Something I can remember doing a long time ago is "giving my unvarnished opinion" about certain things and this almost invariably boiled down to talking trash about someone. I don't recall doing this publicly but I do recall doing it via private email exchanges with people I did not know well and being befuddled that it wasn't well received.
I felt like I was showing them I trusted them or something like that. I felt like I was treating them like part of my inner circle or something and they should be honored or something.
I'm pretty sure this is a gender difference and I feel confident it's about how men and women are socialized differently and not something "genetic." I think women just often don't learn that interacting with "the public" fundamentally works different from private/personal relationships.
I'm not the only one.
I've seen a woman who supposedly had a serious career and experience dealing with the public trash talk someone at a public meeting. The guys were losing their minds and trying to figure out how to get her to SHUT UP and she was nattering on and acting like "I don't know what your problem is. You KNOW it's TRUE."
And she did it more than once.
So sometimes the guys do try to tell women "You just can't DO that in public" and we just don't get it. We have some horrible blind spot and have no idea what their problem is.
We seem to not get that if you are saying it publicly it's not enough for YOU, as an individual, to be smart and know what you are talking about and be "trustworthy." It needs to be something you can reasonably prove and if it could harm someone's public reputation, there needs to be a really compelling reason to be saying it.
"It's true and you know it" is not sufficient. What I know and what I can prove are two different things.
Women more often than men seem to not get that talking trash about someone in public -- including one-on-one to someone you don't really know well -- undermines your own trustworthiness and harms other people. Women seem inclined to feel like "But if I can't tell you the bad things about a person, how will we ever protect ourselves against bad people?"
I don't know how to delineate why this matters or convincingly argue that it does and for me this is related to larger issues that concern me that are difficult to talk about. For now I think I just want to make the observation that this seems to go on, that I'm not the only intelligent, educated woman who seems to be slow on the uptake about this kind of stuff and that men do, sometimes, TRY to tell women "You can't DO that (in the public sphere)!" and we fairly often natter on, oblivious, and keep doing it.
I felt like I was showing them I trusted them or something like that. I felt like I was treating them like part of my inner circle or something and they should be honored or something.
I'm pretty sure this is a gender difference and I feel confident it's about how men and women are socialized differently and not something "genetic." I think women just often don't learn that interacting with "the public" fundamentally works different from private/personal relationships.
I'm not the only one.
I've seen a woman who supposedly had a serious career and experience dealing with the public trash talk someone at a public meeting. The guys were losing their minds and trying to figure out how to get her to SHUT UP and she was nattering on and acting like "I don't know what your problem is. You KNOW it's TRUE."
And she did it more than once.
So sometimes the guys do try to tell women "You just can't DO that in public" and we just don't get it. We have some horrible blind spot and have no idea what their problem is.
We seem to not get that if you are saying it publicly it's not enough for YOU, as an individual, to be smart and know what you are talking about and be "trustworthy." It needs to be something you can reasonably prove and if it could harm someone's public reputation, there needs to be a really compelling reason to be saying it.
"It's true and you know it" is not sufficient. What I know and what I can prove are two different things.
Women more often than men seem to not get that talking trash about someone in public -- including one-on-one to someone you don't really know well -- undermines your own trustworthiness and harms other people. Women seem inclined to feel like "But if I can't tell you the bad things about a person, how will we ever protect ourselves against bad people?"
I don't know how to delineate why this matters or convincingly argue that it does and for me this is related to larger issues that concern me that are difficult to talk about. For now I think I just want to make the observation that this seems to go on, that I'm not the only intelligent, educated woman who seems to be slow on the uptake about this kind of stuff and that men do, sometimes, TRY to tell women "You can't DO that (in the public sphere)!" and we fairly often natter on, oblivious, and keep doing it.