There is something to the old "Women are from Venus, men are from Mars" perspective. In my own experience, I've found there are times when men genuinely do not understand what a woman is trying to signal, just as there are women who can't fathom that a man couldn't understand what she was signalling, it seemed so obvious to her. Or that a man might think about sex and progression so very differently from a woman.
The notion that men and women speak different languages in some ways is far from new, and there is indeed something to it. And it's not just men and women, but people from different cultural backgrounds and from different levels of status and empowerment within a society.
Deborah Tannin's books are better at dissecting these factors, imo, than John Gray ever was, though she still writes with the biases of a (US) western sociolinguist (or whatever one would call her academic specialty). Gray has no academic credentials at all, as far as I know.
Historically, the people who were in power didn't bother listening or learning the "language" of whoever was beneath them in the social hierarchy. Masters didn't worry about parsing what servants or slaves meant, the established population didn't worry about immigrants, and the colonizers didn't worry about the nuanced cues of the colonized, and men didn't bother learning how to read women (though they made a lot of condescending comments about how "unfathomable" and "alien" women were). The underclasses, of course, didn't have the same luxury, as their survival and economic well being depended on being able to read their oppressors moods and body language.
Any advice given was for those with less social status or power to become more like those above them, or to humor them and not
bug them when they didn't pick up on their subtle, feminine cues. Remember how John Gray essentially told women it was mostly on them to make things work, because men needed to be left alone when they got home from work and didn't want to hear "troubles talk" or to bother reading subtle, indirect cues that something was wrong and she really, really needed him to cook dinner or look after the kids tonight? Remember all those books about "fear of success" and the glass ceiling back in the 80s told women that their own habits and communication style were holding them back, and if we could only learn to be more
assertive, we'd be as successful as men, and we'd no longer be victimized by men?
Except when women tried being more assertive, they were judged differently than men, because now they were pushy "bitches."
So maybe what is finally changing is that women are collectively pushing back against these norms, the idea that whatever men do is better and whatever happens to women is really their own fault. Maybe women are finally insisting that men gain the same literacy in female body language and cues that women have been forced to develop for male norms and cues since antiquity.
It's not all women, though. It never is with social movements involving women. We seem to have a higher defection rate from our own social justice movements than members of other traditionally marginalized groups do, though it's very likely I am missing nuances and dynamics that are present in other groups that aren't as united from within as they seem to be from without. Some women feel that they are better off siding with the status quo, because they fear losing whatever they have built for themselves, whatever status they have gained, in the so-called "man's world."
