Return of the Guy: Men were pronounced economically and evolutionarily finished in the late 1990s. but Charlotte Allen says that manhood is back in fashion

Women's Quarterly, Wntr, 2002 by Charlotte Allen

REMEMBER BRENDA BERKMAN? You probably don't, unless you're a hard-line feminist or you live in New York City. In 1978 or thereabouts, Berkman filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the New York Fire Department, complaining that she and several other women couldn't pass the physical fitness section of the city's employment examination for aspiring firefighters. In 1982, in response to Berkman's suit, a federal judge ordered the city to lower the physical standards, and Berkman and about forty other women who were now able to pass the new and easier rest went ahead with their firefighting training. The overwhelming majority of them dropped out, deciding that they didn't really want to be New York City firefighters after all. Since 1982, the city's graduating classes for firefighters have contained only one or two women each and, out of a force of about eleven thousand, there are currently fewer than thirty women.

After her hire, Berkman and some of her cohorts engaged in nearly two decades of guerrilla warfare against their male coworkers. The women charged that the men were committing a catalogue of horrors and hate crimes against them, including rape, tire-slashing, death threats, tear-gas assaults, urinating into women's boots, and leaving a female firefighter alone in a burning house. None of these charges quite made it to the courts, or even to the serious union administrative stage. But they were reported in rich and credulous detail by feminist journalists and historians (one of them called physical fitness a "social construct"), and Berkman became a heroine on the websites of the National Organization for Women and groups of that ilk. She also became something of a political activist, snagging an appointment as a White House fellow during the Clinton years, and last summer she publicly backed Democrat Mark Green's unsuccessful candidacy for mayor of New York.

Then this thing called September 11 happened. The World Trade Center towers were bombed into twin incinerators of carnage, suffering, and rubble. New York City firefighters were suddenly everywhere on the scene and in the public consciousness. Make that firemen. Firemen lost their lives by the hundreds, including Fire Chief Pete Ganci; they hurled themselves into the flames and smoke and collapsing steel girders to pull out the dazed living; they slept in their clothes for a few hours in nearby buildings, when they got any sleep at all. We will never forget the photos of them: the brawny young man in his helmet carrying the wounded young woman in his arms; the grizzled, mustachioed veteran fireman pausing a moment to peer up at an American flag that someone had planted at the site. These men were heroes, and even the worldly New Yorker magazine devoted several covers to honoring them.

To her credit, Brenda Berkman, now a lieutenant stationed at a lower Manhattan firehouse, worked herself to exhaustion side by side with the men in the aftermath of the bombing. And guess what--there were no complaints from her about harassment or opposition to affirmative action or social constructs. There was only camaraderie: "I want to make sure everyone knows how grateful I am" for the public's support of the New York firefighters, male and female, she told a feminist news service a few days later. Her personal website quietly disappeared from the Internet.

IN THE FURNACES of September 11, there was suddenly forged a new social trend: the return of the guy. (Remember that it was four guys who rushed the terrorists who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, wrenching it to the ground near Pittsburgh.) This trend was continued in the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. No one, even NOW, was heard to gripe that there were no women reported among the U.S. Special Forces troops fighting hand to hand with militant supporters of Osama bin Laden during the days after the Taliban fled Kabul. "For the first time in a long time, American heroes are not movie actors or sports figures or celebrity scandal-survivors," political commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Sunday Times of London. "They are cops and firemen and special forces soldiers." Their sex is male, and they do the kind of work that calls on specifically male attributes and virtues: physical strength, tough fatherly leadership (think of Rudolph Giuliani), brotherly bonding into fighting units, co urage, and blunt compassion. Welcome back, guys.

For decades, even before the rise of the radical feminist revolution during the late 1960s, scholars and pundits alike had been tracking and often bemoaning what they viewed as the increasing obsolescence of the male of the human species. As early as the 1950s, sociologist David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd) and urbanologist William Hollingsworth Whyte (The Organization Man) worried that the rugged and tight-lipped individualism that had been the hallmark of American manhood from the Revolution through World War II seemed to be dissolving into bland suburban conformity and that men's loyalties seemed to be shifting to faceless, goal-less, amorphous business organizations rather than self and immediate family.