I’ll offer the simple answer first. In our culture, men run the show, women are taught to follow their leads, to please them, and thus we go out of our way to fit into the semantic categories set up for us: prude or whore, bitch or sweetheart, princess or dyke. But there’s a slightly more complex answer too, which says what’s really going on is that women happen to be better at a thing called listening. Cornell linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet once argued that women, on the whole, have become better at picking up on the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of the people they’re talking to.
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