Femininity (16 page)

Is gossip trivial, reprehensible and malicious by intent? Having worked in the news
business for many years, I can say that reporters are enthusiastic gossips in private
conversation, not only because they love a good story but because their job is to
make coherent sense out of the way the world functions by putting together odd, seemingly
trivial pieces of fact. Trying to substantiate a rumor is a beginning step in investigative
reporting. As a sign of the changing times, what once had no place in honorable journalism
among men—who sleeps with whom, for example—is now considered morally pertinent to
biography and politics. Gossip is feared because it is disrespectful of the mighty
when it exposes personal behavior at odds with public pretense.

Women have a tough time getting listened to, except by other women. The Sphinx, who
had the head and breasts of. a woman, talked in unfathomable riddles; Cassandra was
fated by the gods to see the truth and not be believed; female prophets in the church
were squelched as unseemly. And Sigmund Freud lifted up his head to inquire, “Dear
God, what do women want?” A touch of madness, or silence, or coquettish uncertainty
have been the feminine strategies when answering men.

In mixed company there’s no question which sex has cornered the market on longwinded
chatter. Men readily interrupt the speech of women, and women allow the interruption.
In one
systematic analysis of taped conversations between men and women, the men did 98 percent
of the interrupting. Sociologist Pamela Fishman concluded that men are the talkers
and women provide the support work that keeps a conversation going. In Fishman’s study
of male-female conversations, when women tried to initiate new topics, it was mostly
without success. They generously followed male-suggested topics, they asked nearly
three times as many questions as the men to draw them out, and they interjected frequent
little boosts like “Oh, really?” to keep things perking. (Women also employ more body
language than men to indicate conversational interest. Head bobbing, a flurry of little
nods to show support and agreement, provides a visual accompaniment to the feminine
task of animated, empathic listening.)

There are many reasons why men interrupt the speech of women and get away with it.
For one thing, more men have been trained to be verbally aggressive. In law school
an argumentative, disputatious style is practiced in the classroom to sharpen combative
skills. Courses for salesmen include training in how to make an effective stand-up
presentation and how to be persuasive. But more to the point, boys grow up assuming
they have valuable information to impart. By tradition girls were instructed by their
mothers and advised by their teen magazines that the most appreciated quality in a
young lady is her ability to listen, to play dumb on dates and to act impressed in
male company. In all-female company, a church mouse can turn into a nightingale—I’ve
seen it happen.

Then there is the very real question of how well female voices carry. A deeper male
voice can drown out a lighter female one, and a woman has to work extra hard—truly
assert herself—to override an interruption. Once again, a natural biological difference
between males and females works to female disadvantage. A deeper voice seems more
authoritative, like taller stature. Advice on how to train a dog usually includes
the suggestion to lower your voice register to impress your pet with the seriousness
of the command. I always used this procedure on my sensitive collie and it worked—the
dog hopped to. A deeper voice means business.

But there is just so much lowering of the voice a woman
can do. I never had trouble getting my devoted dog to sit or stay, but hailing a cab
is another matter. When waving the arm fails, one must resort to “Hey, taxi!” A guttural
shout—Dustin Hoffman’s funniest moment in
Tootsie.
Ladies aren’t supposed to shout. Neither are they supposed to whistle. Whistles and
shouts are as unfeminine as belches, snores and loud sneezes. Of course, no lady should
ever be in the bereft situation of needing to hail her own cab, should she? “Hey,
taaxiii”
strikes momentary terror in my heart. As I hurl the ringing words aloft I simultaneously
worry that my voice won’t carry, the cab will speed by, and someone on the street
will think, That certainly is a loud woman.

When hailing cabs it might be inspirational to remember the Great Call of the gibbon,
the monogamous primate who is our fourth-closest relation, for vocal dimorphism in
gibbons refreshingly gives females the center stage. The female’s Great Call dominates
their morning territorial display, and the pair of apes perform their gymnastic stunts
during the Great Call’s climax. A gibbon male has a short
hoo-hah
that he interjects between renditions of the female’s aria, but her opening notes
command his silence. “The female gibbon can utter the short calls of the male,” Joe
and Elsie Marshall reported in
Science.
“The male, however, never sings the Great Call.”

That’s how gibbons do it. Actually I’m good at hailing cabs and I hold the floor well
in male-female conversations. I say this not to toot my own horn—“A whistling woman
and a crowing hen are fit for neither God nor men”—but to make the point that when
my reputation for authority does not precede me, my gibbonesque arias get drowned
out accordingly.

Women know how to laugh appreciatively; indeed, smiling and giggling are acknowledged
feminine skills, but most of us are rotten at telling jokes. And many have learned
to censor the belly laugh and the risible guffaw with a hand that daintily covers
the open mouth. The aggression in humor is well known. A stand-up comedian takes conscious
risks that are incompatible with feminine propriety. He holds center stage; he delivers
a punch line. (Get it? A
punch
line.) He ridicules the manners and customs of others. “Let me tell you about my
mother-in-law …” Would the reverse be funny? Erma Bombeck, a very funny woman, sits
down to do her humorous riffs, and while she uses
herself, the car, the washing machine and the children as subject matter, I have never
heard any father-in-law jokes. Or many husband jokes, either. Comedic women are usually
self-deprecatory, in the Phyllis Diller-Joan Rivers tradition. With few exceptions,
female guests on the Johnny Carson show present themselves as dizzy dames. Encouraged
by Johnny, feminine dippiness became a talk-show routine in the late-night hours.
Madcap femininity with a touch of instability is a salable female commodity, as Hollywood
discovered. Bright comediennes with the knack for playing dumb, vulnerable dips are
quickly stereotyped, like Judy Holliday, Shelley Winters, Goldie Hawn. (It helps to
be blonde.) Aware of the damage in this feminine stereotype, Jean Stapleton, who played
slow, simple Edith Bunker on television for many years (“Stifle yourself, Edith!”),
took pains to disassociate from the role when she campaigned for the Equal Rights
Amendment. In a sense, men are right. The women’s movement has no sense of humor.

Using expletives is another mode of expression that runs counter to femininity and
the power relationship in the most basic of ways. To no one’s surprise, studies show
that men use more four-letter words than women do, but younger women are narrowing
the gap. I doubt whether liberation will bring us to parity in this regard. Something
more than a disregard for politeness is involved in the classic obscenities of Anglo-Saxon
origin. They are anti-female in intent and cannot be used by women with convincing
authority. The shock value of the words may be an affront, but the power behind the
basic image, the ability to follow through, is sorely absent when a woman says “Fuck
you up your ass, buddy.”

Achieving parity in jokes and curse words is obviously not the cutting edge of the
movement for equal rights, but being listened to is crucial. Sitting in a close circle
and speaking in turn by “going around the room” became the first rule in feminist
consciousness-raising sessions, to make sure that every woman, the reticent, the diffident,
the shy, would be heard. The technique can work only in a small group, and there are
some who claim that the leaderless small group best suits a woman’s style of communication,
rather than the hierarchical principle of an auditorium with a raised podium at one
end.

“Give me a balcony in every town and I can take over the country,” a Latin American
dictator once said. Speaking to the multitudes from a certain removed height is a
technique that few women have mastered, or tried to master. Eva Peron aside, demagogic
manipulation of the masses has been a masculine province. A woman on a soapbox with
a microphone in her hand, even if she is perfectly coiffed, will still be called strident,
hectoring or “somewhat shrill,” as the American press said of Margaret Thatcher the
week she took office. Electronic amplification of a high voice annoys many listeners,
and it doesn’t help that audio equipment is set for lower tones, or that speaker’s
podiums are routinely built to the specifications of male height.

For one brief and shining moment in world literature, writing “in feminine” gave women
an edge in creative expression. Japanese nobility during the tenth-century Heian period
believed the Chinese language was superior to their own. They reserved Chinese for
higher study barred to women, and they attempted to write their serious works in Chinese
as well, in much the same manner that Western scholars used Latin and Greek. While
they struggled to master the square, formal characters of a foreign language, women
of the court were free to use
kana,
a simplified, phonetic script, to set down the language they actually spoke. Permitted
a fluidity and a native idiom that men denied themselves, Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki),
author of
The Tale of Genji,
and Sei Shonagon, author of
The Pillow Book,
produced the lasting masterworks of their age.

There is something very Japanese and very feminine in the story of Shonagon and Murasaki
skipping past their fellow writers with a brush stroke light and true. Their experience
was not repeated elsewhere. In European ghetto culture, Jewish men of learning reserved
Hebrew for themselves while others made do with Yiddish, but no Lady Murasaki emerged
in Yiddish, or if one did, his name was Sholem Aleichem.

But writing in feminine does not usually refer to the genius of Murasaki. It refers
to the stereotype, to sentimental prose that is scented with lavender, that is vapid
and suffocatingly enclosed. A feminine sentence is said to gush rather than roar;
it lacks muscle and lean strength; it is precious and insubstantial; it
limps along to inconclusion like an unstressed final syllable, inferior and weak.
It suffers from italics and from excessive quotation marks when it tries to be slangy.
When it seeks to break from its mold and be strongly declarative it is said to raise
its voice and become strident and shrill.

Do women write in a feminine style? If there is evidence that women speak in a feminine
manner, how can this not carry over into writing, since the rhythms of a written sentence
reflect the cadences of oral speech? The feminine environment has been a world of
closed interiors, imposed limitations and cramped space. It would be strange in some
instances if claustrophobia, desperation and self-consciousness did not seep onto
the printed page. In A
Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf toyed with the notion of a distinctive feminine sentence, one that
was not without positive virtue, but she did not define it, and her own style of writing,
except in her diaries, was an extreme attempt to shake loose of gender. (Toward the
end of her life she grew to detest her early essays and blamed their politeness and
sidelong approach on “my tea-table training. I see myself handing plates of buns to
shy young men and asking them, not directly and simply about their poems and their
novels, but whether they like cream as well as sugar.”)

To be accused of a feminine style has haunted the psyches of women who write, for
the accusation means critical dismissal, not chivalrous regard. George Eliot, the
Bronte sisters and George Sand did not care to reveal their sex on the title page;
a masculine pseudonym gave protective coloration to their words, and that was the
only chivalry they required. Earlier in the nineteenth century Jane Austen had coped
with the identity problem by publishing her first novel as the work of “A Lady,” alerting
the reader, suggests critic Rachel Brownstein, that here is a “distinctly feminine
and well-bred voice, the voice of a genteel maiden” who desires to please. As recently
as a decade ago a university study attempted to gauge reader response when the sex
of an author was attached to a piece of writing. When the writing bore a woman’s name,
readers felt it was a less competent, less significant work.

A professor of English named Mary Hiatt put excerpts from
the works of one hundred contemporary authors into a computer to see if any general
principles of feminine writing might emerge. The women in her sample wrote shorter
sentences than the men, had a tendency to overwork the word “really” in an effort
to be
really
convincing, thereby betraying the fear they would not be believed, and they displayed
an overall tendency to play it safe with language. Caution is what marked the writing
style of women.

I understand the tendency to play it safe when one feels grateful to be allowed to
play at all. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” Robert Southey
sternly reproved Charlotte Bronte, who had the courage to withstand his opinion. A
more feminine woman—a less certain woman, one without egotistical belief in her own
worth—would surely have acquiesced. She might have been imitative rather than original
in the effort to prove that the business of literature could be hers. Or she might
have chosen to scratch off a very small piece, a modest, negligible portion, to claim
as her own: she would deal in the miniature, the cameo, the sketch. A more feminine
woman might have given up thought of publication altogether, to pour her passion into
her diary where she could express her emotions as freely as she wished, and never
face up to the unfeminine task of pounding her thoughts into hard-edged shape. The
hope, of course, would always remain that one day a reader would discover her soul.