A wonderful bit of writing about manliness, where to find it, and where not to. The author notices what I’ve been noticing: Like any muse, spirit, doppleganger or deity, it hangs around wherever it’s welcome.
At the martial-arts school where I’m training…[e]ven the teenage boys there are pretty manly, on the whole — not surprising, since manliness is very nearly defined by stoicism and grace under pressure, and a martial-arts school should teach those things if it teaches nothing else. Anywhere firearms are worn or displayed openly, ditto — go to a tactical-shooting match, for example, and you’ll see even prepubescent boys (and, though rarely, some girls) exemplifying quiet manliness in a very heartening degree.
On the other hand…when I go to places where people are talking rather than doing, the percentage of man-children rises. Occasionally my wife Cathy and I go to screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film institute, most recently to see Sergei Bodrov’s The Mongol; it’s pretty much wall-to-wall man-children there, at least in the space not occupied by middle-aged women. If our sample is representative, my wife is manlier than the average male art-film buff.
It has become oh so fashionable, since somewhere around the time the Equal Rights Amendment was up for ratification, for men to “show their feelings.” Somewhere around Bill Clinton’s elevation to the White House about a decade later, things had degenerated to the point where what was previously encouraged, became all-but-required; there was a stigma involved in a gentleman not showing his feelings.
This trend progessed, as trends do, on film simultaneously with real life — in lock-step.
In theater, as well as in flesh-and-blood-land, there is a certain mutual exclusivity between dealing with a crisis and putting your insecurities on display to whoever might be interested in watching. If you take on the job of driving the invaders from the Alamo, or zombies from the abandoned farmhouse, your position in the story is established, and there’s no need to whimper or quiver. They’re already waiting for you to do something; and so you have a role. And in real life, of course, when you’re dealing with that kind of situation you don’t have time to show your fears.
But if there’s no Terminator Robot coming from the future to eliminate John Connor…or there is one, but it’s above your pay grade to deal with it…what do we need you for? You have to be the plucky sidekick, soiling his shorts in twittery agitation, or else there’s no point for you to be there. Exit Han Solo. Enter Jar Jar Binks.
The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others. He’s twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn’t know when to shut up. He’s never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is weak. Unproven. Not really a man. And it shows in a lot of little ways – posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing. He’ll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones.
Hat tip: Gerard, again.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998. 
The hitch in the giddy-up is that this is not our daddys’ “right” and “left.” They are due for a shake-up, a major overhaul. Here’s just one example: The sense of community. Both the hard-right and the hard-left demand one. Our vision of it here, at The Blog That Nobody Reads, is an unorthodox one because we demand a sense of community as well, but we lean, like Jefferson, toward voluntary membership in all matters and coercive membership in none. To us, the merit of an idea has everything to do with the substance of the idea, and nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the population in which it finds support. The “majority” can be right, the “majority” can be wrong.
She could not be reached for additional comment Wednesday night.
We also went a little overboard, in our view, going so far as to keep George Carlin’s Seven Words You Cannot Say out of the text itself. We will do that, to a certain extent. But we’ve softened it a bit. That’s because we like to make everyday life safe for real people…not for ninnies. And, I’m sorry, but if you’re walking along in front of some other guy’s computer terminal when he’s on his lunch break and you see in our humble font the word “titty” and suddenly you’re tearing down the hallway to the H.R. department screaming with your arms flailing over your head…well, maybe someone somewhere wants to make life less traumatic for you, but we shall not be joining in that sad charade. No, if we were going to keep that policy rigid and zero-tolerant, it would be out of conern to those corporate firewalls that block websites automatically when they see these words going up the tubes. But how concerned should we be about those? The latter is a direct consequence of the former. Besides, it’s a batshit-stupid policy. I don’t know who actually still enforces it. Having a dirty word down in the actual text of something, could be a situation that easily comes up with doing actual work on the innerwebs. No, I’m not trying to be funny. Think of technical advice forums, professional information exchange forums, membership-only, things that are behind some kind of closed door.