Guest post: There’s this thing you might have heard of called “socialization”
Originally a comment by Samantha Vimes on For no reason at all.
There are some uninformed people speaking up this time.
Listen, guys: there’s this thing you might have heard of called “socialization”. It’s where people form opinions, values, and behaviors based on what the people who came before them and live around them think, do or say. It’s the reason why so many people have a low opinion of women. It’s not that women are, in general, so bad at life that we deserve to be mocked and scorned. It’s that when you were boys, the men around you taught you to deride women. She’s angry? Must be that time of the month; it cannot be thought that he did something genuinely wrong and is being told about a legitimate grievance. She’s asking if you want to eat? She must be a fucking passive-aggressive manipulator– it can’t be that eating is a social thing and she thinks it would be more polite of her to wait a while if you aren’t ready to eat with her now. You had an argument and she expects an apology, even though *she* apologized? It must be that she is actually crazy, not that her socialization taught her that all arguments end with both people apologizing to each other to show the relationship is more important than the topic of disagreement, so she swallowed her pride and apologized even though she was right, and now you’re just sitting there, smug, thinking you “won”, when she was just trying to show you how much she cares.
Look, men and women are socialized differently, and the way to deal with that is to open up more lines of communication and talk about why things aren’t working smoothly if both people just act the way they were taught to act.
For instance, “spread for me” is a horribly sexist sounding phrase to a woman’s ears, because it reduces your lovers to passively granting access to sex, rather than reflecting enthusiastic consent and partnership. It also sounds objectifying.
Furthermore, demanding that a woman “ask you” for things is demeaning. These are not the days where a man must provide for a woman. We can buy our own food. She doesn’t need your permission to eat. She just wants your fucking company, so don’t pretend like it’s a huge favor you’re granting. Do you want to eat or not? If she asks and you aren’t hungry, how about saying how long you think it will be before you are ready to eat? (My husband is diabetic. Sometimes we actually can’t eat at the same time, and sometimes I get low blood sugar – more likely to make me cranky than PMS ever would – because I wait too long for him… but I’ve learned to grab a snack, I just want to know what size snack to get.)
Socialization also plays a role on which particular descriptions of the physical act of penile-vaginal intercourse are considered lowbrow, vulgar, and therefore in need of language policing from the sort of people who enjoy policing language.
I really doubt that anyone reading these posts is “uninformed” about the concept of socialisation.
Odd though that the default assumption here is that no less than 100% of human behaviour results from social conditioning. The assertion that individuals are a completely blank slate, whose character is determined entirely and exclusively by society, is a pretty bold claim, is it not?
No, that’s not my claim. For instance, no amount of socialization will make an autistic person not autistic, or a blind person see. Introvert/extrovert needs seem to be inbuilt.
But I know perfectly well my husband and I were socialized differently when it comes to apologies– we remember the socialization happening. We discussed it.
On the other hand, testosterone levels do, in my personal experience, effect how emotionally unstable I can be. If I hadn’t gotten my excess testosterone under control, I’d be quite irrationally angry about being strawmanned. So me, the poor dears, probably do struggle a bit more with their tempers on average. Maybe they shouldn’t be burdened with so many positions of power.
@Damion Reinhardt
Damion, the post is not about language policing, which makes your comment a non sequitur. The objection to “spread for me” is not that it is lowbrow or vulgar. You may want to read the OP again, more carefully this time, if you’re confused as to where the objection lies.
@Jib Halyard
Odd that your default assumption is that Samantha–or anyone else “here”–believes such a thing, given that nobody has expressed any such unlikely opinion.
Ah, the days of yesteryear, when we all spent hours refuting the unsupported claims of stubbornly stupid people with grudges.
…I’m sorry, I was lost in nostalgic reverie there for a second.
I think you’re missing the common cases where the stereotypes are invoked and where people believe that the passive-aggressive approach is being used … and where women are socialized to use them. In the first case, the idea is that the woman isn’t asking if he wants to eat, as she doesn’t actually want to know that. What she’s doing is expressing that she wants to eat, and expects the man to figure that out and react to that instead of to what she’s really saying. So a better example of that might be the stereotypical “Do you want to go out to eat tonight?” question, where she’s not really asking that, but is instead saying that for some reason she really wants to go out to eat tonight. According to the stereotype — and it seems common enough in some areas, at least, to be something that actually happens — if he simply answers the question with “No”, at a minimum she doesn’t get the response she wanted, and at worst she ends up mad at him for not understanding her or ignoring her wants.
The same thing applies to the apology case from the original post. That’s not a case where she apologizes after a fight and expects an apology as well, but is based on cases where she’s clearly angry at him, but when asked about it at first denies that she’s even angry, and then if she actually admits to being angry won’t say why. So she’s angry about something, won’t say why, and yet expects an apology anyway. In this stereotypical example, the men end up apologizing despite having no idea what they did wrong just to settle things.
This is where the passive-aggressive accusations come in, but it follows from the socialization of women to be, in fact, passive. As they’re encouraged to not express what they want directly, they try to express it indirectly and expect others to then give it to them. This, however, can require deep mind-reading on the part of the person they’re talking to, which doesn’t work.
Thus. you’re right that better communication is required. Unfortunately, your examples don’t really reflect that. If she wants to eat with him, why doesn’t she just say “Hey, I’m ready to eat now, but I’d like to eat with you. Are you ready to eat now?”. Instead, she STILL isn’t asking for what she actually wants, and your example of his reply forces him to assume one of multiple potential meanings and answer as if she’d really EXPRESSED THAT instead of what she really expressed. Thus, I think it fair to say that even if someone can guess at what she wants, making her directly express that is a good way to further communication. If a man says to a woman “I’ll give you what you want, but you have to tell me what it is. I’m not going to guess at it” women who like the passive-aggressive approach know that the man isn’t putting up with it, and women who hate it know that they can, indeed, directly express their wants with a reasonable expectation of getting it, and in both cases “mind-reading” is off the table.
@Samantha Vimes
I saw no one in the thread before you dismiss the role of socialisation when discussing the origin of the “apology meme”; only a suggestion or two that it might not be the only thing going on, the strongest of which was
To what were you responding if not these comments?
All of this stuff is really well covered here:
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/tannend/book_you_just_dont.html
One thing I really appreciate about Tannen’s analysis is that she doesn’t say ‘men talk like this, women talk like that’ but rather ‘we tend to run across two common patterns of language interaction in our culture, one of which is typically used by men and the other typically used by women.’
I think what bugs me about this post is the “you jerk men refuse to communicate with women in the terms in which they were socialized to communicate” overtones. I tend to fall more on the “the way our society socializes women to communicate is awful and we should stop doing it” side of the fence.
My wife does the passive commentary thing. Like, “what do you want for dinner” secretly means “I’m hungry and I’m hoping you’ll cook tonight.” (Cooking is split 50/50, when she cooks she usually has a plan, so asking me what I want is supposed to suggest that I cook somehow?) I hate it so much. It means that sometimes I offend her for no valid reason because she expected me to intuit her feelings in greater detail than I can. And far worse, it means that I cannot trust her when she agrees with me. If she indirectly suggests that she has a need in hopes that I might resolve it, and what I suggest isn’t actually satisfactory, she’ll assent to my suggestion in the same indirect way. I hate this so, so much.
The biggest fight we ever had ended with me literally begging her to describe her needs and desires re the issue at hand, and pleading that she do so without describing them in terms of me. What did SHE want, FOR a HERSELF. She kept answering with her idea of something I wanted that was minimally compatible with her wants. In the end, she literally never answered the question.
I won’t give details, but imagine a serious conversation, like “shall we have children and if so how many,” with someone who won’t answer the question “how many children, if any, do you hope to have” except with phrases like “I want you to be happy.” And when you express that you’ve always imagined having two but you’re negotiable, and ask what she thinks hoping she’ll use that as an example way to answer, her answer switches to “two might work…” in an uncertain tone of voice.
That’s not the actual argument we had. But suffice to say that it took me literally seven years of accidentally hurting her feelings and feeling bad about it to intuit the precise nature of her actual feelings well enough to mostly stop hurting them. All because she’d go along with things out of a socialized inability to directly say no, then insist she wasn’t doing that when I started to get an inkling it was happening and started to try to elicit details, then she literally refused to answer coherently when I tried to address the issue. Seven damn years. And I still don’t KNOW how she feels about the issue. I’m just guessing from a miserable trial and error process, every moment of which I hate.
Hmm. Apparently I am still bitter about this.
TLDR, my life would be a lot easier if I were psychologically capable of living the way those “jokes” suggest, to wit, apologizing without knowing what’s wrong and then forgetting about it. My wife’s life would be worse, though. But I don’t feel like some sort of representative sacrificial member of my gender, so I feel more than a bit out out that I have to do all the outreach. I do it because I’d feel bad if I didn’t, but I also feel like a college educated adult woman with her own career could maybe put some effort into recognizing the dysfunctional way she was raised to behave. Society may be a big place with entrenched disparate gender related power balances, but there’s only two people in this house, and any disparate power I have is because she won’t accept it no matter how much I try to give it away.
Does anyone say “spread for me” when they are not talking about something like buttering bread? I have never come across this expression in any other context before and I had to read the sentence several times before it dawned on me what, presumably, it is supposed to mean.
I haven’t seen it before either, but I’m familiar with phrases like “spread ’em” and related. Also with the paired ideas of keeping your legs together and spreading your legs – both pretty much directed at woman-as-slut. It may be a particularly US bit of vocabulary, I don’t know. It’s mostly or always hostile, I think, which is one reason it’s so very peculiar in that comment.