Well, it's that pop culture time of the decade. Or half-decade. I'm not sure of the cycle, but it goes like this: a bunch of rubbish about women (cf. Are Men Necessary? and others) and then a bunch of rubbish about men, as in this CS Monitor article Oh man!.

Anybody remember Real men don't eat quiche?

Anyway, I was raised by a man (my Dad) and had brothers who were, more or less, future men, and friends who were almost men (in high school) and nominally men (in college) and, well, men, ever since. And then I married a man (my husband). So I think I know a fair amount about men, for somebody who's never been one.

And I do know something about our societal sex roles, given that I grew up in our society, and had a sex (female).

So, you know, I feel as qualified to weigh in on the topic as any other unqualified pop-culture pundit. Why do I bother to weigh in? Well you might ask. I'm a pop culture junkie. It's horrid, I know, but it's as addictive as a bag of Zapp's Cajun Crawtator. It's a human thing. Without that urge to shout back at the (metaphoric) television, there would be no letters-to-the-editor pages.

Anyway, as usual, the women's rubbish seemed to be all about how smart women can't get dates, how smart and educated (and wealthy) women are leaving boardrooms in droves to stay home and fulfill traditional roles supervising nannies and whatnot, and about how our twenty-first century lifestyle of earning money and then spending it makes the modern woman feel an unspecified yearning somewhere deep inside, the satisfaction of which probably involves reproducing her genetic material, or possibly adopting a baby from China or Romania or Africa or somewhere like that.

(I feel the need to point out here that a life comprised entirely of "getting and spending" makes everyone feel kind of unfulfilled. Wordsworth observed this in 1807, and it hasn't stopped being true.)

Also as usual, the men's rubbish is about how they feel vaguely, symbolically, castrated by strong women.

That's not quite how they word it, of course, but what do you make of Frank Vincent (an actor who plays tough guys) stating in A Guy's Guide to Being a Man's Man, that "The women of the world are overrunning the guys...men got in touch with their sensitive side and gave away too much in the process."

Now, when guys complain about guyhood becoming too "sensitive" I find myself in a quandary. I hate overtly and self-consciously "sensitive" guys because I think it's fake, a pose often used to cover up a fundamental core of jerkiness. But when self-consciously "manly" men complain about it I always think -- so what's the opposite of sensitive? Insensitive? You think guys should be insensitive?

That's not quite how Vincent phrases it. He does opine that in order to be sufficiently manly a guy should eat lots of steak, get a manicure but never a pedicure, eschew novelty ties, and listen to Sinatra. Which all sounds suspiciously GQ to me, but whatever.

Then there's Manliness by Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield. Which, when you put all those words together, sounds like a pun of some kind. He seems to think that we need something called "gender clarity" and that it requires (surprise, surprise) "men and women returning to traditional roles in the private sphere (girls dust/cook, guys fix/mow)." Although, on account of it being the twenty-first century and all, he allows for women CEOs and stuff.

As he says, "Manliness can't be repressed because it is in our nature." Which sort of makes you wonder what the point of his book is.

He appeared recently and hilariously on the Colbert Report, in which he reveals that he thinks the "proper" domestic arrangement for a heterosexual married couple is for the female half to earn one-third of the money and do two-thirds of the housework.

(So...uh...what, you're supposed to crunch the numbers and if the woman makes too much money she should quit or something? Is there any couple anywhere that would actually do that? And if they did, wouldn't you think they were insane?)

He also reveals that he isn't quick-witted, doesn't have a sense of humor, and is very soft-spoken. And that he looks sort of slouchy and soft next to Colbert. Which, frankly, doesn't make him a very effective spokesmodel for the new manliness. In fact, it makes him seem like a stereotypical insecure academic wimp who is overcompensating on a national stage.

(Of note: his academic area is government, and he is an advocate of the "president is above the law" theory which conservatives currently favor. But just watch them backpedal next time the POTUS is a Democrat.)

It's funny, isn't it, how we keep "rediscovering" and "redefining" what it "really means" to be a man or a woman...and it always involves a return to the imagined social norms of the American 1950s.

I hate to break it to you would-be-manly guys, but if masculinity truly is an inherent and natural part of being a male homo sapiens, then it also has to be defined cross-culturally. And, you might be surprised to learn that not all cultures on the planet have always defined "traditional" sex roles the same way. For example, very macho Latino cultures think a lot of male touching and effusive emotional displays are manly. And the whole notion of women "working outside the home" would have been nonsense for thousands of years of agriculture, where work was the home.

I defy anyone to explain exactly why cleaning a house is inherently feminine, while cleaning a car is inherently masculine. Or why working with dangerous tools is a guy thing when those tools are used for woodworking, and a girl thing when those tools are used for cooking, unless it's a high-priced gourmet restaurant, where it's a guy thing again. And is balancing the household accounts and paying the bills a girl thing, because it pertains to the household, or a guy thing because it involves money? Huh? I really want to know.

Actually, I don't.

Every person is made up of an uncountable number of different unique traits and abilities, and every household is made up of a seemingly inexhaustible number of tasks that must be done, and a sensible household tries to match tasks to persons based on abilities and opportunities, and doing this through the distortion of external sex role expectations is simply idiotic.

I don't doubt that certain traits, if you were able to look at everyone in the world and average them all together, would strongly cluster in one sex or the other. Is that really the point? If you happen to be one of only five percent of females worldwide who really doesn't give a rat's tail about the cleanliness of your home, who cares? Somebody still needs to do the dishes.

About the only thing on Mansfield's list of manly traits that approaches universality is a tendency to want to get involved in battles. Yes, warfare seems to be a guy thing. Although it's worth noting that it's never been terribly manly to send other people to die in a war without putting yourself at physical risk -- the manly ones are the ones leading the charge who might actually get killed, not the kings who sit back and tell 'em where to go.

And it's also worth noting that many men have recognized a love of war for its own sake as, really, kind of a character flaw, and the moral courage it takes to stand up and advocate for peace, especially when that position is unpopular, is also pretty manly.

So, anyway, whenever this cycle comes round again, just remember -- it's not very manly or very womanly to let a bunch of pop-culture pundits tell you what kind of person to be.

Including me.