Joe Cary, a 36-year-old former bond trader who lives in Los Angeles, took a class at the Tracker School last spring and is enrolled in another this fall. "I had to do it," he said. "It was just male instinct that needed to be fulfilled."
Cary said he now had "a confidence so I know that I'll probably be OK when I walk into a shady place."
Harvey Mansfield, author of the recent book Manliness, and a professor of government at Harvard, said, "When manliness has nothing positive to do it goes to experiences that are contrived." It is odd, he added, that "when we need real fighters all we get is pretend fighters." Young men sign up for extreme survival courses because "they are as embarrassed about patriotism as they are about manliness, and to go into the military may seem too conventional."
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