Now in my fifties, I listen to the Girl Watchers and find myself invigorated by their moral clarity. In a frenzied age in which the young and even the middle aged endlessly seek contentment in the next new thing, they continue to subscribe to older verities, perhaps most emphatically to those once unembarrassedly known as the “manly virtues”: self-reliance, honest effort, commitment to ideals larger than themselves.