There is a young woman I've had class with a few times during the last three years who is obviously very intelligent. She makes good points in discussion and has a knack for using good examples to help illustrate her points. And yet, any time this student makes a point which might be even mildly controversial or up for debate, she ends her statement by saying, "I mean yeah I don't know."
This seems to be part of a habit among women our age of apologizing for everything. We are constantly saying things like, "Oh sorry, can I just..." or simply uttering "sorry" as an almost automatic response.
This apologetic activity drives me crazy. Hearing a student diminish all her points with a penitential "I don't know" is enough to make me want to start carrying a pair of pom poms around in my backpack and pull them out to yell "Be Aggressive! Be-Be Aggressive," any time this happens.
I just don't understand this tendency of so many female students to purposefully undermine their own authority. Why do we feel the need to do this? Why do so many young women have issues with just saying what they think and leaving it at that? Well I've had enough of it.
Lately, I've even taken to half-yelling "No you're not!" whenever one of my roommates apologizes for something which merits no "I'm sorry." More often than not, when they are saying this to me the situation is not one in which there is anything to feel fault for.
From my Psych 101 class and a past SWAG elective, I remember the general psychoanalytic reasons for these reactions. Even today, women are raised to be more polite and non-confrontational - it's one of the reasons we are so famous for our adolescent passive aggression. But I still don't think this is a good excuse for always begging forgiveness.
As my generation graduates from college, we are entering a world in which women are constantly gaining ground in higher education and the workforce. However, I don't see how we ever expect to shatter the glass ceiling if we are constantly cutting down our own authority with nervous apologies. As Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich first wrote famously in 1976, "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
True, the examples of "sorries" and "I don't knows" I see so frequently now are not always attached to moments of important decision-making. The young woman I mentioned may be undercutting herself in class discussion, but for now it is only her grade which may suffer. This will not always be the case. How can we expect to assert authority at important moments if we can't even do it for minor arguments now?
Although I hardly claim full immunity to this bad habit, I think I've grown up less prone to it because I take to heart two important pieces of advice from a man's perspective - my father's perspective to be exact. From a young age, my dad has always told me, sometimes to his detriment, "to question authority." Never assume that a superior is right and you are wrong just because you see them as your superior. In conjunction with this, the second part of Dad's advice is: "When it's time to start throwing bricks, start throwing bricks." Of course this doesn't mean you should literally start dismantling the walkway any time you want to make a statement. Instead, my dad's point is that your voice should always be heard, and if you need to assert yourself more strongly to be heard, then do it.
Just because we are the "fairer sex" doesn't mean we have to keep shying away from confrontation. As my classmate has proven, we have worthy arguments - we just need to say it like we mean it.
Katie's column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.mcnally@cavalierdaily.com.
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