Another cartoon for the weekend: a Zits on communication hang ups:
Here, the person doing the talking is female and the person (apparently) not listening is male, and this configuration is conventionally associated with communication hangups, especially (but not only) in mixed-gender couples; “he just doesn’t listen to me”, the women complain. (In real life, you can sometimes find male couples where one man — or each man — complains about the other.)
But in the cartoon the person doing the talking is also a parent and the person (apparently) not listening a teenage child, and this configuration too is conventionally associated with communication hangups.
Put the two conventional associations together, and you get an especially potent combination of beliefs, that teenage boys just pay no attention to what their mothers are saying.
September 26, 2012 at 8:04 am |
[…] gives us two stereotypes at once: genderspeak and teenspeak. MalesĀ don’t listen, males are uncommunicative (especially when talking to females), and the teen stereotypes are for […]