BY DEBRA PICKETT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield thinks there's a crisis of manliness in America, that the all-powerful liberal feminists have gone too far in establishing a "gender neutral" society that won't let boys be boys or men be men.

His new book, Manliness (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $27.50), argues that this problem of "unemployed manliness" is a critical issue of modern life and if we keep on trying to squelch manly behavior, we'll soon be living with a generation of boys who have no idea how to safely, productively channel their aggressive, masculine impulses.

It's hard to know whether to laugh -- Why couldn't the all-powerful feminists get it together in South Dakota? Or during the Alito confirmation hearings? -- or cry about Mansfield's screed. Because I, too, believe there's a manliness crisis going on. But I'd say there's a bit too much manliness in the air, rather than too little. And if one recent poll is any indication, a lot of women happen to agree. A manly administration

Mansfield has many definitions for manliness, including "confidence in the face of risk," and "easy assumption of authority." He says manliness "seeks and welcomes drama, prefers times of war, conflict, and risk, and brings change or restores order at crucial moments." And it "can be heroic. But it can also be vainly boastful, prone to meaningless scuffling, and unfriendly. It jeers at those who do not seem to measure up, and asks men to continually prove themselves. It defines turf and fights for it -- sometimes to defend precious rights, sometimes for no good reason." By these definitions, it's clear that the war in Iraq is one of our most manly national undertakings in a long time and the Bush administration is, in fact, just chock full of manly men (and Condoleezza Rice) doing manly things. There's the pile of over-confident predictions of victory, and all those easy assumptions of authority -- "Warrants? We don't need no stinking warrants." -- and, of course, the jeering stance against those who would dare question the wisdom and efficacy of the so-called War on Terror. This is an administration that casts its mistakes, like the increasingly apparent presence of innocent men among the enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay, as virtues and its failures as successes-yet-to-come. Much as we'd all like our kids -- both boys and girls -- to develop great self-confidence as they grow up, this kind of unassailable manly bluster is probably taking things a bit too far. Crossing the line

Women, unsurprisingly, have less patience than men for manliness-run-amok.
And that probably goes a long way toward explaining why the president's
approval ratings are 14 points lower among women than among men.
Just 30 percent of women say they approve of the job President Bush is doing
in office.
Though a "gender gap" in political sentiment is nothing new,
this one is notable because the president, in his 2004 campaign,
managed to appeal to many women -- "soccer moms" was the term of art then -
- who might usually have tended to vote Democratic but were persuaded by his
manly insistence that he'd keep us all safe from the terrorists and
evil-doers.
Sometime between then and now the president's tough-guy appeal has crossed
an invisible border from John Wayne territory into Rambo land.
Man-hating? Not quite

Mansfield says the hairy, scary feminists are rapidly doing away with
all differences between the sexes and that they hate all things masculine.

I don't happen to know any women, feminist or otherwise, who feel that way -
- childbirth being a real sticking point on the whole
elimination-of-differences front -- but lots of us have a certain
intolerance for people who seem to live as caricatures of sex-based stereotypes.
The girly girl who is scared of bugs, dressed in immobilizing high heels and
unable to master the proper use of a hammer and nail is just as ridiculous
to us as the manly man with his car, meat and beer obsessions and his
forever-stunted emotional life.

Manliness, by this estimation, is no more or less of a virtue than femininity.
It's one aspect of a (hopefully) complex personality.
But, like any single trait, too much of it can be a problem.

Maybe our supposedly gender-neutral society is emphasizing this idea more than
it used to and is less inclined to let bad behavior off the hook with
a "boys will be boys" wink and nod. But moving away from having completely
separate standards of conduct doesn't mean we've abandoned the notion that
men and women are different.

I kind of like the idea of holding each other accountable, of, for example,
being able to tell a whining complainer -- of either sex -
- that it's time to "man it up."

Perhaps this week's poll numbers are a message to the president that
he ought to get in touch with his feminine side.