Dare to Ask: Sir, may we have a word with you?

By Phillip Milano

Question

I still don't understand why women talk so damn much! Most of the time, they're talking about b- s-! Shoes, the mall, babies, clothes, makeup, celebrities, etc. Why is it I never hear women talking about anything deep?

David, Woodbridge, N.J.

Replies

You mean as opposed to talking about sports, how drunk they got last weekend, who they [had sex with] while drunk, and what tools or toys they're going to buy?

A., 40, female, Missouri

If you choose to hang with bimbos, you're going to get blather about shoes and celebrities. Go to a Mensa meeting, join a book club or sign into a chat room about politics. ... Too many guys want little girls or subservient housewife types.

Dot, female, California

Roughly half the members of yforum.com (note to readers: that's the Web site that spawns much of the dialogue for this column) are women. So I would hardly say women "never talk about anything deep." And if women talk as much as you say, then they are bound to talk about things in-depth.

Carrie, 21, Houston

Expert says

We tried to gab with a couple of well-known women who study how the sexes communicate, but their female publicists prattled on and on to us about how they were too busy working on new books (actually, they politely and quickly ditched us by e-mail, but we're still silently sulking alone).

One, Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, wrote The Female Brain, which repeated the oft-repeated claim that women average 20,000 words per day compared to men's 7,000.

That idea was highly criticized for not being backed with hard science, and other researchers have documented many studies, including at the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis, that show men talk as much or more than women, depending on the situation.

What most experts seem to agree on is that there may be differences in why men and women communicate, if not how much they communicate. It's the classic idea that men reserve conversation to pass along knowledge and solutions, and women use it more to be supportive and social, said Scott Haltzman, a Brown University professor of psychiatry and author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women.

Research supports that "when men are stressed, they tend to close themselves off, while women tend to engage in more emotional connection," he said. "As [researcher Deborah] Tannen says, women talk for rapport, men talk to report."

For women who complain their spouses don't listen, Haltzman suggests offering dialogue as a "task" rather than to bond.

"In general, keep things short, particularly if it's something you want him to help you with," he said. "If you want him to listen, speak in a way that he understands, instead of trying to get him to morph into Hugh Grant."

Phillip Milano, author of I Can't Believe You Asked That! (Perigee), moderates cross-cultural dialogue at Y? The National Forum on People's Differences. Visit www.yforum.com to submit questions and answers. Send general column comments to phillip.milano@jacksonville.com. You can also hear his podcasts or watch his TV spots.