Last weekend, I sat down to watch the movie Waiting for what I thought would be two hours of mindless entertainment. What I got was a persistent need to think about what I had seen on a greater level. The time I spent thinking made me realize how much society changes with each year that passes.
Naomi, a very memorable character, is an extremely bitter, angry, overworked waitress for an Applebee’s-like restaurant. She hates everything about her job, other people and basically the world.
Even though Naomi’s actions throughout the movie are hysterical, they got me thinking about why she is the way she is. I decided that growing up in our incredibly dysfunctional society has created a tension that is perhaps easier to explain than many would think.
Take the recent lecture given by Harvey Mansfield as an example of this dysfunctional society. Mansfield, an older man and professor of government at Harvard University, stated and defended his investment in the importance of manliness in Nelson Hall last week.
According to a recent Technician article, Mansfield disagrees with America’s attempt to create a gender-neutral society. He is afraid that society will achieve its goal of creating a world in which men and women are treated equally, causing men like him to lose their right to prevail over women. Mansfield said he believes that manliness is an important factor in preventing this type of revolution from happening. This explains his motivation for traveling around the nation to lecture others on his egotistical, caveman beliefs.
I don’t think Mansfield has anything to worry about.
As long as people like him are considered scholars who lecture at prestigious universities, manliness has no threat. His problem is that he is set in his ways, as many older people are. As people age, they become less and less willing to accept change. Take the “in my day, we had to walk five miles to school” speech as an example of this.
For Mansfield, it would most likely go something like this: “In my day, men were superior to women, and that’s how it should be — societal advancement is overrated.” If society accepted this way of thinking, many breakthroughs and innovations never would have happened. A caveman would have said, “In my day, people did not walk upright.” Magellan’s grandfather would have said, “In my day, people did not sail around the world.” Alexander Graham Bell’s uncle would have said, “In my day, people sent letters to their friends.”
Our society is dysfunctional because of people like Mansfield — people who stand in the way of advancement by attempting to keep everything the same as the years go by. He defended his belief that “gender neutrality in theory is abstracting from sexual differences so as to make jobs and professions … open to both sexes” in the article, by saying that even though this would be fair, it would detract from the happiness of society. As far as I know, equal opportunity and endless possibility have never created a decrease in happiness.
Clearly, Mansfield is thinking only of his own happiness and not the happiness and unity that could evolve.
Some things should remain as they are, such as morals, religion and hospitality. People no longer care about each other like they used to. We now have to lock our doors to keep out criminals and fight alone for what we deserve. We live in a society that believes in the “every man for himself” idea, and this society will never be able to escape this disease with people like Mansfield and his idea of “manliness” standing in its way.
Manliness is defined as “belonging to or befitting a man.” It is no wonder to me that Mansfield adopted this word as the title for his book because this is surely his hope for his ideas. Mansfield defined manliness in the article as “…confidence in a situation of risk.” The situation of risk here is the formulation of a gender-neutral society, and Mansfield wants men to have the confidence to fight against the fair and just situation that would occur if men and women were equal in all aspects of society.
This world has become very angry, like Naomi. Society evolved to walk upright, let Magellan board his ship and let Bell invent the telephone. Now, our society needs to allow itself to progress, like societies in the past, to better the world we all live in.
