Wordslut
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Other gender-based power plays include speaking to women in a patronizingly “teachy” manner, aka mansplaining. One of the most blatant examples of mansplaining from recent memory comes from a video that went viral in 2017 of a physics panel featuring six brilliant scientists, one of whom was a woman, UC Davis professor Veronika Hubeny. An hour into the discussion, the male moderator (not a physicist) finally directed a question at Hubeny, only to begin immediately talking over her, trying and failing to explain her research himself. It took an audience member shouting, “Let her speak, please!” prompting the audience to erupt in applause, for the moderator, at long last, to zip his flap.
Consistently interrupting women as they’re speaking is a similar ploy for control. Much research has shown that women are routinely interrupted more than men, both at work and in social scenarios (a small but significant 1975 survey found that men were responsible for almost 98 percent of the interruptions recorded in mixed-sex conversations). Worse yet, there’s also the act of not responding at all. Robin Lakoff once pointed out that while interrupting someone frustratingly tells them that they have no right to the floor, or that what they’re saying isn’t important, nonresponse renders the victim’s speaking status nonexistent to begin with. As if to say, the idea of a woman making a worthwhile contribution is so meaningless that as far as the listener is concerned, her statement might as well just have been a loud gust of wind and therefore does not merit a response. I remember once pitching a project to a group of creative higher-ups, the boss of whom was a British guy in his sixties—he didn’t say a word for the entire meeting, and when I was finished, he immediately picked up the conversation he was having with his colleague before I got there, as if the last forty-five minutes had simply . . . never happened.
And then there’s the act of dismissing a woman’s testimony when she comes forward with any of these offenses.
Pointing out that men use language to dominate women both regularly and casually is not exactly news. It’s hard to forget that until relatively recently, women were not even considered people in a legal or political sense (American women weren’t able to own property until the late 1800s or vote until half a century later, and that was just white ladies). Even as women become incrementally better represented in business and government, things don’t naturally get better for them as a whole. Instead, it’s often true that as women gain more freedom and control, men’s use of these linguistic power moves increases accordingly. Because men have gotten so used to speaking for everyone, thanks to millennia of doing so, when women begin to creep into their territory, they feel as though they have to do something to reassert the authority they’ve been taught for so long is rightfully theirs. In a way, catcalling, interruption, disregarding a woman by telling her she’s crazy, and other forms of silencing are in response to this gradual challenging of the power scales. It’s all a way of rendering what women think and say irrelevant, a justification for keeping them from the authority they’ve begun to reclaim.
“Silencing is always political,” Robin Lakoff said in a 1992 paper. “To be voiceless is to have no ‘say’ in what gets done, what happens to one, to have no representation. . . . To be deprived of speech is to be deprived of humanity itself—in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.” When one’s humanity is taken away, the obligation to treat them equally is also removed. “So the silencing of women, in all its forms, is more than a convenience allowing men to enjoy conversation more,” Lakoff said. “It is the basic tool by which political inequity is created, reinforced, and made to seem inevitable.”
The hopeful truth is that inequity is not actually inevitable. To correct it, what we need is to convince the people who currently have a monopoly on the microphone—and thus a monopoly on social and political control itself—to do as our preschool teachers told us and let someone else have a turn. What we also need is to empower those who have been convinced that they don’t deserve access to the microphone to seize it firsthand. The tricky part is that none of that can happen until we’re able to grasp why these acts of linguistic domination happen the way they do—we have to understand the social functions of catcalling, interruption, and other forms of gender-based verbal harassment. This understanding will help us see why our current strategies for dealing with linguistic power moves haven’t worked very well so far, and ultimately, what we can do better.
In recent history, acts of verbal dominance have gotten worse, not better. A 2017 study analyzing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from 1990, 2002, and 2015 determined that as more female justices were added to the bench, interruptions of women did not improve but escalated. Using the logic that more female justices would normalize female power, you might expect the opposite result. “Interruptions are attempts at dominance . . . so the more powerful a woman becomes, the less often she should be interrupted,” the researchers wrote. Instead, they found that in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices.
“With more women on the court, the situation only seems to be getting worse,” wrote the study’s authors, who were also able to prove that the motivation for interruption definitely had to do with gender, as opposed to experience on the bench. This confirmation came after finding that female justices more than males were persistently cut off not only by their male colleagues but also by their male subordinates—the advocates on the floor attempting to persuade them. “Even though Supreme Court justices are some of the most powerful individuals in the country [with interruption], gender is approximately 30 times more powerful than seniority,” the authors concluded. (Not to mention, in 2015, the most common type of interruption of any individual justice was by male advocates speaking over Justice Sotomayor—this dynamic accounted for 8 percent of all of the court’s interruptions. Sotomayor is also the only female Supreme Court justice of color.)
Most women haven’t experienced being interrupted on the Supreme Court bench, but they have experienced catcalling. Out of all the linguistic methods used to subordinate women, we tend to hear a lot about street harassment because (a) it is the one form of gendered subjugation that nearly everyone who’s ever been female (or perceived as female) has been put through, and (b) almost everyone who has absolutely hates it. According to a pair of 2014 surveys from nonprofit organizations Hollaback! and Stop Street Harassment, somewhere between 65 percent and 85 percent of all American women experience catcalling by age seventeen. Recipients include women of all ages, races, income levels, sexual orientations, and geographic locations, as well as many men, especially men who aren’t straight or cisgender. The Stop Street Harassment numbers showed that respondents who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender were significantly more likely to experience street harassment than anyone else. Black and Hispanic respondents were at greater risk too.
In an episode of This American Life, Australian journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith attempted to interview every man who catcalled her on a busy street in Sydney. To persuade one of the men she confronted that women do not in fact enjoy unwelcome sexual commentary from strangers, she quoted a poll stating that 67 percent of women think that an interaction with a catcaller is going to become violent. Eighty-five percent feel angry after being catcalled, 78 percent feel annoyed, 80 percent feel nervous, and 72 percent feel disgusted. In 2017 I conducted a small survey of my own, asking my friends on social media to tell me how catcalling made them feel in one word: small, degraded, and objectified were among the top responses. According to Hollaback!, only 3 percent of women find catcalling flattering.
This 3 percent number is especially interesting when you consider the fact that
most men accused of sexual harassment say that they’re simply shelling out appreciation. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” “It’s just a compliment,” and “We’re just ordinary people. We want to say hi,” are a few of the responses linguists have collected from confronted catcallers. Statistics aside, one of the biggest flaws of these defenses is that whistling at someone you don’t know as they walk by, offering unsolicited appraisals of their outfit or demeanor, and commenting on body parts not normally available for public scrutiny violate pretty much every norm of compliment behavior experts have identified. (The most pertinent of these behavioral observations, according to a 2008 analysis, is that the majority of men’s compliments to women have nothing at all to do with appearance but instead with softening face-threatening acts such as requests or criticism. And they almost always occur between people who know each other, e.g., “Kate, you know you’re my favorite, but can you please try to show up on time tomorrow?”). In a 2009 paper titled “The compliment as a social strategy,” linguists Nessa Wolfson and Joan Manes determined that whatever the immediate discourse function, “complimenting has the underlying social function of creating or reinforcing solidarity between the speaker and the addressee.” If asked to illustrate the concept of bonding via flattery to an alien race unfamiliar with human social interaction, I think we can all agree that “Smile!” and “Let me tap that ass” would not be considered good examples.
In 2017 comedian Peter White put the lunacy of the compliment argument into perspective with this pithy statement: “I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”
Objectively, having your body spontaneously critiqued by a stranger in the street is so bizarrely unlike any other human-to-human encounter that it’s genuinely impossible to know how to respond. For all of my teenage years, catcalling distressed me so much that whenever it happened, I simply kept my head down and didn’t react. But in my early twenties, after having tickled my inner revolutionary with the teachings of a gender and language class or two, I decided to try my hand at confronting them. Because I’d heard that many men who do this are just looking for a quick reaction, and that a smile or the flick of a middle finger were considered equal successes, I tried to give my catcallers something less expected.
“I know why you’re doing this,” I said once to a pair of boys in backward caps, who’d hollered that they’d like to “show me a good time” in Union Square Park. “You’re trying to prove how straight you are to each other. I’ve studied people like you in school. You can’t fool me.” I highly doubt I convinced any of the men I confronted to stop catcalling forever, but I did bamboozle and embarrass a few of them, and those felt like small victories in the moment. I remember one guy actually ran away from me. I’m sure it was because he felt annoyed rather than defeated, but it did the trick.
On social media I asked my friends to tell me their personal favorite techniques for coping with catcallers and was inundated with responses: among them were shouting in a foreign language to freak them out, making ugly faces to confuse them, and staring them down to make them feel uncomfortably seen. I even asked Deborah Cameron what she’s done in the face of street harassment: “I’ve told them to fuck off on occasion,” she told me, “but like most women I’m wary of getting into it with them—it’s potentially dangerous.”*
Unfortunately, Cameron thinks that spending any more time on a catcaller—attempting to reason with them or change their behavior—is likely a waste of time. “They aren’t listening, especially if they’re in a group,” she said. “Hypothetically, it might be interesting to just say to a catcaller, ‘Can you explain to me why you just said that?’ and keep questioning every answer, and watch him struggle to make any sense of his own behavior. But I can’t really see your average street harasser sticking around for that kind of interview.”
Even when they do, the results aren’t exactly promising. On Gordon-Smith’s episode of This American Life, she was able to persuade only one of her dozens of catcallers to stop and have a real conversation with her. A former speech and debate competitor, Gordon-Smith gave the guy every rational argument to reconsider his behavior: statistics, insightful questions, emotionally charged personal anecdotes. But in the end, he just couldn’t be convinced. After 120 minutes with this man—whom she described as otherwise sweet, friendly, and “not a bad guy”—the only thing Gordon-Smith was able to accomplish was getting him to promise to no longer physically attack women in the street (he was big into ass slapping). Discontinuing his verbal comments was something he did not feel compelled to do (which he couldn’t come up with a particularly cogent reason for). “Compliments, when I feel they’re appropriate . . . I think I’m still gonna do,” he said, after which Gordon-Smith argued that she still felt he was choosing his fun over women’s feelings. Said the guy: “Well, that’s kinda just the selfishness of the world.”
Gordon-Smith made one last point: “Can I tell you why I found this stuff really depressing?” she asked. “I feel like I’ve been walking around for days now believing that people want to be nice, and believing that it comes from a good place, and believing that guys are just trying to have fun and compliment people. But it’s real, real hard for me to keep believing that when I tell people how angry it makes us, I tell people how sad it makes us, I tell people about sexual violence statistics, and the reaction isn’t, ‘That matters to me, and I’m going to stop.’ The reaction is, ‘That doesn’t matter to me.’”
The unfortunate truth is that Gordon-Smith was right: simply informing a catcaller or any other verbal harasser that his words are hurtful is not enough to make him stop. And this isn’t because the person is a bad apple. If only it were that simple. Instead, it’s because of a much larger problem with what dudes in our culture believe belongs to them.
The fundamental reason why street harassment sucks is the same reason why a male coworker calling a female coworker “sweetheart” sucks, which is the same reason why it sucks when a man touches a woman he doesn’t know in a way he would never touch a man (like by placing his hands on her hips as he slides past her in a crowded bar). The underlying problem with all of these forms of sexual trespassing is that they rely on the assumption that a man has an automatic right to a woman’s body. It’s a display of social control, signaling to women that they are intruders in a world owned by men, and thus have no right to privacy.
When a man touches or says intimate things to a woman he doesn’t know, there is an implication that he has an inherent access to the recipient’s sexuality, which reduces her to a plaything and draws the focus away from any of her more relevant or impressive identities. Scholar Beth A. Quinn once pointed out that according to research on sexual assault, calling attention to a woman’s sexuality can function “to exclude recognition of her competence, rationality, trustworthiness, and even humanity.” In other words, a woman could be a CEO of a company, have an IQ of 180, or be a prosecutor making her case in a courtroom, but the second the male defense attorney calls her “honey,”* all of that is taken away. (By contrast, a man calling attention to his own (hetero)sexuality—which catcalling also does—actually makes him seem more worthy of respect. As Quinn says, “The power of sexuality is asymmetrical, in part, because being seen as sexual has different consequences for women and men.”)
This expression of overfamiliarity is not something that happens only to women, by the way. Our culture has a worrisome habit of treating all kinds of marginalized groups—people of color, queer folks, people of lower socioeconomic class—with a presumptuous level of intimacy. A 2017 study of body-camera footage revealed that police officers were 61 percent more likely to use low-respect language, such as informal titles like “my man,” with black drivers than they were with white drivers. Interactions like this are not a sign of affection or something the recipient should be flattered by. Because really, they’re just a signal that the speaker cons
iders them of inferior status and has some sort of preapproved license signed by the universe to treat them as such.
There is one unified reason why many men feel as though they have an inherent right to comment on women’s bodies, ignore them in meetings, or dismiss them with the excuse that they’re on their periods and acting hysterical: it’s because of a lack of empathy. Studies of sexual harassers show that when a woman retaliates against a man’s sexual trespassing (which she’s not supposed to do, of course, because she’s just an object to him) and is by some miracle believed and the dude is confronted, he will likely make some excuse about his intentions. He’ll say that he was misinterpreted and meant no harm. He’ll say that he’s a “good guy” and that he doesn’t deserve to be complained about or have his reputation tarnished for a little playful repartee.
But when he says this stuff, he’s really just playing dumb. Because research shows that when sexual harassers are asked to switch places with their targets, they are able to grasp quite quickly that what they’ve done is wrong. It’s not that their intentions have been misunderstood—these dudes realize the harm they’ve caused. It’s simply that they aren’t motivated to care. They lack empathy. And this, underneath it all, has to do with a problem of how our culture teaches men to be men.
Our standards of masculinity are extreme and undue: they require that men be powerful, exhaustingly heterosexual, and utterly unrelated to femininity at all costs. In order to perform and protect that masculine identity, men quickly learn that in many cases, they must mask a woman’s viewpoint and disregard her pain. As Beth A. Quinn wrote in 2002, “Men fail to exhibit empathy with women because masculinity precludes them from taking the position of the feminine other, and men’s moral stance vis-à-vis women is attenuated by this lack of empathy.” This empathy deficit toward all things feminine surely hurts men too, as the masculinity standards that cause it do not allow men to display any emotional, physical, or linguistic characteristics that could possibly be construed as womanlike. So they often lock themselves up in a rigid box of heteronormative masculine behavior out of fear that being perceived as feminine will endanger them and take their power away.