Men and women are said to have different way of communication. Is this true? A study on the style and the matters concerning on gendered speech is called ‘Genderlect’ (McHugh & Hambaugh, 2010). Deborah Tannen write a book that explain why men and women talk past each other (Griffin, 2012). Tannen explained that men and women are said to be talking from “different words from different world” (Griffin, 2012). It means that men and women “just don’t understand” each other (McHugh & Hambaugh, 2010). Tannen stated that “male-female conversation is cross cultural communication (Griffin, 2012).
In the She’s the Man (2006) movie, it shows how a teenage girl copes in the boy’s world. Viola Hasting pretend to be her twin brother, Sebastian Hastings in his brother new school. Her motive is to shows people that even though she is a girl, she can beat boy’s soccer team. Since her brother is skipping the class, she got the idea to transform to be Sebastian. She learns man’s way of speaking, their walk and their attitudes. Tannen said about men and women are two different species are clearly shown in this movie (Griffin, 2012).
According to Lakoff (1975), “women use more descriptive adjectives and fewer profane words than men do; women use more polite forms; women use more intensifiers, hedges, hesitations, and hypercorrect grammar; women are more indirect in making requests and expressing opinions; women use more questioning and polite forms than men do”. The reason being perhaps according to Tannen, that woman is said seeking for human connection whereas men are only concerned with status (Griffin, 2012).
Tannen uses the term ‘rapport-talk’ for women and ‘report-talk’ for men’ (Griffin, 2012). Tannen further add in that women talk more than men. This statement can be demonstrated in the movie called It’s a Boy Girl Thing. It is a movie on how a boy and girl swap their body. Therefore, each of them has to learn how to act like a boy and girl. There is a scene where the girl (which actually a boy) have to endure doing a sleepover thing; gossiping, doing nailpolish and wearing pajamas.
Tannen also stated that men tell more stories and jokes than women (Griffin, 2012). Back to the She’s a Man movie, we can see that Viola tries to make jokes, acting tough because that is what she thinks boys do. There is also a scene where Duke, Viola’s roommate, told her unconsciously about what he thought a relationship should be. Then, he realized that he should not tell that to another guy as that may bring his status down.
In term of listening part, Tannen stated that women does the cooperative overlap - A supportive interruption often meant to show agreement and solidarity with the speaker (Griffin, 2012). Women always hold eye contact or nod when listening to the other party. They also add in their facial reaction or say umm, yeah, or it’s true words.
Women speech according to Lakoff (1975) is seen to be “deficient, as conveying weakness, uncertainty, and unimportance, in contrast to the standard or neutral language spoken by men”. At the beginning of the She’s the Man movie, Viola’s voice is not heard by the boy’s soccer team coach. When she says she wants to join the boy’s team, all the boys laugh at her.
In conclusion, Genderlect is a term suggesting that masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects (Griffin, 2012). Tannen suggested that men and women speech is different. Men speech styles is called report talk while women’s rapport talk. Lakoff considered women talk as poor as compared to men. However, Lakoff work seems to be enlarging the differences between sexes by stereotyping them (McHugh & Hambaugh, 2010). Shields (1975) argued that psychological research conducted on sex differences has never been value free or neutral; historically it has been used to justify the exclusion and subordination of women.
References
Griffin, E. (2012). A First Look At Communication Theory 8th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
McHugh, M.C. & Hambaugh, J. (2010). She Said, He Said: Gender, Language, and Power. Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology Chapter 19.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454945/synopsis Retrieved on 15/04/2012
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