Gender and Discourse.

"In every known society, mankind (sic!) has elaborated the biological division of labor into forms often very remotely related to the original biological differences...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. Accepting Mead's conclusion, it should come as no surprise that males and females develop different speech cultures. 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. Gender and Discourse offers the scholarly background (and prelude of articles) to the earlier work. I see no reason to quarrel with Tannen's descriptions. Males tend to use language to negotiate position in a status hierarchy, women tend to use language to achieve personal connection.

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. The women from second grade on head right into the subject in an engaged dialogue. The men, in contrast, have a very hard time getting onto any topic - let alone a "serious" topic - for more than a few turns. When the men finally succeed at seriousness, their "serious" is different from the women's. The graduate students hit upon marriage, but deal with it more as an abstraction than a personal concern; two tenth-grade boys get serious about one participant's "drinking problem." But where women tend to sympathize with the problems of others, the male interlocutor tells the tenth-grade drinker that is not really a problem. Tannen generalizes from her various examples that men see conversation as competition, women see it as an instrument of intimacy. 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.

The controversial issues all lie in the "theory" and politics - and here I also tend to agree with Tannen's commonsense approach. She is strongly committed to the cultural basis of gender styles of communication, while noting that there may well be a remote biological basis. But therein lies the political problem. You Just Don't Understand, as the title indicates, deals with miscommunication between men and women based on divergent cultural styles. That view annoyed certain "feminist" critics who thought that Tannen was denying the hierarchical hegemony of males. The difference between male and female is not a difference of dominance, it is just a misunderstanding of cultural tropes! Tannen is surely correct that such criticism rests on a misunderstanding. (Not all misunderstanding is gender-based!) She quotes from the earlier work: "No one could deny that men as a class dominate women in our society....And yet male domination is not the, whole story....The effect of dominance is not always the result of the intention to dominate."

The question of cultural style is one thing, whether it becomes die style of some dominating class is another. 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; in Bedouin societies men "gossip" while women do all the work. For all that, Bedouin male gossipers are probably more dominant than your average American stockbroker. On the other hand, if Tannen is correct in her analyses of American male speech patterns as "hierarchic," one could argue that the group that commands the hierarchic language will command the hierarchy. If women wish to play in the "dominance" game they will have to learn to speak "hierarchic."

I think that the most valuable single lesson from Gender and Discourse is that the simple polarity: hierarchy-intimacy, fails to comprehend the actual complexities of our linguistic and social interactions. The simplistic version of the male-female model: dominance-subservience, lines up opposing clusters of concepts; hierarchy denies equality which of course denies closeness and solidarity. But that clearly is not the universal case. Tannen cites an Iranian custom which has been labeled "getting the lower hand." "Taking a lower status position allows an Iranian to invoke a protector schema by which the higher-status person is obligated to do things for him or her." Closer to home, we accept an appropriate hierarchical respect of grandchild to grandparent, but the nature of the hierarchy is at the same time the basis for intimacy and solidarity. (As a friend has noted: the reason that grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.) Tannen would replace the dichotomies of our gender debates with a multidimensional grid which would allow hierarchy to be close (Japanese) or distant (American); equality be close (siblings) or distant (business associates).

While it is not part of Tannen's discussion, since she is a professor at Georgetown University I was tempted to speculate on how the complexities of her analysis might impact the Catholic controversies about "inclusive" (gender neutral?) language and "hierarchy." Hierarchy is easier. She is obviously correct that hierarchy is not necessarily an instrument of distance, the defeat of intimacy, as the grandparent example illustrates. The problem is not hierarchy - but what we may need is the pope as Holy Grandfather! The issue of gender neutral language, however, is somewhere between ultra-difficult and undesirable. Undesirable in the sense that a genuinely sex-neutral language might be misunderstood by everybody - not just half of the biological division of the race. Finally, if Tannen is on the right track, the difficulty of improving church language is deeper than changing a few pronouns. If male style is in the texture, then substituting Sarah for Abraham, Priscilla for Paul, may maintain miscommunication under a different name.