by Laura Kipnis
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.]
MANSFIELD: Maybe some questions from the audience?
MAN IN AUDIENCE: I want to ask Professor Mansfield if it’s true that manliness is a quality of men, if it has to do with risk-taking and aggression and strength, what will be the consequences to the conflicts among nations and entities when one is more feminine and one is more masculine?
MANSFIELD: Or what would be the consequences internationally for a country that was more feminine versus one that was more masculine? Well, we may be finding that out when we look at the decline or decadence of Europe—
KIPNIS: Because of all the women leaders, you mean?
MANSFIELD: Because of all the womanliness in their policies. Let me be less provocative and say that I perfectly well realize that men are responsible for most of the ills in the world and also for most of the remedies. So you look at the manliness of the Islamic hijackers, it takes a certain manliness—a corrupt or perverted manliness—to fly airplanes into buildings and kill people. Versus the manliness of the New York police and firefighters who went up the stairs of those buildings, knowing that they probably wouldn’t come back down.
So yes, I think that manliness is responsible for the fact that the great preponderance of crime is committed by men. The great preponderance of the prison population are men. History’s great tyrants are men. But men are also responsible for the kind of good which results from somebody standing up and taking a risk. So manliness is not simply aggression, it’s also assertion—assertion of a point of justice, or a point of right. When that point is a contest and when it takes courage, then it takes manliness to make that point.
KIPNIS: Your argument, once again, gets very slippery: whatever you disapprove of gets described as feminine, so the European welfare state is feminine because you’re politically against it. Whatever social institution you approve of, namely the culture of individualism, or a personal trait like courage, is manly.
MANSFIELD: But earlier you heard me praise the morality of women.
KIPNIS: Yes, we’re all very grateful!
MANSFIELD: Yes, I know you are, that’s why I did it. There are differences between men and women, and some of them are to the advantage of men and some are to the advantage of women, and sometimes it’s good to have both. On the whole we need aggression but we also need caring. But it’s just very unlikely that you’re going to routinely find one person who’s both. When I say that women are less aggressive than men, that’s a generalization. A stereotype. But most stereotypes, as I’ve said before, are true with regard to sex.
KIPNIS: Like dumb blondes?
MANSFIELD: Dumb blondes are … a disappointment.
KIPNIS: There’s a quote from Brecht, which I’ll paraphrase because I can’t remember it exactly, it goes something like: “It’s impossible to understand the laws of gravity from the point of view of a tennis ball.” And in my view, we’re all the tennis balls at this moment. We’re living through a period of massive social and economic transformations, and both of our books respond, in different ways, to this period of upheaval in gender roles.
MANSFIELD: You know, I’ll defend you on this, because—
KIPNIS: My protector!
MANSFIELD: —you may not like it [addressing the audience]—but I think there’s a lot of common sense in her books, and much less feminism than we’ve seen today in her manner. And she does recognize the obvious differences between the sexes and tries to come to terms with them, and she recognizes them in a very intelligent manner. I wouldn’t give up on her.
I was left wanting to thrash him, but in a fond sort of way. After the debate, Mansfield shook hands with me and told me how wonderful I was. He couldn’t have been more gracious. A short time later he invited me to Harvard for a conference he was holding on feminism (with a nice honorarium), but the prospect of having to play the role of its tireless defender and rehash basic principles exhausted me in advance, so I politely declined.
III
SEX FIENDS
Gropers
It’s not that I don’t take male professors seriously, far from it: these are a serious bunch of guys with vast storehouses of accumulated knowledge about often-arcane things, though it’s no news that social graces aren’t always high on the list. Ask a male academic what he’s working on and too often he starts vying with Fidel for the longest monologue on record. He feels some compelling need to cram all the available space full of words, his words. Does he think you’re interested? No, he’s forgotten you’re even there. Having posed this question on occasion when stumped for conversational topics at an academic reception or cocktail party—then been left shifting my weight from one foot to the other clutching a long-empty glass, praying for rescue or at least a refill—I’ve resolved to shelve such lines of inquiry. I feel especially bad for their students, forced to endure semester-long monologues delivered with all the charm of sawdust, though let me quickly add that some my best friends are male academics, and they’re exempt from the above remarks.
But all in all, I like academic life. At its best, it’s a big drawing room comedy peopled by awkward characters like me, bumbling around, causing offense in new and surprising ways. I also love academic gossip, one of the great topics at academic conferences, where, after delivering papers to dozing colleagues from far-flung places, we gossip about other colleagues not in attendance, especially the annoying ones. At one such recent event, I was wedged between two acquaintances who’d formerly taught at the same university. The wine was flowing; so was the professional dirt. One had since moved on to more lucrative pastures, and the other one was updating her on departmental politics and personalities at the old place: whose book was finished, who had another job offer, whose tenure prospects were looking grim. “What about Bob?” asked the departed one, delicately wrinkling her nose. “Just as bad,” replied the other. “It’s a real problem.” She explained to me, “We have this guy in the department who … doesn’t wash.” They both laughed, almost apologetically. “He smells.” This was no mild odor apparently, but a full-fledged stench. “It’s worse if he gets excited about something. If you get into an argument with him, watch out.” The departed colleague suggested that it was a form of aggression. He sounded like a skunk, able to release malodorous stink bombs at will. “Time for an anonymous note,” I proposed. “You could make it sound like it came from a student—misspell everything.”
Bob comes to mind because stinky academic behavior has been so much in the news lately, and the offenses of the male professoriate continue to take such eye-rolling forms. The problem is that a slew of new behavioral regulations are being imposed on all the rest of us in consequence. And it’s all taken so seriously now: some maladroit male professor gropes an undergraduate, and instead of ridiculing the guy, or telling him to back off, in today’s climate it’s practically mandated that the student become traumatized for life by the experience.1
The new terminology coined to address such occasions is making things even worse. Consider the “unwanted sexual advance”: what tangled tales of backfired d
esires, bristling umbrage, and mutual misunderstanding lurk behind this sterile little phrase. In the right hands, such narratives once provided great raw material for comic or satirical treatment: look how obtuse humans can be in the throes of desire! What optimists we are about our charms and physical allures! But those deploying the new coinages find no human comedy in such situations. Forget bumbling pathos or social ineptitude—in these accounts, it’s all trauma, all the time.
Let me offer an example of what I mean, since a detailed account of one such episode is contained in the charges leveled in a New York magazine cover story by feminist author Naomi Wolf against the literary lion Harold Bloom—a man of rather advanced years at the time of the article’s publication—concerning a long-ago unwanted sexual advance. Despite the ancient vintage of the incident, the story created an international media stir. And by ancient, I mean it had taken place some twenty years before, when Wolf was in her senior year at Yale and Bloom was one of its celebrity professors. He had “sexually encroached” on her, she now charged, and she still wasn’t over it.
The story goes like this: Wolf had asked Bloom to do an independent study devoted to critiquing her poetry, and he agreed to meet with her weekly. Unfortunately, these sessions failed to come off. Bloom, known for hanging out with his student coterie at a local pub, suggested getting together over a glass of amontillado to discuss the poems, but this never happened either. Bloom then invited himself over to dinner one night with Wolf and her two roommates—one of the roommates happened to be Bloom’s editorial assistant. After dinner the roommates go off somewhere, Bloom and Wolf are sitting on the couch. Bloom clutches Wolf’s sheaf of poems close and Wolf thinks she’s finally going to receive a few pearls of insight from the illustrious scholar. Instead he leans over, breathing, “You have the aura of election upon you.” Then he puts his hand on her thigh—a “heavy, boneless hand,” as Wolf describes it, in a bit of literary-anatomical flourish. Wolf leaps up and vomits into the kitchen sink. Bloom leaps up and grabs his coat. Corking up the rest of his fancy sherry, he leaves, telling her on the way out, “You are a deeply troubled girl.” They never met again; Bloom gave her a B for the independent study.