Manliness

Über

Manliness is a book by Harvey C. Mansfield first published by Yale University Press in 2006. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University. In this book, he defines manliness as "confidence in a situation of risk" and suggests this quality is currently undervalued in Western society.
He suggests the quality is more common in men than in women, but doesn't strictly exclude women, for example he names Margaret Thatcher. He also suggests the quality is "good and bad", not all good, but not all bad. His main point is that gender neutral ideology denies both the reality of sex-specific qualities, and the valuable components of these, to the detriment of society.
Mansfield attributes the rise of gender neutral ideology firstly to Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, and then to feminists who repackaged the ideas as part of a political program. He names Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.