Martha Nussbaum on “Manliness”

Martha Nussbaum wrote a completely awsome review of “Manliness” by Harvey Mansfield. Below is an excerpt but by all means read it in its entirety here:

…Mansfield’s assertions (I cannot quite call them arguments) seem to be as follows. Manliness, the quality of which John Wayne (says Mansfield) is the quintessential embodiment, is a characteristic that societies rightly value. But modern feminism wants a society that has effaced all distinctions of gender, a society in which men and women have the same traits. This is a dangerous mistake, because manly aggression, though not altogether reliable, supplies something without which we cannot have a good or stable society. (Mansfield connects manliness not only to military performance but also to the ability to govern a nation, and, as we have seen, he denies that women who are not Mrs. Thatcher have this trait.) Since women are only rarely capable of manliness, a society in which both sexes have the same traits will have to be lacking in manliness. We should reject this aim, and, with it, modern feminism.

The second half of the book contains, as Mansfield has warned his reader, a more complex set of assertions, though they all lead to the same bottom line. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as his more complex icon of manliness, Mansfield notes that traditional John Wayne-style manliness is not necessarily combined with virtue. Indeed, traditional manliness is often linked to a Nietzschean sort of “nihilism,” which accepts no restraints and desires to soar “beyond good and evil.” (This reading of Nietzsche, like so many readings in the book, is not defended by any close look at an actual text. Is this the Nietzsche who prizes the disciplined virtue of the dancer, who teaches that laisser aller, the absence of restraint, is incompatible with any great achievement of any sort?) Theodore Roosevelt, though, did combine traditional manliness with virtue, thus showing that it is both possible and valuable to do so.

On the whole, however, men will allow the constraints of virtue to drag down their manly flights only if women insist on virtue as a condition of sex. So women’s non-manly inclinations hold men in check. This old saw, which one encounters over and over again in the writings of Leo Strauss’s followers, seems to derive not from a realistic look at life but from an opportunistic reading of Rousseau’s Émile, minus all Rousseau’s complexity and nuance. Rousseau shows clearly that the difference between Émile and Sophie is produced by a coercive regime that curbs Sophie’s intelligence and even her physical prowess — she would have beaten Émile in the race had she not had to run in those absurd clothes. He also demonstrated, in his unpublished conclusion to the Émile-Sophie story, that a marriage so contracted would be a dismal failure, since parties so utterly distinct in moral upbringing would be totally unable to understand one another.

But back to feminism. Feminism (exemplified in Mansfield’s book by a few carefully selected bits of early 1970s authors) wants women to reject virtue and to seek sexual satisfaction promiscuously. In effect, it teaches women to be as “nihilistic” as men. But women are doomed to dismal failure at this task, because their manliness is puny. Meanwhile, they will lose the hold they once had on men through modesty and virtue. They will therefore be more endangered: Mansfield actually asserts that a woman can resist rape only with the aid of “a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment”! (How does he handle the well-known fact that a large proportion of rapes are committed by men with whom the victim has already had an intimate relationship, or with whom she currently has one?) Society, meanwhile, will come to grief. So, once again, the lesson is that we ought to rid ourselves of feminism.

Where to begin? Since in Mansfield all roads lead back to the bogey of feminism, let us begin there. Modern feminism is a hugely diverse set of positions and arguments, but almost nobody has seriously suggested that gender distinctions ought to be completely eradicated. Indeed, much of the effort of legal feminism has been to get the law to take them seriously enough. Thus feminists have urged that rape law take cognizance of women’s unequal and asymmetrical physical vulnerability. Some courts had refused to convict men of rape if the woman did not fight her attacker. In one recent Illinois case, the conviction was tossed out because the woman, about five feet tall and less than one hundred pounds, did not resist a two-hundred-pound attacker in a solitary forest preserve. But in a situation of great physical asymmetry, feminists have urged, fighting is actually a stupid thing to do, and in the Illinois case even crying out “No!” would have been stupid, given the extreme solitude of the place and the likelihood that shouting would provoke the attacker to violence. (I take this example from the feminist legal scholar Stephen Schulhofer. Mansfield utterly ignores the existence of male feminists, though they are many. Feminism is a concern with justice, not an exercise in identity politics.)

Feminists have also taken exception when insurance companies refused to offer pregnancy benefits and then claimed that they were not discriminating, because their policies protected all “non-pregnant persons” and refused to protect “pregnant persons,” male and female. Catharine MacKinnon made the valuable observation that sameness of treatment is not enough for the truly “equal protection of the laws,” when there are underlying physical asymmetries that significantly affect women’s social functioning. The “equal protection of the laws” requires, instead, that society dismantle regimes of hierarchy and subordination. MacKinnon’s strategy was based upon existing law in the area of race. Laws against miscegenation had been defended on the ground that they treat everyone alike: blacks cannot marry whites and whites cannot marry blacks. Yet the Supreme Court held that these laws violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because they uphold and perpetuate “white supremacy.” The denial of pregnancy benefits, MacKinnon argued, was like that, a regime of male supremacy. The refusal to offer pregnancy benefits is now seen as a form of sex discrimination, thanks to feminist argument.

Feminists, then, have not typically sought a society in which there are no gender distinctions. They have challenged imposed and unchosen gender norms that interfere with women’s freedom and functioning — seeking clothing, for example, in which one can do what one wants to do and is capable of doing (not like Sophie’s absurd doll clothes). Anne Hollander has written eloquently of the way in which women have claimed the suit, that attribute of the successful man the world over, as their own, replacing with it those billowing petticoats that made women seem vaguely like mermaids, human on top and some hidden uncleanness below. But women’s suits never have been and never will be precisely like men’s suits — perhaps because women have better fashion sense, perhaps because color-blindness is a male-sex-linked gene.

What feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are no sex-based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes of basic political and social functioning. Just as society now refuses to discriminate on grounds of religion and race, so too it should refuse to discriminate on grounds of sex. …

This wonderful Nussbaum piece contrasts quite dramatically with a review of same penned by antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers.