Men, Women & Myth

This lecture will have certain things in common with a sermon, and so, in the manner of a preacher, I would like to begin by setting my subject through the quotation of a text. There are two of them, the first from the Iliad, Book 22, when Achilles is closing in on Hector as the two fight before the walls of Troy: "It was a great man who fled, but far better he who pursued him rapidly, since here was no festal beast, no ox-hide they strove for, for these are prizes that are given men for their running. No, they ran that day for the life of Hector, breaker of horses."

My next passage is from Second Paglia, if I may so term her latest collection of essays titled Vamps and Tramps: "I have intensely disliked the tendency of many feminists to want men to be remade in a kind of shy, sensitive form to become, in essence, new kinds of women, contemporary eunuchs which is less inconvenient to women. I think that this is not in the interests of the human race. We want masculine vigor, and I'm afraid that in order to get men macho again we may have to endure a certain amount of instability in sexual relations. That is, there may have to be a kind of honorable truce between enemy camps. So what would my advice be to the sexes at the end of the century? I would say to men: get it up! And to women I would say: deal with it."

Just as the struggle at Troy was no trivial business for Hector, since his life was in the balance, so I would argue that your struggle at Wabash for self-definition as young men is no trivial business either, since the definition you arrive at will have much to do with your personal happiness in the future and the effect you will able to make in society when you leave us. Nor is the question of your view of yourselves as men a trivial business for Wabash as an institution, since in our decision to remain a single-sex college we have committed ourselves to a direct concern with this part of your lives.

There is indeed a struggle going on at Wabash for your masculine souls, and it is being waged between the forces leading you to mature and vigorous manhood, and those which have rather different plans for your future. The work of Michael Kimmel and others allied intellectually with him is one of the chief agents currently being employed in our curriculum to influence the kind of choices you make in this most important spiritual journey, and since Mr. Kimmel himself has been brought to campus this week, and the Gender Issues Committee subsidized a visit last semester from the I.U. feminist Robyn Wiegman, it seemed to me a most appropriate time to address quite directly in this class issues surrounding the advance of "gender studies" into the academic program of our college.

What I propose is first a brief historical overview of how we have reached the intellectual point where we find ourselves, then a critical look at some of Mr. Kimmel's published work, and finally my view of what valid gender studies might be in the contemporary college curriculum. And previous experience leads me to say in advance that any aggrieved complaints about the style of this lecture as unacceptably "patriarchal" will only provide me with what I consider a high compliment.

Contrasted to equity feminism is a new creature to which Mr. Kimmel and others like him owe allegiance. This Hoff Sommers terms "gender feminism"; I sometimes call it "academic feminism," since colleges and universities are the one place where its failure to deal with reality can be consistently tolerated. (I might say parenthetically that when I gave one of Michael Kimmel's articles to my younger sister, who is a partner in a major Chicago advertising agency, her reponse was: "Any man who would be convinced by this stuff is too wimpy for us to hire.") The crux of gender feminism lies in certain ideas about the relationship of nature and culture that have been floating around in European thought since antiquity, but which have achieved dogmatic status under the influence of the French scholar Michel Foucault and his bevy of followers, among whom Michael Kimmel finds his academic home.

And I think it is important to realize that this is very much an in-crowd. Mr. Kimmel came to us with a stack of recommendations from the kind of Women's Studies Programs that Hoff Sommers subjects to such trenchant criticism in her book. And all these writers constantly quote and refer to each other. Brod, Pleck, Kaufmann, it's a kind of gender mafia, which manages to flourish because most people haven't the time or interest to pay much attention to them. Several colleagues, and they were people who favored co-education in the last study of that issue here, have told me that they think the gender-feminist line is pretty silly, but they don't want to upset people by saying so. (Hoff Sommers explains and warns against that phenomenon, too.) Much of the consternation I have sensed in the air throughout this week I think is due to the simple fact that these people are not used to hearing public criticism of their views, and are a little afraid that students might actually find other humanistic approaches compelling. As the saying goes, "May the best man win."

To return now to the definition of gender feminism. It assumes a distinction between sex, which is determined biologically (and some won't even admit this much), and gender, which is supposed to be determined by society and a person's psychological response to its pressures. Since societies can change, so can the nature of gender, these people claim, and so they talk endlessly about the "social construction of gender", the idea that there is nothing that can be called absolutely "masculine" and "feminine", but that these terms are employed to describe something purely conventional and hence subject to constant alteration. This is Step One of the theory.

Step Two involves the idea that men have conspired throughout history to construct definitions of masculine and feminine that allow them to control women, and they do this through the creation of patriarchy (which means, by the way, not rule by men, but rule by the fathers). At this point I confess to some confusion in sorting out what appear to be two irreconcilable types of gender feminists. The first attributes things like an "epistemic advantage" to women over men, which makes women capable of understanding the world better - how can such a concept escape admitting some female "essence"? And if this knowledge comes from the current construction of the feminine one would think women should be interested in preserving the status quo.

The second type consists of gender feminists who are dedicated to the political task of deconstructing any kind of false essences i.e., they feel we should be ridding ourselves of the ideas about masculinity and femininity we were probably raised with, abolishing patriarchy, and replacing it with something called "gender justice," which I will talk more about later. Mr. Kimmel seems consistently allied with the latter camp, and it is this kind of gender feminism to which I will refer in the rest of my remarks. These concepts, in a completely unvarnished form, are already present in our curriculum at Wabash. I cite the course description of English 41: "Gender Studies, a more inclusive label for feminist studies, considers how the social construction of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' informs our world view, and examines to what extent various institutions are shaped by that view"; and the Freshman Tutorial "Men and Masculinity": "The underlying assumption of the course is, therefore, that men are not born but culturally created."

What will be of interest to me today is the kind of understanding of themselves that Michael Kimmel has urged on men and women, which I will argue is destructive of art and culture, and fundamentally incompatible with the existence of Wabash as a men's college, as his testimony in the military cases would appear quite clearly to indicate. And despite the efforts of several colleagues to dismiss this issue as a red herring, I continue to find it crucial. Has Mr. Kimmel said publicly that he is willing to retract his sworn testimony that he cannot imagine an example of single-sex education for men that would not be based on the kind of sexual stererotypes his career has been devoted to attacking? So far I find no reason to retract my statement that it is highly imprudent for this school, at a time of financial austerity, to have spent $5,000 to brwhich he sent for discussion at Tuesday's Gender Forum here is his idea of a devastating criticism of Robert Bly's version of the men's movement: "[Bly's] men's movement, therefore, misses one of the central insights of social scienceÑthat gender is a product of human action and interaction, that definitions of masculinity and femininity are the products of social discourse and social struggle." Some of us have certainly missed that insight, because we think it is false, and Mr. Kimmel does not even make a half-hearted attempt to prove it.

Well, we now know what Mr. Kimmel assumes; what does he do with his assumptions? He has written with great candor that his goal in his work is "dismantling masculinity in order to implement a vision of sexual equality and gender justice". What might "gender justice" be, one asks? I find it very much a buzz word in Mr. Kimmel's circles. Mr. Kimmel is the editor of a journal called Masculinities, which makes no bones about its political aims, and so I assume he does not feel violently opposed to what he prints in it. Let me quote you just a few of the "Commandments of Gender Justice" which I have paraphrased from a recent issue:

1. It is a gender responsibility to reduce the socially conditioned results of attraction to women. (What a revelation! Penile erections are now socially constructed.)
2. We should not behave towards women in a "gentlemanly" way, because the concept of the gentleman is a sexist construction. (So much for Wabash's one rule of student conduct.)
3. If married, and if we have had the misfortune of growing up without acquiring skills such as doing laundry and vacuuming, we must learn these skills. We must never assume tasks at home just because we like doing them. Gardening might be an example of that. (I suppose it offends the earth goddess if we men put our patriarchal shovels in the ground.)
4. We should always read feminist and anti-sexist literature with a constant awareness of our gender responsibility.
5. When militant feminists are brought upon their house by the suitors.

With what great psychological insight does Homer characterize Telemachus (who would be just about your age) and Penelope in the first book of the Odyssey, when we see what might be taken as the first time the son has ever asserted himself directly against his mother's wishes. You will remember that Penelope cannot bear to hear the story of the Trojan heroes sung in her hall, but Telemachus rebukes her: "Men like best a song that rings like morning on the ear. But you must nerve yourself and try to listen," Homer says, "The lady gazed in wonder and withdrew, her son's clear wisdom echoing in her mind."

Penelope knows the time has come for Telemachus to enter another stage in his life, where she will always be important and honored, to be sure, but where her influence can never be exactly as it was. As for Odysseus, we see through the great passage of Book 11 showing his meeting with his mother in the Underworld that for him psychic separation from the maternal occurred long ago, which is what makes it possible for Odysseus to share with Penelope one of the most magnificent relationships between a man and a woman in the whole of our literature.

I could go on, and the story will be the same. In another of his articles Mr. Kimmel begins by saying "American men have no history," and then argues that we are only now in a position to acquire it after being enlightened by contemporary feminist scholarship. Our guest would have spent his three days with us very profitably had he sequestered himself in the Caleb Mills House with a copy of Leaves of Grass: "The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place, / He too is all qualities, he is action and power, / The flush of the known universe is in him, / Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well, / The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost becomes him well, pride is for him, / The full-spread pride of a man is calming and excellent to the soul, / Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself, whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail, he strikes soundings at last only here."

So in the nineteenth century Walt Whitman recorded our history. Has Mr. Kimmel ever read Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome? Does he know that at the beginning of this century a woman gave us what is arguably the most potent description we have of the American man trapped in a self-annihilating struggle between duty and passion?

Lest I weary both the class and myself, I will conclude here my catalogue of what I as a classicist consider to be the scholarly problems with Mr. Kimmel's work. The ideas I have encountered seem to me better suited to the television programs where Mr. Kimmel has appeared. Wabash College is not the Phil Donahue show; I think we should be doing better in support of our academic program.

I begin with biology. As you have read in Paglia for today, it is highly ironic that at a time when scientifc research is revealing every more clearly the extent to which the chemistry of our bodies affects who we are, gender feminists are loathe to talk about testosterone and estrogen. In my two years on the Gender Issues Committee we have found it impossible to involve members of the scientific departments in any panel discussions, and I suspect the reason is that they consider the scholarly methodology of the gender feminists so poor that from their point of view the case is quite hopeless. As a very wise woman, the Spanish St. Teresa of Avila, says in her autobiography: "We are not angels and we have bodies. To want to become angels while we are still on earth is ridiculous." I think then that a grounding in science ought to be the first prerequisite for meaningful gender studies.

Next, of course, in my view one must turn one's constant attention to the arts. And here is where I am more than willing to repeat as often as necessary the kind of controversy we have experienced during the last week, so long as we continue to have insinuated into our curriculum the aesthetics that gender feminism represents. As we learned from Ms. Wiegman last semester, for these people, art cannot be anything but an outward construction based on an inner one, and so both are ripe for dismantling. This is ultimately the counsel of barbarism; the kind of thought that has torn paintings by Titian from the walls of academic offices because they do not meet politically correct feminist standards. By contrast, I want to be instructed by great art; I do not presume to instruct it. In this connection I would like to repeat a quotation from Goethe which I first used in my LaFollette Lecture at Wabash some twelve years ago, and which seems to me even more apt now: "All great excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain in the spectator; only later, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Properly speaking, we learn only from those books we cannot judge."

And so I follow Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia in seeing the canon not as a patriarchal imposition, but as something created and handed down by artists themselves. Homer is transcendently great in Greek literature because every Greek writer, man or woman, who made poetry chose to be influenced by him; in English literature Shakespeare holds a similar place, as does Dante in the Italian, and Cervantes in the Spanish.

How then can the various insights I have tried to share with you today be used in what I would consider valid gender studies? I will end my formal remarks with one example that came out of a class I gave for the first time last term titled "Images of Men in Traditional Epic"; I would like to thank the members of that seminar, a couple of whom are in this class as well, for their help in the development of my own thought on the subject. One of our texts was the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, and in my previous readings of it I had never thought much about Grendel except as the typical folk-tale monster whom the hero must slay as part of the masculine initiatory process. But this time something else was revealed. I found that the poem says very explicitly that Grendel lives alone with his mother in a cave deep beneath the waters of a lake. Water, the primaeval symbol of female fluids, the foam out of which Aprhodite, that is pure female sexuality, arises; the cave, which the class will remember as the womb we saw Odysseus enter in the Cylcops-episode, the place where he was nameless, without identity; and finally the mother, alone with her son.

Scholars of folklore would say that in this episode femaleness is over-determined: the all-powerful mother who will not let her son go, no father present to act as model and help in the separation. What can Grendel do? Lash out in irrational, bloody violence against the knights banqueting together in their castle. He has never found an independent masculine identity that would allow him to join in the society of men, so in the rage that comes from this impotence, he can only, in a quite literal way, deconstruct and dismantle other people's masculinity. This is Grendel. Could it not also be what Michael Kimmel has in store for you? He is, you know, also notorious for having written that he is "proud to be a mamma's boy."

What I have encouraged you to do today in the course of your education, and indeed throughout your lives, is to take seriously what men and women all over the world have created and given to us as definitions of themselves in great works of literature and art, works which have nothing to do with Foucault's petty world of power relations and oppression, but which I believe are rather reflections of our creation in the image and likeness of God. And if you do begin to see life that way then I think you will come to the conclusion that the things the gender feminists are attempting to convince you of are supremely trivial.

Mr. Kimmel has written contempuously of Louis Sullivan and Charles Ives for wanting to make an art that would represent themselves as men. But has Michael Kimmel built a hall like the Auditorium in Chicago? Has Michael Kimmel composed music like "Three Places in New England"? Can he sing like Luciano Pavarotti? Can he dance like Micael Baryshnikov? Can he call an entire generation to a recognition of spiritual duty like Martin Luther King? Has he ever risked his life to save the life of another man, as my father did in the Pacific War? If you want patterns of masculinity my advice is to look to men like these, so that when you come to the end of your life you will be able to say with the Roman noble Scipio Hispanus: "By my good conduct I heaped virtues on the virtues of my people; I begat a family and I sought to equal the exploits of my father. I upheld the praise of my ancestors, so that they are glad that I was created from their line. My honors have ennobled my stock."

When you have ideals like these to inspire you, gentlemen, you most certainly do not need any help from Michael Kimmel.

This article was as an open lecture to Kubiak's Classics 1 course, January 26, 1995.

Reprinted with the author's permission 04.12.96.