In the village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea, when a woman is annoyed with her husband, she swears at him for 45 minutes, at the top of her voice so the neighbours catch every nuance. During this “kros” — the word means “angry” — the target is not allowed to answer back, nor may anyone interrupt until she’s given her feelings full expression.

And what expression it is. The anthropologist Don Kulick recorded a typical kros: “You’re a ****ing rubbish man. You hear? Your ****ing ***** is full of maggots. You’re a big ****ing semen *****. Stone balls! ...****ing black *****! You *****ing mother’s ****!”

When the flowers of English womanhood carry on like this — at closing time on Friday night in Ipswich, say — they’re thought to be behaving laddishly. When the housewives of Gapun turn the air blue, however, they are only doing what comes naturally to a woman. The village men, apparently, pride themselves on their ability to conceal their opinions and express themselves indirectly: if they need to get a grievance off their chests, they get their wives to do it for them. In Gapun, women are from Mars, men are from Venus.

I sensed early on in this delightfully spiky book that Deborah Cameron — an Oxford professor of language and communication — would give a first-class kros, and enjoy it, too. The only problem would be limiting the number of victims to one. Cameron’s targets are many: there’s John Gray, the author of the psychobabble classic, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, Deborah Tannen, the author of You Just Don’t Understand, Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, and the husband-and-wife team behind a slim volume called Why Men Don’t Iron.

These writers all subscribe to some version of what Cameron dubs the Mars-Venus myth, which holds that women are more verbal than men, that women talk more about people, relationships and feelings, while men talk more about things and facts, that women use language in a co-operative way, whereas men use it competitively. Oh, and that these differences mean that men and women routinely fail to communicate, but can learn to do better — which might explain why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has sold more than 10m copies in 37 languages.

For Cameron, this is simplistic eyewash, best countered with a few well-aimed stats. She cites the meta-analysis of Janet Hyde, a psychologist who has collated masses of research findings on male-female communications. Hyde’s number-crunching suggests that the difference in language use between men and women is statistically negligible. Women don’t interrupt more than men, nor are they more talkative or empathetic in conversation, less prone to assertive conversation, or any better or worse at verbal reasoning. The headline for Hyde’s discovery could read “Men and Women pretty similar, research finds”. And yet, Cameron muses, this isn’t a story any of us, male or female, much care to talk about.

To prove her point, she cites the slew of news reports last year claiming that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average manage only 7,000. This “fact”, from a popular science book called The Female Brain, turned out to be based not on research, but on a self-help book, which itself cited other self-help books, each featuring wildly varying figures. As Cameron concludes, “All the numbers were plucked from thin air. The claims were so variable because they were guesswork.” The invented figures were quietly deleted from reprints of the book — without headlines.

It is not as easy to delete the whole pink v blue polarity, however, even if one can have a great deal of fun — as Cameron does — teasing evolutionary biologists for their inventive and contradictory Just So stories about the development of language. Did early man, à la Fred Flintstone, get into the habit of long silences while hunting mammoths, whereas women, tending their young or gathering berries, needed to chatter? Or did these alleged language differences stem from the prehistoric male urge to show off to prospective mates, who obligingly learnt to listen supportively? We’ll never know, and we’ll never stop speculating.

Cameron, skilled at deflating the sweeping generalisations of others, steers clear of overarching theories, until the very end — when she asks just why the Mars-Venus myth should be so popular today, particularly among educated western women, who might seem to have the least to gain from stereotypes about male-female behaviour. “My parents, who married in the mid-1950s, never argued about who should take out the trash, pick up groceries, wash dishes, drive the car, choose what to watch on TV, or make important financial decisions,” she writes. “Nor were they ever in conflict about whose job came first or whose life had to be fitted around domestic commitments. These things were settled in advance by the basic fact of gender difference.” And now? Pretty much every decision a modern couple makes is up for negotiation. No wonder we like to think our problems can be blamed on a failure of interplanetary communication. It’s easier than admitting we’re all earthlings, and we haven’t a clue.

Second-class males

The literature of Mars and Venus is remarkably patronising towards men, who feature as bullies, toddlers or Neanderthals sulking in their caves. One (male) author even calls his book If Men Could Talk. A book called If Women Could Think would be instantly denounced: why do men put up with books that set them on a par with Lassie or Skippy the Bush Kangeroo (‘hey, wait a minute — I think he’s trying to tell us something!’)?

The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? by Deborah Cameron
OUP £10.99 pp204

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