demanding and withdrawing: alas, some real shit! for YOU!!!

even sooner, now....

clearly this has remained mostly sleeping as i've sleptwalked all semester. closing in on a thesis wihich should make the world clear, right?

mm. yeah. anyway. another post to remind myself to post AFTEr proj, or AFTEr bard. this is my career in the waiting, yet in the making...

and speaking of biosocial blues: a clarification (bc i was confused persuing the entirety of this my own blog's archives):

the "talking sex" in my poetic rant from july, i believe, was referring to the female gender and particularly references to this gender of mine in both the news at that moment of the summer - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762186 - and to aNOTHER betty carter tune (not an original) entitled, yep: Girl Talk. I also found and downloaded a Dakota Staton take on it, which i'm also hip to.

ANd this happens to be- or i made it half-happenin, so unwittingly: a perfect example of a 'biosocial' issue that I'm thrilled to bring to the fore.

"We like to chat about our dresses... that we wear tonite. We chew the fat about our hair [tresses] and how our neighbors fight./Inconsequential things that men don't really care to know/ become essential things that women find so appropo./ I'm a dame, it's my game, tis all the same they call it girl talk. Just girl talk. or, as Ms. Staton sings: "But that's a dame, we're all the same, it's just a game, we call it Girl Talk." why women is the gender appointed to these more intimate and relational domains... that's another discussion.


but what i would like to point out, which is to me utterly germane? my most hotly simmering interjection and interrogation to this discussion, really... alright enough prefacing: power. "verbal space" . you see, a close friend (currently in teacher's college) has recently gotten into feminist pedagogy and is learning the hard way that- especially as newbies in any professional environment, and especially as a woman- "no one's gonna give you verbal space. you gotta *take it for yourself!!"

WHICh gets me thinking... do we women SEEM to be talking 'more' (than men) merely because our speech is an act of (re)claiming what we are somehow not *supposed to be claiming in the first place? -that is, a 'verbal space' to which we are not, a priori, entitled?

Do our own mannerisms and self-effacements by themselves not create this dynamic? do we not speak more hesitantly/speculatively, with more qualifications and effacements and prefaces and uncertainty- above all with a more pronounced assumption of *INTRUSION*, than do our male counterparts?? would this alone- assuming we still have the audacity to talk at all- not make us seem longer-winded? 'fluffier'? or dare i say, high-"maintenence?" --annoying?

(not to imply this behavior doesn't stem like men's from the oppressive conditioning pervading our lives, of *course... and that this conditioning includes that whole trope of "nagging our tired man" the npr article is so kind to mention.)

ahhh...

no wonder then, even the liberal-biased NPR wouldn't posit this to explain the sticky allure of that now-erroneous supposition (given that we trust the methodology and ecolgocial validty of the results) that we talk MORE.

oh and this bit i loved too: "Mehl guesses that the talkativeness claim 'evolved as an explanation for what scientists call the demand/withdrawal pattern.' That is, the situation where a woman demands to talk through problems and her male partner withdraws emotionally." --evolved, indeed. but where? when? on african plains c. 48,000 BC? under post-industrial paternalism? have male chimpanzees 'been shown' in experiments to exhibit more emotional withdrawal (than their female counterparts) too? this being the case i guess i'd just have to get cool with gender's "unfortunate constraints" and stay in my place then, right?

But please (Father Science Almighty!) before i do, do tell me how you expect me to stay within my boundaries when you won't even delineate them yourself. and after you've painted them the same damn color as the room we're in!! Just make my cage visible, already, alright!!!??

And then I'll be quiet. Promise.