Page 28 - MidWeek - Feb 9, 2022

28 MIDWEEK FEBRUARY 9, 2022
My girlfriends and I were out for drinks. One was talking about her bad day at work and how she found herself apologizing to her boss (though she wasn’t at fault). The conversation turned to how women are constantly saying “I’m sorry” to everyone: boy- friends, parents, strangers at the supermarket. I even apologized to the bartender at one point! Why do wom- en seem to sheepishly apol- ogize, often for no reason? – Not Sorry
The value of “I’m sor- ry” gets seriously watered down when it covers ev- erything from plowing your
Now Sheepishly Playing: Silence Of The Ma’ams
SUV into somebody’s living room to yoohooing the wait- ress: “Sorry, but could I get a fork?”
explains that women, across cultures, are prone to take this precautionary approach — basically the verbal ver- sion of walking on eggshells — in hopes of averting social and physical conflict and avoiding retaliation.
differing physiologies) in or- der “to ensure the survival of their children to adulthood.” For example, males, from boyhood on, specialize in de- fense: fighting the enemy and protecting the babymakers of the species.
fect, right now in 2022, for solving our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ mating and sur- vival problems and often a mismatch with the realities of our lives today.
behave a certain way is not a mandate. Knowing you’ ve got the female emotions soft- ware package, you might preplan to be more direct: Practice asking for what you want plainly, without apolo- getic airbags, and then do it: both in conversation and by pruning the “Excuse me for existing”-speak from your texts and emails.
Because an apology is an admission that we’ve wronged somebody, the “pre- crime” weenie-ism above seems to make no sense.
Girls and women use more tentative, hedgy-wedgy lan- guage, front-loading even the most innocuous requests with meekspeak like “I normally wouldn’t ask” and “I hate to bother you.”
Now, maybe you’re think- ing, “Hello? It’s 2022, and dudes are trotting off to Tech- broland with an iPad, not a spear.” Well, yeah. Unfortu- nately, they — and all of us — are stuck with an outdated psychological operating sys- tem.
Ancestral women who sur- vived to pass on their genes to women living today were likely those who opted for low-risk ways of going for what they want: using hints, hedges and manipulation instead of assertive direct “asks.”
It’s not like the waitress was hired to read gripping crime novels, and how dare you tear her away from find- ing out who the real killer is when you could just eat your polenta with your hands?
Because boys and men tend to be direct, women’s mealymouthing is — unfair- ly — stigmatized as a defect.
Whether a woman is a mother or plans to be is im- material: “Even if a woman never has a child, she still sees the world through a dif- ferent lens than a man,” ob- serves Benenson.
Eventually, however, asserting yourself should (hopefully) become more of a norm for you.
However, “sorry” isn’t always an acknowledgment of “I did something awful to you.” Sometimes it’s a pre- emptive measure: “Don’t do anything awful to me.” Psy- chologist Joyce Benenson
Benenson explains that men and women evolved to have different roles and mo- tivations (in line with their
As evolutionary psychol- ogists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it: “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” with “Stone Age priorities” — meaning per-
That said, a propensity to
Chances are this will amp up your self-respect as well as others’ respect for you — probably because being around you no longer feels like being beaten to death with an olive branch.
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