Girltalk - demise of a social tradition among women - Column

National Review, Feb 1, 1993 by Florence King

IT'S NO LONGER fashionable to admit it--it's no longer fashionable to admit anything--but I loved "girltalk." I use the past tense because girltalk is dead.

It died around 1970 when feminists, convinced that women never talked about anything important, established "consciousness-raising" groups based on techniques used in Communist Chinese political re-education camps. Early Women's Lib CR was the granddaddy, so to speak, of the supportgroup/task-force/problem-solving craze currently filling the land with endless dreary talk, so the wonky din you hear is essentially a product of feminism.

Women no longer need girltalk to gossip privately about men-the-beasts and "the female complaint." Now that the secrets of the bedchamber and the distaff sickroom are aired on TV, we have lost one of the most richly satisfying sentences ever to fall from female lips. I first heard it in 1939 while watching Garbo as Camille, when my grandmother leaned across me and whispered to my mother: "The doctor ought to tell him not to bother her."

Girltalk was said to be rambling and repetitive, but it paled beside the speech code concocted by our new HHS Secretary, Donna Shalala, when she was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. Sounding like a Roget rolling brakeless downhill, she barred insensitive speech about "race, color, national origin, ancestry, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, disability, and age." She forgot personal appearance, but then she's such a humanitarian that she never thinks of herself. (Oh, Lord, stop me from being catty, but not yet.)

A woman worried about her teenage daughter said to me, "I know she's sexually active." It sounded cold and detached. The girltalk phrase, "I just know she's having things to do with him," expressed real concern: euphemisms have passion. They also develop the imagination. As a child overhearing gossip of a couple "running around together,'' I visualized them tearing down the street hand in hand, like FranCois Viiion and Catherine de Vaucelles fleeing the Burgundians.

Girltalk had ingratiating rhythms. Inserting that theatrical ''just" in front of verbs gave female voices a pleasing springiness. The susurrant tones of female speech have flattened out; women now talk in the "caucus voice," metallic, grinding, scourging, the voice that filled the French Foreign Legion.

Feminism creates boring women the way democracy creates bad-tempered artists. Under the patronage of an absolute monarch who could do no wrong, artists were emotionally as well as financially secure, free to be openly elitist instead of covertly elitist in the democratic manner. The system produced charming courtiers like Jean Racine, instead of surly snobs like NEA chief John Frohnmayer.

Many otherwise charming women lapse into feminist Newspeak whenever someone hits the right button. I got a fan letter from an obviously intelligent, well-bred woman who lives in a town I was thinking of moving to, so I asked her to tell me about it. Her letter describing housing and shopping was thorough and helpful, as well as witty and colorful, but suddenly Newspeak squirted out of her like ink from a squid: "I would not stand living here in the provincial, white-male dominant society if it were not for the liberating and liberal influence of the colleges and for the respect I have for what my husband does within this particular setting."

I no longer enjoy talking to women because I know that sooner or later they're going to say, "The operative word is 'choose.'" Some other verbal dental drills are "career move," "glass ceiling," "institute" as a verb, "perception" meaning any non-feminist point of view, and "passive-aggressive." That last is Newspeak for "Patient Griselda, always spinning," a literary allusion now lost in the mudslide of multicultural ignorance. Today's Patient Griseldas are always wonking, especially if they went to law school, where normal, intelligent women without speech defects are turned into rolling balls of tangled wool.

I especially avoid married career women because they want to talk about how boring their husbands are. Flaubert could describe Emma Bovary's boredom without becoming boring himself, but feminist matrons induce the sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of dress-for-success suits.

Above all, I avoid lesbians. It's impossible to enjoy a martini when someone keeps saying, "I'm tired of being invisible."

THE SORRY STATE of female conversation is but one aspect of a larger problem. To explain, let me tell you a story I heard in one of my most interesting girltalks.

Once upon a time, a woman was so hounded and pestered by a man that she nearly went mad. Shrewdly recognizing him as the kind of persistent suitor who, once he gets a woman, loses all interest, she realized that there was only one way out of her problem. "I married him," she explained, "to get rid of him."

Now, a perpetually hoarse new President has taken office in tandem with his lawyer-wife. As The Billary wonk and crunch their way through what remains of the English language, we just might get so glazed and numb that we will let them do anything they want if only they will shut up.