Gender and Discourse, Deborah Tannen
O'Brien, Dennis
WHY YOU JUST DON'T GET IT GENDER AND DISCOURSE Deborah Tannen Oxford University Press, $19.95, 203 pp. Dennis O'Brien "In every known so- ciety, mankind (sic!) haselaborat- ed the biological...
...Gender and Discourse offers the scholarly background (and prelude of articles) to the earlier work...
...The women from second grade on head right into the subject in an engaged dialogue...
...Tannen is surely correct that such criticism rests on a misunderstanding...
...In one of the experiments detailed in Gender and Discourse a series of male pairs and female pairs ranging from second graders to graduate students were assigned the task of talking of something "serious" for a video taped interview...
...She quotes from the earlier work: "No one could deny that men as a class dominate women in our society...
...Deborah Tannen's description of the American culture of male-female talk was the subject of You Just Don't Understand which was on the New York Times best-seller list for four years...
...The effect of dominance is not always the result of the intention to dominate...
...I see no reason to quarrel with Tannen's descriptions...
...But where women tend to sympathize with the problems of others, the male interlocutor tells the tenth-grade drinker that it is not really a problem...
...Not all misunderstanding is gender-based...
...The men, in contrast, have a very hard time getting onto any topic—let alone a "serious" topic—for more than a few turns...
...haselaborat- ed the biological di- vision of labor into forms often very remotely related to the original biological differences...
...In many Western societies women are downgraded as "gossips"—a sharing of personal tidbits that create a sense of shared intimacy, while males stolidly work...
...The controversial issues all lie in the "theory" and politics—and here I also tend to agree with Tannen's common-sense approach...
...two tenth-grade boys get serious about one participant's "drinking problem...
...we know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the next generation," Margaret Mead wrote in Male and Female...
...The graduate students hit upon marriage, but deal with it more as an ab41 straction than a personal concern...
...And yet male domination is not the whole story...
...But therein lies the political problem...
...The question of cultural style is one thing, whether it becomes the style of some dominating class is another...
...The difference between male and female is not a difference of dominance, it is just a misunderstanding of cultural tropes...
...Accepting Mead's conclusion, it should come as no surprise that males and females develop different speech cultures...
...That view annoyed certain "feminist" critics who thought that Tannen was denying the hierarchical hegemony of males...
...Males tend to use language to negotiate position in a status hierarchy, women tend to use language to achieve personal connection...
...When the men finally succeed at seriousness, their "serious" is different from the women's...
...Dennis O'Brien "In every known so- ciety, mankind (sic...
...You Just Don't Understand, as the title indicates, deals with miscommunication between men and women based on divergent cultural styles...
...in Bedouin societies men...
...In the study of gendered pairs, the men don't even sit facing one another, while women may gaze intently at one another for the entire session...
...She is strongly committed to the cultural basis of gender styles of communication, while noting that there may well be a remote biological basis...
...Tannen generalizes from her various examples that men see conversation as competition, women see it as an instrument of intimacy...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
