The Myth of Mars and Venus by Cameron Deborah

Author:Cameron, Deborah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Failure to communicate?

The 1967 prison film Cool Hand Luke is remembered, among other things, for a line spoken by the prison warden to Luke, an inmate who persistently rebels against authority. ‘What we have here’, says the warden, ‘is failure to communicate.’ Both of them know that communication is not the issue. Luke understands the warden, but chooses to defy him. What the warden really means by ‘failure to communicate’ is ‘failure to do what I want you to do’.

A similar (mis)use of the word ‘communication’ has become increasingly common in our culture. Conflicts which are really caused by people wanting different things (he wants her to have sex and she does not want to; she wants him to do his share of the housework and he wants her to stop nagging about it) are persistently described as ‘misunderstandings’ or ‘communication problems’. If someone does not respond in the way we want them to, it means they cannot have understood us—the problem is ‘failure to communicate’, and the solution is better communication.

This belief, or hope, is undoubtedly one of the things that make the idea of male–female miscommunication appealing to many people. In the words of Deborah Tannen:11

Understanding style differences for what they are takes the sting out of them. Believing that ‘you’re not interested in me’, ‘you don’t care about me as much as I care about you’ or ‘you want to take away my freedom’ feels awful. Believing that ‘you have a different way of showing you’re listening’ or ‘showing you care’ allows for no-fault negotiation: you can ask for or make adjustments without casting or taking blame.

It is comforting to be told that nobody needs to ‘feel awful’: that there are no real conflicts, only misunderstandings, and no disagreements of substance, only differences of style. Acknowledging that many problems between men and women go deeper than ‘failure to communicate’ would make for a much bleaker and less reassuring message.

But the research evidence does not support the claims made by Tannen and others about the nature, the causes, and the prevalence of male–female miscommunication. No doubt some conflicts between individual men and women are caused by misunderstanding: the potential for communication to go awry is latent in every exchange between humans, simply because language is not telepathy. But the idea that men and women have a particular problem because they differ systematically in their ways of using language, and that this is the major source of conflict between them, does not stand up to scrutiny.

In this chapter and the last one, I have been considering a version of the myth of Mars and Venus which says that men and women communicate differently, and have difficulty understanding one another, because their formative years are spent in separate social worlds. There is also, however, a version of the story which traces the same differences back to the formation of the human species. In this version, our behaviour is not something we learn from our childhood playmates; it is something we inherit from our prehistoric ancestors.

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