Overweight, overwrought, overheated and predictably unmarried, the feminist author Naomi Wolf was a whole chocolate cake’s worth of dessert as an unwitting foil.
Slate.com reduces Ms. Wolf’s resume to a single devastating line:
“Her three books are breathless, hyperbolic tracts on What Holds Women Back.”
You may remember her as the ditzy woman hired six years ago by Vice President Al Gore to muscularize his flabby image as a beta male who yearned to be an alpha male like his boss.
Second in a Two-Person Race
The fang-flashing Ms. Wolf is a Phi Beta Kappa icon for the “I Is a Victim” crowd, the Ku Klux Klan of the feminist movement.
She was swamped in Sunday’s taped duel with Prof. Mansfield because her interview was thickly lined with anger, often the permanent guest in feminist interviews. Ms. Wolf lost because she was so determined to prove Prof. Mansfield’s assertions wrong that she ended up acting out the crudest traits in women (or men). She forfeited her temper numerous times, repeatedly acted catty and petulant. Her emotions defeated her common sense, twelve to nothing.
It was a classic display of a soft-spoken, succinct, restrained man vs. an undisciplined woman, a deadly snapshot for those who believe the feminist movement rhetorically exceeded its boundaries years ago.
By contrast to Ms. Wolf’s zaftig appearance — she kept running her hand through her hair, I suppose in frustration — the professor was the study of a distinguished gentleman who has lived a life of moderation. He was far more in charge of his impulses. Spare of build and succinct of language, Prof. Mansfield, even to a casual viewer, would have been seen as the only disciplined person on the utilitarian set.
Prof. Mansfield could have won by reading the Culver City telephone book. Typical of men of few words, he was in control throughout the sixty-minute interview since his adversary was an overstuffed jar of pickled nerves and smarmy emotions.
The thesis of his book “Manliness” — time to confront authentic manliness — infuriates feminists who have dedicated for the last thirty-five years to slyly winning a propaganda war in America.
Perhaps feminists have convinced a majority of Americans, certainly a majority of academics and media, that women are superior to men in all significant ways, that reparations need to be paid to women for having been victimized throughout history, and that there are no discernable differences between the two genders. Gender trumps all concepts. The Constitution is to be rewritten to affirm this drop-dead equality. These theses are true because feminists say so. If you disagree, you are anti-woman, the new most grievous sin committable in America. Sexism supplanted racism as the lone crime meriting execution.
Women Were Dressed to the IXs
Women were to be installed tomorrow or sooner in all important positions formerly held by men. Compliantly, the major religions of America were the first to conform, eagerly, to this dictum. Schools were a close second with their landmark Title IX ruling. As of the lunch hour, feminized courts ruled, Title IX would flip all cultural standards. Girls’ sports programs were to be equally valued with boys’ in spending and facilities. Fans were ordered to take girls playing baseball as seriously as they took boys.
Many feminists believed that historic gender roles were to be exactly swapped, that it was the turn of men to do housework. A woman’s body, they said, was a woman’s to do whatever she wanted with it.
The main commandment of the feminists was that feelings were to replace convictions as the dominant form of thinking and intellectualizing. Feminists energized the most enduring phrase of the era: “I swear I am not judgmental.”
Several years ago in Santa Monica, I interviewed a fluffy — but markedly angry member — of the goofy women’s group Code Pink. After a pre-war visit to Baghdad, to inspect a battalion of human shields, the woman sputtered. But she could not bring herself to say, publicly, that Saddam was a bad guy.
Feminists, with a strong assist from their acolytes in the mainstream media, ordered men to immediately get in touch with their feelings, and stay in touch. Firemen became firefighters. Congressmen became congresspersons, and God became woman, by fiat. Proof? Proof? Evidence is yesterday. I am woman. I say so.
Seriously, They Created Feminist Studies
Commandment II (women are superior to men) and Commandment III (no difference between the sexes) were ordered taught to all children in the land.
And so, Feminist Studies were born as a no-kidding course at formerly sober universities. Once those walls were down, all the dogs in the neighborhood scampered inside. The general level of academia plummeted into a steep decline that continues at an alarming pace.
Girls graduated college with a straight face and a degree in women’s studies. In interviews, I couldn’t keep a straight face long enough to ask what their original sources were and how the degree would be utilized.
Ancillary developments helped to flip other American bedrock beliefs onto their backs. Abortion was a crime for centuries. In the feminized early 1970s, passionate belief in abortion replaced belief in God as the only acceptable belief concept in post-traditional America. Rape became the favorite criminal charge of a generation. Didn’t one respected feminist assert that all heterosexual sex was tantamount to rape? America became so rape conscious that when a woman researcher proclaimed “one-third of women in the world are rape victims,” not a single protest was heard.
Gay culture transcended heterosexuality in respected circles as the lifestyle of choice. Affirmative action legitimized skin color as the legal successor to brains as the main ticket into college.
Victims and Their Rewards
Scientifically unrelated, unmistakable links emerged between the movements of feminists and gays. Both told the same lie. When they said they wanted to be treated as equals, they meant as superiors. Manly women also emerged, purposely seeking to blur the differences between the sexes. Even the number of sexes legally expanded.
Knowing that America loves and embraces underdogs, feminists brilliantly devised a steady drumbeat mantra of “We is victims.” Their plan soon was rewarded. America squeezed feminists so tightly that the underdog morphed into the overdog. “A woman of color” who was gay became the envy of many. She was lionized as the ultimate citizen.
White men, once the ruling class, became the shunned class. They had less social standing than heterosexual insects.
Thus, the need was born for Prof. Mansfield’s book, Manliness.
He brought two strong streams of criticism: gender studies, a phrase that once would have been a punch-line, and the claim than anything men can do, women can, too.
Regretting that manliness was mean-spiritedly driven out of fashion, Prof. Mansfield argues that manliness, in the tradition of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and Gary Cooper, is virtuous, natural and emphasizes the critical differences between the genders. Has nothing to do with superiority, he says with finality. Even though manliness is a normal (preferred) way for men to act, it has, of course, downsides. More physically inclined than women, men are far more violent. Boys prefer war games. Girls choose frilly dolls. Women and men, as nearly everyone pre-feminist agreed, are different.
Here Are Some Distinctions
Women, Prof. Mansfield maintains, are more risk averse, more cautious, less likely to rigorously champion ideas, people or causes than men.
In answer to a question, he says that no, women cannot do everything men can, and the reverse also is true.
Prof. Mansfield is the author of three other volumes, scholarly and traditional, “Machiavelli’s Virtue,” “Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power,” and “America’s Constitutional Soul.”
In Manliness, he writes that men are wired for competition, intellectually and physically to a much greater extend than women.
He told the Boston Globe that manliness does not need to be preserved, that it abounds even if it does not exactly flourish. The issue is, he added, that “women need to come to terms with it (as does) society as a whole.”
Postscript
Tart and smarmy throughout Sunday’s television interview, Ms. Wolf arrogantly asked Prof. Mansfield what his daughter thought of his new book. With the greatest brevity and solemnity, he said: “She died.”