This week we read a short piece by Deborah Tannen called “There Is No Unmarked Woman”.  Tannen discusses how men and women are judged differently based on their appearance, making her case that while men find it easy to go under the radar, thus going unmarked, women have no such option.  Tannen strives to write scientifically and professionally, and to seem not to choose a “side” in the battle, but she shows how she seems destined to fail in even that attempt to be unmarked, revealing that her points about how men and women are marked ascend to levels far higher and more intricate than clothing and hairstyles.

Tannen uses an anecdote about how once when a talk-show host demanded to know why a male audience member thought that Tannen was “male-bashing”, even though the audience member admitted that Tannen’s descriptions of women and men were “exactly” (Tannen) accurate, the man answered, “Because she’s a woman, and she’s saying things about men.” (Tannen)  Tannen references facts presented by a male biologist that support her points, and remarks on how because he’s a male, she doubts that anyone questions his right to talk about men and women, even as he agrees with her neutrality and goes beyond it, saying how men should be marked, not women.  Tannen discusses how her scientific credibility is reduced by her womanhood, especially as it pertains to matters comparing men and women. 

The prejudices Tannen notices about how people think of men as having more rights to talk about men/women issues than women do contrast starkly with the prejudices exhibited by our class as we discussed Tannen’s piece.  When Nate (importantly, a male) proposed his idea that women are marked because of other women, not because of men – who he says don’t notice all of the things women worry about being marked for nearly as much as women themselves do – there was a general outcry from numerous females in the classroom, who proclaimed quite emphatically how wrong Nate was.  A while later, Prakhya (importantly, a female) said something that, while not matching Nate’s words verbatim, had a conclusion – men don’t notice all of the things women worry about being marked for nearly as much as women themselves do – that seemed identical to Nate’s conclusion.  This should, if gender bias were not at play, have resulted in a new outcry about how erroneous the conclusion was.  However, with the old conclusion now coming from a new source, a female, all the women in the classroom did not clamor in protest, but instead nodded in agreement.

It would seem that the women in our class, at least, believe that women have a much greater right to discuss the subject of gender differences than men do.  I wonder how many people reading this are women, how many are men, and what they think of my point of view.  Ask yourself, whoever you are, this question: “How did I (that is to say, the reader of this post) interpret these opinions?”  Now, more importantly, ask yourself, “How would I (again you, the reader) interpret this post if I was told that it was not written by Michael, but by a female in the class he asked to write it for him, in exchange for writing a post for her blog, to mess with people's biased opinions?”  Not that that’s what happened, of course …