Men (14 page)

So to conclude, feminism was never about forcing gender neutrality on the world, it was about ending gender hierarchies and the systematic forms of privilege that excluded women from important areas of social and public and professional life. But it's certainly understandable to me that the process of rebalancing the traditional distribution of power
would
be a source of male anxiety.

HARVEY MANSFIELD:
This reminds me of my experience with Naomi Wolf [
apparently he meant that she wouldn't let him get a word in either
], but I'll begin by saying that I loved your book. In fact, your books, as I read your other one,
Against Love
, too. And I very much recommend that you [
to the audience
] buy them. Because this lady is a wonderful phrase turner, a beautiful writer and observer, and she's a thinker.

[
I was starting to feel bad about mocking his book; he really was a nice man.
]

I begin with that, and also I begin with the end of your book where you say that femininity and feminism are out of whack—I think that's definitely true. I very much agree with you there.

What you call the “female condition,” I would call “female nature.” The essential female condition, I think, is for women to be with men and to understand that men and women are different. So it becomes necessary to appreciate and to come to terms with those differences [
I'm starting to like him less
], whereas the female situation of today—meaning the effects that feminists have had on women—involve living in a society, which I call the gender-neutral society, where female nature is denied and gender differences are minimized as much as possible. By which I mean, your sex no longer gives you your rights, it doesn't give you your duties, and it certainly doesn't give you your place. That's a big difference from the past.

Now, it's true, there are lots of exceptions to this. But as an aspiration, society today wants sex to matter as little as possible [
most people would say “gender,” but he prefers to collapse the two
], and therefore we want manliness not to exist. There isn't any respect or justification for the existence of a quality like manliness, which is specific to one sex only. Now, I don't say manliness is exclusively male [
indeed, he cites Margaret Thatcher admiringly as a paragon of manliness
], but it's predominantly male, something that men have.

How I define manliness is: “confidence in a situation of risk.” Women have confidence, too, but they don't seek out risk the way men do. Or, better to say, the way some men do. Because manliness is a very
judgmental
quality. Some men have it, others don't, and those who have it look down on the men who don't have it. Whereas women, being excluded from manliness (even if that's not totally the case), are excused from being unmanly. So now we can go into some of the other differences between us.

KIPNIS:
Well, one area about which you and I completely disagree is the really egregious claim that female modesty is a protection against rape. That's just silly. So is the idea that if women relied more on their femininity, men would be less violent because their protective instincts would be aroused. Also that if women played our roles more in accordance with nature, things would be better all around, because that would contain aggressive male behavior.

That's just a lack of reality, or a failure of social observation. It not only blames women for male irresponsibility—i.e., if we were more modest, then men wouldn't ever leave their wives and families in the lurch—it also blames us for the economic uncertainties inflicted on us all at this stage of capitalism. If women were more modest the family wage would be magically reinstated? Those evaporating pension plans would rematerialize? Look, the very idea that a woman can rely on a man for a lifetime of economic support is increasingly dubious, and that's just the new economic reality for all of us, no matter how demure and modest a woman is.

MANSFIELD:
Well, let me say something about women's modesty.

KIPNIS:
Please do.

MANSFIELD:
I think women are naturally more modest than men. Men are more predatory or more adventurous in sex, and—it's true, a lot of women today try to match men here. And some of them succeed. Because a natural inclination is not something you
can't
oppose. So when I say women are naturally more modest, that doesn't mean that they can't be immodest, if they try hard enough. But they'll still always be fundamentally
more
modest, even when they don't want to be. Since this is the case, and since studies in social psychology tend to prove it, isn't it true that women, when they abandon the double standard in sexual morality—and that, by the way, is the only standard—are simply unhappier? Because once you abandon that, you abandon any standard at all.

KIPNIS:
Well, mutual pleasure is one standard.

MANSFIELD:
All right, okay—I agree with that. But it's not a moral standard.

KIPNIS:
We probably disagree about that.

MANSFIELD:
All right. But once you play the man's game, aren't you pretty likely to lose? You're going onto their ground when you try to compete with men in brashness. I think it's still the case that women like to be asked out, rather than asking out. For a man these days, sure it can be a great thrill to be asked out on a date by a woman. But, for the most part, women leave that to men, because when you ask somebody out you're taking the initiative, and I think men still want to take the initiative. They're the ones who make the first pass. You put your ego on the line. And I think a lot of women are more sensitive than men are. When a man gets slapped down he forgets it. It's not a great blow to his ego because there is probably something wrong with the woman who doesn't like him. [
Scattered laughter from audience.
] But it's different for women.

KIPNIS:
You know, until pretty recently there were many more consequences for women when it came to sexual expression than for men. When Simone de Beauvoir, whom you discuss in your book, wrote
The Second Sex
, birth control was actually illegal in France—she had to go to New York to get a diaphragm. It's been less than fifty years that women have been freed from at least some of the consequences of sexual expression. So what women are “by nature,” or whether women are more modest or equally immodest—I just think we don't yet know. Ditto the question of what women want from men, given that economic independence from men is also a fairly recent option.

MANSFIELD:
As important as careers are for women, what's been more central in feminist thinking is this obsession with sex. And that's what's so wrong about feminism, and what has caused all the difficulties we see today and all the unhappiness that women have. Because most women do want to get married, and that's because they're smart enough to realize that a happy marriage is the most common and easiest way for a human being to be happy.

KIPNIS:
I recall quoting a statistic in
Against Love
that only 37 percent of American couples who are married say they're actually happy. So your ideas about happiness in marriage may be overstated. But speaking of marriage, I was quite surprised to find such an ode to henpecking in your book, which comes up as part of your premise that women's role is to be a moral corrective for men. I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that not many men are so on board with the henpecking plan.

MANSFIELD:
Women and men are just happier married. What I actually said was that a happy marriage is the most common form of happiness.

KIPNIS:
Ah, you're equivocating.

MANSFIELD:
I didn't say
all
marriages are happy.

KIPNIS:
And the percentages are diminishing by the minute.

MANSFIELD:
Yes, I do think the number of unhappy marriages has been much increased by feminism. For example, the kinds of things we see on
Desperate Housewives
, where all the troubles of modern feminism are on view.

KIPNIS:
[
Laughing
] Wait, are those women
feminists
? There's a certain slippage here between “women” and “feminists.”

MANSFIELD:
Right.

KIPNIS:
When you say about
Desperate Housewives
that these are the emblems of modern feminism—where's the feminism? Sure they're women, they're suburban women living in suburban households. Maybe a few of them work outside the home, but again, what feminism?

MANSFIELD:
I meant they show that feminism doesn't work.

KIPNIS:
I see. Look, I know, you reject Freudian explanations, and let me preface what I'm about to say by reassuring you that I don't mean this in a personal way, but—

MANSFIELD:
Uh-oh!

KIPNIS:
 —but there's just a real animus against women in your book, and it comes across in what you're saying here. You blame women for every problem of modern existence, including structural transformations that we're all struggling through. Let me cite a leading conservative, Francis Fukuyama, in
The Great Disruption
—just to show that I'm not somebody who thinks all conservatives are dumb—which is about the transformation to an information society, or postindustrial capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. His point is that this stage of economic development doesn't require gender differentiation for the new jobs that are available, especially technological or information-based jobs. Women's entry into the labor force and all the changes in the family starting in the '70s wasn't because of
feminism
, it was due to transformations in the economy, including the need for two incomes to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. He thinks feminism was an epiphenomenon of these economic transformations, not a cause of social shifts. In other words, don't blame feminists, blame capitalism! Yet all these economic forces somehow drop out of your argument and what you substitute instead is this nostalgic idea that aggression derives from body strength, and aggression underpins manliness, and manliness is the necessary quality for social creativity and energy, which accounts for who should run things—as if manliness is all that's necessary to put everything back on track.

MANSFIELD:
Women, I think, just don't have the same kind of nonstop ambition that a man has. The “glass ceiling” is, for the most part, self-created by women. And I don't blame them for that because they realize that they're not going to be as happy as a man can be, sort of pushing ahead and never thinking about what's going on with the family back home. And that's why I think women are very wise in not trying to equal men for the same degree of income and career ambition. It's a good thing that people expect women to take care of their family more than they expect men to. And that's because women are better at it.

[
Moans from the audience.
]

KIPNIS:
But creativity and intelligence are distributed equally between the sexes, so why are women supposed to relegate our creative efforts to the home, or to being moral correctives for men? Or let me try another approach. If you value women's moral contributions so much, then put your money where your mouth is. If things like child care and taking care of the home are such valued social enterprises, then reward people for doing them—give women Social Security or actual wages for these labors, which was one of second wave feminism's big ideas: wages for housework. Or how about wages for being moral correctives on men?

MANSFIELD:
That's another one of my gripes with feminism—too much concern with money and calculation.

[
Groans and laughter from the audience
.]

KIPNIS:
Okay, there's another issue I'd like to bring up, which is your idea about nature itself having some kind of moral force, that should in turn dictate our social roles. I have to argue with the idea that there are “natural” gender roles. To begin with, arguments proceeding from nature are completely suspect to me, because they're always completely selective. We like nature when it's a nice day at the beach; we don't like nature when it means being killed by a tsunami. We like flush toilets instead of having to defecate in the backyard, which would actually be far more “natural.” We want to have happy sex lives without having to raise a dozen children. So even if there are physiological differences between the sexes that derive from nature, let's consider all these ways that technology and modernity have overridden “nature,” in ways I believe all of us are in favor of.

MANSFIELD:
In fact, the purists and the most radical feminists were very much hostile to motherhood and to anything which smacked of the physiological, or I might say the natural differences between the two sexes. The other thing feminists took no account of is manliness, or any quality specific to men that might cause resistance in them [to feminism], or that might require special allowances.

KIPNIS:
That's a caricature of feminists. Or anyway you're picking and choosing which feminists you pay attention to.

MANSFIELD:
I must admit, there are the later, more reasonable, less radical feminists. But their attention to manliness is about what they see as the defects of manliness, not the positive qualities, the assertive qualities, those qualities which have made men the leaders of all the great changes of the world.

[
Groans, laughter, and a smattering of applause from the audience.
]