Results matching “Harvey Mansfield”
Check out this amusingly bad argument from one of University of Idaho's budding Harvey Mansfield's:
There is a difference between a good thing and the best thing. For example, a meal served with a delicious dessert is a good thing, but a meal in which every course is delicious is the best thing. Getting an A in one class is better than getting no A's but not as good as getting all A's. I think we can all understand this pretty easily. However, whether we understand it or not, sometimes we treat the good things as though they are actually the best things.Where am I going with this? I'll tell you. When we talk about women's rights, we should consider whether they are good things or whether they are the best things, because many people treat them as the best things. Of course, I will say it is better to have women's rights than not to have women's rights, but the only way to put women's rights first is if we are willing to say -- which I am not -- that women are better and more important than humanity as a whole.
Wow. Pass the dessert and give this dude an A+ for worst logic and most irrelevant metaphors ever.
Thanks to Anne-Marije for the heads up.
Harvey Mansfield is at it again, but this time he's got Sarah Palin to project all of his confused rhetoric and unexamined generalizations on. In a piece at Forbes today he argues that Sarah Palin is the shero of what feminism should have been all along--a woman cozy in sex role differences, happy to mythologize masculinity, and still ready to serve (notice the language here) in office herself (cause, gosh darn it, women are pretty clever after all). An excerpt:
All Sarah Palin did was to claim her equal opportunity to a job once held exclusively by men. This sort of equality--the opportunity to take on public careers outside the home--is something liberals and conservatives agree on. That conservatives accept it is proven by the rapturous reception she received from Republicans, who greeted her as a political savior.This she may or may not be, but she seems to have had the effect of enthusing the base, in part because of her sex.
Now, why could the women's movement not have taken advantage of this bipartisan agreement from the beginning? What impelled it to adopt a radical feminism hostile to both liberals and conservatives? Was this feminism necessary to attack male domination and to stir up the status quo?
Harvey, #1, the definition of feminism is political, social, and economic equality. #2, equality confers that no one group of people can lord domination over another. #3, the status quo wasn't equality. WTF is so hard to understand about this equation?
As if his faulty logic and infuriating language weren't enough, he continuously pushes the tired notion that feminists are no fun, unattractive, and asexual to boot, writing that Sarah Palin is "one who knows what it is to be a woman and enjoys it," and "You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic."
Huh? What? I mean is this old man serious? Someone needs to send Harvey Manfield a big ass care package from Toys in Babeland, Rachel Kramer Bussel, and Jane Campion, or teach him how to use a computer so he can type in a URL: www.feministing.com. His email, just in case you'd like to tell him what you think of his piece is hmansfield@gov.harvard.edu.
Related Posts: Summers' position as #1 Harvard Asshole challenged
Thanks to Dawn for the heads up.
I was away last weekend cavorting around the fabulous city of Milwaukee, so I've got two weeks' worth of links for you today....
Speaking of Milwaukee, a guy there robbed a bank, then hung around to harass one of the female tellers. Shockingly, she said no.
Women are leading the fight for indigenous people's rights.
Celebrating the Pill's 40th birthday.
How dudes with websites turn a high-school athlete into an unwilling internet sex object. I feel absolutely terrible for this girl: "She felt violated. It was like becoming the victim of a crime, Stokke said. Her body had been stolen and turned into a public commodity, critiqued in fan forums devoted to everything from hip-hop to Hollywood."
A fight is brewing over how much HIV/AIDS funding will be dedicated to pushing abstinence at the expense of real preventive measures.
How Monica Goodling tried to get off the hook by referring to herself as a "a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing," and other thoughts on the chick-factor.
California now allows conjugal visits for gay inmates.
UN Dispatch talks to a unit commander in Liberia's all-woman peacekeeping force.
How religion affects teen sexual behavior.
A chat with Seattle's queer feminist electro duo, Team Gina.
Further evidence of the huge toll the war has taken on Iraqi women.
The L.A. County Department of Health reports that women of color have higher rates of chronic disease than white women in the area.
Gay-rights activists are detained by police in Russia, after the cops refused to protect them from a rioting crowd.
A new report on the "celluloid ceiling" found U.S. female directors made only 7% of the 250 highest-grossing films in 2005.
Illegal abortions are putting poor women in Brazil at risk.
"Life within the woman" now trumps life of the actual woman.
The first Carnival for Radical Action.
A Q&A with performance artist Sarah Jones.
Exposing the millionaires who helped push Bush to fund abstinence-only education at such exorbitant levels.
Stern College, the women's college at Yeshiva University, won't provide birth control, condoms, or emergency contraception.
How to "use your breast power responsibly." Gross, right? Even worse, it's ABC News, not Cosmo.
Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius rejected a bill that would have opened abortion-related medical records to the public.
Sexual assault of female foreign corrspondents is all too common.
Louisiana House passes a bill banning D&X (or so-called "partial-birth") abortions.
In another blow to the abstinence-only-until-marriage crowd, the American Journal of Sociology publishes a new study showing sex is NOT harmful to older teens' mental health.
Erica Jong urges female fiction writers to not let their work be branded as "chick lit."
On the politics of "ghetto" and mainstreaming stereotypes.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announces plans to subsidize contraception.
Frances Kissling dares the church to excomminucate her.
Michelle Obama discusses mommy-tracking.
The New England Journal of Medicine weighs in on Gonzales v. Carhart. And the antis are getting ready to start harassing doctors who they suspect are continuing to perform D&X abortions.
Britain offers men up to six months of paid paternity leave, but new figures show that very, very few men have taken advantage of the policy.
Horrors! Feminism has masculinized women, and now poor guys don't know how to assert their manliness. Somebody call Harvey Mansfield, stat! (Brought to you by Laura Sessions Stepp, of course.)
Tennessee rejected a bill that would have required ultrasounds for any woman requesting the abortion pill, RU-486. The legislation was redundant -- all doctors already must perform an ultrasound to confirm pregnancy before administering RU-486.
Teen girls' reported satisfaction with their own bodies decreased after only 10 minutes of watching music videos.
Why diversity training isn't enough.
Future abortion providers face a long road.
A New York City Council report says there are few barriers to EC access in the city.
Prepare to be courted during the '08 presidential campaign.
At least that's what the Democratic party leaders seem to think. Ryan Lizza discusses their attempts to match, swagger-for-swagger, Republicans' caricature of masculinity:
The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity.“As much as the policy positions is the background and character of these Democrats,� says John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who helped recruit this new breed of candidate. “So we went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough.�
Have they retained Harvey Mansfield as a consultant? Lizza asks, "If a party measures its candidates by whether they wear a uniform, carry a gun or simply look tough — does it invite the public and press to apply that standard to all the party’s leaders?" Sure, it invites the public and the press to apply that standard to all the party's male leaders. And it invites them to apply a standard of femininity to the party's female leaders.
This cardboard-cutout view of gender means there's no way for female politicians to prove their "toughness" on a surface level, because that's a trait society is only comfortable associating with men. If you're a dude, you prove you're a "red-blooded American" by quarterbacking a football team, you prove you're "tough" with a tour in Iraq, you prove you're a no-nonsense by sporting a flat-top buzz cut. If you're a woman, you certainly can't do those things and still be considered electable. (Well, maybe Iraq is OK. But you'll have to talk a lot about how you missed your kids while you were away.) You can't prove "toughness" by talking about reproductive rights (those women who raise money for Emily's List? Total pussies) or about better health care policy. Nope, you need a gun, a dick and some balls to show you've got what it takes.
Women politicians must prove they'll be good leaders being just as tough as the guys, but by only talking up their nurturing, feminine credentials (five beautiful grandkids!) or about how women can "clean up" the halls of Congress, etc. Because when women do try to exhibit "toughness" on a surface level, the same way male politicians do, they inevitably make the party and the voters uncomfortable. They're called a ball-busting bitches and often seen as whiny and attention-grabbing -- not truly "tough."
If your actions don't fit the perfect either/or gender mold -- like if you are a powerful Democrat who bluntly calls out the president on his bullshit, but you happen to (gasp!) have a vagina -- your gender-role-defying actions simply get left out of articles like Lizza's. James Webb gets props for his aggressiveness because he picked a fight with Bush at a White House reception. But all of Pelosi's hard-nosed quotes about Bush are completely nullified by her decision to wear pearls. Sorry, honey. Can't have it both ways.
Back in March, we listened to Rahm Emanuel (who used to be a ballet dancer before he took to politically enforcing the stereotypical gender binary) declare that we need more nurturers in office. So the influx of "masculine" Dems is only half of the picture. This is really about buying into the idea that America can only be a safe and prosperous place when our male leaders are manly and our female leaders are womanly.
From macho-man Harvey Mansfield's book, "Manliness." (I can't believe I didn't catch this until now.)
“To resist rape a woman needs more than martial arts and more than the police; she needs a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment.�
Uh huh.
Check out Slate’s take on the recent slew of books rejecting gender equality with a call for women’s return to the household and men’s return to the stoic “manliness� that they’re born to have.
Jess Row addresses the lovely anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan’s book To Hell With That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife and our favorite Harvey “Misogynist� Mansfield’s Manliness. Then he adds:
What's most distressing about these books, however, isn't that they play on ancient prejudices and dredge up empty stereotypes, but that they aren't being met by a fusillade of other, better books—books that examine contemporary relationships and gender roles without panic, dread, or shame. This is particularly true, of course, when it comes to books about men.
As an example of one productive book on manhood that’s lacking at the moment, Row introduces Iron John by Robert Bly, published in 1990. The book essentially addresses male stereotypes and discusses the struggle with male identity as they exist in a culture that teaches them to be unemotional and aggressive.
While I agree that we need a book that would challenge Mansfield’s and deconstructs the history of what it means to be a man, I wasn’t digging Bly’s thoughts that women and men have to “acknowledge that their inner lives, and needs, are different� and that “the feminist movement. . . needs to encourage this kind of self-understanding among men, not fear it.�
I don’t think it’s a matter of fearing an existence of this kind of male solidarity, it’s the “recognition� of our different needs that personally puts me off. I’d like to know exactly what kind of different “needs� he's talking about here. It’s one thing to recognize and study your gender role as it’s portrayed in society, but embracing “differences� (as well as talking in binaries) seems a wee problematic to me.
Thoughts?
A bridge in Paris has been named after feminist Simone de Beauvoir. Awesome.
Designed in the form of two steel intersecting curves, [the footbridge] is part of a regeneration effort in south-eastern parts of the French capital.This is the city's 37th bridge and the first to be named after a woman.
De Beauvoir is most-known for her groundbreaking book, The Second Sex.
My fave de Beauvoir moment recently? When in an article about manly man Harvey Mansfield, a writer from The Harvard Crimson identified Simone de Beauvoir as Simon.
The American Prospect's cover story this month is a Lakoff-esque take on politics: Republicans are the party of masculine disciplinarians and the Democrats are feminine nurturers.
Author Francis Wilkinson claims that the masculine characteristics that have made Republicans (particularly Bush, our swaggering Fratboy-in-Chief) electable are the same characteristics that have been the root of their most prominent failures-- particularly in Iraq and New Orleans. And yet he points to a new round of macho, macho Dems-- veterans and businessmen who don't speak foreign languages or engage in sissy sports like windsurfing-- who are stepping up to "save" the left from its feminine image.
Check out Mikhaela Reid's comic ode to Harvey Mansfield, Mansfield's Manliness Manual. (The pic above is a cropped version. Obviously.)
Women's E-News dismantles the "happy homemakers" study.
Phyllis Schlafly has terrible taste in upholstery. Apparently single-handedly destroying the ERA wasn't enough-- she's got to assault us with awful floral prints, too.
The reality of polygamy? Yeah, it's a little different than what's shown on HBO's Big Love.
Two pieces at AlterNet take on the myth of the perfect, overachieving girl-- who kicks ass all over the place, but still struggles with her self-worth and has to work harder to get into college.
Britain is reducing taxes on contraceptive products.
Restraining orders often fail to curb domestic and dating violence. But that's because they aren't properly enforced.
South Dakota lawmakers should look to Latin America if they want to see how abortion bans work. Er, don't work.
Filmmaker Mary Harron discusses "The Notorious Bettie Page," her upcoming biopic about the pinup queen.
Romance novels are getting dirtier. When will all these women just start reading erotica?
Elle Magazine has a surprisingly good, critical take on anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan.. which prompted me to wonder, if only 21% of writers at The New Yorker are women, why does Flanagan have to be one of them? Ew.
Apparently, women lack the "gravitas" to be successful TV network news anchors. "It is essentially a chauvinistic word," Connie Chung said.
Can TV change public perceptions of women? Maybe if we start seeing more realistic female characters.
Oprah puts manly-man Harvey Mansfield on the cover of her magazine. The writer of the piece has also written a breathy tribute to "American maleness."
What will it take for pro-choice Republicans to leave the Republican Party?
It wasn't exactly news to me that Harvard Government professor Harvey Mansfield is an asshole. After all, this is a guy who gave a lecture on the "problem" of women's autonomy and has said that gay and transgendered people should remain on "society's margin."
So The New York Times Magazine interview with Mansfield, Of Manliness and Men, is really just the icing on the misogyny cake.
The whole interview is priceless, but this bit is my fave:
We need roles. Roles give us mutual expectations of what is either correct or good behavior. Women are neater than men, they make nests, and all these other stereotypes are mostly true. Wives and mothers correct you; they hold you to a standard; they want to make you better.
To which interviewer Deborah Solomon responds, "I am beginning to wonder if you have ever spoken to a woman." Indeed.
By the way, it looks like Mansfield's original book cover (above) didn't quite cut it. I guess even a brick wall wasn't manly enough for Mr. I-Lift-and-Open-Things.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at The National Review thinks we're "nuts" to be pissed over Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield's recent comments. This I don't mind. In fact, I'm quite pleased.
Describing Mansfield's lecture as "sensible talk" is another story...
And I thought Harvard couldn't do any worse that Larry "Women Suck at Math" Summers! Oh, how wrong I was.
Government Professor Harvey Mansfield gave a lecture last night where he called for women to be more modest, talked about women's search for autonomy as a problem, and said that gay and transgendered people should remain on "society's margin."
In his discussion, ironically titled Feminism and The Autonomy of Women, Mansfield said "we need a new feminism." You know, one that keeps women in their place.
According to Mansfield, this change in traditional society has grown out of women's desire to achieve success in the workplace and at home. In his lecture, entitled, "Feminism and The Autonomy of Women", the professor identified this problem as one arising from "radical feminism" which sought to "lower women to the level of men" in terms of sexual behavior...."By the age of 30, you see men," he cautioned, "who are used to getting free samples" and will not enter into loyal, reliable relationships. Citing evolutionary biology research, Mansfield said that "men are interested in quantity, and women are interested in quality."
"Women play the men's game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance�it isn�t so attractive or so erotic," said the professor.
Besides the disgusting double standard going on here, am I really supposed to care what this guy thinks is erotic?
...Mansfield argued that the questions and confusion facing feminists arise from their attempt at achieving "autonomy" and asserting that "men and women have no distinct nature."
I love that autonomy is in quotes by the way.
A big fan of digging his own grave, Mansfield went on to say that gay and transgendered people are on "society's margin" and should remain there and that "substitutes for the traditional family are dysfunctional...you wouldn't want children to grow up in them."
Amazing.
But I guess these kind of comments shouldn't surprise me considering the title of Mansfield's upcoming book: Manliness. (The cover is priceless by the way.) Mansfield's following works will be titled Macho, Macho Man and Worship the Cock.
Note: I have no idea how Harvard Crimson writer Samuel Jacobs felt about the lecture personally, but his identifying Simone De Beauvoir as "Simon De Beauvoir" certainly gives me pause.
