Topic 60: 'Men Say'

Carol:

What Planet Did You Say You Were From?

For some reason when Stephen Spielberg’s film adaptation of Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple came out, it caused a bit of a to-do that had not happened when Walker’s book came out in 1982. The controversy seemed to be a gender thing, and it seemed to polarize the male and female faculty at our college here in central Arizona around whether or not the film portrayed men as the stereotypical bad guys, whether or not it unfairly manipulated emotions—the New York Times had criticized Spielberg for “fashioning a grand, multi-hanky entertainment that is as pretty and lavish as the book is plain” (source: Maslin), The College even sponsored a Brown Bag Lunch panel to analyze the merits and flaws of the movie. The discussions about The Color Purple, femaleness and maleness, were kind of fun and allowed for some (usually) good-natured public debate that drew in not just faculty but staff and students as well.
I remember a more intimate conversation with several women over lunch where we established a kind of litmus test for men. We liked men who liked The Color Purple. In fact, several of us loved men who liked The Color Purple, and we admitted  that, in fact, we preferred the company of men who did not fall on the “macho male, groin-scratching” end of the gender scale  just as we didn’t fall into the “girly-girl eye-lash fluttering” end, not that we used those terms. I think we even got so far as to categorizing men on the campus by whether or not they would like the movie. A very intellectual conversation, indeed.

It was the eighties and we had been reading Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) and Women’s Ways of Knowing would be published the year after our debates about The Color Purple in 1986. It was probably about that same time when I got into a very heated argument with a (male) lawyer about whether women lawyers had to “act like men” in order to be successful in the legal profession and what it even meant to “act like a man.” I think I got angry because I was also struggling at work with what it meant to “act like a professional” in a college community where male faculty and administrators still significantly outnumbered females (I served on several committees where I was the only woman).

Somewhere beyond all the academic jargon about male vs. female cognition, male vs. female communication strategies, that light lunch room banter about women who liked men who liked The Color Purple was comforting. What men say or think or feel, or what women say or think or feel, did not have to be so black and white, pink or blue; it could be a brilliant hue of purple.

Thank goodness, The Color Purple was released before the expression “chick flick” became popular. That would have stopped the conversation cold. I hate that label. Not a lot of women use the expression, but men I know who would never call a woman a chick seem to have no problem saying “Oh, that new Julia Roberts movie…isn’t that just a chick flick?”  My  husband?  He never says that.  After all, he married a woman who loves men who like The Color Purple.
 

Source: 

Maslin, Janet. “Film: the Color Purple from Steven Spielberg. New York Times. December 18, 1985.

Megan:

Say What You Mean

According to the Internet, and also a lot of books, men and women are genetically incapable of communicating with each other, which seems to bother women more than men. A quick search of this topic title led me to numerous articles like “What Men Say and What They Really Mean.” Some of them are written by men, some by women. Why don’t men just say what they mean? This is the sort of thing that frustrates me to no end.

I know women don’t always say what they mean, but I think that’s because we have been socialized that way. We have a history of not being heard, and we have been trained to be nice and quiet. Maybe that’s not the case anymore, but I remember when I was a kid, one of the ways we girls put each other down was by saying someone was “too opinionated.” I had (have) a strong, intelligent mother and a feminist father, so I wasn’t raised that way, but some of my friends were and that way of thinking is contagious when all you want to do is fit in.  The brainwashing was mostly beaten out of me (or replaced) when I went to a women’s college and learned to speak up, be heard and not only share my opinions but also defend them. Yet sometimes I still can’t say what I mean.

What excuse do men have for not saying what they mean?  Aside from the usual polite reasons, I honestly cannot think of why men would say one thing, but mean another, except to lie.  The men in my life – my family and friends all seem like straight talkers to me. The prison, of course, was different. The inmates were constantly speaking in code, or lying, or trying to manipulate and condition staff. I once had a radicalized terrorist try to get information on building homemade bombs but instead of saying “bombs,” he said a famous brand of running shoes. Of course, I didn’t pick up on it at the time because … well, how could I?

Anyway, aside from prisoners who undergo a different and terrible kind of socialization, which affects more than just what they say, I still haven’t figured out why men don’t (or can’t) say what they mean. Or maybe they do. Maybe the people who write these columns are just trying to sell stuff, so they target insecure women in lousy relationships. Or maybe because I’m not in a relationship, I really just don’t care whether men mean what they say.

Actually…
That IS what I mean.