Between grief and nothing, I'll have the chicken.

Monday, cigarette #2
Still outside WLH, 11:05pm
MUSIC: "Floating in Space," the Seth Material

Floating in space with no constraints,
Tell me, are you free?

Harvey Mansfield keynoted the last debate of the semester, Resolved: Men should be manly, and the Women's Center was out in full force. I was curious to hear what the professional feminists had to say to him, because asking the average Yale feminist to explain her position is like straw-polling Straussianism at a Nascar event. People who take a position for granted don't usually have a lot to say about it.

I cornered one after the meeting, enticed her with promises of coffee, and eventually wound up at her apartment where she let me smoke inside. She was smoking Light 100's and I had my Marlboro Reds, but the sisterhood of tobacco overcame our differences. Truly there is more that unites us than divides us.

The conversation rambled, but somewhere around hour three we were finally able to slap our positions up on the x-ray board and say, "There's your problem." At the end of the day, her biggest problem with the patriarchy is that it hurts women. "Yes it does," I said, "in the same way that loyalties sometimes ask us to do things which are morally wrong. But this doesn't mean that either loyalty or gender roles should be given up." She pointed out examples where patriarchy became abusive. (This is a woman who spent her summer trying to get prostitutes to unionize.) "Sure. Getting rid of manliness and womanliness will get rid of this suffering. But it will also leave women and men adrift with no coherent picture of what virtue should look like. Having nothing to live up to means never falling short, which will leave them perfectly happy and perfectly unsatisfied, like a mid-life crisis but worse."

Epigrammatic Eve once said, "Liberals think life is a comedy; conservatives think life is a tragedy," and here it was in front of my eyes. I prefer suffering; she prefers being unmoored. Suffering, at least, can be redemptive. What are the compensating benefits of being completely adrift?