DOES OUR CONCEPT OF MANILINESS MATTER?

[FireKat 10]

I do not know what MANILINESS is but I guess you meant manliness. 

 

Encarta Dictonary

1. -conventionally typical of a man

-having or showing qualities conventionally thought to be characteristic of or appropriate to a man, especially physical strength or courage

 

I do not see a specific reference to honor in this definition. I think lounge chair setter can be considered manly as most of the men I know have a big thing about their chairs if you use the above  definition.

As to the use of all caps I guess pappy has to yell to get our attention.

 

[CalicoPenn 729]

After reading the Manifesto on Manliness by Harvey Mansfield (Man, that's a lot of Mans), I am more convinced than ever than the Manliest of Men are, in fact - Gay Men. Straight Men are sissies compared to Gay Men.

 

"Manliness," (says Mansfield), "is a quality that causes individuals to stand for something." There is nothing more manly then a couple of dozen drag queens removing their stilletos and beating the holy heck out of New York City Police Officers raiding a gay bar in NYC on the day that Judy Garland died and starting, with that one small act of "standing up for something" a major civil rights movement.

 

"Manliness, says Mansfield, thrives on drama, conflict, risk, and exploits". You want drama, conflict, risk and exploits? You can have all four all at the same time any Friday or Saturday night in any gay bar in the country. Gay men thrive on drama, conflict, risk and exploits - and no one does it any better!

 

Glad to see folks finally coming around and getting it. Time for the BSA to finally get it to, if we're going to stop being such a "girly-man" organization.

 

Calico

 

 

[evmori 11]

Is there a point to this thread?

[Hiromi 9]

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."

 

 

 

 

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

[Trevorum 24]

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK.

[GernBlansten 10]

I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flowers. On Wednesdays I go shopping, and hang around in bars.

[Lisabob 13]

He puts on women's clothing

And hangs around in bars?!

[GernBlansten 10]

I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK.

[Hiromi 9]

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.

 

 

[Trevorum 24]

Thannk youuu ... thannk you vurrry muchh ...

 

[GernBlansten 10]

He's a lumberjack, and he's okay.

He sleeps all night and he works all day.

 

He's a lumberjack, and he's okaaaaay.

He sleeps all night and he works all day.

 

[le Voyageur 72]

Pappy...

 

The English lesson wasn't needed, just wanted a clarification seeing that you were using broad brushstrokes.

 

so again, who are the "we's" you're now referring to when using the word "our"?

 

Maybe the reason that I am not interested in being one of your "we's" is that I've had my fill of arm chair generals and conmandos in the BSA who dream of nothing better to do then militarize their units. The worse one was a wannabe at Camp School who had read far to much Clancy. Never served a day in the military, but bragged how he had led an elite SEAL team on a daring Phoenix mission against a Taliban training camp, and was now ready to serve his Council as a Program Director.....

 

so yes, please leave me out of your "we'ness"....k, thanks

 

 

[FireKat 10]

Pappy, sometimes I really wonder if you really read what you copy/paste.....

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."

sympathizing with others  That has never been in your discription of what you call a 'manly-man' but more of your definition of a 'girly-man' as sympathy is a natural female trait but must be trained into men.

As to self-sacrifice, do you know why they say 'women and children first' and 'every man for himself'? Women will naturally find an protect the children. Men will protect themselves. So the culture developed the 'women first' mantra so men would stop and remember that there are others beside themselves to carefor. A mantra to train some of the 'manlyness' out of men.

[Lisabob 13]

Michael quotes yet another guy as saying, in part, : " 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."

 

Yeah there Michael, you might want to go read a bit of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. I recommend you start with The Leviathan. Note that H and L (both by the way, commonly considered to have provided key philosophical contributions to modern democratic theory) talk a whole lot about the notion that human beings created government in the first place to provide ourselves with basic security. So much for them, they must have been nasty pinko commie girlies ahead of their time, huh.

 

Have you actually read any of Marx's writings? Or Gramsci's? Or Engels'? Or other serious political theorists (not pundits) of this vein? There is plenty to find fault with there, but blaming them for what the 20th Century witnessed as so-called "communism" is kind of like turning to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker to understand Christianity, or watching Baywatch to learn what American culture is really about. What they wrote, and the twists and perversions that were added by power-hungry (ahem) men in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the 20th C. really bore little resemblance to each other.

 

 

[Hiromi 9]

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."