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Can I just mention that music from the TRON soundtrack featured in Top Gear this season? I thank you.

Food for thought

I said: Discussing the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival recently, which has long excluded transwomen who don't "share the experience of growing up under patriarchy", I wondered if I'd qualify as a woman by that definition, lacking so many female experiences: never been raped, never experienced intimate violence, never been pregnant. For that matter, I've only worn makeup a handful of times.

Multiple commenters remarked that rape was not "part of being female" and one disputed that "most women have been raped". Now the confusion is partly my fault for being unclear, so I've clarified what I meant in the comments - that rape is an experience of a large proportion of women "under patriarchy". But think about this: why were the only objections to the mention of rape? Why didn't anyone argue pregnancy is not an automatic part of being female, or dispute that "most women have been bashed by a boyfriend or husband"?

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Following up the references in Bury, snagged a couple more books on how men and women communicate, and almost immediately discovered my problem and its solution:

"It is also worth noting that aggressively negative questioning often leads people to take up entrenched positions - especially in a public debate - and little cognitive progress is made when this happens. Defensiveness is not an attitude which encourages creative thinking. Supportive elicitations and modified criticisms are much more likely to facilitate good quality open-ended discussion or productive exploratory talk."
- Janet Holmes, Women, Men, and Politeness

Well, dur, you may remark. My problem has been - is - that I sometimes provoke that defensiveness with my bluntness, my "bald disagreement", then get annoyed by all the defensive talk and only become even more blunt. What I have to accept is that, if I want a good discussion, I need to try to avoid provoking defensive responses in the first place, regardless of what I may think of that kind of reaction. (Intriguingly, as ChiTARDIS showed, I'm seldom so blunt in face-to-face communication - not only is this a "male" way of speaking, it's also an Internet way of speaking, terse and to the point. Or, to put it another way: tl;dr.)

More on this shortly.

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OK, so let's see what the 1995 book Women, Men, and Politeness by NZ feminist and linguist Janet Holmes has to say about differences in the way men and women talk, and especially how they handle conflict.

First lemme quote you these two bits from chapter 1:

"Most women enjoy talk and regard talking as an important means of keeping in touch, especially with friends and intimates. They use language to establish, nurture and develop personal relationships. Men tend to see language more as a tool for obtaining and conveying information. They see talk as a means to an end, and the end can often be very precisely defined - a decision reached, for instance, some information gained, or a problem resolved. These different perceptions of the main purpose of talk account for a wide variety of differences in the way women and men use language." (p 2 - all emphases in this posting are mine)

"Men's reasons for talking often focus on the content of the talk or its outcome, rather than on how it affects the feelings of others. It is women who rather emphasises this aspect of talk. Women compliment others more often than men do, and they apologise more often than men do too." (p 2)

Or, as someone (ahem) remarked to me the other day: "If you care about interacting instead of lecturing you might consider what I said." Holmes explains that these are the "referential" and "affective" functions of language - one carries information ("It's seven a.m.") and the other expresses feelings ("Sorry to wake you up so early.").

She goes on to say that everyone has "face needs" - the need not to be imposed on, the need to be "liked and admired". When you - when I challenge someone with a bald disagreement, that's a "face-threatening act". (It was this loss of face that used to send me into a terrible panic in online disputes, as recently as racewank '07. "Oh shit, I've fucked this up, everyone laughs at/hates me forever!!!") Defensiveness arises out of the need to "save face" - for example, an older fangirl "pulling rank" on me when I bluntly pointed out she was wrong. (People of lower status are generally more polite to people of higher status.)

Linguists have put forward a variety of explanations for these differences, from the biological (of which I'm personally very sceptical) to socialisation to inequality. Of the latter, Holmes says: "Men's greater social power allows them to define and control situations, and male norms predominate in interaction." (p 8) Add that to the Internet's original male majority, and we have an explanation of why so much Internet discussion was (and is) "masculine" in nature: confrontational, brusque, concerned with winning the argument rather than group bonding or soothing ruffled feathers. Well, that and the urge to save bandwidth.

(Lemme see if I can dig up some examples from Usenet. ETA: here's a thread from talk.rape in which I use a blunt style. It's actually a pretty civil discussion, but there's no mucking about reassuring each other. And ETA again: a discussion in which I made an effort to defuse things a bit with compliments and humour.)

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Browsing through Enterprising Women over on Google Books, I found some evidence to back up one of my hunches: that a lot of fangirls are mutants like me. The author, Camille Bacon-Smith, recounts how many female fans have experienced "scorn" for their "masculine" interests. She describes Star Trek fangirls growing up during a time when, as teenagers, they were expected to give up any tomboy inclinations, and defer to and flatter boys. "Many women in fandom, however, did not make this transition". Some were outcasts because of their physical appearance; some refused to mask their intelligence. Even in fandom, some suffered ostracisation or harassment from male fans. (That said, as a teenager, I was far more bullied by girls than by boys.) It's possible this explains some of the sensitivity around issues of gender and inclusion into which I have poked my thumb.

Some data points on the gender makeup of fandom. Firstly, from Enterprising Women: in 1988, an index of 34,000 Star Trek fanzines included only 4 edited by men, and only 10% of contributors were male. Polls of readers of sexually explicit Trek zines found they were mostly women. Secondly, this list of 80s/90s fanzines gives a snapshot of offline Doctor Who fandom in the UK: there are women editing and writing, but they're a tiny minority.