Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University, defended and explained the arguments in his new book Manliness.

In a New York Times book review, Walter Kirn described Mansfi eld’s book “a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity,” and it “shows little awareness of much that’s happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up.”

Mansfield fielded questions about his views on “manliness” and gender roles in what he described as a “gender-neutral society” at a lecture given Tuesday night and Professor Sanford Kessler’s political science seminar “Classic Perspectives on American Democracy.” Mansfield gave Technician time in his busy schedule to answer further questions.

Technician: What is so great about manliness? Is it more important than femininity?

Harvey Mansfield: Manliness I define as confidence in a situation of risk. It’s great when it brings something to the attention of the public and does so in such a way to inspire the rest of us. It’s not always great. Sometimes it’s even criminal, but it’s a quality that pertains especially to men though not only to men. It’s responsible for the greatness of human triumphs in politics.

Technician: What about femininity? How would you define femininity?

HM: I’ll leave that for women to do. One of the great troubles of feminism is that it destroyed femininity. Femininity was what Betty Friedan called “the feminine mystique” — something imposed on women by men to keep them captives and the feminists never replaced the femininity they destroyed — therefore, left women confused and without a guide.

Technician: You say we are becoming a gender-neutral society — could it be argued we are becoming a more gender-equal society in which we have thrown out the antiquated misconceptions of sex?

HM: Of course it could be argued and I think that’s what most people would say today. (Pause) What the gender-neutral society might say is that men and women are free to become as equal as they wish, but what it does say is that men and women must be equalized and understand that one sex is interchangeable with the other. Technician: You comment in your book that “gender neutrality in theory is abstracting from sexual differences so as to make jobs and professions (especially the latter) open to both sexes.” Wouldn’t that be a fair society?

HM: Yes, and so I think we’ve made an advance in justice or fairness. I’m not sure we’ve made an advance in happiness.

Technician: In your lecture last night you essentially agreed with one of the arguments of former President of Harvard Lawrence Summers, that women are inherently inferior to men when it comes to science and this is why you do not find more women in these professions. I’d like to read part of an article by Judy Wajcman published in 1991 titled “Feminist Perspectives on Technology” and get your reaction to her argument: “The failure of liberal and equal opportunity policies has led authors such as Cynthia Cockburn to ask whether women actively resist entering technology … I share Cockburn’s view that this reluctance ‘to enter’ is to do with the sex-stereotyped definition of technology as an activity appropriate for men. As with science, the very language of technology, its symbolism, is masculine. It is not simply a question of acquiring skills, because these skills are embedded in a culture of masculinity that is largely coterminous with the culture of technology. But at school and in the workplace, the culture is incompatible with femininity. Therefore, to enter this world, to learn its language, women have first to forsake their femininity.”

HM: In the first place, Summers was talking about women in science at the highest level.

Technician: But to get to the highest level you have to start at the bottom.

HM: Well no, I think the highest people never started at the bottom — well, only in status. They learn so quickly that they leap ahead, like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, and speaking of that movie I think it would be mainly in mathematics that women are not as able as men at the highest level. Since science is so closely allied to mathematics and modern sciences that’s the real difficulty. I don’t think that it has to do with sex stereotypes or the manly world of technology. It’s true there are manly teenagers who are computer whizzes or play game shows or show games.

Technician: Video games?

HM: Video games. Much more than women do, that may be important, but I think this is something that is part of our society. On the contrary we make all our best efforts to introduce women to science and to prevent any prejudice against them from being effective.

Technician: Can it be argued that women are progressing into them because they were turned off in the past?

HM: That would be the opposite of what you read to me.

Technician: She makes arguments later on that women in the past like the Victorian era were turned away from sciences.

HM: Oh yeah, in the Victorian Era. Women were turned away from all kinds of men’s occupations. So, we should just focus on recent history since the gender-neutral society got started and its principle is now in effect that you cannot question it in public without encountering heavy criticism. So I think today all the pressure is in favor of women’s equality and if inequalities remain they become significant.

Technician: In your lecture you agreed with a questioner that President Bush could be considered one of the manliest of all political figures today. You also believe that true archetypes of manliness are Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. Could it be argued that Bush has nothing in common with a truly, almost cliche, example of manliness like Theodore Roosevelt? Namely his reluctance to serve abroad in the Vietnam War and face criticism from the press for his actions.

HM; (Pause) I’m not sure reluctance is the right word to use. He did serve, but in a position that did not encounter danger unless of course his unit had been called up as has happened more recently.OK, I would certainly agree that was not a manly action. And the other one was…what did you say?

Technician: Face criticism.

HM: No, I don’t think that’s particularly manly. (Pause) He may be conscious he doesn’t shine in press conferences. Where he does shine is in informal lectures and talks like the ones he’s been giving more recently. But at the last press conference he gave, he was very productive against that little vignette with Helen Thomas. Not every action a manly man takes is manly. That shows something of the limitations of manliness. But what the question meant to say was that he had both the virtues and the drawbacks. He is bold and he is determined, those are good things, but he is also stubborn, which is a bad thing.

Technician: Last night in your lecture you gave a disclaimer during a question that your comments on manliness were not universal, but in your lecture you stated and I paraphrase, manliness is so ingrained in men that it cannot even be considered a virtue. Could you clarify? They seem to be opposite arguments.

HM: (Pause) I didn’t mean when I said manliness was ingrained that it was equally ingrained in every human. It’s ingrained in human nature — certainly in the male half of that.What did you say after that?

Technician: That it wasn’t universal.

HM: Right, of course when one makes universal statement — it is universal statement to say there are no universals. In human behavior you have to expect there will be exceptions to the rules that you find. So, that’s why everything is “for the most part” as Aristotle said.

Technician: So are some men predestined to be manly?

HM: No, I don’t think it is predestination. There may be a kind of a natural temper in certain persons, but it has to flower. The choice of how you live your life will have a great deal to do with that.

Technician: You also write about Ernest Hemingway and his manliness. You write of The Old Man and the Sea as an example of Hemingway’s understanding of manliness, but you do not recognize Hemingway’s posthumous work like The Garden of Eden in which sexual roles are not so clearly defined and are bended. Is it possible for a person to lose their understanding of manliness?

HM: It is possible to have it qualified or nuanced. I haven’t read that book you refer to. I wasn’t so much talking about Hemingway, but his hero. When an author presents somebody, he’s doing it somewhat from the outside. He’s controlling a figure he presents, and it doesn’t mean that is his opinion and because he writes one book that exemplifies manliness, but he wrote more than one because he also wrote the books about bullfighting. I think manliness can be a theme that every viewer can be in favor of.

Technician: Do you see your message as being at all dangerous? If someone not familiar with the work of classic political theorists and political and social theory in general were to pick up your book and not recognize the intricacies to your arguments, could it not lead to a society of dangerous chauvinists?

HM: Yeah, I suppose that is possible, barely possible. To prevent that I constantly reiterate manliness is not all good and all good is not manliness.

Technician: Do you feel the comments by President Summers coupled with some of the negative press your book is receiving paints Harvard University as sexist?

HM: No, not in the least. That might be the case if he hadn’t been fired and if I weren’t one of the few conservatives there. By the way, I am a conservative, but this is not in my view a conservative book. I didn’t write this to rally conservatives to my view, but rather as I say on the first page to address the conservative woman.

Technician: Are you optimistic or pessimisitic about our “gender-neutral” society?

HM: We need to change some of our ways.

Technician: Which ways would those be?

HM: We need to respect manliness more and we need to find a new definition of femininity.