Yesterday, excited about there being only three more teaching days, I was chatting with the man who oversees the Service Centre at school. (I often get there long before class starts, leave home early to miss the traffic congestion, prefer to hang out at school than in a car!) I was telling him that my two classes this semester are so very different. It has been a good term, good students. But one class is very talkative, the other painfully quiet. The two classes balance each other out. With the group that is so quiet, hardly talks at all, I’ve tried every trick I know to engage discussion and nothing has worked: breaking up into small groups, calling on them individually to choose another work to discuss, working together, etc. The other class is so verbal that I have to limit discussion time. They are a delight to teach, for sure. The Service Centre man, Dave, asked me the makeup of the class, how many males, how many females. So I counted up: more than the usual, maybe one to three in a class of twenty. (The makeup of the College is about three males to seven females.) Both these classes are half and half: half male, half female. And the quiet class is a much younger group, being Intro Figure. The other class, Intermediate Figure, has had more time to adjust to the give and take of art critiques. And maybe it is quite simply the group dynamics.
Dave said it’s the hormones keeping them from talking, not wanting to expose themselves to the enemy, the enemy being other males. An interesting theory. If so, the male competitive nature has backfired here, limiting the learning process because of their “natural” protectiveness toward their own vulnerability.
The differences between the sexes has always been a pet subject for me. My children have always been able to have close friends of the opposite sex. And their partners are their best friends. I always envied them, their ease with gender differences. It was not the way I was taught to see the opposite sex. But one that makes so much more sense. I do now have one very close male friend and also know some men I would call friends, men I can talk to, who can talk openly to me.
Liberating women from years of repression, prejudiced situations, and subservience has been a good thing in many ways. So now a woman does not have to be like a man to succeed. Maybe. Although that is still an idea that is percolating for women. But I feel it has been hard in other ways, especially on men. Too many women feel that men have to change, AND they have to change and be what women want them to be, more like women. So this can make some women very demanding, and rejecting, of men. Maybe all these qualities were there before and women are just more open about it, expressing it more openly. It certainly hasn't made it easier for either sex.
One bonus of an art school situation is that it is expected that men be sensitive and aware of feelings. But perhaps Dave is right, the male competitive drive is still strong and can be inhibiting when it comes to communicating feelings and perceptions about something as intimate as creativity.
Posted by leya at April 14, 2005 09:08 AMI was teaching a fiction class last summer where one of my students, a woman, was writing from the first-person point of view of a male former rock star. A fellow student, a hyperactive screenwriter, commented on her scenes among two male friends. "Straight men's interaction -- your best guideline is to think of male homophobia." I've never forgotten that comment: when I see the awkward half-hugs, punches on shoulders, reluctance to express out-and-out enthusiasm, I flash back to Mark's extremely matter of fact observation.
Like you, I'd at first think artists are "different." But maybe that just adds a need to compensate, like my friend Barry Wallenstein, who had to fight the sense of his family that poetry was for wimps. Does this feel like a piece of the puzzle, too?
Posted by: Chris at April 28, 2005 12:25 PM