And, to bring this back to the original topic, men keep talking over, ignoring, and otherwise disrespecting women who try to make themselves heard, even when repeatedly asked and begged not to.
The feeling I get from the thread is that there’s a general concurrence that this is not, for the most part, a deliberate action by the men in question. It’s largely a bad habit, and the discussion (as see it) is about how to break that habit (or, better yet prevent it from being ingrained in the first place).
Women are asking for equal treatment, and they’ve been making limited progress for decades. You’re asking for preferential treatment - for people to change the way that they conduct conversations when you are around, to facilitate your understanding of the subtext. If people are just as set in their habits when it comes to talking with you as when it comes to talking with women, I’m sorry to say that it looks like you’re going to have to keep living with the frustration of trying to interpret non-verbal communication.
If, as the saying goes, 99% of the information transferred in a conversation is transmitted non-verbally, you’re pretty much asking people to slow down their communication to 1/100 speed so that you can keep up. Personally, I think that the “99%” figure is way too high, but it would still be a remarkable slowdown to include all of the non-verbal information while conversing.
As a comparison, think of a very technical, complicated thing that you do in your job. Think of how you would explain it to another engineer. And then compare that to how you would explain it to a layperson, [using only the thousand most common English words] (https://xkcd.com/simplewriter). By asking everyone to explain everything going on non-verbally, that’s what you’re asking them to do: take something that is intuitive to them, and explain it clumsily in words that don’t quite fit.
I’ve tried typing in the Simple Writer, and I always end up with words outside of the 1000 most common, not because I’m not cognizant of the limitation being imposed, or because I’m not trying to meet those limitations, but because I’m in the habit of using words like “cognizant.”
There’s a saying that you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence; similarly, I think that you should be wary of attributing people’s speech patterns to a conscious decision not to accommodate you, instead of neglecting to break out of their long-ingrained habits. Especially if, as you say, you have a hard time with subtext.
Except I don’t need anyone to serve me, I’d actively dislike that idea.
