the myth of the female communicator...

I have always been puzzled how the myth of women being better communicators got started. This thought arose in me the other night when watching Scrubs of all shows. JD and Turk were having a fight. JD approaches Turk in the cafe and clearly, calmly, and coherently explains himself, at which point Turk reciprocates. I have never had any sort of problem with another male that I couldn't (fairly) easily work out in this way. It also makes me laugh when I hear women say they prefer guy friends because men say what they think. So how is it that these mystical, invisible, inaudible "signals" that women give off have come to be called "communication?" Huh? Did I miss something? Maybe it came from the fact that women use more words in a day than men. Like all statistics, I believe this has been used to justify claims that are not true.

I know I've never been in a relationship, and I'm sure others here will attest to this, in which stuff like this does not occur:

{Uh oh, she's looks upset} "Honey, is something wrong?"
"No." *heavy sigh*
"Are you sure? You seem a little unnerved."
"It's nothing." *sigh's again*
"Well, if you're sure. Glad to know you're okay."
"Mmmmhmmmm"

Then later that evening, after she blows up about something trivial...

"You never listen to me!!! You never know what's wrong!!! Why don't you communicate with me!!!"

Yep, it's the same old story over and over. After constant daily prods somehow magically you are the one not communicating. Absurd, absolutely absurd. And don't even think of bringing up the fact that you did try to communicate. Nothing brings out the beast quicker.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

No light to shed - just experienced the lack of communication many times like your mock conversation...

i have totally lost the art of communcating with my wife.
we can't hold a conversation without distraction and digression.
nothing gets accomplished, so i avoid it.

david the rumour was started by 2 women, leaning over a shared washing line, who could not think of anything else to say to each other at the time, so invented the myth as a means to make snide, masked remarks at / to each other, on a vocational level.

law of the Jungle my son stay well clear....

Men and women generally have differing styles of communicating IMO (there's an author by the name of Deborah Tannen who has written a couple of good books on this) but the notion that women are better communicators (especially insofar as they are *inherently* better at it) is a myth put out by pro-feminist researchers (again IMO).

you bring up an interesting point, I am not sure if potentially men or women are necessarly better comunicators than one another but I think that women have easier access to the ability for a couple of reasons.

1. Biology, it is a known fact that the female brain is better coordinated between its two hemispheres than the male brain is. That means that in a female visual info, emotions and other sensory experiances are more quickly desiminated and then expressed by woman than men.

2. Social. Women in this society have been much more condtioned from youth to express themselves and verbalize, the addtional practice over time gives women the edge in many cases

The above of course are generalizations with exceptions of course.

TJ