Gendered Communication Quotes

I can't believe this, I'm arguing with a woman!

In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.

A man is designed to walk three miles in the rain to phone for help when the car breaks down - and a woman is designed to say, 'you took your time' when he comes back dripping wet.

I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.

I get accused all the time of having a big mouth. But if you ask me, guys gossip way more than girls do.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.

It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.

All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

Women are more skilled than men at making gossip entertaining.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.