Necessary Dispensibility
16 December 2006Dr. Esolen writes in the December issue of Touchstone:
“Women are beautiful, and men are necessary. It has been the great victory of the feminist movement to make women unlovely by persuading them that men are not needed.”
A few pages later, as it happens, I found an article on John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In reference to the book it says “Whereas women need to receive caring, understanding, respect, devotion, validation, and reassurance, men need to receive trust, acceptance, appreciation, admiration, approval, and encouragement.”
Doubtless there are many questions that could be raised about that statement and the extent of its validity, but set them aside for a moment in favor of one single question:
Do men have a particulary need — or need in a particular way — to be needed?
Clearly we — the human race — need women. Otherwise there would be no human race. But with the advent of artificial insemination, single-parent homes and working mothers, women in every area of business, government, and ecclesiastical leadership, it is rapidly becoming less clear why we need men.
In a previous post we (and a great many commenters) discussed another piece by Dr. Esolen, in which he maintained that men must be “dispensible,” willing to lay down their very lives.
He is right that real men will gladly die — but we must have something to die for. A man can die knowing that he is dying to save his wife and children, to preserve his homeland, to keep his integrity, to glorify his God. A man can brave peril and danger knowing that his doing so is integral to the success of the mission, gladly carrying out his orders so that the goal will be accomplished, even if he does not live to see it.
What manhood itself cannot survive is being rejected as unnececessary.
We have no right as men to blame feminism for our failings. But I wonder, realistically speaking, how much more might be accomplished by many men if they were driven by the honest need and trusting expectation of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and female friends?
What do you all think?
Cool. You posted.
To answer: yes, I think men need to be needed, and if they don’t get that sense of needed-ness at home (generally via appreciation, probably?), they’ll look for it somewhere else, like work.
But I also think women need to be needed. We saw that even in “The Hairy Ape,” when the girl was telling her aunt how she wanted to do something worthwhile. Of course, O’Neill’s characters are hardly paragons of proper femininity; but he seems to be onto something. It wouldn’t surprise me if the “It’s so nice running my own home!” sentiment, like from Charlotte in P&P, is related to that being-needed-ness.
But it seems to me that this needing-to-be-needed works itself out differently in men and women.