Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 205

Sometimes the sex of communicators affects not only the meaning we give to their utterances, but also the very structure of those utterances. Women, for example, tend to use more tentative phrases or qualifiers, in their speech than men do. Phrases like “I guess,” “I think,” and “I wonder if,” abound in the speech of women but not in that of men.

This pattern of speaking also is passed on to the very young through their favorite cartoon characters. Past studies revealed that female cartoon characters, more than male characters, used verbs indicating a lack of certainty, such as “I suppose,” and words judged to be polite.⁵¹ When students were shown cartoon characters and asked to identify a character’s sex based on the words the character spoke, students assigned the logical, concise, and controlling captions to male characters and the emotional, vague, and verbose captions to female characters.⁵² Do cartoon characters continue to perpetuate such stereotypes? Have recent films with strong female characters started to break down this stereotype?