Unmarked Understanding

               I found the piece "There is No Unmarked Woman" by Deobrah Tannen intriguing for multiple reasons. I, personally don't ever care too much about my clothing or my hairstyle as long as it looked somewhat "acceptable" it was okay to me. To me I have a standard of what I wear to school and I don't wear anything special ever. Women, on the other hand, seem to have an endless variety of clothing to choose from and while I used to be jealous of such a thing, I now think about the consequences that it can play. How it can define and possibly "diminish her as a person" depending on the style and quality of the clothing. How it causes there to be no "unmarked" woman, no standard to follow. But, besides all of this, how she develops her argument throughout the essay, in fact, less than half the time is spent on clothing aspects. Most of it, however, is supported by factual/objective evidence that slowly leads into her final claim/thesis about how society continues to support these marked and unmarked roles. This comparison to other stuff besides clothing is extremely powerful because it brings up the theme of universality; how the marked and unmarked applies to everything, even in our everyday language whether we realize it or not. People, however, are unaccepting and according to Tannen, try to label her as a feminist or a male-basher. The end discussion about how she herself is labeled and the deconstruction of those words are used serve to highlight her own intelligence and the ignorance of society. By including the anecdote about the man who clearly wasn't rational in his argument about calling her a male-basher, Tannen makes huge gains both logically and emotionally by refuting the obviously flawed claim and reinstating her own. 

"To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a women as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character."