Letters to the Editor
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BTW, DrFresh,
Your statement that inspired my last post was the following:
"Verbalizing a feeling is pretty meaningless and indulgent if the next thought isn't leading to an actionable item."
As a person who enjoys conversation just for the sheer meandering pleasure of it, I will admit to saying much that has nothing to do with an "actionable items." I only worry about "actionable items" if I have to hold a meeting and need an agenda.
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And men also
talk AT women.
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when men talk at women it is ususally because they are trying to impress them
not because they don't care what their reaction is, although admittedly it's not usually a very effective way of achieving the intended goal.
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Banal
Banal
I've noticed that whenever studies come-out showing differences (or similarities) between the sexes, and if a variety of adjectives can be apply to interpreting the results, the editorial preference is to pick the most negative possible adjective to apply to men and the most positive adjective to apply women.
Yep. And what's really sick is Salon marketing as hip. i.e. it's kewl to have negative stereotypes about men and a raving paranoid worldview, where everything is interpreted as you describe. It's "sassy" and "empowered" or something.
The women and men, who read Broadsheet tripe and don't see the problems, people have a lot of gender baggage they're looking to have confirmed, and they're probably not doing so great in their careers, let alone physical fitness and other reflections of mental health. It's a good guess many are overweight, or socially lacking, or have other issues they need to rationalize.
Skilled professional women are in demand in many workplaces, especially in high tech, science, medicine, and other top professions. There are few "misogynists" in those industry in this era, and many others who actively seek out women employees for gender balance, so if anything the bias is slightly affirmative action and pro-women which is fine with me.
The type of people who go into soft subjects like "women's studies" are usually not the most capable students or thinkers. Like majoring in English, it tends to attract slackers. There are exceptions, but slackers are the rule.
Broadsheet (and increasingly Machinist) are moronically simplistic pages.
Salon has become rather neurotic attempting to straddle the spectrum from occasional quality journalism, to the daily garbage. No wonder subscriptions are down and Salon is financially in the toilet. It's hard to find and read the good stuff when it's embedded in so much garbage.
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I think men are willing to talk to bond as long as adequate sexual chemistry is present
obviously there can be a chicken-egg problem there, but let's admit that either one can or can not come first/be absent
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in fact I've heard fairly frequently from women that when they are sleeping with someone a lot
they can never get them to shut up
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God, I'm a chatty cathy too
AKA: I feel like I'd have to digest all the smart things you say in your post to say something complete, but I'll probably forget all about this in an hour, so I might as well go now.
I guess the point that I was trying to make is this:
Imagine it's 1950 and someone comes out with a study that says: REPORT -- Women just as sexually satisfied as their husbands
We would sit around and say things like 'I knew it' or 'that's bullshit' and essentially not get anywhere, because the ins and outs of communication and relationships are elusive in some ways and obvious in others. Still, in an objective sense, I'd argue that my hypothetical study would be way wrong. Equivalence, regardless of what pseudoscience you'd use to get there, would be a mirage.
What I'm saying is that it's obvious to me that men are unhappy with the way they are spoken to by women (in 'the home', of course -- work is a whole other ball of wax). That's why it's a stereotype. And what I see in this thread is a kind of triumphal and sexist sense that men are the ones to blame for this complaint. That the complaint is a mirage.
Obviously, I like talking for the sake of it, too. But conversation is the art of making yourself interesting to someone else. I do my best to get there. I just think that the center has to move, and that in this case, women probably have some thinking to do. About how words can be weapons. About what it really means to speak 'like a woman'. About why girls in junior high are the worst.
I'd start with Punch Drunk Love, but that's just me.
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@Banal Anonymous:
Slackers never lasted in the classes I taught. I winnowed them out fairly quickly with the ten page research essay. You see, I always required them to provide hard copies of any source that they paraphrased. I caught lots of plagiarizers that way. Of course, I usually kept making them revise over and over until it was ALL in their own words. I was a little sadistic that way. Those types where usually gone by the drop date, and subsequent plagiarizers? I flunked them. Football coaches hated me. Maybe I ruined someone's sports career. Maybe I ruined someone's science career. Maybe he/she would have found a cure for cancer. I don't care.
Athletes, fraternity boys, party people, and harried single moms all bit the dust if they cheated.
The reason Biden will never get my vote: He plagiarized.
I confess: I am a word snob. If you think English is for sissies, you were probably never challenged enough -- or maybe you found easy teachers.
As to why I read Broadsheet? It amuses me. It also really amuses me that so many people who claim to dislike it post here.
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Anonymous
"The type of people who go into soft subjects like "women's studies" are usually not the most capable students or thinkers. Like majoring in English, it tends to attract slackers. There are exceptions, but slackers are the rule."
So, since I assume you are not a slacker, you have hard evidence to back this up? Including a rational, measurable definition of a "slacker" as opposed to a non-slacker?
Or are you just talkking out your ass?
Since there are so few jobs open to English lit scholars, the majors I know worked pretty damned hard to make themselves attractive to academia. That meant they had to publish. Which meant they had to be pretty fantastic writers. Among other things.