David Riesman's Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy by Keith Kerr B. Garrick Harden Marcus Aldredge

Author:Keith Kerr, B. Garrick Harden, Marcus Aldredge [Keith Kerr, B. Garrick Harden, Marcus Aldredge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Marriage & Family
ISBN: 9781472428509
Google: 3BpMCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2015-08-28T02:53:09+00:00

Sex and Negativism

Considering this report, one naturally asks (as our code was set up to do) whether there are substantial differences in the sociable styles of the two sexes. There is certainly a world of difference between this luncheon, with its delicacy, and the raucous quality of the student “beer bust” (at the bottom of the optimism index) or the “Post-Departmental” party of graduate students discussed earlier. At these latter occasions, and others high in negativism, nobody but nobody is given a chance to perform before a listening group—even to perform in a nihilistic way. The conversation (as borne out by tape recordings) is choppy, in a Hemmingway-like vein (though without his concealed artistry). Those who do manage to hold the floor under such conditions tend to be somewhat autistic and to harangue, but this in turn provokes competitive response: baiting, teasing, challenging, or simply interrupting. Leads are thrown out but not picked up; people act as if to listen to one another would be a kind of passivity.

To the anthropologically minded, our account may sound as if one social class—or age-grade—is criticizing the “bad manners” of another class or generation. However, to some extent, our criteria spring from the experience of the participants we observed: the parties where the participation-structure of performers competing for the floor joined a negativistic tone appeared to give people neither relief nor the feeling of having touched others or social reality. For these individuals—virtually all college-educated—were not lower class people who had not learned middle class manners; rather, they were middle class people who felt they would be freer without formal standards for sociable conduct.

The fear of passivity is, of course, more characteristic of men, and the baiting and teasing would seem to reflect a machismo-like male vanity. Yet our overall totals do not show substantial differences in sociable style between men and women. This may reflect the crudity of our coding; it surely in part reflects the nature of our population, in which equal position for women is taken for granted, and in which many of the women were professionals in their own right. In the overlapping circles of social science, Jewish groups, and metropolitan locale, strong polarizations in sex-style tend to be at a minimum. No effort is made to formalize the difference by a postprandial single-sex coffee break; this occurs only in the older and more established groups—groups where, on the whole, women did tend to contribute less and to take a somewhat more muted part. In the middle class groups of middle or apprentice occupational level, there is often a de facto separation of the men and women, the former talking not really shop but office gossip, while the latter discuss children and domestic affairs (their “shop”), but tone differs less than topic. And many topics in our sample were equally accessible to both sexes: politics, for example, both local and national, which was not at all a monopoly of the men, and psychological questions which were not a monopoly of the women.

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