"Authoritarian Niceness"

I was held captive in one of those three-hour brainstorming sessions for the student government today that was chaired by an external facilitator that somebody sprang for. It was relatively bearable, but it made me think of an old column by a hilariously chauvanistic and cantankerous male columnist for the New York Post-esque paper in my old home town, worrying that the world had been "wussied up" because arbitrators were being replaced by touchy-feely feminine facilitators. Chauvinism aside, I'm not sure there's much of a difference. Facilitators still boss you around, but do so in much more verbose ways with a rhetoric of wide-eyed openness (e.g., "Okay, so you are all going to explore and brainstorm in the small groups we will assemble, and you will not laugh or snicker at any idea if it is too fanciful and unrealistic, and when the prescribed time period has elapsed, we will reconvene and list all of the ideas that we, collectively, as a group have decided are of greatest importance). I suppose it gives people warm feelings inside to be talked to like they're in preschool again, but the message and directives are the same, regardless of the cultural frames that transmit them.

So, my point is that I'm not sure I totally buy Gilligan's (in)famous dichotomy between "male justice" and "female feeling." Hierarchical directives can be implemented through a "feminine frame", just as kindness and altruism can be filtered through a "stoic male frame." In other words, the medium is not the message.