It’s About Making Babies!

Scott Adams states that men and women are different in how they greet others on his Dilbert Blog, “Another Gender Generalization”.

Men are story tellers. Women are schedulers.

That’s the sort of overgeneralization that drives people mad. I suppose that’s what attracts me to writing it.

. . .

When I find myself in a conversation with a man, he often tells a funny story about something that happened to himself or someone else. Or he asks me a question that elicits a story from me, however brief. Or maybe one of us will tell a joke, which is a form of a story. . .

Women, on the other hand, sometimes appear to be telling stories, but they are actually recounting past events in the approximate order in which they happened. . . . Women are sharing feelings, and for that you don’t need a neat story format. What matters is the sum of the experiences.

Story tellers – or establishing the tone and security of the encounter?

Scott uses the terms story tellers and schedulers.

While the point of the exercise of greeting with a story might be simply to share an (emotionally significant) story, it does set the mood of the encounter. Does the story represent a gift of humor, an expression of respect? And example of power or social position? An ice-breaking story might relate to times of armed conflict – establish who, in terms of security, organization, and social structure, you are and what your relationship is to who you are greeting.

Men, or the one in a relationship that takes charge of security, probably does do more story telling as a verbal display of battle honors and social position.

Schedulers – or keepers of family lore

Back before people could communicate easily, before the telephone and daily mail delivery, people and families often went years without knowing what happened to a friend or loved one. We still see the cultural echoes of those times today. From a comment by juvegal on Scott’s Dilbert Blog post:

My mom delights in giving me the obituary announcements in much the same way, for people I don’t know now and will (obviously) never know. She insists on connecting them to people she is convinced I know, despite the fact that I haven’t lived in our home town for over 10 years (and, incidentally, neither has she…)

This isn’t about sharing emotions, though emotions often define which events should be laid out as to how they came about and what resulted. This is about connections. This is about how one’s home relates to a community. In a craft, what matters is what one knows. In matters of family and community, status, respect, and honor depend largely on who knows and respects one, and who one is related to by blood, marriage, or association. The practice of retracing who married who, where they lived, and who they associated with or were related to is a matter of establishing a cultural map, a means of creating a virtual diagram of a period and portion of a community. From times when literacy, the skill to read and write, was scarce these storytellings and verbal recreations were a matter of preserving the history of families and communities. The practice defined then, and still does, identities and reputations and relationships.

Today we count on the computers at the Sheriff’s office for registering sex offenders. In my parent’s time you sat in the coffee shop for an hour, daily for a week, and there wasn’t a criminal or dude, or dudette, with a bad reputation within miles that you wouldn’t hear about. Church gossip could be stunningly devastating and cruel. It also kept the community from forgetting about lawbreakers, and bullies, and cheats and liars.

So and so had a baby? That isn’t just two people with a little one. That is two families sharing a grand child. That is a neighborhood with another spark of life. That is a community looking forward to extending it’s values and beliefs into the next generation.

Way back when when men were men, and women tended the home fires, the division of labor often left hubby working away and Mom tending kids, garden, house – and learning and teaching crafts and other skills, and tending to social obligations – keeping track of laundry days and holidays, and who is married and who died.

What Scott calls “scheduling” is the cultural echo of the oral tradition of genealogy and community awareness. Men are just slow, before they retire from their initial profession or craft, to catch on to the importance of social structure in home life.

Just don’t confuse “Catching Up” with gossip. Please.