Rapists, Seducers, and Harassers! Sounds like a presidential debate to me

As everyone knows and some saw, the first of the presidential debates took place last night in Colorado and was broadcast live for the viewing pleasure, and oftentimes disgruntlement, of the entire country. 

For me, CSPAN's live stream of the debate presented an interesting opportunity.  Without forethought at the beginning of a busy semester, I had scheduled a brief debate unit for last week for my freshman English students. 

As things wrapped up last week and I realized that the first presidential debates were scheduled to take place last night, I decided to live steam it to my class as it would be airing for a 90 minute portion of one of our 4.5 hour sessions. 

This ended up being way more entertaining than I had expected, and I suspect quite a bit more entertaining than my students had anticipated. 

When covering debate last week, I referred to an article that Alli suggested to me a few months back: Wayne Brockriede's "Arguers as Lovers." In this piece from 1972, Brockriede details the types of argument using the analogy of various kinds of sexual relationships: rapist, seducer, lover. In 2000, Jay VerLinden expanded on these analogies by adding "arguer as harasser" to the mix. 


As you may already know or suspect, an "arguer as rapist" is generally not considered a good thing and is for the most part to be avoided, particularly in academic or generally intelligent debates. The example we looked at in class of someone who is generally rapy in his argument style was Bill O'Reilly; we discussed his penchant for forcefully talking over his guests and for attacking the arguer not the argument. These are considered primary tropes of the "arguer as rapist."

The "arguer as seducer" is basically anyone who, while arguing or debating, appears charming, genial, and considerate, but is in fact fabricating information, misquoting, misrepresenting facts, or otherwise being dishonest. Paul Ryan, anyone? His demeanor is charming...and he doesn't like fact checkers. 

The "arguer as harasser" is exemplified by undermining of an opponent by lightly provoking them or distracting them and the audience, when there is one, with deriding humor. Paired with O'Reilly, our friendly neighborhood arguer rapist, is Jon Stewart as our harassing arguer. Though this form of argument is still generally frowned upon in academia, you'll see if you watch the video clip below that it can be quite effective. 

And last but by no means least is the "arguer as lover."  This for all intents and purposes is the ideal arguer and if you can get two of them together, or at least two people who utilize the lover tactics and approaches far more often than the other options, you can have a truly informative and constructive debate. The only example I could find of a debate that is strongly based in the ideal of argument for understanding and not for dominance is one between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury. It's just difficult to find Americans doing this. 

And that brings us back to the presidential debates.  What I asked my students to do while we watched last night was to keep a record of tactics, approaches, and aspects that could fall into one of the four categories.  

What they saw and discussed with one another and with me was quite different from what the general media, both liberal and conservative, claims to have seen. I was shocked and confused this morning to see the yahoo news update and to hear the post-debate coverage on NPR. What debate were they watching? I wondered. 

The media, and many Facebook friends, spent late last night and the rest of today declaring Romney had "won" the debate. That word choice should have been my first clue that the majority of the country was not watching last night's debate through the same lenses my students and I had been.  

While the rest of the country found Romney's fast talk to be charming and engaged, the majority of my students saw a man all too comfortable to use rapist strategies to silence the moderator and keep his turn as long as possible, seemingly in part to assert his dominance. And while the rest of the country saw Obama's slower, methodical responses to be a sign of disengagement and perhaps a lack of preparation, my students saw him using lots of harasser tactics, with virtually every of the president's responses intro-ed with an undermining quip at Mitt. 

We all agreed that Obama made some real mistakes, mostly by not jumping on more of the inconsistencies voiced by Romney; however, everyone felt, regardless of political affiliation, that Obama had presented himself more favorably by seemingly using mores numbers and facts, by staying more often on topic, and by not jumping at every chance he got to needlessly dominate the moderator (with the exception of that one very bad moment...which I could write a whole other blog post about). 

So it seems that all this talk about Romney being a better debater is more than anything referring to the impression he gave the audience that he is jovial, interactive, and dominating.  Domination- rather than discussion and clear presentation of facts and details- of an opponent in a debate is not what my students have been trained to look for and value; they were looking for someone who considers what the other person has to say and contemplates his response with claims and facts.  That's not too much to ask- its just the rules of a proper debate, it's just the ones we should all care about.  Otherwise why don't we just have Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart moderate next time?  That will be the show we all seem to want.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im8WhG-8FGw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfQk4NfW7g0