Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/10/21/mansfield_manliness_and_masculinity.php
Friday, October 21, 2005
"We live in a Queer Age." So claimed English department chairman Peter Travis at an October 12 debate with Harvard's Harvey Mansfield. I'm not sure if the age is such, but Prof. Travis's pink shirt certainly was—though he didn't specify where it placed him in the supposed "rainbow of genders." "Have you heard of the third gender?" he asked. I hadn't, though he seemed to intend the question rhetorically.
Sexuality wasn't the topic at hand—the prompt was "Is Manliness a Virtue in a Free Society?"—but the excerpts above give you a sense of what end of the ideological rainbow the good professor was coming from. Arguing for the negative, Travis used this "evidence" to support his claim that gender is a social construct.
Prof. Mansfield concluded his opening address by listing a series of traditional gender stereotypes—"men are hard, women are soft" and so forth—and surmising that they are "mostly correct." As the capacity crowd in Dartmouth Hall sat in stunned silence ("how did such a Neanderthal ever get tenure?" I could hear many audience members thinking), it was clear that we had a genuine disagreement on our hands. Unlike many such events, this debate seemed poised to live up to its name.
It was potential that went largely unrealized, however, primarily because the professors were talking past each other for much of the 90 minutes. Their mutual misunderstanding—or refusal to engage their contrary understanding—was embodied by their use of terminology. Mansfield referred to the quality under consideration as "manliness," which is the title of his forthcoming book. Travis ridiculed "manliness" as a quaint 19th-century anachronism and instead preferred "masculinity," the topic discussed in his occasional Dartmouth course "Constructing a Masculine Mystique." Mansfield was as dismissive of "masculinity" as Travis was of "manliness," but the dispute was never resolved—or even addressed.
This talking past each other infected the substance of the debate. This was due, in part, to the format. Government professor Allan Stam, though christened moderator, spent most of his podium time delivering soliloquies on his manliness—which were, admittedly, hilarious—and little energy to forcing the combatants to spar rather than flail their rhetorical weapons in opposite directions. Only once did Profs. Travis and Mansfield respond to the same question in rapid succession.
But what of the substance? Prof. Travis's stated initial position—that gender is a social construct—is clearly bunk. While many liberals assert that there are no inherent sex differences and disputing this orthodoxy in official discourse can get one in hot water fast—just ask Harvard president Larry Summers—no one actually believes it. If you doubt me, just try asking for the unisex bathroom next time you are sauntering through the hallowed halls of an enlightened university.
And this is just the tip of the empirical iceberg. In any number of things, good and bad, the distribution of men and women is bi-modal. More men than women are elected to political office. More men than women end up in prison. This says nothing about the capabilities of any individual man or women—or even where the two distributions intersect on any given tendency—but rather that, on so many things, we're dealing with two sets of data.
And then there is the whole business of child-bearing. Charles Murray (he of The Bell Curve) boiled down the whole business is a recent Commentary article on the Summers controversy. (For those who have been living under a rock or wisely steer clear of academic squabbles, Summers said at an academic conference that biological differences may be responsible for the disproportionate number of men at the extreme right end of the curve in math and science. He was ransomed only after Harvard committed several hundred million dollars to fighting against nature.) After listing the number of female Nobel laureates—there aren't many, Murray noted that being enough standard deviations above the mean to win a Nobel Prize requires unbending devotion to a single pursuit. Women, he theorized, do not exhibit this devotion as frequently as men because some (many?) take time off of work due to pregnancy, and many of those choose to take on childcare responsibilities. Whether this is what nature intended or an unfortunate side effect of womanhood is up for normative debate, but the descriptive biological fact remains.
Lest anyone still doubt the differences between men and women, consider this e-mail sent to The Dartmouth Review by Xenia Markowitt of the Center for Women and Gender in response our polite request to co-sponsor last week's debate:
Thank you for thinking of the CWG and the Men's Project to cosponsor your event. We like having the opportunity to support student efforts to create programming on campus. Our guiding principles in supporting such initiatives are that these programs create space for positive dialogue on a given topic, and not create polarizing nor divisive conversations. "Debates" as a rule are not our preferred method of achieving that end…Therefore with the information I have now, the CWG (and the Men's Project) will decline to cosponsor the event.
A man would never have written that.
The claims above remain ideologically controversially, even if empirically verified (and yes, on that last bit, I jest), but I need give no further support to my claim about profound sex differences. Prof. Travis did so for me. You see, for all his babbling about social constructs in his opening, Travis spent the rest of the debate making categorical claims about men. Most all of them were negative, but they were categorical nonetheless: men are insecure, men are imprisoned, men are just plain in trouble.
Mansfield, as it happens, didn't disagree. Men are in trouble (everywhere outside the manly preserve of the Review office, of course); the only question is whether this has been caused by the abandonment of manliness (Mansfield's position) or the embrace of the masculine mystique (Travis's view). To resolve this dispute, we must consult history—were men really manly back in the proverbial day or do some like Mansfield just pretend they are?—but whatever the clarification, the conflict is between two views that presume sex differences. Either men are bad, or men have some good qualities and some bad, but men indisputably are.
Mansfield caught Travis on this. His one question for Travis was along the lines of "If manliness doesn't exist, how can it be bad?" Sadly, Travis completed avoided responding to his interlocutor, but his answer was implicitly clear.
Mansfield napped Travis in one other place, creating the most poignant moment of the debate. After the English professor got done enthusiastically reeling off the pitfalls of the manly myth, his Harvard counterpart said simply: "What a manly display of exaggeration!"
Later on, when the tenor turned political, Travis listed a slew of Republicans who hadn't served in the war and a slew of Democrats who had (you see where he's going with this, given the shared assumption that war is the most masculine and/or manliest of pursuits). Mansfield replied, again simply, by pointing that John Kerry protested the very war in which he was a hero, a fact brimming with symbolism.
Mansfield didn't go there, but much the same could be said of Travis, protesting the very characteristic his rhetorical bombast embodied. In his attempted obliteration of manliness, he was very manly indeed.