Women and Words: Deborah Cameron's straight talking
Even though I'm having issues with the editing abilities of the staff at The Guardian, I'm still forcing myself to check it a couple times a week because they do sometime have some great people in there, such as Deborah Cameron.
Technically, the article is an extract from her new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?, so the credit should not go to the editors at the Guardian, but to Cameron's publicist for getting the extract published. (Side note: if your curios as to why I'm pissed at the Guardian, go read this and this.)
I read alot of Deborah Cameron during my Msc. I was a fan then and I'm a fan now. Cameron's new work aims to take us into an area of gendered socio-linguistics that may perhaps not be what neither men nor women want to hear.
I'm dying to read the book but for the moment I will have to do with the extract.
Cameron starts off by pointing out that it's no longer un-PC to claim that women and men communicate differently, so people should stop pretending they are breaking boundaries by researching gendered linguistics. Unfortunately one of those people is Pinker. But it's not as if I was reading Pinker for his gender analysis.
Cameron's new book is about the myth of the communication barrier between women and men: a scientific myth and a discursive myth in terms of how we define ourselves. Both these myths are detrimental and sexist in many ways. We've all gotten used to the myth that men aren't very communicative and Cameron points out that describing men as inadequately proficient in verbal communication isn't exactly a compliment, yet we now use it to explain so many things to ourselves in terms of why the battle of the sexes is still raging. As yes, it is still going on. Stating that men and women speak differently, which according to Cameron is actually a myth, is somewhat of a moot point now. And of course, since it's a myth, it's even more of a moot point.
Of course, the fact that women and men are programmed to speak differently doesn't mean that women and men don't communicate differently, that we are taught how to verbalize different issues according to our gender. Cameron is talking about biological evolutionary theory. So can you ignore the myth? Or will we always believe that men and women are so different we can't even communicate properly?
I know it's off-topic, but I looked at your second Guardian link (the one about babies, not date-rape) and I couldn't BELIEVE that the last comment was from some woman who had children in the 60s having a go at the parenting skills of the wife of one of the male commentators. This on the basis that the male commentator was a decent guy who said that he liked to get up in the night to feed his baby so his wife could get a break. Incredible.
Back on-topic, that was a great article. In particular, I thought the comment very interesting that when people talk about "how men react" or "how women react" they are [paraphrasing here] really talking about how they react themselves.
Posted by: Annette | October 1, 2007 4:21 PM