How women use language
I wrote to Jim Kalb:
Men frequently say that women when they speak are primarily expressing their emotions rather than using logic and reason. There is truth in this, but it treats women as though they were just expressing emotions rather than aiming at something practical, rational, and intelligible.
You have put it differently. I don’t remember your exact words, but it was something like, “Women are seeking to arrange things to make them work.”
That struck me as true and stayed in my mind. And I used it recently in an e-mail discussion. In the below excerpt I quote a previous comment of mine and then I add a further comment:
>> When a person says in absolute terms [a certain angry thing], that is a statement I take seriously.
> I’ll qualify that and say that I would take it less seriously from a woman, since women often don’t literally mean what they say. When women say things in anger they are expressing their emotions, they are handling a situation in the way it seems best to them to handle it in that moment, often they don’t mean literally the words they are saying.
Jim Kalb replied:
“Handling a situation” seems to me a good way to describe women’s use of language. Of course there’s also often an element of simple expressiveness. But even there the function is communicating how one feels and so involves language as interpersonal activity rather than language as something that has to do with objective arm’s-length reality. And then there’s also language as a way of finding out how one feels about something, you talk it through with a friend, and language as simple activity and pastime.
I replied:
We’ve named four ways in which women use language: (1) to express emotions; (2) to handle interpersonal situations and make them “work”; (3) to find out how one feels about something, and (4) to engage in simple activity and pastime.
Two qualifications are needed: (a) obviously, men use language in these four ways too, though not to the degree women do, and (b) obviously, women often use language to describe objective reality, just as men do, but they typically do so less than men do. To put it differently, women use language to describe objective reality, but describing objective reality tends not to be their primary focus. Other concerns are typically primary for them.
Mr. Kalb replies:
Agreed with the qualifications. In a civilized world one wouldn’t have to make them explicitly, but I suppose we have to deal with the world we’re in.
- end of initial entry -
James W. writes:
G.K. CHESTERSON: A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
LA replies:
I would just add that intuition is a way of comprehending reality. Intuition may be non-rational, but is not necessarily anti-rational.
Laura W. writes:
You put a woman in a bind in responding to your comments about women and language. Since you see women as often not “literally meaning what they say” and filtering their view of reality through emotional objectives, doesn’t that discount a woman’s views on the very subject of women and language?
Jim Kalb says that women are expressing their emotions rather than “objective arms-length reality.” I’d put it differently and say that women are often expressing emotional reality, which is every bit as much “objective arms-length reality” as the tangible world. This is why women tend to be more religious than men.(They are not expressing this reality at all in part of their lives, of course. A woman biologist doesn’t approach her field with emotion, but probably interacts with her coworkers more emotionally than a man.)
One of the great statements on this subject is Robert Frost’s poem Home Burial. “A man must partly give up being a man with womenfolk,” he says, in this sad description of a man and a woman trying to discuss the death of their child. The man doesn’t see the emotional reality that she sees. It’s not that she is just trying to say what she feels. She is trying to get him to see what is there.
One could reverse Frost’s statement and say that “A woman must partly give up being a woman with menfolk.” Unfortunately, this is something many women today, encouraged to exalt feminine tendencies, resolutely refuse to do. (Whether this was always the case is something I don’t know, but certainly the consequences are different today and have been disastrous for the family.) I cannot count the number of women I have met who insist that the men in their lives communicate as their best girlfriend would! If only these women, poorly educated in the fundamental ways of the sexes, could “give up being a woman” for a small part of the day. There’s more hope in that, of course, than a man “giving up being a man.” Why can’t women see that men are, in some ways, alien and utterly untrainable?
LA replies:
Laura writes:
“I’d put it differently and say that women are often expressing emotional reality, which is every bit as much ‘objective arms-length reality’ as the tangible world.”
But isn’t that what I was more or less trying to get at, when I said that women are not just “expressing emotions,” but are “aiming at something practical, rational, and intelligible”?
Laura W. replies:
But, you say, “obviously, women often use language to describe objective reality, just as men do, but they typically do so less than men do. To put it differently, women use language to describe objective reality, but describing objective reality tends not to be their primary focus. [My emphasis.] Other concerns are typically primary for them.”
I disagree. It is their primary focus. It’s just, in certain instances, a different reality.
LA replies:
That is a very interesting comment and I would like to hear more from you on exactly what you mean, and how you would see this operating in various situations. I can’t pursue the subject with you further today, unfortunately.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 07, 2007 09:54 AM | Send