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A Verbal Battle of the Sexes
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19045 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1991 |
1,759 Words |
| Author
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Suzanne Fields
Suzanne Fields, columnist for the Washington Times is
nationally syndicated. She is the author of Like Father, Like
Daughter: How Father Shapes the Woman His Daughter Becomes and
was editor of Innovations, a magazine for mental health
professionals. |
YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND
Women and Men in Conversation
Deborah Tannen
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990
330 pp., $18.95
At the tower of Babel, everyone speaks in a different tongue. No one understands anybody else.
In You Just Don't Understand; Men and Women in Conversation, Deborah Tannen tells how Babel can shrink to two people, if one is a man and the other a woman. They share only the same frustration.
The author, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, explores the very different worlds men and women inhabit, even when they live together, and the ways emotional, psychological, and physical differences conspire to create different languages that often require a skilled interpreter. Interpretation is always illuminated by example.
He: I'm really tired. I didn't sleep well last night.
She: I didn't sleep well either. I never do.
He: Why are you trying to belittle me?
She: I'm not! I'm just trying to show that I understand!
The man feels "put down" because the woman doesn't focus on him, by focusing on his complaint. She diminishes his experience by "trying to get into the act." But she thinks she's comforting him by showing empathy--she understands how awful he feels because she sometimes feels awful in the same way. But he doesn't want her to sympathize by matching his problem, which he wants to think is unique.
If men have trouble with the "emotional" way woman
respond to their problems, women have as much trouble
with the "reasonable" way men respond to theirs.
When a woman complains of a scar left from breast
surgery, her husband, who has been consistently
...
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