The Feminine Technique
In asking why there aren't more female newspaper columnists, Maureen Dowd confessed that six months into the job, she tried to quit because "I felt as though I were in a 'Godfather' movie, shooting and getting shot at."
"Men enjoy verbal dueling," said Dowd, who is the only female Op-Ed columnist at the New York Times. "As a woman," she explained, "I wanted to be liked -- not attacked."
Dowd put her finger on one reason fewer women than men are comfortable writing slash-and-burn columns. But she didn't take her argument to the next level and question the fundamental assumption that attack-dog journalism is the only kind worth writing.
That is the blind spot that explains why women are missing from many of the arenas of public discourse, including science (as noted by Larry Summers of Harvard) and opinion writing. (The Los Angeles Times was recently criticized for not running more women on its opinion pages.)
No one bothers to question the underlying notion that there is only one way to do science, to write columns -- the way it's always been done, the men's way.
There is plenty of evidence that men more than women, boys more than girls, use opposition, or fighting, as a format for accomplishing goals that are not literally about combat -- a practice that cultural linguist Walter Ong called "agonism," from the Greek word for war, agon.
Watch kids of any age at play. Little boys set up wars and play-fights. Little girls fight, but not for fun. Starting a fight is a common way for boys to make friends: One boy shoves another, who shoves back, and pretty soon they're engaged in play. But when a boy tries to get into play with a girl by shoving her, she's more likely to try to get away from him. A recent New Yorker cartoon captured this: It showed a little girl and a little boy eyeing each other. She's thinking, "I wonder if I should talk to him." He's thinking, "I wonder if I should kick her."
Older boys have their own version of agonism, using fighting as a format for doing things that have nothing to do with actual combat: They show affection by mock-punching, getting a friend's head in an armlock or playfully trading insults.
Here's an example that one of my students observed: Two boys and a girl are building structures with blocks. When they're done, the boys start throwing blocks at each other's structures to destroy them.
