Big Girls
Harvey Mansfield and Ayaan Hirsi Ali puzzle out our feminine ideal today. Mansfield:
Responsible choice guided by the inclinations of human nature is abandoned, and social science offers partial and partisan studies supposedly proving that women are either prisoners or conquerors of their inclinations. Social science sets itself against the impressions of common sense, yet studies in social psychology and evolutionary biology tend to confirm those impressions, otherwise known as “traditional stereotypes.” Social science blunders into popular discourse, destroying the authority of common sense and replacing it with confusion. Not to be excluded from anything open to men seems to be the most powerful desire of women today. Women want to be able to say they can do anything. Men do not feel this about themselves, vaguely aware as they are that women are indispensable. Perhaps the best contribution they can make now to understanding between the sexes is to refrain from asking women to prove they can do anything.
To be sure, our competing demands of our young women for hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity make for a stressful tension. But it wouldn’t be our age, would it, unless we sublimated this tension into yet another case of having our cake and eating it too? If Mansfield is right that social science tells us one thing or the other when it comes to the truth about being female, our anti-science — the pop-culture humanities departments of Fantasy, Celebrity, and Personality — tells us one thing and the other. Be more manly, girls! — And more womanly! Nietzsche wept.
Coincidentally, my piece at AmSpec today says a lot more about roughing and toughening up our girls in the age of Rihanna.
There wasn’t room to size up our boys today, but Ali herself suggests a place to start:
As for the males who are uncertain about their position in the gender divide, their preoccupation is not with courage but is a different kind of permanent struggle: the one to find oneself, or in other words, navel-gazing as a state of mind.
The term “navel-gazing” is mauvaise foi in elemental form.
— Freddie · Mar 6, 05:29 PM · #
That culture doesn’t send a clear unified message to it’s victims, no matter what that message may be, is one of the root anxieties driving the basic conservative psychology these days.
— cw · Mar 6, 06:42 PM · #
Interesting article.
When I was living in a medium sized town central IL, I was at a bar with some friends and we were complaining about the white power types, and an old guy who we liked said “Stop shitting on the KKK.” Us: “Seriously?” And he responded “I know they have their problems, but back in the day if a man was beating a women, they’d have a talk with him. And if he didn’t listen, they’d make sure he went away.”
It’s an odd story, because growing up among cops in a white ethnic southside neighborhood of Chicago, I’d hear stories late at night at big gatherings about how off-duty and ex cops would have to be neighborhood enforcers, taking care of domestic abuse situations. I still remember hearing laughter at how clumsy wife beaters were (they fall down the stairs all the time. They bump into things a lot, too).
(And to be pop culture about it, this situation is exactly how the Godfather opens.)
I’m both attracted to and repulsed by the way the authority of violence in these, and other, matters gets handled in poor and small neighborhoods – but I imagine it is not a strong suit of the mass middle class you allude to in your article. The career-success-gladiator habitus instilled in those girls is hopefully not the landmine you worry it is when it comes to handling the more corrupt and dangerous men among us.
— Rortybomb · Mar 6, 09:33 PM · #
“Social science blunders into popular discourse, destroying the authority of common sense and replacing it with confusion.”
How one longs for the idyllic days before social science, when everyone had ‘common sense,’ and no one was ever confused!
— Max Socol · Mar 7, 01:30 AM · #