the cool, the hard, the distant
July 13, 2015 1:20 PM   Subscribe

Think of the ways we talk about manliness: as making necessary sacrifices, doing what needs to be done, choosing the ugly truth over the pretty lie. In all of those definitions, we're still just talking about being good, brave, responsible. And if that's what we mean by manliness, then we have to acknowledge the fact that women are now — and always have been — as good at it as men are. Which, in turn, means that men can, and ought to, learn manliness from women.
Franklin Strong for The Millions: The Manliness of Joan Didion.

If you're unfamiliar with Didion's oeuvre, check out what is perhaps her most famous essay: "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power." (Originally published in Vogue in 1961, it was later republished as "On Self-Respect" in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, her first nonfiction collection.)

Here are links to a baker's dozen more Didion essays, and a few more on top of that.
posted by divined by radio (24 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
And if that's what we mean by manliness, then we have to acknowledge the fact that women are now — and always have been — as good at it as men are. Which, in turn, means that men can, and ought to, learn manliness from women.

Or we can accept gender expression as a continuum and stop calling certain traits "manly" altogether.

After my initial encounter w/Didion, via The White Album, I thought of her as impressively unsentimental - bordering on hardboiled - and with a great eye for the sordid, telling detail. Not exactly sexually specific characteristics.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:33 PM on July 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


Christopher Kimball said recently in an interview "I don’t like adjectives that do not carry information, that carry only sensibility," and I thought immediately of Didion. "Information is control,” she writes in "The Year of Magical Thinking." I admire her chilly, reserved observation and reporting, analytical even when the subject is her own mind. Her sensibility emerges from the way she arranges her information and works her sentences, and she never insists on making the reader feel some obligatory emotion. This is how it was: Didion, transmitting the donnée, even when surrounded by danger, death, grief.

Thanks, dbr.
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:49 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Or we can accept gender expression as a continuum and stop calling certain traits "manly" altogether.

Right there with you, would you mind forwarding the memo to all the men in the world to whom the concept and pursuit of "manliness" is seen as roughly equivalent to life itself? (They don't listen to me because I'm a woman.)

...impressively unsentimental - bordering on hardboiled - and with a great eye for the sordid, telling detail. Not exactly sexually specific characteristics.

Again, I agree, but do you really think that women who display these characteristics are able to do so without being labeled as "masculine," or at minimum thrown into stark relief in comparison to "femininity"? Because they (we) really aren't.

For real though, this is all why I added the 'notsurehowifeelaboutthis' tag. 'Cause I'm not sure how I feel about this!
posted by divined by radio at 1:49 PM on July 13, 2015 [7 favorites]


Again, I agree, but do you really think that women who display these characteristics are able to do so without being labeled as "masculine," or at minimum thrown into stark relief in comparison to "femininity"?

This is very interesting because I think women are more likely to be described as "mannish" (can be read as "like a man, but not a man, just creepy and weird") than "manly" (containing the positive traits associated with masculinity). I feel like as a woman we all celebrate these "manly" traits so it seems like I should have them but if I actually do have them (and certainly if I try to get credit for them) I'm "mannish" and I get smacked down. It hadn't occurred to me how different referring to a woman has having traits of "manliness" would seem but it's huge.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 1:55 PM on July 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


Again, I agree, but do you really think that women who display these characteristics are able to do so without being labeled as "masculine," or at minimum thrown into stark relief in comparison to "femininity"? Because they (we) really aren't.

No, and I didn't say this - but I also don't think it's helpful for a literary journal of The Millions' aspirations to reinforce the stereotype (even in an nominally pro-feminist, roundabout way). If we have any hope of eroding gender essentialism, it's going to be through millions of public and private attempts to reject, challenge, and problematize it - the author clearly almost knows better than to put things in such reductive terms, so this feels like a missed opportunity. Also a misreading of Didion, who I suspect was tough, unblinking, and self-possessed enough to bridle at having her strengths called "manly", especially give the bullshit she no doubt had to put up with as a female journalist in the 60s and 70s.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:58 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's worth having a look at How Esquire Engineered the Modern Bachelor in connection with/contrast to Franklin Strong's piece.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:04 PM on July 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I really love Joan Didion's books. She's a magnificent writer. But anecdotally, she frequently shows up in frustrating conversations with men about literature, the kinds that usually end with the guy talking about how he doesn't read books by women/enjoy female authors "except for Joan Didion." And that's usually my cue for leaving the conversation.

As to her writing being mannish, I cannot even compute She is certainly cool--both in style and temperature--although much of what she writes (especially her fiction) is rather explicitly about women.

I think that gendered adjectives are mostly silly, unnecessary and unappealing. Though I will admit that I've always secretly wished to I might to get to be rakishly handsome for a day.
posted by thivaia at 2:17 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


MonkeyToes that article is fascinating...and troubling. Thanks for sharing.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 2:38 PM on July 13, 2015


"Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds."

One is free not to adopt set scripts (of masculinity, of femininity, etc.) as long as one has evaluated and accepted the risks of doing so, and doesn't look back. In some ways, labeling her work as girly or manly is very much beside the point.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:51 PM on July 13, 2015


Some traits that we thing of as specifically "manly" or "womanly" are generically human, while others are highly sex-specific. Also, a lot of popular definitions of masculinity tend to contain implicit value judgements - when people say "a real man does this", what they are really saying is "a man whose behavior I approve of does this".

I like Jack Donovan's analysis of masculinity because he attempts to bypass these moral value judgments and really get to the heart of what we mean when we say that a person or action is "masculine". As his memorable phrase goes: "there is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man".

Or we can accept gender expression as a continuum and stop calling certain traits "manly" altogether.

Gender expression as a continuum still has its extremal points. For example, on the extreme "manly" end I'd include such things as leading other men to defend a castle using close range weapons, killing others brutally and risking violent death in the process. Historically, women who did such things were very rare. On the extreme "womanly" end, I'd include breastfeeding (obviously impossible for men), and nurturing a baby. And then there are relatively neutral things that aren't intrinsically sex-specific, that may be more socially determined, such as apparel, grooming, cooking, and other common practices and activities.
posted by theorique at 6:00 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: leading other men to defend a castle using close range weapons
posted by oceanjesse at 6:45 PM on July 13, 2015


For example, on the extreme "manly" end I'd include such things as leading other men to defend a castle using close range weapons, killing others brutally and risking violent death in the process. Historically, women who did such things were very rare.

I'm not a medievalist, but my money is on castle defense being something women played a large part in, simply because they were there and were facing horrible fates if the defenses were overrun.

On the extreme "womanly" end, I'd include breastfeeding (obviously impossible for men), and nurturing a baby.

Breast feeding has a sex component, but nurturing a baby does not. Hell, I am not even a father and I've still spent time nurturing babies.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:02 PM on July 13, 2015 [7 favorites]


Metafilter: I blew my rad Didion quote in another thread.

Great collection of articles.
posted by clavdivs at 8:49 PM on July 13, 2015


Fighting and raising babies are the extremes? Or only fighting when it involves a castle? Anyway, that is super weird for all the dads and female soldiers that definitely do exist...
posted by easter queen at 9:03 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Women indeed did take charge of castle defenses. Their husbands would be off at whatever war and they had to take command.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:35 PM on July 13, 2015 [1 favorite]




I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

From "Goodbye to All That," and apropos of nothing except I love Joan Didion and I recall the moment after reading that sentence and first realizing I was inexorably aging. Thanks for making me a grownup, Ms. Didion.
posted by one_bean at 10:22 PM on July 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


On the extreme "womanly" end, I'd include breastfeeding (obviously impossible for men)...

I don't have the link handy, but apparently both women and men will often spontaneously lactate when fed after a long period of starvation -- which was evidently a source of some embarrassment for male inmates of concentration camps who were rescued by the Allies after WWII.
posted by jamjam at 12:26 AM on July 14, 2015


I think that gendered adjectives are mostly silly, unnecessary and unappealing. Though I will admit that I've always secretly wished to I might to get to be rakishly handsome for a day.

I highly recommend it.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:36 AM on July 14, 2015


Wasn't the classical gender essentialist POV that traits like strength aren't necessarily coded masculine or feminine, but that all human traits have different expressions that are either more masculine or feminine in character? A lot of thinking in the Taoist tradition proceeds from an idea that's sort of like "men are strong like this, but women are strong like this, and you too, manly man can learn to be as strong as a woman if you workout the right way and eat your spinach." From what I've read of that stuff, "feminine" strength was viewed as a more self-sacrificing and creative kind of strength, modeled on classical ideas about motherhood and the pain and difficulty of birthing children. Basically, "male" strength was the kind that breaks down a door, storms into a room full of enemy soldiers, and kills them all with a brutal efficiency. "Female" strength was the kind of more subtle and resiliant strength embodied by the adaptability of a woman's body to the changes required to carry and give birth to children--a kind of strength found less frequently in men to patiently endure and overcome physical and spiritual discomfort for long stretches of time without losing the capacity to love the things that cause the discomfort. In the same way a mother still loves her children even though bringing them into the world may have scarred her body and required months of physical pain and inconvenience, ideals of female strength included an idea of emotional resilience in the face of suffering, and even abiding love and empathy for people who might hurt or inconvenience you. Of course there's no need to gender code any of these ideas like this, but there's definitely a thread of thought along those lines in a lot of the classical ideas about feminine and masculine ideals. Brash, dominating, and forceful were coded masculine; patient, self-sacrificing, adaptable, and forgiving were coded feminine.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:27 AM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Joan Didion drives booksellers nuts, because her books are shelved in so many different sections, so when somebody asks "where are the Joan Didion books?" you can't give a simple answer and wind up tied up for awhile.
posted by jonmc at 5:44 AM on July 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


“She is, in the end,” writes Roiphe, “a writer of enormous reserve.”

Her 'reserve' always struck me as affect, overlying a peculiar self-absorption. I wouldn't call her writing male or female. But she does have an 'apartness' to her. Maybe the writer is just picking up on the fact that her apartness is not the usual sort of female apartness. But that doesn't mean it's 'masculine.'
posted by Hobbacocka at 6:45 AM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wouldn't call her writing male or female. But she does have an 'apartness' to her.

It's the Central Valley way. Her writing about Sacramento is really the key to understanding her - it's the sort of place where if you're intellectual you aren't really home when you're at home. (And if Didion is the manliest woman writer, Fresno native William Saroyan is a very womanly man writer: his stories are all about family and emotions and sensuality.)
posted by psoas at 12:32 PM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


apparently both women and men will often spontaneously lactate when fed after a long period of starvation

TIL ... this. Interesting, I'll have to read more!
posted by theorique at 1:54 PM on July 15, 2015


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