Replying to myself because L_Mariachi don’t give a fuck… Check out the Flaming Lips/Stardeath & White Dwarfs cover of Dark Side Of The Moon, with Rollins doing the background spoken bits.
There’s no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
This is the Taylor Mali rant that I’m familiar with, which is gender-neutral but refers to characteristics that seem more female to me. I’ve seen it shared by many people, both male and female:
I don’t really know much about this phenomenon apart from that, although it fits with other complaints I’ve heard by women that they are talked over or that their opinions are not taken seriously, that their way of speaking is considered less valid than that of men. In many ways, speech that involves a lot of hedging, apologies for having an opinion or reluctance to be clear is a the result of this. Being told by old white men that this is now women’s problem is likely to be taken as helpful advice, even though it is seen by many people to be a problem that holds women back from negotiating or sharing their opinions well. There’s even an app to help you stop doing that:
While a more equal society with more male involvement in parenting might change this, language change tends to follow trends set by teenage women. So, like, get used to it.
I shared that on my G+ feed a while back when it went around on Open Culture, and wound up having a very long argument with a nice old white man I know about whether she has a point, or whether her whole premise is bogus. It was surreal. Despite being a somewhat old white man myself, what the speaker says really hit home for me. Fantastic rant.
It’s interesting that you should say so. It’s as if you are suggesting that there is only one side to the conversation: that the feminist is “policing speech” and no-one is fighting back. Her precise point is that the feminist of whom you speak who is “policing speech” is reacting to the actions of a much larger and more pervasive police force. You happen to be a member of that police force, so you see its actions as normative, and hence invisible, but she does not. She’s trying to get you to wake up and see your side of the police action.
Why do you need to disagree with her? Why not listen to her and try to understand why she feels strongly enough about this issue to get up in front of a crowd and do a slam poetry reading on it? The only reason to propose that what she has said is invalid is that you are not comfortable with it being valid. Clearly it is valid for her, or she wouldn’t have said it. Please remember the Latin construction of communication contains “co”, meaning “together,” meaning that in order to communicate, you have to listen as well as speak, and not be an idiot–a person who thinks only of himself
Even if a person with whom you are arguing is wrong, you have to understand their side of the argument in order to refute it. You can’t simply say that it’s wrong because it seems wrong to you–if you do that, you are engaging in soliloquy, not in dialog (another word the etymology of which is basically “two (that is, not one) speaking”).
Let me just say that that is completely ridiculous bullshit.
Mod note: Stay on topic. Hint: It’s not about you.
Old white man here, with daughters who I want to be successful. It’s not about ‘policing’ or dismissing, it’s about trying to help someone communicate more effectively. Because of the reactive attitude so eloquently expressed by the poet, I’ve given up trying to help co-workers and acquaintances with direct advice about their speaking flaws other than to suggest they join Toastmasters.
Note that she is most powerful and effective exactly when she is NOT using the speech patterns that she is defending.
If you’re like, trying to get a job? Or something? Where the judgement of the person interviewing you is critically important? Maybe adjust your speech patterns towards what the person in charge of paying you money to do something expects? Because the universe is not 
percent all about listening to your personal self-expression all the god damned time Dahkotaaa’ would you please just do this pivot table for me like it says in your fucking job description and no Excel is not denying your “spiritual arithmetic” it is just regular arithmetic like everyone else on the planet uses
and my god the microwave what is that a durian
I am fairly certain I did not say she was wrong. She might be right - for her. I am also not defending “(not all) old white men”. To think that is my “agenda” is completing missing my point. I am pointing out that while her individual circumstance might be true for her, it is not always true for people like her (other people). It’s not “old white men” that police speech to younger folks. It’s older generations that police speech to younger folks. It careless to think it’s only “old white men” that do this.
Assuming I agree with you that her actual point is that “other people… contribute to speech policing… even if you aren’t a woman”, and that any other details is “dwelling” and “miss[ing] the point”, I then question why this is remotely interesting. I did not “learn from her experience” if she is stating the painfully obvious. Older generations police the speech of younger generations. Full stop. Big deal. My wife and I do it/did it for my kids and I am sure they will do it for theirs. Eventually we retire and/or die and the younger generation’s speech wins. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Considering that I disagree with you and that I think her actual point is that it is only “old white men” that police her speech and that she means it as a universal thing for many young people (or perhaps she means only women, that really doesn’t matter). Then I disagree and as stated, it’s careless thinking. She might not be wrong for her, but she is too narrowly focused.
I had too many homebrews last night and for some reason thought to comment. My bad.
This whole fucking thread gives me existential blues, as it’s full of a bunch of posters, many new, policing the speech of the artist…
Right? I guess for a lot of men, mansplaining never gets old. Or even visible.
http://i.imgur.com/uqY3IE2.gif[quote=“lllllAlaskaJack, post:25, topic:73025”]
But then “milliefink” responded, not with any kind of reasoned answer, but with a gif showing a guy saying “what?” Nothing else. That’s it.
In that context, how is my response driving trollies? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that milliefink trolled, and I dismissed it?
[/quote]
Ha. There is a part of me that dislikes slam poetry, probably for a lot of the same reasons as you: it tends to be preachy, it’s less about actual poetry and more about performance, it often falls into the same kind of rhythm and cadence no matter who is doing it, and so it can be monotonous if you see a lot of it.
But it has its place and it has validity. While I don’t seek it out, I have seen some great performances that temper my dislike. I love free jazz, but it’s hard for me to defend it sometimes-- slam poetry is like free jazz, it’s not for everyone.
Her team actually won the 2015 National Poetry Slam Championship that this video is from.
[full disclosure: she and another member of her team live in my neighborhood.]
Has the term “oldsplaining” gained any currency yet?
[What’s actually amazing is that you don’t see the problem there, especially in THIS thread, about a poem that points out how insistent men tend to be about the supposed validity of THEIR common ways of speaking. Oh, the male-pattern deafness!]
But didn’t you know? Male brains are attached to disembodied, all-seeing eyeballs! That’s why there’s nothing wrong at all with them telling women that they know what it’s like to be a woman better than women themselves do. DUH!
What form of rhetorical sleight of hand are you going to employ when a woman (and a well respected third-wave feminist at that) criticises this form of speech?
Um… you know that women, even feminists are, like individuals and can have differing opinions, right? Feminism is not some monolith, it’s actually a field of discourse, like many others. In this case, Wolf is wrong, I think. I disagree with her. Feminists can disagree on issues and discuss and debate them, just like other people… I know this may come as a shock, but yeah, it’s true. Why exactly, do we all have to agree for us to not be shouted down?
And actually not too long ago, This American Life did a story on vocal fry and guess what - Ira Glass does vocal fry and he NEVER GETS CALLED OUT, while many of the women on his show actually do get called out, often bordering on hate mail, when they do it. So, while people might think they hate vocal fry, they only seem to be complaining about women.
Thank you for that! I am disappoint (in bbs commenters, not in bb) that it took this long for that to come up. There’s always been something excessively macho for me about Taylor Mali’s onstage persona, and the content of some of his poetry. As in this poem, he often blares out advice and demands from an unwittingly white male perspective, failing to account for the experiences of others. And thus, for the inaptness for others of his advice and demands. I think Melissa Lozada-Oliva does an excellent job of knocking him down a peg, and of suggesting (for me at least) that while men often tell women that they’d be better off if they communicated more like so many men do, we’d all be better off if more men talked more like so many women do.
I see that @jsroberts posted the poem that she’s responding to (yay!). Maybe it should have been included in Corey’s post.
The point I was making is that having a penis doesn’t prevent someone from having an opinion on something, if people complaining about this are wrong about it they’ll be wrong for the same reasons that Nami Woolf is wrong about it, and if they’re right, then they’ll be right for the same reasons.
Oh, the irony…
No, it doesn’t, but having a penis does not make you an expert on how other people experience and understand the world. To understand how people who are different from you in some way experience and understand the world, I believe you need to actually listen to them and take them seriously.
