Is It Really True That Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus?
In the 1990s, John Gray made at least a small fortune with his book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The book was on best-seller lists for years and was discussed on almost every talk show. It also fed some of the prevailing myths about women and men. Was that book on target? Are men and women from different planets?
When we look at some of the recent popular literature, we may conclude that John Gray was right. Both Christian and secular writers appear to have accepted his basic premise. For example, in Men and Masculinity, British evangelical leader Roy McCloughry concluded that "all conversation between men and women is cross-cultural conversation."1 He later elaborated by quoting Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation. Tannen makes the point that men and women use conversation for different purposes: Women use conversation to seek confirmation, to make connections, and to reinforce intimacy; men, on the other hand, use conversation primarily to protect their independence and to negotiate status.2
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If, in fact, there is truth in these conclusions, the task of preaching to mixed audiences may be far more complicated than most preachers know. It is possible that the way a doctrine is taught or an illustration is selected can actually backfire on half (or more) of an audience, simply because we think that men and women hear the words we have spoken in the same way. Is it possible that men and women in the same country, in the same town, in the same church could actually move within different cultures? If so, what are the implications for the preaching task?
Anthropologist and missiologist Paul Hiebert discusses culture as the way in which ideas, feelings, and values are shared by a group of people.3 In normal use, the word culture refers to any group's "way of life" — how people act based on what they believe, feel, and value. Churches have their own cultures — their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. Ethnic groups have their own cultures — their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. Nations have their own cultures — their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. It may be that men and women in North America have subtly different cultures, with somewhat different sets of shared beliefs, feelings, and values.
We tend to think that "all Americans" or "all Methodists" (or Baptists or Pentecostals or whatever) would hear messages in similar ways. Yet it takes only a few minutes of reflection to recognize that deep divisions exist even within our ethnic or denominational subcultures. That should alert us to the possibility that men and women may actually live in different worlds of ideas, feelings, and values.4
Historian Anne Firor Scott tells us that our culture grinds the lens through which we view reality.5 A lens that allows us to see one thing clearly may also make other things fuzzy, impossible to see. Anyone who wears bifocals understands how that works: A near-sighted person needs one lens for reading and a separate lens for seeing anything more than a few feet away. Is it possible that men and women have different cultural "lenses" that cause them to look at reality in differing ways?