Cannot not think of this quote from C.S. Lewis' "That hideous strength":
> “The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”
Indeed. The author seems to imply that men are so bad at understanding contextual clues that communication with them is virtually impossible, almost as if they were primitive machines and not full-fledged human beings capable of observing and thinking. Even worse, when confronted with this uncomfortable truth, instead of learning how to communicate properly, they react with frustration, almost as if they were primitive animals driven by instincts and emotions and not full-fledged human beings capable of learning.
Still, I find it hilarious, even though I am a man myself!
And on a more serious note – why, when presented with two different phenomena (in this case: men and women, but there are many more cases, like "SQL" and "NoSQL", or "Rust" and "Clojure", or "GUI" and "CLI", etc., etc.), so many people automatically assume that one must be somehow strictly "better" and the other somehow strictly "worse"? Of course, it's sometimes (maybe even often) the case, but neither "sometimes" nor "often" does not mean "always"!
Wholeheartedly agree! We are drowning in false dichotomy and always wanting to know what is "the best" as if there were an absolute measure of goodness. You just can't project a high dimensional space down to a single dimension.
I love your rhetorical twist on sexism, which exposes a harmful aspect of stereotypes. The positive stereo type, "all X are good at Y, or naturals at Z"
We both know people who are dogmatically over precise in their language, it has its use, but becomes exhausting after while, esp where not needed. Here comes the generalization, but the use of overly pedantic forms of communication come from either an environment with high complexity, or a person using another as an extension of their own self and that manipulator (the assistant) literally has no context, so everything has to be over explained. When your groovin, all you need is a look.
The longer I spend on social media the more I have learned that the only differences between men and women is that men are terrible and women are awesome. Right?
> “The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”