Feminine Fragrance

The Myth of Mars and Venus

( The painting of Mars and Venus by Sandro Botticelli 1483, source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_and_Mars_(Botticelli)

Deborah Cameron, a professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College of the University or Oxford and a leading expert in the field of language and gender studies, wrote a book entitled The Myth of Mars and Venus in which she describes the men are from Mars, women are from Venus position and reveals that differences between men and women are an issue of culture, not a fundamental difference in our chromosomal makeup. I borrowed this title from her book.
Away from the demands of feminists for the same status in language, some social linguistic scholars think the language of men and women differ in their speech patterns.

Women usually speak in a softer voice using pitch and inflection to emphasize points. They sound more emotional in speech. They use approximately five tones when talking and interrupt others less and allow more interruptions. They disclose more personal information about themselves, and make more indirect accusations. They use "why," which sounds like nagging (i.e., "Why don't you ever call?"). They make more indirect statements, use more intensifiers such as "few", "so", "really", "much", "quite", make more tentative statements and use "tag endings" or upward inflections which make statements sound like questions (i.e., "It's a nice day, isn't it?"). They use more conjunctions when changing topics (i.e., "and", "but", "however") and ask more questions to stimulate conversations. They tend to establish more business relationships through discussing their personal life.

On the other hand, men speak in a louder voice using loudness to emphasize points. They sound more monotonous in speech. They use approximately three tones when talking and interrupt others more and allow fewer interruptions. They disclose less personal information about themselves; they make direct accusations (i.e., "You don't call"). They make more direct statements and "beat around the bush" less often, use less intensifiers, and make more declarative statements (i.e., "It's a nice day."). They use more interjections when changing topics (i.e., "Hey!", "Oh", "Listen!") and ask fewer questions to stimulate conversation. They rarely discuss their personal life in business.

In 1975, for first time, the known grammarian Robin Lakoff claimed that there is a typical female language, very different from that of men, marked by the use of certain linguistic features such as hedging devices, tag questions, intensifiers and qualifiers, so-called “trivial lexis,” “empty” adjectives, and rising intonation on declaratives. Specifically, male use of language was considered the norm and women’s language was deviant from that norm, and thus being regarded as inferior to that of men. (See: Lakoff, R. (1975), Language and Women’s Place, New York: Harper & Row)
To justify his own statement, Lakoff put forward a “dominance approach” theory, according to which the difference in language between men and women is a consequence of male dominance and female subordination. In this view, women are a suppressed minority group.

But another group (supported by John Coates (19860 and Deborah Tannen (1990)), on the other hand, believe that men and women belong to different subcultures and that any linguistic differences can be attributed to cultural differences. They argued men and women communicate differently (and women do it better) because of the way their brains are wired. The female brain excels in verbal tasks whereas the male brain is better adapted to visual-spatial and mathematical tasks. Women like to talk; men prefer action to words. (See: Holmes, J. (1992b), “Women’s Talk in Public Contexts”, Discourse and Society ).

Recently ( on 2009-09-30 ) a book has been published under the title of Code Switching: How to Talk So Men Will Listen (ISBN: 1592579264 , EAN: 9781592579266) by Alpha Books, where authors Claire Damken Brown and Audrey Nelson narrate how men and women act in ingrained styles learned from birth and deeply embedded in the workplace structure. According to the authors, women tend to write long e-messages, which express support, and are more personal and emotive, while men are to the point with precise orders. They point out the following gender differences in their book:
1 – Women play the role of "office mother" offering to lend a sympathetic ear
2 – Men play devil's advocate and act in a challenging way
3 – Women make the effort to laugh at jokes and make colleagues feel good about themselves
4 – Men are more likely to be the joke teller
5 – Women act in a passive manner, letting colleagues talk over them and interrupt

Although in my opinion, both the theories are somehow nearer to the truth. I strongly believe that men and women are coming from a different subculture and not only are they different in biological manner, but they are also different with their psycho-socio backgrounds. This is due to the way boys and girls are raised linguistically. Janet Holmes claimed that women often use empty phrases like I think or you know, because they are not committed to what they are saying and that they can be used to soften or mitigate utterances in order not to hurt the addressee’s feelings.
Women’s expressions are mainly an interpretation of women’s ideas and their surroundings, and I think they differ from men’s harshness. The myth of Mars and Venus is no exception to that rule. But I don’t find anything harassing if females are considered different. It is to be remembered that the world is built with two complimentary powers and male-female differences today did not exist in the same communities in early periods. It is the patriarchal society which makes its dominance over the feminine world. Those who are saying about the brain mapping, to prove that the female is a weaker sex, has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith.

Still some scholars fight against the male dominance over language and making women invisible from language. Access their causes and successes at my SENSE &SENSUALITY blog.