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Princeton Politics
Your second to last paragraph is wonderful. I’m sure that if we all went around behaving like apes and cretins again, we would certainly all be better friends.
If we are to reestablish a healthy, positive, and self-respecting understanding of masculinity in society, then homosexual conduct must be viewed as so ignominious, so disgraceful, so shameful that “nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it.”
Actually, that is kind of exactly what I was raised to believe. But on this campus, virtually no one would agree with this view, and this is probably why (even though I don’t express this sort of view to any but my friends) I’ve had some difficulty fitting into the PC culture here.
The most probelmatic part of the article:
“…how do men, and particularly adolescents for whom the personal pressures of approaching manhood and the social pressures of insecure peers are most acute, prove that they are men, that they aren’t gay?
So, gay men aren’t actually men? I thought part of your argument was to “divorce masculinuty from sexuality,” but you obviously are still conflating the two.
mcginley is nostalgic for a manliness he does not entirely understand. what we lauds is far from what he finds in philadelphia — not the land of the homophobic but land of the heteronormative.
he might be well suited to examine virtus (manliness in the roman world) and examine it within a classical context. a course is being offered in the classics department next semester on those marginalised by roman ‘virtues’. other suggestions for readings on the manliness of the past include the works of cicero in de amicitia as well as its inspiration: plato’s symposium.
mcginley’s ignorance of the emotional constraints imposed on men by limiting their animalistic (and natural) desires is blinding. it is why, i assume, he is willing to extol a compassionless repression of same-sex sex.
it could just be robbie george’s catholicism speaking through mcginley.
this is literally the dumbest thing i have ever read. i sincerely hope your future employers google you, find this article, and laugh.
Brandon, I was almost intrigued by your argument until you said that the only way to preserve masculinity is to divorce it from sexuality, which must be accomplished by not allowing homosexuality to be included in any definition of masculinity. That is inherently heteronormative, meaning that your definition of masculinity presupposes heterosexuality. Which is a version of sexuality. Hence, a logical fallacy.
But that’s not my main critique. Brandon dude, I don’t think you realize how offensive this is. You basically just said that gay men can’t be “masculine.” Masculinity is a social construct, so anyone on earth can adopt its norms.
I am so not convinced by your argument that you actually think that stigmatizing gay men is bad.
point of irony: pittsburgh is the setting of the well-rated showtime program “Queer as Folk”, which centers on the lives of gay men and women living there.
Certainly the conclusion that McGinley arrives at presupposes many things that he has not elucidated in his essay. First, there is the bold, but apparently unsubstantiated claim that it was the stigma against homosexual conduct that laid “the foundation for a healthy, powerful, and beautiful conception of manhood” in the past. This is on its face not the most plausible of arguments. I take the argument as McGinley presents it to be that men in the past were able to have emotionally open friendships because it was assumed tacitly that as a man you were a heterosexual. Since this was the case, there was no need to wonder whether two affectionate male friends were romantically involved.
The problem now, according to McGinley, seems to be that you can’t have affectionate male friendships without people wondering if the two might be gay. There are two major flaws with this reasoning. First, there’s the “so what” argument, in other words, so what if people think two affectionate males might be gay? The obvious rebuttal to this argument is that there is a stigma against homosexuality, and thus the appearance of being gay is something to be avoided.
The solution that McGinley suggests would be most preferable, and “obvious”, to remedy this, is to have an even stronger stigma against homosexual intercourse. The second objection then, is that this solution is far from obvious, or at the least that there is an opposite, and just as obvious solution: remove the stigma altogether. If the stigma didn’t exist, then we could all say “so what” when two affectionate males were conjectured to be gay.
I think there are a variety of other problems with the essay’s arguments – it’s not clear from where this supposed vision of masculinity comes from (and it seems likely to me that it may never have existed as imagined). Certain historical claims are also made about how masculinity was in ages past, but it’s not clear when that past was. Certainly at many points in the past the prohibition against homosexual sex was not what McGinley makes it out to be. Aside from the Romans and Greeks, in the beginning of the 20th Century during the campaigns in Haiti, homosexual acts were surprisingly common among American troops stationed there – it was only a stigma to be the receptive partner.
If you want to trace some thread through most masculinities of the past, I might suggest not fear of homosexuals, but dominance. Certainly what has had to be downplayed with the acceptance of sexual equality has been the maxim that to be a man, you must be in a position of power within your social group. Whatever happens to define power in a particular group has often been associated with masculinity. This idea too is in need of complication, but I think it would provide a much stronger starting-point, and is also visible in the whole Dockers Man-ifesto that seems to have touched the whole discussion off for McGinley.
“Meaty sandwiches and hearty soups” are destroying the environment and ruining the lives of animals and people. Greens are delicious, and it is instructive that McGinley’s view of masculinity must be expressed through participation in the institutionalized violence of agribusiness.
This is genius.
The day that you can give me workman’s comp when I saw my arm off at work and social security in my old age is the day that I’ll agree with your argument about the welfare state.
The welfare state does not replace charitable interactions between humans in society. Last time I checked, Americans were doing loads of socially conscious and charitable acts. The beauty of the welfare state is that it makes us all a part of a “brother’s keeper” society that recognizes that everyone is entitled to some basic standard of living, no matter the cards that are dealt to them in life. The welfare state recognizes that people fail to take care of one another in society because of things like, oh I don’t know, racial prejudice, or prejudice against the poor, or against the indigent.
And like it or not, Brandon, Americans enjoy and expect to receive some level of care from the state, especially in hard times. Think about food stamps in the past two years. As the stigma attached to them has faded due to the pressing need induced by the recession, more and more families have gratefully used SNAP to supplement their family’s earnings. The American people made this possible through their taxes. We are all our brother’s keeper in this respect.
I think you should re-evaluate your distaste for the welfare state, since your quick brushing off in this article is ill-conceived.
Fair is foul and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
-Macbeth, 1.1.11-12
“SHARE’s desire to avoid blaming victims or victim-blaming prevents SoSN from being able to successfully discourage behaviors that increase the chance of date rape.”
It sounds as if you are insinuating that blaming rape victims will help prevent date rape. I am astounded at your complete and utter lack of logic and human compassion. Keep up the good work, Tory!
@poeta, excusemewhat, Molly A, &c:
These comments show that the responders have failed to engage seriously with McGinley’s argument, which clearly and rightly expresses a distinction between “homosexual desire” and “homosexual acts”. Analogy: I can believe that smoking is bad for you, that it is bad for society, and even that it should be banned, without in any way implying that I hate people who desire to smoke. Other parts of this article (e.g. the analysis of “masculinity” as a set of societal expectations) do not make quite as much sense to me, but on this point the reasoning is very good and, unfortunately, ignored by the responders.
Seems that the author asked meaningful questions, all of which have gone unanswered or, at best, avoided by Ms. Cherrey. This fact alone is revealing.
Mr. Norton Writes very well. Perhaps in the future he will select a more responsive person with real convictions and thoughts worthy of expression.
I would probably agree with much of what is said in this article, if I understood what it meant. As it stands, it conveys very little meaningful information to me. I was provoked to comment here because, in the print version, the sentence beginning “To be modern is to be unable to utter a truth” was proudly quoted in large print. That sentence actually contains a triple negative and conveys exactly the opposite of what (I assume) the writer intended. I think that raising these philosophical issues is great, but for a useful discussion to take place, the writing must be intelligible to non-philosophy majors.
There are a lot of semantic and mechanical errors in this piece, ones that I did not make. Overall I like the edits–they make the arguments more weighty and direct–but “in order to determining the nation’s priorities”? I didn’t write that.
This is a terrible article. The author did only cursory research. Why leave the reader with lingering questions? A good article would do the research and answer those questions.
As a nonprofit institution, the university is not allowed to donate to political candidates. A quick interview with the university’s Office of Government Relations or Office of Community and Regional Affairs, or with Rep. Holt’s office, would confirm this and would thus clarify the author’s skepticism at how the Center for Responsive Politics defines “contributor.” And if there is a liberal bias among those employed by the university, so what? Is the university obligated to employ an equal number of democrats and republicans? Such an idea is ludicrous.
Stop trying to create controversy where there isn’t any.
You are quite right, princeton14, to note that the style of writing in this article is quite obscure, oracular, turgid, etc. But this is very much intentional. While clarity in writing has its merits (and all of my previous articles for the Tory have been, by comparison, quite clear), obscurity also has its place. The reason is that this article is primarily an attempt to match the form of the article to its content. And what the content of the article mainly concerns is the cultivation of a kind of thinking that breaks free from the narrow confines of modern rationalism; the piece thus firmly plants itself in the postmodern tradition (in particular, in the tradition of Adorno, Horkheimer, and other Marxist theorists). In this sense, clarity here would be a failure of argument – or, at least, would go against the emphasis on form that this article advances. Whether such an emphasis or such a formalist project is desirable is another question.
It is true that much of what is said in this article could be worded much more lucidly, and that many of the points that I make are rather straightforward. But because language shapes our view of the world, trading in concepts, phrases, and styles of diction that have become standard often serves only to reinforce the status quo. To change the way in which we see the world, then, it is sometimes necessary to change the way in which we use language. This article is an attempt to do just that, however successful or unsuccessful it may be.
I have problems with this article.
1) You refuse to observe the rights of those who wish to explore their sexual horizons, these HIV test allow people to do so without fear of HIV.
2) Conservatives are the minority on the princeton campus, and our student government has to put policies in place that support the largest part of our campus.
I understand that you’re upset that the conservatives are being misrepresented, but you have to take into account how few of them there are left, they’re a dying breed and princeton must support the side that has the greatest chance of surviving.
-Chang
I happen to visit your page and just read the article without an intention. After I read it, I found it very useful for women. They need to read this regarding planned parenthood and its effect to our reproductive health. This is worth sharing. Thanks!
David,
It’s always refreshing to see Frankfurt-influenced critical analysis making its way into the world, and intriguing –to say the least– to witness your attempts to graft this analysis onto some kind of political conservatism. As far as I know, it’s never been done before; while Adorno has occasionally been accused of closet conservatism by more doctrinaire Marxists, I’ve never heard of an actual conservative embracing him into the fold.
Nevertheless, I use “grafted” in the strongest sense here; it seems to me like you’re taking two disparate and quite possibly opposing things and trying to force them together, with the result –despite being exceedingly well written– risking some sort of unworkable Frankenstein. Critical theory as both a method and a project is directed towards the radical transformation of society; conservatism in its broadest sense seems directed towards the preservation of tradition. It remains unclear to me how you intend to resolve (dialectically or no) these two opposing “movements” -opposing in both an ideological and a directional sense- and your last paragraph doesn’t do much more than baldly assert their synthesis. How does conservatism escape ideology? You seem to value the “subversive ground of thought thinking against itself,” but what does one subvert other than tradition? Perhaps most appositely: what conservatism, exactly, are we talking about?
This reasoning is really delightfully shoddy for a magazine that has plenty of time to edit its content:
Mrs. Pollnow’s logic that selling something which should not be taken by force can be extended to many other issues:
- Slavery is taking labor by force and is inexcusable, ergo labor should never be sold in a market
- the privacy of the home should never be invaded by force, ergo it is wrong to pay people to film documentaries in their homes
- wouldn’t adoption and lawful intercourse with someone who does not pay for the act be non-permissible by the same reasoning? What if you sell it for a low price, like a romantic dinner, perhaps?
She tries to circumvent that objection by an ad hoc argument that stealing an egg secretly could not be remedied by money (which does not address the slavery example just given – slavery is presumably not remediable by paying money). Also: Really? I don’t think everyone feels that way, as having something taken from me without my pain or awareness does not seem problematic and is one of a row of non sequitur in the article.
The argument completely veers off into farce at the point where she mentions that obviously human sexuality is never for sale anywhere. Ever heard of the Netherlands? So it’s a non sequitur sequence of unrelated concepts of theft and appropriation whose connection is assumed not proven and the transferred as a “parallell” to a case that is not obviously similar unless tautologically assumed to be so.
Don’t submit this for an ethics class where you actually have to show your assumptions…
Bennett,
Your last sentence gets to nub of the matter straightaway: What, precisely, is “conservatism”? This is an important question, but unfortunately it’s one to which there is no clear answer. For some, conservatism is closely tied to free-market capitalism (and to the Republican Party); for others, it embodies an ethos of “social conservative”; and for yet others, it is a certain intellectual stance in favor of only gradual social reform.
The way in which I use the term “conservatism” is in the latter two senses. Conservatism, for me, embodies a commitment to “traditional” values (community, family, etc.), as well as a resistance to radical revolution. (And in fact, it’s the conjunction of these two senses of conservatism that leads me into a position similar to Adorno’s. On the one hand, my commitment to social conservatism makes me critical of free-market capitalism, for the latter directly undermines the values that (social) conservatives hold dear. But, on the other hand, my commitment to the third sense of conservatism makes me wary of, say, endorsing a communist takeover. Like Adorno, I’m wary of – and perhaps against – attempts at hastily and radically reforming the system.)
You also ask: “[W]hat does one subvert other than tradition?” That is, how is critical theory (which aims at the critique of society and tradition) reconcilable with conservatism (which aims at their preservation)? The answer is, in fact, quite simple: critiquing a tradition is not incompatible with preserving it. Only if one is a Burkean conservative – where conservatism means an uncritical adherence to tradition – is this so. But this isn’t the only way we can see conservatism. For traditions are living only to the extent that they are subject to constant critique from those within them. A tradition that is only passively received and transmitted is a dead tradition; living traditions are traditions full of conflict. So, insofar as we as conservatives follow “tradition,” to that extent we have a duty to subject tradition to critique, to bring out its contradictions and develop it further. And in this sense, Adorno and the rest of the critical theorists, with the critical apparatuses that they developed, are allies.
This is an excellent article. Regardless of my own culture, religion or heritage, I know that it was white American Christians who invented free speech, free religion, capitalism, and prosperity.
Surely, I’m not the only person who wrote a comment on your piece on Cornell West. At first I thought you would be too busy with exams to screen and publish the best letters. Now I wonder if you are just too fearful about fanning the fires of controversy at Princeton. This is deplorable because it means you are really just another toothless voice for preserving the status quo.
Your interview makes it clear that Princeton should have never hired and then given tenure to Cornel West, a scatter brain gadfly who cannot think straight. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end of a toxic brand of racial politics when one of its prime spokesmen can only spout rubbish. He comes across so addled that one must wonder if he was able to sober up for the interview. Also, I wonder why West is so surprised that 0bama dropped him like a hot potato. Did he really think our thoroughly arrogant president has any motivation other than blind ambition?
Thank you for this well-considered argument. I hope it sparks some hearty debate on this topic that so many conservative types have failed to really consider.
This is a great example, “Another good example is the “In God We Trust” phrase printed on American currency. Some non-theists lobby to remove this from our currency, but others think it’s petty or a waste of time. If PUSH entered the thorny arena of political activism, it would necessarily isolate certain members, contradicting its primary goal of “establishing a positive social environment for rationalists, skeptics, and non-theists.”