From Free Life, Issue 17, February 1993
ISSN: 0260 5112

Intellectuals learn a higher proportion of what they "know" from books than regular people do, so it is pleasing that the above books will be read by the very people who most need to read them. They will be ignored by all the people who don't read books, and who thus knew all along that people are not like other people, and men are not like women.

The silliest thing about BrainSex is its title. Its more sensible subtitle is: The Real Difference Between Men and Women. BrainSex, with its capital letter in the middle, is the sort of word usually found only in the computer software industry. It sounds like sex done without physical motions from inside a machine, as in the recent virtual reality film Lawnmower Man. In fact BrainSex is about the physical differences between the male and female brains, as caused by contrasting hormonal histories in the womb, much of the scientific story having only been unravelled quite recently.

The abnormal illuminates the normal. A few girls get dosed with male hormones in the womb, just when the sexually specific parts of their characters are forming, and they grow up to be tomboys. A few boys don't, and they grow up abnormally companionable and accomodating. For the the rest, boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Give a boy some toy teachers and toy social workers to play with instead of toy soldiers, and he'll stage fights between teachers and social workers. Boys are better at maths and "spacial awareness", and are more aggressive. Girls learn to read and write quicker, are more accurate, and have a better sense of smell. Men are more ambitious and hierarchical. Women are more egalitarian and sociable. Men compete. Women focus on companionships and relationships. Men adore machines. And so on.

This book, then, won't tell you much that you don't know. It will merely tell you that you are right in what you have been quietly assuming, and that the previous books, which said that sexual differences are all caused by differences between male and female upbringing, are wrong. If you want to know more about the science of these ancient truths, then BrainSex is the book for you.

If I personally have found the writings of Deborah Tannen about contrasting conversational styles more interesting and helpful than BrainSex, this is because I am personally so interested in having conversations. Not good at it, you understand. Just highly motivated.

Tannen's first book, That's Not What I Meant!, is subtitled How conversational style makes or breaks your relations with others. It's mostly about difficulties between different ethnic groups, which Americans are very aware of, America being such an ethnic mele. There they all are, constantly annoying each other by talking too quickly or too slowly, too abrasively or too solemnly, too rudely or too politely. The book only has a little bit in it about the problems between men and women.

But when this first book came out in America, it was the man/woman stuff which caused the fuss and got Tannen onto the chat shows and phone-ins. So she did a follow-up, You Just Don't Understand (subtitle: Women and Men in Conversation), dealing with the specific issue of gender differences. This was the first of the two that reached Britain as a paperback, That's Not What I Meant! being issued in Britain as the follow-up.

Both these Tannen books having been published in Britain by Virago, and Tannen being a student of "gender", is she some kind of cuckoo in the feminist nest? Not really. Half of feminism is the claim that women are as good as men, but the other half is that men are monsters, which is a rude way of saying that women and men are not the same as each other. So Tannen's work is something which the politically correct community is probably now ready to accept. Tannen herself is scrupulously non-judgmental about how the sexes in particular, and people generally, are not better or worse, merely different, although she tells of how journalistic errors of omission sometimes showed her as taking sides in the sex war, instead of mediating in it.

I have found Tannen's books both interesting and useful. Because of the accidents of my genes, hormones and upbringing, I now want to cultivate the company of women but am not good at it, and I like how-to books. I also run monthly intellectual soires attended by libertarians, including even some female libertarians, and what I have learned from Tannen about the conversational differences between the men and women has changed the way I now run these gatherings. Before reading Tannen, I used to run my soires as "public" events throughout, and would follow the tiresome male procedure of "encouraging" the ladies to speak out, despite their obvious reluctance to do so. Such heavy handed egalitarianism was, I am sure, most off-putting, and achieved the opposite of the desired effect of persuading women to attend. Some women did, but mostly, I suspect, to be supportive towards the men friends whom they accompanied, which women tend to be. What happens now at my evenings is that I end the public side of the proceedings about half way through, and we all split up and talk separately. Sure enough, and just as Tannen would predict, the women at that exact moment start chattering away happily and don't stop for the next two hours. Women do not on the whole care to flaunt themselves conversationally in group settings, but they love to chat in more intimate circumstances. I'm sure the women prefer my evenings as they now are, which will mean more of them coming, which will mean more men coming, men being men. The only exception to the rule about women remaining mostly mute during the public part of my soires is when we switch from politics, philosophy, etc., to "culture". When the power of man over man is no longer the issue and human insight and empathy is, the women spring to life. This again would come as no surprise to Moir, Jessel or Tannen. It also strrongly vindicates the LA strategic dogma of going beyond mere politics.

And it will come as no surprise to my long suffering conversational friends that a topic dealt with by Tannen that particularly interests me is people who interrupt. From Tannen I learned the reassuring news that being an interrupter doesn't make me the spawn of the devil. True, my interruptions are often me proving my existence (I interrupt therefore I am). But at their best, interruptions are like cheering someone on. "Yes, I have that problem too." "I know someone just like that." Instead of not interrupting at all, I am now trying to make my interruptions quicker - encouragingly but not so disruptively. But I've also been made to see that others have their own ways of talking. They make big, slow speeches, the conclusions of which I must await patiently, and during which they can't bear to be interrupted. Which doesn't mean they are the spawn of the devil either.

A particularly good point made by Tannen is that, because problems like this don't go away, they can cause far more trouble between people who have lived or worked together for a long time than among those newly acquainted. After all, when you meet someone new you expect to get your conversational wires crossed a few times. But if you and your husband are still driving each other mad after five years together, that's more worrying. A mere difference in talking style can seem painfully like a more fundamental problem, like not loving each other. By telling couples like that exactly what their problem might be, Tannen is, I think, doing a lot of people a lot of good. She has probably saved many marriages.

Once again, I can best illustrate the matter from my own personal experience. My good friend and Libertarian Alliance collaborator Chris Tame and I have had problems conducting intellectual conversations over the years, which, for a couple of intellectuals who are supposed to be on the same side, has been a worry. Day-to-day business is no problem, but profound discussion we have found harder to sustain amicably. The answer is that we have different conversational styles. I am, as I say, an interrupter, and a fast-talker. Chris, by contrast, is a slower, set piece, long speech, please-let-me-finish type of a character. So when Chris and I are in discussion mode we both have to make an effort. But neither of us need feel that this effort is any reflection on the quality of our characters or our relationship. Confronted by another quick-fire interrupter I get along fine. I interrupt, and they just interrupt me back. What many non-interrupters don't realise is that we interrupters actually like being interrupted in our turn by our equally assertive companions, indeed, we're expecting it, depending on it, and confused and embarrassed if it doesn't happen. Tannen explains this and many other such things with great clarity, wit and sympathy for the sufferings of others.

You may feel that I have been interrupting what might have been a quite informative review with my own personal recollections, reactions and preoccupations. Actually I have been trying to cheer all of these books on, by saying that they are the kind that make all their readers' lives - not just mine - work better and more understandably. "Yes, I have that problem too." I recommend all three, and especially the two by Tannen.

Brian Micklethwait