In praise of yappers

What we say when we talk about women who talk too much

In her book Women and Power, the classics scholar Mary Beard begins with a story. “I want to start very near the beginning of Western Literature,” she writes, “and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up.’” The example is from Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, the titular hero, has been gone for years, sailing around attempting to return home after the Trojan War, and meanwhile, his son Telemachus has grown from infant to young adult, with the accompanying young adult male’s brash confidence and hubris.

One night, Odysseus’ wife Penelope comes downstairs and finds a bard performing to the flock of men who’ve crashed out in her house as suitors to her hand in marriage, all assuming Odysseus is dead. The bard is singing a downtempo number about men trying to get home from the Trojan war, which Penelope doesn’t much like. So she asks him to play something different, which upsets her rather bratty son, who thinks he’s the boss, not her. “Mother,” Telemachus says, “go back into your quarters, and take up your work, the loom and the distaff. Speech will be the business of men, all men, and me most of all.”

Beard goes on throughout the book to illustrate how, in the Greek, Roman, and early Christian empires, women did not have a public voice. What is happening here, according to Beard, is not just that women weren’t allowed to speak in public, but that speaking and oratory “were exclusive practices and skills that defined men as a gender.” And for thousands of years since, women have been expected not just to shut up, but to shut up so that men could speak on their behalf.

Women, Paul the Apostle wrote to the Corinthians a few centuries after Homer sang about boys getting away with silencing their mothers, should keep silent in church. “For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission,” and not only that, but they should not even ask questions of church leaders in public. “If they desire to learn anything,” Paul says, “let them ask their own husbands at home.” As a person who has spent a substantial amount of time in Catholic churches, I’ve often heard this reading recited by a woman, because women are only allowed to read from the scripture, but not preach on it. That’s followed by a sermon delivered by a man who reminds the congregation that we have to read Paul in his historical context, or who reminds the congregation that Paul did praise women at other times, or who otherwise tries to logically writhe his way out of the problem that Paul did, in fact, tell women to shut up.

I don’t remember the first time I was made aware that I talk too much. I come from a talking family, a storytelling family, a family where “Oakesaggeration” becomes a game of one upping one another to see who can turn the story of a trip to the grocery store into something operatic or where doing something a few times turns into doing it hundreds or thousands of times. No, I’ve never been to Ireland to confirm this, but every Irish person I’ve met (versus my own Irish American family) has reassured me that it might be genetic. Bards like to blab, and I caught the blabbering bug as a kid and have been a talker ever since.

Recently I was at an event where the (male) speaker misquoted Joan Didion, who wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Instead, he said, “we tell stories in order to live” which changes not only the intention but the outcome, because for those of us who talk too much, the problem isn’t just that we’re telling stories, but we are specifically telling stories not just for an audience, but for our own sake. I talk because I have an anxiety disorder, I talk because I have major depression. I talk because my brain boils over with anecdotes, theories, and bits and scraps of things I’ve watched, read, heard and seen, but mostly I talk because I love to tell stories. It’s why I became a journalist, why I write essays and books and this very newsletter. It’s how I bond with people, and how I have tried to put myself back together after cancer treatment. I tell a story about cancer, and it helps me to contain cancer into being an experience rather than the one thing that defines me. Sometimes.

When I was in high school, my father’s car broke down near Ashland, Oregon. While we waited for the parts to arrive, he bought some standing room tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it was there where I – mostly a product at that point of Catholic schools and the Catholic church – heard and saw women telling stories for the very first time outside of my family dinner table. But as magnificent as Shakespeare’s women were, they too were told to shut up.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice is a glorious talker. Funny and wise, she’s also unmarried, not an easy fate at the time, because there isn’t a man who can out talk her until Benedick shows up. Shenanigans ensue (Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare movies can get as bloated as his ego, but his 1993 film version of Much Ado is all Italian countryside chic and includes a dazzling young Emma Thompson as Beatrice and Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington riding in on horses in slow motion, with their shirts unbuttoned and sweaty chests glistening). Benedick and Beatrice eventually admit they kind of like one another, and she, believing that he’s sick, finds him well and nervously says:

I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield

upon great persuasion; and partly to save your life,

for I was told you were in a consumption.

To which he replies

Peace! I will stop your mouth.

Shakespeare isn’t much of one for stage directions, but he inserts “kissing her” so the audience gets it clearly: when a man tells you to shut up, he will put his own mouth on yours to make you do so. And that’s basically the end of the play. Beatrice never says anything else, but Benedick gets to launch into yet another monologue, and we’re left to assume, I suppose, that their marriage will largely consist of him telling her to pipe down.

I don’t remember the first time a man told me to stop talking, but I know it has happened many times. Maybe so many that I learned to just wait it out before I started talking again, but somewhere along the way it also became clear that for all of the generations of feminists who came before me, for all of the women around me who told such glorious stories, the “strong and silent type” remained a masculine trope that men of my generation seemed to imitate in great numbers even while my male peers in academia regularly interrupted, talked over, and explained things I’d already said. Men were allowed to be both silent and stoic – often because they were busily repressing their emotions – and were expected to be verbose and noisy. They were allowed, in other words, to be seen as strong and wise, chatty and thoughtful, to philosophize and to pontificate. They were allowed to talk as much or as little as they desired. Language belonged to them, and they could hoard it or spew it out, whatever they desired.

Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay about this and we started calling it mansplaining, and the men laughed it off. But the men were actually not laughing it off – they were seething about it, seething when women ran for office, seething when they came within any distance of winning. These kinds of men would read a book or two by a woman and pat themselves on the back and never read one again. These kinds of men would praise women on social media for how well they supported these men – what wonderful mothers! Wonderful wives! How virtuously these wonderful women made it so that these men could run for office, write books, run companies, crush the world beneath their feet! These kinds of men liked women to be around as set decorations in the story they were telling about how masculinity was being erased and threatened. These men took educated women, smart women, women who probably have interesting things to say, and like the Greeks and the Romans, they cut out their tongues, they inserted pins through their tongues, they grabbed the women’s tongues and ripped them free by force.

There has been much despairing talk lately about what we should do, what women in particular should do to meet this moment. And that will vary depending on your levels of tolerance for crowds and noise, for making phone calls, for organizing people, teaching, nursing, whatever skillset you possess. But here is something I think many of us can do. We can just keep talking and refuse to shut up. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is raped by the horrible sons of a corrupt leader, and they cut out her tongue and cut off her hands. And she takes a long stick, places one end in her mouth and holds it between the stumps of her arms, and writes their names in the dirt.

She doesn’t shut up. She keeps talking.

Hitomi Manaka as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Niagawa Shakespeare Company, 2019. Image via the New York Times.