Menaissance? What menaissance?
July 28th, 2006
I’m not quite sure how I missed this Daily Mail corker from a fornight ago:
“We’re in the middle of a Menaissance… Years of feminism, which insists on the absolute interchangeability of the traditional roles of man and woman, are giving way to a reassertion of the male attribute of machismo… The metrosexual, that urbanised, sensitive, emotionally and physically androgynous model of 21st-century manhood, is dead.
And there’s more - U.S. feminists are (apparently) “bearing torches and pitchforks” hunting down Yale’s Harvey Mansfield; meanwhile Brits (God Help Them) are worshipping “cry-baby Beck-ham, hairless, smothered in costly unguents, neurotically self-aware”; and the U.K. taxation and redistributive structures have (I kid you not) “served to stamp out that key element of manliness - self-betterment and provision for those they are responsible for”.
The article epitomises everything that’s wonky with the Mail’s gender cosmology…
Go read: A question of manliness | the Daily Mail
Or, if you’d like to stay calm and happy this morning, try the Observer, or the Washington Post. And Bookdrunk over at Rhetorically Speaking has a great analysis of the whole article.
Or, if you want to feel good about being a feminist and feel confident that the whole Menaissance thing is twaddle, read Martha Nussbaum’s fantastic review of Harvey Mansfield’s book Manliness, which kicked this whole thing off. (Thanks to Alas, a blog for the link.)
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:54 pm
I think that this menaissance thing has some valid points and some ill thought out and offenisve points. I mean ok men (especially decent and caring ones) are going through a bit of a crisis and they don’t know how to act towards women and how to simply be themselves, but I would equally argue that that is the same for women. In modern western society we have less prescriptive roles and we can therefore sometimes feel at a loss as to how to act and be, especially towards the opposite sex. Aren’t we all going through such crises? I mean I want to be with a man who embraces my strength, intelligence and confidence as a modern woman, who understands emotions and feelings, who is caring but who also stands up for himself and who stands up to me, in recent years I have realised that I can’t stay with a guy who doesn’t stand up to me and give me a run for my money.
However some of the comments especially in the mail article about American masculinity being the mode that modern men should be following, is this guy crazy? I would like to put him and his family in Lebanon or in Iraq right now and see if he would still be saying the same thing. The problem seems to be that some people care too much about these issues and therefore don’t know how to be men and still be nice and some men just coudln’t give a s*** and thereofre go around doing damage to any of the progress that nice men have made. Out of interest what do you think of these coca cola zero adverts? I am assuming that there target audience are these menaissance men, interedting then thast manliness is to be found in drinking sugar free coca cola!