Women going quiet amongst men

I remember so sharply a time in high school when i made a joke and everyone in my social circle just ignored it–which in of itself isnt neccesarily wrong because conversation is dynamic like that. But THEN a guy made the exact same joke and people were literally rolling on the ground. I felt so incredibly angry, and worse because i didn’t think i could point it out–these guys were the “good” ones, and that guy was a close friend’s boyfriend.

The worst part is its such a small thing and i know if i ever brought it up my friends would be like, uh, seriously!? you remember that?! Let it go already! But i dont *want* to let it go. It upset me.

I’m at an all women’s school now and it becomes very apparent in an environment such as ours, mostly women and a few men, that women are HILARIOUS.There isn’t that subconscious desire to wait and let the guys speak. The type of humor they engage in varies, too–among other things, we become more physical. In the mostly coed world, humor that involves using ones body (piggy backs and jumping on eachother etc is something guys do–they are so much more free with their bodies. Us ‘girls’ are conditioned to keep our limbs close to our bodies; our legs closed, to take up less space. It’s great when i’m there, but makes returning to the ‘real world’ that much harder!

“Whenever they do have a woman on the panel, she usually lets the men speak first.”

I’ve seen this happen on Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You as well, and did wonder why. Now I know, and it’s depressing.

Every single one of them is a fluke. You could line them all up, from Fanny Brice through to Sarah Silverman, so that they covered Broadway end-to-end, and THE WHOLE OF BROADWAY will be one big fluke.

Them’s the rules.

You know, I’m with you all the way on the childhood experience: I too grew up expecting people to listen to me, because when I was learning to speak, people did.

Which is why I really can’t accept the potential diagnosys of Aspergers for “missing social cues”. It seems incredible to me that “not being socialised to bow to the kyriarchy” equals “autism!!!” all of a sudden, and I take grave exception when people try (as they occasionally do) to apply the same analysis to my own behaviour.

I’m not autistic – I’m just badass. =)

Or get told to “calm down” by someone sounding more flustered than yourself.

A little gender-neutral tidbit: I know a couple of young teachers on my old school. It seems they are all taught a certain tactic to regain the attention of the class when it gets too loud, namely: instead of trying to talk over the whole class they have to be silent. Male and female teachers try it out every once in a while, but from what I have seen, it doesn’t work so well. After a moments irritation the students usually take it as a permission to talk more and the teacher is loses what little authority he/she has. On my own experience: It happens to me a lot, too, but luckily I learned by example in another group where we had a lot of dominant talkers that sometimes I need to say “Goddamn, let me finish my train of thought, if you expect the same courtesy from me!” (it was sometimes funny, when all the people in the group would start a meta-discussion about they are discussing, and here I am, still haven’t said anything more than Hi. It was a matter of survival, really). OTOH, men tend to disregard one ANYWAY, while women usually stop to rethink their behavior (though it doesn’t mean it is always the case). Probably because women can usually relate to the feeling of being overheard and see where the discussion lost equal footing.

You’re a reminder to your female peers that they don’t have to be passive. That can be very threatening to those women who’ve elected to be that way (either through socialization or choice). It’s a real shame.

I remember that episode – it was the Boys vs Girls one. And they are correct – there have been a number of scientific studies on laughter that have found that women laugh more than men, and all people laugh more at men than at women. So in any social group, men will be the ones whose jokes will be laughed at, and women will generally be the ones doing the laughing.

This is explained by the social nature of laughter – very little laughter in social situations actually occurs because something is funny, more often it’s a social signal. Laughing implies you are non-threatening, and that the person whose witticisms you are laughing at is of a higher social status than you. (At least that’s what some researchers think). So it seems pretty natural in our society that women would laugh more, and men would make more jokes.

Of course researchers often explain this biologically; I would tend to think it’s for social reasons. As people have already noted, women have very good reasons for wanting to appear non-threatening.

There’s an interesting article about laughter here:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html

New reader, so hopefully it’s alright to comment on an older post.

I find myself doing this all the time, even among family members. It surprises me, as I’ve normally never at a lack of things to say. It can be very intimidating to speak up, or to find a break in the conversation.

I find it interested that several people mentioned being the oldest child and feeling like what they had to say was valued. I’m the oldest child and I felt that way too, and I think that very much helped me feel confident at school. I didn’t notice it as much until I became an adult and was in adult social situations. I’d always attributed it before to feeling too young before.

As for the women not being as funny trope, my husband and I just had a conversation on this last week. We were discussing the lack of top stand up comedians, and he actually said, “Maybe it’s because women aren’t as funny.” I could only stare at him in shock for about thirty seconds. I never expected those words to come out of his mouth in that order. The man was more feminist than I was for the first eight years of our marriage. I pointed out to him that I crack him up multiple times a day. Out witty banter could be recorded and sold as comedy CDs. We could make a fortune, if only I could carry recording equipment on my back. I think he said it unthinkingly, because it is so socially conditioned, and because there is a lack of visible female comedians, but maybe that’s because of the industry being mostly run by men and for men. After a little tiff, he retracted his statement as unthinking and untrue. But sheesh, if even the good ones occasionally say things like that when the evidence to the contrary lives with them, I can’t believe how entrenched these attitudes are.

To make it even worse with the horses, I found out that for a long long time, due to Freud being insane, psychologists taught that the reason girls wanted horses at twelve and thirteen especially badly was that horses were a replacement penis. The men on that show (and the women) are just the right age to have been hearing that in their psych 101 classes. Let’s make fun of girls and any sexual desire they might have.

Good God was he ever. Though it’s complicated by the fact that most of his female patients were parental sexual abuse victims, and told him graphic stories about it. when he told the scientific establishment, they told him no one did that to their children, and he chalked it all up to the women’s fantasy lives.

Though on a side note, anyone who has dealt with small children will testify to oedipal and electra complexes. He thinks for some reason electra complexes develop for an entirely different reasons from oedipal ones though. Whut.

Somehow a girl wanting a pet was to be about men. How could I forget the females of the species don’t do anything for a reason that doesn’t have to do with men.

This is so true. I remember in Catholic school that the girls were just as brutal to an assertive girl like me as the boys were–when the boys weren’t around to do it for them, that is. Mostly, though, the boys would retaliate against me for opening my mouth while the girls would stand in the shadows behind them, out of the way, giggling as if to say “she’ll NEVER get a husband if she keeps that up!”

In my case, though, I was fully aware that for some reason a girl who didn’t act like an inferior airhead had some kind of penis-shriveling quality. I just DIDN’T CARE. And I still don’t. Maybe I just would rather have a man who is man enough not to be pathetically intimidated by a strong, assertive woman–or, God forbid, might actually find strength to be an attractive quality in a woman?

You missed one other thing from school: Any girl who wasn’t properly meek and deferential to the male>female equation was A TOTAL LESBIAN. Didn’t really matter if she wasn’t, it was an automatic label used as a further retaliation against assertive girls. Yes, I got that one, no, I am not a lesbian, and no, I don’t consider “lesbian” to be an insult so it didn’t have the intended effect on me.

But this is also one that cuts both ways. Guys have been getting uglier and nastier, because for a guy to be well-groomed or make any effort to look good, or to make any effort to listen or be sensitive to another’s needs (unless it’s for sex with a cute girl) is to be GAY. So straight men who might otherwise have not been pigs run screaming from anything more than a shave, shower and clean shirt for fear of being seen as “queer”, while straight women who have plenty of good things to say stay in the shadows for fear of being seen as “lesbian”. For some reason, society has used the hysterical fear of being seen as homosexual as a bludgeon to keep men and women firmly in their traditionally appointed roles.

And, naturally, it benefits men more than women. They get to be ungroomed loudmouthed pigs while expecting women to be quiet and obedient supermodels, then make the erroneous claim that “this is nature, baby, take it or leave it”.

BTW, I had some ass on youtube tell me that women have lower IQ’s than men so therefore if women had been in charge all these thousands of years we’d still be living in caves hurling our filth at one another, and only through the superiority of the Penis-Guided Mind could we have achieved our world.

Geez, jackass, did you ever think that if girls show lower IQ’s, that that might have something to do with internalized social expectation? Nope, jackass just wants to believe that the playing field is Totally Equal now, and that women have just lost the argument that they can do as good as a guy, and we’re just man-hating monsters if we refuse to admit defeat and slink back to the kitchen like good little girls.

There’s a reason I’m celibate, you know.