More on Manliness (or the lack thereof)

My colleague, Christian_Left, shows himself to be ahead of theZeitgeist in his previous post on manliness, and how hyper-masculinity has polluted American politics. The recent issue of the American Prospect has a cover story on the same topic, complete with a roughed-up G.W. standing next to a flaccid missle. Subtle, huh?

The cover article, by (Mr.) Francis Wilkinson, is not a critique of the idea of manliness so much as an account of the demise of GOP dominance of testosterone politics. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess. But the final paragraph does hint at a different model of American manliness that might be more useful for a progressive political movement:

But after having wallowed in our fear these last five years, maybe what we need next are leaders who will raise us above it. The one man who taught us better than any other to conquer fear was no Governor Terminator. His muscles were unimpressive. He had no physical swagger to him at all. His military experience was a desk job. He wore no cowboy gear. He smoked cigarettes not like a Marlboro Man but filtered through a slender, feminine holder that could have been a prop from the Follies Bergere. He didn’t promise to protect us. He made us believe we could protect ourselves -- from the violence of fascism and the vicissitudes of capitalism alike. And he handed us the tools to do the job. We built the better part of the American century on the back of an aristocratic, polio-addled cripple. Now that was a man.

Christian_Left wants us to go a few steps beyond this, of course, to a masculine-less politics rather than just a different version of masculinity. If that can be done, then our politics and our society will be better, but I don't see such archetypes going away any time soon. A useful short-term strategy, then, is to look for other archetypes of masculinity, ones that fit better with a sane and progressive foreign and social policies.