In love, it is often said that the man is guided by his sexual desire when the woman is more in emotions and feelings. If this kind of sexist generalities are to be destroyed once and for all, there is a very specific area in which this a priori reductive pattern is observable:the vocabulary used by both sexes to talk about love. The New York Times conducted the investigation and analyzed the countless love stories submitted to it over the past 4 years. They found that men tended to write about sex and deeds more broadly when women wrote more about marriage and feelings. When it comes to the theme of family, male writers use the terms "son", "father" and "dad" while female writers speak more of "daughter", "mother" and "mum". This confirms the theory that a parent tends to favor the child of the same sex, more or less unconsciously.
Men would envision the relationship in action, judging by their use of the words 'bump', 'reach', 'hit' (figuratively speaking, one imagines), 'struggle'. Women would rather be attached to affect and resort to expressions such as “resentment”, “furious”, “agony”, “hurt”. The journalists of the famous media support their findings with science, which suggests that parents tend to use a more varied vocabulary of emotions with girls and to tell boys not to cry. The latter grow up with advice:that of expressing their anger, while girls are recommended to do the opposite. The love/sex relationship is addressed by writers of both genders, but men give greater importance to sexual understanding at the start of a relationship, when women favor emotional closeness. Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of Berkeley, however, insists on the existence of a real evolution concerning behaviors:"In the 1950s, men could get angry, confront each other, show hostility in order to swear. Women could express fear, grief, love in order to cry. [Today] it should rather be said that there is confusion in gender roles and stereotypes ". We'll try to be observant the next time we open a book of contemporary literature!
