the walker's version of slut-shaming

I have friends who seem to like shaming me. They send me articles about people who have walked farther, and in far tougher conditions, than I walk. The longest I've ever walked in a single stretch was about 35 miles, roughly from Troutdale to Cascade Locks, Oregon.* But along comes my friend John McCrarey with an article about a guy who walked 46 miles in way-below-freezing temperatures. My buddy Tom, just piling on, sends me an article about a man who's been walking 21 miles a day (close to 50,000 steps), for years, to commute to and from work because he can't afford a car.

Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown professor who works in sociolinguistics, once wrote a popular book on the differences between male and female discourse titled You Just Don't Understand! In that book, she contended that the essential difference between the ways men and women talk is cultural: even siblings of different sexes, brought up in the exact same family, will be "enculturated" into different universes of discourse as they're molded into their gender roles. For women, Tannen says, this comes down to engaging in "rapport talk," i.e., talk whose purpose is to build relationship bonds and a sense of community. For men, it's "report talk," which is basically the mode I'm writing in now: I'm the speaker, this is my podium, and I'm telling you something while you listen politely.

Rapport-talk is anti-status: it's about sharing, integration, bonding, and the cultivation of a sense of unity. Report-talk, by contrast, is pro-status and hierarchical by nature: in a group of guys, it could be, for example, that one guy has the floor, and he's regaling everyone with the latest story about his best friend's hilariously dangerous antics, and the other guys yield the floor to him until he's done "reporting," at which point another guy has the floor. Because male discourse is focused on status and hierarchy, Tannen argues, men often see the world in terms of problem-solving, in part because solving a problem puts the "helpee" in the helper's debt.** Another way in which status inserts itself into a conversational situation is the phenomenon of one-upsmanship. "You worked fifteen hours yesterday? That's nothing: I worked three days straight—no breaks, no sleep, no nothing, before I collapsed."

I suspect that something like this one-upsmanship is the subtext for why my male friends keep sending me these articles about people who have outdone me in the walking department. "Twenty thousand steps? That's nothing—look at this dude who did 46 miles in thirty-below weather!" (The article notes that the guy did the walk in part because he'd had too much to drink. That's the most extreme case of "Walk it off!" I've ever heard of.)

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*I just measured out the distance from Troutdale to Cascade Locks using the ruler function on Google Maps, and Maps says the distance is over 40 miles. Hmmm.

**Tannen contends that this difference in perception of social situations is at the root of many unnecessary misunderstandings between men and women. A woman might, for example, complain about how stressful her day was, prompting the man to suggest ways that she could improve her future days by eliminating stressors. The woman then reacts with resentment: she hadn't recounted her stressful day because she was looking for help in solving a problem; she was merely communicating her feelings in an attempt to seek out empathy. The man, for his part, is surprised and annoyed by the woman's resentment: he was, after all, only trying to help. But help isn't what the woman wanted: she just wanted understanding.

In movies, the classic example of this situation comes from "White Men Can't Jump," starring Rosie Perez, Woody Harrelson, and Wesley Snipes. There's a moment in the movie when Gloria (Perez) tells her boyfriend Billy (Harrelson) that she's got a dry mouth. Billy immediately gets up and gets her a glass of water: from his perspective, there's a problem to be solved. But Gloria rejects the water, saying: "See, if I'm thirsty, I don't want a glass of water—I want you to sympathize. I want you to say, 'Gloria, I too know what it feels like to be thirsty. I too have had a dry mouth.' I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness."

Perhaps because she's a woman, Dr. Tannen expends more effort, in her book, on explaining the woman's side of things. I'll note on behalf of my fellow men, though, that there are many times in life in which the mere sharing of feelings isn't enough when you're faced with an actual, practical problem. At such times, the problem itself needs to be examined, attacked, and solved. If a tidal wave is on its way to my village, it's not enough to share my wife's sense of impending loss—we need to get the hell out of the village!


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