Emoticons

Gender stereotyping is risky. It’s outdated, it’s judgemental, it’s lazy, it’s narrow-minded and it should be avoided at all costs.

            So before I start avoiding it, there’s just time to share something I’ve noticed about men and women, when it comes to phone text messaging:

            There is no better way to get hold of a man (in the wireless communication sense) than by sending him a text. Men like texts. Texts don’t mess around, they get straight to the point, and they don’t involve small-talk.

            Man A might send: ‘what time is the meeting tonight?’

Man B would text back: ‘8. Will pick you up’.

            And it’s all over. Finished. Man A knows that Man B will be at the door in time for the two of them to make the eight o’clock start and if any further information needs to be exchanged, then that can be done in the car.

            But in my experience if it’s two women, the text exchange is likely to be more along the lines of this:

            ‘What time is the meeting tonight?’

            ‘8. Will pick you up 7.45 ish . Got 2 do Tesco 1^st.’

            ‘U sure? I can drive myself if U R busy’

            ‘No Probs.  Kids out ;- ) so have plenty time’

            ‘Cheers!!!  I’ll take car next time J’

            ‘Perfect J’

            ‘C U later!!’

            ‘C U then!!! J’

            ‘J’

Before you know where you are you’re caught up in a death spiral of diminishing messages, exclamation marks and smiley emoticons which only comes to an end when your friend is revving her car outside your door. There’s been no clear hopping-off point from the exchange so you keep on hitting that ‘reply’ button like it’s Groundhog Day, engulfed by a peculiar sensation of helplessness.

            It’s a similar story with email, though I’m not sure whether it’s quite as gender-specific as texting. Lots of men sit at computers all day and I’ve no idea what they get up to. But whoever claims that email speeds up communication has obviously never used it to say a quick hello to a friend. 

Sure, email is instant and informal. It’s so instant and informal that responses can be dashed off in moments and unless you’re terribly disciplined, and I’m not (it doesn’t sound like much fun anyway), you can use up hours zapping fantastically entertaining snippets back and forth to your friend who is completely on your wavelength otherwise she wouldn’t be your friend and that’s why it’s so enjoyable. But in the zapping, entire mornings get wiped out and you’re left wondering why you never have any spare time to get on with things.

            And the chronic waste of time doesn’t stop there. You can only go so far in an email exchange with a close friend before one of you becomes compelled to move things on a bit, if only for the sake of getting off the computer and back into real, three-dimensional life.

            So you suggest lunch, ‘for a proper catch-up’. Excellent. This entails fifteen more emails sorting out a good time and venue plus, of course, the big chunk of the day that going out for lunch takes up, once it actually happens. And when it does, you spend the entire time going over all the things you’ve already discussed in the two thousand emails you exchanged the week before.

            Ah, progress, eh?

            And as text and email exchanges have become longer, so letters and phone calls have become shorter. Most of the letters that leave my house are thank you notes because thankfully, most of us would still agree that proper thank yous involve envelopes and stamps. Long, eagerly-anticipated letters full of news, with page numbers at the top, where every word is hand written with you in mind, are like hens’ teeth.

            There just isn’t the time to sit down and write a proper letter. There are all those emails to catch up on, for one thing. Besides, letters take two days to arrive, don’t they? Think how many emails you can exchange in two days! How long is it going to be before we are so bang up-to-the-minute with the activities of our friends that our email systems will actually overtake their writers and start predicting what we’re going to do in the future? There’d be no need to get up in the morning! Hang on…there’d be no need to exist at all…

Remember, you read it here first.