More reflections on a culture's twilight years.

I thought I would add this post due to the arguments (10 non-scriptural arguments against same-sex marriage) Anthony Esolen has been developing at Mere Comments.

As far as I can discern, the strongest argument against same-sex marriage (SSM) seeks to deal with the assumptions of the SSM position--namely, that our bodies matter little and what is really essential is the "heart" i.e. what a person feels, thinks, etc. apart from what they do. Of course, what one does has largely to do with the limits placed upon them by their bodies. But in a society where gender--i.e. the body--is downplayed to make room for pure choice (choice in the abstract divorced from the body), bodily limits matter little.

I just ran into Harvey Mansfield, a long-time professor of government at Harvard, on the web. I am sure his views are controversial, but I am interested in reading more of his works. Here's an excerpt from a June 2006 article he wrote for Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College:

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), an earlier and more fundamental book than [Betty] Friedan's, had argued that women were not different from men by nature, but only by history. It was a history of oppression by men that kept women from being as aggressive and assertive as men are. With the title of her book, Beauvoir implies that men live a better life than women, that manliness is better than femininity. Since women are perfectly capable of manliness, that quality should no longer be named for one sex. Beauvoir renamed it “transcendence,” a gender-neutral term. The gender-neutral society was born and manliness as the quality of a sex was demoted to masculinity, a title that signifies such homely features as the hair on your chest and your face.

Thus feminism, in its eagerness to claim manliness for women, destroyed femininity. We began to see gangster movies with lovely actresses playing the role of hit men. Some feminists denounced the manly passion for competition and war, but in doing so they had to be careful not to imply that women are unsuited for business or for the military. Since the Sixties, we have become used to seeing women in men's occupations. Yet the gender-neutral society created by today's feminism is not in fact as neutral as it claims. Despite its dislike of the word manliness, it is on the whole friendly to the quality, now under a new name, more neutral and prosaic, such as “leadership.” On the one hand, the world seems to have been feminized, yet on the other hand, it is still a man's world, and in a strange way even more so, because both sexes are now engaged in employments that reward the manly qualities of aggression and assertiveness.

With the push for a gender-neutral society, not only is masculinity and femininity diminished, or "destroyed" as Mansfield says, but language is abused and loses its ability to carry meaning. Just look at how vague and un-concrete the words transcendence and leadership are. They are attached to nothing in our concrete experience. They're abstractions and their popularity today--or at least leadership's popularity--reveals just how threatening the particular is to our culture. Particulars--such as bodies--ostensibly restrict freedom. Notice Mansfield suggests that when the "more neutral and prosaic" term leadership was preferred over manliness, a shift in society began. But this shift was not merely about gender differences, it was a shift in language and imagination. So maybe we should say that when a language begins to lose its particular-ness, the loss of a collective meaning is not far behind--nor is all sorts of confusion--especially, the confusion of male and female.