For the past few weeks, I’ve had a book on my desk called “A History of Virility.” It’s a seven-hundred-page scholarly anthology, published by Columbia University Press and translated from the French by Keith Cohen, chronicling how Western masculinity has been transformed, successively, by Ancient Greece and Rome, encounters with barbarians, the medieval court, the Enlightenment, colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of childhood, mechanized warfare, Fascism, the labor movement, feminism, gay liberation, and so on. The book is the size of a telephone directory; its cover features a glowering, Brando-like Adonis in a tank top. It is, in short, a source of amusement to all who pass by, many of whom point to the word “virility” and say, “Ew.”
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?
“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
The virile is not simply what is manly; it is more: an ideal of power and virtue, self-assurance and maturity, certitude and domination . . . . courage and “greatness” accompanied by strength and vigor.The Romans made virility more complex and demanding. The main challenge for Greek men who aspired to andreia had been insufficient brawniness: Maurice Sartre quotes a cutting description of an almost virile young man named Theagenes, who impressed with his “broad chest and shoulders,” but was ridiculed for, among other things, the “blond fuzz” on his cheeks. But Roman virilitas was even harder to achieve. A man with virilitas had to be tall, muscled, handsome, tanned, and well-endowed. (Roman men spent a lot of time naked at the baths.) He also had to be clever, energetic, confident, and politically engaged. But the defining quality of virilitas was self-control.Virilitas was an ethic of moderation, in which strong or “vigorous” powers were kept deliberately reined in, in the manner of a standing army. If a man became too aggressive, too emotional, or too brawny—too manly—his virilitas could be lost. For this reason, being a ladies’ man could compromise one’s virility. (“For the ancient Romans,” Thuillier writes, “giving in too often to the charms of women is in itself slightly effeminate.”) To be sexually powerful, you had to be in control of your desires.
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Dreamworks/AF Archive/Alarmy
