Musing Upon Builder's Tea: The Dangers Of Gender Stereotyping Readers

As a callow undergraduate, I developed numerous pretentious picadilloes. An example of such intellectual hubris was a predilection for entering the substance of what I deemed interesting conversations into a journal. Those conversing with me were entirely unaware of this practice. The adumbrated intent was to re-examine these entries upon graduation and cull from the verbiage such pearls of wisdom as might serve to give my mind the perspective youth denied me. I did produce a synthesises of these multifarious exchanges and the distillation gained the risible title, ‘Insights and Observations From My College Days’. Fortunately, fate, the wisest editor ever to stalk the written word, interceded and retained my only copy somewhere unbeknownst to me.

I do however remember many of the entries with the vivid recall akin to that of my first kiss, first love and first serious loss. The celestial editor may have had the judgement, but I had the egocentric ownership of the intellectual property and the mental paraphernalia to memorise dodgy aphoristic contraband. Perhaps some of my retained understandings of these conversations still have the capacity to catalyse thoughtful consideration, even if the majority deserve their appointment with oblivion.

One such note detailed a conversation with my college tutor. Rain lashed the Quad and I hastened my way across puddle-strewn flags from the lecture theatre to the buttery. Once safely ensconced in the dry salvation of this steamy palace of sweet delights with its heady atmosphere of ideological debate and gossip, I ordered a cup of tea and leafed through my shabby lecture notes. The heavy oak door swung open violently and a bedraggled figure gave the room a cursory glance and dumped himself opposite me. My fellow evacuee from the drenched Quad was my tutor, eschewing convention and diving for shelter with the sheep he was charged with shepherding.

I burbled on about the Kant lecture I had just left and segued into a disorganised waffle about labelling individuals in order to substantiate a philosophical doctrine. My opinions were voiced with a certainty at variance with the shallowness of my understandings. The verve with which I shared my thoughts pulled facts from their moorings like a strong tide in an unsheltered harbour.

I will paraphrase our exchange as time has washed a verbatim account under the bridge along with my once jet black hair. He opened up with, ‘Kant’s Categorical Imperative, now there’s an exercise in oxymoronic humour ! I read P.G. Wodehouse to be tickled, but I turn to the great philosophers when I want a damn good belly laugh’. He ordered a cup of tea and pressed home his point.‘ Of course the apotheosis of the facile and the Mother of all that is spurious is the insidious stereotype. It’s an anthropological kink as flawed as it is ubiquitous. Mankind’s attempt to know the general from the particular and form omniscient pronouncements clad in the garb of veracity, but lacking anything recognisable as truth. When we stretch an observation to become an axiom, we create the potential for great comedy and rather reductive misunderstandings.’

The teas arrived and a short silence followed the delivery of our hot brews. He stared at his drink, the steam rising gently from the chipped mug. ‘Labelling people is a tricky old game. One needs a fine grasp of the laws of assumption, prejudice and uninformed inference. The sweeping statement is not something to be undertaken lightly. The stereotype requires all of these ingredients or it risks being grounded in common sense and that would never do. A fine exponent of the art is inveterately assertive and considers nuance to be the enemy of truth. An exemplary practitioner deduces from unempirical observation and unconscious bias pseudo-truths cast as meaningful insights, which sit upon unequivocal facts. The very finest stereotypes are lazy and offensive. If you want to diminish something, find a means by which you can stereotype it. It’s a calculation with the form of an equation but producing an answer baring no relation to the problem set.’

I knew that this monologue was intended for me and meant to sting. I did sting. Few egos are as a precious as the wannabe intellectual’s.

My tutor dropped four cubes of sugar into his tea and frightened the liquid with the sight of the milk jar, rendering his brew a manure brown that looked more like alluvial sludge than Assam infused tea. He swilled the mug’s contents with a teaspoon and slurped his drink with noisy relish.

Locking eyes with me and peering over his misted horn rims, he continued: ‘You looked shocked! I’m a Don and you may therefore have expected me to order Earl Grey, caressing it with a freshly squeezed lemon. This, my boy, is colloquially known as Builder’s Tea. Perhaps in days of old when milk was difficult to obtain, our salt of the earth builder probably took his tea black, sweetening the bitter sup to aid its imbibing. The three reprobates currently installing my new kitchen would retch if forced to drink such muck. One only drinks coffee made from freshly ground beans and the other two seem to consider acceptable tea to be warm milk, violated by a tea bag for the merest instance. None of them take sugar. Strapping blokes, skilled artisans and wonderful time wasters, they have a wireless tuned to Radio Three and make sarcastic jokes about Wagner being mood music for the oppressed. Societal stereotyping would have them leering at anything in a skirt, singing along to tuneless pop anthems and supping gallons of industrial strength tea.’

He finished his brew and gathered up his books. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat. Just try and remember the Builder’s Tea the next time you feel tempted to make sweeping generalisations in support of bogus arguments. You are here to expand your mind, not reduce it to a set of dubious defaults. No two human beings are alike and grouping them into contrived categories with equally artificial ascriptions is unlikely to arrive at anything worthy of the epithet Knowledge. Assumptions are for those who don’t know, but sententiously tell us what they consider to be facts.’ With that he patted the damp shoulder of my jacket and left the room.

So, to the point of my anecdote: forming a stereotype about anything is inimical to proper understanding. This is never truer than when ill-advisedly lumping readers into categories. Readers are individuals with the idiosyncratic predilections, sensitivities and unique minds resulting from an inestimable cornucopia of influences and experiences. Gender is perhaps the least efficient means of understanding the wants or tastes of any given reader. Prescribing a set of behaviours to a reader by dint of gender reduces that Being to a stereotype and as intellectually unsound as any other prejudice based upon received understandings, social bias and ignorance.

No stereotype is helpful or constructive. The reader of a book cannot be known to an author with certainty unless we are referring to pulp fiction, bigoted red top newspapers and party-political memoranda. An adult reader cannot be neatly scooped up and placed in a tidy box, to be labelled with callous zeal. Scooping up any individual and dumping them unceremoniously into a prescribed category is an act of intolerance, lacking imagination and compassion.

I am very much of the opinion that readers are amongst the most complex of entities. I’m equally convinced that the gender of any reader may play some part in their emotional and intellectual predispositions. However, I am entirely uncomfortable with the idea that male readers can be cleaved into a category distinct and separate from female readers. We are all readers and each one of us brings their unique psyche to the wondrous act of engaging with a book. Builder’s tea and the gender stereotyping of readers – both a tad unpalatable to my sensitive palate.