This is something that I do all the time, but I had no idea it might bug people. If I’m interacting with a married couple, I will address myself to the woman. Even if my business is with the man, I will do everything to include the woman. And I also expect any woman who wants to address my husband in my presence to do this through me.
Obviously, I’m not talking about a dynamic among close friends. This is what I do around strangers and distant acquaintances. I’d see it as very disrespectful if a woman talked to my husband like I wasn’t there. Does anybody else feel this way?
Clarissa's Blog 
My natural inclination (I assume) is to primarily address the one I have business with and include the other as much as politeness (and the other person) indicates is appropriate.
The idea of a person interacting with the opposite sex member of a married couple primarily/exclusively through the same sex member is based on avoiding sexual jealousy and/or tension.
LikeLike
“The idea of a person interacting with the opposite sex member of a married couple primarily/exclusively through the same sex member is based on avoiding sexual jealousy and/or tension.”
Of course. The signal that I’m trying to send is, “This is your property, I’m not interested in it.” 🙂
LikeLike
Yeahhh, I’d be really weirded out either by being treated as my lover’s property or by them being treated as my property. In a situation where someone who really didn’t have much in common with me but had stuff in common with said lover tried to interact with my lover by including me as much as possible, I’d excuse myself out of the conversation, or be ridiculously uncomfortable if excusing myself politely wasn’t possible.
Some contributing factors to this is a) I don’t give a shit about sexual/romantic fidelity since I feel like there’s nobody that can replace me in all my precise character quirks, so any relationships anyone I care about have with people who aren’t me aren’t affecting me in the slightest past the time/emotional energy for me issue (and if I feel I’m not being paid enough time/energy I’ll complain way before anyone starts paying attention or time to someone else), b) I am really uncomfortable with the thought of being emotionally available to people because I have to, or with the thought of others being emotionally available to me because they have to and c) whatever deal I have with any of my lovers, I have it with them, not with any uninvolved third party I never really talked to. There’s this idea in my society that men are barely sapient and if any of them cheats on a woman (however you might define cheating) it’s the other woman’s fault and I hate this with the fury with a thousand suns. If I believed men were such moral imbeciles, I’d do my best not to interact with any of them at all, but I don’t believe so, and I don’t see how a stranger could break rules me and my lover had agreed upon without my lover’s enthusiastic agreement.
LikeLike
Does this have to be a gender issue? In a conversation with others, does anyone like to be ignored? If I’m talking with a couple, I’ll make eye contact with both even if the words are primarily for just one of them. To get a message across, I don’t want anyone feeling uncomfortable or left out regardless of gender or marital status.
Its the old words of advice that people seem to forget easily: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
LikeLike
“Its the old words of advice that people seem to forget easily: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.””
LikeLike
So if a woman had business with your husband (let’s say she had to make an appointment with him) and looked at him primarily instead of you as she was making the appointment, you would be offended?
LikeLike
Oh yes. I would not like that at all. Besides, it wouldn’t work because my husband would refuse to engage in any way but through me.
Maybe this is cultural, as I’m now thinking. I know that in Latin America, for instance, no man would even look at me when my husband is present even though I’m the one who speaks Spanish. He’ll look at my husband and give responses to my comments in his direction. And if he doesn’t do that, he expects to get hit in the face immediately. 🙂
LikeLike
P.S> I don’t mean N would hit him, obviously. I mean this is culturally expected.
LikeLike
on Mrs. Manners:
This is weird. Beyond weird. My wife often accompanies me to mathematics conferences. If a female mathematician who wanted to talk to me felt she had to talk through my wife I think both she and I would be annoyed.. No one is anyone else’s property. (At least, most places in the world,slavery is not permitted.)
LikeLike
The post linked in the Mrs Manners entry states one of the major grievances of feminists with whom I am acquainted. The person is being disrespected by being made less than human in the interaction.
LikeLike
Your acquaintances don’t seem to go for understatement a whole lot. Even for me this is way too dramatic.
LikeLike
Yes. I feel like I must be misunderstanding. My husband sometimes comes with me to campus and if the men I work with started directing conversation/questions about work to him, I would find it quite strange. If the conversation is purely social, then it should include both of us of course. But a work question at my place of work should be directed to me even if the poser of that question is a heterosexual male.
LikeLike
That’s precisely the kind of situation I’m talking about! This is why I prefer to go to all-female conferences. Female scholars don’t do this kind of thing but male scholars have trouble separating the private and the public.
Everybody always feels very uncomfortable in these situations. You can’t just ignore the wife and talk shop to the husband like she’s a piece of furniture. So you start making small talk with her. But that makes you feel resentful because you feel forced to waste time that should be spent working.
I so loved my Oxford conference and my feminist conference back in 2012. There were only women, and I was blissfully unaware of anybody’s personal life.
LikeLike
“This is why I prefer to go to all-female conferences. Female scholars don’t do this kind of thing ”
What is “this kind of thing”? (the reply function doesn’t always make it clear which comment is being responded to)
LikeLike
Female scholars do not drag around husbands and foist them onto the colleagues. Male scholars, however, do seem to enjoy being accompanied by a silent, shadowy wife who makes everybody uncomfortable because nobody knows what to say to her. In my discipline, it’s especially bad because at professional events we speak in Spanish but when a wife approaches, everybody has to switch to English to accommodate her.
It’s usually English-speaking wives, too. I don’t remember seeing a Hispanic wife do that. The male colleagues who bring the wives, however, can be both Anglo or Hispanic.
By the way, N and I had our small honeymoon at the same hotel where I had my conference. (We were poor and couldn’t do anything more special than this.) My presentation was the day after we got married but even then it did not occur to me to bring him to the talk or to any part of the actual conference.
LikeLike
You can’t just ignore the wife and talk shop to the husband like she’s a piece of furniture. So you start making small talk with her. But that makes you feel resentful because you feel forced to waste time that should be spent working.
Oh boy, I know this feeling. I am in a male dominated field and my colleagues are overwhelmingly male. At conferences they always have women accompanying them, and I end up in these situations with lots of boring small talk, whereas I really wanted to talk about something specific and technical but I cannot as I don’t want to be rude.
LikeLike
” At conferences they always have women accompanying them, and I end up in these situations with lots of boring small talk, whereas I really wanted to talk about something specific and technical but I cannot as I don’t want to be rude.”
Exactly! I have no idea why they drag these women around when these are obviously professional events where they have no place. Do they bring them to the classroom, too, to sit in the corner and stare at them adoringly?
LikeLike
Usually, there is no need among healthy adults to strongly indicate a lack of sexual interest, because genuine sexual interest is obvious. The difference between polite conversation and flirting is night and day.
Yes, if you were doing this to me I would feel quite uncomfortable, worse, if I was speaking to your husband (and not flirting of course) and you were visibly uncomfortable I would feel like you must be slightly unhinged and want to stay away from both of you. Must be a cultural thing.
LikeLike
In America at least, if a couple (husband and wife) go to see a salesperson (male or female) to conduct a business transaction such as a purchase, the salesperson usually talks to the member of the couple who is perceived as being the more interested or knowledgeable about the item being sold. Car salespersons talk mainly to the husband; interior decorators talk to the wife; etc.
This isn’t sexism. It’s called conducting business efficiently.
LikeLike
“the salesperson usually talks to the member of the couple who is perceived as being the more interested or knowledgeable about the item being sold. Car salespersons talk mainly to the husband; interior decorators talk to the wife; etc.”
This perception is precisely what is sexist. You cannot possibly know what a stranger is interested in, so when you make these assumptions they are all about you, not about the stranger. And it’s very bad for business because you are engaging with your fantasies and not with an actual customer.
LikeLike
“Car salespersons talk mainly to the husband”
Car people do as much talking to the husband as possible because most (American) men want to avoid admitting ignorance about cars in front of their wives and so it’s easier to sell them a bill of goods. Freezing the wife (more likely to ask tougher questions) out makes life easy.
“interior decorators talk to the wife”
Similarly, most American women don’t want to look like they don’t much care about the exact shade of pale green (or admit that they didn’t know which popular style a couple of years ago is now hopelessly out of fashion). The husband is more likely to ask why that ugly ass wallpaper costs three times more than the simpler nicer looking one.
“This isn’t sexism”
Yeah, it is. It’s just not as direct as some assume.
LikeLike
In the spirit of Mycroft Holmes, or perhaps Salvador Dali, I sometimes speak with people in a way which discomfits them appropriately, although sometimes this results in being perceived as dangerously aloof.
If I’m doing this in the presence of more than one person, after a while of this, I single out the person who I perceive is the most discomfited and then focus my attention and intensity on that person, at least without being too obvious about the game afoot.
Now if I can get someone to crack under the pressure … 🙂
Clarissa did not know this, but before my physical injuries my plan was to arrange to meet with her in Oxford, but instead of proceeding directly, I was going to send three or four couriers along with “urgent messages” from me prior to my arrival. Naturally, I would have been one of those couriers, just so I could observe how appropriately I’d managed to deliver a discomfiting …
I have horrible manners, of course, and I hope they will eventually catch on. 🙂
LikeLike
I can’t say that I would have necessarily welcomed the couriers. 🙂
LikeLike
See, it would have worked. 🙂
LikeLike
No it isn’t. Sexism is based on untrue assumptions about interpersonal dynamics, and you’ve just confirmed that the car salesperson’s and the interior decorator salesperson’s assumptions about the relative role of the husband and wife in each transaction are correct.
You may think that in a just society such gender considerations SHOULDN’T matter — but as long as they DO (and they still do in 2015 America) –then the salesperson is simply being practical by not wasting conversation with the junior partner (be it husband or wife) during the sales pitch.
LikeLike
Ah, Jones, your posts would be more entertaining if you included a plain English translation to them (Maybe a final paragraph at the end, so the rest of us would know what the hell you’re talking about. 🙂
Surrealism works well in a photo-realistic Dali painting — in pure prose with nothing but text to try to assemble into a recognizable puzzle, not so much.
LikeLike
Sorry about the order / location of my last two posts — I HATE the way whatever screwed-up logic the WordPress app that Clarissa utilizes to organize her comment section places uses when it determines where to place replies.
Obviously, the “‘This isn’t sexism.’ Yeah, it is.” post is a reply to Cliff Arroyo’s comment dated October 25, 2015 at 02:01, and the “Ah, Jones” reply is to Jones’ comment dated October 25, 2015 at 02:09 .
LikeLike
WORDPRESS SHOULD BE GIVEN A MERCY KILLING!!!
The utterly nonsensical order of the postings in the comment section, regardless of how the posters have tried to position them the the threads, makes it almost impossible to follow the trend of thoughts and replies of the posters, without rereading everything multiple times and and saying, “Yeah, this comment up here probably addresses this one down here, and “THIS comment is an answer to…I THINK??”
It’s a very frustrating mess. Do you have to use WORDPRESS, Clarissa, due to financial or perhaps university constraints — or is there a chance you can switch to a less crazy website content management system? If other commenters will also agree to contribute, I will kick in my (small) share toward your purchasing a new, reasonable 21st Century content management system for your website.
Is this a possibility?
LikeLike
I’m sorry for the aggravation!
Initially the blog was on the Blogspot platform but that was a disaster and a half so I moved to WordPress. I’m not seeing a better functioning system for now but if I do, I might move again.
The best thing to reply to comments is to copy-paste the bit you are responding to and place it in a comment at the bottom of the thread. I see them all in the reverse chronological order they have posted, so this system would be more helpful for me. When people place comments in trees, I have no way of knowing who’s responding to whom.
LikeLike