The second is wholehearted self-promotion. The first is halfhearted biblical exegesis. Insofar as it is possible to impose an organizational principle onto “Manhood,” the book takes up four distinct projects, though not in any particular order. These books have significant differences, but they all find themselves in the awkward position of claiming that masculinity is both unassailable and endangered, both natural enough to be obvious and fragile enough to require defense. New Age types can consult Robert Bly’s “ Iron John,” the loosely Jungian urtext of the mythopoetic men’s movement, published in 1990, which counsels men to embrace their “Zeus energy.” Pseudo-intellectuals may prefer the more refined if less coherent “ Manliness” (2006), by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who blusters about chivalry and gentlemen. Recently, there’s Jack Donovan’s “ The Way of Men,” which boasts that it is for anyone who has ever “wished for one day as a lion,” and Jordan Peterson’s best-selling “ Twelve Rules for Life,” which is nominally gender-neutral but in fact instructs readers in the art of masculinity (and which is a literal rule book). Josh Hawley of Missouri attempts to provide in “ Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” the latest in a long line of guides. After so many centuries of coffee, reading and cigarette-sucking, are there even men left to emulate?Ī gender rule book is precisely what Sen.

No wonder there is such a chorus of complaints about the dearth of male role models. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in 1999. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence.

For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis.

An offer from a gentleman book review