Book Review: Tu No Me Entiendes

Title: Tú No Me Entiendes

Author: Deborah Tannen

Date: 1990 (English, You Just Don’t Understand); 1991

Publisher: Morrow (English); Javier Vergara (Spanish)

ISBN: 950-15-1109-X

Length: 331 pages

Quote: “En muchos aspectos, cada persona no se parecen a ninguna otra...Pero...La mayoría de las personas exclamaban que lo que yo decía era verdad...Se sentían aliviados al comprender que los problemas que ellos tenían se debían a cuestiones generales.”

In You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen followed a previous bestselling study of ten common patterns of misunderstanding between men and women, That’s Not What I Meant, with this analysis of ten more.

I didn’t buy her books in English when they came out. There was a reason. Tannen was a psycholinguist. The writer known as Suzette Haden Elgin, whose blog has been preserved as a memorial at ozarque.livejournal.com, was a psycholinguist. I was buying Elgin’s books; her last one had respectfully cited Tannen’s book. Tannen had not returned the compliment. If there were going to be sides I wasn’t going to be on Tannen’s.

But, in Argentina, Javier Vergara arranged for translations of a set of popular psychology books from the U.S. into Spanish. This was interesting. How would some of those books work in Spanish? So...well, I bought Tú No Me Entiendes. And I’m glad I did. I still don’t know how well it works for most of the Spanish-speaking world, but reading it in Spanish forced me to read it more carefully and find that the book repaid an attentive reading. When I scanned it quickly in English it was easy to think “Oh, another rehash of those old stereotypes of ‘Women’ that don’t apply to women I would know.” When I read it in Spanish I had to acknowledge that Tannen took appropriate precautions to describe patterns of behavior some of which do, in fact, apply to women I know.

Enough other people have reacted to Tannen’s work, in cyberspace, that I know I’m not the only one who came away with the conclusion: “Tannen’s stereotype of women isn’t as bad as disgusting John Gray’s, but she’s talking about those ‘Nice Girl’types who never dare to do anything less badly than their buddies are doing it.” And women who were early adopters of computer technology, women who blog or work online, have a distinct tendency to feel that Nice Girls are basically something like kitchen drain blockage, and they tend to whine that we affect them just like baking soda.

Nice Girls tend to be a bourgeois phenomenon. Poor people can’t afford to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of conformity in all things. People with old money don’t need and aren’t expected to be conformists, and people who’ve made their own money think life’s too short. Rich men’s daughters sometimes want to be conformists. Like Margaret Atwood’s character Elaine in Cat’s Eye, the daughters of real achievers can hardly be their parents’ intellectual equals when they are eight or ten years old, so they can feel that it’s very comforting to feel that all it takes to bond with other little girls is to sit around cutting out paper dolls and saying they’ve done it badly. They soon learn, however: Nice Girls and good women, women who become good at things and achieve things in their own right, aren’t really compatible and don’t become real friends. Achieving anything requires a bit of daring to stand alone, outside the little conformist cliques. Some women bloggers at least affected to doubt whether women as stereotypical as the ones Tannen seems to know actually exist.

They exist, all right. They’re not dangerous in the way that dictators, child molesters, and homicidal maniacs are dangerous. They are, however, as Tannen mentions in this book, the biggest obstacle to women’s individual or collective progress: The girls who go after jobs that aren’t pink-collar, or who happen to be able to do pink-collar jobs outstandingly well (type 150 words per minute, recruit their children to help maintain a Martha-Stewart-type home), are unlikely ever to be accepted by any little conformist clique. There’s a reason why the ideal wife in the Book of Proverbs, a homemaker and entrepreneur, is a “woman of valor”in the same way a successful war chief is a “man of valor.”Women whose goal is to maintain that cozy feeling of approval within a conformist clique need not apply. When the conformist clique is all about trying to lose ten pounds on a fad “reducing diet”and then going back to sitting around munching high-calorie snacks together, a woman who naturally enjoys maintaining a healthy, shapely body can try to jump through all the hoops “friends”hold out for her and do everything it takes to be liked by the conformists, but she’ll never really achieve their approval.

Women who use their God-given talents, even if the only talents they have are staying slim and sober and balancing their budgets, will be happier if they just recognize the fundamental covert hostility of Nice Girls as one of the stones in life’s pathway. We can and do have friends—but, since our friendships are going to form outside of conformist cliques, to some extent they will resemble what Tannen describes as typical “male”friendships more than what she describes as typical “female”friendships, although gender dysphoria has nothing to do with this effect. Good women, as distinct from Nice Girls, have not usually bought into sexist bigotry enough to whine with the seventeenth century poetess that “my soul is masculine”; they tend to prefer less offensive bromides about individuals being unique and “being human beings first, men or women second.” (That was a phrase Cynthia Voigt used on the jackets of all of her books, each of which was, at some level, a study of how achievers grow up.) They may make careers of marketing products or services or books to women, including Nice Girls, but life does not give them the option of really liking, or being liked by, Nice Girls. Real women like Abigail Van Buren, Mary Kay Ash, Julie Andrews, Oprah Winfrey, and (she admits it, in subtle ways, several times in this book) Deborah Tannen, are good enough outside observers of Nice Girls to allow Nice Girls who meet them to feel that they’re Nice Girls too, but they know, deep down, that they are only outside observers.

Are Nice Girls really the majority type of women, or do they merely seem like a majority to the women achievers who succeed in writing for and about them? I suspect the latter. Part of the strategy that allows Tannen to be perceived as Nice by the Nice Girls in her audiences is either saying or believing, I cannot be positive which, that Nice Girls are a majority, and treating them as one. Certainly the majority of humankind, and of any merely demographic category of humankind, are by definition not outstanding achievers. That leaves two more possibilities: some of the non-achievers may be unsuccessful would-be achievers, or they may be hostile, embittered non-achievers who don’t even try to be “nice” conformists. I would agree with Tannen at least that those ways of dealing with non-achievement seem to be more common among men than among women.

It’s rare for women (or men) to achieve the kind of supportive friendship among independent, high-achieving, strong-willed and fundamentally introvert colleagues that C.S. Lewis lived in and wrote about. When it happens we can enjoy, to some extent, the cozy feeling of consensus among achievers, rapport as achievers. This is what Pamela Dean excels in writing fiction about; it’s what makes readers who’ve enjoyed Real Friendships, in which success and support for one another’s success became norms a group could conform to, love Dean’s novels and other readers angrily reject them. Not all of us have any experience of being part of a community of high-achieving women (which may or may not include men). The Internet has made it a little easier for groups of writers to document the phenomenon of Real Friendship among e-friends; Elgin’s Ozarque blog documented this, as other blogs may be doing. Such groups, women achievers have to agree, are the solid gold reality of which the little conformist cliques are brass-plate imitations. It can be very interesting to note their similarities and differences to the groups of women Tannen describes.

I note, for example, that although Grandma Bonnie Peters might at times have sat down face-to-face and stared into the eyes of patients as a way to build rapport, the conversations she enjoyed as part of friendship took place in what Tannen calls a more typically male physical position, with the participants either side by side or at angles to each other, looking at objects rather than each other’s faces. I would have said that these were very feminine conversations. Natural health care being GBP’s passion, the topics that interested her included exclusively female topics, the care of men and children and, particularly (she was a La Leche Leader), breastfeeding. But even with the beloved granddaughter who was the model for the logo on Grandma Bonnie’s Allergy-Ease Foods, I never saw her sitting knee-to-knee, eyeball-to-eyeball, going “m-hm, uh-huh, tell me more” in those endless discussions of nuances and social trivia that interest less brilliant female minds. I saw her discouraging that sort of thing with other women, saying that conversation should be not a distraction from but a part of Doing Something Useful. I have wondered whether she thought the eyeball-to-eyeball kind of conversation even had lesbian implications, or potential.

And this is probably the best way to read and review either of Tannen’s books, in whichever language you prefer; there are 29 other translations as well as Spanish and the original English. Reality-check. Tannen chose to write her books in a “feminine,”storytelling manner, using at least as many personal conversations among people she knows as she uses academic studies to illustrate her points. When she does cite an academic book or article she tells it as a story. There are few numbers and no tables in her book. You could write your own reprise, even if you never went to college or even high school, in the same format. Really.

It seems to me, although I’ve read no formal studies (who’d volunteer for a formal study that drew a clear objective distinction between women achievers and women non-achievers?), that women achievers as well as men are likely to weight independence higher than intimacy. Atwood's fictional Elaine, who is so deeply hurt by her school friends’ conformist bullying that she avoids intimacy as an adult and blames her worst elementary school friend for her not having a lifelong friend with whom to face old age, is probably an extreme example. In real life Margaret Atwood (who admittedly shared enough of the life experiences she gives Elaine that she felt it necessary to open Cat’s Eye with a note that it’s not an autobiography even if it’s written in the style of one) did find a Partner For Life and rear a child. In real life Emily Dickinson’s life as a homebody was not reclusive—celibacy did not interfere with her visiting, and being visited by, women friends and relatives—and many, if not most, other successful women writers have been happily married. Even A Room of One’s Own rails against a particular dysfunctional pattern of family life, not against all family life altogether. Most women independently choose intimacy. However, successful women as well as men learn to prize the spaces in their togetherness, or, if they would get a friend, to prove him first and be not hasty to credit him, or to take time to ask Do I Have to Give Up Being Me to Be Loved by You? We ask that question of other women as well as men. Women achievers who do marry young may, like Atwood, also divorce or separate young before meeting their Partners For Life. They may, like Kathleen Norris, commit to a religious community, but only after years of cautiously confirming that the group will not interfere with their solitary reading and writing.

Too many women achievers have grown old and died without ever reconciling themselves to denominations where church membership became a question of conformity—though, for many, the basic social pressure to conform became intolerable when the denomination voted to stop upholding some specific rule, typically a rule of frugality that many women had actually found liberating, and the pressure was now to indulge in extravagances that had never tempted these women. 

Tannen touches on so many topics, in this book, that any reader who chooses to write out reactions to this book (as it might be for morning writing practice) could easily spend a few days writing an e-book. After saying that, perhaps what this review needs to emphasize, by mentioning it last, is that despite the casual tone of Tannen’s work this book is the “popularization” of serious linguistic research.