Hiromi

If he had ate it and didn't have fun killing it, then absolutely- HE-man!

Was John McCain Boy Scout??

Was Barack Obama?

Curious minds want to know.

Pappy

Thanks Crew21,

I really liked the BP site when I visited it. The old Scouter pamphlets of BP have always made a lot of sense to me, and they seem to be bear little resemblance to the BSA materials for boys today.

We have kids read the founding documents of our nation, and learn of the people who founded our country and the reasons why, but in BSA there is short shrift paid to its genesis and the actual writings and illustrations of its founders. (Is BSA afraid the boys might get too many ideas and actually take over the darned thing?)

It seemed that BP's materials were better designed as "How To" and "Do It Yourself" books for boys that really lent itself to the notion of Boy lead and created Patrols. It had a real fun exciting game aspect to it. It was soaked with adventure and imagination It still inspires- hear that Bob WHite- BP's stuff still inspires.

BSA literature is lacking in this regard. IMHO

Pappy

(This message has been edited by Pappy)(This message has been edited by Pappy)

While I encourage my scouts to respect their fellow scouters the Brownies, playfully calling a fellow male scout a Brownie during an aggressive PT session is very common and the boys find it very funny. Sexist? Shock and Horror! Maybe a little. But the boys see the gargantuan difference between the unit they belong to and the Brownies. The idea of Brownie pretty much equates with girly. Boys don't want to be a girl- despite the efforts of Den Mothers across the nation to make it otherwise.

My scouts don't suffer from gender confusion in our unit, that's for sure.

OK Fire Cat- Now Breathhhhhhhhhhh.

Pappy

The only motorcycle that I ever saw that made me want to ride one was when Steve McQueen grabbed the bike in THe GReat Escapem which I beleive was a modified 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy Bird. Not a prodcut of the Nazi war effort to be sure.

Pappy

http://www.boundless.org/1999/features/a0000025.html

Excerpts from : The Crisis of ManlinessWaller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada

Fatherhood and manliness have always been closely connected, not only because fathering a child is a palpable proof of manhood, but also because fathers are supposed to provide their sons with a model of what to become. And yet, as a culture, we have never been more conflicted about what we mean by manhood....

Given these signals from the culture, confirmed every day by real acts of mayhem, some hold that we should try to get rid of manliness altogether and make more rigorous efforts to create a genderless personality free of male violence. The recent horrific shooting in the Arkansas schoolyard, with little-boy killers waiting in their army fatigues to ambush their classmates and teachers, might suggest that they are right. Add to this the fact that the majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 25, and there seems good reason for discouraging male children from embracing any notion of manly pride.

But it is not so simple. The last 30 years have witnessed a prolonged effort at social engineering throughout our public and educational institutions. Its purpose is to eradicate any psychological and emotional differences between men and women, and the grounds that any concept of manliness inevitably leads to arrogance and violence towards women and to rigid hierarchies that exclude the marginalized and powerless. This experiment was meant to reduce violence and tensions between the sexes. And yet, during this same period, "macho" violence and stress between men and women may well have increased. Recent crime statistics suggest as much in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom the countries where the feminist social experiment stigmatizing manliness has had the greatest latitude to prove itself.

As the recent book by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead confirmed, absent fathers are one of the strongest predictors of violence among young men in the United States, at least as important as poverty, lack of education, or minority status. The ease with which men of my baby-boomer generation have abdicated our roles as fathers is undoubtedly connected with feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Boomers were told that we shouldnt be hung up about providing masculine role models for children and should do whatever made us happiest, including escape an unsatisfying marriage. After all, to hold things together for the sake of the children would restrict both men and women to old-fashioned "patriarchal" responsibilities. The results of this hard, bright credo of selfishness are todays under-fathered young men, many of them from broken homes, prone to identify their maleness with aggression because they have no better model to go by.

It seems plain enough that we are missing the boat about manliness; for there are forms of pride and honor that would be good to impart to young males. Indeed, manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to it, are the surest means of promoting respect for women. Equally, manly anger and combativeness can provide energy for a just cause. Horrified as we are by the cult of warrior violence in the Balkans or Rwanda, we may have gone too far toward the opposite extreme in the Western democracies. As Michael Kelly recently observed, "There are fewer and fewer people, and they are older and older people, who accept what every 12-year-old in Bihac knows: that there are some things worth dying and killing for." Abolitionism in the ante-bellum United States, the Allies defeat of Nazi Germany, and the civil-rights movement of the 60s would never have succeeded without the legitimate expression of anger against injustice. The point is not to eradicate honor and pride from the male character, but to re-channel those energies from the nihilistic violence of Fight Club or the Arkansas schoolyard to some constructive moral purpose.

To do this, we must recover a sense of what it means to be manly honorable, brave, self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings of delicacy and respect toward loved ones. For if young men are cut off from this positive tradition of manly pride, their manliness will reemerge in crude and retrograde forms. Some 30 years ago, the Rolling Stones recorded a misogynist rant called "Under My Thumb." Today, it is one of the songs that fans most frequently request of these aging shamans of adolescent attitudinizing. In three decades, tension between men and women not only has not disappeared but may actually have intensified, and we must wonder whether the experiment in social engineering itself is one reason why.

For hostility towards women is an aberration of male behavior. If, as the prevailing orthodoxy contends, the male gender were intrinsically aggressive, hegemonic and intolerant, then by definition male behavior could never improve. The message young males receive from feminist reasoning is not, You should be ashamed of liking "Under My Thumb," but, Thats the way your gender thinks about women.

All that 30 years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive maleness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility. The gurus of sensitivity have tried to convince men to become open, fluid, non-hegemonic and genderless beings who are unafraid to cry. But little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we cant give them all Ritalin. Psychologists have begun to express concern about our educational institutions readiness to pathologize what once would have been regarded as boyish high spirits rough-housing, "hating" girls, locker-room language and to treat ordinary immaturity with powerful drugs.

Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes, and the way to educate them to treat girls and women with respect is to appeal to their heroism, not to try to blot it out. Look at those kids performing daring flips on their skateboards, or sailing on their Rollerblades into the heaviest downtown traffic like warriors contemptuous of danger. They are almost always males. Look at that squeegee kid with his shaved head and horsehair plume, decked out like some road-warrior Achilles. Walk into one of those high-voltage computer emporiums, selling our centurys most potent icon for the extension of human mastery over the cosmos. Who are the salesmen? Almost always cocky young men, celebrities-in-waiting in dark suits and moussed hair, hooked on the sheer power of it all.

One thing is sure: Given our current confusion over the meaning of manliness, we have nothing to lose by re-opening the issue. If academic feminism is correct that violence toward women stems from traditional patriarchal attitudes, our grandparents lives must have been a hell of aggression and fear. Yet, if anything impresses us about our forebears, judging from their lives, letters and diaries, it is the refinement of their affections for one another and of mens esteem for women in particular. Perhaps we cannot return to that world. But boys and young men today need re-introducing to this tradition of manly civility.

Despite recent caricatures of the Western tradition as one long justification for the oppression of women, our greatest poets and thinkers from Homer to Rousseau have explored the delicate interplay of love and self-perfection. In Homers Odyssey, Telemachus, son of the great war hero Odysseus, embarks on a journey to find his missing father and thereby save his mother from the oppressive noblemen who want her to give up her husband for dead and marry one of them. As he searches for his father in an adventure parallel to Odysseus own search for a way home to his long-lost wife and child, Telemachus is educated by his adventures and grows from a boy into a man, guided by the wise goddess Athena, who is also his fathers best friend among the gods. Telemachus search for his missing father, guided by the goddess, in effect provides him with the upbringing that Odysseus was not able to give him, although he still inspires it from afar because the boy learns during his travels of his fathers exploits and wants to prove himself the heros worthy son.

When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mothers protector from oppressive men, who has to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father would be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective. They are Telemachus.

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Boy Scouts are not drug tested either.......Pappy

DOD Urinalysis Test (Drug Test) Results

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The Defense Department is continuing its anti-drug efforts with a new policy that involves more frequent random testing of active duty military, reservists and civilian employees.

Signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz on July 31 (2002), the new policy reflects the reality that the nation is at war, Andre Hollis, deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics, said Aug. 13.

"It's even more critical during war that our service members are mentally alert and physically fit. Drug use is inconsistent with that," he emphasized. "I'm sure that's the message you'll hear from the NCOs all the way up to the secretary of defense."

Hollis said he was tasked to do a bottom-up review of DoD's drug policy after assuming his job in August last year. The new policy is a result of that review, he noted. The primary purpose of the policy is to reduce demand for and the use of illegal drugs within DoD.

From This Link:

http://www.stewsmith.com/linkpages/usmcPFT.htm

Marine Corps Fitness Standards - IST and PFT

StewSmith.com | April 2007

The Physical Fitness Test is administered every six months. All Marines are provided time to train and are expected to maintain an adequate degree of physical fitness. The standard physical fitness test consists of three events that measure cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and endurance and mobility.

The Initial Strength Test (IST) for Recruits

If you are thinking about joining the USMC, you will have to pass the IST Initial Strength Test. The IST is a shortened version of the USMC PFT, a recruit only has to do pull-ups, sit-ups, and a 1.5 mile run. The minimum standards for passing the Initial Strength Test are as follows:Male

Female

2 Pull Ups

Flexed Arm Hang - 12 seconds

35 Sit Ups (2 minutes)

35 Sit Ups (2 Minutes)

1.5 Mile Run - 13:30

1 Mile Run - 10:30

In Accordance with Marine Corps Order (MCO) P1100.72B page 148 discusses IST fitness and weight standards. MILITARY PERSONNEL ROCUREMENT MANUAL, VOLUME 2, ENLISTED PROCUREMENT, paragraph 3274, all Marine Corps recruits, male and female, requiring recruit training (boot camp) are required to pass the IST prior to shipping to recruit training.

The USMC Physical Fitness Test (PFT)

Male Marines will perform "dead-hang pull-ups, abdominal crunches, and a 3.0-mile run. Female Marines will complete the "flexed-arm" hang, abdominal crunches, and a 3.0 - mile run with a pull-up option

Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test Points - Male

Points

Pull-Ups

Crunches

3-Mile Run

More about manly men - this time from our most manly-man president- TR

Excerpted from:

The manliness of

Theodore Roosevelt

by Harvey Mansfield

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/mar05/mansfield.htm

The most obvious feature of Theodore Roosevelts life and thought is the one least celebrated today, his manliness. Somehow America in the twentieth century went from the explosion of assertive manliness that was TR to the sensitive males of our time who shall be and deserve to be nameless.

Nothing was more obvious than Roosevelts manliness because he made such a point of it not only in his own case but also as necessary for human progress. It was being a progressive that made him so eager to be manly. Here is gristle to chew for liberals and conservatives, both of whomexcept for the feministshave abandoned manliness mostly out of policy rather than abhorrence. With the Library of Americas publication of his Letters and Speeches and The Rough Riders, An Autobiography, lets see how Roosevelts manliness was at the center of his politics..

TR is at his most emphatic in urging a man to enter politics. Not for him a bland, mollycoddle word like our participation. Finding no positive term strong enough to please him, he repeats negative verbs, his favorites being shirk and shrink, to show his contempt for those who abstain from politics. To be efficient and practical a man must ready himself to meet men of far lower ideals than his own and not be content to associate merely with cultivated, refined men of high ideals and sincere purpose to do right. Politics is struggle, and it is sheer unmanliness and cowardice to shrink from the contest. You see what I mean about shrink; and note how vices are magnified with sheer in front of them. Not for TR the use of weasel words, another phrase he coined or made his own.

Here is where the professors like William James go wrong; they consort with one another, cherish their ideals, and shirk their duty to join the actual battle that is less pleasant than discussion with friends over tea. The tough-minded manly man not only accepts pain but actually does his best to avoid pleasure. Yet isnt manliness for all its risks and trials pleasant for the manly man? And not only at the end of the day? Roosevelt wants his manly man in politics to accommodate himself to the rough and coarse and the selfish, and this would seem to compromise rather than fulfill his manliness by making it depend on success in his relations with others beneath himself. He might become a team player or an organization man, hardly roles for a manly man. So we must not forget the manly loner and the argument to be made on his behalf. The loner would be contemptuous of bookish professors, but he shares with them a taste for solitude.

Contrary to what you might first think, pragmatism is a philosophy, not the dismissal of philosophy. And Teddy Roosevelt was more a philosopher than he knew. His advocacy of manliness reflects the difficulties of pragmatism and tells us something about our situation today. We have abandonednot reason for manliness like the pragmatists, nor manliness for reason like their tender-minded opponentsbut both reason and manliness. We want progress without a rational justification and without the manliness needed to supply the lack of a justification."

This is another take on the Manly Virtues and what our feminizing culture has done to them. It would be interesting to reflect on how scouting has become infiltrated by this tendency of thought and attitude to soften our idea of manliness and how it has perhaps handicapped out expectations of boys and prejudiced us to boy's better male instincts and yearnings.----Pappy

Excerpts from: The Manly Virtues

William Gairdner

Too often, a guaranteed way to ruin a good day is to read the morning paper. The execrable and morally lacerating descriptions of the Paul Bernardo trial have simply reminded me how often I have to junk the paper before the children see such bad taste and grotesquerie. Hiding a newspaper is surely cause to ask, What is happening to the world?

For ever since the decline of communism the West has seemed in a state of accelerating moral uncertainty. It's as if, having spent so much effort telling citizens what liberal democracy is not, we have forgotten how to say what it is (which points out the value of a clearly-defined enemy). It's not war, but peace that is problematic, especially for wealthy nations whose citizens are unsure why they are alive.

Many are even asking the vertiginous question whether the core assumptions and values of liberalism and democracy might be mutually exclusive, for reasons no one can control. That is to say, is the idea of well-ordered freedom with majority rule by virtuous citizens, a goner?

Think about it. Few dare to defend responsible freedom any longer (freedom is now licence, with no limits); majority rule has been trumped and circumvented (by interest groups, judges, and the Charter); and the classical virtues have been, uh, feminized.

Hold on. I say feminized, or womanized, because the Latin word "virtue" means "manly excellence", both in the plain sense of Man (we are humans, not animals), and in the sense of bold, disciplined virtues, shaping citizens for risk and heroism, against which the more feminine, nurturing virtues seek all-encompassing security. We need both in balance, but have lost just that.

What, after all, is Marxist socialism - any kind of socialism - if not an organization (at the extreme, a militarization) of society designed to appeal to our hunger for security - to what is most unheroic.

For better or worse, there have always been only two options. Either leave people free to heroically take risks and organize their own security as individuals and families, with government restricted to minimal influence. Or deliberately assign the duty of eliminating all human risk to government itself, in exchange for total control of the people, their property, wealth, and work. You can't have it both ways. Alas, the latter method necessarily entails the elimination of the manly virtues.

In classical times, these virtues were Prudence (doing the right thing at the right time); Courage (required to take risks); Temperance (self-limitation of the passions); and Justice (equality under the law for all). What is stirring about these virtues, is that they have no meaning unless exercised by free men and women. But it was the clear conviction of the ancients that if citizens were not inculcated with these virtues (to which the later Christian era added Faith, Hope, and Charity - arguably, more feminine virtues), democracy would soon deteriorate into soft, then hard tyranny. For only a citizenry rich in the manly virtues could possibly stave off the equalizing tendencies of democracy that will always, if unchecked, eliminate shalls and shall-nots altogether, thereby destroying heroic notions of the good, thus raising the unworthy, and lowering the worthy...

We discover this same softening trend in the "Goddess" movement in the churches, in feminized university curricula, in politically fearful professors, and in the "Gaia" movement (where Earth Mother devours Sky Father) in environmentalist ranks. We sicken, too, of the silly, maleness-dissolving notion that our opposite genders are "socially constructed" and not an obvious, wonderful, and very exciting natural fact of normal biology around which all human life revolves; especially of the message that men and their manly values are bad. Nonsense. This is the sour grapes of politicized, security-drugged intellectuals who themselves feast on the impressive achievements of a risk-based male culture - only to criticize it. As the more honest (and feminist) Camille Paglia has put it, "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." The dominance of the urge for security stifles achievement in individuals, and civilizations.

Better ordered freedom, natural biological differences, risk, and the manly virtues taught to children, I say, than the nurturing nightmare we have left behind - or the softer version in our midst.

Scoutings founding fathers seemed to have no problem speaking in the terms of manliness. It was a central concern of theirs.

THe point of this thread is to raise the topic of manliness as it applies to scouting, scouters,and scouts. Have we changed our outlook of manhood?

If so is it for the better?

Has scouting been hurt by the feminized male?

I wonder what our founders would think. I wonder if many of the scouters in this forum would really care to know what our founders would think about the world of today and how scouting has adapted to it.

An excerpt from

Why the Boy Scouts Work

Heather Mac Donald

http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_why_the_boy.html

As the nineteenth century ended, men on both sides of the Atlantic worried about boys, especially poor immigrant boys in the teeming cities, who seemed destined for delinquency or poverty. Ernest Thompson Seton, a Canadian naturalist, wildlife painter, and children's author, summed up these anxieties: "It is the exception when we see a boy respectful of his superiors and obedient to his parents . . . handy with tools and capable of taking care of himself, under all circumstances . . . whose life is absolutely governed by the safe old moral standards." Seton looked around for "robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood," and found instead "a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and a doubtful vitality"just as his British contemporaries found an alarming number of young men unfit for the draft.

These concerned men responded by creating a host of character-building organizations, the most powerful of which was the Boy Scouts. The organization grew out of Seton's newly created boys' group, the Woodcraft Indians, and the insights of an ebullient British war hero, Robert Baden-Powell. Lord Baden-Powell had returned to England from the Boer War in 1903 to find children devouring a soldiers' scouting manual he had written. Teachers urged him to revise the manual for boys, and Baden-Powell, inspired by Seton's Woodcraft Indians handbook, seized the challenge.

He envisioned a new organization that would draw on wartime scouting lore and ancient codes of chivalry to teach boys the Victorian virtues. King Arthur's Round Table, Baden-Powell understood, resonated in boys' souls, for it symbolized the marriage of strength and goodness, by contrast with today's "gangsta" culture, which defines manliness as violently predatory. The aim of this new organization, Baden-Powell wrote in 1906, "is to develop among boys a power of sympathizing with others, and a spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism."

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Well hello Fire Cat,

You're right of course. I have failed to use the term hysterical for many of the male posters. My mistake. It would have been very appropriate.

But that would have been akin to calling them girly men as well- because hysteria is derived from a feminine term- referring to the womb.

Call me a bigot all you want- I am very prejudiced to a lot of behavior and attitudes expressed by a great deal of the members of this forum.

And they have been prejudiced against a good many of my ideas and attitudes as well.

SO be it.

Pappy

Fishsqueezer,

You wrote : A pristine environment by definition is one that is unchanged by man. I do believe that existed. You might want to review Genesis and note that the world existed before man and therefore was pristine. There were also pristine continents prior to man migrating to them. You may wish to read more educational stuff when you have a moment between watching westerns and hanging out with real men.

pristine ˈprɪs tin, prɪˈstin; especially Brit. ˈprɪs taɪn - Show Spelled Pronunciation[pris-teen, pri-steen; especially Brit. pris-tahyn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

adjective

1. having its original purity; uncorrupted or unsullied.

2. of or pertaining to the earliest period or state; primitive.

[Origin: 152535; < L pristinus early; akin to primus PRIME ]

Synonyms 1. undefiled, unpolluted, untouched.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2006.

American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This

pristine (prĭs'tn', prĭ-stn') Pronunciation Key

adj.

1.

a. Remaining in a pure state; uncorrupted by civilization.

b. Remaining free from dirt or decay; clean: pristine mountain snow.

2. Of, relating to, or typical of the earliest time or condition; primitive or original.

There is no pristine because there is no original condition other than the one that states that this it how it was before man got here.

It is a ludicrous and misleading term used by the propagandists of environmentalism.

I never said you were incapable. I said that your view of things seemed to imply bigotry toward the capable man. Sorry if you took it personally.

I do not wish to get into a tit for tat with you concerning what I said and what you said. But I appreciate the effort you went to with all your cutting and pasting.

I think your interpretation of Genesis ( and God said. It is Good)is about as forced as perhaps my interpretation of the Lords Prayer (His Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven).

I do not believe in the intrinsic value of things, it is true. Value is man made, or given to us by our creator. We ascribe value to things. God did not give us too many hard and fast rules about mining and damming rivers.

Other than that, please be rest assured that I teach my boys to have respect for the wilderness as well as to see all the potential that the earth has to relinquish.

Pappy

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I honestly don't know, Bob.

I think it was called Prairie Council. They had a big camp, and it was sold to a Church Group, Seventh Day Adventist, I think.

You probably could find out the facts quicker than I about when and why it happened. ALl I know is that it caused a lot of hard feelings with a few of the grey beards around these parts.

Pappy

Oh hello le Voyageur!

"DOES OUR CONCEPT OF MANILINESS MATTER?"

our (our)

adj. The possessive form of we.

Used as a modifier before a noun: our accomplishments; our hometown.

I suppose I meant the possesive form of we. But if you choose not to have a concept of manliness, le Voyageur, I'll understand.

Pappy

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

Hi Bob,

Ours is a relatively new district in a reorganized council. There seems to be a lot of hard feeling around here about reorganization and a lost council camp. We used to be the seat of our own council. But after a mismanagement issue we lost it and the camp.

This bitterness may have affected the general mood of the scouting culture around here.

This was all before my time, so I am only speculating and relating hearsay.

Pappy

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

"By Pappys definition of manliness, it is manly to cause extinction because we needed that dam. It is manly to pollute the rivers and air because we needed the power. It is manly to cut old growth forests because those old trees make for stronger homes. If we harm creation it must be because God wanted us to. If He didnt want us to use it up, He wouldnt have given us power over it. That sounds very similar to the argument for slavery."

Never said or implied any of that. That is what you want to read into it. Just because we train our boys to have the ability to build civilizations from whole cloth - a benign but fantastic power- it doesn't follow that they would by virtue of their ability run rough shod over the land.

Your bigotry to the capable man is showing. I never implied pollution-laying waste to the land, or anything else.

Other than that- I find most of what you wrote to be wonderful and true.

I am not arguing for He-mannism and machismo- but freedom for men to be men and see the world for all its potential and their mind for all its possibilities.

Pappy

I'm pretty critical of Ayn Rand as well, but she did have some interesting insights into the mind of man and she was a great champion of the creative spirit behind much of Capitalism and industry.

But all the lists aside, Manliness is an attitude about freedom and about knowing our place in the universe. I want my boys to see the world as a place to explore, to investigate, and to use to their advantage and the advantage of others.

I don't like the zoo aspect we have developed of "nature". There is no nature. It is a really bad concept, unless you keep it catholic "small c", and keep man in the picture as part of the creation.

Our role in nature is as politically contentious as it is intrinsic to our idea of religion and our reason for being.

God made man in his image. God is a creator- therefore man is a creative creature.

There are forces that are dead set on limiting or eliminating the manly outlook from boys. The thought police work in the schools to keep boys in the role of dutiful well mannered little clerks. Meanwhile the boys are busy day-dreaming of destroying things, building space stations, hunting squirrels, evading Nazi's, imaging themselves fighting bug-monsters as starship troopers, cool scout projects, and being in movies.

My sons and his fellow scouts were reprimanded for drawing images of guns in school. All images of guns, knives, and blade weapons are prohibited along with any fight scenes, battles, or machines of war.

I think this is diabolical.

What is the most common subject? : The environment.

Can you say EMASCULATION ??

Pappy

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Hey Vicki, if you haven't embarked for the next hill yet, I cordially invite you over to a new campfire I just lit. It is all about manliness, and I dedicate it to you, darlin.

Pappy

Here is another perscription for Men:

(Scouting seems to cover some of this)

From::

http://federalist.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/preparing-boys-for-manhood/

By the age of 18 every American male should be able to:

Stay physically fit.

Practice first aid.

Swim, row, sail, and navigate.

Speak a foreign language.

Competently operate cars, motorcycles.

Safely use and maintain hand and power tools for working wood, stone, and metal.

Wire, plumb, frame, roof, and duct to code.

Handle a concealed pistol defensively.

Maintain and shoot rifles and shotguns.

Garden.

Ride and care for horses.

Manage personal finances.

He should:

Kill, skin, and eat a wild animal.

Fell and stack a large tree.

Read Ayn Rand and The Federalist Papers.

Most importantly though there may be no sure prescription for it he should have a sound moral character.

Comments

1. Lien O'Neill - January 18, 2008

Can I enlist you to teach my kids some of this? Call it the Federalist Scouts or something? Particularly the wild animal, large tree, and duct to code bits.

I only pasted this article for edification, and to serve as the springboard for a turn in the conversation from the last thread.

I think the idea of Manliness should indeed be well formed in both men and women who would want to form boys.

This forum is pretty simple. If you don't reply to the posts- they slide down the list and nearly go away.

I don't think I am trolling. I think this stuff is really interesting and really matters and goes to the heart of much of what we do in our lives and why we do it.

Pappy

Hello Folks,

Old Grey Eagle asked Pappy -

"Maybe you should define what "manly" means to you as you use the term a lot and I want to be clear..."

Below is an article that sheds light on what at least one intellectual thinks about the idea of manliness. I think our fundamental concepts of what is Manly should at least in part continue to inform BSA as an organization and the volunteers working in the trenches with boys.

I'll be interested to hear what you'll think about Mansfields idea's.

Pappy

Being a Man

Harvey Mansfield ponders the male of the species.

by Christina Hoff Sommers

04/10/2006, Volume 011, Issue 28

Manliness

by Harvey C. Mansfield

Yale, 304 pp., $27.50

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."

Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name.

In Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield seeks to persuade skeptical readers, especially educated women, to reconsider the merits of male protectiveness and assertiveness. It is in no way a defense of male privilege, but many will be offended by its old-fashioned claim that the virtues of men and women are different and complementary. Women would be foolish not to pay close attention to Mansfield's subtle and fascinating argument.

Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of

manliness. It is modest, not because its claims are cautious--Mansfield courts wrath and indignation on almost every page--but because, as he says, "Most good things, like French wine, are mostly good and accidentally bad. Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad. . . . This is what I mean by a modest defense."

"Manliness," he says, "is a quality that causes individuals to stand for something." The Greeks used the term thumos to denote the bristling, spirited element shared by human beings and animals that makes them fight back when threatened. It causes dogs to defend their turf; it makes human beings stand up for their kin, their religion, their country, their principles. "Just as a dog defends its master," writes Mansfield, "so the doggish part of the human soul defends human ends higher than itself."

Every human being possesses thumos. But those who are manly possess it in abundance, and sometimes in excess. The manly man is not satisfied to let things be as they are, and he makes sure everyone knows it. He invests his perception of injustice with cosmic importance.

Manliness can be noble and heroic, like the men on the Titanic; but it can also be foolish, stubborn, and violent. Achilles, Brutus, and Sir Lancelot exemplify the glory of manliness, but also its darker sides. Theodore Roosevelt was manly; so was Harry "The Buck Stops Here" Truman. Manly men are confident in risky situations. Manliness can be pathological, as in gangsters and terrorists.

Manliness, says Mansfield, thrives on drama, conflict, risk, and exploits: "War is hell but men like it." Manliness is often aggressive, but when the aggression is tied to the concept of honor, it transcends mere animal spiritedness. Allied with reason, as in Socrates, manliness finds its highest expression.

Women can be manly--Margaret Thatcher is an example--but manliness is the "quality mostly of one sex." This creates problems for a society such as ours that likes to think of itself as "gender neutral," egalitarian, and sensitive. Manliness is not sensitive. Today, we mainly cope with it by politely changing the subject. The very word is deemed quaint and outmoded. Gender experts in our universities teach as fact that the sex difference is an illusion--a discredited construct, like the earth being flat or the sun revolving around the earth.

And yet, the complex range of behavior that "manliness" characterizes persists. It is still mostly men who embody it. We have succeeded in bringing the language to account, but we have not managed to exorcise masculine thumos.

After almost 40 years of feminist agitation and gender-neutral pronouns, it is still men who are far more likely than women to run for political office, start companies, file for patents, and blow things up. Men continue to tell most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to editors. And--fatal to the dreams of feminists who long for social androgyny--men have hardly budged from their unwillingness to do an equal share of housework or childcare. Moreover, women seem to like manly men: "Manliness is still around, and we still find it attractive," says Mansfield.

Mansfield's amusing, refreshing, and outrageous observations must already be causing distress for his Harvard colleagues. But many readers will be grateful to him for his candor and bravado. Today, when

scholars acknowledge sex differences, they do it timorously. They follow every assertion of difference with a list of exceptions, qualifications, and caveats. Into this world strides Professor Mansfield, loaded for bear, and lethally armed with all the powerful stereotypes thought to be banished from bien pensant society. And he deploys them without apology in shocker after shocker:

[Women] shun risk more than men and they perceive risk more readily; they fear spiders. . . .

Women seem to desire more than men to make a nest and to take responsibility for making it. To do this, they sometimes need the help of their men, and they nag them responsibly and more or less charmingly according to their skill. . . .

In my experience, it is difficult for a man who is attracted to a woman not to find her cute, rather than intimidating, when she gets angry.

Mansfield reminds us that philosophers and poets were worried about manliness long before contemporary feminists began to anguish over it. He presents a magisterial survey of the role played by manliness in the thought of the great philosophers.

From the Greeks to Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophers have extolled or deplored manliness--but mostly they looked for ways to control it. No one, says Mansfield, understood the vices and virtues of manliness better than Aristotle and Plato. They gave it its due while "remaining wary of its dangers."

Unfortunately, few modern philosophers have followed their example. The ancients well understood that too much--or too little--manliness is a bad thing. Too much is dangerous, but too little is fatal to a society's prospects for greatness--or even for its survival. Modern philosophers err on the side of wariness and suspicion and, according to Mansfield, "the entire project of modernity can be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed."

The entire project of modernity? This says, in effect, that modern philosophy has been engaged in making wimps out of men. As Mansfield sees it, since the dawn of the modern era, philosophers have conspired against manly thumos. Hobbes, for example, ignored the higher forms of heroic and philosophical manliness: He reduced it to a simple aggressive drive that leads to a "war of all against all." It had to be broken--not accommodated--by handing over power and rights to an absolute sovereign.

Hobbes placed self-preservation at the center of his theory. But, says Mansfield, manly men do not merely want to survive: They seek glory for themselves and their causes. For Mansfield, Hobbes is the extreme--but still typical--example of modern philosophers' disdain for manliness: "Liberalism is unmanly in setting down self-preservation as the end of man, as do Hobbes and John Locke."

Mansfield himself does not mind being a loner. For years, he has fought a forlorn battle at Harvard in defense of high standards. He was the only member of the faculty to vote against establishing a women's studies major. All the same, one would have expected him to find a few defenders of manliness somewhere in the annals of modern philosophy. But he does not cite any. With the possible exceptions of Baruch Spinoza and Edmund Burke, he complains that philosophers of modernity just don't get it when it comes to understanding and valuing male spiritedness: "Modern thinking does not want to cooperate with manliness, and does not care for thumos."

In place of the heroic, but rationally controlled, conception of manliness offered us by the ancients, modern thinkers give us a pallid, cautious, risk-averse bourgeois manliness--a world of Babbitts, rather than Achilles.

But this perspective is badly skewed. Surely Mansfield would not deny that the "bourgeois" male denizens of modernity have been responsible for some of the most prodigious displays of genius in art, literature, and music. They invented science, the free market, and liberal government, and they refined the art of war, magnifying its lethality a thousandfold. It would appear that Mansfield systematically underestimates the manliness of modern man, and of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Francis Bacon, and Ren Descartes who helped create him.

His discussion of Nietzsche's powerful influence on contemporary feminism shows Mansfield at his philosophical best and manly worst. Here, more than elsewhere, Mansfield dazzles us with the aptness of his insights, while being recklessly inattentive to nuance, exceptions, and complexity. He has no doubts about Nietzsche's manliness. He sets up a dramatic contrast between the manly ideal favored by Plato and Aristotle and the unrestrained masculinity promoted by Nietzsche.

Both Plato and Aristotle developed a conception of ethical manliness based on courage, tying manliness to protectiveness and reason. Manly men (and women) are the guardians of Plato's Republic; they are the noble gentlemen in Aristotle's polis. Both maintained that philosophers, not warriors, are the manliest of all.

By contrast, Nietzsche, a classicist by training, idealized the pre-Socratic Homeric age. He preferred the warrior to the philosopher, exalting Achilles over Socrates. He criticized Plato and Aristotle for putting reason above passion. For Nietzsche, says Mansfield, "Humanity is not to be found in reason but rather in the spark of life--the assertion of each man's life by that man." Nietzsche has burdened modernity with an exceptionally dangerous philosophy that Mansfield calls "manly nihilism." Where Plato and Aristotle place severe constraints on manly expression, Nietzsche gives us a manliness unrestrained by anything outside itself. Says Mansfield: "Manly assertiveness feeds on itself alone, and does not serve to protect and defend a cause greater than itself."

So where did contemporary feminists turn for philosophical inspiration? They had their pick of any number of the polite, sensible, and sensitive thinkers of modernity. John Stuart Mill would have been perfectly suitable. But no, says Mansfield, they turned down this nice guy--"a wimp when you come down to it"--and "went mad for crazy manly Nietzsche."

Nietzsche is hardly the philosopher one would expect to emerge as the muse for modern feminism. Not only did he valorize unrestrained male assertion, his contempt for women was famously explicit:

The true man wants two things, danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually.

In another context, he said women were for the "recreation of the warrior." His advice to men on the subject of women: "Forget not thy whip." Why, then, did Nietzsche's point of view appeal so strongly to intellectual feminists?

"In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women. . . . What interested [feminists] in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as fact--God is Dead--and the possibility of creating a new order in its place." Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche. But many did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism. In Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag." Far from being critical of Nietzsche's hypermasculine fantasies, his "will to power," and his rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic--she embraced it all and urged women to emulate it.

Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." She rejected the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an authoritative moral order. When she said that women must seek "transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a "tragedy" for women; both are traps that are incompatible with female subjectivity and freedom. She described the pregnant woman as "a stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg." She compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery.

Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists. The early feminists questioned the rigidity of sex roles, but they never doubted that there was such a thing as human nature, and that women had distinctive roles to play in the family and society. Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to be free of all roles. Toward what end? She did not specify. Beauvoir's womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan. In the decades following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine.

Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they are less effective at being true Nietzscheans. Unlike radicals in other social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never engaged in violence. None went to jail. So how did they succeed in changing American society?

As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices." They formed "consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training" workshops. Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of sexism. Tantalized by the Nietzschean idea that knowledge was a form of power, and not the result of disinterested inquiry, feminist scholars went on a rampage "reinventing" knowledge. In the academy, women took full advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and thwart women.

Is Mansfield being fair to feminism? Is Nietzsche its main guiding spirit? Not really. His description of "feminist nihilism" rides roughshod over many distinctions within feminist theory and the women's movement. Alongside the reckless feminism of Beauvoir, Firestone, Greer, and company, there was a quieter, more reasonable, eminently sane version (inspired by those "wimps" Locke, Mill, and David Hume) working its way through American society and bringing needed reforms. Mansfield is aware of, and appreciates the achievements of, this moderate wing, but Manliness gives the impression that Second Wave feminism was one long Nietzschean production. It was more than that.

But one forgives Mansfield his imprecision and hyperbole because so much of what he says is profoundly true. Not all of contemporary feminism is a playing out of Nietzschean themes, but a great deal of it is. He is also right when he points out that many feminist leaders emulate some of the cruder and unappealing qualities of manliness.

An example (not given by Mansfield) is Eve Ensler's male-averse play The Vagina Monologues. This is loosely based on interviews with more than 200 women on the subject of their intimate anatomy. Its more serious preoccupation is exposing male insensitivity and violence. Pathological male thumos is everywhere: The play is a rogues' gallery of male oafs, losers, brutes, batterers, rapists, child molesters, and vile little boys. It is as if honorable manliness never existed.

Mansfield's analysis of women's nihilism gives us the lens to understand these developments as caricatures of the feminist will to "empowerment." It is a form of manly assertiveness unmoderated by Aristotelian ideals. Here we have an example of women imitating masculinity in its lower range. It is the dark side of the "gender neutral society" in which we now live.

The women who champion Eve Ensler's production are rightly concerned about the problem of male violence. But the known solution is to teach boys (and men) to be gentlemen. "A gentleman," says Mansfield, "is a man who is gentle out of policy, not weakness; he can be depended upon not to snarl or attack a woman when he has the advantage or feels threatened." And any gentlewoman or "lady" is naturally more suited for the task of civilizing a vulgar, barbarous male than a whole army of gender warriors.

What would Mansfield have us do? His book is primarily a conceptual analysis of manliness. It is not a self-help book. But it should surprise no one that this bossy, opinionated, and intrepid male thinker has a lot of advice to dispense. Women who like manly men will want to pay close attention. He says a lot of useful things your women's studies professors probably forgot to mention.

First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public realm and private life. In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy of gender neutrality. He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal opportunity to men and women. However, "our expectations should be that men will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women."

Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness; they must stop trying to feminize boys. A healthy society should not war against human nature. It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity." That means it has to civilize it and give it things to do. No civilization can achieve greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males.

In the private sphere, his advice is viv la difference! A woman should not expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is; nor should she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends. Manly men are romantic rather than sensitive. They need a lot of help from females to ascend to the higher ethical levels of manhood, and Mansfield urges women to encourage them in ways respectful of their male pride.

Men, for their part, need to be gallant to women and respectful. Above all, they must listen to them. Mansfield offers this advice to young men:

Women want to be taken seriously almost as much as they want to be loved. To take women seriously you must first take yourself seriously and after that ask them what they think. And when they tell you, try to listen.

He is not suggesting that women accept a subordinate role; on the contrary, he compares women to philosophers. They are, on the whole, less assertive, but that makes it easier for them to be observant, reflective, and calmly judgmental: "It should be expected that men will be manly and sometimes a bit bossy and that women will be impressed with them or skeptical."

The world of gender studies has never before had to confront anyone quite like this solitary rogue male professor of politics. Critics will rail against his excesses and feminists will be indignant and offended. But many women will be charmed by his effrontery, and grateful for the truth and wisdom in Mansfield's elegant treatise.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The War Against Boys and coauthor of One Nation Under Therapy.

Nice try Local 1400.

The demise of scouting in my area began a few decads ago- and has been steadily declining ever since.

I am only one of two new units to form in the past three years. We have no access to the public schools - that is the domain of official-BSA-dom. They can take the credit or the blame for the FOS and the Roles in our neck of the woods. My net only stretches into the CO private school and a few Home Schoolers.

In fact- one troop, whose CO is a Baptist Church, built a potato cannon follwoing our lead- and they are the fastest growing unit in our area.

We will actually only continue to diverge the troop and pack as the boys matriculate. Right now we are heavy with WEB II and Boy scout first years. By next year we will have regular separate meetings and events for the BS patrol.

But I swear by the Denner system we have implemented. The boys really enjoy it.

Pappy(This message has been edited by Pappy)