Putting Men, Women In Their Places

When I was a kid, we didn’t need books to tell us that men were from Mars and women were from Venus. We could see that they inhabited different worlds.

Women were at home; men were in the office. Women wore the skirts; men wore the pants in the family. She raised the kids; he ran the world.

Now, after 30 years of emphasizing what we have in common, we’re back to focusing on the differences between the sexes. The more similar our real lives, the more we seem to focus on the separateness of our emotional workings and biological wirings.

The pop talk now is all about the different languages we speak, the different ways our brains work, the difference in our feelings. We scan the latest research looking for evidence of gender gaps rather than common ground.

Deborah Tannen’s work, “You Just Don’t Understand,” has become proof that men and women can’t communicate, even though her point was that we can. Complex new brain research has been reduced to a similar shorthand pronouncement that men and women “think differently.”

We’ve become hooked again on notions of natural differences. But we should be more concerned with ways we again are nurturing differences.

The Yale University researcher, Dr. Sally Shaywitz, who watched men and women sounding out words under a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, was struck by the alternate paths the male and female brain take to get to the same place. But today, we’re directing men and women to separate places.

You don’t need an MRI to see that in the world I work in. Newspapers once put men and women into single-sex spheres. The male world was public affairs - by and for men. The female world was private matters - by and for women. It took time to break down the print barriers, to have women reporting the news and to have “women’s subjects” - from breast cancer to child care - leading the news.

Many of us who believe the old women’s movement slogan - “the personal is political” - still struggle to connect private life and public policy.

But in enclaves of new media, we are facing a resegregation of men and women. It’s not just ESPN for the boys and Lifetime cable for the girls. It’s not just the Internet, although it has chat groups that most resemble fraternities. The most glaring examples are the talk shows.

Talk radio has become largely a guy thing. It not only has moved to the right but also to the testosterone. The powerful hosts are mostly male; so are the callers and so are the listeners. It’s become the turf of the angry white man.

Talk television, on the other hand, is largely a gal thing. The hosts may be more equally divided by gender - Ricki Lake and Montel Williams, Rolando and Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael and Maury Povich - but the viewers are mostly female.

The sexes are split and so are the subjects. Male talk radio is about political life. Female talk television is about personal life. The hot topics of the radio week are the balanced budget, food stamps, Congress. The hot topics of the television week are “man-stealers,” “meddling mothers-in-law,” “obese women.”

I don’t think that men naturally “evolved” from hunting mammoths to attacking Congress. Nor did the fittest of the female species survive gathering berries to become obsessed with man-stealing.

But the right-wing talk radio folks deliberately point their followers to the world, the arena of public policy, while the no-wing talk television hosts direct their audiences to the home, the dramas of private life. One sex gets marching orders; the other gets hankies.

In the end, keeping men and women in single-sex slots may be equally destructive. But in the current rush of policy-making and unmaking, it’s most troubling that the public voice is overwhelmingly male.

These men are arguing, sending faxes and forming what we call “public” opinion while women are talking personally in the traditional living room of relationships. Men are told to worry about laws, while women are told to worry about their in-laws.

In the cacophony of loud broadcast voices, women are uncomfortable in a shouting match. They’re drowned out when speaking in their own voice. Indeed, the year of the angry white man, typified by the sound of talk radio, may not signify a male backlash as much as it does a female retreat.

But public policy is not a boy-thing. Whether you believe in nature or nurture, governing is not done in one part of the brain or for one half of the population.

Don’t tell me that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The last time I looked, we were living here, together.