Abstract

In what is advertised as a “controversial coast to coast bestseller,” most men who were asked “How would you feel if something about you were described as feminine or womanly?” said they’d be angry. Consider these voices from The Hite Report on Male Sexuality:Enraged. Insulted. Never mind what women are really like—I know what he’s saying: he’s saying I should be submissive to him.To be called “like a woman” by another man is to be humiliated by him, because most men consider women to be weak, and a man doesn’t want to be considered weak.Chagrined. I may appear soft, but I carry a big stick. So watch out.If I was described as having something “like a woman’s,” I would be outraged. I would defend my masculinity almost automatically. I wouldn’t like being compared to a woman’s anything.1About two seconds of reflection should be enough to convince most of us that what is offered in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality as the representative testimony of contemporary American men is, in fact, representative: our relations with women are problematic, those with ourselves something worse. What Shere Hite does not call attention to is an intriguing recurrence in many of the responses: the question is heard as a charge and it is imagined to be coming from another male. The basic point now seems to me inescapable, though to say “inescapable” is in no way to say that the history of literary theory and criticism has found it so . One way of understanding that history is to read it as a series of ingenious escapes from the basic point which is economic and sexual and which goes something like this: What we know as “femininity” is internally linked to what we know as “masculinity” because both designations are highly motivated cultural constructions of biological difference that do powerful social work at the moment when they are lived, when they constitute the barely conscious and barely reflected upon substance of belief. The political synonym for “belief” is “ideology” in the particular sense of “ideology” as a constructed thing which nevertheless feels natural and is never experienced as a thing bearing interested human intention. The basic ideological point has to do with social engenderment, and it means, among other things, if you’re male, that you must police yourself for traces of femininity. If you’re male it means, among other things, that the great dread is not so much that another man might call you feminine or womanly , but that you might have to call yourself feminine or womanly. The political issue of gender has recently been the special concern of feminist criticism and eventually, after a long look at Wallace Stevens, I’ll address feminism directly, in what may be its institutionally most potent form. 1. Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality , p. 64. Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. He has also published Criticism and Social Change and After the new Criticism