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-“We harbor an ideological bias against the feminine voice, rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity.”
Some highlights from the JSTOR article On Men and Women’s Public Speech.
“Gunn uses speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in their 2008 contest for the Democratic nomination to illustrate how gendered norms about speech create a double bind for women.
Gunn argues that the field of public address is an important symbolic arena where we harbor an “[ideological] bias against the feminine voice,” a bias, he contends, that is rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity (and the corresponding devaluation of femininity, the voice that constrains and nags—the mother, the droning Charlie Brown schoolteacher, the wife).
Both Gunn and Campbell contend that masculine speech is the cultural standard. It’s what we value and respect. The low pitch and assertive demeanor that characterize the adult male voice signify reason, control, and authority, suitable for the public domain. Women’s voices are higher pitched, like those of immature boys, and their characteristic speech patterns have a distinctive cadence that exhibits a wider range of emotional expression. In Western cultures, contends Gunn, this is bad because it comes across as uncontrolled. We associate uncontrolled speech (what Gunn calls “the cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp”) with bodily functions and sexuality—things that happen in the private, domestic spheres (both coded as feminine). Men are expected to repress passionate, emotional speech, Gunn explains, precisely because it threatens norms of masculine control and order.
The notion of control also relates to the cultural ideal of eloquence. Eloquence is not just a Western value but is rewarded in many cultures around the world.”
[…]
““Eloquence” is, essentially, code for values associated with masculinity.”
Ouch. Yet another patriarchal societal barrier that needs to be brought to light and rectified with all due haste.
The Female Version:
And then there is male date preparation:
Wearing pants? Don’t smell? Check! Good to go!
Men worry that their date won’t measure up to their aesthetic preferences. Women worry that they’re going wind up dead.
The disparity is RIDICULOUS, and the fact that dudes get offended when women try to protect themselves is hard proof that way too many guys Do Not Understand how dangerous it is to be a woman. (Not to mention it’s fucking insulting. “How dare you not trust your life and safety to a complete stranger whose intentions you have no way of knowing”?)
The point is, “WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING A NICE GUY FROM A SERIAL KILLER.”
It’s not like they fucking wear nametags, okay? Moreover, the most awful people with the worst intentions often put on the nicest face or deliberately make themselves seem harmless and likeable, to lull potential victims into a false sense of security. (Read up on Ted Bundy sometime. It’s horrifying shit. Or read any thread on the “Let’s Not Meet” subreddit.)
In order to protect ourselves, we are forced to assume the worst of every man we meet, because statistically speaking, the biggest danger to women…IS MEN. Saying “not all men are out to get you, you’re just being paranoid” is like saying “not every car you ride in is going to crash, so buckling your seatbealt is stupid.”
When dealing with an unknown situation, in the absence of absolute proof of safety, exercising a little extra caution can be the difference between life and death. Shaming women for being what you may view as overly cautious is every bit as horrid as blaming them if something goes wrong later on.
[Source]
Canadian society, especially the justice system, just isn’t ready to hear women when they speak the truth…
This is an amazing post detailing all the conditioning, socialization, and patriarchal f*ckery that women have to fight through, just to be heard.
There’s a question people keep asking about the Ghomeshi trial, and I was up most of last night trying to think of how to answer it. I finally shut my brain off by picturing, in as much detail as possible, a solid wall of packed dirt in the dark above me. I spent the rest of the night mentally attacking my invisible wall. When I finally went to sleep it was what I dreamed about.
Between pretend punches, the words crept in.
Why
punch
did
punch
they
punch
lie?
If they were telling the truth about the assaults, why did they lie about other things? Why didn’t they just tell the truth?
“Manipulative”
punch
“Deceptive”
punch
Why?
I’d like to try to answer that question for you because I’m in an oddly perfect position to do so.
As the verdict of the Ghomeshi case came out, I…
View original post 1,127 more words
I’m not sure if talking about patriarchy while discussing a TV show based on conspiracy theories is the best plan, but what the hell. If this sort of shit is happening to Gillian Anderson, it can (and probably does) happen to you, if you happen to be female.
“Anderson and Duchovny’s legendarily potent onscreen pairing—rife with sexual tension yet ambiguous enough that a simple embrace could leave fans swooning for days—has been the object of heated obsession for decades, ever since The X-Files, a show that transformed serialized TV and elevated the potential of genre storytelling, premiered in 1993.
Tales of alien abductions, malicious government conspiracies, shadowy figures, and a plot to take over Earth drove the series’ “mythology” arc, in which Mulder (a believer) and Scully (a skeptic) hunted down the truth about what really happened to Mulder’s missing little sister.
But it was the unexpected magnetism between Anderson and Duchovny that truly gave the show its rabid appeal.
“The chemistry was there from the first day they ever appeared together in [Mulder’s] office,” series creator Chris Carter tells me. “It was not apparent until that first day that these two people were gonna click. The chemistry you can’t manufacture. It was just total luck.”
The success of Fox’s six-episode X-Files event series, which premieres with an episode written and directed by Carter on Sunday, hinges in part on whether that chemistry—and the excitement and anguish of watching the agents, clearly two halves of a whole, engage in the will they/won’t they dance—can be reignited again, nine seasons, two movies, and 25 years of X-Files history later.”
I’m excited to see the new shows, as I was a fan back in the day. Unfortunately, here comes the P…
But while Scully asserted her authority at every turn, Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”
“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”
She laughs again, this time at the absurdity of the notion of Dana Scully as anyone’s mere sidekick. “I have such a knee-jerk reaction to that stuff, a very short tolerance for that shit,” she says acidly. “I don’t know how long it lasted or if it changed because I eventually said, ‘Fuck no! No!’ I don’t remember somebody saying, ‘OK, now you get to walk alongside him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and spunk than it being an allowance that was made.”
The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.
“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson says of the pay disparity, first disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.
“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”
She stammers for a moment, at a loss for words. “It is… sad,” she finally says. “It is sad.” (Sources told the Hollywood Reporter Anderson and Duchovny ultimately took home equal pay for the event series.)
Yeah, 2015 and sexist bullshit is still flying high in Hollywood. Awesome.
My chorus of MRA hacks is always on about how great things are for women and often how the wimmenz have it better than dudes.
Right.
So here again, is an example of what existing while female is like.
“A group of computer scientists, when studying the acceptance of contributions on the software repository GitHub, found open source code written by women is actually more often approved than code written by men. The catch—there’s always a catch—is that this only happens when the woman’s gender is hidden.
GitHub, which is used by more than 12 million people, allows developers to write code for the projects of other software developers, who then choose whether to approve the submissions. Among the three million submissions (or “pull requests”) the researchers examined, female-written code saw a 78.6% approval rate. With male-written code, it was 74.6%.
If female coders specified their gender on their profiles, though, their acceptance rate fell to 62.5%.”
Yep, equality is certainly firing on all cylinders here…
“Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless,” the six computer science researchers from California Polytechnic State University and North Carolina State University wrote in the study published Feb. 9. The higher blind acceptance rate for code written by women is all the more impressive when you consider that men in the open source community overwhelmingly outnumber their female counterparts—who by various estimates make up only 1% to 11% of the population.”
Of course, this is just my usual cherry picking routine, certainly not meant to draw attention to larger issues/patterns in society.
[Source: Quartz]
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