Deborah Tannen's Essay on "Sex, Lies, and Conversation"
Deborah Tannen's essay on "Sex, Lies, and Conversation" highlights the different communication styles of men and women. Tannen attempts to get beyond simplistic stereotypes that, for example, women chatter constantly while men are 'strong and silent,' or, conversely, that women are shy and quiet and men are more articulate than their female partners. Rather, the truth behind these contradictory stereotypes is much more complex. Tannen opens her essay with an anecdote drawn from her own personal experience, from one of her lecturing engagements. A man stood up, pointed at his mute wife, and said, quite loudly, "she's the talker in our family" (Tannen 1) The crowd laughed, and Tannen uses this as an example of how women are often more talkative in social situations, where relational and establishing a human connection is a priority, while men are more apt to speak in public to gain social capital, and where they alone are the focus of attention. Tannen is an academic by training but her writing makes effective use of dialogue and dramatized real-life scenarios to illustrate her points. This also makes her essay more engaging for the reader, as the reader is encouraged to identify with the incidents Tannen relates in support of her
Rather it may be a different conversational set of expectations and habit that is hard to alter. "Some couples will still decide to divorce," if they cannot accommodate their spouse's conversational expectations, "but at least their decisions will be based on realistic expectations" of what their partner is capable of offering or tolerating when conversing (Tannen 4). To illustrate this point, Tannen uses an example of a study of 10th and 11th grade boys who spent most of their time together talking 'to' one another slumped in their chairs, staring at the camera, the ground, or anything but the person they were talking to, because the sense of one-on-one intimacy was too uncomfortable to negotiate. what is important is not the individual subjects that are discussed but the sense of closeness, of a life shared (Tannen 2). Body language between the sexes is another linguistic difference equally as important as what is said or unsaid-women tend to sit closer together, for example. Conversely, she also cautions women not to take male jokes as challenges or real attacks (Tannen 2; 3). It would be easy to condemn the husband in the above-cited example as a heartless boor, but she does not, rather she suggests that he is merely unconscious about his conversation patterns, a common foible for all of us. Although she does not offer a specific prescription for improving the 50% divorce rate, she does suggest a more balanced and reasonable state of relations between the sexes. Although the opening paragraph is quite funny, some of what Tannen describes is poignant, such as when a wife complains that "he doesn't talk to me" (Tannen 1). Men are also more likely to be objective, and try to show that they understand the other side of an argument, rather than to simply make their conversational partner feel 'right' by agreeing with what they say (Tannen 3). Complaints about male social silence at home outweigh complaints about inequitable sharing of chores and women giving up life opportunities to keep house.
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