Myth? Yeth?

[differenceblog]

The Guardian has printed an excerpt from Oxford sociolinguist Deborah Cameron's new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, which will be released later this month. Three excerpts in total are due to be printed. The first excerpt, printed yesterday, ambitiously lays out a plan of attack against the "myth of Mars and Venus... that men and women differ

Comments

[differenceblog]

That seems more like an issue of institutionalized sexism in language structure vs. gender differences in language use.

I think those overlap at "words/languages that have different forms depending on whether it is a man or woman speaking" (I believe a couple of languages have different male/female dialects?) but I don't think they're the same in English. Am I wrong?

I defer to your greater linguistics knowledge on this one.

[moominmolly]

Argh, that was the lamest Language Log post ever.

[differenceblog]

Nods. Normally, they're the blog I want to be when I grow up, but I don't really know what that was supposed to be.

[charlycrash]

Really, so many perceived differences between men and women can be explained in terms of confirmation biases.

I read Hyde's Gender Similarities Hypothesis a while back and I wasn't really sure what to make of it; it rather seemed like it was pushing an agenda rather than viewing the subject dispassionately.

Some of the meta-analyses she cites are pretty interesting, though: a lot of things which are perceived to be "observable fact" wrt sexual dimorphism were found by Hyde's cited meta-analyses to either possess such a small sexual dismorphism as to not really be worth considering or in some cases actually contradicted "common sense".

Iirc, the only major differences that she found were throwing range, a couple of sexual things (frequency of masturbation and stated attraction to casual sex) and spatial ability, although there may have been a couple more.

[differenceblog]

According to Cameron's excerpt, she did find differences in spelling accuracy and frequency of smiling.

[charlycrash]

Whoops, missed out a rather critical 'other' in there.

Also, iirc she found a large difference in physical aggression, although certainly not aggression period.

[differenceblog]

Did you miss an "other" or did I miss an "other"? I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were missing anything important, but I wanted to point it out for people who might be reading the comments, but not the excerpt.