DEBATE AS RECLAMATION
So often we are caught up in the day-to-day whims of the fast-paced debate space. Public forum high school debate is a style of public speaking that prioritizes argumentation, speed, but most of all, simplification. All these factors destroy the presence of women in the debate space.
Public forum debate is a two-on-two event that was created in 2002 by the founder of CNN in order to bridge the gap between Lincoln-Douglas (philosophical, abstract debate) and policy (fast, detailed, long debates based on topics which suggest that something should be done, a policy action). It was originally created to become the most accessible format of debate, in which anyone could sit in and understand. High schoolers who participate can enter tournaments in their districts, or pay for tournaments on what is most commonly called the “national circuit”. From these tournaments, you can get bids, which can take you to the champion tournament at the end of the year. The national tournaments have a set number of bids to give to their top ranking debaters. But, those top-ranking debaters have historically been solely male, with progress only recently being made: why is that?
The first problem is the format’s shift over time. While intended to be accessible at inception, public forum has quickly become an over-competitive activity increasingly similar to policy, with obfuscated arguments created specifically to confuse novices, constant ridicule of those who don’t understand jargon, and the inaccessibility of ways to learn. All these create a bitter mixture that ultimately results in the rich schools rising to the top: higher hired coach capacity, more resources, better team.
A common theme in traditional public forum debates is the isolation from reality: what is happening during the debate should have no effect on the real world, creating this sense of a “debate world”. Progressive debaters and general criticizers of the format will tell you to reject this notion. Criticism must happen within the debate space, during a round, that is their argument. And yes, bringing the argument into a round makes it something that must be addressed, and cannot be ignored, and it is certainly important. But does this not create an echo chamber? No one standing outside the space looking in will be able to process our issues, they won’t understand them, not until the argument is run on them during a round, giving them no choice but to object and argue against it.
The second issue is the debate community itself. It is common knowledge that high school debate activities are, and have always been, irritatingly non-diverse. From “policy debate [being] plagued with hierarchies that often disproportionately privilege white, economically advantaged men” (Warner, 2003) to a study done by Lynn and Kawolics in 2018, finding that “female competitors are significantly disadvantaged in Public Forum Debate”, it seems that the future of women in debate is dismal. Structural disservices plague the dedicated debaters as they try to compete at higher levels. The richer, predominantly male debate teams become more prevalent on the national circuit — often lacking filters, respect, and awareness. The subjective judging practices give way to unintentional bias: female-female teams [are] 17.1% less likely and male-female teams [are] 10.0% [less likely] to win a debate round against male-male teams (Yi and Nie, 2020). Every month one debater is called out for his sexist behavior, but every weekend I meet another debater who truly believes that I am “a burden on my male partner”, a woman who is just following along, incapable of her own thoughts, beliefs, and arguments.
The third problem is the commodification of the female experience within an argument. If we presume that the product, the object, is the judge’s ballot, the debater will do anything to reach that goal. Unfortunately, the methodology is often flawed, especially on the impact side of the debate. An impact of an argument is what happens after the resolution (topic) is passed, or what happens if the resolution is not passed. Too often will I hear “the impact is women dying”, “more women will be raped because of this”, or “100,000 more women will go into poverty” said dismissively at the end of a contention only for the numbers. When women are inserted into an argument just for the ballot, it becomes an interesting question of, is my activism effective? Am I actually working to solve this issue? And I think that’s where the next question “does debate affect reality” come in. Are you actually raising awareness, or are you using women as a number, a statistic, a static object that can be warped, re-interpreted, and shared as evidence?
As Baudrillard so eloquently put it, “We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it.” Inserting an impact into your argument creates this fake world, a fake situation in which doing this, will get you this result. Thus, you have created yourself a little activist, a world in which you solve this issue affecting women — your judge will now be excited to vote for you, they are a consumer of your disaster’s wonderful solution. In this debate space, where every word counts in your under-five-minute speech, slowing down is necessary. Are we caught up in a strange new form of commodification, disguised as activism?
Building upon Virilio’s belief that speed is the reason why our politics and lives have evolved the way it has, it’s only reasonable to think we should slow down. "Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape” (Virilio). As debaters in this event, we are overtaken by speed. Public forum debate is the epitome of fastness, the very essence of dromology is treasured and cultivated almost as a culture within our flawed debate community. What we do in our format is condense, oversimplify, argue for abstract concepts that need nuance, but without time, we can’t. We’re carried by our fast-moving speeches, but Virilio reminds us that “we have yet to master [them]”. How does this affect how we view women and activism during a round? Effectively, this practice leads us to make gross generalizations, playing into the commodification narrative that was previously mentioned, and disallows the formation of nuanced thought. There’s a difference between “high-speed rail hurts Black people” and “high-speed rail runs through historically Black neighborhoods since the costs are lower, meaning construction of high-speed rail hurts Black communities more than others”, but due to time constraints, over the course of the round, your activism is simplified, made into this faint sense of an “idea” without the actual reasoning attached to it. At the end of the debate, your judge will be voting for some idea that you made sound really nice, not for your activism. It is in this way that the culture of speed has forced us to transform our proposed change to lingering afterthoughts of criticism.
It is a gruesome form of silence: when your ideas are commodified, shunned, but worst of all, simplified: it is impossible to critique the debate space without the sufficient support to do so. Arguing for progress during a round is a heavy task: in any given tournament, there are over a hundred rounds. Will one round make such a heavy difference? If every round is a critique, what is the point of a topic? Evaluating whether releasing the animosity of the female debater in-round is a worthwhile task is one that should be highly discussed.
Despite this, the purpose of this essay is to discuss reclamation. With all the issues out in the open, what is left is the beauty of argumentation. What’s left is how to remember to bloom under the strict rules, the wordy jargon. Being a debater is a strange identity to encapsulate, in the literal sense. A contrarian would ask, “how does showing up to a high school every weekend and yelling at people for eight hours constitute an identity?” — and I think it’s just that. The strange experiences we all share: losing your flows after the round, running out of pen-ink mid-round, the awful overloaded wifi, meeting some kid from California that stalked your Tabroom the day before, sharing prep with your opponents from last round, and refreshing your Gmail a hundred times when round pairings are supposed to be out. When all of this is not supposed to be for you, because the structure of everything, especially high school debate, lies precariously on the patriarchy, it’s an act of protest in itself to take back what has historically been so male-dominated. Eating the overpriced tournament pizza is an act of revolution, because you are still there, taking it for yourself. Flowering, growing, and learning, while understanding the baseline of the format has the cards drawn against you, makes you realize that the only way to fix it is to slow down and critique infinitely. To critique and question, but never give up on the exhilaration of a debater’s identity, is the fundamental belief of a new system that we will build.