Men and Women and Conversation

Listen here, Sonny Jim, and we might get somewhere

The man shortage is a vastly overrated problem. From where I sit there seems to be an excess of men. In parliaments, in businesses, in universities, in my own home. I can’t get away from them. There are plenty of men in prison, too, most of them single, a minority of them murderers, rapists or pedophiles. Women need only free themselves from old taboos to tap the vast pool of younger men, and shorter men, and actuaries. There is a glut of men in rural and remote Australia, as Bernard Salt, the demographer, has recently pointed out. And soon boatloads of Pacific Islander men will be imported, ostensibly to pick fruit, but potentially to pick up brides.

No, I don’t believe Australian women face a man shortage, as we are so frequently told. Look in the right places and the odds of finding a man are surprisingly high. The problem is a shortage of men that women can talk to.

The crisis in male-female conversation cries out for more attention. It is more serious than any minor numerical discrepancy between the sexes. Relationships are being destroyed, or aborted at first date, due to the mismatch in communication styles.

Say a woman has found a man down a coalmine, on an oil rig, or through an internet dating site. Before long she has detected the fatal flaw. “He just doesn’t listen. He won’t talk to me.” She thinks it is an individual problem, and that a more sympathetic conversational mate can be found down the next coalmine. The man, meanwhile, is wondering if a different woman might talk, nag or complain less, and be more inclined to take his advice.

But this conversational crisis is bigger than any individual. It is gender-wide. And it starts young. More than one sociologist and linguist has pointed out that on the whole girls talk and boys grunt. Girls talk about feelings, and boys mumble about things. But it goes further. The linguist Deborah Tannen, who has studied thousands of conversations between the sexes, has argued girls talk to establish intimacy and connection, and to include others. They say, “Let’s do something.” Boys use conversation to establish status, and to preserve their independence. They give orders and take them.

For girls, “talk is the essence of intimacy”, she says, “so being best friends means sitting and talking. For boys, activities, doing things together, are central. Just sitting and talking is not an essential part of friendship.”

Who knows how these patterns are established? Perhaps boys find the world too hard and threatening a place in which to expose their insecurity or doubts. Women teach the species to speak. Yet the boys – with exceptions, of course – soon develop the minimalist style mothers, girlfriends and wives despair of.

For many women the hard work begins once they settle down with a man. The sociologist Pamela Fishman was one of the first to expose how women engage in a more or less solitary battle to keep the conversation with their partner rolling. She planted tape-recorders in the homes of three middle-class couples (with their permission) and recorded more than 50 hours of chat. She revealed how women threw out little flares to try to keep the talk flowing. But the men doused the flames with “umms”, non sequiturs and unaccountable pauses. And in case you were wondering, the women’s subject matter was not boring; it was often about current events or work.

When women talk to men about their troubles, they want intimacy. “Trouble talk” is the glue that holds female friendships together. Women share misfortune in a companionable way that brings them closer. But men feel compelled to offer advice. Tannen says men can’t understand why women complain so much but don’t follow up the perfectly good solutions they proffer. Men fail to get that women don’t want solutions tossed out as conversation-stoppers. They want connection.

It is not that men can’t talk. The Australian sociologist Dale Spender showed men talk more and interrupt more than women; they quite like to hog the attention. Fishman found that topics introduced by men “succeeded” 96 per cent of the time while those introduced by women “succeeded” 36 per cent of the time. Last year, a study published in the journal Science based on recorded conversations of 400 volunteers confirmed that men talked every bit as much as women.

It is just that men and women often can’t talk to each other, or don’t hear what is really being said. A generation ago, no one expected them to have much to say to one another. Australian barbecues were famous for separation of the sexes around keg and kitchen. Feminism raised women’s conversational expectations and put men under pressure to perform, not just in the bedroom, but in the living room and at the kitchen table. The Australian male, so often laconic at home and loud in public, has proven to be a hard case.

Finding a man is not so difficult. Finding a man who can talk and listen like a woman is a tougher task. “What do you think of my theory?” I asked a man. He gave me some very unhelpful advice about what I should do with it.

Letters to the Editor response – Look who’s talking

1. If a man wrote a similarly critical piece about women as Adele Horin’s about men, there would be howls of outrage. It has somehow become accepted for women to lambast men about our supposed failings, and it’s about time men started to fight back. The fact is that women are terrible communicators, exactly as Horin describes. While men communicate with the purpose of revealing a problem and finding a solution, women simply want to babble on about feelings and expect the other party to do nothing but listen.

Men want to include both parties in the conversation and form a taskforce to solve a problem, while women just want a lame audience. No wonder men are so much more successful in business and leadership. Who cares how such-and-such made you feel? The only relevant question is what you plan to do about it and that is what concerns men – exactly as described. Clearly that is a far superior way to interact.

Women arrogantly take the stance that their way is superior, against all the evidence, and refuse to be rational, constructive and inclusive. Instead of trying to change male behaviour to suit themselves – a tactic that seems to be failing – perhaps it would be better to accept their own shortcomings and work on modifying them. I’m sure men would be more than happy to help with ideas on how to improve their communication skills. Men are very good at that. – Phil Surtees Waverley

2. Adele, just accept men and women are different. Women talk to connect; men do to connect. Women do to achieve; men talk to achieve. That’s how it is. Don Smith Ashfield

3. I am still chuckling over Phil Surtees’s letter. He misses Adele Horin’s point. Attempts to share one’s emotional life with men are often frustrated by the misconception on the men’s side that every problem has a solution. What women are after is a listening partner who responds with empathy, establishes intimacy and reciprocates by sharing his feelings. They are quite capable of making rational decisions.

4. Good on you, Phil Surtees, for fighting back. My husband is an excellent communicator, and I am still learning to get my point across in a few seconds without any preamble. It’s a shame you don’t care how “such-and-such” made me feel, because I was going to tell you that reading your letter made me feel that I am not alone, and gave me a good laugh to start the week. Thanks. Oh, you don’t want to know. Sorry.

5. Phil Surtees, Don Smith and Adele Horin are all guilty of prejudice. I know men and women who are better and worse at concise problem solving, “talking”, “doing to connect” or “aimless banter”. My high school physics teacher once told the class that boys were better at physics than girls and that was “just a fact of life”. Admittedly there were only three girls in the class, but we came first, third and fourth in the next test. Maybe the trend points one way or the other, but there are still a lot of people in the overlap of those bell curves.

6. But, the final word must go to Rosemary O’Brien of Georges Hall, who wrote. Phil Surtees, purely in the interests of female/male analysis, did you find it really mattered whether you employed a male or a female divorce lawyer?

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