Journal Entry #2

This week’s reading brought up some interesting questions for me regarding the forms of speech examined. While reading Sattel’s article on the characteristics and dynamics of male inexpressiveness I noticed a strange reaction I had to an example he used from literature. In his article, Sattel explains that while we have come to know inexpressiveness as a typically masculine trait, which we may understand simply as opposed to feminine, that rather, “The starting point for understanding masculinity lies, not in its contrast to femininity, but in the asymmetrical dominance and prestige which accrue to males in this society," (119). His thesis is then, that rather than understanding that men are simply taught to hide their emotions as part of occupying the male identity, we should recognize that this is instead a move to seem more rational, and thus capable of handling the situations of power and prestige which they are, as American males, to inherit. He explains further “Being impersonal and inexpressive lends to one’s decisions and position an apparent autonomy and ‘rightness’” (120). At this point in the text I believe it is easy to see which phenomenon Sattel is referring to, it even has a kind of common place in society: the stereotype of the stony stoic male, embodied by John Wayne as referenced in the beginning of the article. However, what I encountered in Sattel’s chosen passage from Fear of Flying was quite the opposite.
In the example, a man and a woman are in a quarrel wherein the man retains information, according to Sattel, in order to establish power. What I found to be completely bizarre about this example is that I had to read it twice just to be clear on who the female and male speakers were. In this example, we stumble upon another well recognized pattern of speech, only the genders are reversed. This was particularly striking because all of the examples prior to this one were indeed "typically" masculine (President Nixon, President Ford, John Wayne), but something about this example made the man's speech sound so utterly feminine. This is because of a phenomenon which, though commonly identified, especially in the media, has remained untouched by the readings so far, namely the "feminine" mode of attack.
In this example the man seems to be acting out what in pop media could be named the "feminine" response to a disturbance. In this cliché, the woman, held back by her non-confrontational nature and a desire to "test" her partner and decide if he is indeed as devoted/attentive as he seems to imply refuses to reveal information, but is generous in her display of disdain. The situation thus remains tense until the man either guesses long enough to reveal the secret root of the conflict or gives up. One line was particularly evocative of this stereotype, "I can't read your mind. I don't know why you're so mad. I can't intuit your every wish" (121). This line could have come from any modern middle-class couple sitcom.
The questions, then, which arose for me in reading this was how the "feminine" forms of aggressive speech, or attack, fall in with the rest of our understanding of how women speak. It seems to me that in quite a few of the readings the topic of male aggressive behavior has been covered, although perhaps not explicitly. And while most of these texts seem to suggest that women are not particularly aggressive, I am surprised that there has not been more attention paid to the occasions in which women break with the "desire for cooperation" and set themselves willingly apart from a group, namely in conversational battle. It seems to me that although in this case the gender roles are the reverse, that this would indeed be a good place to start examining the way we think of gendered forms of verbal attack.


Works Cited:
Sattel, Jack W. [Barrie Thomas, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds.] Language, Gender, and Society. Rowley: Newbury House, 1983.

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