How the practiced rhetoric of assertive dialogue leaves women out.
by Emma Winsor Wood
Every day the Internet percolates with anger and irritation over some new offense in the gender wars. The most recent skirmish flared up over last week’s New York Times piece, which offered advice to women negotiating for a raise; the week before it was Sheryl Sandberg’s “bossy ban.” Small battles certainly win wars, but the myopia of the news cycle combined with demand for new content can make some of these arguments feel half-formed and petty—e.g. Jezebel’s publication of the un-retouched images from Lena Dunham’s Vogue photo shoot. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder: Why are we paying attention to this at all? Sometimes I need to remind myself how much is at stake in each dispute. Sometimes I act as my own harsh reminder.
Scene: I was lounging on the sofa with a close guy-friend, expressing my outrage over the fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns, how it represented stalled gender equality, and how “had Europe gotten so far ahead,” when he interrupted: “But I don’t support paid leave.”
I halted. This friend and I often disagree on political matters—he loves Ayn Rand!—so I should have expected such a riposte, I should have prepared for it, yet I hadn’t. I had read an article in The New York Times by an author who shared my own feminist values on a provocative topic, and I had adopted her cause as one of my own without much further thought.
“But—” I said, the blood already rising swiftly to my temples, cheeks; the gush of it submerging thoughts, thoughts clearly articulated pre-rebuttal now scattering like pigeons on a road, my voice mounting an octave, a few decibels. “But… but it’s about women’s rights, it’s—”
“Who should pay for that year of leave? The company, which has to train and pay another employee to do your work? Your neighbors, who are already taxed for the purpose of educating your child?”
I let out a canine-like yelp of discomfort, turned away in frenzied anxiety, and in an act of complete mental regression, tunneled my head beneath the sofa cushion. “Never mind, never mind I don’t feel like talking about it, I don’t want to debate, let’s change the subject,” I comma-spliced into the cushion.
Although I’m well-educated, confident, and opinionated, I often find myself reacting like this way in the face of calm, authoritative men who question my feminist convictions. It’s infuriating: not only do I look ridiculous, I also undercut whatever point I’ve just made regarding gender equality by acting like a silly girl incapable of participating in a rational argument. What’s more, it’s a problem I only encounter in gender-related debates—give me any other topic, and I will construct, defend, and even question my own position.
Feminist scholars have been observing for years that the language and structure of rationality is biased toward men: after all, they created it, named it, shaped the idea round their modes of reasoning. It’s closely related to the idea that to be a man in society is to be neutral; as the norm, you get to assume the position of no-bias and, therefore, of rationality. As a white male, rational thus comes to mean whatever you do.
I can distinctly remember the first time I encountered this idea, three years ago, in a book whose title and author I can no longer recall. I had been reading in bed, in a patch of sunlight from the skylight above. I remember re-reading the relevant passages two or three times, immediately, then getting up to tell my (female) roommate: “The whole system is biased against us.”
I’m not qualified to enter into either a philosophical examination of rationality or an academic analysis of the above feminist point and yet it seems fair to say that we all come from biased places—women as much as men—and that these biases, in turn, shape the systems and rules we create. For example, in its definition of “rational,” my MacBook’s Dictionary reads: “(of a person) able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically: Andrea’s upset—she’s not being very rational.”
But I realized my kneejerk “support the sisterhood” response to this new idea was too hasty. Our methods of logical reasoning (“the system”) are not themselves biased. Rather, it is the language of rationality itself that functions to undermine women as debaters, witnesses, and experts. Our culture dismisses women as too emotional to be objective before they begin speaking. And so, as men are inherently neutral, women are inherently biased—and, being women, particularly biased with regards to women’s issues.
As Karen Jones writes in The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, “The problem lies in who is and who is not allowed to assume aperspectivity, rather than in aperspectivity itself.” Society has appointed men, as Jones goes on to observe, as the “knowers” in Western political thought. Writers and cultural critics detected a manifestation of this phenomenon a few years ago: they called it “mansplaining.” All women instinctively know this refers to the commanding tone with which men explain things to women whether or not they have any can claim any expertise in the area. Most men are at ease feigning a familiarity they don’t possess because, as the societal gatekeepers of knowledge, they are less likely to be questioned, refuted, or dismissed.
Back to the scene on the sofa. I don’t want to excuse my immature reaction, and yet I can’t help but think my own discomposure discussing feminist topics with men stems from an until-now-vague understanding of what I was up against. If our culture continues to reinforce male neutrality against female bias and emotionality, the man will, by default, always win—sometimes, rightfully. But how will I be able to tell whether the argument was fairly won, through rational thought, or won, unfairly, through the assumption of my irrationality and bias?
Aristotle wrote in The Rhetoric, “If it is a disgrace to a man when he cannot defend himself in a bodily way, it would be absurd not to think him disgraced when he cannot defend himself with reason in a speech.” As women we are disgraced—not because we lack the ability to defend ourselves with reason in speech, but because we lack the right to reason.
Emma Winsor Wood is a poet and freelance writer. She writes the Women and Words column for TheRiveterMagazine.com. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaWinsorWood.
