Book: The myth of Mars and Venus
Mar. 2nd, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Deborah Cameron
Details: (c) Deborah Cameron 2007; Pub Oxford University Press 2007; ISBN 978-0-19-921447-1
Verdict: The myth of Mars and Venus is an accessible and important contribution to the debate about gender and language.
Reasons for reading it: I've been meaning to read Cameron for ages, because people keep quoting her or linking to her articles and I have a lot of sympathy for her views.
How it came into my hands: Thuggish Poet gave it to us as a wedding present, to dispel any worries we might have that men and women can never communicate effectively.
It turns out that people refer to Cameron so much that I've actually already absorbed most of her arguments, so there wasn't a whole lot that was new to me in The myth of Mars and Venus. I was interested to discover that she comes out just as strongly against people like Lakoff and Tannen who claim that women use language differently from men because *sexism*, as against people like Pinker and Baron-Cohen who argue that women use language differently from men because *evo-psych*. Cameron's argument is that women don't use language differently from men; people adapt their language use to their roles, their circumstances, to what they're trying to achieve. Also "women" are not a monolith; language use also depends on social class, geographic origin, level of education, age and so on, and can sometimes be a marker of other specific identities such as geek or Queer. This means that she can dismiss a lot of contrary evidence on the grounds that it's based on a convenience sample of WEIRD college students.
I found the book very easy to read - I got through most of it in a couple of hours' train journey - and its arguments very plausible. However my disappointment was that Cameron presents surprisingly little primary research. Three quarters of her bibliography refers to either the pop science and self-help manuals that she's debunking, or media articles which illustrate wrong popular beliefs about language and gender. And although I do basically agree with Cameron's thesis, she sometimes veers off the track of carefully presenting both sides of an argument, and simply presents speculation as fact or uses annoying polemical techniques such as ridiculing her opponents' views rather than actually dealing with them. The primary research she does cite consists of a bunch of absolutely fascinating examples of language research done on people from a more diverse range of cultures than the typical subjects, everything from 19th century Japanese schoolgirls to blue collar African-American women with diversions via trans women and phone sex operators. (One example I really liked was a study by Mary Bucholtz on
Some aspects of Cameron's (clearly marked) opinions I found quite interesting. For example, she has quite a lot to say about the assumption that men are, essentially, less verbally skilled than women which can disadvantage men in the modern workplace where being able to build a rapport with customers is often more important than technical skill. She also proposes that one reason for the popular obsession with "hard-wired" differences between men and women may be a way of coping with the anxiety produced by a rapidly changing society, particularly when it comes to gender roles. I could definitely see some merit in her view of the rise of companionate marriage, so that people have much higher expectations than in the past of a strong emotional connection with their spouses, but at the same time, people have less strong support networks in terms of families, religious organizations, geographic neighbours etc. So there is a huge pressure on spouses to be able to "communicate" almost superhumanly well, and when reality doesn't quite live up to that ideal, innate gender differences in communication style make a good scapegoat.
I think tMoM&V is a book that everybody who wants to have an opinion about gender and language should read, it's very much a key aspect of that debate. And I don't think most of my friends are likely to take John Gray or Louann Brizendine seriously, but may well be a bit less skeptical when it comes to people like Baron-Cohen who sound "sciencey", so it's definitely good to have access to the other side of the argument. But it's not a book that every right-thinking person should accept wholesale, because it's just not rigorous enough. I think I need something one notch more academic than this, perhaps something aimed at university undergraduates rather than complete laypeople or subject experts.
Details: (c) Deborah Cameron 2007; Pub Oxford University Press 2007; ISBN 978-0-19-921447-1
Verdict: The myth of Mars and Venus is an accessible and important contribution to the debate about gender and language.
Reasons for reading it: I've been meaning to read Cameron for ages, because people keep quoting her or linking to her articles and I have a lot of sympathy for her views.
How it came into my hands: Thuggish Poet gave it to us as a wedding present, to dispel any worries we might have that men and women can never communicate effectively.
It turns out that people refer to Cameron so much that I've actually already absorbed most of her arguments, so there wasn't a whole lot that was new to me in The myth of Mars and Venus. I was interested to discover that she comes out just as strongly against people like Lakoff and Tannen who claim that women use language differently from men because *sexism*, as against people like Pinker and Baron-Cohen who argue that women use language differently from men because *evo-psych*. Cameron's argument is that women don't use language differently from men; people adapt their language use to their roles, their circumstances, to what they're trying to achieve. Also "women" are not a monolith; language use also depends on social class, geographic origin, level of education, age and so on, and can sometimes be a marker of other specific identities such as geek or Queer. This means that she can dismiss a lot of contrary evidence on the grounds that it's based on a convenience sample of WEIRD college students.
I found the book very easy to read - I got through most of it in a couple of hours' train journey - and its arguments very plausible. However my disappointment was that Cameron presents surprisingly little primary research. Three quarters of her bibliography refers to either the pop science and self-help manuals that she's debunking, or media articles which illustrate wrong popular beliefs about language and gender. And although I do basically agree with Cameron's thesis, she sometimes veers off the track of carefully presenting both sides of an argument, and simply presents speculation as fact or uses annoying polemical techniques such as ridiculing her opponents' views rather than actually dealing with them. The primary research she does cite consists of a bunch of absolutely fascinating examples of language research done on people from a more diverse range of cultures than the typical subjects, everything from 19th century Japanese schoolgirls to blue collar African-American women with diversions via trans women and phone sex operators. (One example I really liked was a study by Mary Bucholtz on
Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girlswho apparently
used a very 'correct' and formal kind of speech to symbolize the value they accorded to knowledge and intellect, and they avoided the slang expressions favoured by other teenage girls.) The trouble is that the book at times felt like just a bunch of probably cherry-picked anecdotes rather than a coherent argument. To an extent, if Cameron is trying to convince us that there are no universal differences between "men" and "women," then even a few examples of women who don't fit the popularly accepted pattern are enough to make her case, but I think it would be an uphill struggle to convince a skeptic using this approach.
Some aspects of Cameron's (clearly marked) opinions I found quite interesting. For example, she has quite a lot to say about the assumption that men are, essentially, less verbally skilled than women which can disadvantage men in the modern workplace where being able to build a rapport with customers is often more important than technical skill. She also proposes that one reason for the popular obsession with "hard-wired" differences between men and women may be a way of coping with the anxiety produced by a rapidly changing society, particularly when it comes to gender roles. I could definitely see some merit in her view of the rise of companionate marriage, so that people have much higher expectations than in the past of a strong emotional connection with their spouses, but at the same time, people have less strong support networks in terms of families, religious organizations, geographic neighbours etc. So there is a huge pressure on spouses to be able to "communicate" almost superhumanly well, and when reality doesn't quite live up to that ideal, innate gender differences in communication style make a good scapegoat.
I think tMoM&V is a book that everybody who wants to have an opinion about gender and language should read, it's very much a key aspect of that debate. And I don't think most of my friends are likely to take John Gray or Louann Brizendine seriously, but may well be a bit less skeptical when it comes to people like Baron-Cohen who sound "sciencey", so it's definitely good to have access to the other side of the argument. But it's not a book that every right-thinking person should accept wholesale, because it's just not rigorous enough. I think I need something one notch more academic than this, perhaps something aimed at university undergraduates rather than complete laypeople or subject experts.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-04 02:27 pm (UTC)I think I need something one notch more academic than this, perhaps something aimed at university undergraduates rather than complete laypeople or subject experts
There's a textbook I picked up in the Cambridge University Press bookshop - "Langauge and Gender", by Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, which I think fits the description exactly. I thought it was a good read. I can lend it to you the next time you're in Cambridge (or leave it with
I must write up my rantlet about Baron-Cohen at some point; there was a time when I crunched the numbers on the effects he was claiming, and compared them with Janet S. Hyde's meta-analysis (see the start of Chapter 3 of TMoMaV). My conclusion was that the numbers Baron-Cohen was claiming didn't justify the rhetoric he was using.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-04 03:02 pm (UTC)I have rants about Baron-Cohen too, though I think they've mostly ended up in comment discussions rather than a post. He seems to really really fundamentally need to believe in gender essentialism, no idea why, and as a result he horribly over-interprets some otherwise quite interesting experimental data to shore up that belief.
SBC
Date: 2012-03-05 12:08 am (UTC)YAB
Re: SBC
Date: 2012-03-05 08:10 am (UTC)1) The possibility that bits of the body other than the brain may have a role in constituting the mind (or being the thing the mind supervenes on) - for example, consider the adrenal glands, consider the fingers?
2) The possibility that brain states currently observable with current technology ("coarse-grained") may not be exactly correlated with brain states that could in principle be observed with more advanced technology ("fine-grained")?
3) The possibility that Cartesian dualism or something similar may be worth thinking about; i.e. that some nonmaterial entity has some (causal) role in constituting the mind?
Re: SBC
Date: 2012-03-06 09:32 am (UTC)Speaking as a scientist rather than a philosopher, I think #1 is almost certainly true; behaviour and personality and emotions and everything else that we might put under the heading of mental state depend at least as much on the rest of the body as on which set of neurons are transferring electrical signals at any given moment.
I don't think more advanced brain imaging technology would necessarily help; fMRI is pretty good for what it is, but there's a huge temptation to over-interpret that kind of data. Honestly a lot of inferences about gender differences are based on purely anatomical information, which to my mind is only one step above phrenology. If technology advanced enough that we could get large amounts of data about people's brains actually functioning in real life or at least realistic situations rather than doing carefully controlled experiments inside an MRI machine, even then I wouldn't expect that data to tell the whole story about human behaviour.
I am not sure about Screwy, but I personally reject Cartesian dualism, I don't think there's anything non-material involved. I also reject transhumanist dualism, though, I find it extremely implausible that you could run anything recognizably human purely on software simulation of neurological signalling.
Re: SBC
Date: 2012-03-06 09:21 am (UTC)