Marked Men By Deborah Tannen Summary

Jahkiya Jack

English

Prof. Avila

15 July 2016

Analysis of Deborah Tannen’s “Marked Women, Unmarked Men”

In the article "Marked Women, Unmarked Men", author Deborah Tannen discusses the issue of women being judged by appearance or other superficial factors, while men are seemingly untouched by the judgement of others. To begin her argument, Tannen describes her observation of three women during a conference meeting, and stereotypes each one by their clothing, makeup, and hairstyle choices. Meanwhile she pays no attention to the eight men at the conference, supporting her claim that the way a women is perceived is based on her appearance, but men have the freedom to be unmarked. Tannen goes on to further support her

In the essay Tannen claims, "There is no woman's hairstyle that can be called standard, that says nothing about her" this along with Tannen’s similar statements regarding women’s appearances suggest that every choice a woman makes about herself is used as a way to evaluate her personality. For instance, if a woman wears revealing or tight clothing with lots of makeup and tousled hair then she is viewed as attention seeking and even as a hoe to some. Because of personal experience, I completely agree with the point Tannen is making. As a teenage girl I can easily say that I have looked at a woman's outfit whether it be a tight dress and heels or a turtleneck with loafers, and formed my own opinions about who they are. Tannen goes on to use the clothing styles of three ladies in her conference meeting as examples to further her point. Carefully analyzing each of them, she observes that they all had different styles; while the men were all dressed alike because they have the freedom to. Tannen continues to argue her point that every woman's style is marked stating, "Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision had a carried meaning". While I concede with Tannen that women are indeed marked by their

Tannen discusses the fact that adding suffixes to certain words to make them feminine seems to infer a sense of frivolousness. In Tannen's example she quotes actress Alfre Woodard, who explained that she identifies as an actor because of the negative connotation of being self-involved and superficial that goes along with the term actress. Tannen supports this claim by explaining how gender markers like the -ess in “actress” add extra meanings commonly associated with women such as being unserious and even sexual. I agree that actresses are not taken as seriously as actors, although it is not because of the evidence Tannen provided. My feelings on the issue stems simply from the fact that actresses get paid less than actors for doing the same exact job. Tannen continues to contest the english language by bringing about the topic of “Ms”and “Mrs”. She explains how these titles exclusively mark women as either married or single, while men are completely unmarked with the title of “Mr”. Although they are only titles it is easily said that an actor is taken more seriously than an actress and that at a certain age a women would be judged for being either a “Ms” or “Mrs”. Some may say that these suffixes and titles are just added to show grammatical differentiation in gender and not for social gender classification. However, I fully support Tannen’s claim that women are solely