Cross-Gender Interaction

So this week’s topic was really interesting: Cross-Gender Interaction. In class we discussed about the reasons why English could be considered a ‘sexist’ language, and then focused on some of the general features that females/males would use in their language, and finally, some reasons why females/males would even speak differently in the first place. During class a couple of things popped into my head that I thought I’d share here:

1) Nouns and Gender in German
I took LAG1201 in year 1, and suffice to say, it was confusing! I think part of the confusion is because, unlike French where nouns have 2 gender categories, German has 3: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. It’s crazy. So the definite article for masculine nouns would be der, die for feminine nouns and das for neuter nouns. On first glance I’d probably think that German has attempted to mitigate the issue of a sexist language, but then it’s quite weird: children are called das Kinder while girls are called das Mädchen (both neuter) and they have 2 different words, das Auto (neuter) and der Wagen (masculine), for cars. Also, like what Dr. Deng said in class about French, in German, the computer/PC is masculine in its gender, so it’d be der Computer or der Personal-Computer.
I don’t really know what to make of it, or even how some nouns land into some categories…it all seems quite arbitrary.

2) Topic Development
So we learnt that women prefer more personal topics while men prefer more impersonal topics… I think this is true but only to a certain extent. I think men do talk about personal issues – I guess at some point they must want to share their feelings/problems, right? (: -but perhaps this is also mediated by their use of more aggressive language when they talk about such personal issues. For example, they might probably scold a lot of profanities when talking about problems, so that it creates a kind of distance between themselves and the problem, making it seem more impersonal. I’m just hypothesizing here based on what I’ve learnt and heard; do not want to stereotype!

3) Messages vs. Meta-Messages
So Dr. Deng said men focus on the literal message, while women focus more on the meta-message, a kind of inference from the literal message. It’s so funny because just before class, my friend was relating to me a story:
For convenience, we’ll call my friend A and her friend B.

B went to Thailand and bought A a bag. However, when B got home, his mother saw the bag and asked if she could have it, so B said “okay”.

B then told A that he didn’t have a present for her because his mother took it.

A then said, “Didn’t you get your mother anything?”

B replied, “She said I didn’t have to get her anything, so I didn’t, and then she decided she wanted your bag.”

To this, A said, “You shouldn’t ever believe a woman when they tell you they don’t want anything!”

Hope you enjoyed the story! Have a good weekend!