Silence is Golden
Created | Updated Mar 13, 2012
A man of his word
...a woman of her Thesaurus.
This is a rather loose translation from a German mock proverb: Ein Mann, ein Wort – - eine Frau, ein Wörterbuch1. The latter part was added after somebody had claimed that women used around 21,000 words a day, while men only used 7,000. Later studies (from 2007) found that both men and women uttered about 16,000 words a day.
Then why, I wonder, does the idea that women are real chatterboxes while men are taciturn stick in most people's heads? The implication of this is that women are superficial and men are thorough... Where does the idea of the gossipy woman come from anyway?
Like so many other things made to oppress women, this idea is as old as the Bible:
34: Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. 35: And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church
—I Cor. 14
Just like children weren't supposed to talk without being asked, women were not supposed to talk in the presence of the higher beings, ie men. Maybe the idea behind this was that if you weren't allowed to talk, it would prevent you from having your own thoughts and opinions in the first place? To be fair, the clergy didn't want the common folk to have their own thoughts at all, including the men. If you didn't think on your own, you didn't question things, and so you just obeyed and did as told by the clergy. 2 However, the clergy felt threatened by women, and this resulted in witch hunts and lots of other draconian measures to mute women for many centuries. Just think of the scold's bridle, which was used for 'insubordinate' women in England as late as the 19th Century.
Now we all know that it's not easy to free yourself from ideas and traditions which have been engrained into the collective conscious for such a long time. But how are things nowadays? What is the reality in an average family?
I don't remember my dad as being taciturn, or my mum as chatty. And anyway, if my dad lacked words, he let the carpet beater speak3. Ours wasn't of rattan, but of vulcanised rubber: flexible, unbreakable, and making mean streaks, and it had a name: Red Max, due to its colour. But I digress. My father in law was known to call his wife to silence in public. It wasn't that she talked too much, it was just because he had to be in the centre of attention.
And in my own family? A typical day will go like this: my husband comes home from work. I serve him tea, he sits down at his PC and starts his games. If I come and ask something, he says: not now! without as much as looking at me. If I'm lucky, he will listen to me later, while still playing his his online game – he only mutes the microphone. If he wants to talk to me, it has to be immediately! If I hint at this being inconvenient at that very moment, he's angry. So I sit down and listen to endless dissertations about his game, hacked accounts, cheats and sbots, none of which interest me one iota. He demands that I look into his eyes all the time. If I dare to glance elsewhere for a split second, I'm accused of not listening.
It is interesting that what I've experienced in my life is in absolute contrast to the taciturn men4 and chatty women we are made to believe in.
And you? What is your experience? Is it really the women who do all the unnecessary talking while the men say little, but what they say is of great importance? Or is it the other extreme, with the women being cut short while the men drone on and on and on about things they are interested in? I can't really remember why I started writing this in the first place. Probably because Papier ist geduldig (paper doesn't blush?) and because I have to get rid of my unspoken 16,000 words today, so I felt I should at least write some of them down.
