It's Every Man for Him or Himself

It's Every Man for Him or Himself

 

Within the past few years, society has really stepped out of it's comfort zone in terms of making men and women more equal, but will this ever completely change? Deborah Tannen argues that the difference between the two genders, in terms of language, will always be segregated if parents teach their children strict gender roles from an early age. The difference in which men and women communicate is quite astonishing, as males are taught by their peers to use language as a means of asserting dominance over women, while women use communication as a way of confirming and supporting ideas. Deborah Tannen's book 'You Just Don't Understand' supports the idea that there is a huge gap between the genders and their means of communication. She believes that there are six main differences between the ways males and females use language: Status vs. Support, Independence vs. Intimacy, Advice vs. Understanding, Information vs. Feelings, Orders vs. Proposals and Conflict vs. Compromise.

 

The way that males are presented in this ideology indicates that they are ignorant and controlling within conversations with females, but is this strictly true? I disagree. While it may be true that parents enforce a way that their children should act due to their gender, it can't be a definite representation of the way that all men communicate. As modern society becomes more inclusive, this theory becomes less valid, being almost 30 years old. The amount of change that has happened in the past few years is remarkable, as we are now seeing less and less strict social structures in terms of gender. Despite this, the theory does speak some truth as we do not live in a patriarchal free world; Debora Tannen's ideology still applies to some people.


Several other linguists have decided that interactions between men and women have been miscommunicated through their different uses of language. Robin Lakoff has implied that women use far more precise devices such as intensifiers, tag questions, hedges and hypercorrect grammar. He argues that women are more polite, indecisive and submissive than men, and are therefore more weak in how they present themselves.


Another feature of spoken language between the two genders is the idea of dominance, particularly men having dominance over women in conversations. Zimmerman and West. These two theorists believed that within mixed-sex conversations, men were more likely to interrupt than women. This ideology can be backed up by the evidence that they collected as a result of a recorded conversation in a work place, where in 11 conversations men interrupted 46 times, while women only interrupted twice. These results led Zimmerman and West to believe that the reason behind this was that men were attempting to dominate women in an assertive way. However, this theory was criticised by Geoffrey Beattie, where he states that men are likely to interrupt because they could be eager in the topic of conversation.