Harvey C. Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard University, supposedly a bastion of free speech but where, as we have noted, frank discussion of male-female issues is risky. Perhaps that is why Professor Mansfield opted for Yale University Press for his new book, Manliness, which also has a lot to say about feminism.

The manliness concept centers on action and courage, which Professor Mansfield illustrates, in a thorough and entertaining way, from history, fiction, and popular culture. "Manliness favors war, likes risk, [and] admires heroes," he writes. "The manly or courageous person takes responsibility in a risky situation." That is not to say that formidable women do not exist. In fact, says the author, "Expelled members of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet might think they had met one of them."

Professor Mansfield asks us to consider the evidence for manliness in social psychology and evolutionary biology, "which show, as best they can, that the stereotypes of men and women are basically correct." Men and the manliness they exude "are still around and not going away despite our gender-neutral society."

In its downside, with links to Darwin, Nietzsche, and nihilism, "manliness gets a license from science and philosophy to boast and to act without restraint." One would expect this breed of manliness to repel feminists, but according to Professor Mansfield that is not the case. "Feminism would rather join in manliness than oppose it," he says.

The professor outlines prominent thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, whose ideas were very promising to women. Yet feminists "turned down this sensible, sensitive male – a wimp when you come down to it – and went mad for crazy, manly Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche in drag, as Simone de Beauvoir, but Nietzsche it was." Nietzsche is "the big bad wolf standing behind feminism who said that psychology is the queen of the sciences."

Manliness also discusses Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, which argued that beauty is a form of enslavement to men. As Professor Mansfield points out, Naomi Wolf is also known for advising Al Gore on how to be more manly, more Alpha Male. Wolf went on to express doubts about radical feminism, and will have more if she reads Professor Mansfield’s book.

"The danger of extreme manliness is already within feminism itself, which is opposed to rational control," he writes, elsewhere observing that radical feminists, in protest of patriarchy, have turned against reason itself, calling it "phallic."

The women's movement, explains the professor, "was a manly enterprise, an assertive claim to rights long denied." It was womanly, however, "in its choice of means, particularly in the idea of raising consciousness. It was also womanly in the character of the anger that fueled it."

On that score professor Mansfield notes that the notion of a society without roles comes from Karl Marx. The idea of consciousness-raising is a neo-Marxist compound from the 1960s, "a reminder that feminism came from the left and that it owed much to Marx's critique of liberalism." The professor is not reluctant to say that Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, "was either a communist or close to communists in the 1940s" — something she tried to conceal from biographers.

No feminist leader in our time has run for office, the author observes. Women now serve in combat, but Professor Mansfield, not one to shirk his homework, finds that in the NATO countries, where this is allowed, women comprise only one percent of the complement.

"Women are misled by feminism into mistaking themselves," says Mansfield. "They are told they have no weaknesses because they have no essence, no definition; hence, they have no limitations. Women can do anything, young women are foolishly assured. They are also told to see their strength as weakness."

Professor Mansfield also charges that "Feminism has no understanding of womanhood; it leaves women without a guide and even tries to convince them they need no guide."

What womanhood should be in our society the professor leaves to "a new feminism less fascinated with manliness than the feminism we have had." A better feminism could begin with the idea that women "want it all." They want a career, and to be women too, says Mansfield. They don't want to be defined, and they do. "The challenge to a new feminism is to make sense of those two desires and unite them."

What about men and manliness, the ostensible subject of this book? The entire enterprise of modernity, says Professor Mansfield, "could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed." He expects men to not merely be free but manly because "a free society cannot survive if we are so free that nothing is expected of us."

Manliness will surely provoke a storm in women's studies departments, partly because it shows what a book on such issues should look like. Those ranks are unlikely to produce anything of similar erudition, called Womanliness. Even the radicals, however, might appreciate Professor Mansfield's musings on the sensitive male.

"Could it be that the truly sensitive male is the one who does his job and leaves you alone – except when you don't want to be left alone?"

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.