Manhood as a gender-neutral virtue
The word ‘manhood’ used to mean certain desirable qualities of a human being, such as courage, fortitude and self-control. There is, of course, no reason whatsoever why women cannot possess these qualities too. If ‘manhood’ was intended to imply that the qualities came more naturally to individuals of the male persuasion, therefore, this was an insulting untruth.
Yet it is not in fact certain that it was always so intended; for ‘man’ has not one but two opposites, namely ‘woman’ and ‘boy’. When a male person was told to ‘be a man’, this did not necessarily mean that he should stop behaving in a ‘womanly’ manner, it could equally well have meant that he should grow up and act like an adult. On the other hand, it is true that for example a pain-averse individual might also, in the old days, have been reproached as ‘womanish’. That this was wildly unfair was pointed out as long ago as in Euripedes’ Medea; for that character claimed that she would rather stand in the front line of battle than bear another child. Another weight on the wrong side of the scales was the use of ‘manhood’ as a euphemism for the penis, thus setting up an equivalence between anatomy and the virtues. We might say, therefore, that the word ‘manhood’ was ambiguous, in that it seemed unsure whether courage, fortitude and self-control pertained to adults only, or to males only.
In recent times, however, it has been so solidly assumed that the word is entirely male-chauvinist in inspiration and content that it has virtually disappeared in its primary sense. It is now used solely by bad romance writers whose publisher’s guidelines forbid the word ‘penis’. The consequence of this may be that the human virtues once denoted, properly or improperly, by the word ‘manhood’ are now more difficult to talk about and to advocate. It is a knee-jerk assumption that anyone nostalgic for the ‘manly virtues’ must be wanting to confine women to the kitchen, if not to the rape camp.
These days, the compulsory praise of ‘strong’ women certainly rewards courage and fortitude, though whether it advocates self-control and courtesy is considerably less certain. This is because the contemporary cult of the strong woman co-exists with the equally contemporary cult of sentiment, without anyone ever pointing out that these two things are actually incompatible. What used to be called ‘manhood’, in the sense that was in fact open to both sexes, requires the possessor to do things that ran against the demands of feelings, because sometimes ‘a human’s gotta do what a human’s gotta do’.
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