I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering of people I didn’t know, who regularly host discussions of thoughtful topics. In a little while I was deep in conversation with two women, one of us Chinese, one of us Brazilian, and we were so relaxed and open together that our peels of laughter attracted a man in a blue linen shirt. He came and joined us, and when the Chinese woman kindly made him part of our intimacy by explaining, we were talking about online dating and what a minefield it is for women, he said, “I wouldn’t know about that, I met my wife before all this happened.”
That is, rather than ask questions and be curious about the rapport which had drawn him, he winched the conversational topic out of our grasp and put it firmly inside his own experience.
In fact he wasn’t just conversing, he was pontificating, complete with didactic finger wagging and pompous tone. Within five minutes the man was doing all the talking as the three of us women supplied what Dale Spender has called ‘housework’. “So how did you meet? Wow, that’s interesting. Gosh!”
I pointed this out, in a friendly tone, thinking that in a group based on thinking, he might be interested to learn something from a perspective he has not considered. Instead he took immediate and lasting offense. “Or,” he said, “it could be that you just have a negative attitude.”
Some men, even whilst literally setting straight a group of women whose discourse they have interrupted and whom they don’t know, cannot bear to be resisted or corrected by any insubordinate females. Their only recourse is, I must hate men. Imagine being so accustomed to civil obedience that any disagreement must be read as hatred.
When I told him that in a group of people of colour talking about the experience of Blackness in a white-dominated world, he would not expect (one hopes) to come into a discussion and begin pontificating about his own experience, he looked blank. “This is no different to any other conversation I have experienced,” he said, and when I said, “Exactly my point,” he didn’t know what I meant.
Eventually the woman to my left, who is from China, graciously took him on so that the remaining two of us could return to our rapport. We talked until she had worked out what she wants to do with her career, having qualified in law in Brazil and her qualifications not considered applicable in Australia. This insight, which was merry and nourishing, arose through the free and open discourse in which strangers respected and made room for each other; if we had submitted without protest to the domineering man, we would have had a less pleasant afternoon and she might not have gained it.