Chatter, natter, prattle, gossip, nag, whine . . .

Press, 10 August 1981, Page 12

Chatter, natter, prattle, gossip, nag, whine . . .

By

SALLY ADAMS,

in London

Men interrupt women more than women interrupt men. Men talk more than women. These simple theories go against received/ perceived wisdom but are easy to demonstrate in any mixed group.

Test them out at the next dinner party you attend. Staff meetings or work conferences are hot recommended for beginners; social occasions are safer. More civilised usually. Dale Spender believes the male muscle in linguistics is irrefutable and has hundreds of tape recordings to prove it.

Her research has convinced her that a whole new approach to language study is needed, and this has not endeared her to male academic colleagues. At some meetings, men suggest she is searched for a tape recorder. It may be said as a joke, she comments, but they are serious.

She is tenacious, persistent. and annoying. One man said. “You make a problem every time we talk."

“Now you know what it’s like,” she replied. The problem is not solved by exposing it. For her it is a continuing struggle to speak up her per cent's worth. Even when she thinks she has been hogging the conversation. scrutiny afterwards shows she spoke only around 30 per cent of the time.

She won't be manipulated. “They can't use 'bitch' to pull me into line as they could have done when I was 25."

She's 37. “Instead of pushing me back into my place, it serves, as a reinforcement. When someone says ‘You're a bitch’ I know I’m doing the right thing."

Sounds like a shrew? A front-line stormtrooper in the monstrous regiment?

She is a feminist, but calls herself “a closet heterosexual." She has been living with the same fellow’ for six years.

"Most of my friends haven’t met him. I've no' wish to make him an honorary woman."

Every morning she cooks his breakfast. “It’s my vulnerability ... but I do it because it’s not expected of me."

Men who live with feminists are very special, she says.

■ She is an Australian, with a multitude of degrees and diplomas. now teaching women's studies at the University of London.

She edits “Women's Studies International Quarterly" and writes books. At present she is working on "women of Ideas." a book about the buried generations of women thinkers. Her most recent book. "Man Made Language," has recently been published in Britain. Men. she says, have encoded words and these contain an inherent bias to silence women and enshrine male supremacy.

She is a passionate egalitarian, appalled by statistics like: women do four-fifths of the world’s work, earn onetenth of the world's salaries and own one per cent of the world's wealth. How does this relate to language? To her it's all about power.

Consider male and female titles, and how the female ones have been downgraded.

King OK. queen now has added homosexual meaning; sir OK. dame has pantomime link; master OK. mistress overt sexual meaning; courtier OK, courtesan now only sexual meaning. Why is there no word for man ’ talk equivalent to chatter, natter, prattle, nag, bitch, whine and gossip? Why is there no four-letter shock word for rape as there is for sexual intercourse? Rape is a respectacle safe word, perfectly acceptable in polite conversation.

There is no taboo word to express the force, the trauma of rape. Why? Could it be because the victim’s experience is outside male awareness?

Consider the. use of he/ man to stand for mankind. You think it automatically includes women?

How about this quote: “H /ien the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed rhe mighty brain that liras to di.stingui.sh her .so sharply frr>m other

species. ” WHiat about the difference between the meaning of the words emasculate, to take away maleness, and effeminate? Take the adjective castrating as applied to women. "She's a castrating female." It's other men who castrate men, says Dale, rarely women. Dale Spender says because men encoded the language, "defined the topic" she calls it. it’s deficient in women’s meanings. There’s no word, she says, which expresses being in the wrong just because you're a woman. “There's no word that sums up the fact- that you start from a position of "not being an authority, not even on yourself." She believes when a word is needed, the language moves to meet it.

Take sexism. First recorded in print in 1972 in an American college magazine. By 1973 in general use. Sometimes old words are

given new meanings. She cites spinning, used to represent the journey feminists are making and taken from spin and . spinster, evoking the whirling movement of creation. A non-starter for me. but who knows?

“Almost all our disciplines have founding fathers, very few have founding mothers." Psychology she regards with particular horror: a subject where a sexually healthy male is defined as “independent, assertive" and an unhealthy male as “passive, dependent." the very terms applied to women. And what, she asks, of the definitions of impotence and frigidity. Impotence is described in terms of inability, something caused by women. Frigidity as something wrong with, a failure in women.

Academics attack her, saying this is not linguistics, biit that, she says emphatically and triumphantly, is just her point. Linguistics is a male study of the language encoded by men. They have this notion that they can say things more quickly and say them better. But they are saying what words mean to them. They think women haven’t come to terms with the world they live in. She started her research into language and sex “by doing stupid things like counting adjectives. I wasted a lot of time. Then I realised I had to look at people’s assumptions.

"Why do they think women’s language is deficient? Why was there such a big hassle in England about women announcers on the 8.8. C.? Who talks more? Who interrupts more?"

Her credo is now clear. "We need a language which constructs the reality of women's autonomy, women's strength, women's power. With such a language we will not be a muted group."