Yet another pompous, turgid pile of “grumping” about women? Maybe not
(This could just sound like shtick on the order of George Carlin’s
terse pronouncements such as “The wrong two Beatles died first”)
Subsections below:
1. Sandberg’s Lean In as
setting up discussion
2. Ethical theory for women as Platonistic versus Aristotelian
3. My own “theoretical attitude” toward women (as to ethics) is
empirical and pragmatic
4. The variability of women’s career aims and styles as complicating
things
5. Men as centered on a record of experience, women centered on self-image; and the “demand for
elegance” in the media world
6. Smaller-scope general observations: showing the roots of reality
7. Using a theory of mental illness as a route to understanding the
communication issue
8. The way women pose difficult issues at work is most dignified (and
shown to admit resolution) when women’s expectation
of being honest and of fair dealing is the standard they feel they should
be held to
9. Worst-case women at work: metes and bounds, partly defined by women
10. Specific principled and acceptable ways women are treated differently
than men (not just by me)
11. A few starter ideas for recognizing the “worst-case woman at work”
I guess I used to be a feminist.
I don’t know if I really at an earlier time would have embraced that term for
myself; maybe I did. But that would have been about 30 years ago. I remember
being very willing to adopt the term “Ms.” as a form of address, which in the
1970s was firmly one little plank of the platform of ideas embraced as defining
the movement for women’s rights. Growing up from age eight with only my mother
as the parent in the family, and seeing the unusual trouble a widow faced (as
opposed to the much-more-attention-given topic of divorcees), and also having a
capacity for understanding other people that was essential to my eventual interest
in psychology, I was impelled to be sympathetic to women’s more general plights.
But life has a way of teaching
you about reality, and—well, let me cut to the chase. When I hear talk in the
media about “What happened to the revolution?”—meaning, the women’s-rights
revolution—I say, “What revolution?
The women’s rights revolution? Does anyone need that today? Are women one big
bloc of ‘proletariat’ that needs its own revolution? Do you need the noise,
sloganeering, cant, gestures, and street theater of a revolution?”
1. Sandberg’s Lean In as
setting up discussion
Another orienter: There was a
review of the new book, Lean In by
businesswoman Sheryl Sandberg, in New Jersey’s main newspaper The Star-Ledger (March 18), by one Karen
Prager, a local journalist. In my memory bank of regional publishing tales
(does it seem as if, in the New Jersey media world, I “know where all the
bodies are buried”?), I have one about a woman who ran a sort of lifestyle
magazine out of a small office in South Orange, N.J., who was subjected to
attention by the likes of the Columbia
Journalism Review in 1997 for unethical behavior in running her magazine.
And one person who helped get that sharp journalistic-investigatory eye applied
was a Karen Prager who had worked briefly (as had many others) at that office.
But in that exposé, which didn’t
just involve the CJR but did other
mainstream news entities, there were many other individuals, who were current
and former employees, who played a role. A very interesting situation, and a
pre-Internet precursor to the phenomenon of “Googlebombing” of a
media professional whom some regard as ethically beyond the pale. Anyway, if
this was the same Karen Prager, I do not mean disrespect for bringing up the South Orange story. I’m not sure if or when I’ll recount
that story, but it is very interesting.
Anyway, I am interested in
reading Lean In (though given my
recent economics and reading situation, it might not happen), and Ms. Prager’s
review was interesting for representing a certain kind of feminist position
with regard to Ms. Sandberg. Let me just focus on one idea that represented in
a “call-out” of the print version, echoing a line in the review: “We can’t wait
until someone puts forth a unified field theory of feminism to address the
needs of all women” (p. 27).
I think the meaning of this is
clear enough: one theory to address the
nature of women as a “special” group and what their needs, not least for
justice, are. (My understanding of “unified field” is that it relates to
physics—physical reality—which is amenable to a “field” conceptualization, while I thought a “unified theory” (without “field”) meant one coherent
theory robust enough to epistemologically address whatever it was
about—physical reality, moral reality, or the nature of a kind of self-willed
organism, etc. But maybe this is a quibble unimportant to the matter at hand.)
Again, do all women need one
theory to address what they (or some) feel is a problem plaguing them? If it
was put forth, would all women agree to the validity of the theory? (I would
assume this theory is largely along ethical lines.)
2. Ethical theory for women as Platonistic versus Aristotelian
In a way, this is a dispute
between two types of philosophic tempers that goes back to the ancient Greeks.
Anyone who studies philosophy has to start with those thinkers who started the
West’s version of it—with Plato and Aristotle. Plato was the first great
philosopher (after others who defined certain areas of concern and theories,
but did not have the fullness of vision he had: Democritus, Parmenides, and
others). Plato developed the theory of Ideas, or “forms”: to grossly sum up his
position, to deal with the problems of irregularity, imperfection, and so on in
the world, there was a “world” of forms, of Ideas, that represented the best
versions of things: the form of dog,
the form of a man, etc. Things on Earth
in some sense partook of these forms. It isn’t hard to say that this was a
philosophy of “one big, neatening-up theory.”
Aristotle, his follower,
importantly diverged from Plato in dealing with concrete reality as part of a
true reading of the world. So there weren’t just what could be called “forms,”
or ideal versions of things, but
there was perceivable reality that was inextricably connected with these.
(Again, a rough sum.) Twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell synopsized
Aristotle (at least in his metaphysics) as “Plato diluted by common sense” (in
Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy
[New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1945], p. 162).
Plato represented a general sort
of philosophy that would be echoed in what, in the 1600s-1700s, would develop
as rationalism (the name was a later
usage)—epitomized by Rene Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz. The reality of things was most fundamentally in what could be
rationally interpreted. Aristotle was, in a way, a forerunner of empiricism—or the line of philosophy in
the 1600s-1700s epitomized by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
Empiricism generally held that reality, a true reading of things, lay in what
could be perceived through the senses.
The two philosophic tempers were
again defined comparatively by twentieth-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin, when he talked (metaphorically)
about the hedgehog, who knows one big
thing, and the fox, who knows many
small things.
3. My own “theoretical attitude” toward women (as to ethics) is
empirical and pragmatic
The idea of needing a unified
theory to address women’s needs is like a Platonist viewpoint. Some might feel
that appeals to them the most. My own view of women is very much empirically
oriented, and pragmatic. Sometimes I might joke that, when you sum things up
about women, you follow the medieval philosophic standard of “adaequatio intellectus et rei”—“adequation”
of intellect and thing—that is, what is a
true idea is one that is adequate to lining up with reality. And if my
reading of women seems contradictory as to what I would allege about typical
actions, as do what my emotions seem to be, I would quip that that’s an example
of having a mental schema adequate to the reality: Women seem self-contradictory, so my reading of them will seem that
way, too.
When people—it is often women,
but need not be—raise the issue of, “If women do the exact same work as men
(for a given type of job), shouldn’t they be paid the same?,” this seems like
an issue that it would only be fair to answer, “Of course.” But the reality is
that this is not the only matter that characterizes what challenges are posed
to, and by, women in the workplace.
4. The variability of women’s career aims and styles as complicating
things
For one thing, as a natural
course of how so many women pursue their lives, women don’t stick largely to a
career course in their adult years. They will seek some point at which they
will have children, whether they return to work quickly after giving birth or
not. Some will drop out of the work world for some years. But the factor of
giving birth to children inevitably puts some wrinkles in their work courses
that men typically don’t experience.
Even if a high-power female exec
has a room built next to her office to house her child during the day (which
obviously could foster resentments—regarding favoritistic or privileged
treatment—among some of this woman’s coworkers, both men and women), there is
still a different complexion to how she carries on that men generally don’t
exhibit. So the sheer biological fact of women having a “workplace game face”
altered by childbirth is one thing that makes women differ from men. Closely
related is the fact that many women see no problem in taking time off from
work—weeks, months, years—related to raising children.
5. Men as centered on a record of experience, women centered on self-image; and the “demand for
elegance” in the media world
This all shouldn’t raise too
much controversy as a focus of difference
between women and men. But to me, the
psychological difference amounts to something very important: men, by and
large, assess themselves as to their record of work experience—where they
worked, how long, what they did (all the verifiable facts)—while women tend to proceed along the lines of
self-image—what they see themselves as (deserving)
now (as to how they are suited for a certain job), or how they see what they want to be in the future based on this current
job.
What I heard of Sheryl
Sandberg’s basic points in her book (in a review or two, not just Ms. Prager’s)
seemed pretty interesting. She sounded like a pragmatist and common-sensical.
No feminist cant, programmatic thinking, hoary old one-size-fits-all
communist-type ideology.
Ms. Prager says, “A favorite
section of mine cites studies showing that men attribute their success to their
own abilities, while women say it is a combination of luck, hard work, and the
help of other people.” I think this is a fairly true definition, though I would
say that men enjoy a certain level of
good luck too. One quote I saw somewhere recently (on a calendar, I think)
is that, “The harder I work, the luckier
I get,” or such. I think that’s a pretty valid observation.
Ms. Prager’s (and Ms.
Sandberg’s) defining the difference of men and women along the lines of men’s
attributing their success to “abilities” seems to me too much a school-age way
of defining it. I think a lot of men—especially as they get past 30 or 35—focus
on a record of achievements, not
“ability.” I hate it when people today—I think I last heard this in any
significant context maybe 12 or so years ago—say something about me regarding
“talents,” such as, “I don’t have anything that could use your talents.” To me
citing “talent” is condescending, as if I am 20 years old. At 51, I prefer to
be assessed on record of work. Where it comes to a sub-area of work (among the
several I’ve been in) where my record in this sub-area is thin, I’m willing to
debate in relation to that; but the record of achievements is key, not sheer
self-image or wishful thinking.
The difference between women and
men along the lines of record (in
males) versus self-image (in females)
is especially pronounced in the media world. There are so many outrageous
situations you could cite, with humor
or not, of clashes with specific women along lines where they seem to see
themselves as entitled to take a position, or make a decision, based on sheer
self-image that sometimes seems almost self-delusional, even in the face of a
male’s position that, based on indubitable, empirically-based reality, the
record available for the asking.
This is especially a problem
when, as I’ve only recently come to be able to articulate directly, work in the
media world requires people (hopefully, who have the talent to meet the
demands) to be elegant: there is a demand for elegance. You have to show
some class; in a sense, you have to act as if to set an example, as if you are
“setting laws for others” as articulated in your behavior; and the fact that
pressure and crazy premises at work are leaning on you means that the challenge
to be “elegant” and to emotionally show grace under pressure is harder than you
might ever have expected.
And all of us who’ve been in
this situation know we can make mistakes. No one is perfect. But the fact that some people “eminently” don’t
have what it takes to meet, even if imperfectly, the demand for elegance can stand out like a sore thumb, and can leave
some who do meet the demand better hurt
(sometimes for years) by those who can’t.
I have to point out that, having
worked in the media world for over 20 years, and maybe sounding on this blog as
if I’ve gotten awfully grumpy (in general terms) about women, my position is
this: I don’t regret having worked with
specific difficult women, especially younger ones, where there may have
been clashes along the fault line of “record versus self-image.” Even with the
more difficult of these women, I “enjoy” (relatively speaking) working out
problems even with the worst cases (most challenging, sometimes downright
dysfunctional) cases.
What I regret is more general, and could be said to echo especially the
rather dogmatic, sclerotic views of older women (those who came of age, say, in
the birth years of modern feminism, the late 1960s and early 1970s): surrounding
the idea that women can and should be so intransigent about “their different
needs calling for taking a stand irrespective of reality”—that is, that women
should somehow agitate and interrupt normal congress based on some “needs” that
they feel they are “special” to demand being addressed, and essentially
short-circuit any way that normal routes can be followed to adjudicate a
dispute. This, to me, is a “political position” that puts self-image above the
prerogatives of dealing with all concerned parties fairly, based on the record,
and is intolerable.
6. Smaller-scope general observations: showing the roots of reality
I think there are a number of
fundamental facts about women in the workplace that I’ve gathered empirically,
and often in the teeth of extremely demanding, nuance-revealing ethical
conundrums, that rather put the lie to old-line, dogmatic, “bra-burning”
feminism:
Workplace women who are too
outlandish get recognized as such by their peers. Women who go too far
in terms of being too presumptuous, or preposterous, about what they think they
deserve as a position, or as recognition, are scorned as beyond the pale and
from a confident position by other women:
in fact, the way you identify a woman who is outlandish in presenting herself,
and promoting her interests, beyond what she realistically should is in how
other women seem “all of one mind” in rejecting her behavior.
Even headstrong women sometimes
can use ad hoc decision-making help by a male. Some women who seem so
headstrong, as if they are “their own women who don’t need men to help them
with every little step,” can still surprise you as to sometimes needing a male
to help them decide a more difficult issue. When this concretely comes up in my
dealings, it doesn’t really bother me. In my experience it has usually come up
among younger women.
With some women, the issue isn’t
power, it’s the ability to self-express (or be personally understood) better.
The idea that women need “more power”—such as with use of the cant term
“empowerment,” which often bores me: I think what is truer among a lot of women
is that they, as individuals, seek better ways to communicate, that they really
have some things to get out, some vision to be articulated, recognized,
translated into some kind of action, and need a fellow (it could be a male, or
not) to facilitate the “birth” of this.
7. Using a theory of mental illness as a route to understanding the
communication issue
Some of the more difficult cases
of mental illness among women—whether with the more difficult personality
disorders, or with psychotic disorders—cohere with an interesting fact: women are more “affiliative” than men, as
gets observed in other contexts, and the ill ones who have someone communicate
with them (this can be a difficult challenge to pursue, but also takes a
“soft touch” in a way) on the basis of caring can offer some
response as if you’re turning her ship back from the brink, as if the show of
care was an important spot of hope they could use.
For the moment, assume the theory
that developing a fairly serious mental illness is like exhibiting a new,
unrecognized language. This is a variation on linguist Noam Chomsky’s idea that language develops in individuals when little spurs to action from
outside (a child’s hearing language used by another) triggers development in
that child of a capacity to start developing competence in use of language
almost as if it’s largely unpacked from the individual child’s own brain—as if
some kind of “language activating device” was inborn, to allow this development.
Back in the context of mental
illness, if someone is traumatized—raped, attacked, whatever—and this triggers
a post-traumatic, or anxiety-neurosis-type reaction—or even worse, a psychotic
break—the development of symptoms is like starting to use a new language. An
exterior stimulus has triggered a cornucopia of responses, which seem to issue
forth so prodigiously, it’s as if, with all else, the person has an inborn
“device” that helps unfold the rich array of symptoms (equivalent to “bits of language
use”) that follow the initial stimulus.
As an essential practical
matter, for someone who’s trying to help a sufferer of mental illness, figuring
out some pattern to “the language” is a huge part of what it means to getting a
handle on that sufferer’s specific form of mental illness (as the sufferer
would describe it, which is key to addressing the problem at all). Finding a way to communicate with a female
in the throes of acute mental illness is like finding out what language she is
newly speaking.
If you find a way to “dignify”
this language by addressing it as it is from the person’s viewpoint (without
wanting to convey it should be permanent), and you start turning the person
back to reality—that is, guide her to start using “the more normal kind of
language that is being widely used”—then, as an incidental, the person shows
some acknowledgement of being helped, of being recognized. And for more general
purposes at hand, she should thereby starting acting in a healthier manner.
This is similar to how
communicating with women “who need it”—in a non-mental-illness context, not
least often at work—sometimes undoes a bad logjam she’s in. (If this seems as
if some women pose too much trouble in these non-mental-illness contexts,
that’s not anything I can explain as to why the specific instances; you deal
with what problems you find, and try to move on.)
As it happens, in the work
world, when a woman is posing a particularly thorny issue, the most fundamental
thing that defines the problem is some issue with her specific self-image.
8. The way women pose difficult issues at work is most dignified (and shown
to admit resolution) when women’s expectation
of being honest and of fair dealing is the standard they feel they should
be held to
When you intervene in a woman’s
problem when it is exacerbated personality disorder (and thus is posing a “mental-illness
context”), it require you, first, to get a grip on an unusual language, or a
weird “algebra,” in the process of getting her “out of that castle she built in
the sky.”
When some younger women who
intrude on work with a tricky personality issue, or who—more aligned to
concrete work matters—pose unusual problems because
of a self-image issue billowing up and defining the work problem, they
thereby pose a necessary precondition to ameliorating the problem: you have to
learn their temporarily “unorthodox” language.
Resolving issues in this sort of situation usually works with younger women. Older women (older than myself) who “need” this form of
“language-recognizing” intervention are usually more difficult to deal
with—indeed, can often be intransigent and outlandish.
9. Worst-case women at work: metes and bounds, partly defined by women
I hope this all explains what my
disposition is when I talk about female dysfunction in the workplace. When I
talk about “worst-case” women—who are usually older than myself (i.e., more
among the “older baby boomers,” born between about 1946 and about 1955)—this
does not mean that when I am critical about not-worst-case
younger women, that I paint all the same with the same brush. This is insulting
to me. It is crucial that understanding what the problem is with demanding
younger women, as opposed to the sheer, brute impositions of preposterous older
women, is one of finding a way to understand what her communication issue is,
and in some way showing the start of a way out.
All these problems issuing from
women seem to fall under the umbrella of “self-image being the prime criterion,
not a record of achievements.” But with
younger women who are amenable to intervention, there is more promise, and the
problem is different: finding a way for her to bridge some issue she has
welling up, that takes recognition to help it get more aligned with
realistically resolving what her problem is.
The older women who are just spectacles of dysfunction, and almost
a provocation of arrogantly imposing their fantasies of themselves on wider
reality, are really more clear-cut cases
of people who are not fit to be in the
work world, and very often, they
are recognized in their outlandishness most quickly, or most decisively, by other women—“a jury of their peers.”
And the main reason for this
would seem to be simple: when women,
especially starting in school, feel that, given all the obstacles they feel
they might face (economic disenfranchisement, sexism, the sheer chanciness
of certain careers), their best hope is
to be honest in their endeavors, therefore
they are all the more hurt or offended when one of their number suddenly feels
she won’t play by the rules that the average achieving woman feels are
axiomatic: fair dealing, being honest in your work, expecting advancement based
on honest efforts, etc.
This may sound like I regard
women in a very dogmatic way now, but I don’t think that’s much more true than
it ever was for me: I’ve always been apt to deal with women as individuals, and
address problems very much by ear—both because of the typical situations you
are in and because of my temper regarding these matters. And in a way, by their
very nature as concrete problems, the problems posed by women in the workplace
often have to be dealt with in a very ad hoc, individual-oriented way.
Even when the problems posed by
a number of women might tend to argue about a sexist (female-centered) culture
at a workplace, to an extent the more
specific problems you are compelled to address are more defined by the peculiarities posed by the individuals who are
of most concern in a matter that has arisen.
10. Specific principled and acceptable ways women are treated
differently than men (not just by me)
Some ethical principles we seem to
follow, which are valid and long-held, seemed only able to be determined by
seeing them in practice; we don’t teach them or enshrine them as propositions
seen as such. How valid ethical principles are held but determined only
empirically is similar to the findings of author Michael Walzer, in his
book Just and Unjust Wars (New York:
Basic Books, 1977), where he spells out ethical standards by looking at
examples, war being a classic case of something where ethical principles are
applied and inferred from practice amid the hurly-burly of life.
* There are any number of
situations, not least in the work world, where women are allowed to get away
with something (assessed on the level of basic competence or display of basic
integrity) for which a male would be run out of town on a rail.
Christina Clark Rohde, in Getting Rid of
Pinky, her little 2011 novel about an erratic local news editor, writes
that “I can’t stand the sex discrimination pinheads, but I’ll tell you if Pinky
were a guy she would have found herself on the wrong end of a tire iron in many
a local parking lot” (p. 25). It’s nice to actually see a woman, of seasoned
age, writing this sort of point. I have been aware for some time of how if some
women, who dared to consider themselves a valid professional, wanted to be
fully accorded the respect of a professional, they would then be subject to a
major calling-down—perhaps sometimes by other women—for behaviors that, if a
man were to engage in them, would make him look like a complete fool or an incompetent.
* Similarly, we rarely hear the
word coward applied to a woman in
certain very specific, passing situations in which her behavior, bearing on
some aspect of social life, becomes subject to public inspection, and this lack
of calling her coward is appropriate
enough. Men can get the assessment of being cowardly in a specific
situation commonly enough (and, as happens in life, often rightly so). Now
there is no shortage of women some of whose behavior—not happening very
often—is, to my mind, cowardly. If women wanted full equal rights, I could say,
“OK, you want full equal rights, then whenever you act like a coward, I’ll call
it down in no uncertain terms.” But we don’t do this, out of a decency whose
specific moral reasoning can sometimes be hard to spell out.
* Contrarily, some women engage in passing
behaviors that may seem craven or pathetic (if a male did them), but these can
be such as we excuse because the women are in a particular more longstanding position
that fairly allows them to be thus “craven” or “pathetic.” I’m thinking
of a single (unmarried or divorced) women with the charge of young children in
her care, who appeals in a rather begging-seeming way for help on this or that.
If the woman, in particular, is a substance abuser or mentally ill in some
significant enough way, you would think that she is pathetically manipulative
to go looking for help in this way. But, in practice, much more often than not
I will help such a woman, because she has young children in her charge, and (in
the concrete instances) can use the help, and I can (more or less) practically
give it. A male we wouldn’t
necessarily handle the same way (and as it happens, a male wouldn’t ordinarily
be in such a situation, with young children in his care; that in itself would
seem unmanly and practically unlikely, like a male walking around in public
with rollers in his hair and a female’s bathrobe on. Anyway, here, a woman can
be semi-“cowardly” but we help her because, in the situation at hand, we excuse
her for appealing as she does, and out of sympathy/empathy we are impelled to
help.
11. A few starter ideas for recognizing the “worst-case woman at work”
In coming blog entries, I will
give very vivid examples of “worst-case women” in the workplace. For now, here
are a few initial quickie measures, based on concrete instances I’ve seen:
* Other women, especially
younger ones, all seem “of the same mind” (have the same expression) in
reacting to the outre woman’s behavior.
* The outre woman makes claims
about “my reputation precedes me” and yet her reputation is of a bad
professional or is a highly controversial one.
* The outre woman fairly
routinely threatens lawsuits against those she perceives to be “defaming” her.
* The outre woman actually sues
a number of former friends for “defamation”—and may or may not follow through
with the lawsuit (either a suit gets dismissed by the court for failure to
prosecute, or is dismissed on a motion related to the woman’s mishandling
evidence or not squaring with court rules).
* Outre women typically seem to
disdain following legal processes, either not following court rules in a
lawsuit that are, in part, meant to preserve her rights (as well as the rights
of defendants) or lying so much, either within legal processes or not, that you
feel she could not be a competent or reliable witness in a serious legal
matter.
