Men

by Laura Kipnis

  Humiliation concludes with a numbered compendium of Koestenbaum’s lifetime humiliations, from a disgustingly messy sneeze in fourth grade, up through more recent mortifications, like being told he has a flat ass. He may find writing humiliating, but he’s also lucky enough to be excited by the creative dimensions of humiliation. And here’s where I get off the bus—constructing a list of my favorite humiliated moments would be impossible for me, let alone publishing it. Even the thought makes me physically uncomfortable. Would I be a better writer if I cherished my humiliations more? I don’t cherish them, even though I suspect that every accumulated wound and misery seeps out onto the page in every sentence you write. Writers are compelled to flash their underwear around in public too, camouflaged to varying degrees by form or craft, with critics playing the sadistic teachers, camouflaged to varying degrees by attacks on your form or craft. Yes, it’s back to the third-grade classroom with every sentence you write, which is part of what makes it so excruciating. Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity—grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach—yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.

  For Koestenbaum, writing is very much something you do with your body. He makes the analogy explicit in an earlier essay called “Darling’s Prick,” which opens with Darling, a character in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, tracing the contours of his penis on a piece of paper and mailing it to his lover. For Darling, the dotted line is shorthand for something that desperately needs to be expressed, something essential about himself—call it a proto-selfie, if that makes it more intelligible. For Koestenbaum, this gesture of Darling’s is a metaphor for the enterprise of writing itself, and the urgency he wants his own writing to have.

  Notice that Darling and Weiner share a certain aesthetic bent. For Weiner too, there was something he needed to convey with those photos that he didn’t have another way of saying. If only he’d been a character from Genet instead of a politician from Queens! He may have used a cell phone in lieu of paper, but let’s imagine that he too was tracing the contours of something essential, however inchoately. “Assume there is a state of mind called ‘wanting to say,’” Koestenbaum suggests about Darling and, I’d imagine, about himself. From here, the humiliated congressman and the writer struggling for words—or any human groping for language—don’t look like such different animals.

  * * *

  It used to be women who were the hysterical sex, their bodies racked with sexual conflicts and emotional excesses. They were endlessly photographed and sketched, mid-paroxysm; the medical establishment turned them into a sideshows—recall the famous 1887 painting of Freud’s mentor Jean-Martin Charcot trotting out his favorite hysteric, “Blanche,” who cooperatively swoons before a packed seminar room of physicians at the Salpêtrière clinic.

  By the end of the twentieth century, it was men who were racked by sexual conflict, dedicated to playing out their inner lives in public. And not in the political sphere alone: watching male bodies being thrashed became a constant in other corners of the culture too. Masculinity became entangled with punishment, or at least it was a major cinematic motif: men getting beaten to a pulp and asking for more, in movie after movie, like one unending Fight Club. Sometimes it’s played for laughs—Mel Gibson is the emblematic late-twentieth-century figure here, ricocheting between clowning and crucifixion, on-screen and in life. But even when comedic, it’s still painful to watch.

  Are these tough guys showing how indestructible they are or penitents lined up for absolution? Or to put it another way: what does it mean to be a man clinging to power at this point in history?

  In Jonathan Lethem’s essay collection The Disappointment Artist, he writes about his obsession with John Ford’s 1956 psychosexual epic The Searchers, featuring John Wayne’s unsettling performance as the racist, enraged, and hysterical Ethan Edwards, out to avenge white men’s losses in post–Civil War Texas. After spending years tracking down his young niece, abducted by Comanches, shockingly, Edwards tries to murder her when he finds her living as the wife of a Comanche leader. Lethem comes to realize—after watching the movie a dozen times, beginning as a college student in 1982—that it speaks to him in some complicated way: if Wayne (playing against type) is an icon for male neurosis, the film is putting Lethem’s own neurotic symptoms under the microscope too. For him, the real subject of The Searchers is masculinity stretched to its breaking point.

  But his obsession with the film is also humiliating: he’s jeered and misunderstood by classmates and friends who can’t see past the misogyny and racism, not to mention the outdated codes of manhood—Wayne’s performance is so overwrought at times it’s just this side of camp. Still, something in this convoluted film expresses his inner reality, Lethem comes to think.

  Lethem’s lucky—like Koestenbaum, he gets to use culture as a shopping mall of obsessions, a playing field for expressive perversity, to figure out what he doesn’t understand about himself. Sure there are perils to writing your inner life’s deepest story in public. (Koestenbaum enumerates his bad reviews in Humiliation, another thing I’d be too mortified to do.) But at least the two of them have the leeway to explore the darker depths of masculinity in all its incoherencies without enduring national disgrace.

  Weiner went a different route. Two years after the first public humiliation, he attempted a political comeback, running for mayor of New York City, even briefly leading in the polls. Very briefly: new revelations soon emerged that he’d actually continued sexting various women even after he’d resigned from Congress, using the late-night comedy-ready pseudonym “Carlos Danger.”

  Credit must be given: if anyone’s a true Humiliation Artist, it’s Weiner. Stay tuned for the next comeback attempt.

  The Manly Man

  The big problem I had debating the eminent political philosopher Harvey Mansfield—neocon hero and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard—about his deeply offensive and deeply anxious book Manliness was that he was just so nice about it that it brought out the dominatrix in me. I wanted to bend him over a chair and thrash him black and blue with a riding crop. This isn’t a fantasy I’m accustomed to entertaining, especially about seventy-five-year-old Harvard professors, but I swear he was asking for it.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, as by that point Mansfield was being publicly flogged on a regular basis by an assortment of heavy hitters on the liberal left—it was like the book had a “Kick Me” sign on it. Martha Nussbaum had knocked him around in the New Republic for what she said was shoddy scholarship and illogic (according to an online commentator, she’d made him “her bitch”); Garry Wills had written a long, condescending takedown in the New York Review of Books, funnily titled “Mousiness.” Nussbaum and Wills took Manliness very seriously as an expression of ideas about sexual politics: they mounted attacks on those ideas, they fumed about Mansfield’s failure to be sufficiently enlightened about gender progress. But it wasn’t entirely clear to me, once I met him, that Mansfield himself took his ideas that seriously: he meant them as a provocation, obviously; but also, I started to think, as flirtation.

  His basic argument is that society needs manliness, which he defines in contradictory ways. At its best it’s “confidence in the face of risk,” though it can also be violent and stubborn. But we need manliness because all the great leaders and innovators throughout history have possessed it, Mansfield says, and feminism is trying to kill manliness off by promoting a gender-neutral society. Feminism is putting the future of humanity in peril! There are also a lot of summary statements about male and female nature along the way, such as that men are risk takers, whereas women shun risk and perceive it more readily than men—we fear spiders, for instance.

  There are certain men who just like getting women mad at them, for reasons that are open to speculation. This is not always an endearing or benign trait: Mansfield was the sole faculty member at Harvard to vote against a women
’s studies program, which is certainly one way to get a lot of women mad at you. At least he practiced his own code: “Manliness loves, and loves too much, the position of being embattled and alone against the world.”1

  It’s probably not a good thing about me when it comes to institutional politics, but I find it hard to get that worked up about dumb expressions of unreconstructed sexism. For one thing, in my experience it’s the subtle forms that are most insidious (these are not practiced exclusively by men). Also I’m just lazy: I don’t like having to rise to the bait like some sort of earnest marionette. It’s too exhausting. I prefer to just spread a thick layer of irony over the situation and hope my opponents smother in it.

  Mansfield and I ended up together onstage in this awkward intellectual blind date because we were both supposed to be contrarians about gender. I’d recently written a book about femininity and its discontents (The Female Thing); he was touting the manly virtues and trying to get feminists to take him on. The general argument of The Female Thing is that women are stuck ping-ponging between feminism and traditional femininity, which are incompatible ways of being in the world, which is why gender relations are messed up at the moment. Mansfield’s book actually echoes some of the same themes, though unlike him I don’t think there’s an essential female nature that feminism tries to minimize and suppress. I just think we’re living in transitional times. Someone had the bright idea of having us hash it out in front of an audience.

  We met for the first time shortly before the event was scheduled to start. Though I’d been prepared to loathe him, Mansfield was so courtly and deferential that I found myself quite disarmed. I’d been asked to summarize the differences between our books, so after the moderator introduced us, I went first.

  What follows are excerpts from an edited version of the conversation.

  LAURA KIPNIS: I was planning on starting out on a conciliatory note and saying that I hated Harvey’s book—can I call you Harvey?—far less than I thought I was going to, since I know from my close reading of Manliness that it’s women’s nature to be modest and conciliatory, and I’m doing my best to comply. Also I don’t feel like playing the role of the upright feminist here and having to defend feminism against a lot of silly potshots, which I’d find boring and so would everyone else. That ground has been covered too many times already, and even Harvey concedes at the end of his book that there’s no going back to traditional gender roles, and no recapturing some previous version of male privilege. Even he’s willing to defend certain of feminism’s achievements—

  [Mansfield starts to speak but I cut him off.]

  —you can correct me later if I’m wrong.

  And, in fact, I found the first third of the book quite interesting—I thought I recognized a fellow contrarian. But I must say the kindred feeling came to an end when I got to your ideas about feminism which, frankly, verge on male hysteria. By hysteria, I mean that vast quantities of anxiety are being generated about a completely invented and artificial threat, namely your idea that what feminists want is to eliminate all differences between the sexes.

  So I’d like to shift the focus instead to what I think is the book’s real concern, which is: What happens between men and women in the private realm, once sexual equality is achieved? The anxiety is that feminists have tried to enforce what the book calls “gender neutrality.”

  [to Mansfield] You use this term a lot, and frankly, it’s completely spurious! Gender neutrality isn’t anyone’s goal, and it’s certainly not what’s taken place! Walk down the street: Are men wearing skirts? Are men wearing lipstick? It’s not as though gender differences have been eliminated, or are going to be anytime soon. Which is why I’m calling this an anxiety rather than an argument. It’s a symptom of something that goes deeper. So I think we can take your concerns seriously as symptoms, even while agreeing that they have no actual basis in lived reality.

  So having said that, let me try to briefly outline—

  [The audience laughs, as I’ve already been going on for some time.]

  —some of the areas of agreement and disagreement between our two books, and then you can take it from there, okay?

  [Mansfield is looking a little stunned by this barrage of words, but appears to agree.]

  Okay, so another of the big anxieties in your book is that feminists aren’t any fun in bed.

  [More audience laughter.]

  And that feminist sexuality isn’t erotic. You say that feminists have successfully eliminated differences between the sexes, and you believe that sex requires gender roles to make it hotter—okay, maybe you don’t say it precisely this way, I’m paraphrasing.2

  So I’d like to reassure you on all these counts. First, I don’t even necessarily disagree with the idea that gender roles make sex hotter, and I suspect you’d find a lot of other feminists who wouldn’t disagree. Which means, to start with, that you’re simply mistaken when you collapse all feminists together and say that what we all want is equality in the bedroom. By the way, even a lot of same-sex couples still want to re-create traditional gender roles. So if a few gender-neutral couples out there are having bad sex, I feel like that’s not something you can really blame on feminism, though I understand that blaming feminism for the various ills of modern life, including the supposed decline of manliness, is the point of your book.

  Okay, I’m going to wind up and give you a chance to talk any minute now! Though I must also disagree with your idea that feminists are promiscuous and just want to have a lot of promiscuous sex, which is another of the big anxieties in the book. I’d say, rather, that what feminists, and women generally, want is better sex—quality, not quantity. Or first let’s go for quality, then quantity. But really, the more pressing issue is that we want female sexual pleasure to be taken as seriously as male sexual pleasure traditionally has been.

  So, in short, what I’m saying is that the book’s many anxieties—and it’s quite an anxious book—are not really based in reality. They’re psychosexual anxieties. They don’t reflect the social situation we live in, which isn’t to say they’re entirely without basis. After all, anxiety’s a real condition. But a good contrarian has to be accurate in describing the social picture, or his arguments just become silly rants.

  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, ther
e 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.