Why "whither whence"? You mean LB's asking "where are they going to come from" not "where did they go"?

I feel that not being willing to go for the jugular in attacking people's ideas is just the same as saying they're not worth bothering with.

OK, but there's a real cost/benefit trade-off here. If the not-you woman is going to crumble, what's the point from the man's perspective. To make it happen? It's perfectly reasonable for him to think to himself 'I don't agree with this, but it's too much hassle, and everyone will think I'm a jerk for picking on her, so I'll just bite my tongue.' What does the man really owe the woman here?

yeah, that. I typed whither first, but then realized I didn't mean it. also, I'm going to go cry now.

Unfogged: "a certain kind of logico-philosophical cock-swinging"

I know lots of women -- I even married one -- who seem to take all attacks on their ideas as personal, and it is very disheartening. When the response to criticism is "Why are you being so cruel?", one does just give up.

What you call head-patting is normally called "affirming their voice."

2: It's perfectly reasonable for him to think to himself 'I don't agree with this, but it's too much hassle, and everyone will think I'm a jerk for picking on her, so I'll just bite my tongue.' What does the man really owe the woman here?

In a context, like a grad school seminar, where argument about ideas is the entire point? He owes her the assumption that she's capable of engaging in the process that she signed up for. If she has an embarrassing breakdown over it, that's her problem.

Philosophy departments are not always much better about it. Depends on the department and there being a critical mass of women.

I have found, though, that in philosophy it tends to sort by subdiscipline, so while there's always an argument going on, it might be divided by gender. Metaphysics? All the cock-swinging you want. Epistemology? The same. Ethics? No room to swing a cock and the women are fierce. Aesthetics? Pink. History of philosophy? Either everyone does it and it's wholly gender neutral ('You must look at 1p11 I say!'), or no one does it because everyone's clueless.

If she has an embarrassing breakdown over it, that's her problem.

This view is, unfortunately, not universally shared.

6 -- If he's reacting based on stereotype, I'm inclined to agree. If he's got some basis to know different, however, then not. There's no point in arguing with someone who can't/won't hold up their end. Especially not where he's at risk of being an 'oppressor.'

Meanwhile, some people really are, in fact, assholes in the way they argue about ideas. This is all interesting to me because in my own, majority female, graduate progam, I've noticed that I know a lot of men who have plenty of interesting, provocative things to say while we're standing around smoking but are very reluctant to say them in the classroom. Also, it seems that the people who get most wounded by being challenged aggressively in class are the argumentative ones who you'd expect to have hides of iron.

This might be an American thing. In England Joan Robinson, Mary Douglas, Iris Murdoch and quite a long list of others were well known for their ability to chop other people apart. Joan Robinson complained about American academics, not because they were mean to her, but because they wouldn't let her go in for the kill. They'd always say something like "That's a very interesting opinion and thanks for sharing it with us" and put an end to the discussion, rather than admit that they'd lost the argument.

Continuing with the previous, the women above apparently were not worried about being called bitches, and apparently in England it's harder to invaliudate someone by calling them a bitch.

where argument about ideas is the entire point?

No, let's not simplify this quite yet. There are ways talk about ideas and "argument" is one of them, and "vehement argument" is a species of that, and I think it's a fact that vehement argument is congenial to very few people, and it's not at all clear to me that it's the best, or even a good way to talk about ideas.

It seems like a much bigger problem, to me, that we think pundits should be of the "vehement argument" school, than that not enough women are comfortable with it. The advice here seems to be, "go toughen yourself up, girly," but wouldn't it be much better if the advice to editors were "this, too, is worth publishing?"

Look at Dahlia Lithwick. She can do "argument," but--and this was more true a couple of years ago--she's not necessarily pushing a thesis and defending it against all foes, rather she's explaining something in legal and human terms. That's (shockingly) incredibly rare in punditry, and makes her a great read. Of course, there are argumentative women, and I'd like to see more of them published, but I'd rather see more different kinds of voices published.

w-lfs-n shouldn't take comfort from this, though.

The cock-swinging argumentativeness in the seminar room doesn't really translate to the kind of solitary, sustained engagement with an idea or a book that makes for a successful academic career. You also have to have some of those traditionally feminine qualities like networking, volunteering, community-building.

13: If I'm reading alameida right, it's not that there wasn't vehement argument, but when her classmates presented, there were crickets chirping. And in philosophy at least, a good talk is when there's a serious amount of back-and-forth. (A great talk is when your audience starts arguing with each other.)

15: But it often gets you noticed as the smart one, which helps you have the opportunity to network, volunteer, and get the three letters from the bigshots on your committee.

I, for one, stayed mostly quiet in school out of self-consciousness about being thought of as a show-off.

At the same time, I was silently judging everyone else who spoke.

Being the smart one in a seminar room is overrated, though. One of the most professionally successful people in my program made an incredibly bad impression on everyone in the department, but she busted her ass to place articles, introduce herself to any person in any department whose field bordered on hers, and go to random-ass conferences none of the rest of us had ever heard of. Another successful person--in the sense of getting a tenure-track Ivy League gig--rarely opened his mouth and was, I think, very shy; he was first pointed out to me as "the smartest guy in the department."

late to this thread but I have thought about this issue a lot, because I love to argue/discuss, and am very frustrated by the gender issues that keep arguments from being pure "ideas" - like, people seeming not to really *hear* what you are saying, and then a male person says the same argument (having thought of it himself, not having picked it up from you, because he did not hear you either) and everyone picks up on it. You feel stupid and invisible. I lived in the Middle East for many years and maybe there is a greater gender divide there than here. But on the Internet I often feel the same (where my name is very easy to pinpoint as female). Maybe I should try posting with a gender-neutral handle and see if I notice a difference.

It is not that people are afraid to hurt my feelings. It is more like they just assume whatever I said is not worth reading/engaging in. I would just probably think they are right and my argument was stupid/irrelevant (which of course has been known to happen) if it weren't often the case that the exacdt same argument is brought up later by a male voice and suddenly engaged/taken seriously.

The cock-swinging argumentativeness in the seminar room doesn't really translate to the kind of solitary, sustained engagement with an idea or a book that makes for a successful academic career.

This is very true.

I did very well academically because I wrote good papers, but I rarely said anything in class. A little of it had to do with the aggressive style of argumentation, but mostly it had to do with the fact that I don't think quickly on my feet and I'm not the sort to say something just for the sake of saying something. I'd only think of things to say much later, when the material and the discussion had a chance to sink in.

20: It's interesting -- I've never had any trouble having people engage with me online. I think of my pseudonym as gendered feminine, but I do get people thinking I'm male fairly often -- I wonder if it's obscurely feminine enough to have an effect.

Dr. B. was studying this, wasn't she? You around, B?

20 is interesting and would be a nice experiment to run. Of course, you might very well expect a different response posting under a "male" handle, and thereby either (a) perceive different treament where none existed, or (b) act differently and so provoke different responses. So to run the experiment correctly it would need to be double-blind: you don't get to see whether you're posting under a "male" or "female" handle -- your handle is invisible to you. But you get to assess the reactions to your arguments.

It would be a fund experiement to run, and have both male and female participants all assigned both male and female handles. Any social scientists in the room looking for some research? Or has this already been done, and I'm just not aware of it?

I assumed you were male, LB, and I still have to remind myself of why your handle could be feminine.

That's funny; what tipped you off?

25: The cooties.

I am very good at seminar/lecture discussion and quick on my feet, but I would trade it for sustained focus, teh ability to work on my own for very long stretches without feeling lonely and anxious and better writing skills in an instant.

I also love England for some of the reasons that Emerson described. My impression is that it's not just a gender issue there. There's a way in which some English people take ideas very seriously which is not as common over here. People at Oxford, on the whole, seem much more intellectual to me than your typical Harvard student.

I like being able to say that something is rubbish without feeling that I have to worry about upsetting the other person. I see this as a sign of respect, because it means that I think the other person is adult enough to handle the criticism or, in a more casual context, can tolerate the ambiguity that's reflected in the fact that we have different tastes in music.

I don't think that my attitude is all that sommon over here.

You know who will really argue, regardless of gender? Smart young evangelicals, of the type who attend places like Wheaton College. Unfortunately, they are the most obnoxious type of person yet devised.

what tipped you off?

I don't remember. Sorry.

Probably was the cooties. Virtual cooties are the worst kind.

30. I assumed LB was female from the worst comic strip in the world "For Better or Worse". Anyway, back in the stone age when I was in college the only women who would take up an argument were self described feminists. However, I found that rather than argue on the merits, it quickly became an ad hominem attack. This gets boring fast. My daughter really enjoyed being on the debate team in junior high. It has made a real difference in the quality of her arguments.

Those angry self-described "feminists"! They don't even know how to argue correctly.

I immediately thought that "Lizard Breath" was short for "Elizabeth". What else would you call a sister with that name?

Yeah, I thought it was transparent, but it doesn't seem to be to lots of people. (My sister actually never called me LB; cousins did, and high school friends called me just Lizard. I used to sign stuff with a little sketched lizard for a while as a pretentious teenager.)

23: I think the research has been done, and I think it shows that people give male-sounding handles more respect. Anecdotally, if you want not to be harassed on the internet, pick a handle that's neutral-sounding or male. (Or go my sister's route. She ran around as 'rifleprincess' for a while, and forum people didn't know whether to hit on her, run from her, or if she was a crazed feminist or a crazed Republican.)

I had assumed that everyone named Elizabeth gets nicknamed "LizardBreath" at some point or other.

31: Come on, now. Whatever the faults of FBoFW, it can't compare to the steaming pile that B.C. has become.

Have you ever run across an old BC collection? It used to be really funny (I'm talking about the 70's here). Did the guy have a stroke or something?

Hmmm. So I am waiting to hear from Bitch PHD on this. It would be interesting to try the experiment on muslim blogs to begin with.

I think one of my problems is that I am too verbal and I am very conscientious about arguing so that I tend to overstate and people tune me out. (Or so my teenage sons seem to be trying to tell me.) On the internet comment sections this tends to mean long posts which probably many don't really see the point of taking the time to read.

Anyhow it is sort of validating to see that my perception that people don't hear women as wellas they hear men is not just my own personal paranoia. Hopefully it's changing with the times.

36. I think there needs to be some kind of "eminent domain" on the comics page. Too much valuable real estate occupied by has beens. There are a lot of good new strips, and yet Blondie, which has been around since the 20's(!) is telling the same jokes. (Blondie was originally a flapper, and Dagwood a millionaire playboy).

37: I thought it was that the writer found religion, in a bad way.

Yeah, I think few would mourn the passing of "Beetle Bailey".

Fuckin Sarge.

It'd be fun deploying BB to Iraq.

38: Anna, this might be of interest to you.

A couple of years ago I took a political science course in Cairo with a very well-known Egyptian political analyst. There were three women in the class and four men. Each of us had to give a 20-minute presentation on a topic of our choice, and annoyingly, the prof interrupted each of the women during their presentations. I was lucky because he only interrupted me to add something to what I had said or to praise me (in a condescending way); he interrupted the other women to criticize. He didn't interrupt any of the men during their presentations.

On the other hand, when I was teaching adults in Cairo, the women were not shy and retiring at all, and would argue pretty strenuously with the men in the class if we were having a debate. The people I taught there with the strongest personalities were women.

43 -- I'm not sure what kind of fun that would be. Not "m-", certainly.

"o-"?

No, I was just thinking of it as a surreal closing to the strip. They all get deployed, everyone dies, the strip ends. "Fun" probably wasn't the right word at all.

Have you all encountered the Comics Curmudgeon? It makes me glad that all those crummy comics are still around to make fun of.

Ah I see! Yes, it definitely would be fun for the comic strip "Beetle Bailey" to be a thing of the past.

Thanks da, that is a great thing.

Urk! I was for some reason thinking dagger aleph had recommended the site I had just been reading. I mean "thanks redfoxtailshrub, that is a great thing." And sorry about the mangled memory.

Yeah, Egyptian women can be very outspoken, true.

One of the main issues I had with trying to have a discussion in Egypt was the fact that people are always interrupting/talking over each other. Egyptian women are probably more used to this and thus can deal with it better than I can.

Regarding comics, I think it's a great idea for everyone in Beetle Bailey to die in Iraq. I sort of liked For Better or For Worse and am very confused by it now as I didn't read it for many years and am not caught up on how the characters changed.

48. Comics Curmudgeon is a treasure, but like many snark sites needs a subject to be snarky about. What would be do if everything was how we wished it? It is very hard to be snarky and cynical when all is peachy.

Exactly.

I immediately thought that "Lizard Breath" was short for "Elizabeth". What else would you call a sister with that name?

Elizabutt?

Speaking of comics (loosely), this may be the greatest potential procrastination tool in history. At least for the next two weeks, that is, before it's sued out of existence.

I'd wish that Marmaduke would go away, were it not for Joe Mathlete's site.

During the Vietnam war a parody strip did kill Beetle Bailey.

Camp Swampy seems to be the only base from which one does not deploy. The strip doesn't even resemble "army life" anymore. Just an echo.

48: Comics Curmudgeon has made me a Mary Worth junkie. But that's okay, because it led me to this.

60: Before you die, you see Mary Worth.

Especially if you're Aldo.

It'd be fun deploying BB to Iraq.

General Halftrack could work for the CPA. Beetle could be an interrogator. He'd be too lazy to torture anyone.

(I had no idea that Lois Flagston was Beetle's sister.)

63 -- me neither. But it makes sense right, on some level all lame comic strip characters are kindred.

Someone did an informal study on how "male" versus "female" personae were reacted to in Spanish-language internet chat rooms. The female version of the AI, unlike the male, was immediately swamped with requests for sex.

Someone did an informal study on how "male" versus "female" personae were reacted to in Spanish-language internet chat rooms. The female version of the AI, unlike the male, was immediately swamped with requests for sex.

11: "That's a very interesting opinion and thanks for sharing it with us" At least where I come from, that translates as "You are completely full of it" and had to be rebutted appropriately.

Two things we don't seem to have touched on from the original debate: First, attacks on arguments can really be attacks on the person (this is touched on a little bit at 10). Second, in grad school settings that I've encountered, you get very different styles of argument in programs where students believe they are competing for scarce resources (or engaging in zero-sum situations) and programs where they don't. I'll go further and say that the arguments from the second situation were much better because the students were able to have distance from their own stances and because they were able to challenge others without there being an implied loss for the person receiving the challenge.

For the record, the women in my year of my little program were all tough cookies and marginally more talkative in aggregate than the men because of a couple of exceptionally reserved guys.

Ogged, Dahlia Lithwick is the bee's knees, and she's doing a mix of reporting and explaining, with the occasional exegesis thrown in for (non-m-)fun. Argument is mostly implicit. I'm not sure how many fields besides law that it would work in.

Egyptian women can be very outspoken

You're damn right we can.

Look at the female faculty during Larry Summers' speech at Harvard - Nancy Hopkins got the vapors and had to leave the room.

In my experience women can be very outspoken, but hate to be contradicted.

Turning your back on a speaker does not necessarily imply that you are incapable of dealing with him; instead it is one of many possible ways to register your protest.

I just finished the first night of my 'opera' performance so am very much 'Becks-style'.*

Saying that, it's certainly true that a certain kind of ass-kicking style of argumentation is the done thing here (at Oxford). If you present at a graduate level (or above) seminar in philosophy or at any of the forums where people present papers -- like the O/ckh/am Society -- you can expect to find a room full of people who feel their purpose in life is to kick your ass in public and to reduce you to a humiliated fool. That's totally non-gendered. It's possible, or even likely, that the person in the room trying hardest to kick your ass will be female. It's also likely that the person trying hardest will be one of your best friends (outside of that forum).

As dagger aleph says in 21, the ability to thrive in that kind of quick-thinking and fairly savage environment doesn't necessarily translate into serious quality research in the long term. However, it's never been my impression here that there's any gender divide along those lines. You have to be able to mix it, whatever your gender.

I have met a few people who take these things personally, but the attitude, as far as I can tell, is 'fuck those people, they're weak', since most people, really don't (take it personally). You know the rules of the 'game' and you know it's not personal.

* i.e. drunk

In my experience women can be very outspoken, but hate to be contradicted.

Neither gender has a monopoly on thin-skinned ridiculousness. Anders J. Svensson demonstrates.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

She didn't turn her back on the speaker, she got the vapors instead.

I think that there's a general thing here about dominance and competitiveness. Non-dominant men don't do well in certain situations, either.

There are less-talented people (mostly men) who succeed beyond their ability because they're so intensely competitive and hate to lose, and more-talented people (often women) who take less-honored positions because they don't want to deal with conflict and jealousy.

Tryting to demoralize or psych out competitors is also a big part of competition, above all if you're less talented and very competitive.

I think that leadership hierarchies are often determined more by competitiveness than by raw ability.

Walking out on a speaker is a time-honored method of showing disapproval without disrupting a speech. Hopkins was a productive scientist who was apparently able to switch from Harvard to MIT at the snap of a finger. She wasn't walking out of a scientific debate, whe was refusing to listen to a one-way communication from a guy who was pulling stuff out of his butt.

74. I read about that phenomenon as being one of many factors for the general suckitude of MDs bedside manner. The current system is rigged to admit the most competetive, not necessarily the ones with the best potential. I think that this is also what is wrong with our political system . It is rigged to favor narcissists who are good beggers.

Some MDs are so competitive and so accustomed to being successful that they have trouble empathizing with sick people, because sick people are losers. Even a highly successful person who's gotten sick has lost a step on the competition.

one underlying phenomenon here is that we communicate on different channels. We talk and listen for information, for companionship, for laughs, etc.

A clear example: an EMT will get a head-trauma patient talking just to assess their brain status. Or a pediatrician will engage a kid in talking just to see whether they have normal affect.

In romantic situations you whisper sweet nothings. The sweetness is pretty independent of the particular lexemes.

In contexts like those, you listen for different stuff. You hear the words, but you are tuned to a different channel where the details of the propositional content of the words aren't really the point.

I'm inclined to think that some people have trouble with philosopher-style argumentation (or law-school style, pretty similar), not only because they are diffident, but because they don't tend to listen on those channels. They may tend to monitor the emotional-tone channels, say.

Conversely, it is possible for people who are really good at tracking the propositional content channels to be totally clueless about the social niceties channels.

A lot of training goes into all of this. Some of it happens when you're a parent, too--you listen to susie and johnny getting into a detailed argument about the exact position of the legos, and start hearing that they are both low on food.

Anyhow--channels. wow.

78: Yes, exactly.

And also: Some people not only naturally gravitate to listening on certain channels, but attach values to them. So that to them it it is not just "You are talking in a different way" but "You are speaking INCORRECTLY and therefore I don't have to listen to you."

79--
glad you found something useful in 78.

yeah, I'm probably like those judgemental bastards you are describing, since I often think there *is* a matter of fact about which channel one ought to be attuned to in a particular situation.

I mean, there are contexts in which I think one is obliged to tune out the emotional freighting and just focus on the truth-claims (that's the demand in the philosophical-forensic contexts).
And there are also times when I think one is obliged to ignore the words and focus on the tone. When you hear certain kinds of despair in people's voices, then it's not the time to chop logic.

"I've always been a horrible, worthless person, ever since Dad died back in November '73." The right answer here is probably not going to be "You're wrong, it was actually October '73."

And I think if someone tunes into the Facts-n-Dates channel when they ought to be attuned to emotional tone, then they have done something wrong, i.e. screwed up on an interpersonal level.

this is very true, even if it was in fact October ;73. But speaking as someone who tends to remember such dates at moments of crisis, I would say that this is not an unemotional response. It shows a loathing of uncontrolled emotion, is all.

I didn't wade through all 80+ comments, so perhaps this has been mentioned. But any man's disagreement with a woman has the potential for escalation to a claim of sexism/discrimination. In fact, the probability of such is roughly analogous to Godwin's law. Once such a claim is made the man loses regardless of the circumstances. I would be surprised if this lead to a complete refusal of discussion, but I can easily see men limiting their discussions to a far greater extent due to this fear.

mj's point is on the mark, at least for US higher Ed environments. I saw a technical presentation once which a female grad student studded with "like", "you know", "so" and other verbal nullities. Her advisor (also female) asked for comments. One male grad student suggested that the content was fine, the presentation was poor and listed off reasons why. The air got extremely frosty in milliseconds, and he had to shut up immediately lest he be accused/tried/convicted of sexism in the next few microseconds. Once that accusation is hurled, it cannot be undone, and in the increasingly female-dominated land of higher Ed, it's fatal. There is no appeal, either, in the glorious land of Equal Opportunity.

Like or not, that's how it is, even in technical disciplines.