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From: nerad@closus.DEC
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re:  inter-sexual undertones
Message-ID: <7008@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Apr-84 12:09:10 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.7008
Posted: Tue Apr 10 12:09:10 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Apr-84 07:24:40 EST
Organization: DEC Engineering Network
Lines: 79

!libation...  (Happy birthday, Skia!)

Larry Welsch writes:

"To be interested in what a colleague you are working with is doing and to act 
that way [looking interested, smiling even if bored] is not "woman approving 
of man."  To act interested if you are not is phony.  This holds for all 
interpersonal relationships regardless of the sexes involved.
...
"The problem with acting differently than you feel is that you will eventually 
be found out as a phony.  Then you will become the manipulated person as 
opposed to the manipulator."



I don't know about the rest of the people on the net, but I do not consider 
being pleasant to people in the best way I know how to be "phony."  I consider 
myself to be in good touch with my own feelings, but also well enough adjusted 
to realize that my true emotions--whether they be joy, anger, or boredom--are 
not usually appropriate to a business context.  

If I come in to work in the morning feeling like my world is falling apart,
and show that to every individual in the office, I am not being phony, but I
AM being unprofessional.  It is not in the realm of business interactions with
people who are not also my friends for me to impinge upon their mood and thier
work with details from my personal life.  You can not work with your heart on 
your sleeve.

If I am bored, but I need to go and get information from someone who I know is 
a dull presenter of information, I am not about to walk in and say (in words 
or actions) "You bore me to tears, and I don't really want to talk to you, but 
you have some stuff I have to pick up on for my Thursday meeting.  Get it out, 
and make it quick."  I am going to be pleasant, encourage him to communicate 
more effectively by asking questions at relevant points, and leave us both 
with a feeling that something useful has been accomplished.

Likewise (and this saddens me more) if something happens with which I am
overjoyed, I can not dance down the hallways, jumping up and down and hugging
people who I know would care about the good news, whether or not they are
people with which I would feel free to act that way out of the office. 

I behave in SIMILAR manner with the women here.  I make an effort to be
consistantly pleasant, giving positive feedback, and conserving strong
emotional responses for the times when they will have the most effect.  I use
the cues of women-women cultural contexts in my interaction with women.  I use
the cues of women-men with men, with a sprinkling of specific men-men just to
make points.  This is not my only rule for interaction, though.  Most people
in this office are part of a greater American/New England/Business/Intellectual
/High Technology cultural set.  This cultural set governs the wide majority of
interaction, and is for the most part not sex specific.  I was making the
point that I am willing, and consider myself a discriminating enough judge of
situations to use this skill responsibly, without exploiting people. (Remember
when the word "discriminating" could have positive reactions in people?  It
really only means capable of distinguishing between things.  "Criticism" has a
similar problem in common usage.) 

Perhaps I am about to be branded a sexist, but I believe that treating all
persons as persons does not preclude treating them in consideration of their
sub-culture and its cues, whether that sub-culture is women's, men's, jewish,
moslem, christian, italian, urban, rural north, rural south...  This does not
mean discriminating AGAINST OR FOR a person for their cultural orientation,
but only trying to effectively communicate with them in their own context. 

We are all people, but we are NOT all the same.  It is valuable to preserve
the richness of culture where it is not damaging.  The question we really seem
to be running into is one that is common in the women's movement:  Is it
possible to treat each individual without regard to that person's sex without
treating each person as a sexless individual? 

Since neither men's nor women's culture is right for all people, can we excise
the harmful parts of each, and preserve them; or are we going to have to
impose a synthetic androgynous culture which denies cultural differences
between men and women? 


    			If a question looks easy, you don't understand it.
    			Shava Nerad
    			Telematic Systems (@DEC Ed. Svcs.)
    			{decvax, allegra}!decwrl!rhea!closus!nerad