In the book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the American Jesuit polymath Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) argues that human males are understandably MORE insecure than human females. Of course he does not say that human females are NOT insecure. On the contrary, he notes that they are insecure.
So if a certain understandable insecurity of human males is distinctively masculine, then what Dr. Onion describes as the "distaste for the civilizing, feminine strictures that boyishness in line" involves a projection onto women.
In theory, couldn't adult men be in charge of administering civilizing strictures that bring boyishness in line?
In any event, Ong sees specifically male insecurity as motivating males to work out and establish a specifically masculine identity over against other males, or at least in relation to other males.
Now, the psychodynamism motivating male striving that Ong discusses is referred by Plato and Aristotle as thumos (or thymos). They recognized that this motivating force should be carefully cultivated. Carefully cultivated, it is the motivating force involved in the virtue of courage, which they defined as the mean between the extremes of pusillanimity (and cowardice), on the one hand, and, on the other, brashness.
By this definition, the type of behavior that Donald Trump describes in his 2005 comments to Billy Bush involves brashness, an excess of boldness. By our contemporary standards, such brash behavior represents sexual assault.
In conclusion, Dr. Onion has supplied enough information about certain unfortunate trends in our American cultural heritage that I am not optimistic about the possibility of significant change occurring in the near future. But brash sexual assault should be combatted.
(Article changed on October 31, 2016 at 16:31)
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