Chapter 5 - Gendered Verbal Communication

Reflection, Discussion, and Action

Before reading, were you aware of the diversity of men's groups and their goals? What do you think the limited awareness of men's groups says about biases in media and education in America?
Which men's groups align most and least with your personal values and views on masculinity?
Imagine a discussion involving a Free Man, a mythopoetic, and a Promise Keeper debating whether men should pay alimony and child support. Write or act out this discussion.
Write a letter to a significant man in your life, sharing your definition of a good man or inviting him to discuss issues related to men and masculinity, based on what you've learned.

Recommended Resources

How to Survive a Plague: A documentary by David France (2012) about the activism of ACT UP during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Get on the Bus: A film by Spike Lee (1996) depicting the first Million Man March and its significance for black men.
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by Michael Kimmel (2008): Explores the pressures and anxieties faced by young men today.
The Good Men Project DVD: Available with the book of the same title or from the Good Men Project website.
Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement by Rob Okun (2014): A collection of essays by men involved in profeminist movements.

Knowledge Challenge

Do women or men generally talk more?
Why are more people killed by hurricanes with feminine names?
What is conversational maintenance work and who generally does it?

Consider these sentences and what they imply about Western culture’s views of women and men:

"The woman judge cast the deciding vote."
"Jason babysat his son while his wife attended a meeting."
"Freshmen find it difficult to adjust to college life."
"Every student should sign his or her paper."

Gendered Verbal Communication

This chapter focuses on verbal communication, while Chapter 6 will concentrate on nonverbal communication.
We will explore how communication reflects cultural views of sex and gender, and how individuals' communication embodies or challenges cultural prescriptions for femininity and masculinity.
"The tongue has the power of life and death."

Verbal Communication Expresses Cultural Views of Gender

Our language both reflects and reinforces cultural views and values, including those about gender. We’ll discuss six ways that language and gender are connected.

Gendered Language Excludes

Generic language purports to include everyone but literally refers only to men (e.g., congressman, spokesman, mailman, mankind, he, his).
Research shows inclusive language has an impact. Children asked to select photos for a textbook chose pictures of men when titles included male generic language like “Urban Man” but chose more photos of both men and women when titles were neutral.
Generic language leads many to assume only males are included. For example, in one study, when instructions referred to an average student as "he," only 12% of students wrote a story about a girl or woman; when referred to as "he or she," 42% wrote about girls and women.
Dictionaries and national newspapers now have policies requiring inclusive language, and writing style manuals caution against using generic language.
Gendered language is also apparent in traditional pronouns, which erase people who do not fit into conventional categories.
They is increasingly accepted as a singular pronoun that substitutes for he or she.
Some universities, such as the University of Vermont, have agreed to use they to refer to individual students as well as more than one student.
The Washington Post has approved the singular they in its style guidelines.
Online sites such as OKCupid and Facebook allow people to designate their identity, and users of Tumblr often pin the pronouns they prefer to their pages.

Language Defines Gender as Binary

Hurricanes with feminine names are more deadly than those with masculine names because gender stereotypes link masculinity with greater risk and strength.
People were more likely to discount warnings for hurricanes with feminine names. High-damage storms with masculine names had an average of 11 deaths, while those with feminine names had 59 deaths.
Women are frequently defined by appearance and relationships, while men are typically defined by activities, accomplishments, and positions.
Commentators discussed Hillary Clinton’s appearance during the 2008 Democratic primary contest.
In the early stages of the 2016 presidential primaries, Donald Trump made derogatory comments about Carly Fiorina’s appearance.
Coverage of women’s sports focuses more on appearance, while coverage of male athletes focuses on athletic skills.
During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, news commentators regularly referred to professional female athletes as “girls.”
The 2016 Olympics may take the prize for sexist references to women athletes.
Language also reflects social views of women as passive and men as active participants in sexual activity (e.g., "He laid her," "He balled her," "He screwed her," "She got knocked up.")
Because men are expected to be sexual initiators, inappropriate sexual initiative by men is sometimes described in language that makes it seem acceptable. Donald Trump excused his vulgar comments about grabbing women’s genitalia as “locker room talk."
Language reflects society’s view of women as more defined by relationships than men are. On prime-time television, even professional women are often depicted primarily in interpersonal contexts, and their appearance is highlighted.
Historically, women who don’t marry have been referred to negatively as spinsters or old maids, while men are referred to as bachelors.
In China, single, professional women over 27 are negatively depicted as "leftover women."

Parallel Language?

Parallel language means equivalent terms (e.g., male and female).
Some terms do not have equivalent masculine and feminine forms.
- Masculine Term Feminine Term
- Master Mistress
- Wizard Witch
- Patron Matron
- Bachelor Spinster
- Name/Name Birth Name/ Married Name
- Player ?
A majority of heterosexual women take their husbands’ names upon marrying, but there are alternatives to the traditional ways of naming ourselves.
Some women choose to retain their birth names when they marry.
Some adopt hyphenated names to symbolize the family heritage of both partners (e.g., Johnson-Pham).
In some countries, such as Spain, both the mother’s and father’s family names are used to construct children’s family names.
Other alternatives are choosing a new surname together or renaming oneself to reflect matriarchal rather than patriarchal lineage.
- The term matriarchy means “rule by the mothers” and generally refers to systems of ideology, social structures, and practices that are created by women and reflect the values, priorities, and views of women as a group.
- Because a mother’s last name still reflects male lineage—that of the mother’s father—some women use their mothers’ first names to create a matrilineal last name: For example, Lynn Franklin’s daughter, Bailey, might rename herself Bailey Lynnschild.

Language Shapes Awareness of Gendered Issues

Naming is important. We name things that matter to us and don’t name what doesn’t matter.
The power of naming is clear with sexual harassment and date rape.
For most of history, sexual harassment occurred frequently but was unnamed.
Because it wasn’t named, sexual harassment was difficult to recognize or stop.
Only when the term sexual harassment was coined was it recognized as a form of violence in need of redress.
*U.S. laws concerning marriage and naming have undergone significant transformation. Prior to 1975, U.S. states insisted that a woman assume her husband’s last name on marrying in order to vote, drive, or participate in basic forms of public life
Research demonstrates that a great number of heterosexual men prefer that their partners change their names upon mar-riage, and some indicate disappointment or a feeling of loss if their partners refuse Currently, approximately 20% of U.S. women who marry choose to keep their birth names , Lesbians who place high priority on social recognition of their relationship prefer that one or both partners change their names.
Similarly, for years women who were raped by their dates had no recognized way to name what had happened. Until we coined the term date rape, women had to deal with their experiences without the language to define grievous violations that often had lifelong repercussions.
Language is not static. We continually change language to reflect our changing understandings of ourselves and our world.
We reject terms we find objectionable (generic language), and we create new terms to define realities we think are important (they as a singular pronoun, sexual harassment, Ms., trans).
As we modify language, we change how we see ourselves and our world, and we shape meanings of our culture.
Like other languages, American Sign Language (ASL) is dynamic and fluid. New signs are added for new words that emerge; other signs are changed to reflect changing social perspectives.
Naming helps us notice things we otherwise don’t see. For Instance Benevolent sexism is a paternalistic attitude that describes women affectionately but assumes they aren’t competent to do particular tasks.

Language Organizes Perceptions of Gender

Two ways in which language organizes perceptions of gender are through stereotyping and encouraging polarized perceptions of sex and gender.
A stereotype is a generalization about an entire class of phenomena based on perceptions of some members of the class.
Relying on stereotypes can lead us to overlook important qualities of individuals and to perceive them only in terms of what we consider common to a general category.
Many people stereotype women as emotional and men as rational.
The English language may also encourage polarized thinking, which is conceiving of things as absolute opposites.
As we saw in Chapter 2, queer performative theory challenges polarized language for sex, gender, and sexual orientation, claiming that polarized terms—or gender binaries—obscure the range of identities that humans express. Also, the categories of men and women erase transgender and intersex people.

Language Evaluates Gender

Language reflects cultural values and is a powerful influence on our perceptions.
Trivializing language is sometimes applied to women to define them as immature or juvenile (honey, girl, darling).
Other common terms equate girls and women with food (sugar, sweet thing, cupcake) and animals (chick, pig, dog, cow, bitch).
Diminutive suffixes designate women as reduced forms of the standard (male) form of the word: actress, waitress.
Women who are sexually active may be called derogatory names such as slut, whereas men who are equally sexually active are described with terms such as player.
In addition, feminine terms are used to degrade boys and men (sissy, momma’s boy, bitch, girly-man).

Language Allows Self-Reflection

We also use language, inflected with social values, to reflect on and evaluate ourselves.
We live in a celebrity culture, which makes it tempting to define ourselves in comparison to celebrities—or airbrushed, digitally manipulated images of them.
If we find the existing language inadequate, we can move beyond it. For instance, we can label ourselves androgynous, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming. By coining new language to describe our identities, we nudge culture to recognize us on our own terms.

Gendered Styles of Verbal Communication

Language is a primary means by which we express our gendered identities. Keep in mind that we’re looking at gendered styles of communicating, not necessarily sex-based styles.
“I’m fat.” “You’re not half as fat as I am. Look at my big butt.” “I need to give up eating.” Fat talk is common. Almost always fat talk is negative, self-critical comments about how the speakers’ bodies don’t measure up to ideals advanced by media. Fat talk isn’t harmless. Engaging in fat talk predicts lower body satisfaction and greater depression and increases perceived pressure to be thinner.

Gendered Speech Communities

Philosopher Suzanne Langer asserted that culture, or collective life, is possible only to the extent that a group of people share a symbol system and the meanings encapsulated in it.
William Labov extended Langer’s ideas by defining a speech community as a group of people who share norms about communication. This means that a speech community exists when people share understandings about goals of communication, strategies for enacting those goals, and ways of interpreting communication.
Children are typically socialized into gendered speech communities.

The Lessons of Children’s Play

A classic study by Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker (1982) gave initial insight into the importance of children’s play in shaping patterns of communication.
Young children usually played in sex-segregated groups, and girls and boys tended to play different kinds of games.
Boys’ typical games (football, baseball, war) and girls’ typical games (school, house, tea party) cultivate distinct communication styles.
Boys’ games usually involve fairly large groups, are competitive, have clear goals, involve physically rough play in large spaces, and are organized by rules and roles that specify who does what and how to play.
In playing games, boys learn to communicate to accomplish goals, compete for and maintain status, exert control over others, get attention, and stand out.
Boys’ games cultivate four communication rules:
1. Use communication to assert your ideas, opinions, and identity.
2. Use talk to achieve something, such as solving problems or developing strategies.
3. Use communication to attract and maintain others’ attention.
4. Use communication to compete for the “talk stage.” Make yourself stand out, take attention away from others, and get others to pay attention to you.
Consistent with other aspects of masculine socialization, these rules focus on individuality, competition, and achievement. Finally, we see the undercurrent of masculinity’s emphasis on invulnerability: If your goal is to control and to be better than others, you need to show only your strengths.
The games played primarily by girls cultivate distinct ways of communicating. Girls tend to play in pairs or in small groups rather than large ones. Games such as house and school do not have preset, clear-cut goals and roles.
The lack of preset goals for the games requires girls to develop interpersonal communication skills.
Playing Girls spend more time talking than doing anything else teach four basic rules for communication:
1. Use communication to create and maintain relationships. The process of communication, not its content, is the heart of relationships.
2. Use communication to establish egalitarian relations with others. Don’t outdo, criticize, or put down others. If you have to criticize, be gentle.
3. Use communication to include others—bring them into conversations, respond to their ideas.
4. Use communication to show sensitivity to others and relationships.
Of all adolescents, 90% describe technology as“cool,”and the vast majority of adolescent boys and girls play video games.
Approximately 43% of online gamers are female. Girls and women often seek games that privilege real-life simulation, puzzles, and strategy; boys and men often prefer sporting, action, and combat games.
Female gamers aim to build relation-ships and make connections with others through gaming; male gamers tend to play video games for individual achievement.
On average, men tend to purchase games with more violence and higher ratings from the Entertainment Software Rating Board than do women.

Gendered Communication Practices

Feminine Communication

People who are socialized in feminine speech communities—most women and some men—tend to regard communication as a primary way to establish and maintain relationships with others. They use language to foster connections and support closeness and mutual understanding.
Establishing equality between people is a second important feature of feminine communication. To achieve symmetry, communicators often match experiences to indicate “You’re not alone in how you feel.” Typical ways to communicate equality would be saying “I’ve felt just like that” or “I totally know what you mean.” Growing out of the quest for equality is a participatory mode of interacting in which communicators respond to and build on each other’s ideas in the process of conversing.
A third characteristic of feminine speech is support for others. To demonstrate support, communicators often express emotions to show understanding of another’s situation or feelings. “Oh, you must feel terrible” communicates that we understand and support how another feels. Related to these first two features is attention to the relationship level of communication. Conversations between feminine people tend to be characterized by intensive adverbs (“That’s really exciting”) and questions that probe for greater understanding of feelings and perceptions surrounding the subject of talk. “How did you feel when it occurred?” “How does this fit into the overall relationship?” are probes that help a listener understand a speaker’s perspective.
A fourth feature of feminine speech style is conversational “maintenance work.” This involves efforts to sustain conversation by inviting others to speak and by prompting them to elaborate their ideas. Questions are often used to include others: “How was your day?” “Did anything interesting happen on your trip?” “Do you have anything to add?” Communication of this sort maintains interaction and opens the conversational door to others.
A fifth quality of feminine speech is responsiveness. A feminine person might make eye contact, nod, or say, “Tell me more” or “That’s interesting.” Responsiveness affirms the other person and encourages elaboration by showing interest in what was said.
A sixth quality of feminine talk is personal, concrete style. Typical of feminine talk are details, personal disclosures, and concrete reasoning. These features cultivate a personal tone, and they facilitate feelings of closeness by connecting communicators’ lives.
A final feature of feminine speech is tentativeness. This may be expressed in a number of forms. Sometimes people use verbal hedges, such as “I kind of feel you may be overreacting.” In other situations, they qualify statements by saying “I’m not sure if this is right, but….” Another way to keep talk provisional is to tag a question onto a statement in a way that invites another to respond: “Scandal is a pretty good show, isn’t it?” Tentative communication opens the door for others to respond and express their opinions.
There is controversy about tentativeness associated with feminine speech. Robin Lakoff (1975) claimed that hedges, qualifiers, and tag questions indicate uncertainty and lack of confidence.

Masculine Communication

Masculine speech communities tend to regard talk as a way to accomplish concrete goals, exert control, preserve independence, entertain, and enhance status. Conversation is often seen as an arena for proving oneself and negotiating prestige.
The first feature of masculine speech is the effort to establish status and control. Masculine speakers do this by asserting their ideas and authority, telling jokes and stories, or challenging others. Also, men maintain both control and independence by disclosing less than women. Men and boys typically use more I-references (“I have a plan,” “I had a good game”) than women and girls. One way to exhibit knowledge and control is to give advice. For example, a person might say, “The way you should handle that is …,” or “Don’t let your boss get to you.”
A second prominent feature of masculine speech is instrumentality—the use of face-to-face or computer-mediated communication (CMC) to accomplish instrumental objectives. Particularly when men think they are knowledgeable about a topic, they may want to show their knowledge to others. In conversation, this is often expressed through problem-solving efforts to get information, discover facts, and suggest solutions.
A third feature of masculine communication is conversational command. Despite jokes about women’s talkativeness, research indicates that, in most contexts, men tend to talk more often and at greater length than women. Further, masculine speakers may reroute conversations by using what another says as a jumping-off point for their own topics, or they may interrupt. Although all genders interrupt, most research suggests that men do it more frequently
Fourth, masculine speech tends to be direct and assertive. Compared with women’s language, men’s language is typically more forceful and authoritative
Fifth, masculine speech tends to be more abstract than feminine speech. Men frequently speak in general or conceptual terms that are removed from concrete experiences and personal feelings. Within public environments, norms for speaking call for theoretical, conceptual, and general thought and communication. Yet, within more personal relationships, abstract talk sometimes creates barriers to intimacy.
Finally, masculine speech tends to be less emotionally responsive than feminine speech, especially on the relationship level of meaning. Men, more than women, give what are called minimal response cues, which are verbalizations such as “yeah” or “um hmm.” Studies suggest that this verbal communication pattern is reflected in CMC as well, with men using fewer references to emotions in email than do women.
Research indicates that men and women tend to differ in their motivation and use of the Internet, with men emphasizing instrumentality and task completion and women emphasizing connectivity to others. While men were quicker to adopt computer technologies, women now use digital technologies more than do men due to the rise in social media networks.

The Gender-Linked Language Effect

Recent study identifies the gender-linked language effect, which notes that language differences between women and men are influenced by a variety of factors, including topics, speaker status, salience of gender in a communication situation, and other people present.
Women tend to speak more tentatively when talking about masculine topics (sports and automotive matters), but men speak more tentatively than women when talking about feminine topics (shopping and fashion).
Research on the gender-linked language effect reminds us that our gender expression varies according to context and other factors.

Gender-Based Misinterpretations in Communication

Showing Support

The problem is not so much what Jorge and Maddie say and don’t say. Rather, it’s how they interpret each other’s communication—actually, how they misinterpret each other, because they fail to understand that they are operating by different rules of communication. Jorge is respecting Maddie’s independence by not pushing her to talk. When he thinks she wants advice, he offers it in an effort to help. Maddie, on the other hand, wants comfort and a connection with Jorge—that’s her primary purpose in talking with him. To her, Jorge’s advice seems to dismiss her feelings. He doesn’t offer sympathy, because masculine rules for communication define this as condescending. Yet, the feminine speech community in which Maddie was socialized taught her that giving sympathy is a way to show support.

Troubles Talk

Talk about troubles, or personal problems, is a kind of interaction in which hurt feelings may result from differences between masculine and feminine styles of communicating.According to Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri (2015) offered this humorous example to make a not-so-humorous point.
Rewriting famous quotes“the way a woman would have to say them in a meeting,”Patrick Henry’s“Give me liberty or give me death” became “Dave, if I could, I could just—I just really feel like if we had liberty it would be terrific, and the alternative would just be awful, you know? That’sjust how itstrikes me. I don’t know.”Instead of Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful“I have a dream today,” Petri wrote: “I’m sorry, I just had thisidea— it’s probably crazy, but—look, just aslong as we’re throwing things out here—I had sort of an idea or vision about maybe the future?”
But perhaps Caleb does tell Carmen why he feels down. After hearing about his rejection letter, Carmen says, “I know how you feel. I was so bummed when I didn’t get that position at DataNet.” She is matching experiences to show Caleb that she understands his feelings and that he’s not alone According to a masculine speech community, however, Carmen’s comment about her own experience is an effort to steal the center stage from him and focus the conversation on herself.

The Point of the Story

Masculine speech tends to follow a linear pattern, in which major points in a story are presented sequentially to get to the climax. Talk tends to be straightforward without much detail. The rules of feminine speech, however, call for more detailed, less linear storytelling. Whereas men are more likely to provide rather bare information about what happened, women are more likely to embed the information within a larger context of the people involved and other events.
Women tend to include details because they matter at the relationship level of meaning. Recounting details is meant to increase involvement between people and to invite a conversational partner to be fully engaged in the situation being described.
Because feminine and masculine rules about story telling differ, men may find feminine accounts wandering and tedious. Conversely, the masculine style of storytelling may strike women as leaving out all the interesting particulars.

Relationship Talk

“Can we talk about us?” is the opening of innumerable conversations that end in misunderstanding and hurt. In general, people who are socialized into masculine style are interested in discussing relationships only if there is a problem to be addressed. However, people socialized into feminine style generally find it pleasurable to talk about important relationships even—or perhaps especially—when there are no problems Masculine speech communities view communication as a means to doing things and solving problems, whereas feminine speech communities regard the process of communicating as a primary way to create and sustain relationships. No wonder many men duck when their partners want to “discuss the relationship,” and women often feel a relationship is in trouble when their partners don’t want to talk about it.

Public Speaking

Historically, men have dominated politics. Thus, it’s not surprising that the assertive, dominant, confident masculine style is the standard for public speaking. Women who are effective in politics tend to manage a fine balance in which they are sufficiently feminine to be perceived as acting appropriately for women and sufficiently masculine to be perceived as acting appropriately for politicians
These are only five of many situations in which gendered differences in communication style may lead to misunderstandings. Many people find they can improve their relationships by understanding and adopting both masculine and feminine speech. When partners understand how to interpret each other’s rules, they are less likely to misread motives. Thus, greater fluidity and fluency in gendered communicative norms can empower us to become more gratifying conversational partners and enhance the quality of our relationships.

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored relationships among verbal communication, gender, and culture. We first looked at how language reflects and sustains cultural views of masculinity and femininity. By defining, organizing, and evaluating gender, language reinforces social views of sex and gender. From generic male terms to language that demeans and diminishes women, verbal communication is a powerful agent of cultural expression.
*The second theme of this chapter is that we express gendered identities through our communication. Because males and females are often socialized in different gender communities, they learn different rules for expressing support, interest, and involvement. This can lead to misunderstanding, frustration, hurt, and tension. Appreciation of and respect for the distinctive validity of each style of communication are foundations for better understanding between people. Further, learning to use different styles of communication allows all of us to be more flexible and effective in our interactions with a range of people.

Key Terms

Benevolent sexism: A paternalistic attitude that describes women affectionately but assumes they aren’t competent to do particular tasks.
Gender-linked language effect: Language differences between women and men are influenced by a variety of factors, including topics, speaker status, salience of gender in a communication situation, and other people present.
Generic language: Purports to include everyone but literally refers only to men.
Matriarchal: Rule by the mothers; systems of ideology, social structures, and practices created by women that reflect their values.
Minimal response cues: Verbalizations such as “yeah” or “um hmm” indicating attention.
Polarized thinking: Conceiving of things as absolute opposites.
Speech community: A group of people who share norms about communication.
Stereotype: A generalization about an entire class of phenomena based on perceptions of some members of the class.

Reflection, Discussion, and Action

Think about naming—specifically, about naming yourself. If you marry, do you expect to take your partner’s name, or do you expect (or want) your partner to take yours? How important is it to you to keep your birth name? Have you or would you consider changing or hyphenating your own name?
Think back to your childhood games. What games did you play? Do you think the games you played affected your style of verbal communication?
Read several newspapers. To what extent are women and men represented differently in stories, including obituaries? Are women described by appearance, marital status, and family life more often than men? Are men described in terms of accomplishments and action more than women?
Apply what you have learned in this chapter to improve your communication. The next time you have a conversation in which you feel that gendered rules of talk are creating misunderstandings, try to clarify your expectations. For instance, if you are a feminine communicator talking with a masculine communicator about a problem, you may be offered advice. Instead of becoming frustrated for the lack of focus on your feelings, say, “I appreciate your suggestions, but I’m not ready to think about how to fix things yet. Right now, I wish you would help me work through my feelings about this issue.”Discuss what happens when you explain what you want from others.

Recommended Resources

Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes (Eds.). (2014). The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. This is a useful book for those who want more in-depth coverage of relationships between language and gender.
Jessica Valenti. (2008). He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. New York: Seal Press. This is a somewhat humorous look at a serious issue—double standards in how behaviors are named for women and men.