‘I’ve Never Heard a Man Say That’

I haven’t gone on a rant in a while, but this one truly deserves it

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As it says right there in my profile descriptor, I dispel erroneous cultural narratives with research driven stories here on Medium. The pool of these false stories that “everybody knows” but that are actually incorrect is surprisingly large. There’s so much to choose from, that frequently I focus on something I’ve heard a lot about recently online.

As just one example, a couple of years ago there was a lot of talk in some circles about how men are supposedly designed by nature to be promiscuous, and the way we know that is that a man could “in theory” father 100 children in 100 days. I wrote a story explaining how although this might be theoretically possible, a man was more likely to be killed by a falling meteor than he was to actually accomplish anything remotely close to this.

[embed]No, You Absolutely Cannot Impregnate 100 Women in 100 Days The science behind this male promiscuity mythmedium.com

The very first sentence of the essay was, There’s this weird myth going around related to how men are evolutionarily designed to “spread their seed.” Nevertheless, one of the comments, left by a man, essentially amounted to, “But, I’ve never heard anyone say that. Who exactly is asserting this?” Sigh…

This happens rather more often than it should, and I’d like to address that now. Just because you, and especially you as a man, have never heard of a particular assertion, doesn’t mean that I’m making it up. It just means that, for whatever reason, you simply haven’t heard it. Maybe we have different experiences, or different algorithms. Maybe you shouldn’t assume that only things in your conscious awareness are real.

And aside from the fact that I noted in the first line that it was a weird myth that was currently making the rounds, I also said in the story that Darwin hypothesized that males of any species are randy and promiscuous and that females are choosy and sexually reticent. I then went on to mention the infamous Bateman fruit fly study that ostensibly supported Darwin’s theory, albeit with methodology so bad that the study has never been successfully replicated.

[embed]‘Males Are Naturally More Promiscuous Than Choosy Females’ The junk science story from the 1940s that just won’t go awaymedium.com

So, it’s not that no information about this theory was provided. It’s more that this guy had never heard it before and so it must not be a real thing in his mind. I find this rather often, and sorry to say, it seems to always be men who are saying it.

Sometimes this comment comes as a result of assertions that are directed primarily at women — explaining rather outright why a man may not have heard it before. I’ve had many, many interactions with guys online who feel the need to assert that men are stronger than women. Factually speaking, this isn’t universal, and is only on average, but some guys are very attached to this belief. I suppose its because they want to reinforce the patriarchal idea that men and women are so different that they are almost a different species from each other. Maybe they feel the need to be inherently “superior” by some metric.

I don’t honestly know exactly what this assertion is truly about for them, but nonetheless, I have heard it quite often, from a wide variety of men. That other men may not have heard this assertion is completely irrelevant. All it indicates is that they simply haven’t been in conversations where a man felt the need to prove that men are always stronger than women.

The definition of privilege is not that your life is rosy compared to someone else in a different demographic. It’s that you don’t have to grapple with or face things that other people often do have to contend with. I don’t go around questioning the lived experiences of people in other demographics because I know that what an economically secure older white woman encounters in her everyday life may be quite different than what someone else who is not that might face.

[embed]Examples of Privilege For those who find that word inflammatorymedium.com

I’ve never been followed around a store to make sure that I’m not going to steal anything, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t believe other people in other demographics haven’t experienced that. Why is this so hard to comprehend? A large part of empathy is believing how someone else experiences their life and the things that have happened to them — even if you have not personally witnessed or verified it.

Not that long ago, I learned about something called “ritual opposition.” This term was first coined by the linguist, Deborah Tannen, and it indicates a conversational style that some people (most often men) use to verbally spar and test ideas, perhaps as a kind of “devil’s advocate.” It is not necessarily intended to be aggressive or rude, but more as a way to negotiate social hierarchies and refine ideas.

However, if you’ve been socially conditioned to build consensus, and not to spar for authority, it lands as somewhere between condescencion and surliness. In other words, most women do not understand this style of engagement and they don’t like it — particularly around something they have personally experienced.

If you’re in a demographic that has historically been characterized as less logical, less intelligent, and less authoritative, having somebody question your assertions about incidences out of your own life, does not come across as “friendly sparring.”

[embed]When a Woman Speaks Authoritatively It Shuts Down Some Men’s Brains On ‘role incredulity’ and the authority gapmedium.com

Most of the time, “ritual opposition” is not being done consciously, and in some environments it may indeed be an acceptable way to refine ideas. This does not apply to a woman describing something that happened to her or a conversation that she had that you were not privy to. It certainly does not apply to someone with academic expertise that you do not possess.

When I’ve worked hard to provide research, citations, and other documentation, in addition to my own lived experience of what I’m discussing, some guy saying, “But I’ve never heard a man say that,” is not welcome. It’s not friendly jousting or a legitimate search for more information. It comes across as condescencion from someone who is blinded by their own privilege, and maybe even their own sense of importance.

Just because you’ve not experienced something, doesn’t mean that nobody has. Just because you’ve never heard something, doesn’t mean that nobody has heard it, and just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean that nobody knows it.

If you’d like to be better received by someone with a different set of experiences, or by someone with expertise that you don’t have, I recommend double checking your questions or statements before you make them. And this goes for anyone from a different demographic, not just men speaking to women.

I don’t actually imagine that having a mini-rant about this topic will magically result in me (or anyone else) no longer being subject to it, but sometimes it just feels good to blow off steam. And, maybe, just maybe, one or two people will be a bit more thoughtful about how they engage with others — online or in person.

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