freediver
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At my desk.
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I found this bit especially interesting:
THERE ARE SOCIAL REASONS, maybe reasons of survival, too, for all this covering up. Dan Auerbach talks about an important difference – in terms of societal norms – between men and women. He makes it clear he’s speaking in very general terms and that it’s a classical view but … he takes a deep breath: “Men tend to think they are entitled to be direct, to go towards what attracts them. In traditional western culture, we’ve become accustomed to women’s power being based in attracting attention towards them rather than actively pursuing an interest, and so women might not feel as entitled to be as direct about what they want. They may have to find roundabout ways to disguise their interest.”
He also says: “What we comfortably see as assertive in men, we may label as aggressive in a woman. With these norms in mind, a woman’s sense of shame may kick in at a lower threshold of assertiveness than it would in a man.”
Virginia Haussegger mentions Malcolm Turnbull’s admission on ABC-TV’s Q&A program last September that there was no love lost between he and Peter Costello. “Men can say unpopular things about another man and get away with it. The moment women do that, they’re really ostracised,” she says. “It’s interesting that in politics, it’s assumed that women will work together, that they will be the cohesive, nurturing, inclusive elements in a political debate. They’re not allowed to act independently. If they do, they get thrashed.”
So is there a process of natural selection going on here? Are women who act in more indirect ways seen to be more desirable, which means the gene responsible is more likely to be passed on? Or at least, are women who act covertly more successful in today’s society than their more direct sisters? If so, and if it’s a result of behaviour being determined by what’s agreeable to men, then nothing seems likely to change soon, given the surprise findings in a recent paper on differences between the sexes by an international research team. Apparently, the more prosperous, egalitarian and healthy a society is, the more we seem to live up to the man/woman stereotypes made famous in John Gray’s Mars and Venus books.
“The gap between the personality traits of men and that of women widens as the society in which they live becomes more modern, economically affluent and gender egalitarian,” the research team wrote in its 2008 paper “Why can’t a man be more like a woman?” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in the US. The argument is that in traditional cultures that tend to be poor and agrarian, the men are more stressed by hardship, and so are more cautious, less assertive. In developed countries, men are less constrained, freer to be assertive.
There is an exquisitely painful scene in the Keira Knightley film The Duchess that will pummel the solar plexus of any woman watching even if we now live in the 21st century and the film is set in the late 18th. The Duchess tells the story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and her brutal marriage. The duke, played by Ralph Fiennes, utters several memorable one-liners about power and the roles of women throughout. At one stage, as his wife pleads for a chance for her own life, offering him what she thinks is a reasonable compromise, the duke hears her out uncomprehendingly, as if he were listening to an otter asking for an invitation to dinner. “I don’t do deals,” he says finally, his lip lifting. “I’m in charge.”
How often do women still stub their toe – or break their heart – on that truth?
I discovered a new word recently. It’s stutenbissig and it was the senior vice-president for global marketing at the German-based printing company Heidelberg, Adriana Nuneva, who introduced it to my vocabulary. I had been invited to give a series of talks about women in male-dominated workplaces and in my conclusion I talked about the way men respected each other but women too often didn’t. Nuneva explained that in German, stutenbissig literally describes the way female horses snap at each other, but now it’s used to mean the way women “bite” each other maliciously.
We agreed that we needed to be less stutenbissig in our lives. Perhaps that would be possible if we had more respect for each other.
I once wrote in a column, “There is a steely realism to the friendships and working relationships between men that goes missing between women. It is what bolsters men as a sex and the lack of it is what can bring women down.”
Lawrenson, in her seminal essay of the ’60s, coolly wrote of women’s complex feelings towards each other: “Arcane and unadmitted though many of these resentments may be, they find expression in the prickly conduct of feminine relationships, and few women are completely immune to them.”
For her pains, Lawrenson, one of the funniest and sharpest writers of her generation, and a woman who once wrote mischievously – at a time of militant feminism – that she rather liked ironing and folding, has been virtually written out of the history of American journalism.
Perhaps we’ll keep being stutenbissig – and secret female bullies will continue to prosper – until women can happily and fearlessly blow the whistle on all of it.
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female bullies at work (Read 2526 times)
