Karky’s Reviews > The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words > Status Update

FINALLY! It FINALLY brings up that the cultures referenced tend to have strict gender roles, and boys placed in "womanly" positions tend to show less "masculine" traits like aggression. "So the patterns that typify women's and men's styles of opposition and conflict are the result of BOTH biology and culture. Pulling these influences apart is impossible. What matters for us is that the pattern is there."

The framing seems to suggest that certain behaviors are set by nature rather than nurtured. I like how the authors points out that women are no less forceful than men, but that it manifests in different ways. Well, testosterone doesn't cause aggression, but it is increased in contexts like competition which lends itself to aggression… unless channeled differently. Culture may condition how these are expressed.

I'm uncomfortable with this whole part about boys vs girls. It starts off with a disclaimer about trends vs normality, which is good. But then it goes into how boys and girls will naturally self segregate when given the choice, and I don't know if that's true without cultures that divide genders into a binary system from birth. I wish the author stressed how some of these behaviors may be attributed to the culture.

1. I wonder how this would have been written during the Obama and Trump presidencies. 2. I didn't feel the author delved far enough into the Right's resistance to compromise. I felt like she could have gone further back into US political history to better understand how we got to this point. 3. No mention of redlining and other dubious practices? 4. I didn't know about fake pollsters spreading disinformation!

Brings up a good point in how the language of journalism has changed over time, and created different relationships among the audience using language. Previously, journalists routinely based their writings on a sense of connection with their subjects. Today we see demonizations, encouraging us to feel critical, superior, and distanced from the subjects. It gives the sense of bigger polarization and disconnection.

Our public discourse is filled with military metaphor. Military metaphors train us to view everything in terms of conflict and war; limiting our imagination.

The conviction that there are 2 sides to every story prompts people to dig for an opposing side, leading them to compare facts with baseless fringe theories.

"We love using the word 'debate' was a way of representing issues. The abortion debate, the healthcare debate, the affirmative action debate, even the great backpacking vs car-camping debate. The ubiquity of this word in itself shows our tendency to conceptualize issues in a way that predisposes public discussion to be polarized; framed as two opposing sides that give each other no ground."