The Party Line by Rachel Rafelman
"Everyone" was there - the media moguls, the so-called glitterati, the captains of industry, and , less importantly, the captains' wives - all elbow-to-elbow at a gala reception for the opening of a new arts centre. Flotillas of martinis on silver trays floated through the crush and were duly consumed, as gradually the crowd began to split up into discreet groups, each defined exclusively by gender: tipsy women talking "girl talk"; even tipsier men discussing business, sports and politics.
The time could have been 1956, but it was, in fact, last winter (the martinis were a nice retro touch). I was there, and not being accustomed to such gatherings, I was astonished. It wasn't supposed to be like this, the guys with the guys and the girls with the girls. That was what we did in junior high. Didn't gender splits like this disappear with whitewall tires? Apparently three decades of feminism and at least one of public programs like affirmative action and gender-sensitivity training had no impact, once a certain quantity of gin and vermouth had been imbibed.
"The gender split at parties happens, but it isn't planned," says writer and columnist Robert Fulford. "Suddenly you see six women in one group and another group of men standing in the opposite corner and this is among people who are often 30 years younger than I am! I have to say this tendency hasn't declined the way I would have predicted 15 years ago, and I don't see a big decline in the foreseeable future, either."
"What can I tell you?" says Sondra Gotlieb, writer and wife of Allan Gotlieb, former Canadian ambassador to the United States, with what I interpret as being a sigh of deep resignation. "It's the same old story. The women gravitate to each other and talk about their personal lives. The men talk business."
Not much new here. Victorian men sent their women off to the "sitting room" while they smoked cigars, drank port and talked about...well, we'll never really know what they talked about. True, this practice has largely disappeared (though Sondra Gotlieb reports it is still standard dinner party protocol in Eastern Europe). Men no longer banish us. They don't have to. We do it all on our own. What's more, it seems we prefer it that way.
Here is a truly interesting fact: When you start canvassing men and women on the subject of their social conversational preferences, you find a great deal of agreement. Ten successful, self-confident men and women ranging in age from mid-twenties to 60-something concurred on two key points. The first, and perhaps most surprising, is that, in mixed company, men are boring. The second: Under similar conditions, women are not. The second point is kind of a corollary to the first. Given a choice, everyone prefers talking to women.
Of course there are boring women and interesting men. What we're dealing with here are broad strokes, generalities, even stereotypes. Okay? So now we can ask the following: Why are men boring? At least why are they so much more boring than women? The consistent answer from my interviewees is that women get involved in conversation. They get personal. Men do not.
"Men only want to talk about business. They don't want to get into personal stuff," says Bob Ramsay of Ramsay Writes, a Toronto communications firm. "I mean, God only knows what we would get into there!" For many men, a party is just a business meeting with food and drink, an occasion to trot their high-level contacts, deals and even resumes around the table with impunity (unless, of course, being deemed a dullard is an undesirable consequence). But for a woman to do the same would be breathtakingly inappropriate, even if she were the CEO of General Motors. Women downplay their accomplishments as a rule. "This is a good thing. It makes them more approachable. It's socially graceful," comments Margaret Wente, the editor of the Globe and Mail's "Report on Business." "Women are looking for a way to connect and that, in my opinion, is a strength." Wente, who's in the unusual position of being regularly chatted up by men who believe she has inside information, doesn't necessarily regard this as a perk. "I have to tell you, these business conversations are usually as boring as bad jokes."
Business, although it does literally make the world go round, just doesn't make for good party talk, unless of course it is approached in a personal way. For example: "I invested heavily in Bre-X and now I can't afford to ship Reginald Jr. off to boarding school next semester." A woman might say this; a man never would. Money, as one male wag once observed, is life's report card. For women, money's a grade, but only in one subject - and something second-tier like phy ed at that. Intriguingly, Wente, insists that at her own parties the women often chat about mutual funds while the men discuss gardening. (I can hear it now: "My clematis is bigger than yours.")
No matter what the topic, girl talk entails the rapid disclosure of details, with the expectation of immediate and enthusiastic reciprocation. The male verbal strategy is to divulge as few personal details as possible, while assiduously avoiding all expressions of emotion that could be interpreted as weakness. "Loose lips sink ships," a popular Second World War motto, seems to rule male social discourse even 50 years later.
According to Geoff Pevere, a broadcaster and critic, "This personal/private thing is one of the last frontiers of gender distinction." The recent discovery of his own conflict in this realm took him aback: "I came home after spending an evening with an old [male] friend and my [female] partner asked about his partner and their baby. I couldn't answer. Those things just hadn't come up." This is the kind of omission few women comprehend since asking after spouses and offspring is nearly axiomatic in their social discourse.
A short time later, at a dinner party with friends, the women began to discuss an absent couple who were having marital problems. As Pevere remembers it, he and the men fell silent. "I felt it was inappropriate and yet I imagine the women felt they were sharing their concern for friends, and that the couple themselves - at least, the woman - might have interpreted it similarly."
Despite this, Pevere, who confesses to having been born "without the sports gene," prefers the conversation of women. Robert Fulford also finds the traditional male topics of little interest. "Most things are more interesting than business," he says. "And absolutely everything is more interesting than sports."
In fact, the increasing number of women now interested in competitive sports is one interlocutory development that neither welcomes. According to Pevere, it has "taken its toll on the quality of contemporary conversation." Fulford longs for the old days when "by God, at parties, you could rely on the fact that the women wouldn't know about the infield fly rule and all that stuff."
Kate Filion, author of How to Dump a Guy: A Coward's Manual (HarperCollins), doesn't feel it matters what a man is talking about. "In my experience, men are usually monologuing at each other and at women. It's not an exchange of ideas; it's a competition." Writer Allan Fotheringham, who claims Canadian men are especially dull, agrees. He refers to male competitive chat, which politicians are particularly prone to, as "pecker stretching."
Fillion reports having attended many dinner parties where the men "hold forth and the women tune out," or else the women have a conversation among themselves. And if a woman declines to conform with the gender split, or genuinely finds herself interested in their topic and aligns herself conversationally with the men, Fillion says, a price is paid. "It can be seen as flirtatious or showing off. I've also seen the other women become annoyed because she is prolonging a very boring conversation."
Keeping a conversation going is one of the traditional female social functions. "It's part of what we do," observes Wente. "We are the social grease people." Indeed, for centuries women have been trained to draw people out, to get others talking about themselves, and to smooth over any alarming lulls in the conversation.
At the same time, the verbal capabilities of women have been undermined in almost every age and culture. This is probably the reason there are no celebrated female raconteurs. Speaking, especially in a social setting, is a method of asserting oneself, something women have rarely been taught (at least by example) to allow males to dominate in conversation and they, for their part, will do so - often without being conscious of it.
Moreover, from early childhood, females are spoken to differently than males. The content of their speech is correspondingly soft; declarative sentences are stylistically "unfeminine" and opinions are to be expressed obliquely, with an unflagging awareness of the feelings and sensitivities of others. It's amazing how tenacious this early training can be.
Even highly confident, accomplished women temper their speech (often by adding a qualifier to take the edge off an expression of power) and defer, often without being aware of it, to men. Women who are otherwise liberated and articulate can be heard uttering inanities like "Oh, really" and "How fascinating" in support of a male in mid-narrative. They will nod their heads, smile a lot, assume sympathtic expressions and, most important, keep their gaze fixed unwaveringly on the speaker's face.
"This has always worked well. It still does," says Gotlieb, who has seen many succeed against heavy odds in the corridors of power through their so-called conversational skills. "They absolutely hang on a man's every word and make him feel as if he's the centre of the universe." The man, almost invariably, walks away muttering something like, "Brilliant woman...great conversationalist."
Many of us find this very aggravating. I myself, who in the paraphrased words of Erica Jong, "can scarcely think of anything not to say," have witnessed similar scenes and been bewildered by them. How can a grown man not realize that while he's been talking nonstop for 20 minutes, his female audience has said virtually nothing? The men I polled were as perplexed as I. "Maybe it has something to do with conversation as performance, which it is for most men," says Geoff Pevere. "If you've made such a rapt audience of one woman, then you walk away feeling you've succeeded." I wasn't entirely convinced, and neither, I suspect, was he.
Evan Soloman, editor of Shift magazine, talks about the different male and female "social vocabularies." "Men talk loudly and opine with great certainty on issues they haven't got a clue about," he explains. "This is genetic stuff, developed over centuries of bragging and eating hors d'oeuvres." Women, who've presumably eaten fewer hor d'oeuvres and bragged less, have a different catalogue of social behavior. There is no gene for pontificating on their double helix. "Women ask a question and actually listen to the answer, which is something men do not love to do," Solomon observes. "That is why, I think, we sometimes miss the point."
Listening is an important aspect of girl talk since it is at the very centre of reciprocal communication. Women require it of each other. "I'll converse on almost any subject, but I will no longer, not ever, participate in one-sided conversations," says writer Katherine Govier. If this means chatting with women only, during the course of a four-hour cocktail party, well, so be it. "I finally feel comfortable moving away from an arrogant person who talks only about himself or herself. I don't encounter the situation as often as I used to , but I honestly have to say that lately, I've voted with my feet."
Not listening to women is embedded in our culture. Probably because historically, they haven't been credited with enough intellect to say anything worth hearing. And even current studies show conclusively that women talk less frequently than men, that they tell fewer narratives (especially lengthy ones) and that they are routinely interrupted by men - who just as routinely get away with it. Women who may no longer consciously believe that their silence is golden , will still instinctively endure almost any degree of conversational tedium if the speaker is male. What's more, in the very popular and egregious 1995 book The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, authors Ellen Fien and Sherrie Schneider unabashedly advise single women to "follow [the man's] lead...be quiet and reserved..." Female loquacity, they warn, has dire consequences: "We know one man who stopped calling a woman he was physically attracted to because she simply didn't stop talking."
There is also still little gender parity in the realm of humour. Publicist Liza Herz finds herself reining in her slightly offbeat sense of humour when men are around. "I don't really want to do it, but witty women do make men nervous, and then things feel awkward. To them," Herz says, "a woman with a good sense of humour is one who laughs at their jokes." At a recent party, Herz, while talking to a man, made a quip that connected their current topic with an earlier one. "My remark wasn't even all that clever, but his reaction was 'Yeah. I get it. Oh, you're good!' as if I was trying to trip him up."
If clever women are resented, women without obvious professional status are baldly ignored. The simple statement "I'm an at-home mother with two kids" can clear a space faster than a backhoe, and here, women are just as guilty as men. Professional women can be quick to judge and dismiss another less career-oriented female. Full-time parenthood certainly isn't valued as highly as it should be, but this phenomenon is more complicated than that. It's that pesky early training persisting again. Women aren't taught to blow their own horns. In fact, they're not even supposed to admit to owning any instrument of that nature.
Some women actually go as far as to say deeply self-deprecating things like, "I'm just a housewife," accompanying the apology (and that's what it is) with a look of acute embarrasment.
And this knee-jerk humility can intensify when there are rampant careerists in the room. Once subjected to a barrage of dinner party introductions like "Mary Black*, Merrill Lyinch" and "Frances Hill*, Union Carbide," a woman I know responded anxiously, "Janice Freeman*, nowhere." Not only was she putting herself down, but she wasn't even being truthful in doing so. Janice was on sabbatical from her full-time professorship in medieval studies - a fact, needless to say, few people attending that evening ever found out.
Katherine Govier recalls attending a dinner party which dissolved almost at the outset into gender camps, with the women inside and the men outside, drinking beer around the barbecue. "I remember one man came in and wanted to talk to us. He hung around for awhile, clearly intimidated, and eventually wandered away." There is more energy in female conversation she feels, "and there are men who want to interact that way, too."
Gender issues usually come down to a matter of perception, Evan Solomon feels. He considers his female co-workers to be strong and feisty; they tell him he dominates. "There's no way I can get it right because I'm a man, not a woman. The best men can do is ensure equality in areas like education and job opportunity and then if the men still talk more than the women, well, that's just the way it is. We can't tinker on that level."
So where do we go from here? It may be that John Gray was right and women are from Venus while men are from Mars. But maybe that's not so bad. It does give us a whole solar system to party in.
*not their real names
Toronto writer Rachel Rafelman doesn't understand why anyone goes to a party if he/she isn't interested in talking and listening.
This article appeared in the November 1997 edition of Toronto Life Fashion magazine.
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