>
> And I don't think men should be less voluble, Lawrence, so much as
> women ought to be less uncertain of their ability to say interesting
> things. But there are reasons for these uncertainties...
>
It has been my experience that quite a number of women feel that men
should be less voluble, particularly in public fora: that there is a
finite amount of time for talking, that it is like a pudding, and that
men are gluttons who take more than their fair share. That there is a
special virtue in the kind of listening that one does with one's mouth
shut, preferably nodding encouragingly from time to time, and
comparatively less in the kind of listening that one does as an
interlocutor in active debate.

There is a long-running debate around class and education in this
country, and one of its axes is the connection between academic prowess
and "confidence". Public schools, it is said, instill confidence in
their pupils; and it is this confidence, rather than diligent hard work
or genuine underlying ability that the Top Universities and the world of
Professional Employment tend to value and recognise, so that diligently
hardworking pupils with hidden reserves of genuine underlying ability
who have attended comprehensive schools and therefore lack the
confidence to articulate their authentic academic worth are consistently
denied what is due to them.

I can't altogether make sense of this configuration. I think it is meant
to be about glamour, the glamour that they teach in glamour schools,
which is a sort of elan that rests on the ability to uphold certain
social attitudes - not least a sense of entitlement, of easy familiarity
with things that are "above" other more "ordinary" people. Bourdieu
writes about this very well, and I can see that he has a point: the
ability to write "good", praiseworthy essays in the humanities is one
that I learned very early on as a performative skill, which was only
tangentially related to either thoughtfulness or knowledgeableness about
the supposed subject. Dennis Kay instructed a group of us English
students at Oxford to regard our Finals papers as an opportunity to
demonstrate our rhetorical skills, to put on a kind of show for the
examiners; I don't think he meant that it didn't matter at all what we
had read or how much we knew, but the suggestion seemed to be that one
needn't be too concerned about knowing or having read *everything*. A
modicum of learning would get you through, provided that you could
manage the requisite rhetorical spritz.

There is a counter-narrative to be brought up here, which is the story
of the autodidacts and class interlopers whose intellectual chutzpah is
not an extension of a social confidence based on privilege but (at least
partly) a way of compensating for an otherwise rather disabling sense of
social alienation and inadequacy. Neither this nor the master narrative
is entirely my story, but I identify with it, as I identify various of
my (literary and other) heroes with it. It is maddening to see their
(and, I presume to suggest, my) peculiar and unbalanced kind of
intellectual impetuousness and arrogance confused with the complacent
assumption of cultural ownership that the middle classes take as their
birthright: there is a kind of wilful and expedient political erasure
going on in that confusion, which the English left seems to perpetrate
every time it talks about education. I suspect there is an equivalent
erasure going on in a certain leftist view of discursive gender
politics: what about the smart, diffident, combatative women? Where do
they fit in?

Dominic