Playing the Game

"An amazingly high percentage of men, with absolute honesty, are astonished when they find that the verbal attacks they've carried out in the courtroom or at the conference are resented by a woman on the receiving end. THEY ARE NOT PRETENDING, THEY TRULY DO NOT UNDERSTAND. "Males learn very early that verbal confrontations are part of the necessary activity activity of their careers. They learn to admire the skilled verbal infighter, to keep track of the "one for you and one for me" scores as the confrontations go along, and they do not take any of this personally. (The man who doesn't learn this is the man who gets passed over again and again while less able people are promoted over his head.)

"Women are bewildered when they see two men who have just spent twenty minutes trading the sort of vicious insults asscociated with lifelong hatred go off to lunch together as if nothing happened. Men are equally bewildered when they find that the woman they just went through the same process with won't go to lunch because she's angy. They see it as roughly equivalent to refusing to go lunch with someone because you were just whipped at checkers."

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - Suzette Haden Elgin
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