Blog Post #1 - Difference Between Men and Women

(Apologies for the disabled embedding, you can click on the link and watch it on youtube instead!)

This video is a short excerpt from the TV sitcom Friends, detailing a scene where Rachel and Ross have just returned home from their date, and are telling their friends about their first kiss. It is a telling clip of a stereotype present in gender communication, of how men and women communicate differently about the same event, to friends of the same sex.

Rachel, for example, goes home, closes the door and excitedly exclaims "Ross kissed me!!!" to her friends Monica and Phoebe, who were apparently already waiting for her to get back and share the story. Rachel's excitement spreads across the whole room, and Monica gets up to get wine glasses and rushes back, screaming "don't start without me! don't start without me!" whilst Phoebe asks her to "describe the whole thing" - ("was it like a soft brush against your lips, or was it like a 'I gotta have you now' kind of kiss?" and how it ended. Rachel, on the other hand, does her part by going into very detailed descriptions of how Ross held her, and how it felt.

The camera then cuts to the next scene, which shows Ross hanging out with his friends Joey and Chandler at the kitchen table, with pizza on the table. He starts off saying that "Then I kissed her". to the almost nonchalent response of his friends; Joey asks "tongue?" to which he replies yeah, and Joey replies "Cool." with a full stop. All go back to being more obsessed about their pizzas.

This short clip has encapsulated what, to me is the main difference between the way men and women talk - women go into the details and share the emotions with their friends, whilst men on the other hand state the facts, mainly for information exchange and then the conversation ends there. In reference to Tannen's first piece about the difference between men and women, I feel that this is especially emblematic of the example of 'Information vs Feelings'. In that, she writes "All Rebecca's life she has had practice in verbalizing her feelings with friends and relatives. But Stuart has had practice in keeping his innermost thoughts to himself. To him, like most men, talk is information."

Phoebe further reinforces the notion that women talk to gain empathy and support when she asks hurriedly "does it end well? do we need to get tissue or...?" whilst this does not happen at all, on the men's side.

Adopting the social-constructionist perspective, I feel that this could be due to childhood gender socialization, especially the notion of 'boys don't cry'. Boys are taught to be strong and masculine, and that expressing emotions are wrong (though this approach is slowly changing in post-modernity) whilst girls are encouraged often to be more expressive with their feelings. As such, perhaps this can explain why exchanges amongst men are usually short and to the point, at risk or exposing their emotions and seeming like a women, crossing the gender boundaries. However, women are allowed to go into the detail and share the information with their friends for social support and empathy. This further reinforces prior research that men generally focus more on the content while women focus more on the relationship dimensions of communication. With recognition of such difference, one will presumably be better able to remove a potential barrier to communication by being sensitive to how the opposite sex is feeling.

Rachel and Ross' different reactions to the same event also illustrate how differently men and women can react to the same event; to Rachel it seems like an earth-shattering development, whilst to Ross it seems almost mundane. Perhaps if they had seen each other's responses, Rachel would have been very hurt to find that Ross was not as 'into it' as she was - and this might possibly lead to further miscommunication.