Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation by Laura Kipnis

Author:Laura Kipnis [Kipnis, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Men
ISBN: 9781627791885
Amazon: B00JYYSD0C
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2014-11-17T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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