Why Jane Sanders gave Bernie the wife chop
I am pretty sure I saw Jane Sanders, wife of Bernie Sanders, perform the wife chop last week on cable television.
What is the wife chop, you ask? It is the desperate hand motion wives make in public to indicate to their mans plain in,’ boring or just plain air-sucking husbands that they need to stop talking now.
In Jane Sanders’ case, the stakes were high (although not quite so high as this week’s New York primary in which voters, by awarding victory or defeat, may be the ultimate silencer).
Bernie Sanders had just come off a contentious debate with Hillary Clinton. which had shown them both in a less than felicitous light: there had been yelling (his and hers), sneering, finger wagging (Bernie’s passive aggressive way of interrupting) and a rather grim set to Hillary’s jaw as they traded off objections to each other’s policies and some fairly nasty pointing out of each other’s weaknesses.
My initial reaction had been a disappointed sigh. Two great candidates, vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, head and shoulders above anything the Republicans have to offer, who managed, in a feel-bad debate, to look as though they both had been sucking on lemons for hours. (Might I suggest a call to the Justin Trudeau helpline 1-800-sunny-ways?)
Then, during a four-minute plus post-debate interview on CNN, as Bernie continued to blather on, his wife Jane loomed into the frame and did that cut motion with her hands that directors (and wives) use. In truth, Bernie looked as if he wanted to stop but couldn’t. So she did him — and most viewers — a favour.
It reminded me that, for all the negative attention paid to mans plain in’ (men’s patronizing tendency to explain things that most women or indeed most people already know), women have a few hard-wired con- versational tendencies themselves.
I have never known a wife or female partner who hasn’t tried discreetly in public to stop her husband from saying something he shouldn’t or from speaking too long, whether it was to tell the room what his sister-in-law said in private, to explain why Stephen Hawking was only partly right about black holes or to elaborate on the real problem with the Jays lineup, while the other guests look more glazed than the ham.
The wife chop can vary. While my husband is by all accounts a charming and entertaining guy, once he gets going on a story it’s hard to get him to stop. Possibly — and this is important — it’s because he doesn’t want to stop.
I once kicked him (gently) under the table until he said aloud at a dinner, “Why are you kicking me?” I have occasionally waved my hand in a weird fashion to signal the end of the story, and I’ve coughed, shaken my head, and of course, employed the wife chop.
But here’s my question. Why do women feel they have to take responsibility for their partner’s patter? “Oh my God,” a friend once told me, “I tell my husband that if he has been talking for more than a minute without pause he needs to stop and let other people weigh in. He once bored two young women in an airport lounge and I was mortified.”
Conversely, I have met few men who feel the need to monitor or take any responsibility for what their female partner is saying or how long she is taking to say it.
I think women in general are still more receptive to emotional climate and cues, and therefore notice when a roomful of people are starting to emit “kill me now” vibes. Women worry more about interrupting, going on too long, no matter how delightful their speaking is, or just taking up too much conversational space.
Face it, every political candidate, male or female, needs someone to give them the hook. So I’m not blaming Jane Sanders. A press secretary would have done the same. I was just surprised to see her openly administer the chop, perhaps meant for the cable crew as much as for her husband.
If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, it’s difficult to imagine his relatively discreet wife Melania (“come up here honey and say a few words” her husband demanded at one rally) deploy the wife chop.
And certainly, if Hillary is the Democratic nominee, she’ll be chopping Bill more than he’ll be chopping her.
A Hillary-Donald contest would be a field day for genderology, if that term exists. Watching one powerful female leader and one male demagogue try to get the verbal upper hand on each other during a debate would spawn seminars on male and female speaking styles.
I’ve grown weary of both Democrats yelling — an equal opportunity blunder born of exhaustion and frustration. But only one really gets dinged for it. Or as the New Yorker pundit Hendrik Hertzberg, who calls himself a Hillary “supporter” tweeted during that last debate “For the love of God, Hillary, please lower your voice.”
When shamed for it, Hertzberg’s defence was “Bernie always yells” and that Hillary, when she speaks “calmly and conversationally” is “dynamite.”
Dynamite. An apt word for all the minefields men and women tiptoe through while speaking to, against — and even for — each other. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.