I love it. You must read this book review in the TimesOnline (found via Arts & Letters Daily) of Deborah Cameron's The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Commenting on Cameron's take on all the myths about language differences between men and women:
For Cameron, this is simplistic eyewash, best countered with a few well-aimed stats. She cites the meta-analysis of Janet Hyde, a psychologist who has collated masses of research findings on male-female communications. Hyde's number-crunching suggests that the difference in language use between men and women is statistically negligible. Women don't interrupt more than men, nor are they more talkative or empathetic in conversation, less prone to assertive conversation, or any better or worse at verbal reasoning. The headline for Hyde's discovery could read "Men and Women pretty similar, research finds". And yet, Cameron muses, this isn't a story any of us, male or female, much care to talk about.
Tell me about it. Recall the incredible resistance to the research finding that women do not, in fact, talk more than men.
Hooray for Cameron for writing this book. But whaddya wanna bet it doesn't get nearly as much press as "Men are from Mars..."?
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See now, if I were a religious type, bound in eternal thrall to ex cathedra pronouncements, I'd be in a right quandary here, what with you and Blake Stacey taking somewhat different tacks on Professor Cameron's output. Aren't I lucky not to be hung up on fallibility? Aren't we all, in the reality-based community, lucky?
Stone me! People can be misguided, clumsy, even outright stupid on one matter and still have something insightful and important to say. Who would have thought, eh?