You Don’t Say We May Talk A Good Game, But Real Communication Between Men And Women Is Elusive

It was one of those awkward conversations.

You know what I mean, the kind of talk that takes place during the dicey first few weeks of dating.

The we’re-still-trying-to-figure-each-other-out period.

For some reason, I can’t remember why because this was several years ago, I started talking about the idea of men as warriors.

Having just been introduced to the works of Robert Bly, and struggling to understand the phenomenon then popularly known as the men’s movement, my point was this: Men, regardless of our personal preferences, traditionally have been cast in the role of provider. Of hunter. Of protector.

Of warrior.

This male-oriented role-playing has endured through several thousands of years of slowly developing civilization. It also has been the cause of countless wars and untold misery.

In the past couple of decades, we men have been told, mostly by women, that we need to change. That we need to adopt a kinder, gentler view of the world.

And while I don’t disagree, I prefer to think that a more workable solution would be to combine the two attitudes. Like good martial artists, we need first to accept our violent sides, the roots of our rage, and then we need to find acceptable ways of restraining them.

What I was trying to say was that men need to become warriors of change. Only then can we find peace.

Anyway, I finished, flushed with the pleasure of having made what I thought was an excellent point. And then I waited for her response.

She just shook her head.

“We really are two different sexes, aren’t we?” she said.

Another relationship, doomed before it had begun.

Now, I’m not trying to say that this was the only issue that divided us. But it does exemplify the specific problem that we had communicating.

And if nothing else, it reminded me once again just how difficult true communication is.

Not in every case, of course. If we’re talking just about surface issues, it’s all too obvious that we humans are great communicators.

We’re expert at providing each other with good reasons to buy a new car, for example, or to attend a movie, eat a candy bar, try a different hair style, take a Hawaiian vacation, fight a Middle Eastern despot, etc. We pass on and ingest such information about as easily as we inhale air and process the oxygen.

But what if we attempt to delve a bit deeper? How good are we at transmitting and receiving information that is up close and personal?

You know what I mean: messages of intimacy.

Different story, eh? It’s clear that intimacy evokes feelings that few of us really want to confront on a regular basis, except within a very small circle of family or friends.

Unless you absolutely have to, why suffer the pangs of fear, grief and rage on one hand, the turbulent complexities of love on the other?

No, better to keep things simple. And to ourselves.

If we can.

Which, of course, is the problem.

Because we can’t.

For when it comes to feelings, our reactions are anything but simple. This is true even when we’re doing nothing more than thinking to ourselves.

The complications grow quantitatively when someone else, as inevitably happens, enters the picture.

Especially when that someone is of the opposite gender, for then other factors come into play.

In their book “The Power to Communicate: Gender Difference as Barriers,” co-authors Deborah Borisoff and Lisa Merrill make a compelling case for just how difficult it is for any of us even to hear one another, much less communicate. Age, cultural, racial and socio-economic conditions are just some of the many conditions that complicate our abilities to exchange information.

These conditions affect same-gender relations, too.

In the 19th century, for example, working-class white men in the United States were likely to consider contests of strength an admirable sign of masculinity. In contrast, the English privileged classes of the same era associated “manliness” with morality and restraint.

The same kinds of contrasts exist the world over. They exist in the very languages we speak.

More specifically, in the genderbiased languages that we speak. For it is language that Borisoff and Merrill, among others, see as a “symbolic activity shaped and influenced by the dynamics and inequities of power” (their italics).

The “inequities” the authors refer to concern the attitudes that typically classify most things womanly as “weak” (and therefore deficient) and most things manly as “strong” (and therefore acceptable). The result of such attitudes has been to effectively relegate women to second-class status, sometimes muzzling them altogether.

That sexism has ancient sources is well-documented. In the New Testament, St. Paul said, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, not to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (Timothy 2:11-12).

When Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, her crime was less the holding of illegal religious meetings than it was, in the words of Gov. John Winthrop, being “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit and a very voluble tongue.”

To this day, charge Borisoff and Merrill, women “who violate the norms for acceptable womanly behavior” typically are censured in some manner. The same holds true, they say, for men who act in a stereotypically “womanly” way.

In lectures she gives on gender communication, Gonzaga University professor Patricia Chantrill emphasizes that stereotypes are a big part of the problem.

Example: Women and girls are seen as innately soft-spoken, self-effacing, compliant and emotional.

Example: Men and boys are seen as innately confrontational, competitive, challenging and obsessed with winning.

Chantrill’s contention: In society as a whole, by most men and many women, “The male paradigm is still preferred.”

Even worse, these stereotypes are generally considered to have biological causes.

Here’s the contradiction: Studies indicate that such stereotypes are learned; that no matter what conservative commentators say, the pitch of a woman’s voice or a boy’s tendency to dominate classroom discussion - accepted stereotypes both - have no necessary biological sources.

Studies or no, my personal experience tells me this: I know and respect a number of men who are soft-spoken, self-effacing, compliant and emotional. Conversely, when my daughter played high school basketball, she was confrontational, competitive, challenging and obsessed with winning.

Yet, across the culture, traditional stereotypes still carry the weight of fact. They dictate not only popular opinion but also political action, job procurement and salary enhancement.

And at the most basic level, they get in the way of cross-gender attempts at communication.

Only by rethinking these attitudes, say Borisoff and Merrill, will we as a species be able to “remove the remaining barriers that keep us ‘prisoners’ in the gendered lives we have constructed. Only then will (we) be able to reach out and understand each other.”

How does this work in the real world? Good question.

It clearly means more men looking beyond their warrior-provider heritage. Just as clearly, it means more women thinking in terms other than family and home.

If “gender scripts,” as Borisoff and Merrill call them, are merely learned behavior, then behaving differently should make the ultimate difference.

And we can do that by starting with the family. This means thinking less in terms of defined roles and more in shared roles.

It means seeing the acts of providing and parenting as human instead of gender-linked activities.

But that’s only the beginning.

Achieving equality also means working harder to understand where someone of a different nationality, age, salary level and, yes, sex, is coming from when they say something that sounds bizarre.

And it means having compassion for the person who responds wideeyed when you’ve said something that they obviously think is bizarre.

“It’s not an effort to avoid conflict that we’re looking for,” says Chantrill. “Because conflict is inevitable. It’s about making that conflict a learning experience, an opportunity for growth.”

I’ll try to remember that the next time I attempt to explain my own take on life. To anyone.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Bridget Sawicki