Like a fragrant plume from a handrolled cigar, manliness sweetens the air. What it means, who has it and why it matters is suddenly big news in an America that’s had to endure a feminist pogrom of gender cleansing for the past 30 years.

The occasion for the renascent interest is the release of the new book Manliness by Harvard professor of government Harvey C. Mansfield, in which he makes the old-fashioned claim that "the virtues of men and women are different and complementary." Mansfield must have hit a nerve, because the book’s been picked up for review by every newspaper that matters. The most recent Weekly Standard cover fondly recalls "When Men Were Men," and interviews with Mansfield are showing up in the New York Times Magazine, on National Public Radio and other assorted vehicles.

Manliness comes on the heels of another revealing look at the state of American manhood: LA Times columnist Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back again. The author disguises herself as a man, joins a bowling league in New Jersey, and sets out to document life among what she assumes will be a bunch of foul-mouthed, homophobic boors. Instead, she ends up befriending a group of working-class white guys who pretty much "take you at face value" and "speak with absolute reverence about their wives."

Vincent also supposed that her impersonation of a likeable, sensitive metrosexual named NED would accord her the status of Chick Magnet. Au contraire: "Women want men who can fix things," he/she discovers.

Women like men who can fix things.Recall that it wasn’t six months ago that Maureen Dowd was posing the question Are Men Necessary? in her book of the same name. Powerful, well-educated men, in her experience, tend to be put off (she uses the term ‘threatened’) by powerful, well-educated women like…uh…herself. Proof of their pathetic insecurity! What else could account for the persistent exercise by men of their aboriginal preference for "a good looking woman who is kind" over a razor-sharp, stiletto-heeled mistress of the universe? "Men as a species," she concludes, "are so last century."

I’m fantasizing that Dowd might have auditioned that quip in the ladies’ room at The New York Times for the benefit of colleague Deborah Solomon, because it dovetails so nicely with one of Ms. Solomon’s "Questions for Harvey Mansfield" in the March 12 New York Times Sunday Magazine : "I am beginning to wonder," Solomon scolds, "if you have ever spoken to a woman. Your ideas are so Victorian."

Perhaps, Deborah, and yet the level of interest in Mansfield’s ideas and the proliferation of similarly-themed projects (The Alphabet of Manliness, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, He’s just not that Into You,) makes me wonder if you Times babes might not be misreading the zeitgeist-- a spectacular boo-boo if you make a living as a cognoscente. And I thought I was insular.

Here we have Fatal Feminist Premise #1: Equality for Women Hinges on the Institution of a Gender-Neutral Society. What happened there was that scores of newly minted feminists went on to bear children, and then watched helplessly as their little boys hurled rocks at moving cars and their little girls prepared mud pies for baking. The Utopian Androgynous Worldview is just so Carter era, only a barren Women’s Studies major could possibly buy it anymore.

Which brings me back to the SMU Women’s Symposium I wrote about a few weeks ago. Seated at my table were six or so young women, all childless. After Anne Crittenden’s lecture entitled "Having It All – Our Families and Our Futures"—we were asked to enter into a discussion at our table. To my immediate left were two twenty-something Planned Parenthood apparatchiks who contributed comments to the effect that they felt the lecture overemphasized women’s roles in childrearing. "I would not want to deprive my husband of the opportunity to stay home with the children," one reasoned. I almost choked on my arugula. "Trust me," I offered, "he’ll never raise the issue."

What ensued was a spirited debate about gender roles, our table mostly agreeing that they’re "artificially imposed by the patriarchy," and then there was little ol’ me, lighting a candle for the biological imperativistas.

Here’s how Deborah Solomon framed the same issue before Harvey C. Mansfield:

Q.: Were you sorry to see Harvard’s outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

A: He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it’s probably true. It’s common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.

A: It could, but I don’t think it does. We have been going a couple of generations now. There are certain things that haven’t changed. For example, in New York City, the doormen are still 98 percent men.

Did I mention that Harvey Mansfield is a tenured professor at Harvard?

Fatal Feminist Premise #2: The Guys are Going to Have to Get With the Program if Our Agenda is to Succeed.

What I wished I had said to my tablemates at the Women’s Symposium is this: Look around: Do you see any guys in here? Have you ever heard of a Men’s Symposium??

The Battle of the Sexes is a misnomer: it can’t be a battle if one of the sides opts not to engage. Men, it’s now abundantly clear, never felt they had a dog in this hunt. Feminism turns out to have been a rebellion of women against domesticity, a flight from our nature. Snatch victory from that if you can.

You may well be wondering how it is that I am able to stay one step ahead in the march of civilization. My window on the world is the grocery store, and it is in here that any new rumblings from the frontier of weird science will first be felt. Truly I believe this. Ask yourself what it means that we now grow strawberries the size of Rome apples.

Chances are Nostradamus will have an opinion on this, and you will get your fill of him from the tabloid rack in the checkout line. One time I experienced the rush of cheating death when I looked up and noticed that the exact date and time the Star predicted the world would end had just elapsed while I was loading dogfood onto the belt. I’m telling you, things of cosmic proportions are always happening to me in the Tom Thumb.

Last December, I was wheeling my cart down the baking aisle looking for bread crumbs when a woman about my age & stage approached, waving me down with her bottle of Mazola. "Scuse me," she inquired demurely, "is this the same thing as Corn Syrup?" I found this shocking. – Is that harsh? It’s not like we’re talking about some obscure ingredient like pomegranate seeds. Um, no madam, Mazola Corn Oil is not the same thing as Karo Light Corn Syrup, the stuff six year olds use to make lollipops. I pulled a bottle of Karo from the shelf for her, astounded that a woman could reach midlife without ever having baked a pecan pie. It can only mean that her mother never baked one, either. So it becomes statistically unlikely that she’s ever rifled through the pages of Southern Living at a doctor’s office or checkout line, or by now she would have encountered a recipe, an ad, something to introduce her to the concept of corn syrup. And we’re worried about the ozone layer.

What I had just witnessed was the X chromosome shedding a gene. The thought occurred to me: Is it possible for a species to "forget" its biological imperative?

Maureen Dowd sees the day dawning when men will have outlived their biological purpose. Drawing on research conducted by British geneticists Brian Sykes and Steve Jones, she cites an imminent medical breakthrough in which a female egg will be fertilized by the transfer of DNA from another egg, sidestepping the need for sperm altogether. "What I think’ll happen within my lifetime," opines Dr. Sykes, "is that some lesbian couples will have children, and they will both be parents, an egg from one and a fertilized egg from the other will produce a perfectly normal girl." And if that’s not weird enough, these same dudes have set about documenting the decline and probable disappearance of the Y chromosome. It may take anywhere from 125,000 to three million years, but apparently we now know how the Stag Party’s gonna end.

I wonder, though. Men may get the last laugh yet. By the time we figure out how to fertilize an egg without them, women may well have lost the inclination. Look what’s happened to cooking.

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