Love In The Time of Choler

As we prepare to indulge in the various mating rituals which herald summer's arrival and mark the end of a seemingly interminable stress-filled reading and examination period. It seems appropriate to consider the state of relations between men and women. Especially for those of us anticipating languid, exploratory couplings on the Vineyard or Provence or Boise or (place your summer destination here).

Freud asked the wrong question. Instead of agonizing over what women want, he would have found it more productive to ask "What do men, those mysterious, beguiling, ultimately unknowable creatures, want?

We know what the man who reads Inside Edge, with its cynical approach and lowest common denominator appeal wants sexually acquiescent women. But what about those who are a little higher on the evolutionary scale?

Even the French, self-appointed arbiters of the human romantic condition, are baffled. In Paris this spring, the provocative and enthralling Les Hommes et Les Femmes by Francoise Giroud and Bernard-Henri Levy was regarded as mandatory reading for anyone who sought to gain insight into the contemporary state of affairs between the sexes.

Unlike its sterile American counterpart You Just Don't Understand by Deborah Tannen, which also seeks to identify the different languages men and women speak, Les Hommes et Les Femmes regards the chasm between men and women as being ultimately unbridgeable. They also chide American feminists for going too far in attempting to eradicate the difference between men and women.

This increasing politicization of sexual relations between the sexes has also been attacked by Allan Bloom whose elegy mourning the death of Eros, was posthumously published in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Bloom's piece blithely ignored the fact that all human relations, even intimate ones, are colored by Machiavellian power struggles, which admittedly, vary in terms of scale and intensity.

A ruthless stripping away of banal protestations of love in a romantic relationship reveals this durable fact. Feminism's greatest triumph lies its success in helping us to understand and accept this. We might thus be inclined to think of contemporary romantic relations as love in the time of choler.

The carefully negotiated truce in the relations between the sexes can in large part, be attributed to a degree of change in male attitudes and expectations. The cessation of hostilities has allowed for the emergence of admirably modern men with a progressive vision of human relations and a talent for the realization of possibilities. In a highly unscientific survey of friends, Neil L. Rudenstine narrowly beat out Bill Clinton as an avatar of this new male sensibility.

Other men like Professor Harvey "keep 'embarefoot and pregnant" Mansfield, seem to have trouble adjusting to the new state of affairs. In an observation which strains credulity, Mansfield recently declared in The Harvard Review of Philosophy that "Women like to have babies That's why they do. "Is it possible that Professor Mansfield still doesn't get it?

Increasingly, Mansfield's public comments are beginning to sound like the death Rattle of a man whose species is facing extinction. And Mansfield is not alone. In the face of tectonic cultural shifts, some men are beginning to feel beside, puzzled and dispirited. They perceive their domain as shrinking the direct result of the evil machinations of a coven of feminists. I can think of nothing more terrifying than dealing with such men, whose expectations mirror those of their unenlightened forbears, men with truncated visions.

But there is hope. Many members of this generation of college men, having been weaned on feminism and internalized its basic tenets, have (gratefully) ceded traditional roles. Their expectations of the future are different from those of other generations. They accept the fact that there are no certainties, that everything is up for grabs.

Professor Mansfield was right about one thing, a liberated woman liberates a man. The one thing that all men want is to be free.

Lorraine A. Lezama '94 will be summering this year on the banks of the Charles.

Freud should have asked, "What do men, those mysterious, beguiling, ultimately unknowable creatures, want?"