Sex, Lies and Conversation There are many differences between a man and woman, communication is just one difference. Deborah Tannen, a University of California graduate, got her PhD in linguistics at Georgetown University; there she studied the communication between men and women. Tannen has published over one hundred articles and wrote over twenty books, including You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (1990), which spent almost four years on the New York Times best seller list and was translated into twenty-nine languages. The article Sex, Lies and Conversation appeared in the Washington Post in 1990 and gives insight to how opposite sexes communicate with each other. From an early age we are programed to play and be friends with the same gender as our own. From being at school on the playground hearing the famous phrase: “boys are from Jupiter because they’re stupider, girls are from Mars because they’re super stars”, to being in middle school and hearing that the opposite sex has cooties. According to the April issue of American Psychologist, Eleanor Maccoby reports that the results of her own and others’ research shows that children’s development is most influenced by the social structure of peer interactions. Tannen states that she believes these …show more content…
Women tend to look at whoever she’s speaking to in their eyes, face to face, without any distractions often giving listener noises such as mhm, uhuh, and yeah; she likes the listener’s full attention. Men on the other hand, tend to bounce from subject to subject, not looking at the person they are speaking to, and curiously looking around. Men often find that women’s listener noises are frustrating and one man even complained that his wife only had one view of looking at something, that when he tried to show her another way, she got mad at