The Myth of Mars and Venus

Are men and women destined to ever comprehend each other, or does the divergent way each sex uses language mean that one half of the population will never understand the other? Deborah Cameron doesn't think so, and argues so in her new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus. Warmly received, this is another fascinating language reference book from Oxford. To whet your appetite, AskOxford presents a small extract from the first chapter.

Do men and women speak the same language? Can they ever really communicate? These questions are not new, but since the early 1990s there has been a new surge of interest in them. Countless self-help and popular psychology books have been written portraying men and women as alien beings, and conversation between them as a catalogue of misunderstandings. The most successful exponents of this formula, writers like Deborah Tannen and John Gray, have topped the best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Advice on how to bridge the communication gulf between the sexes has grown into a flourishing multimedia industry. John Gray's official website, for instance, promotes not only his various 'Mars and Venus' books, but also seminars, residential 'retreats', a telephone helpline, and a dating service.

Readers who prefer something a little harder-edged can turn to a genre of popular science books with titles like Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain, The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don't Iron. This literature explains that the gulf between men and women is a product of nature, not nurture. The sexes communicate differently (and women do it better) because of the way their brains are wired. The female brain excels in verbal tasks whereas the male brain is better adapted to visual-spatial and mathematical tasks. Women like to talk, but men prefer action to words.

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The idea that men and women 'speak different languages' has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. In this book I propose to question it, and to argue that our faith in it is misplaced. Like the scientists I have mentioned, I believe in following the evidence where it leads. But in this case, the evidence does not lead where most people think it does. If we examine the findings of more than thirty years of research on language, communication, and the sexes, we will discover that they tell a different, and more complicated, story. That is the story which this book will tell.

I have two reasons for wanting to tell it. One is simply that it is interesting, and deserves to be more widely known. The other, though, is more overtly political. I have called this book The Myth of Mars and Venus, and I use the word 'myth' in two senses. The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief. But it is also a myth in the sense of being a story people tell in order to explain who they are, where they have come from, and why they live as they do. Whether or not they are 'true' in any historical or scientific sense, such stories have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs, and so influence our actions. The myth of Mars and Venus is no exception to that rule.

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