Senator Hawley’s Manliness

A manly man bears troubles without complaining. No safe spaces for him, no new pronouns, no government programs, no personal accusations either launched or answered, no mentors, no assurances, no therapy, no wellness, no correctness. He doesn’t notice microaggressions. And he has no shame or apology for failing in the daily performances of dutiful submission, and he doesn’t much care for the more sensitive male who does.

Not concerned for himself, he can, however, complain of the treatment accorded to his kind. This is what Senator Hawley has done, with some effect, in a recent (October 31) and notable speech on the “deconstruction of men.” He points to the plight of unemployed men transformed from husbands and fathers into mere consumers and given to “idleness, and pornography, and video games.” They suffer not so much as victims of angry women or universal, impersonal causes as from loss of responsibility, from loss of employment as men. Their sex is said to be either a fanciful construction with no substantial meaning, or if it has a meaning, it is one that misleads men into toxic misadventures of harmful violence. The video games they love seem to show what they really want to do.

The deconstruction of men is the work of the Left, Senator Hawley maintains. He traces the thought behind it to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and back to Karl Marx, and he singles out Herbert Marcuse, an intellectual hero of the late Sixties. Marcuse’s name might reasonably have been left to rest peacefully in oblivion, where it belongs. But it’s true that his book Eros and Civilization (1955) had a vogue, by combining Marx and Freud in a very strange way. Marx’s revolutionary utopia of freedom was plucked from its support in historical, economic materialism and spliced with the sexual liberation that Freud thought impossible. The result was the slogan to “make love, not war,” meaning having sex without restraint, safely at home, rather than fight for one’s country in the Vietnam War. Marcuse’s ignoble advice was conveyed with the Germanic jargon of the Frankfurt School, and Senator Hawley is probably right to say that it offered to many young men a compelling, though barely readable, alternative to manly virtue. Whether they read of it in his book is doubtful, but doctrines good and bad have a way of trickling down from their original, most remote expression.

What did this one offer to women? Here is a significant omission in the senator’s analysis. What Marcuse offered to women was compliance with men, or at least complaisance in their fantasies now made real. This was both too much and not enough. Women wanted their own liberation not so much for sex and certainly not as slaves of male sex. They wanted liberation from the “feminine mystique” described by Betty Friedan in 1963, which was the view of women held by manly men. From that view women were to be prized as objects of their love but not invited into the privileges required for their duties. Women were to be protected but not indulged. It was not wrong for them to have careers when single but not as rivals to their husbands, the men protecting them with their manly virtue.

The name for women’s reaction to traditional sex roles and to “patriarchy” in general is of course “feminism,” the movement and the conception left out of Senator Hawley’s presentation of the ideas threatening the deconstruction of men. Feminism had made an alliance with the Sixties’ sexual revolution on condition that it would not be liberation for males only, as it first appeared to be when women tagged along the sexual revolution like the groupies around rock bands. That alliance has worked out better for irresponsible males than for sexually adventurous women, whose number is limited. Most women relish their sexual freedom in thought rather than deed. In practice, but often without admitting it, they still want men to take the initiative. The “Me Too” movement shows that they now have new power to punish it when unwanted.

Claiming to represent half the human race, feminism has great power, actual and potential. It’s easier to conclude that Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique trickled down from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, had more to do with degrading American manhood than did Herbert Marcuse’s turgid work on eros. All these books, feminist and Frankfurt School, were in the ambit of Marxism, to be sure, but the feminists were women and used women’s tactics.

The feminists shared the critical theorists’ disinterest in economics and in themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat. To be gainfully bourgeois was their goal as well as their origin. Adopting the Marxist word “consciousness” to replace mere ordinary “opinion,” they made their revolution by “raising consciousness” of themselves as the second sex, for example by attacking the pronouns that privileged “he,” “him,” and “his” for the nouns of accomplishment. Why should a doctor be “he”? This was the traditional women’s weapon of shaming now used to destroy the traditional notion of women as having a nature or essence different from the aggressive male. Newly aggressive women wanted that weapon for themselves, and they got it, not by revolutionary riot or murder and looting but by demanding equal access to professions and jobs (especially the former) formerly reserved for males. They could do this merely by addressing the men in their lives, using tones ranging from dulcet to peremptory, nothing more needed.

This is history recent enough to be unnecessary to cite at length, yet very necessary for understanding the problem Senator Hawley set for himself. Feminist consciousness is the motive force behind “political correctness,” another Marxist term used by enemies of the Left to label the result of consciousness that has been properly raised, “woke” being the new name used by friends of political correctness, now already captured for use by sarcastic opponents. Whether liked or disliked, both “P.C.” and “woke” smack of feminist consciousness-raising. Their despotism comes with a woman’s touch, relying on the woman’s weapon of shame and demanding a new “safe space” in which hostile words are not to be heard. “Cancel culture” enforces the bounds of a territory — a university or some other workplace — kept safe from the expression of dangerous, immodest thoughts. Senator Hawley had to be careful not to pose direct opposition to feminism lest he be accused of misogyny and thus come to ruin. One step at a time: It’s courage enough to defend against the deconstruction of men and accuracy enough to discharge a volley of reproach upon those vulnerable males in the Frankfurt School.

There is another significant silence in Senator Hawley’s speech, also due to prudent and wary respect for a menace. Donald Trump is not mentioned or discussed. Yet Trump, it must be said, is the most prominent bearer of the reputation of manliness at this time. He is surely the model today for male aggressiveness, the one who dares to risk the dislike of women. He does have the support of those women who do not care for sensitive males with too much education but prefer rougher, more manly types willing to take on the responsibility of insulting their enemies. But he is happy to abandon and destroy the conventions of normality, which, unbeknownst to feminists, are so protective of women. Why should women with their newfound independence remain in need, indeed have greater need, of barriers against harassment by pushy males? But it seems that they do, and that they feel they have reason and at long last power to defend themselves, or in practice to be defended by law and government. “Women for Trump” are thus, it appears, a fading minority the senator cannot count on.

And does Trump merit the badge of manliness? Should he carry the flag? Returning to the description of manly man we began with, one cannot say that Trump does not notice microaggressions. He notices nothing more than slights of any size, especially small ones, and makes a policy of constantly complaining of those done to himself, above all the crowning injustice of not being reelected. His idea of standing tall makes him willing to stoop to say anything to defend his fragile dignity. In sum, he gives manliness a bad name. But is it necessary for a Republican politician in a difficult situation, like Senator Hawley, always and in every regard to speak frankly like a man? Manliness is not the whole truth of a human being. Sometimes womanly silence is prudent, if only to preserve the deference manly men always show to women, though not always for their prudence.

One does well to describe Senator Hawley’s speech — for I confine myself to his speech — in the terms with which one would praise it. Let’s say that with it he is helping to save the Republican Party in three ways. He is reproving Trump for the pettiness of his attempt at greatness; he is preserving the essence of manliness from Trump’s degradation of it; and he is carefully moving his party away from Trump. If this looks like an interpretation, let it be the one that explains a fine speech.