Old spice classic scent, and occasionally cedar.
Is it the octopus?
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I was this weekend at the amazing Kripalu retreat center. It’s a safe space you can go to when you need to recharge and renew - also has a ton of great yoga and spiritually oriented programs. Yoga is always a women’s world, though I never get why. So many of the programs center on relationships. It’s just annoying how it’s the women who are there trying to work it all out by themselves. Same thing with therapy - a lot more women than men are likely to get involved. I don’t understand why women have been designated in charge of relationships. Don’t men want to know how to be in better relationships too?
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Tough question. I’ve found, and been guilty of myself, completely failing to listen in many contexts and instead catch myself “waiting to speak” based on some snippet I did hear or as an extension of something I had said before it came time to listen or…you get the idea.
I notice it or I don’t, but I have the idea that it may probably always occur on the occasions of mansplaining, notwithstanding that it occurs in other circumstances too.
That’s a hard thing to try and teach someone who either does, or believes they do, have a role of authority greater than your own.
The only way I can see addressing that effectively in anything but a mutually respectful relationship is to bring in a facilitator.
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Saw this on Facebook today and thought it would add to the mix here:
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The reason I added it in is that manipulation is so much more subtle than people think. Even though her abuse was horrific, she couldn’t see that it was abuse when she was in it.
I spoke with a person who worked at a women’s shelter. She told me everyone who came had that breaking point moment where the illusion of things being okay shattered. She told me one woman coped with her abuse by reading. She came to the shelter after her boyfriend hurled her book at the wall.
I think there is idea in people’s mind that male anger and domination is this overt thing, but in fact it is subtle. I think most men don’t see it themselves. They justify and rationalize how they behave.
I don’t think mansplaining is about a guy having more knowledge (though that might be how he rationalizes it to himself). It’s about him dominating the conversation, setting himself up as an expert. It’s a form of control that somehow men learn.
I know there are ways to break people’s control by being very centered, but in my experience it takes a lot of will and drive to do that. At work, mostly it’s easier to go along - and eventually to leave, than it is to work up the skill to break that control. I am wondering, is there some kind of tool that works, some kind of verbal judo that works to get people to break out of it?
Years ago a therapist gave me a valuable list of ways to language requests to people that made it more possible to succeed. Like, instead of saying, “You should do this” you say, “I’m wondering if you did this what would happen.” Or, instead of saying, “What flavor ice cream do you want?” you say, “Would you like vanilla or chocolate” (that is, you assume they have to make a choice in your language, short circuiting the implied option in What flavor do you want that there is a choice of not wanting any, or not knowing.) I have mainly used this with children. Maybe someone knows what this is called and can provide a link to the full list.
I feel like there could be something like this for mansplaining
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I will give you a trick that sounds absolutely ridiculous. Instead of telling someone “Stop talking over people” you say, “At the last meeting you were talking over Susan and not giving her a chance to talk. I noticed it because usually you are so good at making sure everyone gets their say.” Basically you praise them for having the positive trait of giving everyone a turn instead of criticizing them for having the negative trait of not doing so. It doesn’t matter that they don’t have the positive trait.
I can’t remember where I learned about this trick, but I told it to my sister and her husband, and then she started using it on him about something (I think it was “You forgot to clean the pet cages today, that’s really not like you, normally you are so punctual about that”) and despite the fact that he knew what she was doing it still worked and he started cleaning the cages regularly (and this is after having this discussion fruitlessly for years).
But I think that depends on the person really valuing your opinion of them, which might not be the case for a jerk who talks over everyone at work.
I think any behaviour for group dominance is going to be very hard to counter. The reason people do it is because it works, that is, it has succeeded in achieving dominance in many groups composed of other people who also presumably didn’t want to be dominated. Lots of people have tried lots of things to fight it (either after conscious analysis or just by reacting to the situation) and mansplaining* has come out on top consistently enough that the people doing it aren’t getting enough negative feedback to stop (negative feedback as in this-isn’t-achieving-the-result-I-want not negative feedback as in people-tell-me-to-stop).
* I prefer the term ‘splainin’ because the same thing happens to black Democrats who don’t vote for Bernie, people with mental health issues just run into a wall of it everywhere they turn, etc.
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This talk may be of some interest too. By power posing in private for around 2 minutes, you can boost testosterone and lower cortisol levels. Not a real solution, but may help with going into a stressful meeting.
I remember this one being criticized as bad science
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Ouch, that’s sad to hear. Thanks for the links.
I think it’s still worthwhile to check your posture/body language every once in a while, if only for your back’s happiness.
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There is one excellent reason to assess your own walk:
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Maybe it’s not the octopus?
Hmmm, makes me wonder when I read that about the way you walk and the post about how women who report rape are questioned: How many women in male oriented jobs have experienced some form of violence or sexual aggression? Of those, how many reported it and what was their experience? How many kept quiet about it? I wonder how it might be affecting our workplace and personal interactions.
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It’s the octopus.
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A focus on flexibility rather than strength, perhaps? There could easily be a big difference between the gender makeup of people who like yoga and people who want to work on their relationships, although I can imagine yoga being helpful for men too.
It’s the same with doctors’ visits too - women are significantly more likely to report ill health. I’m not sure how much this is a lack of interest in improving relationships rather than a reluctance to get external help in general.
I think both of these issues have a lot to do with the general culture rather than the two people directly involved. Abuse can get a lot worse if the victim isn’t believed or the behaviour is justified by society. In a sort of “it takes a village to raise a child” way, everyone else in the room is able to put cultural pressure on people and decide who has the power in a way that someone being talked over doesn’t, however strong or confident they may be as a person.
While there are going to be general traits that are seen in groups of men and women however equal things are, it’s possible to look at them in a more positive light and keep them in their place rather than letting them dominate. Where people talk over others without meaning to, there are many ways to highlight and address this issue. Where it’s accompanied by an idea that women’s voices are less valid or that your own voice should be heard to the exclusion of others, that’s a much bigger problem. Where that attitude is supported or not effectively opposed by the community, you have a toxic environment. That final result is not inevitable and it takes the participation of everyone else.
I always say I am fluent in Gibberish, and hence need no translator…
So you’re saying that you prefer to stay and participate in a conversation about hashing out a solution to communication difficulties rather than abandon the scene?
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I’ve talked about this many times with men and more often than not, they seem genuinely confused about the subtle things men do that are clearly about establishing dominance over other men. I think it becomes background noise to a lot of us. We have a lifetime of learning how to react to active domineering men by either being aggressive back or submitting. Indeed, our defense mechanism for countering active domineering is in itself, active domineering.
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Being aware and in control of your body language is a definite plus in interactions & has a place in the thread topic.
Cuddy et al is just f—ed up in that they took crappy science and projected it in a convincing manner backed by Harvard degrees, good presentation and a message of broad appeal.
Basically a “This one simple trick” internet ad boosted into a RL thing.
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I was confronted with the differences in how (generalizing here) men/women communicate when we had several technical meetings in which the critical points of the meeting failed to get discussed. After the second time it happened, I watched more closely to see what was up. As it turned out, our two senior programmers, both women, were operating by different conversational rules than the men.
For the men, if you thought your point is more important, you interrupted and spoke over the first speaker. They then quickly decide the importance of their point and give way or, if they think their point is still paramount, increase their volume. This escalated until one person gives way, usually in under a second. It was a very brief set of negotiations taking place multiple times a minute. In all, a very efficient way of allowing the person who judged their point to be the most important to get the most talk time, while instantly killing time spent on points that were redundant or irrelevant.
However, if you consistently misjudged your own importance, you were shortly considered an idiot by everyone else, and probably got transferred or fired. Likewise if you always held your tongue, since obviously you believed that you had nothing to contribute.
It was an intricate ballet of trying to judge your relevance with steep penalties for consistently over or under estimating the importance of your ideas in the conversation.
The woman wouldn’t play this particular game, and our project was suffering. They were happy to present their ideas when asked, but they refused to fight for conversation space. I tried to make space, but I could not get them to talk over someone when they were interrupted or continue when they were cut off.
I eventually persuaded the manager to turn the meeting into “sequential presentations”, which did work after a bit of encouragement to not cut people off. Despite the fact the meeting was twice as long, it was about 8 times more productive.
It was a fascinating insight into two conversation modes. I have to say I still prefer the “raise voice to indicate importance of your point” style (with the appropriate penalties for getting it wrong), but the experience made it much clearer that cultural differences prevent everyone from being comfortable with that style. (And yes, this is for smaller technical meetings where presumably everyone at the table may have something to add.)
Note, I’m not addressing the fact that the women may be interrupted more. This wouldn’t surprise me at all.
My point is that business environments have to handle a wider variety of cultural backgrounds, even though it might feel slightly less efficient. In the end, we can’t afford to ignore talent from any background, and our business environment and the employees will have to learn to accommodate.
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