"Telling It Slant": Women and Lying

"Telling it slant" is a phrase from a poem by Emily Dickinson that some feminists have adopted to describe a way of speaking that they believe is forced upon women by a male-dominated society. According to Shirley Ardener, public discourse has been encoded by men; women need to monitor or transform their meanings to conform to male requirements. Muted group theory explains that the language of a culture does not serve all its speakers equally. Women are "muted" because the words for speaking are not generated from or descriptive of women's experiences; the language women use is derivative because it developed from a male perception of reality. There is a block between experience and the verbal expression of those feelings. Shirley Ardener refers to this block as a necessary indirectness rather than spontaneity. Tillie Olsen refers to it as telling it slant. Gillian Michell defines this phrase as a "way of speaking that conveys a message by distorting the truth somehow, so that what is conveyed is not the whole truth." Such a statement distorts the truth or withholds it in some way without actually being completely false.

The concept can be illustrated through an example (paraphrased) provided by Michell. A female faculty member makes an excuse for missing a committee meeting to the man who chairs that committee. The female faculty member had suffered severe menstrual cramps, so at the time of the meeting she had been home in bed, trying to proofread a report for the college dean that she had completed the day before. She says, "Sorry I missed the meeting-I had to finish that report for the dean," instead of the more accurate, "Sorry I missed the meeting-I had terrible cramps." In this example, why might the woman have decided to "tell it slant"? Another way to understand the concept is to visualize that instead of telling the direct truth straight up (vertical) or telling an out and out lie (horizontal), a woman chooses to tell the partial truth slant (diagonal). While telling it slant might be viewed as falling somewhere between being truthful and lying, Michell notes that usually it would be categorized as a lie according to Sissela Bok's conception (Bok, Sissela, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life)  Usually, telling it slant would be an intentionally deceptive message meant to make others believe what we personally do not believe.

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Department of Communication, Seton Hall University