Harvey Mansfield: Vying for Most Ridiculous Public Intellectual of the Year

Harvey Mansfield is at it again, but this time he’s got Sarah Palin to project all of his confused rhetoric and unexamined generalizations on. In a piece at Forbes today he argues that Sarah Palin is the shero of what feminism should have been all along–a woman cozy in sex role differences, happy to mythologize masculinity, and still ready to serve (notice the language here) in office herself (cause, gosh darn it, women are pretty clever after all). An excerpt:

All Sarah Palin did was to claim her equal opportunity to a job once held exclusively by men. This sort of equality–the opportunity to take on public careers outside the home–is something liberals and conservatives agree on. That conservatives accept it is proven by the rapturous reception she received from Republicans, who greeted her as a political savior.
This she may or may not be, but she seems to have had the effect of enthusing the base, in part because of her sex.
Now, why could the women’s movement not have taken advantage of this bipartisan agreement from the beginning? What impelled it to adopt a radical feminism hostile to both liberals and conservatives? Was this feminism necessary to attack male domination and to stir up the status quo?

Harvey, #1, the definition of feminism is political, social, and economic equality. #2, equality confers that no one group of people can lord domination over another. #3, the status quo wasn’t equality. WTF is so hard to understand about this equation?
As if his faulty logic and infuriating language weren’t enough, he continuously pushes the tired notion that feminists are no fun, unattractive, and asexual to boot, writing that Sarah Palin is “one who knows what it is to be a woman and enjoys it,” and “You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic.”
Huh? What? I mean is this old man serious? Someone needs to send Harvey Manfield a big ass care package from Toys in Babeland, Rachel Kramer Bussel, and Jane Campion, or teach him how to use a computer so he can type in a URL: www.feministing.com. His email, just in case you’d like to tell him what you think of his piece is hmansfield@gov.harvard.edu.
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Thanks to Dawn for the heads up.