It will not be news to readers of this blog that I take a keen interest in popular literature on the subject of gender and communication. In my house there’s a whole shelf of old books I can’t keep in my office because they’re too embarrassing: they include Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and several examples of vintage neurobollocks. Fortunately, the internet now allows me to sample this kind of material more discreetly (and usually for free). Really, I’ve no excuse not to stay current.
Yet until two days ago I’d never heard of Dan Bacon, a self-described ‘dating and relationship expert’ and the proprietor of a website called The Modern Man (‘if you have a problem with women, I have the perfect solution for you’). Dan has recently become infamous for writing a piece entitled ‘How to talk to a woman who is wearing headphones’. Or, put another way, ‘how to make a woman take her headphones off and pay attention while you try to pick her up’.
From what I could see on Twitter, the general consensus was that the premise wasn’t just sexist, it was creepy and borderline rapey. I don’t disagree. According to Fiona Vera-Grey, who has done research on women’s experiences of being harassed by men in public places, wearing headphones is one of several tactics women use specifically to protect themselves from unwanted male attention. Like looking down at your phone to avoid eye contact and sitting near the door on the tube, it’s a form of everyday ‘safety work’.
But to men like Dan it is a truism that a woman’s apparent lack of interest in you is not to be taken at face value. It’s a challenge. Reading his piece reminded me of when I was in my early 20s (before anyone had a mobile phone or routinely wore headphones when out and about), backpacking around Spain with my then-girlfriend. After days of being hassled by men, we went into a bookshop and bought large badges adorned with lesbian symbols and the sentence (in Spanish) ‘we want to walk in peace’. Which we soon stopped wearing, because they proved to be the opposite of a deterrent. The more clearly we broadcast the message WE’RE NOT INTERESTED IN YOU, the more of a challenge we were, and the more persistent the men became.
In those days we had no idea how men rationalised this kind of behaviour to themselves. Today we have the benefit of websites like Dan’s, where practical tips on picking up women are often padded out with more philosophical reflections on masculinity and gender difference.
Dan’s views are perhaps most clearly summarised in his concluding paragraph.
As you may have noticed, women don’t usually go around approaching men. Women know that it’s the man’s role to be confident enough to walk over and talk to women he finds attractive. Women, on the other hand, have to look their best and try to attract the attention of the confident alpha males who approach.
From this we learn that in Dan’s imagination, nothing is what it seems. Deliberately ignoring a woman’s ‘leave me alone’ signals isn’t proof that you’re a jerk, it’s proof that you’re an ‘alpha male’. The woman’s headphones aren’t saying ‘I’m not available to talk’, they’re a test she’s set for the men who cross her path, and the losers who take her literally will fail. The man she’s actually attracted to is the one who disregards what she appears to want–who knows that her resistance is token, only there to be overcome. In this Mills & Boon theory of male-female relationships, no woman wants her man to be a wimp, or indeed an equal: he needs to make his dominance felt.
In an earlier post about lists of ‘things not to say’ to the opposite sex, I pointed out that women are told not to say things that men might perceive as criticisms or demands, whereas men are told not to say things that women might perceive as concessions or indications of weakness. Dan Bacon observes this convention: his piece includes a list of mistakes men make which includes ‘allowing her to take control of the interaction’.
No matter how confident or challenging a woman might behave, she still dreams of meeting a guy who is more confident than her. A woman doesn’t want to be forced to control an interaction with a guy.
He goes on to point out that just getting the woman to take her headphones off is only the first step: now you’ve got her attention, you need to deliver on the promise of having something to say.
Engaging conversation skills are essential in keeping a woman’s attention at the best of times and even more so when she can switch herself off with a click of the “play” button.
Obvious? Banal? Well, yes, but it’s also an illustration of something that’s puzzled me for quite a while. Advice on communicating with the opposite sex presents men in two distinct and apparently contradictory ways. When the subject is dating, men—or at least, the alpha males the reader is encouraged to emulate—are depicted as articulate, smooth-talking charmers who ‘take control’ of interactions and use their ‘engaging conversation skills’ to keep women hanging on their every word. But when the subject is marital relationships, men are most often presented as verbally-challenged idiots who can barely string a sentence together. They are said to prefer action to words, to be incapable of expressing their feelings, and to have great difficulty understanding what women say to them.
What unites these two accounts at a more abstract level is that each contains an inbuilt justification for problematic male behaviour. In the first case it’s ‘women want men to dominate them’, and in the second it’s ‘men care about women really, they’re just Martians with poor communication skills’. But it still seems odd that they can exist side by side. Maybe it’s a case of telling the target audience what it wants to hear: the smooth-talking charmer appears mainly in dating advice addressed to men, whereas the idiot appears in advice for heterosexual couples which is probably read more often by women.
The same two characters also turn up in scientific discussions of the evolution of language. Here there’s more explicit awareness of the contradiction: it’s a topic of debate among evolutionary scientists with an interest in how and why the human language faculty evolved. The question that’s relevant here is the ‘why’ one: our linguistic abilities are costly (because they require such a big brain), and other primates have done fine without them, so what survival advantage did they confer on us? One early theory about this was that language enabled humans to co-ordinate joint activities that contributed to survival, like hunting. But more recently attention has turned to two other stories.
I’ll call the first one the ‘social networking’ theory. It says that the essential advantage conferred on humans by their ability to speak was to do with forging social bonds and transmitting social knowledge: talking helps individuals keep track of what’s going on in the group and maintain social relationships with other members. This produces a more cohesive (and therefore more successful) group. One prominent advocate of this theory, Robin Dunbar, argues that gossip—by which he means everyday talk about what’s happening and who’s doing what with whom—has a similar function in human groups to physical grooming among non-human primates. Dunbar thinks early human females would have been central in the development of language. Females play a key role in the organisation of primate groups, and females caring for infants would have had a particular interest in building networks of mutual co-operation.
Supporters of this theory often claim that it’s in line with contemporary observations about sex-differences in linguistic behaviour. Everyone agrees that women are the ‘more verbal’ sex, more talkative and more verbally skilled than the action-oriented male. What’s happening here is that the verbally-challenged idiot who appears in books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (and the unspeakable neurobollocks classic Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps) is being projected back into pre-history.
But as you’ll know if you read another of my early posts, it isn’t actually true that women talk more than men: most evidence points in the opposite direction. And while women do, on average, do slightly better on certain tests of verbal ability, the abilities being tested are not things that would have helped our preliterate ancestors as they foraged on the African savannah. These points have been seized on by supporters of the second story about what language did for humans, which I’ll call the ‘lekking theory’.
A ‘lek’ is what students of animal behaviour call a type of courtship ritual seen among, for instance, peacocks, where males display themselves in groups to an audience of females, and the females make judgments on their reproductive fitness. The peacock’s tail is the example famously given by Darwin to illustrate the concept of ‘sexual selection’, where a trait that may confer no practical advantage is selected because it makes its carrier more attractive as a mate. Some evolutionary scientists suggest that the human capacity for language was selected in the same way and for much the same reason: speaking offered an excellent way for early human males to show off to females, and for females to judge the males’ fitness, given that verbal behaviour is a clue to both intellectual abilities and social skills.
Supporters of this theory, like the behavioural scientist John Locke, also claim that it receives support from contemporary observations about sex-differences in linguistic behaviour. Women may have the edge in lab tests of verbal skill, but who dominates—in virtually all the cultures where the question has been studied—the oral performance genres that display most skill and creativity? Who are the most accomplished orators, debaters, poets, rappers, preachers, stand-up comedians? Who fights verbal duels to assert their superiority over their rivals?
In this account it’s the smooth-tongued charmer who gets projected back into prehistory—conveniently ignoring the more recent evidence (by which I mean evidence from the past thousand years or so) that women’s non-participation in various kinds of oral performance reflected neither lack of skill nor lack of interest, but had more to do with men’s strenuous efforts to exclude them. (Which have not entirely ceased, but they’re becoming steadily less effective.)
I’ve got nothing good to say about either of these competing accounts of gendered linguistic behaviour: both are thoroughly sexist, as well as being unconvincing for other reasons. They also illustrate that sex-difference science and folk-wisdom aren’t always as far apart as we might think. Sometimes one is just a scienced-up version of the other. It’s possible Dan Bacon got his ideas from a book about evolutionary psychology, but it’s more likely he’s just channelling the wisdom of the ages. Either way, the effect is to reinforce the belief that women have no right to withhold their favours from men. Sorry, Dan, but the headphones stay on. If you don’t like it, lek off.
language: a feminist guide 