The concern for manliness

NOW that there are strong gender-bending influences
around, the distinction between male and female is getting blurred. In
many places, the transition from boyhood to manhood seems to be
trapped in a warped understanding of what to be manly is.

            The youth are mostly affected by this situation. With
today’s communication technologies, they can get exposed to a lot of
concepts about manliness and yet can still miss the right one.

            Many would rationalize that the world is big enough to fit
all sorts of cultures of manliness. Besides, there’s a trend toward
tolerance, precisely because of the increasing variety of mentalities
and lifestyles we have today.

            In fact, across history, cultures and peoples, the search
for manliness has always been a prominent feature in social life.
That’s a very understandable natural process. The problem with that is
that since it is time, place and culture-bound, the idea of manliness
is not planted on firm ground.

            In a primitive society, for example, to be manly means to
fight, to be a soldier. But when civilization improved and conflicts
were resolved less through battles, its idea of manliness entered into
a crisis.

            There were other notions and practices that while
containing some good elements just could not be given a universal
applicability. I learned that among the Spaniards, they were told when
still young that it was not manly for boys to cry.

            I remember when I was still in kindergarten learning
English with American nuns in the city. Whenever I would go to the
barrio where my father came from, the people there, rough and tough,
would laugh at me because I spoke English and would distinguish the
long a from the short a.

            I was made to understand that speaking English that way
was not manly. It was good that my parents assured me I was on the
right track, and told me just to understand the barrio people.

            Several incomplete and even wrong definitions and
descriptions of manliness have appeared in history. To be manly was
viewed before as being like the Spartans of old, or like the
privileged class of society, or an independent artisan or successful
businessman.

            Sometimes, manliness was attached to having a
Hercules-like physique, or being a Casanova or a playboy. Caricatures
of manliness proliferated.

            We need to cultivate a culture of manliness grounded on
the terra firma of the true nature of man. The old Greek and Roman
civilizations have already given us a cue, by associating manliness
with developing virtues, with the idea that everyone, man or woman,
tries to excel and be the best one can be.

            What Christianity has done is to even ground this
initially correct understanding of manliness by the Greeks and the
Romans to its ultimate source. And that is to be like Christ—to be
“alter Christus, ipse Christus” (another Christ, if not Christ
himself).

            In short, the test of manliness contains a crucial faith
element to it. Absent that, everything becomes a mess.