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From: randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: The Power of Listening?
Message-ID: <8907221627.AA27245@cognito.>
Date: 23 Jul 89 16:10:34 GMT
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu


I'm importing the following from soc.men, because I'd like some
comments from the theoreticians here.  It is p.f. (politically
f**cked), but may nonetheless be worth pursuing.

It started out with the following from Charleen:

  I was browsing Printer's Ink the other night and leafed through a copy
  of _The God in Everyman_ (written, obviously, by the same author who
  wrote _The Goddess in Everywoman_).  Has anyone read it?  Would they
  care to offer a review?

  Anyway, the author (a woman) was commenting that the men she talked to
  while researching the book found it easier to talk to her than to other
  men.  She also offered some statistics, which I don't recall, that
  suggest that men prefer women therapists, when possible.

  Do you men find this to be true, that women are easier to talk to?

I posted, saying yes, and included the following quote from Foucault:

  . . . one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe
  that all these voices which have spoken so long in our
  civilization--repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one
  is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has
  forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
  thinking--are speaking to us of freedom.
    -- Michael Foucault, *The History of Sexuality*, volume I.

Which mutated in my mind, and gave rise to the following hypothesis:

  In our culture, listening, and demanding confession, are "feminine"
  techniques of power.

To evaluate this hypothesis, the following hypotheses could be examined:

  Listening is part of "feminine" interpersonal power tactics.  Can we
    observe such tactics?  Can we find recognizable behaviors expected
    of women of our culture which fill such a slot (various of the
    transactional analysts' games might usefully be examined)?

  Listening is part of a broader deployment of power; a global social
    pattern individual behavior which is not planned by individuals
    like those which G Fitch recently discussed.  Likewise, can we
    find candiates for such a pattern among women; can we show their
    existence and uncover their history?

  Listening is part of the deployment of power characteristic of those
    denied authority by prevailing social patterns.  Can we show, for
    instance, that US blacks had or still have such a pattern?

Anyone care to take up the challenge?  Anyone know if there's been any
research already done which confirms or denies this?  I am unsure that
this leads anywhere, but I'm interested enough to post it & look for
follow-ups.  Besides which, who needs to be politically correct?

++Randolph Fritz  sun!randolph || randolph@sun.com