Got virtually nothing to do with manliness per say, its got almost everything to do with the driving experience. If you want to tell me an auto is just as enjoyable, just as fulfilling an experience, well, so be it. Climbing into a performance car and just dropping the damn thing into "drive" is a pretty damn lame experience in my book.
We've had this argument in here ad nauseam, but there is a big difference between driving an automatic slush box and a properly sorted DCT.