Male Factors
No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men by Anthony Esolen
reviewed by Alexander Riley
A few months ago, a team of men replaced the roof on my house. There were perhaps eight in total, including those who were not there for the whole five or so hours of the operation, but only long enough to, for example, deliver shingles.
Roofing work is physically difficult and dangerous. You climb about twenty feet up a ladder, then walk and sometimes crawl around on top of a house, and expertly wield a range of tools from shingle strippers to powerful nail guns. I watched these men as they marched up from the ground to the top, holding the ladder with one hand, or none at all, while carrying various needed and often heavy objects up with them. On the rooftop, they picked up and carried packs of asphalt shingles weighing around 75 pounds apiece from the apex of the roof, where they’d been deposited by the truck, to the four corners of the structure. The sun’s rays were beating down ferociously on them while they performed these impressive physical feats.
The arduousness of the work did not at all dampen their enthusiasm. Only minutes after they started, one of them began singing. Another immediately joined him. Those two sang intermittently throughout the day, with real gusto, sometimes briefly accompanied by others among their comrades. From time to time, I came outside to admire their labor and hear their song.
Men’s Work
In his latest book, No Apologies, Anthony Esolen poses fundamental questions about this kind of activity and the men who do it. Why is it almost always men who are doing such things? Perhaps you’ve seen the rare female roofer—I cannot recall ever having observed one—but ask yourself how many women are physically capable of it. And how many of those women with the requisite strength and stamina do you believe would willingly choose to do this kind of work?
If you are being honest, you know these numbers are vanishingly small. They could doubtless be increased at least slightly. We could work hard as a society to tell girls from early on in life that roofing is something they should fervently desire to do. We might also subject girls to vigorous physical training to increase the number with the requisite strength.
But again, if you are being honest, you suspect that it would be next to impossible to change the overwhelmingly male skew of roofers more than marginally, even with all this effort. Many, many more men than women are both interested in the work and physically capable of doing it. But we could make a social engineering effort at considerable cost to move the balance a bit if we so desired.
But what exactly would we stand to gain by spending a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to get more women to do roofing? And what would we lose?
Now multiply the physical difficulty and danger of the work still more. Think of the last time you were in a big city and saw workers several stories up on a building frame or operating heavy equipment on the roadway. Did you see women among them? How many? Why do you think men are so much more in evidence in this kind of labor? Be honest.
Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
28.6—Nov/Dec 2015
on the Deepest Longings of the Restless & the Lonely by William Graddy
31.1—January/February 2018
on Ragnarök, an Extreme Weather Event & the Paths to Conversion by Timothy J. Burbery
14.6—July/August 2001
The Transformed Relics of the Fall
on the Fulfillment of History in Christ by Patrick Henry Reardon
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
