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Saturday, March 18, 2006

See, and you thought women never made jokes

I enjoyed this New York Times review of the new book Manliness by Professor Harvey C. Mansfield (or, as we knew him around Harvard Yard, Harvey "C-minus" Mansfield). I can't tell from the review whether Mansfield has actually crafted and set forth a definition of "manliness," whether, if so, it has much connection to what anyone else thinks and, if so and regardless, whether it makes any sense. The review makes me think Manliness fits into the small but choice body of "don't quit your day job" quasi-popular writing by Straussian academics, of which the best example will always be Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
"Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).
"'But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question.'
"In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings?"

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