On Thursday, February 10, 2011, carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
I don't think it's appropriate to go into detail, but in general on several articles I have noticed there's a total double standard with comments by males that are quite controversial being ignored while comments by me which other males only *interpret* as being controversial are attacked.
Such double standards are not uncommon and is encountered frequently in Herring' work:
[[ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91.7687&rep=rep...
Finally, an assumption of greater male entitlement -- indeed, a blatant double standard -- is also evident in both samples, in that only male participants are entitled to express themselves freely. Women were labeled "censors" on Paglia-L for expressing concern about the content of Yaqzan's views on date rape, despite the fact that they did not attempt to exclude other views of the situation, and despite the fact that they explicitly conceded the dominant male (and Paglian) position that a free speech violation had occurred.30 Meanwhile, males hypocritically represented themselves as heroic defenders of freedom of expression, even as their behavior showed them to be intolerant of even partial disagreement with their views. When women attempted to resist or critique male tactics, they were technologically and/or discursively silenced.
A double standard is also evident in the #india sample. The three women, st, sm, and rani, were all kicked for alleged violations of language norms: ... However, the channel operators, ViCe and Aatank, also used profanity ... and youth slang ... , and addressed one another in a non-English language -- the difference seemed to be that since they were in a position of power and authority, they were not subject to the same rules. Nor were any other males kicked for language-related violations, consistent with Spender's (1980) observation that men make the rules of language but are themselves exempt from them.
]]
[[ http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/003/2/00328.HTML
Discussion on each of the lists investigated tends to be dominated by a small minority of participants who abuse features of 'men's language' to focus attention on themselves, often at the expense of others. Such abuse, which I term 'adversarial' rhetoric, ranges from gratuitous displays of knowledge to forceful assertions of one's views to elaborate put-downs of others with whom one disagrees. In the two LINGUIST discussions analyzed, 4% and 6% of the participants, respectively (all but one of them male), were responsible for the majority of adversarial rhetoric. This same 4% and 6% also posted the most words (33% and 53% of the total, respectively, or more than eight times the participant average), and thus dominated in AMOUNT as well as in MANNER of participation.
]]
[[ http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/male.resistance.1995.pdf
Judging by some of the messages protesting to this effect, "silencing" for men involves having to think carefully about what they say before they say it, or possibly not saying something that they otherwise would've said. No doubt these men are experiencing in small measure what most women experience as a way of life, nevertheless, in objective terms the men can hardly be said to be silent in the discussion, because they contributed 70% of the words overall.
]]