I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room -- a women's group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don't talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement. He gestured toward his wife and said, "She's the talker in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It's true," he explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn't keep the conversation going, we'd spend the whole evening in silence."
我正在弗吉尼亚郊区一个客厅里的小型聚会上发言,虽然这是一个女性团体但也邀请了男士参加。当天晚上,有一位男士表现得尤为健谈,不停地发表他的看法或是说一些奇闻轶事,而他的妻子却只是安静地坐在他旁边的沙发上。直到那天晚上聚会要结束的时候,我评论说女士们总是抱怨她们的丈夫不和自己说话。那位男士同意地点了点头。他指了指他的妻子然后说道,“她是我们家的话匣子”,房间里顿时充满了笑声;这位男士看起来十分困惑并感到受伤,“这是真的”,他解释道。“我下班回到家的时候总是无话可说的。如果她不让交流进行下去的话,那我们的整个晚上都会在沉默中度过。”
This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.
尽管美国的男士在公共场合有比女士更加健谈的倾向,但他们在家反而不怎么说话,这段情景正是体现了这样讽刺的情况。这种相处模式正在对婚姻造成巨大的破坏。
The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed -- but only a few of the men -- gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year -- a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.
政治学家Andrew Hacker在20世纪七十年代末期就观察到了这样的相处模式。社会学家Catherine Kohler Riessman在她的新书Divorce Talk里报道说,她采访的大部分女性,认为她们离婚的原因是缺乏交流,然而只有很少一部分男性是这样认为的。考虑到现如今接近50%的离婚率,这将导致在美国每年有数百万起离婚案列,就仿佛是一场因为缺乏沟通而引起的流行病。
In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: "He doesn't listen to me." "He doesn't talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.
根绝我的研究,大多数来自女性对自己丈夫的抱怨,关注点都不在于那些显而易见的不公平现象,比如为了陪伴丈夫发展他的事业而放弃了自己的事业,或者承担了超出份内的日常生活辅助工作,例如打扫、烹饪以及社交活动的安排。正相反,大部分的抱怨都集中在交流上:“他不听我说话”,“他不和我说话”。我发现正如Hacker多年前观察到的一样,对于多数妻子来说,首要也是最重要的是,希望她们的丈夫是一位可以沟通的伙伴,然而却很少有丈夫对妻子抱有这样的期望。
In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.
简单来说,能最好地代表目前危机的画面就是那副经典的漫画场景,一个男人坐在早餐桌前,手里拿着报纸挡在他的面前,一个女人怒视着报纸的背面,想要和男人说话。
address a gathering 在聚会上发言
this episode crystallizes the irony 这段插曲体现了这种讽刺