So it turns out that after all the rows about the washing up, the shopping and
the school run, men are not from Mars nor women from Venus. Both sexes are,
rather prosaically, from Earth. And, despite anecdotal evidence to the
contrary, men and women do speak the same language.
At least we do according to Deborah Cameron, Britain’s pre-eminent feminist
philologist (not often that you meet one of them) and the current Rupert
Murdoch professor of language and communication at Oxford University.
Cameron, 48, is a firebrand with an impressive list of pet peeves, including
Tories, Darwinists, GNER’s passenger service announcements, Big Brother’s
language “so-called” experts, man-hating “pseudo-feminists” and societies
for the protection of the semicolon. Don’t get her started on Lynne Truss.
But the subject that has irked her most recently – enough for Cameron to
dedicate an entire book to bludgeoning its brains out – is what she calls
The Myth of Mars and Venus, published last week by Oxford University Press.
In it Cameron tears into such seminal works as John Gray’s Men are From
Mars, Women are From Venus and Deborah Tan-nen’s You Just Don’t Understand:
Women and Men in Conversation.
These texts, and their bandwagon-hopping cousins, have shipped hundreds of
thousands of copies in the past 15 years by espousing the theory that men
and women are genetically unsuited to communicating successfully with each
other. It’s time, says Cameron, for the nonsense to stop.
“I’m afraid I think John Gray comes from Uranus,” says Cameron, in a joke she
may have rehearsed. “It’s pretty annoying that people like him have made
millions peddling this nonsense.”
The bones of Cameron’s argument, set out in The Myth of Mars and Venus, are
that Gray et al have no scientific basis for their claims. Great sheaves of
academic papers, says Cameron, show that the language skills of men and
women are almost identical. Indeed, the central tenets of the Mars and Venus
culture – that women talk more than men, that men are more direct, that
women are more verbally skilled – can all be debunked by scientific
research. A recent study in the American journal Science, for instance,
found men and women speak almost exactly the same number of words a day:
16,000.
“The main thing about the book is that I wanted to offer people more than the
evidence-free rubbish they get every day,” says Cameron. “My pitch was
basically the CSI pitch: let the evidence tell the story.”
Where the book becomes interesting is when she asks why we have become
interested in these myths. “The first point to make is that in the past 20
years we have become obsessed by communication,” she says. “And that’s not
just in relationships; it’s in customer care, it’s in politics. All problems
are seen to be communication problems.
“If, for instance, anyone disagrees with someone else, it’s seen to be because
they don’t understand each other. Well, actually you could understand me and
still disagree with me. Likewise, if a train is delayed or cancelled, all
anyone’s interested in is whether there is an appropriate announcement.
Communication has become a substitute for actual problem solving.
“Where this relates to the Mars and Venus books is that they say problems in
relationships between men and women are all down to communication. The
misunderstandings are not, for instance, about the fact that men and women
are both vying for jobs, or power, or status, or time. That’s quite
comforting to a lot of people.
“There has been a revolution in gender politics – there is much more blurring
between the roles of men and women – and I think a lot of men and women are
uneasy about that. Books like Mars and Venus tell us that although men and
women may be very similar on the outside, we are profoundly different on a
deeper level – that we’re ‘hard-wired’ differently.”
Where Cameron is most convincing is in her portrayal of modern relationships
where, unlike our grand-parents’ generation, we now put a huge amount of
weight on a few relationships, particularly those with our companions. “My
grandmother never expected to have long, intimate discussions with my
grandfather,” says Cameron. “In the northern working-class community where
they lived, women talked to women and men to men.
“Now we all expect not just to have a partner for life but a companion for
life. In general, too, we have fewer people to whom we talk regularly; so a few people have to bear the responsibility to support us emotionally. We can
be very disappointed when the person we’re in a relationship with doesn’t
turn out to be telepathic.”
Cameron is not simply irritated that the Mars and Venus books have filled too
many Christmas stockings. Her fervour on this issue runs deeper. There is,
she thinks, something regressive, deeply conservative, in this outlook
because what it seems to be saying is that we can’t change.
In the Mars and Venus world view, women stay women, chatting (probably too
much) and being unable to say exactly what they mean, while men get on with
their straightforward competitive existences. It’s a view, she feels, that
does neither men nor women any favours.
“I realise that women are peddling this stuff as much as men,” says Cameron.
“There is a cheap way for women to feel good in this myth. They are
portrayed as sympathetic, good at communicating, whatever. Men, on the other
hand, are autistic, inarticulate Neanderthals. If you’re a woman, that’s a
way of feeling good about yourself when it’s still quite likely that the man
you’re with earns more money than you. It’s a big trap for women.”
What does the collusion of millions of women in this “big trap” say about the
state of Noughties gender politics? “It’s possible that we’re in a
postfeminist moment,” she says. “There is a strain of conservatism running
through these books that says, ‘Wouldn’t we all be better if we returned to
our old gender roles’.”
The rate of change in social and sexual relations has been so quick, Cameron
says, that it has startled us. Aspirant and affluent men and women now look
the same – women wear jeans and work out; men groom – and, more importantly,
they want the same things.
“Again I go back to my grand-parents’ generation. It was very clear then who
was who and who did what,” she says. “But now, in our aspirations and
outlook on lives, educated men and women are very similar.”
This, argues Cameron, is a difficult change, one that has caused resistance.
Hence the success of the Mars and Venus myth, because what could be more
comforting to men and women in a world in flux than a reaffirmation of
traditional roles?
Cameron has been here before. Indeed, swap the central characters around and
one could almost be talking about her 1995 book, Verbal Hygiene. With
debates about the English schools curriculum raging in the background,
Verbal Hygiene not only skewered grammar fundamental-ists but also wondered
why the campaign for proper syntax had become such an emotional issue.
“You had people like Prince Charles and Norman Tebbit inferring that if people
were making spelling mistakes it was only a short step to them coming in
dirty to school and then there’d be no motivation for them to stay out of
crime,” says Cameron. “There were these illogical slippery slope arguments:
how, if children didn’t know how to use the colon properly, it was only a
few steps from drug-taking and criminality. There was a deep moral and
social dimension to it all.
“It’s the same with modern pop linguists like Lynne Truss. Linguistic
standards very quickly become substitutes for moral ones. For a lot of pop
linguists, punctuation is a mark of rectitude, about respect for your
reader. Actually, what’s happening is just what happens to language: it
changes.”
The relationships between men and women change, too, she says, but try telling
the Mars and Venus crew. An argument about whether “I don’t suppose there’s
any tomato ketchup” is a veiled instruction or a genuine question might seem
trifling, but for Cameron at least the argument is political – because,
outside the domestic sphere, the Mars and Venus myth is informing arguments
whose stakes are much higher.
One acute observation in The Myth of Mars and Venus revolves around rape
trials where, Cameron believes, Mars and Venus logic has become the ultimate
get-out clause for defendants. Cameron cites one rape trial in Canada in the
1990s where the female complainant is asked: “Did it occur to you through
the persistent behaviour that maybe your signals were not coming across loud
and clear”, while the male complainant states simply: “She said that she was
tired but she never said like ‘no’, ‘stop’, ‘don’t’.”
Cameron argues that both men and women are perfectly capable of understanding
what a woman saying ‘I’m tired’ and feigning unconsciousness means, but no
one thinks to ask why the defendant is being so obtuse. The complainant, on
the other hand, is roasted for not being direct enough. The myth of Mars and
Venus bolsters a great escape route for the defendant: miscommunication.
Even when there is less on the line, men can use the miscommunication ticket
to their advantage. Ask any man who has failed to do the washing up after
being asked, “Do you think you might have time to do the dishes?”
“Of course everyone knows what is being talked about,” says Cameron, “because
in other situations men can understand and make indirect requests. But it’s
sometimes convenient for one party to misunderstand. The Mars and Venus myth
says this misunderstanding is an inalienable fact of male and female
relationships, but it’s not. The only thing you’ve proved is that the man is
a lazy arse.”
Cameron has work to do to if she wishes to debunk the entire Mars and Venus
cottage industry. Hardly a day goes by without some new piece of research
telling us why women can’t issue instructions or men have difficulty
communicating in groups.
The truth is that the truth is boring. When it comes to the sexes, differences
are much more interesting than similarities. “There’s a postcard that a few
friends of mine have sent me,” says Cameron. “It reads, ‘Men are from Earth.
Women are from Earth. Deal with it’. That pretty much sums it up. The
trouble is, that’s not very exciting. A book called Men and Women Understand
Each Other Pretty Well Most of the Time isn’t going to sell too many copies,
is it?”
Don’t be ridiculous – of course you understand me, darling
Myth 1: women talk more than men Nonsense, says Cameron. In a popular
self-help book, The Female Brain, the claim is made that women say 20,000
words a day and men only 7,000. This statistic has been widely reported in
newspapers and journals but has since turned out to be erroneous and based
on no real research. It has since been removed from the book.
In fact a number of studies have found that men speak more than women,
although others found that women speak more than men. A recent study by the
University of Arizona, on a group of undergraduates, found that both sexes
spoke an equal number of words a day – 16,000.
Myth 2: men and women communicate differently More hogwash, says
Cameron. Linguistic studies have shown that men and women share a 99.75%
overlap in the way they communicate. If there are differences in the way the
sexes communicate, they are infinitesimal.
The only real markers of difference between men and women are that women smile
more and spell better, and it is, says Cameron, only a “moderate difference”.
Myth 3: men’s and women’s brains are hardwired differently when it comes to
language This area, says Cameron, is more difficult. Brain scans show
that, when men talk, they use almost exclusively the left-hand side of their
brains, whereas women also use parts of the right side. But, according to
Cameron, this has had no bearing on how we communicate.
The only proven effect of this neurological difference between the sexes,
comes in the case of severe head injury. If men suffer an acute injury to
the brain, they are more likely to lose their speech faculties than women,
because other parts of the female brain are able to take over.
Myth 4: men interrupt more than women The evidence suggests women
interrupt as much as men do. Cameron argues that some men, naturally, will
interrupt more than others. The dangers of grouping men together is that the
differences between men and women are so slight, whereas the differences
between men and other men are more interesting.
When, and how people interrupt, argues Cameron, is much more about power and
social relations than the genetic make-up of the sexes.
