Nov
Relationtips #3
Posted in Gender | No Comments »H e W e n t T h a t a w a y ! . . . b u t W h y ?
The Truth About Men and Directions
Since Deborah Tannen told wives that it wasn’t just their husband who refused to ask for directions when lost, this particular gender difference has assumed a life of its own. Though I owe a debt to Mrs. Tannen I could scarce repay (by her honest accounts of how and why men and women have distinct, easily identifiable communication manners, she confirmed for me my sanity when there were otherwise good reasons to question it), I think it is necessary to revise her explanation for the phenomenon.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it is this: In one of her earlier books on communication styles, Deborah Tannen, undertook to help men and women understand why, in inter-gender conversation, the parties seem so often to be talking past each other. What kind of world is it where conversations begun with the hope of clarifying misunderstandings, invariably ended in compounding the confusion? The answer, Deb dared to say, was a world in which men and women are different.
Such an answer would shock anyone raised on the Egalitarian Catechism. But there were still a few who had found, by grace, the nerve to reckon their consciousness as real, and who believed their senses functioned with an actual correspondence to reality. These were the 7,000 who knew their search for the meaning of life would not end with the discovery of Rod Serling standing behind a curtain, microphone in hand. They had found their childhood suspicions that boys and girls might really be really different confirmed with each rise in their respective hormone levels. Every new drop of estrogen, each additional milliliter of testosterone, brought with it further and irrefutable proof that their childhood suspicions were actually facts of life.
However, as long as society as a whole was forbidden to enact any legislation based on reality, things were okay. And so Deborah’s books became bestsellers even as the material they treated inched closer to becoming illegal. People seemed really to enjoy learning about non-existent gender differences and how these affected them. Some were even more interested in finding a way to overcome the communication obstacles that weren’t there as a result.
Tannen’s theories include what I regard as inescapable truths, cleverly labeled and winsomely set forth, typically by means of anecdotes. The one mentioned in the first paragraph above, about men who, when lost, are irrationally reluctant to ask for help, became a culture-wide cliché in record time, as did the supposed reason explaining the reluctance. Ego. This male tendency was then compared to the ever-practical female who, with an ego manifestly above such silly concerns, will simply logically and without fear, ask.
Dr. Tannen’s perceptive eye has observed that the different behavior and speech styles of men and women is rooted in the different ways men and women experience their respective identities. The theory, which I buy without hesitation, is that women rate themselves and others on a horizontal plane while men are ranked on the vertical. This is manifestly the case.
From little girlhood, females work with proximity as the defining element of relationships. Girls express love by opening up, allowing in the objects of their affection. They seek to get next to, to get near, objects of their fancy. Conversely, those who are disliked are shut out. Girls learn early, without tutors, without the subject listed in any curriculum, how a group of girls creates, sustains or alters the status of girls inside and outside the clique. It is a wonderful world for those who are granted admittance into the otherwise secret realm of the “most-admired-girl’s” heart. And it can be a hellish torment to be the girl shut out, the girl kept in the dark concerning “the news,” or concerning the future, as it is planned (schemed) by those adept at using their charms to make things happen.
With speech as their major relational tool, women gab it up and up and up with their intimates, discussing even the most inane matters, because what matters is the process, not the content. Your wife’s knowledge of this valuation explains why she doesn’t care two cents what Julianne was talking to you about outside, in front of the house, before you came in. But she cares very much about the length of your conversation. This is because your wife knows that talk for women is, above all other considerations, intimacy’s carburetor. It’s where the mix of fuel and air is mixed, where the ignitable substance—if there is going to be any—comes from that is brought to the spark to get the engine running or to keep it moving. It is where the diamonds of the information world are mined: your likes and dislikes. The knowledge of these in the pretty hands of a skillful woman have determined more outcomes in history than men even knew happened.
For the male of the species life is very different. The male identity is not gratified by proximity but by ascendancy. He is keen to observe where each member of the group ranks, and he knows that ranking is usually the result of performance. Interestingly, though somewhat beside the point, is that for females, the stakes are ontological, whereas for males they are economical. I use these categories here as they are used in theology where ontology refers to God’s being and economy refers to His activities. The stakes are always higher for the female because she finds her self as the cause or blame of her relative popularity while the male, forever and (almost) always bound more tightly to the objective case, finds his sense of self leased out to his performance. To the uninitiated this may all appear to be mumbo-jumbo, but to the gleg, these are bases fitted to be the foundations of differing worlds. The respective social pressures experienced by boys and girls, men and women, are equally rewarding or devastating, but they occur along different axes. Depending upon the consequences of any particular valuation, the potential grief is much greater along her axis than his.
Tempting as it is to follow these differences out from some of their more common appearances, we must return to the original subject: men (not) asking for directions when lost. The quick answer, once it became public as a guy thing, was to attribute it to the famously more delicate male ego. The thinking goes like this: As a guy, he’s always vying for the top rung, always competing at every possible opportunity, even when cooperation would seem to be of most advantage to most people. Thus, while everyone in the car is hungry, and the relatives are starting to worry, the Mrs. is asking, “Why don’t you just pull into that gas station and ask someone?” He responds with a pregnant grunt that says, “Who needs to ask directions? I know where I’m going and I know how to get there. I just need to go around the circle we’ve been driving in for the last 35 minutes one more time. Just once more ought to do it.”
She thinks he’s impossibly stubborn for not mustering whatever sort of humility he might need to let his ego go where it belongs, in order to get the whole family where they belong—today—at grandma’s new house for dinner. He is thinking, “Why doesn’t this female have the good sense to understand that I really am on the verge of cracking the code? This is no stupid ego game! This is a matter of me doing my job.”
As usual, they are both wrong. In this instance, anyway. She’s usually right, I admit; just as Deb Tannen is usually right. But on this direction thingy, I think the boat has been missed. While the tender male ego may rightly be blamed for much misery come upon the world, I don’t believe this is just another instance of it. No, there’s something else operative here and it behooves us to consider if my theory is not the correct one.
You see, among the skillion differences between men and women lies this one: women default to safety, preservation, caution. Men default to danger, risk and the resultant thrill. Please don’t be so silly as to imagine that I’m saying women never take risks or that men always do; or that women never find risk thrilling, or that men never prefer safety. None of these considerations really bear on what I’m suggesting is the preferred alternative explanation for the “don’t need directions, thanks” phenomenon.
It is a verified fact that there is a chemical brain reward granted in high risk activity (that ends well—heh). And it is a verified observation that such behavior is engaged in by males far more than by females. I read recently of a species of monkey that curiously had an adult female to male ratio of five:one. Two women researchers sought an explanation. They first verified that the birth ratio was, in fact, essentially one:one. So what happens? Is there a genetic vulnerability in the male, a mutation that makes it less fit to survive into adulthood (don’t I sound like Chuckie Darwin here-I’m only reporting it like it happened!)? Or were the males perhaps much tastier to a predator’s way of reckoning? It turned out that neither of these accounted for the adult demographic difference. Rather it was because the male monkeys commonly engaged in high risk behavior of idiotic proportions? I know this sounds like I’m leading up to a men’s reality show on cable, but I’m not. These male monkeys would do things like race across a heavily trafficked highway. No matter how many entrants to the Highway Olympics ended up under truck wheels, the monkeys stayed unrepentant. They also stayed dead, as the statistics indicated.
I propose that a similar motivation is behind the refusal to ask for directions. It is a civilized way to play Highway Monkey. Despite what our wives think, the risks we face are well known to us and failure is not desired. We do not relish the thought of walking in to a room packed full of hostile in-laws waiting to tell us how stupid we are. You may think we like that, but we don’t. What we do relish is a challenge. It is not at all the ego that is driving us to drive cluelessly. At least, it’s not all ego. It is the expectation of a chemical brain reward once the challenge is met and swept into our dominion bag of accomplishments. The moment we ask directions, the potential thrill of a dominion moment evaporates.
If you cannot understand the difference between ego and the chemical reward I speak of, you are a female. That’s all right. Don’t let it trouble you. Fact is, I invariably ask for directions—when I need directions, which happens to be very rarely. Like NEVER. Besides, the thrill of grandma’s cooking fresh out of the oven has always trumped endorphins in my mind. Hey! Double entendre.