Transcription
I want now to go back and um, show you I'm going to be showing you one more videotape where we actually hear what friends say to each other and um, the pattern among the boys when they talk to each other. Often, it's not that they don't talk; they do talk, but what are they doing? Rather than telling secrets, they're often using language to negotiate their status in the group. So there are high-status boys and low-status boys, and the high-status boys will give orders and push the low-status boys around. And it's giving orders and making them stick that actually gives them high status. So if a boy does what he's told, takes orders, then that lowers his status. And there's a lot of talk about who's best at what, um, trying to take center stage by telling stories, telling jokes, make yourself the center of attention. Exactly the opposite of what the girls they're trying to do; they're trying not to be the center of attention. It's very, very different that way.
I want to go back now to a videotape. Now, the first tape that I showed you I made uh, myself, but this next video clip I'm going to show you was uh, actually made by Chart House International. That's a company that made a training video for me about uh, with me about uh, talking at work, women and men talking at work. And in connection with that, they sent camera crews out and just captured interaction. First, we're going to go and hear the three little, four little boys talking, and I'll tell you what they say because it's a little bit hard to hear. They're talking about how high they can hit a ball. And the first one says, "Mine's all the way up to there." And the second one says, "Mine's up to the sky." And the first one says, "Mine's up to heaven." And you think that's the end of it, but if you keep listening, there's a little boy in the back, and he says, "Mine's all the way up a god. Mine's all the way up to there. Mine's up to the sky. Oh man, mine's all way up to heaven. Mine up all the way up to God." So what they're doing is using language to top each other.
An interesting thing about understanding gender differences: people that have children of the other sex are often confused by the way their own children speak. And a woman came up to me after hearing me uh, present this and said this explained an experience she had. She had been driving her own little boy and two of his friends somewhere, and they're in the back seat. And one of the boys said, um, "When we went to Disneyland, we stayed 4 days." And the second boy said, "When we went to Disneyland, we stayed 5 days." And her little boy said, "Well, we're going to move to Disneyland." And she didn't know how to deal with it. You know, she thought, "Should I expose my own little boy as a liar? No, no, Johnny, don't say that. You know, we're not going to move to Disneyland." I said, "Don't worry about it. The boys know this is a game," and it, that's the thing about it. It's such an important point to make. People say, and and I'm often quote it as saying, "Boys are competitive, girls are cooperative," and it gets this, you get this image that the boys are all out there, you know, mean, trying to get each other, and the girls are all so goody-goody, cooperating. But both boys and girls are competitive and cooperative; it's just which we put on record and in what way. What we're talking about, everything I'm saying tonight is about conversational rituals. So for the boys, this is a conversational ritual: you try to top each other, and it's fun. "Yeah, man. Wow," you know, they're just having fun. So I said to this woman, "Don't worry about it; they know you're not going to move to Disneyland, but your son won that round because he came up with the best thing to top all the others."
Okay, now we're going to hear two little girls. Same uh, was the same uh, environment in the same preschool, and they're playing two at a time, which girls often do, play two at a time. And they're talking about uh, they're drawing with with magic markers. And one of the girls suddenly looks at up and says, "Did you know that my babysitter, called Amber, has already contacts?" By which I think she means, "My babysitter, whose name is Amber, wears contact lenses." And the other girl says, "My mom has already contacts, and my dad does too." And that's the kind of thing that I was interested in with repetition. She not only says the same thing, but she mirrors the syntax, the very odd way that she phrased it: "has already contact," and then again, you think it's over, but if you keep listening, the original girl picks her head up again, she lights up like a light bulb, and she says the same, "Did you know, did you know my babysitter, C Amber, had already contex? My mom has already cont, and my dad does too." The same, the same effort that the boys are putting into proving that they can top each other, the girls are putting an equal amount of effort into proving that they're the same, even if they're not. And just as mothers can be puzzled by their little boys, fathers can be puzzled by their little girls. And the editor who was working with me at Chart House when we were making this uh, video had just that experience. He went home one evening, and his little girl said, "Daddy, what did you do today?" And he said, "I edited my video." And she said, "I edited my video too." She's showing her love for her father by saying, "We're the same." And I wouldn't be at all surprised if this little girl's mother and father didn't wear contacts. She's not talking about contact; she's talking about the friendship, and she's showing that she likes her friend by saying she's the same. So we have these very different rituals that women and men use, and everything that I'm saying today, in a way, is about conversational rituals. We tend to take conversation very literally; we think we mean what we say literally. People often say to me, "Wouldn't this be a much better world if everyone just said what they mean?" And I always answer, "We do; we do say what we mean, but we say it by our own conversational style and using the conversation rituals that have come to us to seem self-evidently right," and that's what women and men also do. So coming with these different experiences as children, where the little boys are using language to try and top each other as their kind of game and and trying to negotiate their status, and the girls are using language to try to show they're the same and telling secrets and and using language to create that friendship, they grow up with very different expectations about the place of language and the the way we use conversational rituals to get done what we want done. Very often, walking away from the same conversation, women and men will have different interpretations, and often it's because the women are focusing on the question of connection: "Is this way of speaking bringing us closer or putting us farther apart?" And very often men are coming to the same conversation with looking at a different axis, different question: "Is this conversation putting one of us in a one-up or a one-down position?"