Women and Men in Conversation: Normal or Neurotic?

In You lust Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Deborah Tannen (1990) presents the recent sociolinguistic research on differences in the conversational styles of women and men, which can cause misunderstandings and conflict when the two sexes interact. Tannen's descriptors of women's and men's styles are startlingly similar to the descriptions by Karen Horney, a pioneer in the study of neurosis, of the three basic neuroses of contemporary American culture. A comparison of Tannen and Horney reveals that behavior Tannen presents as normal may be, according to Horney, either normal or neurotic. A further implication of the comparison of Tannen and Horney is that our culture itself, which serves as the frame for understanding what is normal, is neurotic.

What is normal? Tannen does not ask the question but assumes that the data she uses are based on the interaction of normal people. Working with that assumption, she has created a model that is conceptually more sophisticated than most previous work on gender and conversational interaction. Not only does she draw on data from all three relevant groups—all female, all male, and mixed—but she shows that both power and solidarity, confined by some researchers to power = male and solidarity = female, are relevant to understanding interaction in single-sex (F/F and M/M) as well as mixed-sex interactions. She shows how ambiguity is the inevitable outcome of women and men understanding and negotiating both power and solidarity differently in the two groups in which they each participate. Further, she points out the relevance of context, particularly public versus private, to understanding gender and conversation. Finally, she insists on the diverse functions of strategies such as interruptions, indirectness, silence, and adversitiveness, which have often been interpreted simplistically in support of the power = male and solidarity = female theory.