Harvey Mansfield, class of 1953 and Professor of Government at Harvard, reflects [pdf – scroll down] on changes to sexual relations since the time he was an undergraduate. He finds
Much improvement since my day. Undergraduate men and women see one another every day; they study together and eat together. Everyone now gets to meet many more people of the opposite sex. In these meetings there is less pressure, less artificiality. You can be yourself. I remember weekend dates brought into the dining hall to stand in line for dinner, running a gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.
But on the other hand: “What is not so good is the loss of romance. Less formality means less romance – less courting, less tension, less excitement…. There is more consummation and less yearning.”
I rather doubt this is right, but at least I think I understand his point. Soon he loses me, however:
Men are less spirited than they were in my day, when we lived in relative isolation from women. Men today are always in the presence of women, hence always in fear of making fools of themselves before women. College men have become premature husbands.
So much for the ability to “be yourself” of the previous paragraph – now men are “always in fear of making fools of themselves”. But “less spirited”? “premature husbands”? I really have no idea what he is trying to get at. But he needs something to balance the manifest increase in social justice of allowing women to control their own sexuality.
In his final sentence, he gets to his point, as the loss of “spirit” is transformed into the loss of “love” and “happiness”:
Altogether, in comparison with the time of my youth, I think I see more equality now and less love and spirit; or more justice and less happiness.
Somehow, I don’t think he has in mind the women “brought in” to run “the gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.” How spirited and romantic it all must have been!
{ 19 comments }
brian fink 02.21.04 at 1:52 am
man, did you ever notis how dum bush lookz?
Prometheus 6 02.21.04 at 2:47 am
The professor reminds me of that twaddle duToit passed around the net a little while back.
Michael Bérubé 02.21.04 at 4:04 am
Problem is, Jon, you’re not reading Mansfield with the patented Allan Bloom Decoder Ring. You have to reference the passage in *The Closing of the American Mind* when Bloom eulogizes the days when truly erotic students ran “from prostitutes to Plato, and back,” and laments the mid-1980s campus in which students have lots of sex but no romance. The meme is basically this: yes, female undergraduates have been good in some ways (we’re not misogynists, mind you!)– but they have also led our young men to spend unwisely some of the purity of their essence.
Mike 02.21.04 at 4:44 am
Well, he’s not being so precise with his words because of the space limitation and it seems that the talk was intended to be somewhat in jest in any case.
I’m going to be pendantic here, but here goes:
I think the internal contradiction Jon points to can be resolved. By “you can be yourself,” he really meant “you can be MORE yourself compared to before.” He wasn’t saying “100% yourself.” Notice immediately before that sentence, he said “there’s less pressure, less artificiality.” The “can be yourself” was also meant comparatively. If he had meant you can be “100% yourself,” then he would have said “there is no pressure, no artificiality.”
What he meant was that guys can be more themselves with women nowadays because they have more occasion to be with women and thus have more practice. But he feels that guys can be EVEN MORE themselves when women are not around, which was more the case when he was young.
It might illustrate the point better if I use some numbers. He’s saying that, in the past, guys could be, say, “90% themselves” 90% of the time (when they were with other guys) and “10% themselves” 10% of the time (when they were with women).
In contrast, today guys are in the presence of women, say, 80% of the time. So even though today they can be more themselves with women around, say “60% themselves,” looking at their situation as a whole, they actually spend more time being “less themselves” compared to before, and thus resulting perhaps in reduced happiness.
You might not agree with his argument, but I don’t think he’s making the elementary mistake in logic that you think he’s making.
Cryptic Ned 02.21.04 at 6:40 am
This reminds me of the articles that complain about the pathetically low standards of US college graduates nowadays by comparison with US college graduates in 1850, without pointing out that back then maybe the thousand wealthiest people in the country went to college, whereas now 1/3 of the population goes to college (numbers plucked directly from the air).
“Sure, for the majority of people, their opportunities have gone from zero to pretty good. But for the people who actually engaged in these activities back then, their opportunities would be less nowadays. To be sure, the downgrading of standards in geometry, oratory, and Latin has been affected by the great increase in college admissions, but one sheds a tear for the days when if you met a fellow college graduate you knew the same things as him.”
Maynard Handley 02.21.04 at 5:45 pm
More to the point, I think, the argument is largely bunk on a scientific basis.
Last week’s _Economist_’s science section had an article describing a neurochemical breakdown of “love” into three components: lust, “romance —essentially a medium-term infatuation with some-one else, characterized by obsessive and irrational behavior”, and the warm glow of long-term companionship.
So what we apparently have now is more lust, less romance, and no comment on the long-term companionship issue. This seems like a perfectly reasonable tradeoff, especially since the lust is fun and the romance can often be pretty unbearable.
The real issue is the extent to which more lust and less romance while one is in one’s twenties increases or decreases one’s chances later in life of finding a suitable long-term companion. This is presumably an empirical matter, though my intuition would be that it’s a good idea. More lust indulged in means less marrying purely on the basis of lust and more experience with a variety of people, meaning you have a better chance of knowing what sort of person makes you happy; while anything that postpones marriage a few years from the lunacy of one’s early twenties seems like it would also be a good idea.
The nays would presumably claim that something about the romance stage lays the foundation for a deep and (reasonably) enduring relationship, but they’re going to have to flesh the argument out quite a bit to have a hope of convincing me.
ginger 02.21.04 at 7:05 pm
But “less spirited� “premature husbands� I really have no idea what he is trying to get at.
You know it already… and you said it already: … he needs something to balance the manifest increase in social justice of allowing women to control their own sexuality.
Some old fogeys really, really miss the good old times of women not even being allowed in universities.
Let them moan and whine. As long as that’s all they do, who cares.
It’s funny though, cos by blaming women for everything he sees wrong with men, he’s showing a really poor consideration of men too. Like they were brainless puppets, brainwashed by girls who, even if they go to college, are thinking of nothing else but enslaving the male and turning him into a domesticated animal known as “husband”. Cos that’s all a woman is after, the bitch.
Ok, I can think of a few situations where that’s exactly what happens, heh, but still…
Matt McG 02.21.04 at 8:27 pm
“Some old fogeys really, really miss the good old times of women not even being allowed in universities.
Let them moan and whine. As long as that’s all they do, who cares.
It’s funny though, cos by blaming women for everything he sees wrong with men, he’s showing a really poor consideration of men too. Like they were brainless puppets, brainwashed by girls who, even if they go to college, are thinking of nothing else but enslaving the male and turning him into a domesticated animal known as “husbandâ€. Cos that’s all a woman is after, the bitch.”
I don’t think he was saying this at all. While I may not agree with him, it seems to me that he is saying that men behave differently around women – because of the desire to impress the opposite sex, fear of failure, whatver… – and that they way they behave in all male groups is different. [And it doesn’t seem utterly unreasonable to think that a lot of men – even men with large circles of female friends and who are totally comfortable with the company of women – do behave differently when women aren’t around… ]
Presumably he thinks that in the second situation men are more likely to take risks, dare to fail, etc. etc.
I don’t think that there’s any blame being apportioned to women here.
As it happens I don’t think he’s right. I don’t think men are being any more ‘themselves’ in the company of men only than they are in mixed groups. Men’s fear of failing to conform to the norms set by other men is just as strong as their fear of appearing stupid and/or weak in front of women. And one might argue that the way men sometimes behave in all male groups can be a bad thing…
BUT it doesn’t seem to me to be a straightforward case of some ageing fuddy duddy blaming women for everything that’s wrong.
cafl 02.22.04 at 1:21 am
I remember at Stanford in the late 1960s when the dorms became coed. There was a big decrease in damage in the formerly male dorms, as the male students stopped “being themselves” and became “less spirited”, thus reducing the number of times they punched through the sheetrock, broke furniture, etc. Too bad, less happiness I’m sure. Does husbandly behavior perhaps mean civilized behavior?
wsm 02.22.04 at 1:56 am
20 years out of college, what I find is most striking is how artificial was the environment there compared to what most Harvard (actually, I went to Yale, but it’s the same) students will face in later life. Most of the male students will be in business, finance, law, politics etc. and will spend their time in surroundings that are 90% male. (Non-peers, such as secretaries, don’t count for this purpose.) Most of the women will either become matrons or professionals in some female ghetto (nonprofit housing, or some such) and spend their time in surroundings 90% female. To me, that is the big difference between my college time and life in my 40s, in terms of relations between the sexes.
ginger 02.22.04 at 5:21 pm
Matt mcg: but the thing is, he’s not just pointing out a simple fact like “men tend to behave differently when in the presence of women”.
(Digression – Which I also think is often true, but then again, women can also behave differently and talk of different things when they’re only among women rather than in the presence of men. That’s not so strange, really, and I don’t view that difference in terms of “pressure” or faking or embarassment etc. or anything negative. It’s just, there are topics – especially personal ones – about which men often will talk only to other men, and ditto for women. Or, there’s activities that men prefer to be left out of entirely – ie. shopping for hours – and viceversa for women – watching football. It’s a cliché, but like all cliché, often has a grain of truth to it. Then, you have to know where the cliché ends and reality begins, because there are also many people who feel comfortable talking about anything and doing anything with both women and men. )
It’s not just a simple observation. The blame is there, because he is complaining that the higher presence of women and more frequent interaction with them in college is actively ruining men. Turning them into spineless “premature husbands”.
Isn’t that precisely whining and moaning and blaming it all on women (and considering men like idiots to boot)? I thought it came across very clearly.
J. Ellenberg 02.22.04 at 8:15 pm
Can it really be possible that, for Mansfield, the salient feature of being a husband is the state of being “always in fear of making fools of themselves before women?” What a peculiar and sad belief to hold, if so.
But to give this publication credit where it’s due, Brendan Conway has a nice article on p.15 pointing out that our big-government bureaucrats are much better than the ones in Zimbabwe, and directing conservatives to take note of this fact and give the regulators a little love.
emjaybee 02.22.04 at 9:20 pm
Articles like this one always make the writer look sad and pathetic, though, don’t they? I mean, are he and his fellow-men so weak-willed that the increased presence of women in their lives will water down their essential manly personalities?
This is just another example of the “masculinity is fragile and thus in danger from women” element of sexism. A pretty weak and qualified example, but still.
You might as well say that segregation allowed blacks and whites to be “more themselves” because they were kept apart.
Mike 02.23.04 at 4:47 am
You might as well say that segregation allowed blacks and whites to be “more themselves†because they were kept apart.
Blacks and Whites are still pretty much segregated socially. That experiment hasn’t been done, except maybe in the military.
For those who are so dismissive of Mansfield’s arguments: Would you be as dismissive towards a feminist advocating single-sex all-female colleges?
J. Ellenberg 02.23.04 at 5:14 am
If they advocated that Harvard become one, yes.
ginger 02.23.04 at 7:54 am
Would you be as dismissive towards a feminist advocating single-sex all-female colleges?
Of course, why, what would be the difference? Single-sex schools are not healthy, either way, female or male only, it’s always an artificial separation. No matter what motivations are given to support them.
I’d find the same argument as ridiculous even if it was specular, ie. with “women ruined by the presence of men”.
I’m kind of shocked anyone would come up with such ideas at all. Anyone but religious fundamentalists, that is…
David Salmanson 02.23.04 at 4:07 pm
I work at an all-girls K-12 and the stats don’t lie, girls who go to all girls schools do better on objective assessments than girls who go to coed schools (corrected for things like wealth, parents education level etc.) The problem is boys do worse in single-sex environments than in co-ed environments. Obviously this does not necessarily carry over to college, and even in my school coeducation in some classes begins in 9th grade and we are completely coeducational by 11th grade. The girls at my school are not noticeably more or less romantic than the popular culture at large so perhaps coeducation is not responsible for the decline of romance.
Matt Weiner 02.23.04 at 4:20 pm
Are the final clubs at Harvard still all all-male? Cos then male undergrads have a place where they can go to be away from the crippling presence of women–and if you could’ve got into and afforded Harvard in 1953, you can probably get into and afford a final club today.
(This is intended as an insult to final clubs–that may not have been entirely clear.)
ginger 02.23.04 at 4:21 pm
Are stats and “objective assessments” the only thing that matters in schools? I thought schools were also places for education. And, god forbid!, socialisation…
I can assure you, it’s not healthy for a young girl to spend so many hours only in the company of other females. You have no idea of the bitchiness that can ensue. Boys act as mediators in class, if you remove them, you’re going to raise a posse of women vampires, I tell you.
The problem is boys do worse in single-sex environments than in co-ed environments
There you go. Theory of objective advantages of separate-sex education is clearly flawed. ;)
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