What Smart Sounds Like

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Tina Fey's Bossypants, her new book of essays, is a great read, funny and smart. But there's one bit I've been mulling over. Fey is an unabashed feminist, and she urges girls (and women) to stop talking in the tentative, sing-song style that has become the lingua franca of American females. You know? The kind that start high and gets higher? And ends with a question? Like, "Hi, I'm Tiffany. I'll be your server tonight?" Fey says, C'mon, do you think a a heart patient wants to go into a doctor's office and hear, "I'm Dr. Wallace? I'll be your cardiac surgeon?"

But I'm not so sure. There's nothing inherently wrong or weak about this speaking style. It's caught on for a reason, maybe because it projects a sense of compromise or lack of aggression, things that are not bad, really. Maybe our knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a brilliant doctor talking like this is because we're clinging to an old, strictly male idea of what brilliance looks like. But that idea comes out of a tradition that was exclusionary, biased, and paternalistic.

Instead of women trying to emulate traditional male ways of talking and being, maybe we should just go ahead and be who we are, without shame or cringing. And eventually, here's what will happen:  People will get used to going in for surgery and hearing their doctor say, "I'm Dr. Wallace? I'll be your cardiac surgeon?" And they will perceive it as normal. They will accept that this is how brilliant doctors talk.
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