So far, Tannen explained that when men and women listen and speak, they do so using two different yet equally valid "languages": Men listen and speak in the language of independence and status while women listen and speak in the language of intimacy and connection. These two languages are developed when the people are very young children. Since these two languages inherently contradict each other, many problems and misunderstandings can arise from this. Tannen gives us many scenarios from her own life, her friend's and colleagues' lives, and even from works of fiction, that demonstrates how these speakers of two different languages interact with people of the same gender and how they interact (and sometimes create conflicts) with the opposite sex.
One scenario is when someone is asking for help. Tannen tells us about a couple that she knew who is driving around, trying to find a street that is supposed to be nearby. The man is driving and the woman is at the front seat. The man insists on finding the street on his own because to him, "driving around until he finds his way is the reasonable thing to do, since asking for help makes him uncomfortable. He's avoiding that discomfort and trying to maintain his sense of himself as a self-sufficient person." Meanwhile, his wife is furious because "if she were driving, she would have asked directions as soon as she realized she didn't know which way to go...Since asking directions does not make Sybil uncomfortable, refusing to ask makes no sense to her" (62). Tannen explained that this happened because to the man, being the one who gives directions means that he knows more than the other person and therefore higher up in the ladder while being the one who receives directions means he knows less and one step lower on the ladder. Also, because saying "I don't know" is humiliating and because he wants to be independent, he thinks that asking for directions will also make him dependent and that taking a wild guess or driving around until he finds the place is the best thing to do. Women, on the other hand, "not only feel comfortable seeking help, but feel honor-bound to seek it, accept it, and display gratitude in exchange." One example she gives of that is how when one of her friends got off the subway, she would ask where a place is even if she can figure it out with a little effort. Even after the person she asked could not help her at all, "she had used the commonplace ritual of asking directions of a stranger not only - and not mostly - to find her way on emerging from the subway, but to reinforce her connection with the mass of people in the big city by making fleeting contact with one of them."
The next chapter talks about the differences in the way men and women in "public and private speaking". Women and girls are more comfortable with private speaking, where they talk with a few people who they are very close and comfortable with and in settings that feel like "home". Men and boys, on the other hand, like public speaking with strangers and bigger groups of people because to them, they must "perserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order" (77) by being able to show others their knowledge and skills.
When women talk to their best friends, they talk about everything in great detail while men tend to dismiss a lot of things as "unimportant", especially those small details women look for. As a result, there are a lot of times when the woman will feel that the man is distant while the man still thinks that they are close: the man is very happy with the fact that she is there with him and a lot of the small details that women like to talk about is seen as nothing noteworthy, so he stays silent unless it is something he feels is important. The woman would feel that the silence means that they are drifting further and further away because he is not talking a lot which means that he does not care. This feeling of drifting away is amplified when she finds that the man is very talkative when he is around others but not when they are both together alone.
The next chapter was about gossip, which Tannen describes as details of your friend's life that you tell to another friend. It is something can either be destructive or an important part of constructing intimacy, especially for women. She relates it to telling secrets as children, saying that "telling what's happening to your life and the lives of those you talk to is a grown-up version of telling secrets, the essence of girls' and women's friendships" (97).
Gossip creates friendships between women because they feel that exchanging and telling secrets is the way they go from being an acquaintance to being a friend since they now know that they can speak their minds when they are with each other. On the other hand, a woman who is not telling her friends secrets will hurt those friends because they will feel that she does not want to be connected to them and is distancing herself from the group.
Gossip and secrets are used my women and girls as proof of status: when a girl claims that she is friends with a popular girl, the way that she proves that to others is by showing them that she knows secrets that the popular girl can only tell her if they are friends. Boys, on the other hand, usually do not do this nearly as much because gossip does very little to raise their status, since their hierarchy is based on skill and winning arguments.
Women like to go over the small details because when someone asks them for those details, they feel that the person cares for them.
----
As of now, I think that everything goes back to how boys and girls grow up playing different games with different rules and types of hierarchies shape how they do everything in the rest of their lives. It also goes back to how the society you live in demands that you speak in a certain way (like how in some societies, you have to use "north", "south", "east", and "west" to survive): in order to fit in and function the children have to learn how to listen, speak, and act in certain ways in their conversations in order to find and keep friends and/or status. Men and women have to constantly look and listen for the changes in their friendships and their status when talking to someone and they have to act accordingly to try to keep the friendship alive.
I think that Tannen will expand even more on the argument that men want independence and status and that women want intimacy and connection by giving more detailed examples and scenarios. I think that she will also explain how people can adjust their conversations so that these misunderstandings can be avoided. I am looking forward to the "Lecturing and Listening" chapter, because I think that this is one of the biggest sources of conflict between men and women.
No comments:
Post a Comment