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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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BLOGOSCOPY A Regular University Diaries Feature MOI, MARGUERITE BLOGGIERE II ' A 1968 profile by the journalist Lee Edison described [Hans] Bethe as "a tall, spare man with a deceptively distracted look." He wrote: "His graying hair seems permanently electrified; his shoes are scuffed, and his tie seems to have been studiously arranged to miss his collar button. He listens attentively, nodding his head as if in agreement, but - as devastated colleagues and adversaries have discovered - this habit is far from a sign of agreement. His 'yes, yes, yes' is rather a signal that his mental apparatus is receiving. What he does with the input is another matter." ' Yet again UD gets to talk about what it’s like for her to be a woman! A woman who blogs! Who blogs in a woman’s voice! UD has no effing idea what a woman’s voice is. All she knows is that she loves the attention. Are you okay, UD? How do you feel about men banging about the blogosphere drowning your woman’s voice? And the op/ed page of the Los Angeles Times - how do you feel about the fact that so few women’s voices are heard there? Yes, it’s time for UD to testify. Ain’t I a woman?! No. Not in any way recognizably akin to the woman Deborah Tannen describes in her LA Times essay on the subject, coyly titled "The Feminine Technique" -- an echo of Betty Friedan’s book‘s title, "The Feminine Mystique." Tannen says there’s a woman’s technique of writing. The feminine technique. It is different from men’s. It is better than their “attack-dog” writing. Because of the “agonistic rituals” with which they’ve been raised, men think that [A]rguing ideas [is] a way to explore them … . Because they're used to this agonistic way of exploring ideas — playing devil's advocate — many men find that their adrenaline gets going when someone challenges them, and it sharpens their minds: They think more clearly and get better ideas. But those who are not used to this mode of exploring ideas, including many women, react differently: They back off, feeling attacked, and they don't do their best thinking under those circumstances. …[Women are] put off by the competitive, cutthroat culture of science. The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation. … [Males see] fighting as a format for doing things that have nothing to do with actual combat: They show affection by mock-punching, getting a friend's head in an armlock or playfully trading insults. So much here to leap upon and attack. It is not only men who think that “arguing ideas is a way to explore them.” It is all sentient human beings. If, confronted with dialectical thought, women “back off, feeling attacked,” they shouldn’t, and Tannen shouldn’t pretend that running away from intellectual rough-housing is a species of moral superiority. If you read in its entirety Tannen’s contribution to the Susan-Estrich-generated controversy about the representation of women among bloggers and opinion columnists, you'll note how she conflates strenuous oppositional give-and-take (as in Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight") and pointless cerebral brutalizing… Along these lines -- UD has noticed throughout her life that some people are profoundly conflict-averse. Such people routinely conflate things in Tannen’s way -- if you raise your voice with them, if you challenge a point they’re making, if you fail to maintain at all times a sharing and caring demeanor, they assume you’re beating up on them and they get angry or weepy or weird. This is called taking things personally, and it is a surefire way to deal yourself out of the world of thought. At its core it represents a wretched egotism. As for the actual physical fighting Tannen mentions - “mock-punching, getting a friend’s head in an armlock or playfully trading insults” - this is and always has been the very foundation of UD’s affectional life. Take it away and she has nothing. |