Men (15 page)

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 desires, 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.

There's no doubt that being groped by someone you find unappealing can be disgusting and gross. And irksome—for maybe a day or two. Even a week. But when Wolf writes, decades after the knee-groping, that she's
still afraid
of Bloom, and that he'd played such a large role in her imagination that she'd stopped writing poetry after the encounter, you find yourself thinking that some crucial things are being left out of the story. What's being left out, I'd suggest, is first of all, the great man's pathos, and second, the complainant's own conflicted desires.

When Bloom had invited Wolf to come chat with him after she'd audited one of his famous courses, she was “sick with excitement” at the prospect, she wrote. He had an aura that was compelling and intimidating, he attracted brilliant acolytes, and Wolf wanted to be one of them. And let's face it: the sexual privilege that accrues to Important Men like Bloom accrues for exactly these sorts of reasons, which is why ascribing such scenes to male sexual rapaciousness alone doesn't explain enough. For one thing, it bypasses the inconvenient problem that power can be erotic, even when possessed by otherwise flawed and unappealing people, especially for those without power (and I'm speaking as a former fawning young student myself: this is not unfamiliar territory). What is to be done, short of a complete overhaul of the human psyche?

Maybe a more nuanced account of male power would be a place to start. Let's imagine, for instance, that some percentage of these otherwise flawed and unappealing Important Men were the guys everyone laughed at in high school or who've been otherwise dented on their journeys through life and now, having achieved some elevated standing in the world, find themselves on the receiving end of periodic adulation from those in positions of lesser power, for instance, their students. Even if these flawed men
should
bring the full measure of their maturity and moral judgment to bear, even if the erotics of power and sexual activity per se
should
be understood as two distinct things, it's not hard to see that rectifying those earlier injuries and humiliations might be the more pressing psychical priority.

What I'm trying to say is that, paradoxically, the trouble really starts when the idealized masculine icon fails to be phallic
enough
, when the icons turn out to be damaged and insecure themselves, when it turns out that Big Men also want validation from those they're supposed to validate. And for the acolyte, with so much hero worship driving the story, how could the Big Man
not
fail and disappoint in stomach-curdling ways? Oedipally speaking, a father figure in the erotic crosshairs is a complicated entity, so complicated that twenty years later the idealizer might still be rehashing the story. (Wolf has told this one in multiple venues by the way; see a previous rendition in her memoir
Promiscuities
.)

But even beyond the levels of mutual miscomprehension propelling these situations, what I've never understood about the phrase “unwanted sexual advance” is that it suggests the outcome of the advance should be known
prior
to that outcome occurring. Do we all announce our desires in neon letters on our foreheads? Do we even know beforehand what they actually are? Surely someone's occasionally caught by surprise, unexpectedly propelled from a non-desiring state into a desiring one by something in the moment, or the air, or the wine. I know it's happened to me, and I suspect I'm not alone. The point is, how can the advance-maker be expected to know ahead of time whether an advance is wanted or unwanted when desire itself isn't a stable condition to begin with? Just to be clear, I'm not talking about cases of ongoing unwanted sexual advances—or threats, or quid pro quo demands—otherwise known as “sexual harassment.” I'm talking about regular human mating conduct, which often involves just … giving it a try.
2

I realize that raising such questions puts me out of step with current thinking about how professors should relate to our students. Maybe I'm out of step because when I was in school hooking up with professors was just what you did; it was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to art school, and in a different era. Mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum, after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims, back when sex—even when not so great or someone got their feelings hurt—fell under the category of experience, not trauma. It wasn't
harmful
; it didn't automatically impede your education; sometimes it even facilitated it. This isn't to say that teacher–student relations are guaranteed to turn out well, but then what percentage of romances do?