Manipulation

Fifteen years ago, Deborah Tannen wrote a bestseller about miscommunication between the sexes called, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Four years earlier than that she had published That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others, which also showed how people subconsciously miscommunicate, whether between the sexes or not. One thing that interested me in those books was the topic of manipulation.

Feeling manipulated by someone else can easily happen for a variety of reasons. For example, if one person prefers to communicate more indirectly than another person, both can come out of a conversation feeling manipulated. Bette tells Billie that she’ll be in Billie’s town on business on Tuesday and Billie reacts positively, saying, “Great! I’ll keep Tuesday evening free so we can have dinner.” Bette, who’d already made plans for that evening, feels things are not going her way and instinctively starts to mentally adjust her plans to accomodate the new development. She didn’t tell Billie no because she had been expecting a much more indirect response like “Would you like to get together?” Then she could have expressed her suggested time and place, kept open-ended, but the response was too direct and too forceful; contradicting a statement that had been put that strongly would have been rude. Since it wasn’t arrived at together (and indirectly), her friend obviously wanted this particular thing very badly. Billie, however, was only showing her enthusiam and had no intention of bullying Bette. Bette feels manipulated into the new situation. Billie could feel manipulated and hurt, too, if she learned that Bette felt miffed and really didn’t want to spend the evening with her when she could have so easily have told her no.

Tannen describes an office situation where Morton works for a director, Roberta. Staff meetings involve listening to everyone’s point of view, debating all the pros and cons of each proposal, but somehow, in Morton’s view, the group, mostly women, winds up deciding (by concensus!) what Roberta all along thought best. Morton feels manipulated and that his time has been wasted. The women love Roberta’s rule by consensus. The one man hates it. My thought: Roberta probably hates the term “boss.”

Do women fear success? Tannen says the research says they do, because a woman saying she’s better than other women, or by behavior even appearing better, is absolutely verboten. Women are supposed to stress their similarities and connections, so what they’re really fearing is rejection by their peers. Girls learn from an early age that displaying superiority will not get them what they want: peer affiliation. Displaying superiority will get boys what they want the most, however: higher status.

So here’s the question. How do women become successful — by manipulation? Perhaps another (more positive) way of saying the same thing is — by indirect means that retains peer affiliation?