someone else's baby). This is the core idea of
feminism—that "gender roles" are not natural but cultural,
and that by changing them we can overthrow old power
structures and achieve new and more creative ways of being.

The feminist view is orthodoxy throughout the American
academy, and it is the premise of all legal and political
thinking among the liberal elite, which dissidents oppose at
peril of their reputations or careers. Nevertheless, a
groundswell of resistance to it is gathering force among
anthropologists and sociobiologists. Typical is Lionel
Tiger, who three decades ago coined the term "male bonding"
to denote something that all men need, and that few now get.
It wasn't social convention that dictated the traditional
roles of man and woman, Tiger suggests; instead, the
millions of years of evolution that formed our species made
us what we are. You can make men pretend to be less dominant
and less aggressive; you can make them pretend to accept a
subordinate role in domestic life and a dependent position
in society. But deep down, in the instinctual flow of life
that is manhood itself, they will rebel. The unhappiness of
men, Tiger argues, comes from this deep and unconfessed
conflict between social pretense and sexual necessity. And
when manhood finally breaks out—as it inevitably will—it is
in distorted and dangerous forms, like the criminal gangs of
the modern city or the swaggering misogyny of the city
slicker.

Tiger sees sex as a biological phenomenon, whose deep
explanation lies in the theory of sexual selection. Each of
us, he believes, acts in obedience to a strategy built in to
our genes, which seek their own perpetuity through our
sexual behavior. The genes of a woman, who is vulnerable in
childbirth and needs support during years of child-rearing
thereafter, call for a mate who will protect her and her
offspring. The genes of a man require a guarantee that the
children he provides for are his own, lest all his labor be
(from the genes' point of view) wasted. Hence nature itself,
working through our genes, decrees a division of roles
between the sexes. It predisposes men to fight for
territory, to protect their women, to drive away rivals, and
to strive for status and recognition in the public world—the
world where men conflict. It predisposes women to be
faithful, private, and devoted to the home. Both these
dispositions involve the working out of long-term genetic
strategies—strategies that it is not for us to change, since
we are the effect and not the cause of them.

The feminists, of course, will have none of this. Biology
may indeed assign us a sex, in the form of this or that
organ. But much more important than our sex, they say, is
our "gender"—and gender is a cultural construct, not a
biological fact.

The term "gender" comes from grammar, where it is used to
distinguish masculine from feminine nouns. By importing it
into the discussion of sex, feminists imply that our sex
roles are as man-made and therefore malleable as syntax.
Gender includes the rituals, habits, and images through
which we represent ourselves to one another as sexual
beings. It is not sex but the consciousness of sex.
Hitherto, say the feminists, the "gender identity" of women
is something that men have imposed upon them. The time has
come for women to forge their own gender identity, to remake
their sexuality as a sphere of freedom rather than a sphere
of bondage.

Taken to extremes—and feminism takes everything to
extremes—the theory reduces sex to a mere appearance, with
gender as the reality. If, having forged your true gender
identity, you find yourself housed in the wrong kind of
body, then it is the body that must change. If you believe
yourself to be a woman, then you are a woman,
notwithstanding the fact that you have the body of a man.
Hence medical practitioners, instead of regarding sex-change
operations as a gross violation of the body and indeed a
kind of criminal assault, now endorse them, and in England
the National Health Service pays for them. Gender, in the
feminists' radical conception of it, begins to sound like a
dangerous fantasy, rather like the genetic theories of
Lysenko, Stalin's favorite biologist, who argued that
acquired characteristics could be inherited, so that man
could mold his own nature with almost infinite plasticity.
Perhaps we should replace the old question that James
Thurber put before us at the start of the sexual revolution
with a new equivalent: not "Is Sex Necessary?" but "Is
Gender Possible?"

In a certain measure, however, the feminists are right to
distinguish sex from gender and to imply that we are free to
revise our images of the masculine and the feminine. After
all, the sociobiologists' argument accurately describes the
similarities between people and apes, but it ignores the
differences. Animals in the wild are slaves of their genes.
Human beings in society are not. The whole point of culture
is that it makes us something more than creatures of mere
biology and sets us on the road to self-realization. Where
in sociobiology is the self, its choices and its
fulfillment? Surely the sociobiologists are wrong to think
that our genes alone determined the traditional sex roles.

But just as surely are the feminists wrong to believe that
we are completely liberated from our biological natures and
that the traditional sex roles emerged only from a social
power struggle in which men were victorious and women
enslaved. The traditional roles existed in order to humanize
our genes and also to control them. The masculine and
feminine were ideals, through which the animal was
transfigured into the personal. Sexual morality was an
attempt to transform a genetic need into a personal
relation. It existed precisely to stop men from scattering
their seed through the tribe, and to prevent women from
accepting wealth and power, rather than love, as the signal
for reproduction. It was the cooperative answer to a
deep-seated desire, in both man and woman, for the
"helpmeet" who will make life meaningful.

In other words, men and women are not merely biological
organisms. They are also moral beings. Biology sets limits
to our behavior but does not dictate it. The arena formed by
our instincts merely defines the possibilities among which
we must choose if we are to gain the respect, acceptance,
and love of one another. Men and women have shaped
themselves not merely for the purpose of reproduction but in
order to bring dignity and kindness to the relations between
them. To this end, they have been in the business of
creating and re-creating the masculine and the feminine ever
since they realized that the relations between the sexes
must be established by negotiation and consent, rather than
by force. The difference between traditional morality and
modern feminism is that the first wishes to enhance and to
humanize the difference between the sexes, while the second
wishes to discount or even annihilate it. In that sense,
feminism really is against nature.

Yet at the same time, feminism seems an inevitable response
to the breakdown of the traditional sexual morality. People
readily accepted the traditional roles when honor and
decency sustained them. But why should women trust men, now
that men are so quick to discard their obligations? Marriage
was once permanent and safe; it offered the woman social
status and protection, long after she ceased to be sexually
attractive. And it provided a sphere in which she was
dominant. The sacrifice permanent marriage demanded of men
made tolerable to women the male monopoly over the public
realm, in which men competed for money and social rewards.
The two sexes respected each other's territory and
recognized that each must renounce something for their
mutual benefit. Now that men in the wake of the sexual
revolution feel free to be serially polygamous, women have
no secure territory of their own. They have no choice,
therefore, but to capture what they can of the territory
once monopolized by men.

It was one of the great discoveries of civilization that men
do not gain acceptance from women by brashly displaying
their manhood in aggressive and violating gestures. But they
do gain acceptance by being gentlemen. The gentleman was not
a person with feminine gender and masculine sex. He was
through and through a man. But he was also gentle—in all the
senses of that lucent word. He was not belligerent but
courageous, not possessive but protective, not aggressive to
other men but bold, even-tempered, and ready to agree on
terms. He was animated by a sense of honor—which meant
taking responsibility for his actions and shielding those
who depended on him. And his most important attribute was
loyalty, which implied that he would not deny his
obligations merely because he was in a position to profit
from doing so. Much of the anger of women toward men has
come about because the ideal of the gentleman is now so
close to extinction. Popular entertainment has only one
image of manhood to put before the young: and it is an image
of untrammeled aggression, in which automatic weapons play a
major part, and in which gentleness in whatever form appears
as a weakness rather than as a strength. How far this is
from those epics of courtly love, which set in motion the
European attempt to rescue manhood from biology and reshape
it as a moral idea, needs no elaboration.

It was not only the upper classes that idealized the
relation between the sexes or moralized their social roles.
In the working-class community from which my father's family
came, the old mutuality was part of the routine of domestic
life, encapsulated in recognized displays of masculine and
feminine virtue. One such was the Friday-night ritual of the
wage packet. My grandfather would come home and place on the
kitchen table the unopened envelope containing his wages. My
grandmother would pick it up and empty it into her wallet,
handing back two shillings for drink. Grandfather would then
go to the pub and drink himself into a state of proud
self-assertion among his peers. If women came to the pub
they would linger in the doorway, communicating by messenger
with the smoke-filled rooms inside but respecting the
threshold of this masculine arena as though it were guarded
by angels.

My grandfather's gesture, as he laid down his wage packet on
the kitchen table, was imbued with a peculiar grace: it was
a recognition of my grandmother's importance as a woman, of
her right to his consideration and of her value as the
mother of his children. Likewise, her waiting outside the
pub until closing time, when he would be too unconscious to
suffer the humiliation of it, before transporting him home
in a wheelbarrow, was a gesture replete with feminine
considerateness. It was her way of recognizing his
inviolable sovereignty as a wage earner and a man.

Courtesy, courtliness, and courtship were so many doors into
the court of love, where human beings moved as in a pageant.
My grandparents were excluded by their proletarian way of
life from all other forms of courtliness, which is why this
one was so important. It was their opening to an enchantment
that they could obtain in no other way. My grandfather had
little to recommend him to my grandmother, other than his
strength, good looks, and manly deportment. But he respected
the woman in her and played the role of gentleman as best he
could whenever he escorted her outside the home. Hence my
grandmother, who disliked him intensely—for he was ignorant,
complacent, and drunk, and stood across the threshold of her
life as an immovable obstacle to social
advancement—nevertheless loved him passionately as a man.
This love could not have lasted, were it not for the mystery
of gender. My grandfather's masculinity set him apart in a
sovereign sphere of his own, just as my grandmother's
femininity protected her from his aggression. All that they
knew of virtue they had applied to the task of remaining to
some measure mysterious to each other. And in this they
succeeded, as they succeeded in little else.

A similar division of spheres occurred throughout society,
and in every corner of the globe. But marriage was its
pivotal institution, and marriage depended upon fidelity and
sexual restraint. Marriages lasted not only because divorce
was disapproved of but also because marriage was preceded by
an extended period of courtship, in which love and trust
could take root before sexual experiment. This period of
courtship was also one of display, in which men showed off
their manliness and women their femininity. And this is what
we mean, or ought to mean, by the "social construction" of
gender. By playacting, the two partners readied themselves
for their future roles, learning to admire and cherish the
separateness of their natures. The courting man gave glamour
to the masculine character, just as the courting woman gave
mystery to the feminine. And something of this glamour and
mystery remained thereafter, a faint halo of enchantment
that caused each to encourage the other in the apartness
that they both admired.

The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, Jane Austen
and George Eliot, Henry James and Charlotte Bront', all have
matchlessly described all that, as has D. H. Lawrence (in
its lower-class version) in his stories. This literature
shows what is missing from sociobiology. Marriage does not
merely serve the reproductive strategies of our genes; it
serves the reproductive need of society. It also serves the
individual in his pursuit of a life and fulfillment of his
own. Its capacity for ordering and sanctifying erotic love
goes beyond anything required by our genes. As our
Enlightenment morality rightly insists, we are also free
beings, whose experience is through and through qualified by
our sense of moral value. We do not respond to one another
as animals but as persons—which means that, even in sexual
desire, freedom of choice is essential to the aim. The
object of desire must be treated, in Kant's famous words,
not as a means only, but as an end. Hence true sexual desire
is desire for a person, and not for sex, conceived as a
generalized commodity. We surround the sexual act with
constraints and interdictions that are in no way dictated by
the species, precisely so as to focus our thoughts and
desires on the free being, rather than the bodily mechanism.
In this we are immeasurably superior to our genes, whose
attitude to what is happening is, by comparison, mere
pornography.

Even when the sacramental view of marriage began to wane,
mankind still held erotic feelings apart, as things too
intimate for public discussion, which could only be soiled
by their display. Chastity, modesty, shame, and passion were
part of an artificial but necessary drama. The erotic was
idealized, in order that marriage should endure. And
marriage, construed as our parents and grandparents
construed it, was both a source of personal fulfillment and
the principal way in which one generation passed on its
social and moral capital to the next.

It was that vision of marriage, as a lifelong existential
commitment, that lay behind the process of "gender
construction" in the days when men were tamed and women
idealized. If marriage is no longer safe, however, girls are
bound to look elsewhere for their fulfillment. And elsewhere
means the public sphere—for it is a sphere dominated by
strangers, with clear rules and procedures, in which you can
defend yourself from exploitation. The advantage of
inhabiting this sphere needs no explaining to a girl whose
abandoned mother lies grieving upstairs. Nor do her
experiences at school or college teach her to trust or
respect the male character. Her sex-education classes have
taught her that men are to be used and discarded like the
condoms that package them. And the feminist ideology has
encouraged her to think that only one thing matters—which is
to discover and fulfill her true gender identity, while
discarding the false gender identity that the "patriarchal
culture" has foisted upon her. Just as boys become men
without becoming manly, therefore, so do girls become women
without becoming feminine. Modesty and chastity are
dismissed as politically incorrect; and in every sphere
where they encounter men, women meet them as competitors.
The voice that calmed the violence of manhood—namely, the
female call for protection—has been consigned to silence.

Just as the feminine virtues existed in order to make men
gentle, however, so manliness existed in order to break down
the reserve that caused women to withhold their favors until
security was in sight. In the world of "safe sex," those old
habits seem tedious and redundant. In consequence, there has
arisen another remarkable phenomenon in America: the
litigiousness of women toward the men they have slept with.
It seems as though consent, offered so freely and without
regard for the preliminaries once assumed to be
indispensable, is not really consent and can be withdrawn
retroactively. The charges of harassment or even "date rape"
lie always in reserve. The slap in the face that used to
curtail importunate advances is now offered after the event,
and in a far more deadly form—a form no longer private,
intimate, and remediable, but public, regimented, and with
the absolute objectivity of law. You might take this as
showing that "safe sex" is really sex at its most dangerous.
Maybe marriage is the only safe sex that we know.

When Stalin imposed Lysenko's theories upon the Soviet
Union, as the "scientific" basis of his effort to re-mold
human nature and form it into the "New Soviet Man," the
human economy continued, hidden away beneath the mad
imperatives of the Stalinist state. And a black sexual
economy persists in modern America, which no feminist
policing has yet succeeded in stamping out. Men go on taking
charge of things, and women go on deferring to the men.
Girls still want to be mothers and to obtain a father for
their children; boys still want to impress the other sex
with their prowess and their power. The steps from
attraction to consummation may be short, but they are steps
in which the old roles and the old desires hover at the edge
of things.

Hence nothing is more interesting to the visiting
anthropologist than the antics of American college students:
the girl who, in the midst of some foulmouthed feminist
diatribe, suddenly begins to blush; or the boy who, walking
with his girlfriend, puts out an arm to protect her. The
sociobiologists tell us that these gestures are dictated by
the species. We should see them, rather, as revelations of
the moral sense. They are the sign that there really is a
difference between the masculine and the feminine, over and
above the difference between the male and the female.
Without the masculine and the feminine, indeed, sex loses
its meaning. Gender is not just possible, but necessary.

And here, surely, lies our hope for the future. When women
forge their own "gender identity," in the way the feminists
recommend, they become unattractive to men—or attractive
only as sex objects, not as individual persons. And when men
cease to be gentlemen, they become unattractive to women.
Sexual companionship then goes from the world. All that it
needs to save young people from this predicament is for
old-fashioned moralists to steal unobserved past their
feminist guardians and whisper the truth into eager and
astonished ears—the truth that gender is indeed a construct,
but one that involves both sexes, acting in mutual support,
if it is to be built successfully. In my experience, young
people hear with great sighs of relief that the sexual
revolution may have been a mistake, that women are allowed
to be modest, and that men can make a shot at being
gentlemen.

And this is what we should expect. If we are free beings,
then it is because, unlike our genes, we can hear the truth
and decide what to do about it.



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