OK–Can I get some readers? And some feedback?
This is essentially a repost of an earlier kos diary. However, I’ll be revisiting the theme in light of the pie wars shortly.
“Don’t you even CARE about winning the war against terror?”
Pattern #3, “Don’t you even CARE about X?”, carries at least three suppositions, can support multiple levels of attack, and can be handled in several new and interesting ways….
Patterns:
#1: “If you REALLY X, you’d Y.” and the closely related
#2: “If you really A, you wouldn’t WANT to B.”
And basic response:
- Identify the mode
- Identify the presupposition(s)
- Respond in NEUTRAL Computer mode TO THE PRESUPPOSITION ONLY
- Stay in Computer mode.
Evaluating “Don’t you even CARE about winning the war against terror?”, we get the following:
mode: Blamer.
presuppositions:
* You don’t care about winning the war against terror.
* You should care about winning the war against terror; you’re rotten not to.
* Therefore, you should feel terrible about this.
It’s the word ‘even’ and the stress on the word ‘care’ which identify this as an attack, rather than a leveler’s simple search for information.
Another feature of this attack is that all three presuppositions are linked together. If, indeed, you DO care about winning the war against terror, the second and third presuppositions are irrelevant.
But this is phrased as a yes/no question. So you have an interesting option available.
Leveler response 1): “No. Why?”
Like a chamberpot over the head, much of the charm of this sort of response is it’s utter unexpectedness. And from here on, you can simply wait silently while your opponent spins his wheels. By the time he finally does get all four wheels on the pavement, he will have completely forgotten that the original goal was to run you down.
The downside to this response is that it will be remembered. You won’t be able to do it twice to the same person or in the same group.
Like most attacks, there is a sucker-bait. The attacker hopes to get you tangled up in defending how much you really care. No matter HOW much you care, IGNORE THE BAIT and deal with the presupposition.
Computer response 1): “Why do you think that we needed a war just to arrest a gang of criminals?”
Computer response 2): “Tell me, Mr. Russert, do you believe that the president’s purpose in confusing a criminal organization (like Al Quaeda) with a legal government (which could declare war), was to distract public attention from his failure to secure the ports, or does he have some other motive?”
Note your reaction to the two computer responses.
In basketball, the first one is a free throw and the second is a three-point shot.
Elgin makes a very interesting side discussion on the differing ways that men and women often react to verbal fencing.
Men, Elgin asserts, are trained from boyhood to use verbal fencing as a human substitute for puppy-wrestling. They keep score, but they don’t take a defeat personally.
Girls do not play games like this. A woman who has been on the receiving end of a verbal attack will feel typically feel battered, not energized. Even if a woman has learned to fence with men, she still may lose her balance if a second woman joins on the opposing side.
Only the politics-as-game paradigm can explain the successful marriage between James Carville and Mary Matalin.
In addition to the above points, Elgin takes the time to detail how power imbalances (parent/child, patient/doctor) can alter the game, creating unique hazards and opportunities.
Most of them can safely be left for readers of the book, but there is one variant of this attack that Democrats particularly need to avoid, because it leaves them open to a deadly counter-attack.
It happens whenever X is particularly awful and could possibly be quantified
Dem: “Don’t you even CARE about the genocide in Darfur?”
Hannity: “Do you refer to the Irskine report, or the study by the Pan-African Analysis Group?
By the time our Dem figures out that there never was an Irskine report or a Pan-African Analysis Group, the interview is long over.
No new homework for now. Just add this new attack pattern to the others you watch for, keep experimenting with your defense.
CategoryVerbalSelfDefense diaries are based on the work of Suzette Haden Elgin.
i’m discussing your diary with a friend of mine. its quite interesting and i’m going to buy the book. my question to you is, how do we get your knowledge noticed a little more? are you posting at the wrong times? is it because of the weekend?
i hope you will consider reposting both of these at some near-future point. maybe we need three or four people to rate you up and get you noticed.
Renee
Perhaps because it isn’t “sexy”?
One thing I’m starting to notice is that there is a very strong aversion on the part of many men to revisit anything resembling a “school” situation.
It’s hard to explain this clearly. But for an all-encompassing metaphor, men use “game” and women use “school”. In business, women end up forced to use the “game” metaphor if they wish to communicate with men–even when it is a stretch for both sexes, and even when women are in the majority of the group. While men are obviously more experienced with the school framework than women are with football, and even when the task involved is learning a new skill, they will still sidestep the opportunity to improve communication by switching to the school metaphor.
Even worse than having to learn from a woman is having a woman tell them that they need to learn something.
This behavior is so universal and so unspoken that I suspect women who tell men that they need to learn something–no matter how well they phrase it– are triggering a reflex reaction every bit as strong as the initial reactions to the pie ad at kos.
When a woman points out to a man that he needs to know something–I think it awakens some really nasty overtones from being a “bad little boy” at some time or place.
Lots of unintended emotional consequences.
And women will have as much difficulty learning a way to not trigger this as men now have figuring out what is and what is not harassment.
BTW, thanks for the recommend. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten on the list anywhere.
Your comment
“When a woman points out to a man that he needs to know something–I think it awakens some really nasty overtones from being a “bad little boy” at some time or place. “
sounds very much like my principal. He cannot admit to ever being wrong and when a female teacher catches, he becomes very personal and vengeful. I have been a target of his all year.
You say, “And women will have as much difficulty learning a way to not trigger this . . .” So how do we? I’m a woman (and a teacher, so it’s even worse). If I am talking to a man who obviously needs to “learn something” – say it’s a conservative man holding forth on something clearly erroneous, just to get away from the gender topics, do I go into computer mode? Use Miller’s Law? Play the game? When is each of these appropriate?
As has been pointed out by others, I can play the game verbally as well as (usually better) than most men – as long as it doesn’t touch something deep and emotional in me. But for example, the war, torture, etc. are not topics I can keep my cool about for very long. I start out OK, then I lose it.
I obviously need to order one of Elgin’s books. Going to do it now.
I wish I knew. Gentlemen…????
step up to the plate! (Note sports reference.)
We NEED you! Don’t you even CARE about winning elections? (Uh, wait. That’s wrong . . . right? Blamer mode, attack. No way to win folks over.)
But we do need you to help us female Dem’s figure out how to talk to your deluded R brothers. (Insert requisite qualifiers about some females, some males, etc.)
Good stuff! Thanks, bayprairie, for pointing me here.
I especially thought this part was interesting:
I wonder if this is where I run into trouble sometimes…
-Alan
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Support Hugo Chavez: Fill up your car at CITGO!
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Isn’t 20-20 hindsight wonderful? ;-o
Here’s a guess at the kinds of situations that might have been in play.
She: very concerned about some issue, very passionate.
He: Interested, but wanting to know how she explains some sub-points that might lead to a different conclusion.
He: starts playing tennis with the idea.
She: either decides he isn’t serious and is putting her down, or gets frustrated because she doesn’t understand what he’s trying to do.
Meltdown….
Mind you, if the issue were a minor one, she’d join in the tennis and have a good time! She’s done it before–that’s why this reaction from her is so confusing!
To avoid this, when you notice her intensity, just switch from the “game” metaphor to the “school” one briefly.
Or, stay with the game but let her be the coach — say something like “I can just hear Joe Sixpack saying [whatever]. How should I answer him?”
I obviously jumped in midstream. I think I need to go back and read your stuff in order.
While I’m doing that, though (might be a couple days)…does it make a difference in the scenario if the womyn I’m arguing with are other Democrats, here on this board and at dKos?
-Alan
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Support Hugo Chavez: Fill up your car at CITGO!
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Lessee….
The biggest difference I can see is that you can probably assume that you have some common–or at least closely related and generally compatible goals.
If you can make it reasonably clear (to someone who jumps in midstream, please) that your goal is one of these:
to understand
to clarify
to extend
or to strengthen the ideas under discussion, you should be fine.
There is also a way to make a case for (temporary) pre-emption. For instance, one might have good reasons to suggest that, given a crooked pro-choice candidate and a straight-arrow pro-lifer, electing the pro-life candidate (esp. if close examination of the person’s position showed a general unwillingness to change current abortion law) might be a better way to promote the pro-choice position in the long run.
Note the huge pile of qualifications there–all needed, unfortunately. After all, if two people disagree about candidate x, but they should focus most heavily on their areas of agreement. By the time the elections are over, x might no longer be a problem.
If you feel that the other’s position damages one of your goals, it’s OK to bring that up. (But a good idea to point out that you don’t think so unkindly of the other as to assume that they’d willingly damage your goal–so they must have some idea about how to protect your concerns while working on their own, and would they kindly clarify this.)
What must be scrupulously avoided is any suggestion that the other’s position is trivial. It’s OK to not put it at the top of your priority list–but try not to undermine it in any way.
And you can ask the same respect for your priorities.
(Back to the game metaphor–this should be a strategy session among teammates. You don’t want to injure the running back during a scrimmage!)
And if you simply can’t resist a bodaciously tempting potshot– just let the other person know you are having fun with the language, not putting them down. (You know, soft snow, not an ice-ball!)
and I could be very wrong. But where I think you go wrong is very much where most people go wrong, particularly young people…. if you don’t feel it, if it didn’t come into your head and doesn’t suit your current train of thought, it’s not real.
I can probably express what I am trying to say by reporting some personal experience.
I was in an “interracial” relationship. (I put interracial in quotes because I don’t believe there are different races.)
I met this guy because we are both classically trained singers and that is what attracted us to each other. In reality the fact that he was attracted to me, and a gentleman about it, really kind of cute and sweet about it,(he was much younger) was what attracted me to him. There is nothing like someone appreciating you to bring on the chemistry.
We were living in south Florida when we first started the relationship. When we went out we got open stares and direct hostility. There were young women who would make nasty remarks about a 23 year old African American man with an almost 40 white woman.
He would tell me that this is the reaction we would get and I didn’t believe him. I also didn’t believe him when he said there were states he would not travel through except on rt 95. So we argued about these things, each of us trying to prove how we were right.
So one day I said “there was this black guy in college…”. Chris told me that the term black guy sounded rude to him. He preferred African American (which is a pain the type out all the time) and would I please not refer to people so casually as “black” people.
Well in the 1970s people were black and I saw no problem with the word. So I argued with him. But then I realized it wasn’t my place to argue about this. To Chris, it was rude and somehow disrespectful for me to refer to someone as the black guy or the black woman. So I stopped doing it. I didn’t have to understand it and I certainly didn’t need to argue about it. I just used a better phrase.
Now I am sure that there are many African American people who would disagree with Chris and say that they don’t mind the term “black guy”. That’s fine, I try hard not to refer to someones race unless it is pertinent to what I am saying anyway. But if there is a general feeling among some people that the term is offensive, whether I understand or not, then I am going to chose a better word.
The point of a discussion is not really to win but to learn and to compromise (as long as it is not your civil or human rights you are being asked to compromise. That is where I draw the line).
and am having great fun with one called The Language Imperative. Anyway she tells this great story(details mangled by yours truly)…
This little kid, maybe 3 or 4, has grown up bilingual. He has confidently learned that people with white skin speak English, and people with darker skin speak Chinese. So he meets a Korean. And is utterly flabbergasted when she responds in Korean to his fluent Chinese greeting!
of how disoriented I felt for several moments when I found out that Sojourner Truth’s first language was (I forget) Dutch or German rather than english.
of when my daughter pointed out that some neighbors were African American, since they were from South Africa . . . although they were white.:-)
Men, Elgin asserts, are trained from boyhood to use verbal fencing as a human substitute for puppy-wrestling. They keep score, but they don’t take a defeat personally.
First, I think the notion of a generic male or female reaction is fairly ridiculous.
Further, having observed this for many years I can safely say that many men do take defeat personally. Indeed many men take the fact that anyone and particularly a woman arguing against their POV personally on the most visceral and immediate level and I can point to countless examples of this up to and including (in the blogosphere) immediate threats of physical violence and years of brutal harassment directed towards ‘enemies’, real or imagined.
Girls do not play games like this. A woman who has been on the receiving end of a verbal attack will feel typically feel battered, not energized. Even if a woman has learned to fence with men, she still may lose her balance if a second woman joins on the opposing side.
Again, while I’m sure this is true of some women it’s hardly universal. I think these sorts of reactions are typical of people who, for whatever reason, believe that gender reactions can be accurately classified in this manner. Again, I’m not saying that this does not happen, only that it’s far from universal.
Some people (men and women) are interested in dialogue, some people (men and women) are interested in dominance and manipulation. Folks interested in dialogue trying to speak with those interested in dominance and manipulation need to learn to make that distinction and not waste their time with someone who regards dialogue as a weakness.
I think I’ve been pretty clear: I have been speaking in generalities. With all of the associated baggage of special-case exceptions by the zillions.
Can you explain WHY “the notion of a generic male or female reaction is fairly ridiculous.”
I suggest that there must be evidence before such a determination can be made–either way.
Further, I suggest that there IS evidence for the idea of generic reactions. Statisticians have a term for it, but the graph says it all. Two bell-shaped curves on a single graph, each centered around a different mean, but with broad overlap.
Now here’s an interesting factoid for you. Based on similarity of DNA alone, there is more difference between men and women than between humans and chimpanzees. (We’re talking % of duplication, here.) There is THAT much difference between the X and Y chromosomes! It would be far odder to have zero differences than to have the kind of differences I’m suggesting.
“Some people (men and women) are interested in dialogue, some people (men and women) are interested in dominance and manipulation. Folks interested in dialogue trying to speak with those interested in dominance and manipulation need to learn to make that distinction and not waste their time with someone who regards dialogue as a weakness.”
So what are you trying to say here? It seems to me that you have set up a dichotomy quite as broad-based as the generic gender descriptions I’ve used–but without any qualifiers.
IF people typically were interested in only dominance or only dialogue, there would be no point in discussion. But I submit to you that most humans, of any gender, are a mass of confusing impulses, and that either dialogue or dominance might surface at any time, depending on which is triggered by a particular context.
Keeping track of thousands of individuals is not a possible thing for a finite human mind. Making sense out of patterns, however, seems to be a built-in organizing principle of the brain. And most people are able to understand the limitations of such patterns.
As long as people remain alert to the limitations, generalizing about human behavior can be helpful.
(Don’t get me going about differing symptoms of heart-attacks between men and women, or about differential responses to different drugs. I want the research to be done on a broad base, and have the subgroups broken apart. If medication X works effectively for 60% of Koreans but only 10% of Caucasians, I want my doc to know that and ask me whether or not I’m Korean!)
Can you explain WHY “the notion of a generic male or female reaction is fairly ridiculous.”
I thought I had. I’m sure that one could map this out on a bell curve and, except for the notion that men don’t take verbal defeats personally, it would map as you describe. I don’t, however, think it’s at all helpful to use language in this manner. It’s rather like saying that women aren’t engineers because they have an innate inability to do math.
Now here’s an interesting factoid for you. Based on similarity of DNA alone, there is more difference between men and women than between humans and chimpanzees.
Yes, I read that study. It also discusses the equally startling variability amongst females and concluded that human females differ from each other almost as much as they differ from males in the behavior of many genes. Likewise there’s a large difference between observing genetic differences and accurately predicting and describing behavior based on these genetic differences. The question is far more complex than this simplistic framing allows.
people typically were interested in only dominance or only dialogue, there would be no point in discussion.
This is true,it tends to be something of a continuum with some people consistently striving for dialogue and others consistently striving for dominance and most folks falling in between. I find this a helpful distinction and use it when engaging in conversations with individuals on blogs or usenet.
I also agree that folks need to remain aware of the limitations when talking about human behaviors and particularly hot button issues like gender differences. I think that one of the reasons are such a hot button issue is because most people aren’t aware of the limitations and believe they can look at the behavior of their spouse and children and make true and generalizable statements.
is that so many people don’t even realize that the two styles of behavior are possible.
People see the “other” style and, instead of assuming that it’s due to differential training in childhood, assume that the other person/people is/are being a jerk.
All of us need to be aware of both patterns–and occasionally we need to recognize when the other party is NOT aware of both.
I take your point about men sometimes taking a verbal loss hard–but women often to take them hard in situations which would not bother most men. A lot of that may be due to the different paradigms of “game” and “school”–school failure is a lot more devastating than losing a game.
Elgin goes into a lot more detail in her VSD book for business and in Genderspeak.
Another author/researcher who I’ve found to be very enlightening is Deborah Tannin. She studies gender communication as well. I can’t do her work justice in a comment, but in essence she says that males are trained to communicate in a hierarchical fashion, and women in a network fashion.
The body of research that this was coming from, at least as of 10+ years ago when I was studying it, showed that males and females are raised in two different cultures. Within an hour or so of birth, people were assigning masculine and feminine adjectives to the behavior of their identical babies — he’s so strong; she’s so sweet — etc., and then throughout childhood, these traits are then rewarded and reinforced while their opposites are punished and suppressed.
there’s some overlap between Tannen’s work and Elgin’s on gender language. I like Elgin’s stuff better–but wherever they overlap, they are in very strong agreement.
the DNA differences between men and women. Can you point me to a site that talks about those differences?
Not offhand. I probably read it in Discover, as that’s the science mag that I get regularly.
I don’t think it has been widely explored–the thing is that there are only 34 (?) chromosomes, and all of them are shared except for the final x/y. X is considerably larger than y (about 4:1), and has some different genetic goals and strategies. There are dozens of sex-linked genetic diseases, (hemophilia, color-blindness, for example) where a woman won’t show the problem unless she has a double whammy of bad X chromosomes, but which show up in men because the Y chromosome hasn’t bothered to keep the corresponding healthy gene.
I’ll bet that Dark Syde, over at dKos, might be able to recommend some resources for you. Or you could try googling for “gene” or “chromosome” and “human” and “sex-linked”
There are 23 pairs of chromosomes. For example, there is a Chromosome #1 which probably contains 2,100-2,600 genes. (A gene is instructions for how to make one particular kind of protein.) Each of your cells contains two Chromosome 1’s – one was in the egg and the other in the sperm that fertilized the egg. So if you are looking at, say, the gene for dihydrolipoamide branched chain transacylase (part of an enzyme complex that breaks down certain amino acids, located at position 31 on chromosome 1), you find one on the chromosome you inherited from your mother and another on the one you inherited from your father. If one is “broken,” you can still make the enzyme using the gene you inherited from your other parent.
For 22 of the chromosome pairs, this pattern holds for both men and women. For the 23rd pair (XX or XY), however, it only holds for women – if a man has a broken gene on his single X – he has no possibility of a functional backup.
Even more interesting is that, in women, each cell in her body is using only one of the X’s. All human cells – male and female – seem to be designed to work with one X. So during embryonic development, each cell in a female embryo randomly inactivates one of the X’s – with the result that we females are all genetic mosaics. Some of our cells are using the genes on our mother’s X, while others are using the genes on our father’s X. All of the cells of males, of course, are using their mother’s X – because that’s the only one they have.
Natalie Angier speculates in Woman, an Intimate Geography, (Highly recommended!) that women’s brains are potentially more complex than men’s because there is some evidence that X chromosome genes are used in brain development. Since some female brain cells are operating using mom’s X and some use dad’s – more genetic possibilities for brain architecture.
“Men, Elgin asserts, are trained from boyhood to use verbal fencing as a human substitute for puppy-wrestling. They keep score, but they don’t take a defeat personally.”
Elgin was specifically speaking of men and women in Western culture–specifically those raised in America for whom American Standard English is a native language.
I think that this is mostly true but there is a clear exception when men think that losing an argument equals a loss in status/position/ego. This is why so many marital arguments are so ugly.
BTW, I think the Native Tongue trilogy deserves a lot more attention than it has ever received from either SF readers, linguists, or feminists.
jump in.
Exactly. But if winning is important, it makes good sense to learn both the rules and the skills first.
Hence–Verbal Self-Defense.
that do not descend into rancor, where BOTH sides of the debate make good points. I agree with much that everyone has said.
As a woman, I do the verbal fencing thing often and enjoy it. (Dad used to say I should be a lawyer.) OTOH I tend to do it more when it’s something I don’t care so much about–something I am intellectualizing, or just intellectually curious about, but have no strong stake in. When it’s something I have a strong investment in, I don’t enjoy it so much when someone else turns it into a fencing match. It’s not sport then. But I’ll still engage (up to a point) in order to try to persuade.
It’s no surprise, as women are taught to achieve consensus and support others, men to compete and dominate if possible, if women tend to be more cooperative and men more competitive in dialogue (which I think true in very general, overlapping bell-curve fashion). Both methods can be ways to arrive at truth, both skills are important, and we can learn to use both.
Thank you for posting them. I feel somewhat braindead at the moment so are there some memes we might could use as a mantra when we are being attacked so that when the adrenaline kicks in and the brain kicks out we can defuse stuff at the outset and splutter in our minds rather than splutter during the encounter?
is probably Miller’s Law.
This from Suzette on the topic:
We tend not to use Miller’s Law. We hear someone’s utterance and don’t care for it, we immediately assume that it’s false, and then we try to imagine what could be wrong with the speaker that would cause them to say something so unacceptable. That’s a recipe for misunderstanding.
Suzette Haden Elgin
With all due respect to Miller, that principle is a mainstay of the hermeneutic tradition in Philosophy from Augustin to Gadamer and Riceur.
Excellent, thought-provoking diary entry.
and I’m going to paste it to the wall. Along with Teresa’s comment ” I didn’t have to understand it and I certainly didn’t need to argue about it.”
Although it’s a good thing to listen and try to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, we must realize that sometimes it is impossible to understand them completely – we have not had the same experiences.
And the toaster comment reminds me of a time in my undergraduate years. UTexas was built on oil royalties from land given to the university in its early days. On the edge of campus, there is an oil pump (“rocking horse”) with a historical plaque, etc. One day I was surprised, when walking by it to hear it talking to me. Investigating, I discovered a speaker attached to it, playing a tape loop of the history about it all. I thought it was funny – it’s in a place that hardly anyone walks by, but here it is doggedly and eternally repeating its history . . . On the shuttle bus a few days later, we passed it and I said to the girl sitting next to me, “Did you know that that oil well talks?” She looked around frantically for an empty seat to move to. I didn’t explain – for some reason I found it humorous that day to let her believe that I was nuts.
The toaster might really be talking. We’ll never know unless we use Miller’s Law, though.
now. Probably it will talk to the coffee machine to make sure both toast and coffee are done at the same time!
I like thiese diaries, but this I simply don’t buy:
Men, Elgin asserts, are trained from boyhood to use verbal fencing as a human substitute for puppy-wrestling. They keep score, but they don’t take a defeat personally.
Girls do not play games like this. A woman who has been on the receiving end of a verbal attack will feel typically feel battered, not energized. Even if a woman has learned to fence with men, she still may lose her balance if a second woman joins on the opposing side.
Where boys tend to resolve conflicts with fists, girls, hardly “battered” by verbal jousting, rather develop an enormous arsenal of verbal means of defense and attack.
Sorry to be so un-PC, but anyone familiar with real world children’s behavior will know that this is true, and deeply documented by sociologists and social psychologists.
There is also a tendency among adult females to prefer not to spar when the subject is important. Sparing is a game, real life topics, the ones that deal with equality etc…need to be addressed with something besides the argument game where one side wins and the other loses.
Huh? I’ve raised three (g-b-g). I utterly fail to see what you mean here: ‘girls, hardly “battered” by verbal jousting’.
If you are suggesting that verbal ‘jousting’, because it leaves no visible injuries therefore leaves NO injuries…. I would ask for supporting evidence.
In real life, among people over the age of two or three (in other words, with basic language skills), verbal violence of some kind ALWAYS precedes physical violence.
Yes, girls do develop language more quickly than boys in our culture. A bit of the edge may be on that second X chromosome, but much of it is also cultural.
That “enormous arsenal” you refer to, however, sounds pretty scary. Funny, though–I’ve NEVER seen it.
For that reason, I’m guessing it’s a lot less universal than you seem to think.