ABSTRACT
I’ll trade a story with Terry Eagleton. In a recent study of male-female interaction in conversation, Pamela Fishman discovered that men dominated, both by ignoring topics introduced by the women, and by developing topics that they had initiated themselves. As Fishman comments: “We have seen that, at least among intimates in their homes, women raise many more topics than men. They do so because their topics often fail. They fail because the men don’t work interactionally to develop them, whereas the women usually do work at developing topics raised by men. Thus the definition of what are appropriate or inapproriate topics for a conversation is the man’s choice…. Men control topics as much, if not more, by veto as by a positive effort.”1
