It makes you sound weak!
May 26, 2016 8:33 AM   Subscribe

"More than 38 million American women have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Many of these women develop coping mechanisms to placate their abusers and protect themselves." How about we stop policing women's language?
posted by xarnop (71 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Also using laughter as a conversation "damper" - I didn't REALLY mean what I just said....see, I'm laughing? Just a joke.
posted by Tullyogallaghan at 8:43 AM on May 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yes, I agree. That's also the sort of thing we should stop telling women they have to monitor.

You know, I wonder if the reason there is such a rage against so-called political correctness is that white men are finally being expected to monitor the way that communicate to the extent that they expect everybody else to do so.
posted by maxsparber at 8:50 AM on May 26, 2016 [127 favorites]


ding-ding-ding
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:54 AM on May 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


This is timely because I need to do my first evaluation on my newish employee, who is a young woman in her 20s. The role of our job to give other people advice and communicate policy. My supervisee is doing a great job but she is an up talker, which many people interpret as denoting a lack of confidence in one's statements.

I want her to be respected by our "clients" and for them to find her authoritative, but of course I don't want to make her self-conscious or be unfeminist.
posted by Squeak Attack at 8:57 AM on May 26, 2016


If professional women stopped using that style today, tomorrow the substitute would be deemed unprofessional in some way.
posted by praemunire at 8:57 AM on May 26, 2016 [46 favorites]


See also "vocal fry" which a ton of people only just heard about but already hate.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:59 AM on May 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


It's almost as if the endless list of rules women are expected to follow in their personal and professional lives is just a framework to respond to any complaint of mistreatment or unfairness with victim-blaming, and whether or not you follow those rules makes absolutely no difference in how others treat you or how much they respect you.
posted by almostmanda at 9:01 AM on May 26, 2016 [44 favorites]


There was an eye-opening The American Life where Ira Glass discussed how many angry emails and letters they get over the voices of the show's producers and and talent, and it's almost all directed at women. Recently, vocal fry was the subject of the most ire, and Glass pointed out that he also has vocal fry, but nobody has ever mentioned it.
posted by maxsparber at 9:02 AM on May 26, 2016 [57 favorites]


Avoiding the use of passive self-doubting language in a professional setting is advice that men get as well, because this sort of language is not clearly split on gender lines. So in a sense, this kind of advice isn't strictly about trying to police women's language and get them to speak more like men. BUT....

“The problem isn’t what women are saying; it's that we are women saying it.”

This is the black heart of it. When a man gets advice from a professional mentor to speak more confidently in meetings, cut out filler words, stop saying sorry, etc, it's good advice that will serve him well in his career.

When a women gets this advice and follows it, she needs to deal with the fallout of being labelled a bitch and difficult to work with.
posted by 256 at 9:07 AM on May 26, 2016 [21 favorites]


Here's that episode. It's the segment called Freedom Fries.
posted by maxsparber at 9:08 AM on May 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


I think we can all agree that Brokaw's vocal fry is the most annoying.
posted by notyou at 9:16 AM on May 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am a soft-spoken woman. I like to say things gently. I was always taught you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,* and that's how I like to speak. I am a cream puff and God damn it I will speak like one as I please. I shouldn't speak more like men; men should speak more like me.

And yet I catch my own internalized misogyny in these things, as well. I've stopped listening to a good podcast because the two young women hosting it speak in constant uptalk and trail off so much. I feel guilty about this every time I see the "new episode" indicator.

-----
* This is true. But you'll catch the most with corpses. Our little girls should be told this, too.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:21 AM on May 26, 2016 [58 favorites]


Ahhhh this is the stuff:

"We are consistently criticized for the way society fails us. We see report after report confirming gender bias literally everywhere. We know that it’s unfair, but we still wind up convinced that it is us who must change. It’s actually a brilliant tactic—if the oppressed are responsible for their own oppression (or triumph over oppression), then the oppressors are off the hook. No one will hold them accountable because we’re too busy trying to fix ourselves."
posted by Dressed to Kill at 9:23 AM on May 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


The problem isn't what women are saying; it's that we are women saying it.

The older I get, the more I realize how much this has affected every single facet of my entire life. Girls and women are born into a world where our every decision will be found somehow lacking intellectual, social, psychological, or (ir)rational rigor. And we just have to live with it, knowing we will literally never be able to do right! The only vaguely reasonable advice anyone can really offer us is to stop caring about what people think! So now we've arrived at a point where it's considered perfectly acceptable, even downright progressive, to pivot our efforts toward dissociating specific behaviors and characteristics from women in order to destigmatize the behaviors and characteristics themselves -- how bad can vocal fry really be if Ira Glass does it, too?! -- rather than destigmatizing women qua women.

I mean, I guess it's easier? I guess we've just given up and accepted that it is. But I still find it unbelievably depressing. "Sorry, we're never going to accept that women are individuals with personalities; the best we can do is insist that things that are stereotypically associated with women can also be associated with men, which makes those things not so bad!" Goddamn. I despair.
posted by amnesia and magnets at 9:33 AM on May 26, 2016 [35 favorites]


As usual in threads like this I pretty much want to favorite most of the comments. +++

This is so timely as I (female) had to throw down with a older white male yesterday and his eye rolling, sighing, snarky facial expressions and general pouting that he had to do something was ridiculous.
posted by CoffeeHikeNapWine at 9:35 AM on May 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


maxsparber Yup, white fragility is a thing. Everyone else needs to be super sensitive about how they talk to and about white dudes because that's just normal and the way the world works, but if a white dude is asked to maybe stop being an ass then it's PC run amok and stomping on their precious free speech, and probably sapping their precious bodily fluids too.
posted by sotonohito at 9:36 AM on May 26, 2016 [20 favorites]


In my personal experience I encounter far more men than women who speak with the kind of passive up-talking that makes every statement sound like a question. And yes, it does come across as less confident, but there are a limited number of situations where that matters all that much.
That said, I fully understand the societal forces that train girls and young women to speak less "aggressively" and that's pretty shitty. We just need to adjust our listening practices to adapt to the fact that women who are fully knowledgeable and confident might come across as less so by the way they speak, and learn to ignore those subliminal audio cues and accept and respect the message no matter how it's delivered.
posted by rocket88 at 9:45 AM on May 26, 2016


I sometimes find myself starting out a comment at work with a long preamble about how I don't know what I'm talking about, if I'm about to say something that's outside my realm of expertise. I hear myself doing this and I'm like "Why are you doing this? Stop, stop, stop" but then my next thought is that if I don't do this I'm afraid that they will concentrate on the fact that I'm speaking out of my area instead of actually listening to what I'm saying. It's like I feel the need to beat them to the punch and get it out of the way. I have to do this because this actually happens and the other people in the meeting will assume that I need to be put in my place. Like "Sweetie no we're not talking about (the thing you do) right now." So anyway this is another reason to stop policing women's language. We're not in a place yet where women can just do whatever they want with no consequences.
posted by bleep at 9:49 AM on May 26, 2016 [17 favorites]


I shared that Chrome extension mentioned in the article—Just Not Sorry—with a group of people in my office (group chat) when it came out last year. At the time I thought it was progressive and pro-woman. Now I feel like a bit of a jerk for sharing it, particularly in an office setting, after reading this FPP article and the comments so far.

And at the same time I can't help but feel like the MetaFilter community reaction to this thing would have been generally positive if a post to, for example, this coverage of it on The Mary Sue had been posted at the time. (I'd assumed the extension had been covered on MetaFilter because I only know about things due to MetaFilter, but amazingly it seems like it didn't get a front-page post. Or maybe I just can't find it?)

Am I way off-base? Not a rhetorical question. (White straight cis male here, obviously.)
posted by The Minotaur at 9:56 AM on May 26, 2016


I was one of them. In Pittsburgh. In the late 1990s. Yes to everything we can do to support and change things. It took me years to stop apologizing.
posted by infini at 9:59 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I taught an introduction to Linguistics class this past fall and included a module on different 'speeches' in the US, black English, Southern English, etc. We spent a day talking about gendered differences, of course vocal fry is the famous one. It turns out, though, that men vocal fry as often as women do. We watched some youtube videos of men and women admonishing women to not use vocal fry. If you search for 'men using vocal fry' you'll just find more videos of men telling women not to do it, for whatever bad reason. I don't know what to tell the young women in my class other than 'don't let anyone give you any bullshit about the way you talk.' I wish I could do more than just point these things out but I must say it is extremely vindicating teaching about language as it is and not as it 'should be' and to see so many light bulbs go off every single day.
posted by os tuberoes at 10:15 AM on May 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


Related Inside Amy Schumer.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 10:15 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think of it in terms of code-switching lite. Uptalk, vocal fry, softening phrases, and in text, excessive emoticons/exclamation points aren't bad habits of fragile people, they're parts of the functional lingua franca in plenty of environments, and if you don't use them in the customary style in those communities, you come off as arrogant and rude.

Taking some of these into other environments where they're not customary, or which employ different strategies for demonstrating cooperation and authority, it's absolutely predictable to anticipate what form the grousing will take. Especially if they're associated with younger or more diverse 'invaders.' I expect it's in the process of evening-out, as the torch passes so do the customs.

I've noticed lots more uptalk in professional people. Even older professional people. Even male people. (There's this one criminalist who gets interviewed on serial killer documentaries who looks like Harold Ramis and uptalks enough to make 80s era teenage Moon Unit eyeroll. I kinda dig it just for idiosyncracy's sake.) I don't mind uptalk much. It seems to reach across to touch noses with the listener to check in that they're still following along and understanding, versus stentorian trumpeting of declarative statements.

Personally, I edit emails for grammar and spelling, and then I edit them for 'I think,' 'just,' 'lol,' emoticons, and exclamation points, because I've noticed that the tone I worry about putting across is not a tone I perceive in other people's writing if they exclude those things. But if they're included, I've noticed that I inevitably visualize the writer as being very young and tentative, and/or a very enthusiastic but submissive cocker spaniel. (Sometimes I'm absolutely going for that; OMFG my incubator is full of duck and turkey eggs, and by the third week of June I'll be reduced to squeaks. And photos.)

Anyway, the difference to me comes at the point where someone is suggesting what other people should or should not do. Sometimes adapting to your surroundings is worth switching to the local patois, sometimes it's just the next chess move in the game of Reasons Why Women Are Problematic and it'll just shift the next concern to shoes or emotions or some other concern trollery. How to navigate that has to be up to the individual, and whether or not they've asked for advice.
posted by Fantods at 10:16 AM on May 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


The Minotaur, don't feel too bad. It seems like the discourse around this kind of stuff is moving really, really fast right now. I'm a woman in a male-dominated white-collar field and the Just Not Sorry app was shared widely on some mailing lists I'm on. On every mailing list, it seemed like there were a few "Thanks, this seems useful!" comments and then someone would say "Wait but why should I have to change how I email" replies and then someone would say "Um, because you actually want to get things done in our workplace rather than crucifying your career in order to be more authentic to your preferred communication style sheesh" and then a few people would agree with THAT and then someone else would say "Well but maybe it's time for MEN'S idiot communication to fuck THEIR careers for a change" and then the thread would devolve into shouting and no conclusion would be reached. I think I saw this play out 4 times on 4 separate mailing lists.

In short, it's an, er, ongoing conversation.
posted by town of cats at 10:19 AM on May 26, 2016 [14 favorites]


It seems to reach across to touch noses with the listener to check in that they're still following along and understanding, versus stentorian trumpeting of declarative statements.

Are those the only two choices though? Maybe people who aren't uptalking are just speaking in a regular tone? And having a normal conversation?

I don't want to change my employee or be a bad feminist? But I know some "clients" aren't taking her seriously? And I would like to help her become more effective? And I think a conversational tone might be more effective than sounding uncertain? And I had a male employee who I also mentored in the expectations of our workplace? And I think men and women both are expected to modify their behavior to be more professional? Otherwise, we'd all come to work in our pyjamas with toast crumbs on our faces after college?
posted by Squeak Attack at 10:27 AM on May 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


There is no perfect way to navigate the situation where you will be judged negatively for speaking confidently and forcefully as a woman, and you will be judged negatively for qualifying your opinions and saying "sorry."

I do want to question the assumption that speaking directly and forcefully is somehow objectively correct. I absolutely do use words like "just" and "sorry" and "I feel like" to adjust my tone and soften how I come off, and I qualify my opinions a lot, and honestly whenever I write an email I dither for 30 minutes about whether I'm being blunt enough or too blunt, but really, I don't want to make myself over in the image of some Gordon Gekko type any more than I want to wear suits with giant shoulder pads in them. Why can't corporate culture be a little gentler? Why can't people get some blowback for forcefully insisting on their terrible opinions instead of saying "I could be wrong, but it seems to me like..."?
posted by Jeanne at 10:27 AM on May 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


"Um, because you actually want to get things done in our workplace rather than crucifying your career in order to be more authentic to your preferred communication style sheesh" and then a few people would agree with THAT and then someone else would say "Well but maybe it's time for MEN'S idiot communication to fuck THEIR careers for a change"

Get me on these mailing lists!
posted by The Minotaur at 10:29 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe people who aren't uptalking are just speaking in a regular tome?

And maybe people who use uptalking are *also* speaking in a "regular tone".

It's a regular feature of, among other dialects, Glaswegian, Australian, New Zealand, and Southern Californian speech.

But I know some "clients" aren't taking her seriously? And I would like to help her become more effective? And I think a conversational tone might be more effective than sounding uncertain?

If she stopped using uptalk, those clients would find another reason to not take her seriously.
posted by damayanti at 10:31 AM on May 26, 2016 [11 favorites]


None of these vocal tics really annoy me. I don't really have an ear for much of it and am usually listening for the substance over the actual words and how they sound.

My husband recently noticed that in one unique situation - on the phone with men that are working in a customer service role - I use uptalk. I deduced that I feel like I'm rarely understood on the phone by men (I have a slight lisp) and my uptalk is mostly, "Did you understand that?" But I've been trying to fix it. Now I'm wondering if I should or not...or what!
posted by Sophie1 at 10:33 AM on May 26, 2016




Am I way off-base? Not a rhetorical question. (White straight cis male here, obviously.)

Hmm. It is a toughie. But I think the best approach, from your POV, is to cease altogether trying to shape how the women you work with talk/act/work (even in the form of "helpful tips" and the like). As others have said, the current culture dislikes what women are doing (whether X, Y, or Z), because women are doing it. If women in the office stopped apologizing so much, the next year's wealth of articles would be "Are you too cold to your coworkers? It could hurt your career" or the like.

At my old workplace, after a raft of complaints (from women only, of course, because no one else even noticed or cared) about the embarrassing lack of women in our office (because they kept ditching the company for greener pastures), the bosses had a great! solution! -- they sent around an email with great fanfare announcing the company would provide mandatory training, free of charge (how kind), to all the women in the office, to teach us strategies for how to advance our careers. As you may imagine, this went over like an enormous wet fart. I would have appreciated the white cis men in my office standing up and saying - "The solution to our office's problem of constantly losing talented, ambitious women to other places is not training the women who've stuck it out here, because THEY ARE NOT THE PROBLEM TO BE FIXED - it's figuring out why our office is driving them away. For example, maybe [white cis male boss who loved making jokes about tampons] is the one who needs the fucking training." As it stood, our last remaining female manager (who left a few months later) was the only one who stood up for us and told us we didn't need to attend the training. Oh and of course we all got called bad sports and closed-minded for not wanting to participate in a sexist bullshit training that some "life coach" conned our HR team into paying masses of money for. (Again - and WE'RE the ones who need training??)

I have subsequently totally stopped caring and tried as hard as I can to stop policing myself and others for things other than "Am I being rude? Cruel? Unprofessional? Sloppy? Incorrect?" in my communications. And even then I still have to essentially smack my own hand sometimes when I sit across the table from my new female boss, who speaks in a very soft, hesitant voice and constantly questions out-loud whether she's right. Our wings are so clipped, still.

I think, if there were some form of therapy or peer-to-peer counseling for professional women in how to deal with working in these environments without cracking up, rather than "Please mold yourself into this season's in-demand corporatespeak image of an ideal woman worker" there would be great demand. Lean In my fucking ass.
posted by sallybrown at 10:47 AM on May 26, 2016 [19 favorites]


I sometimes find myself starting out a comment at work with a long preamble about how I don't know what I'm talking about, if I'm about to say something that's outside my realm of expertise.

I'm not the most patient conversationalist, but I really appreciate it if a person makes clear the extent of their certainty/source of their knowledge when they're talking about something. Maybe it's just because my dad was one of those guys who would rather lie to you for ten minutes than admit that he didn't know something.
posted by praemunire at 10:48 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm not the most patient conversationalist, but I really appreciate it if a person makes clear the extent of their certainty/source of their knowledge when they're talking about something.

I used to do this not because I wasn't confident in my information, but out of tremendous fear of the shame and embarrassment I would feel if the 1% chance I was wrong turned out to be the case. I was afraid to ever be wrong, to not be perfect. I don't see this same thing occurring when the men in my office speak up - if they're called out as wrong, it's a mere speed bump in their monologue about whatever.

The problem is many women feel pressure to discount their level of confidence, essentially. And that is helpful to nobody.
posted by sallybrown at 10:50 AM on May 26, 2016 [13 favorites]


Ironically, in the same publication, there's a piece about how women framing periods as a women's issue is wrong.

So, you know: don't tell women what to do/say/think/feel . . . except for when we do it.

Women don't even get to be women on their own terms, sometimes. Turns out.
posted by gsh at 11:04 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I am the most type A of humans when it comes to getting things done, I almost never want to let go of control. I know this about myself. I am a strong negotiator, and I rarely have fucks to give. And yet... my husband I and I find ourselves in a significant disagreement with a roofing contractor. A disagreement that had us in a conference with our attorney for two hours. Our attorney recommended we call the CEO of the company, with a specific script, to try and negotiate the issue to our satisfaction, before pulling out all the legal stops and filing suit. (They are direct violation of a number of Texas statutes, and they know it.) Whereas, this sort of conversation would normally fall to me, as the hardass in the family, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the conversation would go better if my husband made the call. We even both talked about how it sucked, but that balls were required to avoid being bullied.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 11:07 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Women don't even get to be women on their own terms, sometimes. Turns out.

There's a whole other FPP that's still open about that issue, which addresses what you think is contradictory or hypocrisy.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:09 AM on May 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Just yesterday I heard a guy say that he'd like Hillary a lot more if she'd "stop shrieking like a harpy" when projecting her voice. That same guy complained that her speaking voice was "too soft" when she ran against Obama. So I think that no matter what women choose to do with their voices and words it will be the wrong thing.
posted by xyzzy at 11:10 AM on May 26, 2016 [14 favorites]


I think, if there were some form of therapy or peer-to-peer counseling for professional women in how to deal with working in these environments without cracking up, rather than "Please mold yourself into this season's in-demand corporatespeak image of an ideal woman worker" there would be great demand. Lean In my fucking ass.

Honestly, I'd go for counseling that helps men comprehend that their privilege blinds them in unhelpful ways, but I get what you're saying. I often think that the best thing men could do would be to go a week as a woman. And I realize this plays into current societal gender stereotypes about what women should look like, but y'know, men, try to live life one week as a woman and see if you aren't curled up in a ball weeping at the end. My brothister was a royal ass growing up, constantly telling me that I needed to shut up about how bad women had it, until he started transitioning and going out in public with an appearance that our society deems female. It took him two days before he phoned me up and apologized profusely for everything he'd ever said to me about being a woman. Then he asked me what the fuck was up that he could go out as a man and be normal, but go out as a woman and be treated like shit... often by the same people. (As for the pronouns: my brothister stopped his transition and returned to presenting as male. It broke my heart even though I understand everything that went into his decision.)

As for how to deal with those working environments. It all depends on the individual. It really does. I have a team of 12, every single one of them different. Some of the men deal with feedback that totally blindsided me; some of the women are treated like royalty. But when you look at their personalities, and their networks, it starts to make sense, and once you add large doses of sexism and racism you get a fuller picture. The 28-year-old "aggressive" white man who's never managed a team or worked with the client is promoted to management while the 35-year-old "aggressive" Moroccan who has management experience, credentials, and positive client feedback is not. Adapt example for sexism at will. I put aggressive in quotes because there are men tagged as aggressive who are just blunt. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between the blunt dudes and the assholes though.

I often wonder if the merely-blunt ones aren't tagged that way as a sort of smoke screen against racism and sexism, honestly. Which is to say, as a means for men to do that infuriating thing that is "oh but that happens to us too!!!!1one!!1" When I've gotten to know some of these men well enough to talk about this sort of thing, they've acknowledged that they've wondered the same. So there is individual realization out there, it's that the power structures don't encourage trust that would foster discussions like that. I'm the sort who says, "hey look, this separating wall sucks for all of us, we don't need it" and lots of people are like, finally, someone said so out loud. Others are like, "what wall?!" while leaning against it; still others are like "what wall?!?!" while holding their hands in front of their eyes. But there are an awful lot who are relieved to be able to talk about it.

So, I don't know, point at the wall, call it for what it is, and talk about it? It doesn't always work. But when it does, that's cool.
posted by fraula at 11:15 AM on May 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


It appears to me that Hillary Clinton has changed the way she speaks a great deal over the last decade.

You have to judge when to comment on how people speak very carefully if you want to be compassionate.

Anything like this that Hillary Clinton can do to gain an edge, even taking advantage of unconscious bias, is great. She certainly has enough of an uphill battle as it is.

Here is a piece about her changing accent, but I think you can hear other changes as well.
posted by poe at 11:18 AM on May 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I equate the vocal fry/"sexy baby voice" thing to the affectation that Keanu Reeves uses when he's in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure... the "dumbass surfer" voice or the sports-bar-dwelling alpha-male in men.

In the corporate world, I often find that the irritating actions sometimes accompany the irritating voice. In women, it's the "I'm too stupid so you need to show me" action rather than figuring it out yourself. With men, it's the "Whoa! I can talk sports and I'm the life of the party at happy hour, so my culture fit far outweighs my ability to do my job!" The only things sadder than this are the supervisors and executives that buy into this crap.

I completely get that there are a few people where the affectations are natural. However, if you look at the actions, there are people who can speak very intelligently to the point where the affectation becomes an afterthought. I've often seen intelligent women turn it on and turn it off when they feel they can use it to their advantage.

Not saying this is pervasive nationwide, just my observations from a few decades of being in diverse professional environments.
posted by prepmonkey at 11:30 AM on May 26, 2016


Can we get something like the "Just Not Sorry" extension in reverse for men?

What would that extension actually do?
posted by sibilatorix at 11:32 AM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


In women, it's the "I'm too stupid so you need to show me" action rather than figuring it out yourself.

I use this sexist assumption (that people make about me) against them all the time, in that I often have to interview or question people and get them to admit to certain facts or statements, and going full-head-tilt "I'm not sure I understand, can you explain it more?" really works well. Nothing I can do will make them take me seriously, so I might as well use it to my advantage.
posted by sallybrown at 11:38 AM on May 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


I actually find work environments where training, feedback, and ongoing questions are welcomed to have better functioning employees who actually do things right, rather than places where figuring it out on your own (even if it's wrong) is expected so you don't annoy the boss. It's often a problem of understaffing and incorrect assumption that making up what to is an innate sign of greatness (rather than finding out what the prefences of the boss/customers actually are). I think there's a bias I read about that men have this assumption of correctness about themselves that is actually not accurate and make more errors because of it- as in maybe the should learn to value self doubt and asking and learning rather than assuming you already know more.

There are actually a lot of strengths associated with women coded behaviors that men could learn from rather than immediately giving women demonstrating common "women" behaviors pointers about how to be more like men and stop doing that.
posted by xarnop at 11:47 AM on May 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


I got so annoyed the other day - I was in the airport waiting for my Southwest flight to start lining up, and I squeezed between a few people and bumped into someone. And I said "Sorry." And the older woman walking behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said "You shouldn't say sorry, you should just say excuse me. A man wouldn't say sorry if he bumped into someone!"

In the moment I was too caught off guard to do much other than shrug at her and say sorry once again. I wish I'd asked her if she would have corrected me if I was a man.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:57 AM on May 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Here is the FPP on why calling menstruation a "women's issue" is really problematic. To be succinct, I see the article discussed there and this one as totally consistent. Both are about ceasing to police sex and gender, and respecting people.
posted by DrMew at 12:01 PM on May 26, 2016 [7 favorites]


Another in a long line of AnecdoteFilters: The older women who shaped my life were into profanity, scotch, cigarettes, perms, more profanity, and not getting married or being tied to a "man". Oh, and bridge.

Between that group and the giant big handed scandahoovian girls I grew up with who slapped the crap out of me regularly, why on this blue planet would you ever, ever underestimate women?

Violence against women remains unacceptable. Full stop.
posted by Sphinx at 12:29 PM on May 26, 2016


This is something I've had to deal with pretty explicitly most of my life, so I've probably put way too much thought and effort into trying to figure it out.

It's been my experience that there is no amount of caveats and exceptions and disclaimers that will prevent people from parsing what you're saying in the most hostile way possible, so I've made a serious effort to minimize how much I do that, to not tailor my writing to that audience. People who can't or won't make an effort to understand something without elaborating on it and speculating about my motivations or opinions of other topics and things like that are never going to. There's no point in arguing with them, so I've made a concerted effort to stop even trying.

I still include too many disclaimers when I'm speaking, because speech gets parsed and misremembered too easily, and you usually don't have a record of what you've said. And also, it's hard to adjust real time speech. But I can edit writing and pare my disclaimers down to one each, and only when I mean it. (E.g., "I suspect" instead of "I'm not sure, and this might just be [something], but I suspect [...] and I could be wrong.")

Funny thing is, that makes people MAAAAAD when they know I'm a lady. I get tone policed all the time, and despite having tons of experience being assumed male on the internet, I have only ever been accused of 'mansplaining' by people who knew I wasn't a man. People expect women to spend ridiculous amounts of time and effort massaging their perceptions and establishing credibility and apologizing and deferring and preemptively telling them they're probably wrong. I have gotten some hilarious lectures on these topics.

Almost nobody ever thinks I'm being rude, though, when they think I'm a man. And I know tons of men with low-end Dunning Kruger type confidence about everything, just walking around all day long spouting hot takes on every topic under the sun, often completely fabricating explanations for things they have no understanding of at all. They get called out every now and again, but not with any kind of regularity.

There's a middle ground in there. Men IMO have a lot more work to do in terms of moving along the spectrum of confidence, and we need to adjust how we value confidence as a character trait. Boys grow up being told it's the secret to their success in just about every aspect of life, and that makes them stupid and causes massive fuckups all the damned time. Girls are expected to cushion it with absurd amounts of humility, and tend to get ignored or discounted because of it. Overall, humility is preferable to false confidence, but when there's a social expectation of excessive humility, that humility can be perceived as false, and appropriate levels of humility are still perceived as overconfidence.

IMO, the best approach is for people to actually listen to what people are saying rather than constantly focusing on the way they're saying it. Stop extrapolating, stop analyzing and making assumptions and slippery sloping, stop filling in details, stop criticizing tone of voice, stop assuming that disclaimers are rhetorical flourishes or false humility. Focus on actual words and actual meaning.

I suspect (see that?) that this is worse for women than it is for men. I regularly have people extrapolating things I'm saying, as though I'm being passive aggressive or intentionally either downplaying or exaggerating things. It's really common for me to say something, and have someone 'summarize' it as some over the top, cartoonish version of what I actually said, or expand on it with hostile assumptions about what I probably really meant.

People do that to men, too, of course, but in my experience, it's only when people know I'm a woman that they casually assume that I'm being outright deceptive and weasely. And there is no way I've found to prevent certain people from doing that. It's the people who do it who need to change their behavior.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:37 PM on May 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


I was schooled when I expressed irritation with vocal frey in a Meta. This permitted me to see my internalized misogyny at work there; my correctors were correct. (I still maintain that a good portion of it is a generational thing, though. I think it's good to be careful, I think it's internalized misogyny + ageism [folded into "continuing shock and dismay at the world changing in unfamiliar ways"].)
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:32 PM on May 26, 2016


I wish more people prefaced their statements with "I'm not sure, but" or "I think..." or "I feel like...". I much prefer a little honest uncertainty over a strong, declarative statement by someone who is only 50% sure of what they're saying. I tend to trust people and take what they say at face value, so when they confidently peddle misinformation it frustrates me greatly.
posted by delight at 2:39 PM on May 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


That Fresh Air interview/round table with Penny Eckert linked upthread makes me grind my teeth. For someone with a PhD, she's quick to make judgements about why vocal fry and upspeak is acceptable; she takes her opinion and theories as gospel truth; and she makes the snap judgement that "disrupting" by using slangy speech patterns in places where it's inappropriate to do so--instead of judging one's audience and adapting speech to fit specific situations--is a great thing to do.

There are many reasons why vocal fry, upspeak, discourse markers, and conditional tics don't work in every context. Eckert apparently has a background in researching Californian accents. since fry and upspeak are pretty heavily used in Los Angeles-related slang, I would think someone in Eckert's area of research might theorize that these linguistic trends became widely used across the country because LA is the epicenter of the media. Since California is seen as more casual and less intellectual by the rest of the country (I'm not saying this is strictly true), Eckert might have theorized that this generational accent spread through the media, and that older generations and people with more formal backgrounds object to it because they associate it with tacky reality TV celebrities and dumb, shallow characters like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, Keanu Reeves, and Otto from The Simpsons.

The fact that a scholar like Eckert based her findings not on a study but on an anecdote with a small sample size further irritated me, especially in light of the "disruption" she preached. Obviously the subjective nature of language makes this kind of research challenging, but the fact that she presented her idea as "my students say that vocal fry sounds authoritative, therefore vocal fry is acceptable in all contexts all the time" as simplistic and ridiculous.

Finally, I know that presenting cited research in an audio roundtable is challenging, but since she needed to present her credentials and some of the context for her beliefs, she should have provided them to the Fresh Air producers to post on the website.

As you were.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:40 PM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


A data point: as a man in various tech office jobs over the past 15 years, I often equivocate when I'm uncertain, especially in emails, and it's never effected my being taken seriously or "getting things done". The entire premise is a bunch of bunk. The actual problem is that people don't take women seriously, not how they talk/construct emails. I mean, come on. Coaching speakers to not say "um" and "like" is something that both men and women get, it's true, but ultimately irrelevant.

don't want to change my employee or be a bad feminist? But I know some "clients" aren't taking her seriously? And I would like to help her become more effective? And I think a conversational tone might be more effective than sounding uncertain? And I had a male employee who I also mentored in the expectations of our workplace? And I think men and women both are expected to modify their behavior to be more professional? Otherwise, we'd all come to work in our pyjamas with toast crumbs on our faces after college?

Sorry, but I feel like this is a really obnoxious and unconstructive way to engage in this conversation.
posted by cj_ at 3:55 PM on May 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Squeak Attack: I don't want to change my employee or be a bad feminist? But I know some "clients" aren't taking her seriously? And I would like to help her become more effective? And I think a conversational tone might be more effective than sounding uncertain? And I had a male employee who I also mentored in the expectations of our workplace? And I think men and women both are expected to modify their behavior to be more professional? Otherwise, we'd all come to work in our pyjamas with toast crumbs on our faces after college?

I'm very confused by this comment. The repeated use of question marks - even on statements - seem like a written representation of uptalk, but the content seems to be critiquing uptalk. Is it meant to be ironic, or was the irony unintentional?
posted by Deoridhe at 4:06 PM on May 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Coaching speakers to not say "um" and "like" is something that both men and women get, it's true, but ultimately irrelevant.

Oh, man, and have you ever talked to someone who doesn't use verbal placeholders?

My husband doesn't, and it can be very unsettling. He just does these really long pauses instead. If you ask him a question and he needs some time to think about his answer, he doesn't give any kind of acknowledgement like, "Well, um, let's see..." He just goes blank for a while. He'll also do it in the middle of saying something, so you're wondering if he's done talking or not. I have to ask him all the time if he heard something or if he's finished. And when I don't, sometimes it turns out that he actually didn't hear.

That's much more distracting than most verbal tics, IMO, and it causes more misunderstanding and confusion than any of the things women get lectured about, but I've never heard anyone else (other than me) try to coach him to start saying "um" or something.

I know you weren't saying that, but I always want to warn people to be careful what they wish for when they advise people to cut out verbal placeholders. You'd miss them if they went away.
posted by ernielundquist at 5:20 PM on May 26, 2016 [9 favorites]


I wish there were discourse markers that didn't make the speaker sound dumb. Syllables such as "um" and "like" make me feel like an idiot when I use them.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:47 PM on May 26, 2016


"The only vaguely reasonable advice anyone can really offer us is to stop caring about what people think! "

Except if we do things without caring about what men think, our odds of getting attacked by men online go up by a billion.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:02 PM on May 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Anyway...I have definitely had to femme up my voice--I don't think it's vocal frying, but it definitely gets more high pitched and perky--when waiting on people. I got so many complaints about my natural voice being "rude and mean"(probably because my normal voice is a bit flat) that I now broadcast, very loudly, how subservient and cheerful and apologetic and oh so friendly I am! The more stereotypically perky I am, the more I'm liked and the less complaints I get about me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:14 PM on May 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, man, and have you ever talked to someone who doesn't use verbal placeholders?

Ugh, I'm married to one of those, too. Is he thinking? Didn't hear me? Very frustrating. However, he finds my lack of small talk kind of annoying, too, so probably we're square.

One of my exes was prone to making these terrible definitive sounding pronouncements, which I always found super annoying. I'd suggest softening his (completely off base and whackaloon) opinions with the occasional "I think" and he'd say that the fact that he was saying it implied the "I think". Also very annoying. It's no wonder, really, I sit here peacefully at my desk, talking to no-one.
posted by glitter at 6:35 PM on May 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm involved with Toastmasters, and one of the many wonderful roles in Toastmasters is the Ah Counter, whose sole job is to count the filler words uttered by everyone during a club meeting. I've been told that hardcore TM meetings have a "swear jar" type setup for anyone accidentally says "um," but I've never seen this in the wild.

I've sat in several years worth of TM meetings, and can honestly say there is no gender lockdown between women or men for repeat offenders of filler words. And despite the fact that I've known many very conservative white men in Toastmasters, I feel like the Ah Counter duties are consistently applied across gender, because the *shared goal of everyone* in the room is to improve their clarity of speech.

When you get outside of the Toastmasters environment, people forget/gloss over/deny men have just as many speaking shortcomings as women, but women are the only ones who get dinged for it.... because of the reasons in the article and mentioned upthread.
posted by mostly vowels at 9:55 PM on May 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


ernielundquist: If you ask him a question and he needs some time to think about his answer, he doesn't give any kind of acknowledgement like, "Well, um, let's see..." He just goes blank for a while.

Same here. I've asked Mr Too-Ticky to 'show me a spinner', as in: the thing a computer shows you to indicate that it's doing something. It really helps if he can indicate that he's heard the question and is thinking about a reply.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:13 AM on May 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


"And I think men and women both are expected to modify their behavior to be more professional?" I think a difficulty here is that "professional" was something that was largely evolved and set around male behavior and by males.

There's this assumption that if we start expecting the same things from both men and the women, the best behaviors to expect are the virtues associated with males and those are the best ones.

Traits associated with women, empathic, intuitive, gentle, kind, supporting, needing support, enjoying fashion (or doing so to please others), laughing and giggling (which can be a great survival mechanism)...

there are all sorts of assumption about what is professional behavior that was built around and coded for men, and could probably use some re-evaluating. This article didn't touch on the fact that in addition to dealing with higher rates and threat of sexual assault, many women give birth to and nurture small children at a rate higher than men, which may alter both biological and emotional experiences, priorities, coping behaviors, and needs.
posted by xarnop at 5:23 AM on May 27, 2016 [7 favorites]


This article didn't touch on the fact that in addition to dealing with higher rates and threat of sexual assault, many women give birth to and nurture small children at a rate higher than men, which may alter both biological and emotional experiences, priorities, coping behaviors, and needs.

We had a barbecue for our clients at work yesterday, and a few clients brought their dogs (including one completely ridiculously adorable puppy), and my manager was babysitting her one-year-old granddaughter all day at work, so a big portion of the party was people coo-ing over small creatures. Which is what one of our clerical staff and I had been doing when we walked into the next room, and greeted two new arrivals -- both men in their mid-20s -- with very high-pitched high-cadenced "Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!! How are youuuuuuuuuuuuuu?!?!?!"s, because we were in "Talking to babies" mode.
posted by lazuli at 5:32 AM on May 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


Finally, I know that presenting cited research in an audio roundtable is challenging, but since she needed to present her credentials and some of the context for her beliefs, she should have provided them to the Fresh Air producers to post on the website.


The thing is, all of the following are fairly established findings in current sociolinguistics (a field which Eckert helped shape):

1) The speech of less powerful groups tends to be judged to be less effective/not as good/weaker/"slangy"/incorrect compared to the speech of more powerful groups. This has been found again, and again, in multiple studies.

2) Young women tend to be leaders in language change. There are exceptions, but this is a fairly robust pattern, particularly in the US

3) Because of (1) and (2) young people, women in particular, are frequently being told that they are "destroying the language", or "talking so that they sound submissive".

These are all very, very well established facts, taught in any introductory sociolinguistics class. This is why Eckert did not provide citations.

I would think someone in Eckert's area of research might theorize that these linguistic trends became widely used across the country because LA is the epicenter of the media.


That's because you don't know much about sociolinguistic research. There is very, very little evidence for the media causing language change (with some work on the "Jockney" accent being the main exception). It's something that laypeople think is true, but is demonstratively false.
posted by damayanti at 5:34 AM on May 27, 2016 [9 favorites]


Initially I was going to make a point here that up talk and baby talk strike me as condescending, because it implies that I don't understand what is being said and I need someone to talk to me as though I was five and that I need things explained to me as though I don't understand.

Turns out being splained to by a linguistics PhD is worse. Cite your sources, damiyanti.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:45 AM on May 27, 2016


Here's a link to Dr. Eckert's website, including all sorts of details on her research which you should feel free to peruse.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:17 AM on May 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


That's because you don't know much about sociolinguistic research.
What do I know? I just have a bachelor's degree from a state school! /sarcasm

Some other things that irritate me about how Eckert's studies are spread throughout non-linguistic circles include:

- Every other group that speaks in regional or cultural dialect learns how to tailor their language to their audience. To use a non-controversial example, one with which I have personal experience: my younger brother has a thick Eastern Massachusetts accent. He knows that if he's going to speak to people who aren't from New England that he needs to pronounce his Rs and he can't go around using words like "wicked pissah" (this is a thing he does). If he's talking to us or to his classmates, people will understand his regional accent. This is an aspect of in-group/out-group communication that you learn in undergrad Sociology 101. Somehow, affluent white girls are exempt from learning to understand their audience and tailor their speech so that others will understand them.

- Eckert has a prescriptivism that ignores elementary qualities of communication in favor of expressing yourself at the expense of those with whom you're communicating. There's a huge difference between "according to this study, [x] populations have made [y] innovations in casual speech, as seen over [z] period" and "THIS IS A GREAT THING! DO IT ALL THE TIME! DISRUPT!!!1!" At best, members of an out-group with whom [x] population is trying to communicate won't understand them; at worst, said out-group could be insulted because the in-group refuses to engage with them.

- The way Eckert's studies are passed around laypeople--particularly affluent white women--encourages those populations to be lazy in their speech. Hey, here's this PhD from Berkeley who's telling them that it's okay to use slang and unintelligible language among people who might not speak their dialect, so it's acceptable for them to talk like that all the time, everywhere! They're ~disrupting.

- Finally, there's a racism within the way we defend white women's speech, especially in light of how white women appropriate slang from Black and Latinx subcultures. The word "cool" was used in African-American communities during the jazz era, but it didn't gain traction until a "mainstream" (read: white) population started using it. We're seeing it even more in the present day. Maybe current sociolinguists should extend their identity politics to how white girls appropriate AAVE, instead of just paying AAVE lip service on NPR.

But, I mean, I'm just a humble proofreader. I don't have a fancy degree or anything.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:28 AM on May 27, 2016


Maybe current sociolinguists should extend their identity politics to how white girls appropriate AAVE, instead of just paying AAVE lip service on NPR.

That research is there, and I can assure that, at the very least, sociolinguists talk about amongst themselves. See, e.g., the paper presented at NWAV (major sociolinguistics conference) last year, "Black Twitter": AAE lexical innovation, appropriation, and change in computer(mediated) discourse" . See also Elaine Chun's research about the use of AA(V)E by Asian teens, and Mary Bucholz's work, especially White Girls about the use and non-use of AA(V)E by white teens.

For most of the rest of your post, I recommend picking up a copy of English With an Accent. It addresses (and undercuts most of the assumptions present in) most of the rest of your concerns.
posted by damayanti at 7:00 AM on May 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


Actually I would say these accusations are hardest hit among low economic women who use vocal fry, up talk, and slang.

If anything dehumanizing and making inferior people of lower classes based on their "inferior" speech and the necessity of them making their speech sound like the "proper" English speakers is one among many tools of oppression used on the lower classes.

Southern drawl, slang popular by any group of POC, slang made popular by immigrant groups who mix accents and words into something comfortable for them, these are all groups who are treated worse by the superiority complex of people who think their grammar skills make them superior quality human beings- and all the class, racial, and gender baggage and prejudice which comes with those assumptions.

I've been looking and would be genuinely curious if anyone has seen research as to use of vocal fry, up talk, and other "inferior" modes of speech broken down by economic status. I think upper class white women are just the only group of women with enough social power to push back, not the only group of women who uses altered speech for reasons that might benefit for them- or the only group of women that might benefit from asking people to examine their prejudices about other people's speech.
posted by xarnop at 7:00 AM on May 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


I've been looking and would be genuinely curious if anyone has seen research as to use of vocal fry, up talk, and other "inferior" modes of speech broken down by economic status.

Not uptalk or vocal fry in particular, but most of the early work in quantitative sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov's study on New York English) focused on the use of stigmatized speech features based on class; there's also a fairly foundational language and gender study on English in the UK by Trudgill which showed some interesting interactions with class (basically, the Upper Middle class women had access to/used forms associated with RP, the Lower Working class women had access to/used forms associated with local prestige, and the Middle Working class had access to neither).

All of this is to say: yes, race and class does intersect with all of this, but doesn't negate the fact that general misogyny is the primary force behind "You should speak like X" to women, rather than any neutral fact about the mutual intelligibility or lack thereof of the speech of young, white women and others.
posted by damayanti at 7:21 AM on May 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


In my current work situation I have to constantly think about when I can 'give no fucks' and when I have to perform to expectations in order to get my work done. Depending on the manger I have to deal with I do act and talk differently depending on the situation. I'm a natural code switcher it's something that I've just done my whole life, long before I knew it was even a thing. It gets tougher when it's they're all together but I've gotten pretty good at it.

The biggest conflict is email communication. A big part of my job is communicating with the developers and project leader in another company. It's a long term ongoing relationship. My direct boss just does not seem to be able to understand (or care) that since a good majority of our communication happens through email and that I communicate with specific people who have specific personalities that you get to know over time, his 'one size fits all, super formal, CAPITAL LETTER highlighting way that communication by EMAIL SHOULD happen' approach can actually be damaging. It does not foster the type of relationship that is most conducive to a good ongoing working relationship. It's amazing that when you communicate with people that you work with all the time like they are human beings and not corporate robots that things work better and happen faster! What a concept! I talk to them like they are part of my team, which in context of this project they most definitely are.

This is the one area where I have stood my ground because not only my previous experience has shown me to be right but that it's become very clear in the current relationship that my way works better. His way is fine in certain situations but in other contexts is extremely off putting. Of course he's attempted to TEACH me his way and I've gotten talks about being professional and his years of experience blah blah. I heard versions of all the types of ways of non-verbal policing that have been mentioned.

At one point he was wanting all of my emails sent to him before sending them off and he would change the wording. That didn't last long because stuff just didn't get done in a timely manner because he was always behind in looking at them. It helped that I purposely didn't remind him about it and issues would sit for a week or two with no progress. Bigger boss would be 'why is this not happening' and I'd shrug and suggest they talk to Direct Boss as X issue was sent to him two weeks ago and I don't know where he is with it. They would question more and I would explain the workflow knowing full well that Bigger Boss would be thinking 'wtf?' This only happened a few time before one day he just told me it was necessary anymore and walked away. (Me inside my head: Evil cackle. I know how to play the office game buddy...I'm a woman..we have to get good at this shit out of sheer necessity. Fuck your sexist BS.)

I've been here for two years and Boss still appears to forget that I also have years of experience. At times when he starts talking as if I'm a student I remind him that I have done this or that and it's like he is surprised. Every. Single. Time.

He doesn't act this way with males employees, even with the one who is actually a student on a co-op. I watched and listened. They get very minor versions of it.

My solace is that although it's never been said straight out the people in the company I deal with get whats happening on my end. Especially after the couple of times I've had to uber diplomatically fix some damage that was created by his 'professional' style. We have even developed our own unspoken code so they know when it is something the Boss is doing/wanting/talking and when it's just me.
posted by Jalliah at 7:24 AM on May 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


When I read about language policing it reminds me of this old folktale: Master of All Masters
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:09 PM on May 28, 2016


Another article on the disruption theory.

2) Young women tend to be leaders in language change. There are exceptions, but this is a fairly robust pattern, particularly in the US

What's the reason for that, out of curiosity? The article I linked to points to comparatively high empathy and sociability being important; to me, this suggests conformity mattering more than disruption, at least within the peer group (because "disruption" is anti-social) - i.e. it makes more sense for the drive to be something like peer pressure, wanting to fit in, to sound [cool, whatever]. It's obviously imitative, mimetic. It's only disruptive vertically, across generations, like a lot of youth culture aims to be. What I remember reading about abrupt linguistic changes along these lines was that in those instances, there was an aspirational element involved (e.g. imitating the Queen's RP). If there's any truth to this, that's what I think is (occasionally) slightly bugging about that rasp to olds like me, on an intuitive level - it just sounds fake. To my ears. My old, irrelevant ears.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:18 PM on May 29, 2016


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