John
Grey's popular book 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'
The book states that most common relationship problems
between men and women are a result of fundamental psychological differences
between the sexes, which the author exemplifies by means of his metaphor: men
from Mars and women from Venus, and that each sex is
acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other.
One example is men's complaint that if they offer solutions to problems that
women bring up in conversation, the women are not necessarily interested in
solving those problems, but mainly want to talk about them. The book asserts
each sex can be understood in terms of distinct ways they respond to stress and
stressful situations.
Dale
Spender and Pamela Fishman's challenges to what other theorists have said
Pamela
Fishman conducted an experiment and involved listening to fifty-two hours of
pre-recorded conversations between young American couples. Five out of the six
subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or
sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on
two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for
example ‘you know?”
From his research, Fisherman came to
the conclusion that women use tag questions such as ‘isn’t it?’ as an effective
method of beginning and maintaining conversations with males. She also states
that females do this to gain conversational power which in Lakoff’s is not the
case.Lakoff believes that men have the power within conversations and are the
powerful ones within conversation. This is stated in the dominance model which
says men dominate over women in a conversation. Even though both of these
theorists are female, they both have different views on how powerful they think
they are when it comes to men.
Dale Spender
The book ‘Man
Made Language’ is based on Spender's PhD research. Her argument is that
in patriarchal societies (men are in authority over women in
all aspects of society) men control
language and this all works in their favor. It states how men believe
themselves to have authority over women by their language "Language helps
form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and
manipulating the world" Where men perceive themselves as the dominant
gender, disobedient women who fail to conform to their given inferior role are labeled
as abnormal, promiscuous, neurotic or frigid. This alone shows how men do not
get judged as easily as women and have for freedom in how they use their
language; as long as they got a low-toned, masculine voice, they are perceived
the authority.
Mary
Beard's ideas about women's voices not being valued
Mary Beard is
interested in the relationship between that classic Homeric moment of silencing
od silencing a woman and some of the ways women’s voices are not publicly heard
in our own contemporary culture.
For example, in the
old punch cartoon, one of the characters says “That’s
an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to
make it”. This shows that even in the smallest situations such as a suggestion,
men get the finale word even if women came up with the ‘excellent suggestion’. Due
to it being in a cartoon also suggests that young children are even getting
influenced by the fact men are the dominant people and should over-power the female’s
voice.Mary looks at how the abuse of women speaking out even in
today’s society is subjected.
Mary quotes: ‘The culturally
awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of
speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense, from office
committees to the floor of the House. I’m hoping that the long view will help
us get beyond the simple diagnosis of ‘misogyny’ that we tend a bit lazily to
fall back on.’
O'Barr and Atkins's challenge to deficit theory
The Deficit Model was created by Robin Lakoff in 1975,
when she describes male language as stronger, more prestigious and more
desirable. She argues that women are socialized into behaving like 'ladies'(linguistically
and in other ways too) and that this
in turn keeps them in their place because being 'ladylike' precludes being
'powerful' in our culture. Such as Margret Thatcher changing her way of
speaking so it sounded more masculine, therefore coming across as more powerful
to gain support from the public in becoming Prime Minister.
Lakoff’s key point in this model is that is women speak
less frequently, it shows that they are listening to the male speaker and shows
this by using minimal responses such as the odd ‘yeah’ .In my opinion, this
also comes across as though the female is agreeing with the male as even if she
has a different point of view, she has no choice but to agree as the men’s
language is the norm.
William O'Barr and Bowman Atkins done a study in a courtroom in 1980.
They studied
"language variation in a specific institutional context- the American
trial courtroom - and sex-related differences" were the topic of this
particular research.
During the process of witness examination they
analysed how trial lawyers and law professors.
O'Barr and
Atkins studied courtroom cases for 30 months, observing a broad spectrum of
witnesses.
They examined the witnesses for the ten basic
speech differences between men and women that Robin Lakoff proposed.
O'Barr and Atkins
discovered that the differences that Lakoff and others supported are not
necessarily the result of being a woman, but of being powerless. They used
three men and three women to prove their point. The first man and woman both
spoke with a high frequency of "women's language" components. The
woman was a 68-year old housewife, and the man drove an ambulance. In
comparison to woman and man 3 who were a doctor and a policeman, respectively,
who both testified as expert witnesses .They show that the first pair of
witnesses experience less power in their jobs and lives. O'Barr and Atkins
found that pair 2 fell between pairs 1 and 3 in frequency of hedges and tag
questions, etcetera, in their speech.
