dmmartindale@watrose.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (12/21/83)
Some comments on Sophie Quigley's comments:
I would not want to be in the position of believing that I could
not ask someone else out. Sitting waiting for someone to come along
and ask me would be incredibly frustrating, I believe. The passive role
does have the "advantage" that if you don't get asked out enough, you
can more easily blame the rest of the world if you want to; I don't consider
this a real advantage. Feeling that you have some control over your own
destiny is worth a great deal. But it IS much more difficult to get up
the nerve to ask someone else out than it to just wait for an invitation.
On the other side of the coin, getting asked out by someone
you like is awfully nice (particularly if you are not used to it).
I still remember rather clearly the first time a woman suggested
that we do something together and I had not previously invited her
to do something (in other words, she made the first significant move).
It made my week.
Such experiences have been rather rare; in an environment where
there are about 5 times as many men as women, this is to be expected.
I have not yet had to deal with being asked out by someone who I was not
interested in. I doubt if I'd handle it very well. I'd feel very
uncomfortable making up some sort of excuse, or "subtle hint" - I much
prefer frankness. Yet I'd feel uncomfortable being frank, since that
doesn't seem to be socially sanctioned. How do women handle this?
I think the best world would be one in which either sex felt
free to ask out someone they were interested in and, more important,
people of both sexes had some EXPERIENCE as both asker and askee.
If you are the asker, there is nothing like having spent some time in
the shoes of the askee to give you an understanding of what they might
be feeling, and how they might see your actions. The same is true
in the other direction.
Now, on to the topic of communication, or lack thereof.
People often have trouble communicating with each other, particularly
about important things, particularly when they try to use subtle forms
of communication rather than clear ones. It is true of both sexes; men
are not particularly inept at it. It depends on the people involved, and
how much attention they are paying to each other, and how much they have
in common in how they look at the world, and other things.
An example: I like people. They fascinate me. They are all
different. When I start to get to know someone new, I tend to ask all
kinds of questions. I try to understand what their world is like;
more precisely, I try to understand how they understand the world.
I try to "get inside their head" to understand what their values are and
how they interpret what goes on around them. I want to know how they think.
And I've never found two people alike, or even particularly similar.
And they are definitely all different from me. So when I don't know someone
well, I tend to assume that they are DIFFERENT in as-yet-unknown ways.
Also, I grew up rather on the fringes of normal high-school-in-ontario
society - there are things which "everyone understands" that I may not.
So if I don't know you well, and you give me a "subtle hint"
about something, I might miss it entirely because I simply don't KNOW
that it is supposed to mean that. Or I might notice it, but not know
how to interpret it. Or I might think I know what it means, but give
you the benefit of the doubt until I'm sure. Now, if you think that
there is some sort of common language that "everyone" understands,
then you might very well think that I'm awfully dense. (It took me
the longest time to figure out that passiveness in women didn't necessarily
mean disinterest - some women were just trained to be that way and to them
it's perfectly normal.)
On the opposite side of the coin, I expect other people to also
assume that each person is different. I expect them to spend time
trying to understand how I think, what I assume, what I care about.
Sometimes I encounter women who seem to assume that all men are more
or less alike, or that at least I'm like the other men they've known
who they think are similar to me. In any case, they simply don't take
the time to get to know me. Sometimes, there are situations where it seems
that they have no idea what I mean. We seem to be talking with different
vocabularies. They seem to need to be TOLD something before they
understand it. (Is this beginning to sound familiar?).
Sometimes even explaining it to them in words doesn't get the idea across.
Now, can I complain that the woman has a problem with communication here?
Can she complain that I'm just different and nobody should be expected to
understand what I feel anyway? Both complaints have an element of truth;
neither one is the whole truth.
And then there is the matter of how you should behave before you
know the other person well. Doing this "correctly" all the time requires
knowing what the other person expects, and what you yourself want.
Well, how the hell can you know what the other person expects? There are
no "standards" anymore. I once knew a women who explained (once I knew
her as a friend) that she assumed that I was not interested in anything
more than friendship since I hadn't indicated any sexual interest the
first time we went out somewhere. To avoid being misunderstood on this
matter again, should I make some sort of sexual advance to every woman
I'm even slightly interested in on the first date, in case I become more
interested later? What then about the woman who assumes that I'm
already very interested in her if I kiss her goodnight? Oops.
The simple fact is that there is no single behaviour which is
appropriate for all women, and it's often impossible to tell what this
particular one here right now expects, particularly if I'm just starting
to get to know her. So I muddle through as best I can, and usually err
on the conservative side, and usually get it wrong somehow, but hope that it
won't matter too much in the long run.
The point of all this is that communication between two people
is often imperfect, and the world is a varied and complex place.
Try to see situations from the other person't point of view.
As a woman, you may find than many men are either too agressive or too
passive for your particular taste. Most men will have the same complaint.
Women may "lead men on" with false signals just because they like having
someone pay attention to them. Men will do exactly the same thing.
Enough for now. It's late and I'm getting incoherent.
Dave Martindale
{ihnp4,allegra,decvax}!watmath!dmmartindalesaquigley@watdaisy.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (12/23/83)
Well, Dave, You were much more coherent than I was about this whole thing. I do agree with almost everything you've said and I wish that more people thought about other people the same way you do. I think the world would be much better if we all thought of each other as different individuals and took the time to get to know each person we like without any preconceptions of what that person will be like, based on what other people are like. Having said this does seem to nullify my previous article, so I will try to explain what my beliefs are a bit better. Before I go on on this topic, I would like to comment on a few little points 1- How do women handle choosing between frank or not when rejecting someone? I don't know about others, but I do it very badly, and I would prefer not to be put in that situation, but sometimes, there's no way out. I don't really think there is a good answer to this, or at least if there is I haven't found it yet, as I change my mind about this all the time. 2- Men "leading on" women? it never happened to me, not in a romantic/sexual sense anyway. I assume you are speaking of dating situations, not situations where the people are already into the reltionship. Well, I'll keep my eyes open. Well, back to the original point, sexism and racism is a very touchy topic, and this is what this is all about. Can one assume that a person is going to behave in a certain way because they are a member of a certain group? I am very bothered by the whole idea because I believe that people are individuals and have some power over their behaviour, but it seems that many people ARE influenced by the fact that they belong to a certain group and start behaving the way they are expected to as members of that group. So, when I was making my comment "men are crummy at being subtle", I was acting in a typically sexist fashion, but I was critisising the whole idea of how men SHOULD be and end up being, since it is much more easy to conform then rebel. It is very sad, but the net result is that a LOT of people conform to the behaviour that is expected of them because of their sex/ethnic background, instead of thinking for themselves. This is why it is so easy to be sexist/racist. I think that in the end the only way to solve these problems will be for people to start thinking as individuals. In the meantime people will continue saying such things as "women are all..", "blacks are all ..." because they will be partly true. FLAME ON!