Reviews for Manliness

The average rating for Manliness based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-13 00:00:00 George Abarca This book is incredibly forthright in its gender bias. Mansfield has obviously been endowed by Harvard University to spew their usually conservative and elitist trash. He claims to be aware of gender studies and responding to that body of knowledge but he never truly engages any of the current theory or even ethnographic research. He ignores sexuality completely; he essentializes gender into two very specific and dichotomous categories; and he appears to celebrate/long for the "manly man" existant before Second Wave Feminism and that has very deep repercussions for women and supposed "non-manly men". The poor guy just seems to have been irritated by gender studies and decided to step out of his usual research on Machiavelli and indirect governance; or Edmund Burke. Essentially, this is an old, conservative Harvard professor paid to spew his idiocy and intellectual masturbation......if you enjoy being irritated with intellectual spooge in your eye this book is for you!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-13 00:00:00 Derek Withey Manliness suffers in the eyes of today's reviewers (see the litany of reviews castigating its "binariness") for the sin of having been written when the aperture of Overton's Window was in a different posture, which is remarkable considering it is barely a decade old. His is the Straussian (perhaps Bloomian) approach of marshaling literature and philosophy in service of an argument, namely that manliness properly understood is both "non-toxic" and essential. The book helps us appreciate manliness as it has been understood throughout history and across the Western Canon, rather than in its contemporary caricature. It's a serious, scholarly book that deserves to be engaged and appreciated accordingly.