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How and why does this stuff work? Why does language turn women on? In order to really get a handle on this effect, it’s helpful to remember that men and women process emotion very differently. How so? A man experiences an emotion like he would a hand that is punching them or caressing him. The feeling is sharp, sudden, localized, and temporary. A woman’s emotions are much more intense. She experiences an emotion as though it is something immense, all-enveloping, impossible to ignore—as though it is an ocean in which she is completely immersed. For her, an emotion isn’t one part of the picture; emotions determine the picture. How do you think about that meeting next week when you are flailing in ice-cold water? How can you be worried about that project when you are in a profoundly relaxing sauna? Women experience emotions as places or tangibles—their emotions are the environments within which physical events, which are comparatively unimportant, tend to occur. To convey an emotion to a woman, you should describe it as a place, a space, or an object with qualities you can see and feel and touch and hear. (“The feeling is so powerful that it’s like a red laser which just pierces your rationalizations, you know?”) For a woman, then, emotions determine perceptions. What she feels right now is going to determine how she experiences things right now. Her perceptions of past, present, and future events are subject to revision, based on what she’s feeling at any given time. Given the intensity of female emotion, it makes sense that women seem to have different priorities than men, and to focus on different things as being meaningful. A woman experiences facts, incidents, physical events within the “objective”, external world as the thin black outlines of a picture; her emotional responses to the facts of the physical world are the colors of a picture, and the colors’ intensity and power can easily render facts and objective data trivial by comparison. Next we’ll examine how the female experience of emotion relates to the female experience of language. Review 1. Women’s emotions are stronger and more compelling than men’s. 2. Women feel emotions as if the emotions are huge physical places which they are inside or solid, tangible things whose impact they can physically feel. 3. Women’s emotions determine their perceptions and sensations—if they are not prepared for something emotionally, they will still react badly to it, even if it feels good physically. 4. Women’s emotional responses are more meaningful and compelling to them than the “real-world” and “the facts”.
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