There’s a scene early in The Godfather when Don Corleone meets with popular singer Johnny Fontaine. The young man is in something of a bind–he desperately needs to land a part in a movie to further his career, but a stubborn producer refuses to give him the role. Overcome with frustration, Fontaine breaks into tears, clutching his patron and crying “Oh Godfather, I don
‘t know what to do! I don’t know what to do!” Simmering with rage, Corleone slaps the singer, yelling “You can act like a man! What’s the matter with you? Is this how you turned out? A Hollywood finocchio that cries like a woman?”
The Godfather makes clear how a man was expected to act in the Corleone family in the 1940s. But how should a man act now? That is the question that three recent books seek to answer: Manliness by Harvey Mansfield, The Alphabet of Manliness by “Maddox” (real name, George Ouzounian), and A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man by Frank Vincent (best known as Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, or Billy Batts in Goodfellas). The first is a serious philosophical look at what it has meant to be a man throughout history and how that meaning has changed in modern times. As Christina Hoff Sommers put it in her review of Manliness for The Weekly Standard, Mansfield’s “book is primarily a conceptual analysis of manliness. It is not a self-help book.”
Enter The Alphabet of Manliness and A Guy’s Guide. While it’s not entirely accurate to say that these two books draw from Mansfield’s more scholarly approach, they certainly reflect some of the ideas offered by the Harvard professor. Frank Vincent, for example, shares Mansfield’s staunch support of being a chivalrous gentleman. “[A man’s man] treats his lady with respect,” Vincent writes, but reminds us that he “expects the same in return.” Unlike Vincent or Mansfield, Maddox is fairly disdainful of women in general. But, like Mansfield, he despises feminists and their ideal of gender neutrality, noting that while “it’s unbecoming of a man to hit a woman,” he makes an exception for feminists, “in which case aggression . . . would be a sign of respect, since feminists want to be treated with equality.”
So what does it mean to be a man? More to the point, what do these books suggest it means to be a man? Frank Vincent seems to believe that being a real man takes one thing above and beyond everything else: money. Consider, for example, the opening to his chapter on cigars. “They call cigars ‘the smoke of kings.’ From the $5,000 humidor that sits on your desk to the $1,000 lighter you keep in your pocket to your $200 cutter, cigars are a true lifestyle.” Or flip through the chapter on visiting Las Vegas, in which Vincent recommends hotel rooms like the Wynn’s Fairway Villas, which starts at $1,200, and the Real World suite at The Palms, which will set you back $7,500 per night. As Mansfield writes in his book, “Manliness likes to show off and wants to be appreciated. And it is critical of those who do not measure up to its standard.”
For Vincent, though, it’s not all about spending money. It’s about being stylish. It just so happens that being stylish is expensive. Almost as important as the ability to throw around cash without concern is confidence. A man’s man is a confident man. While interviewing a bouncer for his book, Vincent asked what it takes to get into a swinging nightclub. The doorman replied that a man’s man “is discreet, well-groomed and, above all, confident about himself. I remember I turned some guy down who tried to give me $500.” Mansfield agrees: “The confidence of a manly man gives him independence of others.”
All in all, A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man is only particularly useful to those in a certain tax bracket. It’s an entertaining text nonetheless, especially when read in a Sopranos’ guido accent. If you have a moment, find someone who can ably mimic a Jersey accent to read this aloud to a group of people: “A man’s man has no problems with commitment, as long as he’s not with a woman who needs to be committed. Fellas, it’s all a numbers game. The more women you meet, the greater chance you have of finding the right one. . . . If he thinks his lady’s ‘the one,’ he’ll tie the knot faster than you can say, ‘Bada-bing!'” Or this sentence, later on: “Fellas, one of the most effective ways to meet a woman is on the street.”
Maddox, author of the popular website TheBestPageInTheUniverse, has found himself near the top of the New York Times bestseller list (climbing as high as #2 on the “Advice, how-to, and miscellaneous: hardcover” list) thanks to his insights into all things manly. The Alphabet of Manliness is less a self-help guide than an incredibly obscene catalogue to all things that men like, and why these things are manly. Maddox does not submit his arguments to the logical rigor that Mansfield does; for the most part, things are manly because they are not womanly, and vice versa. For example, the entry for H is “Hot Sauce.” Why is hot sauce manly? Because “All men love spicy food. The statement ‘I don’t like spicy food’ is a more verbose way of saying ‘I have a vagina.'”
Another thing that all men like is heavy metal music, at least according to Maddox. “If manliness had a soundtrack, the score would be metal. No other genre of music is in jeopardy of dying out because its fans keep getting killed at concerts.” One of Mansfield’s key points is that manliness is risky; “Manliness favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes.” But it doesn’t necessarily love metal. Frank Vincent certainly doesn’t. His top singers in the “Man’s man music hall of fame” include Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, and Elvis Presley. Not all of the members are deceased; Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Steven Tyler also make the list. But there’s certainly no heavy metal. As Vincent says in his list “Five Songs a Man’s Man Never Listens to While Driving” about the AC/DC classic “Highway to Hell,” “Unless you got Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson in the backseat, this song ain’t gonna click.”
Maddox’s exaggerated look at what it means to be a man is more akin to the humorous 1982 book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche than it is to Mansfield’s measured defense of manly virtue. But it’s certainly an entertaining read in its own right, and combined with Manliness and A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man, it provides a look at what a large cross section of American society considers masculine.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at The Weekly Standard.
