I don’t know if you’ve been exposed to the men as waffles / women as spaghetti meme yet — it’s something that I’ve encountered from at least three separate, unrelated sources so I’m thinking it’s gaining a bit of cultural momentum at present… I believe this is the book that started it all. Then again, it would appear that the authors of the book also do conferences and such, so maybe it’s a chicken-or-egg question.
Anyway, the basic thought (as I understand it) is that men think in compartments, like the boxes in waffles, and prefer to deal with one at a time before moving on to another. Whereas women think like a tangle of spaghetti, with thoughts defined more as their connection to other thoughts and less in distinct, categorizable modules. (Ha ha — maybe one could call it modular versus connective cognition??? Sorry, it’s my inner nerd coming out.) The point of this all, they tell us, is that communication is apt to go haywire in relationships… the men get overwhelmed at having hundreds of boxes opened, but moved over in favor of new ones, whereas the women feel that the men are avoiding the real problems in favor of dealing with something trivial. (A caveat: I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on this, so I could be simplifying the thesis.)
But from what I see, this doesn’t seem all that new and innovative to me. About a decade ago, we were all about the Martian / Venusian origins of men and women (this book), and before that it was the Peter Pan syndrome and the Wendy dilemma. I heard for about two decades in church about how the besetting sin of men is that of irresponsibility, while women’s besetting sin is taking control. And all of this seems to play into our current pop-cultural obsession with portraying dad as a hapless buffoon and mom as a controlling neurotic.
All right already! I get it — men and women are different! Despite what the lunatic fringe would have you believe, I don’t suppose we really doubt that. Too much evidence to the contrary. But I think that putting these pat stereotypes on the exact ways in which the genders differ is to trivialize the topic. (Plus which, every time I take one of these “personality” tests they end up telling me I’m a man because I think compartmentally / prefer achievement to relationship / prefer my own space to having other people in my hair, etc.) I will agree that in our American culture of the early 21st century, these particular generalizations work.
The problem is that human variability is caused by infinitely more variables than the single one of gender. Another enormous difference is from culture to culture. Interestingly, in some cultures, men are expected to be the emotional, even neurotic ones, and women are thought to be childishly incapable of controlling themselves, let alone anyone else in their lives (this tends to be the consensus in those cultures that strongly repress their women). Thinking of fathers as clownish nitwits and mothers as tyrannical – but well-meaning – harpies would probably strike people from this sort of culture as… so off in left field as to be meaningless. It would be so weird that it could hardly be considered offensive.
No, I think that what we’ve done, culturally, is to set up a standard of expectations and norms. We’ve decided that this is how men and women are, and then we live our lives fulfilling that prophecy. The bumbling dad and the stressed-out mom are roles that we seek to fill. In another place, in another time in history, this wouldn’t have been at issue. Then it might have been the authoritarian – but absent – father and the doting – but foolish – mother.
This doesn’t go to say that it’s bad, per se, that we set up these expectations for ourselves… but I think it is harmful for us to look at these categorizations and see them as truth proclaimed from on high. It might be useful to look at the communication patterns of men and women as described in this newest derivation of the same old cultural myth, but I think a thought or two should be spared to the notion that all of us are responsible for how we relate and communicate with the others around us. Whether you think modularly or connectively or some completely other way, you’re going to have to bend for other people, in order to be understood – and to understand them.
Posted by Kjirstin 
