False Premises

January 26, 2008

I don’t usually post comments, but I was so astonished by Harvey C. Mansfield’s reading in Amsterdam the other night that I felt I had to say something. I’m also disappointed in the local reaction to Mansfield, which has been something like, “Hey, men, women, controversy. Fireworks! Fun!”
     Mansfield isn’t exactly the straw that stirs the drink. He’s more like the sewage that muddies the waters. A colleague of Mansfield’s at Harvard put it well in the New York Times: “He takes issues which might well need discussion and by overstating the problem makes them undiscussable.”
     I don’t know why I was expecting him to be donnish—maybe because he himself deals in masculine stereotypes. In fact he turned out to be gray-haired, small, and, I guess, boyish, in a smirky way. But at first he seemed harmless enough. The essay he read on the differences between men and women was nothing new or even really objectionable; it was all Mars and Venus, punctuated by repetitions of the word “natural.”
     The trouble was, the more clichés he droned out, the harder it became to argue with them. It was like crossing the field of sleep-inducing poppies: at each word you felt your limbs getting heavier and your brain getting duller as the received wisdom pulled you down. The gentleman sitting next to me nodded off.
     Two speakers had been asked to reply to Mansfield’s ideas: Stephan Sanders, a culture critic who writes on gay issues, and Stine Jensen, a popular young columnist who specializes in feminism and gender roles. Sanders was sardonic and hands-off; his comments amounted to, “Aren’t you heterosexuals strange?” But Jensen sharply criticized “Manliness” for its misrepresentation of feminist aims, as well as for making a false distinction between “macho” and “soft” men rather than distinguishing a range of male behaviors. She pointed to numerous studies saying that masculinity is a performance, and not one that always makes men happy.
     When she was done, Mansfield turned to her and said, “It’s hard to know what to say to such an attractive woman.” Yet, he added, her comments had been “strangely unerotic.” Startled and wounded, she started to defend pro-sex feminism (Germaine Greer, Erica Jong). But by the time she had gathered her thoughts he had already gone on to “loss of mystery, loss of romance, loss of courtliness” (I told you he spoke in clichés), culminating in his assertion that Jensen’s place was in the kitchen while he mowed the lawn. “The outdoors is where a man belongs.”
     “But I like working outside.”
     “Then you can do the garden.”
     Even Sanders didn't come to Jensen's defense, and the audience—especially a contingent of nerdy young neocons in sport coats—took Mansfield’s side. Sanders said little until the end, when Mansfield asserted that homosexuals' experience and opinions don't deserve to be counted because they “have chosen to remove themselves from the democratic majority.” By then it was too late.
     Arguing with Mansfield, I realized, is like arguing with the hydra. In the time it takes you to refute each false premise, error of logic, or ad hominem attack, he comes up with seven new ones. He misrepresents his opponent’s position. He lies about his own. He claimed he was defending a “liberalism” that had no sway in private life, yet by the end of the evening it was perfectly clear that he wanted to restore men’s authority within the family. When he said that men’s natural role was to “protect”* women, he really meant “control.”
     And the light dawned. Now I understand why the Democrats can’t win. It’s the hydra. It’s the sheer volume of distortions, misinformation, insults, and outright falsehoods. It’s the Swift boats and McCain’s “illegitimate daughter.” It’s the suppression of government research that doesn’t support the administration’s claims. It’s the 935 lies that got us into Iraq.
     The papers here have treated Mansfield as if he were a nutty professor writing on a lifestyle issue. He isn’t. He’s a prominent academic neoconservative, from a lineage that believes that disinformation is an acceptable means to power. At Harvard, he taught a generation of young Republicans, and, according to the New York Times, his influence reaches far. As a thinker about men and women, he’s a dinosaur. As a lesson in how a conservative plays to an audience, he was scary to watch.
     How can you argue with the hydra? I wish I knew. Germaine Greer was here last week, talking about Ann Hathaway and describing Ian McKellen as King Lear. (“He undid his trouser button and let his cock hang out! I don’t want to see Ian McKellen’s cock!”) We sure could have used her again this week. I longed to have her standing over Mansfield, wielding a firebrand. But who in the new generation is going to stand up and burn off all those lies?


* “As I understand it, what you protected us from was largely other males, wasn’t it?”
–James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read”