Behold, A "Menaissance" is in our midst

Are you beginning to notice a welcome whiff of testosterone in the air? Go ahead, take a deep breath and get a heads up. Maybe people are just fed up with the pussilanymous politically correct movement and are becoming in tune to the wave of masculinity coming to the fore.

Something is going on.

My latest cue was a piece by Mary Jacobs in Sunday's Dallas Morning News, titled "To Be a Man":

After years of fighting the obvious and neutralizing gender differences, we need to give our boys permission ...

It's amusingly ironic: A "menaissance" is emerging from the belly of the politically correct beast. In a book recklessly titled Manliness, Harvard government prof Harvey Mansfield proposes rehabilitating the concept – not just the qualities of heroism, courage and assertiveness that the term implies, but their distinctly male incarnations. Manliness, Dr. Mansfield asserts, is confidence in the face of risk, the kind of brashness that made Harry Truman declare "the buck stops here" and propelled Gary Cooper to face down the outlaw at high noon. He believes that manliness has lost its place in a society that denies the differences between the sexes and banishes gender-specific language. "To the extent that feminism recognizes gender differences at all, it presents them as bad, and as the fault of men," he writes.

Of course, the word is obsolete, except in the ironic sense. Think of the "manly man's man" skit on Saturday Night Live and its comedic antonym, the "girly man." But the reality of "manliness" is still with us, Dr. Mansfield says. "Young men still pick fights, often with deadly weapons," he writes. "What we suffer from today is a lack of intelligent criticism of manliness."

As the mother of a 16-year-old boy, I'm reading the book because I believe Dr. Mansfield is wrestling, philosophically, with a question that has pragmatic implications for our boys.

Raising one boy and one girl, it's obvious to me that the idea that boys and girls are the "same" (except for their equipment) is patently idiotic. I cherish my son's abundant "boy energy." Despite a year of indoctrination in women's studies in college, I found I didn't have the stomach to fashion him into a tamely sensitized male. That would deny the essence of who he is. I love him in part because he's a boy, not in spite of it.

Be sure you read the rest of the piece. This is a growing trend. Last week I mentioned a piece in the Washington Post, titled Man Overboard which was hypercritical of "manliness." You know that masculinity and "manliness" is making a strong comeback when it begins to threaten the feminist status quo. I'm going to leave that last sentence as it is, but the feminists have never been the "status quo;" they've had a vice grip hold on the genitals of the MSM, but they've never really "been" the "status quo." They've only been able to convey that because of the "genitalia vice-grip." Now that the MSM has become immasculated by the New Media, "manliness" and masculinity is coming back in "style."

Deal with it!